Complexity to inform issues of methodology, taxation and politics in a context of crisis

This site will reproduce my thoughts – rantings might be a better word – on the issues facing us in the context of fundamental polycrisis in the era of the Capitalocene (look it up).

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    Down the A696 -the value of being a flaneur

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    A life in data ten – housing and health and a complex realist take on it

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    A Life in Data Nine – return to North Tyneside

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    A Life in Data Eight – an encounter with the Reports of the The Royal Commission for inquiring into the condition of the poorer classes in Ireland 1833-1836

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    A life in data – an interlude – the importance of thinking about housing as a socio-cultural-economic system

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    A life in Methods 7 – the Belfast Years

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    Beyond mere morphogenesis

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    Biting back at the church of realism inquisition

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    Keming Yang Analysing Intersectionality : A Toolbox of Methods (2024) London: Sage

  • Thoughts on a Life in Methods

    A life in Methods 1 – Before Social Science

    Before I managed (with the assistance of that decent and clever man Henry Miller – the Dean of Medicine) to escape from being a medical student, my main sources of understanding of the methods of science came from the physical sciences of Physics and Chemistry on the one hand and Biology on the other. Physics and Chemistry I more or less just did and framed my understanding of how they were done around experiments and mathematical calculations. Biology was different because I read a lot of biology classics including The Origin of Species and Darcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. I also read a lot of natural history including Gerald Durrell’s accounts of his animal collecting expeditions. And then at Medical School I encountered Physiology and read Samson Wright’s textbook on applied physiology – the only one of my texts from medical school I still have nearly 60s years later. The only fellow students of mine in the 1960s who had read Darcy Thompson were doing fine art.

    What I got explicitly from my reading of classical biology was a sense of surveying and describing what is in the world as a key process in understanding – interesting to note that Wallace was a surveyor to trade. What I got from Physiology – at that time implicitly but it became explicit in future reflection – was a recognition of the importance of system and relations in a system. Physiology although emphasizing function of organs is just as much about the relations between them in the system of the body and the way they communicate with each other. My school friend and fellow scout Mike Wilson as a Professor of Microbiology has been a key player in adding in the need to understand the body as an ecological system and emphasizing the importance of the microbiome in that system.

    From Physics and Physical Chemistry, and continuing to follow Applied Maths classes at school although dropping Pure Maths (picked up an A level in that in my 40s) was a continuing engagement with calculation and skill in using a slide rule. This was crucial when I started doing my Sociology and Social Administration degree and had to do statistical calculations. Quite a few young women on that degree sought my acquaintance to be taught that skill although I maintained a pedagogical relationship with them, mainly because my sequential girlfriends in Shields would have killed me otherwise. So I came to the social sciences as mathematically competent and with a view of what science was that went beyond the experimental and an implicit understanding of system, emergence and the importance of relations.

    Thoughts on a Life in Methods 6 – Action Research in North Tyneside Community Development Project (CDP)