catataxis

April showers and religious relics

I am just back from a trip to Zimbabwe, exchanging the bold blue African sky for London’s grey misery. This April has been the wettest in the UK since records began with 152 different parts of the country currently on flood alert. Ironically, there is still a hosepipe ban in force, because the six preceding months saw an extreme drought. The Environment Agency says that groundwater levels will only be properly replenished by large and consistent amounts of steady rain for two months. Welcome to our British Spring! This is not a new story. In fact, it is a...

This morning is the first day back at work after the Easter break. Having overindulged on chocolate eggs on the weekend, I decide to get some exercise and walk to my Mayfair office from London Bridge station. As a result, I happen to be passing the Tate Modern as they open and pop in to see the Damian Hirst show on impulse. There is a huge queue for tickets but no queue or tickets required to see the ‘diamond skull’. The whole of the huge turbine hall is given over for the display of this one tiny piece. But...

When you think of evolution what image first springs to mind? It’s probably a hall in the Natural History Museum filled with fossils. All the dinosaurs, trilobites, coelacanths and ammonites together make an awesome menagerie of extinct creatures. The stepping stones of evolution are laid out before you in rock and bone. But there is something wrong with this picture – it’s just depicting animal evolution which means it is only telling part of the story. There are five other kingdoms of life (plants, fungi, protozoa, bacteria and archaea) and animals showed up relatively recently. Life on Earth started...

Recent research from Collins Stewart, a UK stockbroker, shows that investment trusts have comprehensively outperformed open ended funds over the last 10 years. These funds are rarely recommended by financial advisers since they don’t pay commissions (i.e. kickbacks) to the IFA’s who promote them. In major markets, Investment Trusts gave investors a 106% return while unit trusts only returned 36%. In emerging markets, the difference was even greater: 357% vs 230%. OK. So maybe the last time someone tried to explain the difference between an Investment Trust and a Unit Trust to you, you edged away and went to...

I am experimenting with Apple’s Keynote software (their alternative to the dreaded Powerpoint) to produce a You Tube channel of Catataxis Blipverts. See below and tell me what you think :

Most Western countries are having the same economic debate at the moment: austerity or stimulus? Britain’s coalition government, Germany and the Tea Party in the USA want more austerity. The logic is simple. If you have too much debt then you should stop spending. But the counter argument goes like this: government cutbacks depress the economy, recessions mean less tax revenues which mean more cutbacks. The result is an ever decreasing spiral like the one in Greece where the economy is shrinking 5% a year. So governments should be spending to stimulate the economy and worry about balancing the...

How sad that on the centenary of the Titanic disaster of 1912 another huge cruse ship should sink. It may be insensitive to be grandstanding and pontificating at a time of tragedy, but one of the causes of the Costa Concordia disaster is catataxis. As cruse liners have ballooned in size, the safety systems have not scaled up appropriately. In this case, more of the same is not just different but also deadly. Cruise ships have been a boom industry and as a result the ships have got bigger and bigger in order to achieve economies of scale. Today’s...

I was saddened to hear of Ken Russell’s death last week. He was a particular hero of mine. I saw my first Ken Russell film at boarding school. It was introduced by a wimpy teacher, wringing his hands and describing the intense, moralistic debate the school board had just had about whether it was appropriate to screen this movie. After 10 minutes of this gentle, concerned bleating, he finally left the stage. The projector cranked up and a hall full of schoolboys got their first exposure to a work by The Master: it was The Devils. Wow ! What...

Catataxis means level confusion and the Eurozone crisis is a catataxic one. I will explain the problem with the state(s) of Europe in a moment, but first a little bit more background about the state of catataxia. When things start to get bigger, sooner or later a certain point arises when there is a discontinuity. Getting past that requires a transformation in structure or organization. To get to the next level, something more than just size must change. Think of the biggest insect in the world. It will not be more than a foot long. Those giant ants towering...

One of the best catataxic aphorisms is this “You are not stuck in Traffic. You are Traffic”. It invites you to step above your instinctive personal view of things and see the broader context, and your place in that context. It encourages you to “see the wood for the trees”, to get some perspective on the matter. Here is an interesting parallel in Japan. As always, Japan absorbs interesting ideas from outside and, by putting their own spin on them, transmutes them into something sublime. Remember the crop circles on the farms in the West of England? A trigger...

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April showers and religious relics

Death’s upside: the diamond skull

Lynn Margulis and the Eukaryotic Cell

Catataxic funds outperform

Catataxis: the movie

Stimulation or austerity: the catataxic debate

Costa Concordia: catataxic catastrophe

Rage on, Ken Russell

Europe: the Federated States of Catataxia

Catataxic Rice

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