Art, culture & media

All the stuff about status and imitation and rivalry I post about is in this diagram. It shows that our lives exist in cycles, in time, and we get stuck in our thinking at one part of the cycle. For example right now…

Trump’s regime change adventure in Venezuela will horrify many. (And Trump is a dangerous buffoon.) But let’s add the context. The US does this sort of thing all the time, and for very specific reasons. Russia too,…

Party-goers continuing to dance and film with their phones the fire that was about to kill 40 of them. To get a good vid for the socials. It’s the perfect window into our entire culture. All threats to our collective…

This was a day and a half ago. So I’m no longer infectious. Many workplaces let you come back to work while your RAT is still positive. Madness. I’m still on Metformin for another week. Because Covid is still inside me,…

Donut Labs, an offshoot of a Finnish company, created an electric motor that is actually part of the wheel. No drivetrain or transmission needed. Check out the stats: 845 hp, over 4300 Nm of torque, and weighs only…

There was a TV series on Bodyline, but it amazes me there’s never been a film about Bradman. His sporting achievement is one of the most extraordinary things statistically in all human history, it almost defies belief.…

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

Everything is a Hollywood movie in the American psyche, and this is also another key characteristic of kidult culture. Most views on AI for example are little more than feels from James Cameron’s Terminator movies. This…

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an…

"You've had Covid now, why are you still wearing a mask?" (losing count of that one) Compare with: "You've had a car accident now, whey are you still wearing a seatbelt?" The only part of the human brain now in…

We're living inside a 2000-year period of history that has been mostly dominated by China. Our collective memory is about 10 minutes. The only thing that interrupted the total dominance of China was what they call their…

SAT scores are used in the US mostly to select people for college admisison. They’ve been in free fall since the pandemic began (circled in red). I don’t know about your experience, but in workplaces I feel a real…

Yes planes are a big part of it. The modern mosquito. Not the engines.

Record crowds go to everything now. An increasing shift in the culture towards trending, viral behaviour. The desire to 𝒃𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆. The loss of shared meanings and stabilised hierarchies through social media…

Be prepared in Australia for the targeting of rural and regional people by One Nation, including their newest recruit Barnaby Joyce. They see real opportunity to steal lots of Nationals votes. They’re also targeting…

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that…

Increasingly I’m seeing people suffering ongoing, relentless sickness because of Covid start to blame the vaccines. Given they were sold a fairy tale that the pandemic is over, it’s not surprising. But not getting…

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and…

The Holy Grail of medical science is how to treat inflammation. Most diseases that harm or kill us have a link to inflammation. Heart diseases, cancers, neurological diseases etc. We know how to suppress inflammation,…

The uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re…

The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) makes the rules for Australian energy markets and advises government. It wants to make an outrageous change. Right now your electricity bill is mostly based on how much…

The British Medical Journal. Covid is not really a respiratory disease, breathing is just how it gets into your body. Covid is a vascular disease, it attacks blood vessels. You have blood vessels everywhere. When you…

Sharing just part of my conversation with AI about ORAC, the 1970s fictional intelligent supercomputer. By the way you may notice AI now asks you more questions? That’s deliberate, to reduce the possibility of…

The damage the bullshit of 'living with Covid' did, turning entire nations into anti-vax havens. This is social collapse, just one more part of it.…

AI asked (you just need to ask, no software or art skills required) to create a video showing major figures from history living ordinary lives. This is a wonder, we’re inside another revolution. And we’re doing what…

For most of the last 3-4000 years, China was the only world superpower. Then in the past 300 years Western countries discovered fossil fuels. That gave them a temporary dominance. That dominance is now rapidly coming to…

We watched the latest series of Bridgerton on the weekend. Why do people love period dramas? I think for a reason that links to what I post about a lot. Period dramas are pretty much all about one thing. Social status,…

Watching the first Formula 1 race for the year. This year the cars are very different, they’re 50% combustion, 50% electric. They were hybrids before this too, but not with this much electric. Many purists want just…

This is cheering. A nuclear war would also likely shut down social media, so the ANZAC nations may also stop arguing about everything, start vaccinating again, driving electric cars and using free energy from the sun…

Tesla is about to open the factory for mass production of its semi. It'll be able to build about 50,0000 trucks per year. The semi does over 800 km in range. China has been building thousands of electric trucks per year…

I know a deeply committed ‘motoring enthusiast’. What George Monbiot calls a ‘boy racer’, which better captures the psychology. The guys (though also women, but less often) whose actual identity as a person is heavily…

I’d almost forgotten that I once taught at South Sydney High School, when training as a teacher. I had no idea Heartbreak High was filmed there, I might have realised if I’d ever watched it! It was a nice school. The…

Things getting real. Fuel prices in NZ. Karma is coming for Donald and his goons. The rest of us will pay for his stupidity. You can pay a shit-tonne less by being smart and removing the fossil fuel vampire squid from…

Clean your teeth. When I cut most sugar out of my diet about 20 years ago, the first thing I noticed was much healthier teeth and gums. Most people and even most doctors think fat causes heart disease. That’s very old,…

The deepest human desire and behaviour is to imitate. To copy others, because that gives us status and therefore identity in social groups. Imitation can be used for good, or bad. Good is the control of imitation, so…

Some more details about Teslas, we chose them for their brilliant engineering. Their engineering design not only targets everything that makes them incredible family cars, they’re also brilliant driver’s cars with…

Arson attack against a Western Sydney Tesla dealer yesterday. I worried this bullshit would start again. Basic civil order is the first thing to go with upset kidults, especially when they lose their petrol and diesel.…

I learned a big thing today. I would never have learned it without AI. The skin is often neglected as a vital part of the body. Very few people look after their skin well, women much more than men. The basic act of…

Setting up Starlink for a family member reminded me again of some brutally hard truths about human beings and their groups. Like buying a Tesla, it’s the most beautifully elegant and simple process. Everything just…

I’m up an hour early today. The only way I’ve found to counteract the stupidity of Daylight Saving is to change my bed and waking times, to avoid as much as possible the shift to the circadian rhythm, which is so…

I see this all the time at work and in the community. The avalanche of retirees, freshly released from the pressures of work and then suddenly feeling unplugged from relevance to our societies. This is part of the same…

The real tragedy about Elon Musk being so repugnant to so many people is this. What Tesla are doing and planning to do is almost beyond belief. All of the sub-companies and products, like Space X, xAI, Starlink, the…

Have been waiting to see when the reality of concussion and brain damage would start to really bite in football. From May 1 professional footballers will apparently no longer be able to get insurance for head injury.…

Spinoza made visible an impossible tension at the heart of all of our lives. What is ‘right’, in terms of morals but also facts and knowledge, is always in opposition to what is socially acceptable or popular. If you…

Watching some US Masters. You can see status in everything, because it is everything for humans. Take the beloved baseball cap, worn universally by professional golfers and even fans. It’s completely idiot headwear for…

Lithgow is Australia’s Strait of Hormuz. Maybe it should start a blockade ;)

I've been preparing for this 'shock' for many years already. It wasn't rocket science to see it coming. My various interests I share on here, like renewable energy and EVs, are all part of that.

