March 2018

Australia has a desperate shortage of piano tuners, and an even greater shortage of people who train piano tuners. It’s impossible to perfectly tune a piano, all pianos are slightly out of tune. Great video explains why.

You are an astronaut. Seriously (this can change your life). One of the things that is so misunderstood is that what you feel in your body is not your body, it’s the FORCES that are on your body. For example, you can’t feel your weight - what we think is the feeling of weight is nothing of the sort. As this video nicely shows. You are an astronaut because the only difference between you and an astronaut ‘floating’ in orbit is that you’re next to the ground. Being near the ground doesn’t add weight to you, not the tiniest bit. What it does do is add contact forces to you, UP into your body. Once you start to feel everything in your body as a force that is due to the relationship you have with things around you, everything changes. You are floating in space, just like that astronaut, even when you’re on the ground. It’s just that the Earth constantly pushes up into you, as you float.

I see a lot of childless people on FB, living what looks like lives of constant fun and travel, no doubt using the enormous sums of money they save by not having children. There's nothing wrong with a person choosing to not have children, that's a perfectly valid choice for anybody to make. And some people physically can't have children either, or can't find a partner etc. But the choice to not have them is a trend that's growing, and fuelled I suspect more by the desire to be commitment-free and have great quantities of disposable income. It can't end well. And there will be many who say it's helping bring the world's population down too. It isn't, that's already on the way down, and people in rich countries already don't have enough children to replace themselves. Overpopulation is a poverty problem, not a number of babies problem.

I see this is an issue overseas at the moment, a survey found that smokers are taking up to 6 days a year, in total time, in smoke breaks at work. And a lot of non-smokers are calling it out, asking for another week off themselves each year to balance it.

Apparently eyes are far and away the most powerful way to understand what a person is thinking or feeling. Even if the rest of the face can lie, the eyes usually don’t.

At just before 10 minutes in this video, the big fuel tank strapped to the Challenger Shuttle explodes. I remember when this happened (January 1986), I’d just finished high school and was working at the local corn cannery to make money for uni. It was shocking, and also the first flight to have a civilian onboard, a school teacher called Christa McAuliffe. So there was added drama. What’s much less well known is something even more horrible. It’s almost certain that the astronauts survived the explosion, in the crew compartment, and also that at least some of them were conscious for the next 2 minutes and 45 seconds, as it fell into the Atlantic Ocean, at 200 miles per hour. Lives that are disrespected by every unspeakable moron who says the Earth is flat, and that humans never went to the moon.

That’s not a car. That’s a car.

Dolly Parton is a bit of a genius, but it’s all so effortless for her that she’s often completely underestimated. And superb songwriting.

What's your guilty pleasure? Mine is Real Housewives of Melbourne (or Sydney). Highlights include "you're just a bunch of fucking dogs!"

The maverick Australian farmer Peter Andrews had what I think is a genius insight about the Australian landscape. That water in the Australian landscape has usually been stored in the soil, not above ground in dams or streams/rivers. And further, that Australian rivers have historically run *above* ground level, not below like most of the rivers and erosion gullies you see on properties today. By clearing most of the vegetation on the land, the water has nothing to slow it down to let it seep into the soil, for storage, so it forms big erosion gullies as it’s carried off the continent into the sea. The soil goes with it, or is blown away. You can see that everywhere you look in the Australian landscape, especially where farming has occurred, maybe the odd dam here or there, a parched wasteland of subsoil exposed to the sun, and deep erosion gullies. You don’t have to be a Greenie to think what we do here is stupid. It’s just stupid, period. There are a lot of smart farmers trying to turn this around now, but they’re still outnumbered by the rip it out and clear the land crowd.

Have often wondered about this, the number of jobs out there that really add not much to all to collective happiness or health. We long ago reached a point where society didn’t need as many people to work or for those who do work to work so many hours in such pointless, bullshit ways. Instead we force everybody to work, often on jobs that they know are meaningless and pointless. The answer? We need to go back to the idea of the ‘Common-wealth’. All wealth is common, much of this pointless work is people working to make a tiny handful of people enormously rich, while the majority of people struggle to afford even a house. Not communism that’s needed, just a recognition that the ‘commons’ - what we all share and what’s good for all of us - has to be the centre of things again.

