I was afraid to admit feeling ill because even when I was 4 or 5, I knew that my father viewed sickness as a sign of weakness, of sin, of disobedience.

My father was a particularly zealous Christian Scientist, but young Christian Science children, who have little choice but to believe what their parents are telling them, are taught that illness originates in errors in their parents' and, eventually, their own thinking.

Christian Science is often inherited, and like many inheritances, it comes with family secrets. The religion encourages secrecy. Members of the Church tend to hide their illnesses from one another, even within families. My father has never once, in my presence, admitted to feeling ill.

Nearly every Christian Scientist I have known has been involved with the Church from childhood and has a long family connection to it, going back several generations.

Evolutionary science kind of bears that out: When species are rivals and competing for space and resources, the superior one wins. Nature has no compunction about that; it just is.

As a boy, I was deeply interested in scientific ideas, electrical and mechanical, and I read almost everything I could find on the subject. I was attracted more by the hardware and construction aspects than by the scientific issues.

The once-science-fiction notion of hyper-connectivity - where we are all constantly connected to social networks and other bubbling streams of digital data - has rapidly become a widespread reality.

It could be the case that all the studies supporting a warming planet are wrong; science always leaves that door open, but anthropogenic climate change remains the best explanation for a mountain of data that scientists have been poring over for a century.