The Trump family are masters of ‘pump and dump’ politics. They make announcements, knowing they’ll cause big shifts in the stock market (the pump) and then secretly in the background they and their crony mates buy and…

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant…

I was there when rock gigs still felt edgy. A bit dangerous, seat of your pants, only a handful of musicians daring to try to entertain an enormous crowd that overwhelmed them in scale, with ingenious lighting rigs…

Originally Anzac Day was a day of solemn mourning, and marches were often near silent as many who lined the streets were relatives of those who died. It was like a symbolic funeral. It started in 1916, in the middle of…

A photo of Chifley Road without Andrew Gee or Paul Toole could be worth a fortune.

I talk about Tesla a lot because what it’s doing isn’t publicised much. It’s literally reinventing not just driving, but business and culture. Everything it does uses data in ways to reinforce everything else it’s…

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company.…

Look at the ad spend for Tesla, compared to other car brands. It's almost non-existent. It also does very little PR. The downside of that is people don't get to see the real novelty of what they're doing. They put the…

Why do I post so much about Tesla? They don't talk about the enormity of what they've done. You don't need to be any sort of fan to appreciate it, it will change the world, all of the world (well beyond cars) and it's…

Iggy Pop at Coachella. I remember the elderly performing at big music festivals when I was young. O wait, no I don’t. They were acting their age, playing bowls. The boomers who cheer this on wouldn’t have let the…

I post so much about status because it really is the key that unlocks all human behaviour. Another example, maybe 20-25 years ago I noticed quite a few more luxury European cars circulating in Lithgow. That wasn’t…

Dolly did a long selfie video to explain why she’s disappeared from performing. Her immune system stopped working. You can fool yourself Covid is a nothing burger for a while. Dolly is a master of putting a happy face…

We live in very idealistic times, where everything is processed through the head and through feelings. I went through school at the tail end of corporal punishment, and was caned several times. it didn’t damage me in…

A huge performance looks like a collective sharing. But I think it’s much more interesting than that. The performer is somebody who has spent years mostly in isolation, mastering and understanding an art that in turn…

Right from the start of this term as President, I’ve said this. Through all of the hysteria of apparent fascist takeovers of America. People have no idea what fascism is, and why this isn’t it. Nor do they understand…

A humanoid robot sorting packages. This went for 8 hours, uninterrupted. It’s actually mesmerising, watch the sophistication of the engineering of the hands and arms for example. The robots are coming, with AI. Kidult…

Strip all the bullshit away from 'politics', which isn't even a thing anyway. It's different social groups in the community fighting for status. Modern conservatives are the old landed gentry and industrialists trying…

The number one rule for a long, healthy life? Avoid infections. All infections, no matter how ‘mild’ idiots say they are. Most people who have ever lived died of an infection of some kind, before they were 15 years of…

I laugh when I hear a room full of people indoctrinated by social media narratives on AI, booing AI. Supposedly smart people. Righteously, rudely stupid, which is what social media produces. Only AI can save us from…

A longish but very interesting read about why the airline industry can never make money. This actually links to my dislike of travel more generally, a culture that would be simply impossible without jets and jet fuel.…

The enormous fear that the human race may be overtaken by something actually intelligent. There are so many layers of stupid to this, not least the idea that enormous intelligence would have evil intent. By definition…

When you say that most of the criticism of AI is kidults who watched the Terminator movies...(see the comments).

Of course you can’t win against kidult culture, because it’s the status quo. No status quo can be defeated by logic, or activism, or debating. It can only be destroyed and a new one put in its place, by some internal or…

I'd put money on the NRL and referees sending a message on head injuries with this decision last night. A message boofhead ex-players don't want to hear. They'll be first in line to demand compensation when they start…

A graph that's a window into status, the core of all human life. Real wages only began to rise after the apocalyptic first half of the 20th century, when millions of ordinary workers were killed, meaning those left had…

Just one of Bathurst’s stormwater channels that run through the town, collecting run-off. It’s incredible how fast these become raging torrents, even with light rain. Why people end up dead playing in stormwater drains.…

It’s been very dark and cold and wet in this part of world in the past week or so. That pushes down solar production, but would have been outstanding wind generation weather, day and night (even more at night). Except…

I often say it because it’s true, nearly every way the public discussion of AI is framed is a direct rehash of the Terminator movies. Of two competing ‘brains’, human or silicon. It’s nonsense. In reality AI is the…

Heh, how could inventing machines that are so powerful and smart that they remove the need for work ever be a problem? In only one way. If the proceeds of the work millions of us do are mostly vacuumed up by a tiny…

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are…

Part 2 on Musk. And for the millionth time, I’m not a ‘fan’ of Musk. Nor am I against Musk. I just want to understand the specific material things he does, which I think are revolutionary. There’s critical things to…

I see so many references to the idea that the best thing a person can do for their health is to make sure they have a rich social life. That to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of both life, and how humans work. Of…

I watched the game, it’s a good game. But as when I watch F1, I also watch the people. You can see here the root of our culture, in plain view. The fanatical desire to be part of some team, and to go into battle against…

The grandad of lad culture, leading an entire generation of men into eternal adolescence through broom broom cars, Tonka Truck wankpanzers, and a general all-out assault on all change, has now hit the brick wall of…

By far the biggest billing at this launch of the Obama Centre is musos. It’s a big gig. Like all countercultural political movements, it’s just another leftover Woodstock movement. Not only is modern popular music just…

Why do humans love music possibly above all else? It’s not for all the reasons they often give. It’s because music is imitation in its purest form. And imitation is the root of not just all human life, but of existence…

This stupidity of social media pisses me off, that it labels things now with an AI warning. None of my posts are generated by AI. I may use AI to generate a graphic, or as part of my research. (The graphics are what…

Some who get solar are part of the off-grid movement. Like the self-sufficiency movement of the 1970s. Don’t do this, it’s an idiot idea. (Another viral trend, go figure. ) The grid is a wonderful resource. Off-gridding…

The seductive and dangerous power of music is that it is the only pure imitation. It doesn’t look like or sound like other things. It is imitation for its own sake, which is why it’s like social heroin. And why it…

And one more viral outrage. To be specific here (outrages never do specifics). This isn’t a breach of copyright, which is only about copies and performances. AI is only learning from existing music so it can produce its…

As birds show us, the origin of music is territorial. To define and defend a territory. Playing music people don’t like drives them away. QED.