It’s at least 500 years now since it’s been generally accepted that the Earth orbits the sun. And yet we still use terms like ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’. Convention obviously, but it betrays that intuitively many still feel that passage of the sun across the sky as the sun moving.

Thanks to Peita for reminding me about this discovery. We're very alarmist about plastic, but I think plastic is one of our greatest things. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reduce the amount of crap that ends up in the ocean, but life is something that has a logic that goes way beyond our own lifespans.

You can have a fair and sane and well organised society, or you can have good pop music. But not both.

One of the worst detours I think we took as humans was to believe we think with our brains. Generations of kids have been physically confined to classrooms and desks because of the myth of the thinking brain.

The eyes are said to the be the window to the soul. And it's true that many of a person's feelings, emotions and even thoughts can be directly or indirectly read from their eyes and their surrounds. And that making eye contact with a person profoundly changes your relationship with them. But the eye itself - it doesn't matter how long you look AT it, it won't give you access to anything. We maybe feel the person we know is somehow 'behind' those eyes, but you can stare at the eye itself for as long as you like, and you won't catch a glimpse of anything except eye. It can actually be quite unsettling - we place so much of the character of the people we know and meet within their eyes - it can be a shock to see the cold emptiness of the eye itself, if you dwell on it. Like Hal's red dot in 2001, Kubrick was a genius to play on this cold emptiness of the eye, in portraying HAL.

Nope. Time isn’t a resource. You can’t use it up like a jar of peanut butter. Nobody has ‘enough time’, we’re all ‘too busy’ etc. We fiddle with clocks to ‘save’ time. I think we confuse the number and types of activity we do with time, they’re not the same thing. Ever noticed this paradox - the days where you have a lot of rich experiences seem to ‘fly by’, but those are also the days looking back afterwards that seem to be the longest and most detailed in your memory? There’s something in that.

The Italian thinker Manzotti uses cartoons to explain complex ideas, a brilliant approach. This one is a good example, where he describes the fallacy that the world is made of ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ - the usual idea that the world is made up of objective things, which we all then have subjective views about.

Many people hate maths, or say they can’t do it. I think this is because maths is so badly taught, and that bad teaching comes from a misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Maths is the study of patterns. Where it got lost was in moving the patterns to the written page or screen, and thinking that’s where it lives. That’s great for people who are good at manipulating symbols on flat pages or screens, and a disaster for the people who aren’t good at that. Jean Lave is an anthropologist who set out to test these ideas. She used grocery shoppers as her testers. What she found was that people who were hopeless at ‘maths’, in the way we learn it at school or university, were often absolutely superb at doing even complex calculations in a shopping context. There they were able to understand the patterns without any problem at all. But the minute she transcribed these same grocery calculations into a more standard textbook type maths problem, they had no idea what they were doing.

Happy Birthday you! :)

I'm betting there will be vocal criticisms of these ads. But it's a message that is actually true and the key to society staying healthy and happy. For too long we've been led by (mostly men) in suits who use the fantasy idea that we live in an 'economy'. There is no such thing as the economy, it's a myth. It's been an extremely cunning way of bypassing politics and screwing people.

For years I’ve been able to see sometimes profound depth in single images, particularly where colours such as deep blues and blacks are used. And for all those years I’ve tried to find out why, because the traditional theory of depth perception says it’s the result of your eyes each taking in a slightly different image, which the brain then converts into depth or 3D. Two images in other words, depth is apparently not available in a single image. It turns out traditional depth perception theory is wrong, in all sorts of ways (not least because your eyes don’t take in ‘images’). The colour depth effect actually has a name - chromostereopsis, and you can see it every night pretty powerfully on Family Feud, which uses a lot of deep blue/black backgrounds, as you can see in the picture. See the depth there behind the 2 foreground figures? Excuse the sunlight reflection in mid-screen. For decades researchers and studios have tried to get people to take up 3D film and TV, and have always failed. People don’t like to wear the glasses, but it’s more than that. They don’t find ‘2D’ TV and films flat in the first place. 3D theory is a mess.

