Author Archives: Campbell Aitken

Sky Deutschland has developed technology to transfer adverts from train windows directly and silently into commuters’ heads. Passengers leaning their head against the window will “hear” adverts “coming from inside the user’s head”, urging them to download the Sky Go … Continue reading →

The American Medical Association has voted to designate obesity a disease. As Richard Gunderman wrote in The Atlantic this week, this decision has some interesting implications for the way overweight people are perceived and treated, not to mention identified. For … Continue reading →

In his address on the 22nd of April 2013 the Pope said (among other things):  The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ … Continue reading →

Until recently the Germans used a 63-letter long word to refer to a law about the delegation of monitoring beef labelling: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz Unfortunately, it has officially ceased to exist.

You and I are only 10 percent human: for every human cell in your body you have about 10 resident microbes — harmless freeloaders, mutually beneficial organisms, and a few pathogens. More than 99 percent of the genetic information we hold is microbial. The gigantic … Continue reading →

Imagine travelling to Asia, 13,000 years BC, and saying to the local hunter-gatherers in any one of hundreds of modern languages: No spitting in the ashes! You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark … Continue reading →

This excellent article by Maria Bustillos (The Awl, 29th March 2013) succinctly makes the case for using an editor, no matter how good a writer you are.  

Plagiarism is very easily avoided: don’t present the work of others as your own. To elaborate, if you discuss ideas or reproduce words that you’ve seen in the work of others, you must clearly attribute those ideas or words to their … Continue reading →

Every year my family spends one or two post-Xmas weeks at the beach, most often at Anglesea (on the Great Ocean Road, Victoria) or somewhere on the south coast of New South Wales. The NSW south coast has a lot … Continue reading →

Daughter #2 and her band The Aquabirds (nine- and ten-year-olds) won Brunswick South Primary School’s 2012 talent show with this performance … http://youtu.be/k06qzYmeVgU