Kidult culture is right there, if you choose to look. 80% of ticket sales to the new Toy Story movie are to adults. Mostly 34 and below (Millennials), but even couples in their late-50s and early 60s spotted at…

I think the single most dangerous belief humans have is that their desire to form groups and crowds is benign. That it's a warm and cuddly desire to connect and be together. Let's talk about Love Parade 2010. In reality…

Mass imitation on wide display at the World Cup. Once you start to see imitation, you'll see it everywhere, in all things. Fans will all swear they're there for the football. But their real passion is to be part of a…

The hardest thing I find for people to accept is that their personal, ‘subjective’ taste is also not only social, but created by status games. They will swear to (and at) you that their taste in music and fashion and…

One of the great myths of technology is that it's 'only technical'. That humans only relate with humans, and when they decide something in all that chatter, then you can go and build something. In reality technology is…

We’ve accepted dirty air our whole lives, in a way we’d absolutely refuse to accept dirty water. Now venture capital, including the maligned AI companies, has put forward $500 million to help fix this obvious threat,…

If you watch a lot of films and TV shows that weren’t created in your native language, you may have experienced the frustration of reading sub-titles. Or if it’s dubbed, the usually horrible mismatch between the dubbing…

Ozempic now costs $15 per month, in India. Uptake is slower than was expected. What’s going on here is that people have been trained by decades of ignorance from the diet and fitness industries that their weight…

Social media immediately turned it into an us v them. Smart Americans v Dumb Europeans. Elite senior managers v poor workers on the lower 7 floors. Blah blah blah. It took AI less than 10 seconds to reveal that the real…

Populism is a relative status movement. It’s people who used to be part of a dominant social group, now feeling threatened by the rise of other social groups. What gets the punters through the door is to appeal to the…

A generation ago only serious criminals would even think about doing this. Now it's sport. Imagine driving around slicing fuel hoses at servos. This isn't about EVs versus combustion vehicles. This is about the…

Video from one of the car‘s cameras yesterday. Sharing because it felt like an animated painting by Turner. Quite beautiful.

Watching State of Origin and strikes me again how pointless free to air television now is. More ads than telecast. How cheap have people become that they insist on things being on free to air, when for a relative…

Viral trends include our ideas for understanding the world we live in. A current viral idea is that there’s an epidemic of ‘loneliness’, and it gets worse as we age. This to me is another mistaken idea, caused by the…

This. Regional areas have no real reason to exist now, that their founding rationale of resources for the cities is increasingly irrelevant. But as renewable energy and data centre hubs, they can become important again.…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

I read Count Binface’s policies today. Some of my favourites: - people who use speakerphone on public transport shall be forced to join the army. Or to watch the film version of Cats - he wants the UK to build at least…

Anthony Albanese announcing a national approach to AI today. Having largely missed the opportunity to lead the world with renewable energy because of a decade of ignorant pigshit from Australia’s conservatives when they…

The World Cup is another wonderful window into human culture. Most fans pay no attention to the soccer itself. All that matters is that the team wins. That’s the passion, the desire. To be part of a team, beating other…

Christopher Nolan has made a film of Homer's The Odyssey. In an important way the world has come full circle back to the concerns of ancient times, without recognising it. Homer's Iliad is about rivalry and status and…

Most human-created music is slop. The idea 'AI slop' is social media slop. We can't distinguish between social media and reality now. I don't think I've spoken with one person about AI, anywhere, who doesn't just…

I talk a lot about how human existence is people imitating one another, driven by a battle for social status. We imitate to become part of some social group, to recognise other group members. Creating rivalry within…

It’s stupidly funny, all the rhetoric about the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese. The Chinese are one of the few empires in history with almost zero interest in war or fighting in other countries. They nailed it here. The US is…

Just to give a sense of the sort of analysis AI can turn out in a matter of seconds, I asked it to describe what it saw as the legacy of Live Aid. A superb analysis, and describes the kidult culture I often write about.…

Still nobody asks the obvious question. Why would a ‘super intelligence’ be malign? By definition being super intelligent means being able to understand things like good and bad. Something the stupid don’t understand.…

To me the real meaning of The Odyssey is not really registering with the interest in this film. It’s a story about going HOME. About a culture of conquest and accumulation and travel - an empire - trying to rediscover…

Imagine how expensive your car would be if car companies had to come to every home to build your vehicle from scratch, in your driveway. Cars are affordable because we don’t do that. We build them in factories, with…

Part 2 on why Australia should industrialise house-building, but probably won’t. As always, it’s about status. All societies run on status. The way we currently build homes in Australia is driven by a massive growth in…

A much shorter Part 3 on why we need to industrialise house-building. Look at the collapse in productivity of house-building, when it was ‘subbied’ i.e. houses being built on-site, by a range of independent contractors.…

Somebody at least honest enough to say idiot Terminator movies are doing their thinking on AI for them. Social media went rogue 3 decades ago and has been a wrecking ball through entire civilisations. Few even seem to…

GLP-1 drugs are not ‘weight loss’ drugs. That’s what people need to understand. They absolutely do lead to life-changing weight loss, but that’s just a side-effect of the miraculous anti-inflammatory properties they…

Towns and cities are a remarkable invention. Humans didn’t invent them, or even create them. Wtf, hey? Surely humans create towns and cities? They’re certainly part of the mix. But nobody and no group designs and…

Father Brown was one of those shows I always saw in the options on streaming platforms, and never dipped my toe in. I thought it must be one of those innocuous Brit shows that offered pretty views of the UK countryside…

It’s now trending on social media to label everything made by AI. For a reason nobody can really explain, except that it’s trending. Trending replaced thought years ago. I thought it was time to start labelling things…

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an…

Most regional towns now hold regular economic forums, large chatfests to try to figure out how to keep the towns viable. The thinking being that the towns need to ‘attract’ business and people. I’m not confident that…

Rather than try to make their regions independently successful, China is rejecting the separation into city and country. It’s connecting regions more aggressively to their mega-cities, with fantastic transport and other…

Because music is just about enjoyment and not about status, apparently, or at least everybody tells me. Being a rock star became so popular because it meant you could avoid adult life forever.

Brian showing his age. And that even smart people are swept up in dumb viral outrages. Incidentally I asked an AI chatbot the same question and it gave me the exact album cover. Meta AI is social media AI. There’s your…

So often you will see the claim that AI is ‘stealing’ the work of artists, like writers and musicians. I think that’s deeply and self-servingly dishonest. Just as AI doesn’t store words, books or publications and then…

There was real genius in George Michael’s song for Wham, Freedom. One of the catchiest pop songs ever written, but I think a much bigger artistic achievement than that. It was released in 1984. The song is about a…

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded…

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media…

40 years ago Bruno Latour suggested that we think much more with our eyes and hands, than we do with our brains. Because thought itself has never happened ‘in’ the brain. It’s always been a distributed activity, across…

Gen X is realising that the boomer model, where retirement is a permanent travelling gap year, flush with cash and free of most responsibilities, is not going to be afforded to anybody else. The countercultural…

Somebody has a birthday today. She’s a bit tired. Life is hard when you’re smart and the world is getting dumber. We love ya, curls.