Tony Abbott’s NBN.

Mr Kato talks about this a bit. Both 'sides' will rush to defend their positions, I'm sure. The truth will be somewhere else that they're not looking.

Pictures sometimes tell a big story.

Ah Boomers. Couple with $3.2 million in super, which is tax-free for the rest of their life, worried they’ll lose their free health benefits. Where do you start.

This one flushes out wealth and privilege faster than anything else. These people are getting cash ‘refunds’ from the taxpayer for tax they’ve never paid. Sometimes into the millions of dollars. Let’s see if the extremely powerful boomer lobby manages to kneecap this one.

This is an acoustic sound mirror, made of concrete, on the English coast. Before radar was invented, this was the way the Brits listened for incoming enemy planes. If you’ve never played with or built an acoustic sound mirror, the effect is pretty amazing. Sounds can be clearly carried across long distances. Not to be confused with Australia’s NBN.

I wonder if Roger Ramjet will head it up?

I think salt will be the next edifice of ‘nutrition science’ to fall. Actual research, which nutrition and dietary science usually doesn’t read, has for some time said that the association between salt and blood pressure is probably a myth. For example: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317099.php

Related to the story about sausages in the news today, this is another modern sacred cow that means even a trip to the GP or cardiologist will still lead to you being misled. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt/

And it begins. If only the children of these people had as much fury about intergenerational theft. Maybe they don’t see it, if they really did it might be a revolution.

Music has always been my first love, but at the same time it has a dark side I think that isn’t noticed as much, and which put me off doing it for a living. Music is territorial. In birds it’s very obvious, that their songs mark territory, that’s the main reason they sing. But human music is exactly the same, it defines territory and identity, that’s its main function. Pick on a person’s favourite band or act and see how much passion you provoke. It’s that territorial baggage which can be nasty in music, and not much noticed. On top of that music defines territory by generating refrains - rhythmic patterns of melody and tempo. Those can get ‘stuck in your head’ very easily, and you don’t even notice it happening. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, although there’s an obsessive-compulsive, addictive aspect of this process which can be exhausting after a while, advertisers use it all the time but all songs are just as able to become these loops in your head. Militaries throughout history have used these loops to generate discipline.

As early as 1977 NASA published a note to counter the moon landing hoax theories. “The penetration test showed great resistance to penetration.” Could have done with some copy editing. ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/media/2001/lunar_landing.pdf

“As the body settles into bed, our challenge is to let go of our ordinary mind, our waking sense of self. This part of us, the part of us we usually call I, is simply incapable of sleeping. It can walk us to the shoreline of the sea of sleep, but it can’t swim. By definition, the part of us we call I can do only waking. Because wakism holds that this I is all that there is to us, it reinforces our addiction to waking and our reluctance to fall asleep. ‘I cannot sleep’, the universal slogan of insomnia, is inherently valid. Believing that the waking self needs to learn to sleep is a set-up.” Rubin Naiman

Oldie but goodie. Getting up in the dark at the end of summer is such a joy. The Daylight Savings blanket. 6 inches cut off the top end and sewed onto the bottom end to add 6 inches of warmth to the feet.

I still remember a packet of chips being 10 cents at the school canteen. And I often think, why does inflation exist? Why is a packet of chips now up around $1-$2? Wages have gone up at the same time, so why didn’t we just decide to keep them at 10 cents and not adjust wages? Economists would see that as a simpleton question. But economics is like nutrition, mostly a bankrupt field of knowledge. There’s something extremely important about understanding inflation that economics won’t teach you, I’m really sure. And compound interest is part of it, I’m betting, interest in general is part of it, the idea of usury. The core of our financial world.

It's very instructive that if you take a rort off wealthy retirees, it becomes a national news avalanche. But business systematically underpaying low-paid workers and breaking workplace laws? Let's see how much momentum it gets. Always follow who gets the attention. Which will tell you who has the money. Which will tell you who has the power. Our society is really run by old retired people, who have vacuumed up most of the society's wealth. (P.S. join a union.)

