“Rules change in The Reaches” -A Wizard of Earthsea Today was a day of catching up with some old friends I used to live with in Sydney almost a decade ago. They’re big shot lawyer-y, finance-y people living in Hong Kong now. And they’re engaged. I know precisely nothing about any of these things....
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Want to see what shoaling looks like? Proper shoaling, that is… the thing fish do. In this case, sticklebacks. Go and watch this video of scientists testing out whether a shoal of wild fish would follow an artificial leader. Of particular interest in the companion article is: Robofish moved faster than the real fish,...
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Because I clearly have the mental age of a small child, for me it is terribly exciting to discover that people you know are on vacation at the same time as you -even if they are on different continents. (When I read this post I just had to email and say “wheeee! Horay for...
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When charity ads on TV stopped using numbers to describe the scale of their problems and started giving names to the wailing, fly-covered children on our screens something very interesting happened. We doubled the amount we donated. When Oxfam launched “buy a goat” for Christmas they saw a threefold increase in donations given as...
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Saint Columba was perhaps my most interesting discovery on Iona. Like most early saints he has long fascinated me, doubly so because he actually existed. A lot of them didn’t. Unless you’re new here you’ll know that verifiable physical existence is certainly no barrier to usefulness in magic. (This is a chaos blog,...
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This is part of the Royal Wedding Series which means I’m still in Scotland as you read this. What you probably didn’t know (or care about) is that I spent all Easter Saturday compiling this series and another one for my muggle blog. When I say “all day”, great chunks of it were spent...
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In one of my first ever sales jobs, my boss told me there are two types of sales people: hunters and farmers. Hunters went out and got new business -big flashy deals- while farmers got under the skin of existing clients and extracted year-on-year growth from their spend. Both have different probability spreads and...
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Do you believe in magic? Please. If I ask you at the right time of day or in a room set to the right temperature you won’t even believe in racial equality. Ever wonder why it’s so difficult to articulate your beliefs? Because it’s like nailing vomit to a wall. Ask a black kid...
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Being under the weather makes you think about things like pain killers.. And boredom… And what you have in the cupboard because nuts to going outside. As I was rearranging my bookshelves in preparation for the arrival of two more to catch the overflow I found a title I bought at the Book Of...
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It looks like a few of my sigils may be coming down off the mirror soon as the -possibly semi self-inflicted- star storm abates and gives me my first clear view of what this new adventure could look like. What. A. Ride. These last two months are what we can call the Proof of...
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