This is what you see in a culture that still has the excitement of building things. The celebration of achieving unbelievable things. We used to be like this, we had technological World Fairs to show off the latest…

My own training followed a pathway that disappeared centuries ago. Where you were expected to understand both the sciences and humanities, but not as two separate domains. Not just a mix-and-match. All knowledge was…

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few…

The most profound thing AI is doing is blowing apart the idea that ‘me’ is this little person up in our heads, staring out our eye sockets. The me that thinks the world is just how it is, a view from those eye sockets,…

While social media life has delivered another victory for Pauline Trump, this time in WA, have a look at what AI is doing for scientific research. Google has developed an AI system called Co-Scientist, that dramatically…

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them.…

When humans go to gigs and other performances, their real excitement is the opportunity to imitate one another, at scale. To be a part of an imitating crowd. The performer is just a means to an end.

A not spoken about revolution of AI? It’s the only thing in our history to be ‘well read’. That has read most human knowledge, from all sources, including images and sounds. No human has been able to do that since the…

Photo (not mine) from the 1970s, showing just how rampant smoking was as a habit for many decades. It dominates the photo. Walter Lippmann said that when everybody thinks alike, nobody is thinking much. It’s a useful…

One of the grandparent acts pulling out of Glastonbury, because he says it's too corporate. Neil Young has an estimated net worth of $200 million. Think he found it in the back of a cupboard.…

I'm a huge Macca fan. But he's making my job here too easy. We've had 70 years of love and music, and the world is fucked. Let's make 2025 a year of thought and action.

My posts about ‘gig culture’ get bogged down in the offence people take at their favourite acts being criticised. It’s a wider argument about cultural and social change. The 20th century was a century of revolutions.…

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often…

Given freedom to do whatever they like, what do humans do? They copy what other humans do. This simple fact, that imitation is the heart of all human life, is in direct opposition to every idea about democracy that we…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

Ignoring all of the Elon Musk distraction around Tesla, their engineering is superb. Like the new Model Y, when you build a car all of the component parts have to be bolted and welded together, which takes time and a…

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

Insurance (big part of my job) is going to collapse in our societies, because our 'small government' politics doesn't solve any of our collective problems, dumping all the responsibility back onto individuals. Who can't…

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes.…

In my childhood, the old were not the wealthiest part of society. They were the people buying Iced Vo-Vos for a weekly treat at the supermarket. We refuse to notice or acknowledge the fundamental re-writing of society’s…

I still do everything I can to protect my family and myself from Covid. I refuse to take part in the craziness of trying to beat a pandemic by infecting our way out of it. By basing what I do on ‘what everybody else is…

Part 2 of ‘boomers think they’re 17, even though they’re 80’. Don’t hit me, I don’t make up the data, it’s from The Economist.

People who are 80, pretending they’re 17, Part 3.

I get exhausted even watching the curated lives helicopter parenting creates for kids. Trying to create ‘enriching experiences’ for the kids etc. The kids nearly always overly anxious and precious about everything,…

It’s not how powerful or wealthy people are, or how famous, that drives humans. It’s their relative rank, to other people. Their status. Status gives them an identity, they are ‘nobody’ without it. Begins in childhood,…

130,000 brilliant people work for Tesla. This is the bullshit that happens when people decide to become a mob. I’ll never be part of a mob.

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good…

There’s an emerging business in blacking out the ‘BYD” at the front of the BYD Shark, by people who love the ute but don’t like to advertise it’s from BYD. For many, their car is a huge part of their identity, which is…

Can you, from standing, cross your feet and move smoothly to sitting cross-legged on the ground, without touching anything with your hands for support or using your knees for support? And then get smoothly up again,…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any…

In Australia heat pumps (air conditioning we use in homes and many businesses) are not really a debate. Because they don’t really threaten status hierarchies here. In the UK it’s a furious fight, with the sorts of…

If what the Trump-Musk forces are doing to the US concerns you right now, be assured the Australian arm of the lunacy is geared up and ready to go here too. Social media is their assault weapon. You’ll find many foot…

In the 1970s millions would have called this a beautiful kitchen. Good luck finding anybody who would think that today. What we like is not ‘subjective’, in design, music or whatever. We like something because everybody…

I was talking to my brother about overtourism. Mike is a senior manager in the travel industry. He made the fascinating point that what’s allowed travel to explode to levels of destruction is Airbnb. All of these people…

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here,…

The American writer Noah Smith capturing here what I also believe about societies. Everything we call politics is a lie. Left to themselves, humans do one thing only. They fight each other for status, usually in teams.…

I have a couple of ex-good friends, who spend quite a lot of time on social media trying to convince everybody that vaccines are bad for them. We no longer talk. Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. The…

Social media is not part of society. It has become society. It hijacked it. We transact everything from our most intimate and personal lives, to our businesses and our politics inside it. It's owned by American and…

I don’t remember giving permission for them to film us @[100011634545260:2048:Tod].

You don’t perceive how much our thoughts and tastes are shaped by our desire to belong to a group, until something goes ‘out of fashion’ and you suddenly find it ridiculous. At the time you definitely didn’t find it…

Many kids growing up dream of this moment, being the band striding to the stage in a stadium full of thousands of adoring fans. It’s not really about music, it’s about the desire we have from the youngest age to be…

The genius of Covid is to give people a ‘mild’ illness, so they think it’s ’just a cold’. That mildness is the virus bypassing your immune system, to gain easy entry to your organs and blood vessels. The immune response…

What modern car nuts (mostly just guys of middle-age who used cars as a way of defining their social group as teenagers) don’t understand is that an EV is really a GT car. A grand tourer, gran turismo. Cars engineered…

Hear the dreams here? That’s gig culture, music as a pathway to status and wealth in adult life. A very rare, modern thing in history, from about the 1960s, and now in terminal decline for all but a handful. I would…

This is what's really going on in Trumpland. The tech moguls lining up to fellate Trump are there for a reason, for years now they've had the idea of replacing government with what they call 'The Network State'.…

The team sports of social media can achieve such a level of righteousness, that the team becomes a mob. People call this 'changing the world'. Really it's just being a mob. Looting, arson, vandalism. Some even gun CEOs…

Smart lady. Guess what killed her? Covid.

The autopsy findings in the deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife are interesting. Hackman died of natural heart problems and advanced Alzheimers. His wife died of a hantavirus, viruses you get from mice and rats. The…

I had hoped this bullshit would skip Australia and NZ. But the glory of social media is that one idiot doing something is quickly imitated by other idiots, who I actually don't think even believe they're changing the…

A starter motor. I love that you can't even start a combustion engine, without an electric engine. Same reason you have to idle the petrol, or diesel, burning fuel, while you're stationary, like at the traffic lights. I…

The mob is turning on Coldplay a bit now. Bands becoming less ‘cool’ is the group of people who follow them losing some of their social status. This is the point I make about ‘gig culture’, bands were used to help…

Posted before about this (Australian) revolution in artificial hearts. The plan is to be able to use these indefinitely, rather than have to get a donor heart. Right now it's already giving people with heart failure an…

America doesn’t have much of a functioning public sphere. So everything there sounds like an Avengers movie. If you want the government out of your life, maybe move there? It’s going well.

