AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Eucharistic devotion is the practice of worship of the consecrated host which is really and truly the Body of Christ. It takes several forms. Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is the use of the consecrated host as an object to meditate upon, rather as Buddhists might contemplate a mandala or Orthodox Christians an ikon. The host is placed in a monstrance, a container with glass windows at front and rear. It is held in position by a clip called a lunette. Monstrances come in two main patterns. The Gothic pattern resembles a reliquary. The monstrance on the altar in the photograph is the more common sunburst style, which seems to date from the Baroque period and may have originated in Peru, since the Incas had a sun-god cult and depicted their deity as a sun. Benediction is a short service with hymns and a short period of contemplation of the Blessed Sacrament in the monstrance. The hymns usually sung are to texts composed by St Thomas Aquinas: O salutaris hostia , and the last...

The custom of the Latin Rite Catholic Church is to celebrate Mass with unleavened bread. The priest uses a large wafer (about 8 cm diameter) which is broken at the "fractionation", whilst the congregation receive individual small wafers (about 3 cm diameter) which may have been consecrated at the same Mass but have more often been consecrated at a previous Mass and stored in a silver vessel called a ciborium , which is kept in a locked safe known as the "tabernacle". In a traditionally configured Catholic church, the tabernacle is placed on the altar and the two, together with the altar, form the focus of attention. In a sense, it is the equivalent of the ark in a Jewish synagogue, containing the scrolls of the Law, the Torah . The interesting thing is why we do this? When you search for this subject on the internet, the explanation given is that unleavened bread ( matzot ) was used at the Last Supper which was a Passover meal. However, the Last Supper was held on...

We should take a moment now and again to acknowledge the fact that civilisation as we know it would never have arisen if it were not for the people, mostly males, with Asperger's Syndrome. Both Newton and Einstein have been retrospectively diagnosed with the condition. Most of our technology could not have been brought to a workable condition without individuals having Asperger's Syndrome. Think about this next time you travel in a train, confident that you will arrive safely: what "normal" person would have the patience, persistence and attention to detail to design the railway signalling system on which your life depends? Without the men with Asperger's Syndrome who developed the technology you are using to read this, we would probably not even have developed to the point of writing things down by making marks in wet clay.

A twenty-year old man, Adam Mudd, has been sentenced to two years in prison for creating, when he was 16, a program, which carried out more than 1.7m attacks on websites including Minecraft, Xbox Live and Microsoft and TeamSpeak, a chat tool for gamers. He earned the equivalent of more than £386,000 in US dollars and bitcoins from selling the program to cyber criminals. Mudd was said to be a high-functioning Asperger case. Clearly he was not entirely responsible for his actions. The suspended sentence requested by the defence would have been reasonable in the circumstances. It was refused. The approach seems entirely wrong. Those who have been affected should be suing the suppliers of the software and computer services, since they are responsible for creating the situation in the first place by releasing insecure software. People who are able to crack computer security systems should be employed to make sure the systems offered to the public, commerce and government are as secur...

" Britain’s poor productivity performance before, during and after the financial crisis of a decade ago has left a gap of 16% with the other six members of the G7 group of industrial nations. International comparisons published by the Office for National Statistics show that output per hour worked continued to lag well behind the US, Germany and France in 2015 – the last year for which data is available " Article in Guardian . Oh dear. The entire concept of "productivity" is dubious. If it applicable anywhere, then it is within manufacturing industry where sub-optimal productivity can be due to factors such as wastage defective work which has to be rectified poor design for efficient production poor organisation of the workflow time kept waiting for components or raw materials to arrive obsolescent equipment unsuitable premises These are management issues. There is still a tendency in British industry for the managers not to talk to the lower orde...