The presidency is largely Trump watching FOX News in bed, while eating McDonalds and Tweeting. For Trump it’s like a new series of Celebrity Apprentice - “you’re fired!” - the country has become a reality TV show. But then America has often been led by its fantasies of film and TV, Ronnie Raygun was a movie star, and was adored. The old Wild West narratives still run deep too. A country without strong public institutions is inevitably led by populist fantasies, which it takes from TV and films.

There are things I reckon we’ll look back on in 25 years and wonder what the? Like people spending $1.05 million on properties like this.

“Don’t you think it’s rather arrogant of us to assume that we’re the only intelligent beings in this world, when the River Garonne and the south wind carry with them and express more things that I would ever be able to write - and express them better? They read instantaneously the messages of other fluxes, filter them, make their choice, combine them with their own, translate them, and write them on land or water. They conserve them for a long time. They express themselves through explosions, roaring, noise and murmurings, tinkling and lapping...How would it be if it turned out that we were only the slowest and least intelligent beings in the world?” Michel Serres. Angels, A Modern Myth

One for @[1240225973:2048:Nell] 🙂 Frugality is an important thing for me, but it’s a difficult topic because how people spend their money is a powerful part of their psychology and personality. In boom times, the dominant psychology is euphoria, money is literally no object. Australia like the rest of the world is coming off a prolonged boom, and the evidence is everywhere: - ridiculous house prices - huge amounts of meals eaten in restaurants rather than at home - exorbitant prices for education and health - enormous numbers of service industries to do the jobs like yard maintenance that people would traditionally have done themselves - hugely inflated prices for things that would normally have been seen as robbery, like foods and drinks and entertainment (the famous smashed avocado on toast selling for $10 and upwards, and people spending $20+ for lunch without blinking an eye) Etc. The opposite of this euphoria is penny pinching. But there’s a middle way, and that’s frugality. Rediscovering value-for-money, being aware of what’s a ridiculous amount to spend and what isn’t. Money stops being a status thing and becomes a tool again, that’s all.

I love crows, and ravens. Mostly for their amazing intelligence, and for the character that brings with it. Something that’s confused me for a while though is - why do we not see them much except when they’re eating road kill on a highway, or out on farms? Many other birds venture into our urban spaces, but crows and ravens not so much. And then on the weekend, in a duh moment, I found them. Anybody guess where?

Do you see a lot of kids holding pens and pencils as if they have crippling arthritis in their hands? Some shocking pencil grips out there. But does it matter? https://theconversation.com/how-much-does-handwriting-matter-36108

Happy Birthday you! Frank, or Earnest, whichever it is 🙂 Party on!

Artists are smart.

Hmm, I accidentally deleted my earlier post on this. We need not just more trees, but more plants in general. Not only do they protect the soil, they actually generate rain. Some argue that climate change could be alleviated just by reversing a lot of our land clearing. And you don't need to clear land to farm, there's no reason at all a farm can't also be a diverse polyculture. We clear massive amounts of land and then wonder why we don't get rain. We blame 'droughts', as if it's nothing we can control. And our cities are baking in the heat, when just having trees could make the hugest difference to urban environments. They look nice too, leafy suburbs and all that.

It is interesting how we will tolerate carnage caused by human error, but one mistake by a machine is scary. It says something about how we view identity and machines and moral responsibility. This technology will continue because cars in their current form can’t survive. Still the only form of motorised transport that hasn’t shifted to a much more automated form of control. As the tests are showing, nearly a 10-fold reduction in collisions alone when semi-autonomous cars are used. But it’s not just about safety either, it’s about changing our entire relationship with cars so they stop being our little bit of individual territory on wheels.

Have posted this one before, but i think it’s got more still to give. Religion is a contentious thing for people, mostly because those for and against it have bizarrely come to think it’s a debate about whether there is a supernatural God up in the sky. So you either have ‘faith’ there’s a God ‘up there’, or you don’t. However religion may not be anything about that at all. This gospel tune points the way to a completely different way of understanding it. Religion is about presence, about, as the tune says, not worrying, ruminating, speculating on what hasn’t happened yet, living in the moment etc. Some religions often have this already as their main focus, but you can hear in music like this that it’s a vein of Christianity too. “He has the whole thing in his hands” scares people, they think it means take no responsibility for anything, God will take care of it. It doesn’t mean that at all, it means take care for the things in your everyday present moments, and stop trying to impose a right or wrong way on them, an overall direction. Deal with things only for what they are, as they present themselves to you, stop trying to judge them. Have humility, let reality be what it is and deal with that specifically.