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

The lifestyles of rock stars reveals the true function of gig culture. To create a fast-track to high status life. Old aristocratic villas in Europe are lived in by rock stars. Being in a band wasn’t really about music.…

I’m at an age where the body often stiffens, and the doctor and physio will advise regular stretching to keep it loose, to stretch out those stiffnesses. To release tensions in the body. The problem with this though is…

I get some snide remarks at work about still masking. Often from people coughing between their chortling. I see firsthand their health falling off a cliff, a day at a time, as their immune system gradually shuts down.…

Another aspect of gig culture that is bizarre, but is missed because our own culture is usually invisible, as culture, is the idea of music being ‘performed’. A tiny number of musicians, on a stage, performing music to…

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism.…

Murdoch is society's cancer. Social media is that cancer metastasising. Start fights, fights generate teams, teams generate votes. Always the same business model.

Household electricity use is actually quite a small component of household budgets. A much, much bigger component of those budgets is what it costs for people to fuel their vehicles. That’s also part of your energy…

When you paint flowers, you create flowers made of paint. Not a likeness of flowers, but actual flowers, made of paint. If that sounds bizarre, think about how bizarre the idea of a resemblance or likeness is. How would…

Guy in Hilux parks in a Tesla, and doesn’t realise it’s recording the whole thing, including his rego number, as he keys the car walking past. How’s it feel to be part of a mob? Oh you just meant a friendly, law-abiding…

Two friends of friends in their late-30s/early 40s had heart attacks last year. One had two, in one year. Previously perfectly healthy with no heart problems. Doctors baffled! There’s no mystery, as Peter says, an…

Hybrids are selling like hotcakes, because people want to save money on fuel, and some even want to go full-electric but are worried about range. On both of those counts, unless you’re doing a lot of driving in more…

Copycat stupidity. People vandalise great works of art like this now too, throwing tins of soup and paint at them. Mob behaviour is highly infectious. Their real passion is generating likes and follows on social media.…

Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. Including the annual flu shot. Nearly all serious disease has an infectious origin, and any vaccination alerts the immune system, and offers cross-protection against…

Wonderful footage from the 1960s of construction by the then Department of Main Roads (the DMR) of part of the Sydney-Newcastle expressway. Lots of familiar bits of road even today. I love that post-war public optimism,…

International students are in the top 3 of export income for Australia. Both major parties targeting them as scapegoats for a housing crisis that has nothing to do with them. Voting causes this, desperate attempts to…

I challenge those spruiking the superiority of petrol and diesel vehicles to start their car in the garage, close the garage door and sit with it for a few hours. I'll do the same with my EV. We'll compare notes. (P.S.…

Probably the only thing combustion car enthusiasts have left to distinguish the technology is the noise those engines make. But have a look around at the overwhelming majority of cars being made today, how much quieter,…

I talk a lot about cars not because I love cars, but because they’re key to understanding our wider culture. Notice the debates around EVs are all about the technical pros and cons people see. But that’s not what this…

Social media is spreading American 'gang' politics globally. Everything is always gang warfare in American politics, without a proper public sphere everybody just puts a gang together, to go to war against other gangs.…

I don’t make many changes to my FB settings or friend lists, but will be altering who sees what I post to better reflect what interests different people. If you start seeing fewer posts from me, that will be why. I…

The band photo is a window into what I call gig culture. When music became a dominant way to forge an identity and status in the adult world. It always was that for modern teenagers, their favourite acts are dominant…

This is the delusion. That ‘the people’ run democracies. Or anything. The people is not a thing, groups of people of whatever size don’t think, act or feel. They are always led, they always form hierarchies. Not because…

We have social media zombies bellowing about the Nazi fascist takeover of the US, out there burning and looting and protesting. I thought from the start of Trump’s term that the whole thing would fall in a heap of clown…

If you travel to see the world, or for ‘experiences’ (whatever that means), increasingly all you’ll experience is other travellers doing the same thing. Travel only works if everybody else doesn’t try to do it at the…

Many feel uncomfortable at discussions of ‘gig culture’, because it’s our culture and impacts peoples’ sense of status and identity. But this isn’t an argument that musicians shouldn’t be wealthy, it’s just pointing out…

Gig culture when focused specifically on business is called a gig economy. The transformation of the adult world of work into fleeting ‘gigs’, usually mediated through online platforms. Like a nation of backpackers.…

3D has completely disappeared again from cinemas and TVs. It never takes off because it’s based on a misunderstanding, that a surface (screen, page) being flat means an image people look at on that surface is flat.…

So many people locked their FB profiles, supposedly to protect their privacy but really just because everybody else was locking their FB profiles. Like the exact opposite of privacy, trying to fit in with others. They…

Part of the pelvic bone of a Roman gladiator from the 1st century. The hole circled in blue is damage caused by a lion’s bite.

Tesla is launching cheaper versions of its major cars like the Model Y and Model 3, reportedly from the middle of this year. They'll take some of the more luxury elements out of the vehicles, that aren't needed for…

Australia follows a pattern also seen in the US and other places. The real tension is between urban and rural environments. The more urban a society is, the more cosmopolitan voters tend to be. Living in cities…

The ALP is sometimes called ‘the natural party of power in Australia’. That’s historically true, and has nothing to do with which party you may prefer. It’s the only party that can and has ever won elections in our…

I missed this story at the time. Yikes, blows every other deal ever made out of the water. Queen were never the coolest band in the world in their heyday, but the greatest artists create the future, they’re rarely the…

Zali Steggall, when called a 'Climate 200 candidate' by a political journalist, brilliantly replied, why don't you call LNP politicians Gina Rinehart candidates then? Because that is exactly what they have been, for…

If you’re 50 and over, and say these things, do you see it as equivalent as saying your favourite bands and music are the best bands and music ever? If not, why not? It’s the same stage-of-life social status behaviour.

