Category: Highlands Post (Outreach Media)

They may have won the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s largest corn maze, but after the November season of 2014, the owners of the Cool Patch Pumpkins maze in Dixon, California were forced to consider whether bigger truly was better. There had been trip-ups before; from time to time the odd patron might…

When you’re hungry does it feel scary? For about 800 million people around the world, the feeling of hunger is the feeling of dread – the reminder that, if you don’t find food soon, you could die. In Australia though, most of us are so well off that, when we speak about ‘hunger’, we could…

Just when you thought everything under the sun had finally been investigated, psychologists Angela M. Legg and Kate Sweeny from the University of California have gone and examined the question of whether people prefer to receive good news or bad news first. Not surprisingly, in their 2013 study, they found that people prefer to get…

In Northern Iraq, under ISIS rule, it’s a crime to be a Christian. Followers of Jesus are forced to convert to Islam, pay an unaffordable tax or face death. Thousands have fled their homes. In Vietnam, Christians are persecuted by the Communist government. Whilst religious freedom is legally permitted, meetings are closely monitored, publications are…

Imagine if everything… every gust of wind, every raindrop – each new season…  Imagine if every new thing we received in life came gift-wrapped with sticky tape and paper. Red faced babies in delivery wards … falling autumn leaves… home dinners served hot with the wrapping paper, wet and translucent and sliding off the gravy……

Omniscience means ‘all knowing’. You can usually find it in sentences describing God – not a social media company. But over the years people have been regularly mystified at LinkedIn’s ability to know who their friends and acquaintances are. It’s creepy. If you aren’t a member then you’ve probably received apparently personal email invitations from…

More than the sum of our parts If you lose a hand or foot or even an arm or a leg the strange thing is that, somehow, you’re still here. The hand or leg wasn’t you. So where exactly can ‘you’ be found? Most people today would say that ‘you’ are in your brain. So,…

On August 16, 2015, a quiet Sunday night, Andrew Grace was at his home in Tamarama, Sydney. Thirty minutes later, he had saved a man’s life. As he told the Sydney Morning Herald, he could clearly hear a drowning man’s cry, ‘Help, help, help’ coming from the ocean. Andrew Grace is an experienced surfer and…

You might think statistics is the most boring topic on the planet. It really isn’t! As a lecturer in statistics at the University of Melbourne, I get to analyse and solve real world problems for doctors, engineers, politicians, architects, farmers… the list goes on. Being analytical has become a life habit – annoyingly so, according…

If you’d like to insult a Christian then, ‘God botherer’ may well be the most withering putdown available. The clever person who thought up the term somehow managed to pack in an incredible amount of implication. First off – apparently God doesn’t care. There he is up in heaven wincing and grimacing as yet another…