British anthropologist Robin Dunbar postulated that we have a cognitive limit to the number of people with which we can maintain a stable social relationship. He formed this opinion by studying the size of primate brains against the size of their average social group. From here he extrapolated upwards to […]
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Chpt 42: Fine Till You Came Along
I think I would quite enjoy discovering my genealogy through one of those companies that tests your DNA. My mother’s Celtic roots are a bit of a mystery. However, I am also reminded that genetic data is frequently bought by security agencies and the desire to do that fades away. […]
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Chpt 28: The Precise Nature Of The Catastrophe
Dense urban environments are a black hole of chaos slowly consuming our societies. For most of human history, we have lived in low-density, rural environments. Before 1600, only 5% of the world’s population lived in an urban environment, by 1900 this was 16% and current estimates have urban densities as […]
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Chpt 18: Steely Glint
Winston Churchill, in a speech to the House of Lords in 1943, famously said “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us“. The pre-war urban landscape of Britain was very different to what it is today, with many of the major cities bombed out during the blitz and needing rebuilt, […]
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Chpt 15: Attitude Adjuster
Our modern urban, and city oriented, world feels ill-suited to human beings. Today, some 56% of the world’s population – 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities. This trend is expected to continue, with the urban population more than doubling its current size by 2050, at which point nearly 7 of 10 […]
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Chpt 8: Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory
Time is a fundamental dimension of our daily lives in the modern world. After all, how would we know when to turn up for a meeting, dial into a Zoom call; when to meet a friend for lunch or take the chicken from the oven? Yes, that is hyperbole, but […]