Matt does great videos. But I wonder if BYD really need to step in here and start publishing some more information to drivers about how to best drive a hybrid.  Matt getting just over 300 km on a tank as the full range…

In Australia household solar generates more electricity than all of our coal-fired power stations combined. And it’s still growing at an enormous rate. That was thanks to John Howard, who introduced the subsides for…

One of my favourite examples of how suggestible and manipulable people are. When wind turbines first appeared in the Central West, most people didn’t care, while for others councils even built viewing platforms to see…

This Modigliani nude sold for over A$235 million. The art market is an ocean of fakes and forgeries, trying to cash in on the enormous money a tiny handful of works attract. Modigliani is one of the most copied artists…

It's only in popular music that fights over 'originals' really happen. Symphony orchestras and jazz bands dine out on almost nothing but 'covers'. It's not a musical thing, it's a social thing. Popularity culture always…

Tom Cruise is an interesting cultural thing. Currently marketing his latest movie, and genuinely charming and professional and gracious with his time. And yet he’s a global leader of a cult. (He also can’t act, but it…

I'm over people saying 'cheap Chinese shit'. Apart from it being the gutter-level racism you'd have hoped Australia left behind in the 1950s, it's also factual bullshit. China is the world's factory. If something made…

The only true joy is understanding, I learned that from Spinoza. Everything else we see as the best things in life - love, happiness, experiences, fun, family, friendship, music, travel etc. - all of these are just…

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy aren’t ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist‘, or any of the other dumb -isms we believe in. They’re giant high schools, where permanent…

Two of Australia’s most popular cars, the RVA4 hybrid, and the Ford Ranger ute. Under new vehicle emissions standards coming into effect on 1 July this year, the price of the RAV4 could jump by $10,000. The Ranger could…

Covid didn’t end. We’re just ignoring it, as kidults we got bored with it disrupting our ‘fun’, so we decided to let it maim and kill millions instead. Nothing exists in social media society unless it trends. Not much…

Some Renoir to start the day.

Few will join the dots here. You won’t see what you don’t want to see. Top performers also tend to have elaborate anti-Covid measures, but they don’t give a shit about the same for fans. Just happy to vacuum up their…

The kids drove back from Sydney last night. They didn't charge while down there, and when they got to Katoomba they were already below 30% charge. But the car told them they'd have 22% charge when they got home. And…

Status is the key that unlocks human thought and behaviour. Once you see it, nearly every part of life suddenly unravels in front of you.

I spoke with Hayley (the reporter) about this last year. My mum went to hospital for heart and lung issues and caught Covid there. No precautions were taken. Politicians direct health departments to minimise Covid…

Now that even Musk sees what a bullshit artist Trump is, maybe the focus can go back onto Trump and off Tesla. Where the focus always should have been, except social media rots our brains.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, and died penniless at 37. Now high status people make hundreds of millions off his work. Great art is rarely if ever recognised in its own time, it creates the future.…

We live on the landscape, not in it. Our farming and mining are mostly equivalent, one extracts nutrients form the soil, the other minerals from the ground. (Mining actually does much, much less damage than farming.) We…

Most chronic disease, like cancers, heart and brain disease, are being revealed as ultimately caused by infection. The fact we can survive an infection in the short-term has led us to think of infection as a nothing…

Humans’ own culture is as invisible to them as water is to fish. The massing of tens of thousands of people into a space to all watch and listen to a handful of musicians doesn’t exist for 99% of human history. Its…

The same people who cheer on McCartney and Springsteen doing stadium gigs in 2025 would have laughed at the ridiculous idea of Louis Armstrong or Count Basie being invited to play at Woodstock. They wouldn’t have been…

Young Chinese women now go ‘boy sober’ and date guys acting in roles from online games and movies instead. ‘Cosplay’ culture. Adolescents love to play with roles, in the 1970s androgyny was big, mostly men camping it…

Springsteen reportedly makes about $3 million every time he steps on stage. He makes more in a week of touring than giants of music like Louis Armstrong or Nat King Cole made in a lifetime. Most of the greatest artists…

More kidulting. You may recognise Keith, from the Great Pottery Throwdown. A master potter. He and his wife Marj bought an old chapel in Wales, to renovate. What’s fascinating about the show is watching the modern adult…

These lists of notable deaths every year another window into the culture that’s invisible to us. Almost entirely celebrities - rock, film and sports stars, mostly. Others from the entertainment industry. Some…

The current meaningless trending hashtag in the US. The US President is the most monarchical figure in the world. Hollywood makes movie after movie venerating the position in ways other countries would find farcical for…

I know it upsets some, to dismiss trans, or even discuss it. Because like every other public issue today, there has been no discussion. People just joined a team, mostly driven through social media. They support one or…

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over…

Ah Queensland. "If we don't do it somebody else will" is an excuse to never shut down anything. Child slavery and prostitution, drug trafficking. Etc. "The Premier also said his government would fast-track approvals for…

Mercury was bored of gigging before he was even 40. Rock and roll culture is teen culture, he knew it and said it. We miss that insight in him in the rock stars now left, most of whom have only a fraction of the talent…

I remember asking a few years ago what people think ‘love’ means. Nearly universally they agreed with this, that it’s a feeling. Usually they described it as an enhanced form of friendship or affection. Probably not a…

Used EVs are the hot buy in America now, people have figured out they’re an absolute bargain. The same here in Oz, you’re getting a luxury supercar for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Just one more of the empty…

A couple of years ago, I shared this photo to see if people knew who it was. These days people can cheat at these things with Google searches, but curious if people remember.

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent.…

If democracy means ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind?

Travel is a classic example of status in action, that again we mostly don’t see because our own culture is invisible to us, as water is invisible to fish. Why do millions now travel? They will to a man or woman tell you…

When we were designing the kitchen, we wanted something elegant, not something that was just a copying of a current trend. House design is a great example of imitative human life, if you look at what passes for great…

This room has a timeless elegance. Because its design is about elegant functionality, not showy comparison with other people. None of it is particularly expensive, nor are the furnishings premium. Compare it with the…

A contrast, for my thoughts on timeless elegance. A very popular modern look for a bathroom. Superficially I think most would feel it has style, it looks pretty fancy. But does it have elegance? This is where I think…

Many say to me that people flock to gigs as a mass social event because of the music. But I think this video shows well that big gigs appeal to many people because they like being in a crowd of people. It’s a social…

We’re born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. True adult culture understands this, kidult culture never can, it craves continuous social life. That’s what adolescents do, it’s their appropriate stage of…

This is Tom Keating, master art forger, taken in the 1970s. He forged thousands of works. He's now collectible in his own right, to the extent there are now forgeries, of Tom Keating forgeries. Humans copy, it's their…

Rock stars are the aristocrats of our time. People still think it’s about music. Some of them even buy the exact houses previous generations of aristocrats lived in, they’re landed gentry.

Volcanic lightning at Mexico’s Colima Volcano. Photo by Sergio Tapiro.

