Archive for the ‘Science’ Category

Of COVID and condoms (08/04/20)

OK, it’s been ten thousand years since I’ve posted on The Wisdom site; I apologise for the long silence, which is explained by my being AWOL doing other things. For a while, I went totally off topic, spent a year on tramp steamers, and wrote a book about Indonesia. For the last four or five […]

Sex in the sewers: Paris in summer (19/06/16)

Most people spend long summer evenings in Paris strolling arm in arm around the boulevards, sitting in cafes or lolling in parks. I spent this weekend in the sewers. Am I odd in finding drains a sexy subject? Perhaps. But they’re my number one candidate for a Song of Contagion. I’m lobbying for a diarrhoea […]

World Health Day: healthy for lobbyists (07/04/16)

Today is World Health Day. Judging from what’s in the Song of Contagion Twitter stream (@songfocontagion), this is above all an opportunity for a lot of lobbyists and marketing specialists to promote their specific cause. Greenpeace has been quite active, because of course you can always make a health issue out of the environment. There’s […]

Madness in music (03/04/16)

Yesterday, during a visit to the thought-provoking Museum of the Mind, on the premises of the Bethlem hospital (still active but now renamed), I was reminded both how far we have come in the treatment of mental illness since the ‘Bedlam madhouse’ was first opened, and how far there is still to go. At the […]

If HIV were music, would it be loud and screechy? (30/03/16)

As subscribers know, I’ve more or less dropped off the HIV map in recent years. That’s in part because there are so many other interesting health conditions out there to think about. And that keeps me thinking about why some conditions are more fashionable than others, why some things that affect very few people (such […]

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