Happy Birthday!

Every woman's (gender stereotyping alert) worst nightmare. An outside dunny. Freezing cold in winter, and chock full of spiders.

Is it fake news if staff at the biggest fake news provider in the world say they're sick of producing fake news, on behalf of Donald, the boss of fake news? I'm so confused.

Often thieves understand human psychology better than anybody. Derren Brown, if you’ve never seen him, has produced some of the best television of the past 20 years, blending suggestion, hypnosis, magic and psychological research to show how little we really understand about how humans work. This wonderful short demonstration he does of pickpocketing highlights for me the silliness of the idea that consciousness is the foundation of who we are. It’s not, habits are that foundation.

Derren again, hilariously showing that we’re not really conscious creatures in most of what we do. And that’s a good thing, being overly conscious is one of life’s greatest curses. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0q2KGGMc1EM

So @[100001374621876:2048:Kato] and @[783412914:2048:Kyle]. The very intelligent, brilliant even, Simon Pegg. Putty in Derren’s hands, as you would be too 😉 Also explains how he did it. You can see how much suggestion is right at the core of everything we do. https://youtu.be/sEmCQzueyEQ

Some of the most solemn drivel in public debates is the stuff on A.I. Artificial intelligence is portrayed as computers becoming brains. Brains don’t ‘think’ either so it’s layer upon layer of drivel. There will never be a thinking machine because thinking is not a separate activity to moving or just doing stuff. Our intelligence has always been artificial. We have always used tools to think, in fact we have very rarely thought anything at all without them. Language is a tool. Pens and papers and books are tools. Songs are tools. Our memories are 90+% artificially contained in books and databanks. Google is a massive collective thought machine, it works so well because it collects the work of millions of people with every search.

The dancer was a free option.

Just because there’s such a lot of his amazingly fun stuff to see, and this one talks a little about suggestion and all of us too, @[783412914:2048:Kyle] and @[100001374621876:2048:Kato] and @[584373168:2048:Peita]. https://youtu.be/6kSq7dPlw0A

Good on Emma, sticking to her guns.

@[783412914:2048:Kyle], @[100001374621876:2048:Kato], more hint at the range of Derren’s work. This was a series called Trick or Treat, where he took ordinary members of the public and gave them transformative experiences, in this case turning an old woman into a poker champion in a week, and in the comment below I’ll post the link to the episode where he turned a guy with a poor memory into a quiz champion, in a week. This is what he does, explores largely unknown ways in which human capabilities work, and changes peoples’ lives at the same time by making them recognise that their capabilities are well beyond what they could have imagined. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7-osZbxq4Mc

Happy Birthday!!! Have a fabulous day :)

Some of the work being done with autonomous vehicles in Australia. Notice that part of the new world being developed is not just making vehicles individually autonomous, it’s to network them to each other and connect them to a multitude of other cameras and sensors in our environments. This is a much bigger change - a revolution dare say - than many people have realised. One of the biggest benefits of autonomous driving technology is the ability to turn millions of currently individual and isolated 1-10 tonne missiles on wheels into a connected, coordinated mass transport system.

Do you have any respiratory problems? Asthma, hayfever, a cold, the flu? Another shout out for vitamin C. For years it’s sort of been known as useful for conditions like this, but it gets caught up in the debates around vitamins. There’s good reason to think that vitamin C is not a ‘vitamin’ in that way, and should be studied much more. Generally your GP will tell you it can’t do much harm, but it won’t make much difference either, but that’s because they’re trained to treat it as just another vitamin. But, if you look at medical research, there’s tantalizing evidence, and there has been for more than a century, that vitamin C can have remarkable effects on respiratory illness in particular. I posted here about how it led to a remarkable turnaround for me when I had whooping cough, in just a matter of days. I also occasionally get asthma, and now I pop a vitamin C pill if I get wheezy and it’s gone in minutes. Sometimes if you have a more serious condition, like flu or whooping cough, you may need larger doses, like 6-8 grams across a day. But I’ve found even small doses can have a profound effect. If you have any of these types of respiratory issues, such as a cold or flu this winter, maybe give it a go? You don’t have other options anyway, for viral illness in particular.

