If you think that the recent attack by a Black terrorist in London says anything about the harm done by mass immigration, then think again. A great liberal intellectual called Matthew D’Ancona has crushed such racist nonsense with these lines in the world’s greatest newspaper: As we now know, the attacker, Khalid Masood, was British, […]
If you’re a stale pale male of a certain age and intellect, John Peel might at times have been the most important person in your life. Indeed, he may still be. He was the BBC disc-jockey who reigned as Britain’s musical arbiter elegantiarum from the late 1960s until his premature death early in the twentieth-first […]
If grovelling ever becomes an Olympic sport, Britain has a potential world-beater ready and waiting. He’s called Stephen Crabb, and he was a minister in David Cameron’s Tory government. Here he is displaying his skills before an appreciative audience at Finchley Synagogue in London: Israeli Independence Day: Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb leads UK […]
Was haben Schach und Pfauenfedern gemeinsam? In der Geschichte der Menschheit gab es auf eine derartige Frage lange Zeit keine vernünftige Antwort. Heute können wir antworten: „Sie können beide mit Hilfe eines Zweigs der Mathematik, nämlich die Spieltheorie, analysiert werden. Bei Spielen wie Schach geht es um Wettbewerb, um Strategien für mehr Erfolg und zur […]
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of infallibility and the promise of certain knowledge. Singer Neil Young keeps on searching for a heart of gold. I keep on searching for certainty. Or rather: I search for more of it, because there is an infallible system of certain knowledge. It’s called mathematics and I think […]
What’s the connection between chess and peacock feathers? For most of human history, there was no sensible answer to a question like that. Today we can reply: “They can both be analysed using the branch of mathematics known as game theory.” Games like chess are about competition, about strategies for improving success and avoiding failure. […]
The Polish-Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was that rare thing: a sympathetic Marxist. Unlike Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the feuding revolutionaries of our own day, she doesn’t seem to have fuelled her politics mainly on power-lust, egomania and hatred. She opposed Bolshevik tyranny and defended free speech with the classic line Freiheit ist immer Freiheit […]
