Saturday 21 August 2010

Princess

A blog post by Tulpesh Patel

I started writing a review of “Princess, a biography of a Saudi princess written by Jean Sasson, but, as the Lord does indeed move in mysterious ways, something happened at work very shortly after that prompted me to also turn this into a blog post.

First the book. Princess recounts the life of Saudi Princess, Sultana, from childhood in the 60s to her own motherhood in the 90s
. It was lent to my wife by a friend, I casually started reading the blurb and found it so engrossing I was a couple of hundred pages in before I realised the time. This book is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever read and I can say with complete sincerity, unputdownable.
Sultana tells of ritual and absolute oppression by the men of the household and wider society. The men hold untold wealth and absolute power, able to deny or cover up their own offence or justify any/all behaviour as that sanctioned or encouraged by their faith or tradition. The women are denied education (save for reciting the Koran); forced

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Fluence and the Machine

A blog post by James Cole aka @jdc325
At the recent talk by Andy Lewis at Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub, I saw a demonstration of an odd machine.

Here's a picture of Andy's magneto-electric therapy machine:


While looking for more information on this odd machine, I found