In January 2019, a family in southern Spain was subject to a nightmare scenario. During a family walk near Malaga, two-year-old Julen Rosseló fell 71 meters down a 25cm-wide borehole. He didn’t survive, and it took thirteen days for rescuers to recover his body. Later it was revealed the borehole had been dug illegally.

At the time, my own daughter was the same age, which led me to follow the story with a growing sense of horror and disbelief that such things could be allowed to happen. It seems absurd that something so truly awful could happen to anyone, let…

I remember sitting in my grandfather’s car a few years ago in a gray car park. I was in the second year of my undergraduate philosophy degree, and we were discussing careers. As an engineer and a thoroughly practical man, he wasn’t convinced of the merits of my degree choice.

“But what can you do with philosophy, Gem?” he asked me. “What has philosophy ever achieved?”

I doubt meeting Professor Markus Gabriel would do much to change his impression of the subject.

Professor Gabriel is a philosopher who accepts the existence of unicorns, but sincerely refutes the existence of the…

What do you say to people whose beliefs fly the face of overwhelming evidence? Last week, Washington D.C erupted into violence as mobs of violent Trump supporters stormed the seat of the American government.

Ostensibly they did this because they believe the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.

On January 2nd, Ted Cruz and a number of other Republican Senators released a joint statement challenging the election result on the basis of ‘allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities’.

“And those allegations are not believed just by one individual candidate. Instead, they are…

The great lockdown of 2020/21 has forced me to acknowledge some things about myself that I hadn’t really noticed before.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t some great confessional piece where I bare my soul and acknowledge terrible wrongdoing. Or maybe it will be. You be the judge.

Either way, here are five pointlessly trivial lessons I have learned during lockdown.

1 — I like TV more than I like my friends

I can count the number of times I spoke to my friends over the past 16 months on one hand. That includes in person as well as Facetime, Zoom etc. Turns out I’m really not that sociable a person.

…

OPEN LETTERS

Dear America,

The debate around gun violence has been raging in the US for as long as I can remember and it seems like there’s more chance of Ben Shapiro winning RuPaul’s Drag Race than liberals and conservatives reaching an effective solution.

I want to change that. I’m offering a simple, effective answer to your gun violence problem, but I don’t think you’re going to like it. It involves more guns for more people. It also involves no guns for some people.

Now, I’m not saying my solution isn’t problematic — it is. I’m not saying anybody even asked for…

Holding gender-critical views — for instance, that biological sex is immutable and unable to change — has just been protected by a UK court as a ‘philosophical belief’ under the Equalities Act 2010.

For supporters of transgender rights, the case of Forstater v CGD Europe is a dangerous, absurd decision, using a law to designed to protect minorities to oppress a minority group. For others, it is a sensible application of the law protecting free speech and the rights of individuals to debate contentious issues in public without fear of losing their livelihoods to ‘cancel culture’.

At its most basic…

Clowns to the left, jokers to the right…

Apparently, Elon Musk isn’t such a great guy. Such is the conclusion reached by hacking face-mask enthusiasts, Anonymous, who posted a threatening, anti-Musk diatribe on YouTube.

Or have they? A number of Anonymous-affiliated Twitter accounts quickly disassociated themselves from the video (see here, and here), while other sources appear to confirm it. I guess PR is a pretty tough when you don’t have a ‘blue check’ on your Twitter account. I think Banksy has the same issues.

Either way, it’s not hard to understand why a group of anti-establishment hackers might take…

5 Reasons it might.

Blockchain has a power-consumption problem and the crypto community is scrambling to find answers. While Bitcoin and Ethereum offer their own solutions, a radically different approach is presented by the self-professed ‘green’ Chia Networks. Is this $500 million company worth taking seriously — and can it follow through on its big claims?

The Power Problem

To say that blockchain has a power problem isn’t exactly new. Yet there’s a very good reason it's being taken so seriously — cryptocurrency is all about the long game.

If crypto can’t resolve its dependence on fossil fuels, investors can kiss goodbye to…