No, I am not talking about the Tango. Or Ukraine. Or the middle-east. I am talking about the interplay between the conscious self and the unconscious self. The ego and the id as Freud described it over a hundred years ago. Yesterday, I saw that one of the Jung feeds on X (@QuoteJung) posed an interesting question: “What is more dangerous? Ignoring the unconscious or over-analyzing it?“. The answer, as Iain McGilchrist put it in his fabulous book The Master […]
Read moreIt is a sunny Monday morning so what better way to start the week than with a few thoughts about Michael Faraday (1791-1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). And to delve into Maxwell’s beautiful equations maybe. A five-minute read. Faraday was an extraordinary experimental physicist and visual thinker with incredible intuition. He didn’t have a strong formal mathematical education, but his conceptual understanding was profound. He was, in short, an experimental genius. An intuitive right-brain genius. Faraday together with Maxwell […]
Read moreIn 1927 the Belgian Catholic priest and former engineer Georges Lemaître was the first person to propose that the universe was expanding1, 2 rather than being in a steady state. This was grounded in his own mathematical reasoning, derived from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Einstein was initially highly dismissive, reportedly saying “vos calculs sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable”. Nevertheless Lemaître’s hypothesis was indeed confirmed experimentally just two years later by Edwin Hubble through observations made with the […]
Read moreAnd the mechanics of Information Theory. Research suggests that the first single-celled organisms formed around 3.8 billion years ago but it was not until about 600 million years ago that, quite suddenly in evolutionary time, the Cambrian explosion occurred, giving rise to multicellular life, diversification and biological complexity1. And you and me. So what is a complex system? A simple definition is that it is a system with agent-like objectives and action properties that cannot be predicted from its parts […]
Read moreHere is a poem by GK Chesterton (1874-1936) in celebration of my father, Patrick Simpson Lambert (1924-2008), the most thoughtful man I have ever known, despite his human frailties. There were many learnings for me through his life that every day still evolve and build and teach. But the most important learning is that of empathy, understanding and stoic acceptance of life’s hard slings; a trait that he himself raged against as he slipped into his own gentle good […]
Read more(Two-minute read. An eternity to apply) A few thoughts on the nature of hypothesis testing. For those who do not know or have forgotten, hypothesis testing is at the foundational core of science and, some would say, ‘truth’. It is the discipline, the science, the craft, the art, the philosophy of experimental construction and assessment as to whether something is ‘true’ or ‘false’. Interestingly it is impossible to prove that something is true or false1 in our physical reality; […]
Read moreIn 1911 the New Zealand Physicist Ernest Rutherford fired a stream of particles1 at a gold leaf foil with the aim of better understanding the nature and structure of the atomic nucleus (Figure 1). The details are unimportant in this context, but one can think of it in abstract terms as kicking a football at a goal with a net full of holes in front of a layer of invisible concrete bollards2 . To his surprise or maybe not he […]
Read moreThe Greeks, or at least some of them, well understood the importance of the brain even if they did not know very much about its inner workings. And the Egyptians before them had a hieroglyph for the brain, the first known recorded reference to the brain being an Egyptian papyrus from the seventeenth century BCE describing a couple of patients who had suffered trauma to the head. The Greek surgeon-philosopher Hippocrates, or at least his translators (1), was a beautiful […]
Read moreThis short case study tells the story of how Tesco and its marketing data analytics consultancy partner Dunnhumby used Big Data to re-engineer the UK Supermarket Sector in the 1990s and 2000s. Some years before the term ‘Big Data’ first entered popular usage. Timing and background The year is 1993. Four years after Tim Berners-Lee proposed the concept of ‘the Internet’ and five years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. Whilst the enabling technology for the Internet had […]
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