The hidden secret of fruit, like reading books almost universally lauded as a great thing. Alas. ““People usually try to improve their diet by eating more fruit - but fruit cultivated for humans is much higher in sugar and much lower in protein and fibre than most wild fruit because we like our fruit to be so sweet and juicy...” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys-banned-from-eating-bananas-at-devon-zoo-9058856.html?amp&__twitter_impression=true

The danger of constantly focusing on the brain. We’re brain-obsessed, whether we think thoughts are swimming around in there, or memories, or in this case disease.

So, when you sit and watch Ricky Ponting, with his $65 million in the bank, commentate on the ‘Big Bash’, doesn’t it ring alarm bells - cricket is losing its way? Gambling is trashing the game, and its culture. The Poms are loving today’s story, they’re better at winning off the field than on it, and I remember Atherton having a pocket full of dirt and modifying the ball with it, and the entire England team on an Ashes tour conspiring to use peppermints to induce reverse swing. But it’s like the Lance Armstrong-ing of cricket, they’re all at it, with bookmakers financing the carnage.

Not trying to excuse the Australians, who I think are a bunch of boorish, greedy, cheating yobs. But I do remember this, exactly the same or even worse behaviour. Has been going on forever, the games Pakistan threw for bets, Hanse Cronje’s game-rigging - all far worse. Today’s story for me is more about the way cricket has been trashed by self-interest, not about the cheating itself. Notice that betting was the centre of most of the worst cheating, as I think it is today.

The cricket scandal says as much about cricket fans as it does players. The Big Bash and T20 in general is the cancer that funds the behaviour, and the destruction of the culture of the game. And the public love their T20. Once you turn the game into a gambling-led circus where only more bowlers being smashed around the ground is enough to satisfy the public appetite, and players become mercenaries and ‘teams’ just a temporary assortment of highly paid mercenary gladiators, it’s game over. Literally. Are you not entertained? Maximus saw the rot in the culture of Rome, which he also saw the public’s full culpability for. T20 is cricket’s Roman circus. But we’ll see whether anything changes or whether this only becomes an opportunity for rival teams to sink the boot into Australia. The cheating and corruption is everywhere, and much worse than this too in other places. That’s the real issue here, but I’m betting (pun intended) it won’t be the one that gets sorted.

Happy Birthday Amanda 🙂 Bit of a windy day for it.

Nick Hanauer, still one of the really smart rich people. Says that what creates jobs and makes business rich is consumers with money. Don’t give tax relief to business, give the money to consumers. Everybody wins. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX5poAfZ1k8

Just sayin’. Why is roughing up the ball ‘tampering’, but shining it isn’t?

Last year the financial services sector took $31 billion in fees, from super. That’s almost as much as the age pension costs, and it’s growing. What could go wrong? If the government hadn’t been so keen to privatise retirement saving, the public coffers would now have an extra $2.5 trillion. Instead it’s being siphoned off by financial sharks, globally. And you have no control over it, the money is locked away. (P.S. Paul Keating, average life expectancy rising doesn’t mean we can ‘all expect to live longer’. And he’s the architect of Australian super.)

Iconoclasts were famously known as the people who would go into churches to smash ‘idols’. All the beautiful iconography in churches was their enemy, which they saw as a distraction from true religion. But iconoclasm went on to become our world. We hate mediators or intermediaries, we want purity. We hate institutions: we hate government, we hate the law, we hate the church, we hate the press, we don’t trust knowledge. We think politicians should just ‘say it how it is’, that religion is a ‘lie’. We won’t compromise on things, because that would mean surrendering some of our purity. And we hate the people who end up having to make those compromises for us, because we refuse to. We protest, we don’t build. Down with the establishment.

Business doesn’t create jobs. Customers (with money) create jobs. You can be the second without the first, but you can’t be the first without the second.