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid is everywhere online at the moment. Live Aid, where the Western world looked at the catastrophe of human starvation, and did what? It put on a gig. That’s what gig culture does to try to…

“Irish musician Bob Geldorf said that 40 years on from Live Aid the concerts inspired people to feel that ‘the individual was not powerless’ and that they could change the world.” There’s the constitution of gig…

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room…

Tobacco plantation owners were some of the high status, wealthy people of their day. Every era has its high status positions, that generate wealth and power. The counterculture we’ve all lived since the 1960s is the…

Look at every person in that crowd, and find me the one who’s really ‘there for the music’. They’re there for the crowd, the appeal is to be part of a crowd. Hardly anybody you see in this pic is actually listening,…

"The “alt-music” image of a counterculture is a 20th century affectation; an evanescent form produced by radio and television, by Hollywood and the music industry. Those cultural forms are the empty vessel that 20th…

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the…

Billion dollar plus tours are not uncommon today for the legends of pop music. People refuse to see how fundamentally different this is to how this industry began, as kids trying to ‘make it big’ in the world, as the…

I’m too old for false modesty. I’m extremely good at music, which might surprise some who see me post so often about music today. Music is one of my gifts, as we all have gifts, it comes as easily to me as breathing.…

This is what caused the global pile-on, on J.K. Rowling. Her querying why ‘people who menstruate’ isn’t ‘women’. I saw this in a news article about cervical cancer screening. The sentence could easily say ‘you’re…

AI is a brilliant tool for summarising whole areas of research. Like this one, a discussion a few of us have been having here, about the role of popular music in the countercultural revolution, the dominant culture of…

Where does a phone call happen? I remember asking that question a few times. There is no simple answer, which is the point of the question. There is a ‘presence’ to the conversation that isn’t located anywhere in space…

Bathurst Our Town doesn’t celebrate the lives of great engineers or teachers or nurses or tradies who die. But musicians, yes. Because they’re like our gods. Kidult culture. What Bathurst Our Town does most is give…

I encourage everybody to read these findings. You don’t want Covid, and you certainly don’t want to keep getting it over and over. Long Covid is not just having a mild form of ongoing Covid for a while. It means things…

AI is us, the idea it could be against us comes from watching too many Terminator movies. It’d be like thinking your left hand and right hand are at war. Given that collectively humans mostly engage in pissing contests…

Kidult culture is also name-drop culture. The death of or publicity for a legend of kidult culture has others madly sorting through even the merest contact they may have had with them, so that the post can be about the…

These AI baby vids are hilarious. In recent weeks I’ve had various people repeat to me every dot point of this bullshit, not realising it all cascades down from the master bullshit artist himself. Whole communities now…

This child behaviour, fighting over toys, really is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Neither really wants the toy, it’s a sideshow. Each wants it because the other wants it. It’s desired purely because…

My plumber commented the other day that he loved our bathroom ‘because it isn’t all just greys and whites’. This isn’t our bathroom, but I like the use of colour here. The minimalist greys and whites in home design are…

Ricky is one of the well-meaning, smart younger generations that think belief in God is belief in fairy tales. But they then adopt the *exact* same structure of belief, of an independent, ‘objective’ something that…

The EV not only measures how much energy is used on a trip, if you’ve driven the road before it has a memory of your last trip there. Every little peak and slope on this graph corresponds with a different part of the…

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters…

Sting here talking about the disappearance of venues for live music for new bands to learn their trade. The problem though isn’t that, it’s that young people no longer see being in a band as a way of ‘making it’. That’s…

It’s common to attribute negative human behaviours to individual psychology. Greed is a favourite, and there’s an absolute epidemic of calling everything narcissism now too. But in reality, nearly all human thought and…

I don't make it up. 'Change the world'. But it's just about the music, apparently.

Trump appointed a fossil fuel executive to run his energy policy. This is the BS at the heart of the US as a culture, this belief in freedom and free speech is really sponsored horseshit from its corporate barons, who…

One of the greatest misunderstandings about the body I think is that the skeleton is like a solid frame that all the tissues and organs are then hung on. Bones are tissues too, they change depending on the forces on…

An Australian showing just how long you can own an EV. His Tesla now has over 800,000km on the clock, he drives over 100,000km per year, using the car as part of a luxury limousine service business. Says the car still…

Here’s a fun paradox. Humans copy one another obsessively. But why? Because they’re all different. We’re obsessed about imitating other people *because* we’re all different. If everybody is different, the only way to…

If you work at the front line of public service, the thing you will overwhelmingly notice is that what humans do above all else is complain. That complaint in turn is driven by the status games I often talk about.…

Not an easy room to photograph. But bathroom done.

What began as a mechanism for ordinary kids to ‘make it big’ in the adult world became just the adult world. Gig culture is over, it just hasn’t realised it yet. It also doesn’t recognise how unusual it is to make music…

One of the reasons I decided against becoming part of the music industry is that it’s mostly not very bright. Like I always say, I know, it’s an industry about entrenching teenage life across our entire lifespan. And…

How do you prick the populist balloon dominating politics? You target the trick populists use. Don’t get involved in the details or content of what they say, it’s irrelevant. Their shtick is - make people ANGRY.…

One of the brilliant things AI can do for you. If you’re out walking and want to identify plants, it can do it instantly. In the paid versions you can do it in real time, with your phone camera, while you chat to the…

When first released some thought Spinal Tap was a serious movie about a real band. The music industry is like Trump, it's hard to do satire because the reality is so ridiculous.

I got AI to write a song, just out of interest. it took less than a minute, music and lyrics. It was a good song. My postgraduate work was about how fundamentally we misunderstand science and technology. The horror many…

Paul McCartney recently mocked this song’s meaning as childish and naive. But it’s also a vital piece of evidence for the time that the kidult culture I talk about was taking over the world. Decades of compulsory…

The Terminator movies are as damaging to AI I think as Jaws was to sharks. Incredible to see how many of the ways issues are discussed in public are just re-hashes of bad Hollywood movie scripts. I know many would be…

If you want to see how humans work, watch any sporting event. People don’t just go to watch the sport. They go to support their favourites. That support creates teams in the stands as well. Being a member of a team like…

Not money. Not power. Not ’capitalism’ or any -ism. It’s all status. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Everywhere. You are literally nobody, without status, for social animals status is also identity. Even what you…

Hamill describing the explosion of the counterculture, with an impact going well beyond music. The moment teen culture began to replace adult culture, at scale. The counterculture is our culture, just as the Soviet…

Is our taste in music ‘purely subjective’? Researchers tested this in the early 2000s. They set up a music market of unknown songs and got about 15,000 students to rate them in one of two ways. The first got to rate…

It’s one of the wet dreams of all modern popular music culture. The walk to the stage to be screamed at adoringly by tens or even hundreds of thousands of fans. In reality few will notice anything particularly musical…

This is how Covid wins. By us no longer doing any meaningful testing, people can be out there completely symptom-free, infecting thousands of other people. I’ve highlighted in yellow the key part - a ‘mild’ illness…

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then…

The still surviving belief that fat causes heart disease is behind the enormous surge in sales of air fryers. But after decades of drug and surgical progress, heart disease and stroke are still the biggest killers. It’s…

Imagine them making a Star Trek movie where they got to choose between the sound of a combustion engine for a space ship, or this sound. Even the sound of an EV is sexier.

