Moral Dilemmas

Here are some interesting moral dilemmas to consider over your morning coffee: If a lifeboat is at risk of sinking, is it OK to push some people over the edge to drown in order to save the rest? If  a fat man gets stuck in the entrance to a cave, trapping other people inside, and [...]

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Scientific American has an article that argues that post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is being over-diagnosed in soldiers returning from war because its too ill defined, as a syndrome. This can lead to soldiers getting treatment or being pulled in to a culture of long-term disability, when they might have been going through a perfectly [...]

Favorite Wife: Escape from Polygamy by Susan Schmidt

In Favorite Wife: Escape from Polygamy, Susan Ray Schmidt tells of how she escaped from her marriage to the leader of a Mormon cult who was 23 years older than she when they married (she was 15), and who had 10 other wives. She suffered arguments, jealousy and death threats before she managed to escape [...]

Sikhs Give up Their Turbans

Young Indian Sikhs are throwing away their turbans in favour of short hair that is easier to manage and helps them assimilate. Less than 25% of Sikh under 30 now wear a turban. However, they’re now coming up against an unforeseen prejudice. Last year four Sikhs were refused admission to medical school under a Sikh [...]

Hill of Crosses in Lithuania

See these amazing  pictures of the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania, which looks like a crazy, religious version of Steptoe’s yard. The national pilgrimage centre has thousands of crosses of all shapes and sizes crowded onto a small hill. The site is a centuries old symbol of Catholic resistance against repression. The crosses have been [...]

Is Religion set for a Revival?

An article in New Scientist suggests that in hard times (such as now) people are more inclined towards religious belief. Some scientists suggest that this might be an evolutionary survival strategy. Others argue that that’s wrong -  what use does the belief in life after death to evolution? Read more…

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing…..Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible by Washington Post writer David Plotz, read the bible from cover to cover and found a scandalous melodrama, full of family feuds, violence and plotlines that could keep several soap operas in stories for years. Plotz originally wrote a feature called Blogging the Bible for Slate magazine, in which he set out to find out what would happen when he read the book on which his religion was based, but about which he knew little. The book is framed by a number of provocative questions as he finds out how much the Bible relates to his everyday understanding and observance of his Jewish faith.

A couple of years ago, NYC-based Esquire writer AJ Jacobs wrote a book about his experiences in a similar, but more immersive, project The Year of Living Biblically, in which he was obliged to grow a ZZ Top beard, tell the truth and stone adulterers.

Here’s a Quick Way to Have 20,000 TV Programme Ideas

TV is a visual medium, so sometimes it’s easier to have ideas for new programmes with a bit visual stimulation, and watching old archive can be a great way to spark ideas for history or science documentaries, or even list shows. Once upon a time, if you wanted to find rare footage you needed to hire an experienced archive researcher. Nowadays, you can find – and sometimes view – all kinds of fascinating archive material online. Here are some excellent resources, which contain more than 20,000 films, to get you started. (Photo by Joshua Davis under Attribution-Share Alike CC)

Teen Sex

Teenagers who take a pledge of chasity are just as likely as their peers to indulge in pre-marital sex, and more likely to do it without taking precautions, according to a report in Pediatrics journal. In 2005, the BBC broadcase Secret of the Sexes, which was groundbreaking in that it conducted a huge online survey [...]

A Hospital Ghost Story

Once upon a time, one wintry October, there was a young nurse working nights in a draughty Victorian Hospital. Her ward was at the end of a 2nd floor corridor, the end of which was bricked up. The security guards refused to walk the to the end of the corridor to pick up the nightly ‘bed report’ as they were ‘afraid of the dark’. Inside the long, open ward, 28 men, most missing limbs, slept as quietly as animals in a zoo. One night, the nurses, huddled in their capes around a table in the middle of the ward, tried to stay awake as one of them, the oldest, muttered about God.

The nurse went to visit the staff toilet, which was outside the ward, off the dimly-lit corridor. As she washed her hands (as they did back then in the olden days), she heard the ward telephone ring. And ring. And ring. She wondered why no-one was answering it, fretting that all the patients would be woken. The other nurses denied hearing the telephone.

A young man, a boarder from another ward, still in possession of all his limbs and the most compus mentis, called out in fright. He’d woken to see someone standing at the end of his bed, staring at him, before disappearing into the fetid sluice. It was hard to see who it might have been; all the beds were occupied.

The nurse heard the squeaky wheeled blood-pressure monitor roll towards the nurses’ station, as if someone were holding onto it for support. She turned to see who had got up in search of a cup of tea and reassurance. There was no sign of anyone, except for the stethoscope swinging back and forth from the machine.

Talk turned to ghosts. The senior nurse (in years only as we second-year students were in charge of the ward), spoke of when the old nurses home was bombed in the Blitz. The home was at the end of the corridor, where now there was only a blank wall. Legend had it that on certain nights in October you could could hear running footsteps as ghostly nurses fled the burning building.

Derby City General Hospital is not the only hospital with strange goings-on. There must be many others, if the experiences of that nurse at the Manchester Royal Infirmary is anything to go by. How do I know they happened? Because that nurse was me. Do I think the phantom telephone, strange figure and self-propelling sphygmomanometer were signs of a ghost? No. But nor can I find a rational explanation for them. Where’s Yvette Fielding when you need her?

But seriously… there what was going on? There’s clearly folklore involved – medical folk love a good gory story – mixed with real history and probably some brain-altering tiredness brought on by lack of sleep… Yvette? Horizon? Anyone? Is ANYBODY there???