DH Lawrence, who was himself a school teacher, often said that education forced on all people was an evil. To be ‘uneducated’ is not the same thing as not being smart, it just means to not spend a lot of time in schools and other education institutions. The danger of forcing all people to go through the same education, Lawrence said, was that those who hate school end up resenting those who do well at school. And then they end up having no respect for knowledge itself. At the same time physical jobs, like trades, are seen as a fallback for those who are less ‘smart’, rather than as a different type of smart. I think we can see this right now, with the growth of populism, and the delight with with which many ignore expertise. Climate science? Fake news! And it’s now noble to be a tradie or do physical work (as it should be), but school and university educated people are seen as pencil pushers or chair warmers. One of the big problems is that we make assumptions, that kids of well-off parents are likely to be smarter at school stuff, and the ‘lower classes’ should be the tradies. But often the school geniuses might be in poor families, and kids from rich homes would be excellent tradies. We also use a hierarchy, that nuclear physics is harder than plumbing, for example. The trades suffer most with this, because they can sometimes take pride in *not* being thoughtful in what they do - that’s seen as a wank. The craft of some of those trades then disappears, and is taken over by a yob sort of culture.

Happy Birthday sir!

Thanks to my wife for accidentally giving me the idea that in every way I am uncool (long list), I can now call myself 'retro'.

I think just about everybody who works for a larger company suffers through this. The trickier thing is figuring out why it happens in the first place. My two cents. We run our companies upside down. We don’t understand scale. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/23/from-inboxing-to-thought-showers-how-business-bullshit-took-over?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Many people seem to get stuck between two main states in everyday life. Either free and relaxed but slumped, or upright and supported but tightly held and not very free. They either ‘sit/stand up straight’, or they ‘relax’. The first needs effort, the second is the releasing of that effort. What if the human body and gravity allows you to be completely free and relaxed, and supported at the same time? What if you don’t have to ‘hold yourself up’ in everything you do? I post about that a lot, because it can change a life and it impacts everything you do. Freedom beyond imagining is right there to be had.

Happy Birthday! Live Long and prosper.

This was genuinely useful in the paper today. Shows traffic volumes over Easter on the M1, at what times, from last year. If everybody reads it, it'll be interesting, the peaks might just all shift to the quieter times :) You'd have to pay me a whole lotta money to want to be driving on long weekends. (Blue lines are Easter, black normal Fridays or Mondays.)

Both of these industrial sites are uneconomic and the owners desperately want(ed) to close them. The government is desperate to save one, and was happy to watch the other go belly up. Understanding why will tell you nearly everything about this current government.

Rather than get rid of Facebook, we should recognise that it’s now a public service, like water or electricity. It should be regulated, as Cook says. That’s how these corporate giants make such enormous sums of money, by targeting real social needs and then vacuuming up the money that would normally be public monies used to run the public service.

Researchers studying the remains of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses 2, who died more than 3000 years ago, concluded that he died of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was only isolated by Koch in 1882. Notice how our technologies are specifically positioned in time and space, in fact we often date human history using the emergence of different technologies. Machine guns don’t turn up in Neanderthal sites, we don’t expect them to. But knowledge we take to be eternal, timeless. Once something is ‘discovered’, it apparently has been that way forever. But it ain’t so. Knowledge is as bound by time and space and specific conditions as technology. Facts have histories, and not just histories of the people who ‘discover’ them. Which might seem bizarre, but there I think we have one of the keys to understanding the world we live in.

It’s horrible living in a sentimental age. Take this cricket saga, where we’ve moved from outrage last week, to guilt and forgiveness this week at the sight of the trauma Smith and Bancroft showed. Rather than treat the whole thing as a symptom of the way cricket is being run, we slip into the usual Days of Our Lives melodrama of the personalities involved, and get our rocks off with the roller coaster ride from outrage to grief. That’s what sentimentality is.

This is what has always struck me as the single most important thing people need from education. Not any individual subject or type of knowledge. The capacity for sustained attention on something. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/13/the-21st-century-skill-students-most-lack/?utm_term=.a9b5d302d5f0