John Howard popularised the ‘assimilationist’ view of immigration. The one that constantly bangs the drum about how migrants have to ‘integrate’ with ‘our way of life’. The problem with this view is, who is ‘our’? For…

The world is going nowhere in the fight against climate change. This is like an enormous asteroid heading for Earth, as in the movie Armageddon, while we all choose to ignore it and go on holidays. Millions who failed…

Because we're entering dangerous times with echoes of the early 1930s (when people start talking nationalities and flags, lock the doors), I think it's worth looking at the features of criminal behaviour in Australia.…

America’s decay isn’t caused by ‘authoritarians’ taking over the country. It’s caused by its cultural obsession, its hatred of public regulation and policing. That’s the theme of every Western movie, right there in…

Robot vacuum faces off against cat. Like a Western movie.

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the…

A 'revolution', yep. Not a musical revolution. A social revolution. Teenagers taking over the world. Those teenagers are now either dead or in their 70s and 80s. Still reaping the fruits of their revolution.

Part 2, the UK. What happens when you let entire populations, including children, catch pandemic viruses, over and over. C is the trajectory that happened, beginning in 2022.

This 1940 video designed to teach the public about new dialling telephones (as opposed to having to always use an operator) highlights just how difficult it is to get humans to change anything. The task itself is…

It's exciting to be there at the start, to feel the ground shake. But also worth remembering combustion race cars rev the crap out of their engines at the start because otherwise their combustion engines have zero…

Can you guess what’s happening to the hearts of young people aged between 18-45, leading to such a rise in heart attacks? Dating from ‘freedom’ from protections against catching Covid?

When Major Thomas Mitchell stumbled upon the Western District of Victoria in 1836, he described it as “the finest country in the world,” “rich, open, well-grassed, park-like.” See that? Park-like. There was a belief…

Some angered by the suggestion Covid is extremely bad for them say ‘but my doctor says it’s fine’. Doctors are human and subject to the same social dynamics as the rest of us. It will take millions of deaths for the…

What’s happening in America and our interpretation of it, as ‘authoritarian’ takeovers, sometimes by ‘Nazis’, shows just how much adult life is teenagers living inside fantasies, mostly derived from Hollywood films.…

Chris Bowen has organised for all Australians to get 3 free hours of electricity in the middle of the day, as some retailers were already offering. This will give people an opportunity to load-shift their heaviest…

Mr Lincoln says Happy 21st wedding anniversary to my beautiful wife. My smart wife. Always go with smart, everything else is a momentary distraction at best.

“One of the great divisions of existence is that between people who absorb the learning that lies in books, and those who take nothing on trust, and have to find out the hard way through life’s lessons for themselves.”…

This is the wet dream of many adolescents of the past 70 years. Adulation from a stadium full of screaming fans. Anybody who studies crowds knows the screaming isn’t about the act. It’s about the crowd themselves, the…

I have literally less than zero desire to attend any stadium gig. The only reason you would go is the reason they exist. To give people the experience of being in a crowd, responding to a current viral trending artist.…

These are of course known as miracle weight loss drugs. The GLP-1 drugs. But they’re showing signs of doing far more, in areas that medicine has been historically powerless. Chronic disease, like ME/CFS, mast cell…

Part 2 of things AI can do that most wouldn't know. A very common belief is that AI can only be as smart as the people who program it. That's just rubbish, all technologies introduce a whole range of things that humans…

Dr John isn’t a medical doctor, though a large part of his success is allowing people to believe that. He influences millions. Had a young woman turn up to work to tell me that Council should be spreading Dr John’s news…

Every old band has seen the massive cash-vacuum nostalgia tours now are, and are dusting off the instruments to get out there fast. The Gallagher brothers are making $100 million EACH from their tour. Nostalgia is hot…

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of…

So the LNP did it, they decided to become the Dad's Army of climate (in)action. One part of their spin will be that Australia is only a small contributor to global climate change. Australians are carbon/energy PIGS.…

One of the big criticisms of owning an EV is that it’s much faster to refuel a petrol or diesel car. There is actual data on this, average time to refuel at a bowser has been studied not least by service station owners,…

Somebody wrote a very smart pushback to the populist political surge in local government, in Bathurst. The Facebook invasion. The only thing I’d add to this is that General Managers implement the decisions of elected…

Everybody goes to AC/DC because everybody else was going to AC/DC. Everybody went to Metallica because everybody else went to Metallica. Everybody went to Oasis because everybody else went to Oasis. See the pattern…

Brian May talks now about being in the autumn years of his life. To me he’s an example of how genius is mostly misunderstood, because that’s what genius actually is - something too difficult for most to understand. (The…

We’ve arrived at the green part of the curve. It gets very fast from here, the hangers-on to the old status quo will be run over in the rush. How change always works. Many still opting for hybrids. My advice? Don’t do…

The Press has never been free. What we call media was invented by elite members of societies, barons, as part of the furthering of their own aims. It only began to appear free when multiple barons established opposing…

A more subtle manifestation of kidult culture is how songs are used to express emotion in TV shows, streaming and films now. Rather than characters articulating a set of feelings and exploring them, which used to be the…

Silicon chips are far and away the most complex things humans have ever created. Take the M3 chip, from Apple. It has 37 billion transistors etched into a piece of silicon smaller than your thumbnail. The complexity of…

I paid for my own shingles vaccine doses (Shingrix) a couple of years ago, because I’m not yet old enough to qualify for the subsidised shots. I get every vaccine I qualify for, because I strongly believe infection is…

Supposedly abstract art, like Francis Bacon’s portrait here, annoys many because it doesn’t ’look like’ things. That gives it away, for non-artists ‘recognition’ is essential. Just as the greatest excitement at a gig is…

I do know people hate our culture being described as kidult. It’s not an insult, it’s only a description of how the culture operates. (It is also a disaster, but that’s different to it being an insult.) Twee…

Gough Whitlam's government bought Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles in the 1970s, for $1.4 million. There was lots of fake outrage at the time from the other side of politics, who used it as a stick to beat the government…

Bob Ross died 30 years ago, but he's become an international star posthumously. His painting videos are used by millions as relaxation aids, because of his gentle delivery and the sound of the paint going onto canvas…

I think many school teachers today would say that their biggest challenge isn’t the kids. It’s the parents. Because the parents never left school, they’re kidults, and they then pass on those mindsets and behaviours to…

In China fishermen use cormorants to help catch fish. The cormorants dive into the water to catch the fish, and are prevented from swallowing the larger fish by restrictions around their necks. This is just one example…

In many ways China is uniquely similar to Australia. Both are ancient cultures who found way to live IN the landscape, for thousands of years. Not on it. To make the landscape part of their society. Those farmlands are…

Veteran music producer Tony Visconti, who lived through Beatlemania, describing the EXACT shift the counterculture of that time was. And it had nothing whatever to do with music. Like he says here, until The Beatles,…

Nothing reveals our culture more than disaster. The event has to be turned into a movie/TV show, it has to be narrativised. The culture of the feels, people need to be emotional to be engaged. Emotion precedes action.…

I want to talk about the ‘hollowing-out’ of towns, to give more context to my deep dislike of modern travel culture. This is Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds, one of the most photographed towns in the UK. It has…

What to do, in the face of horrible events like Bondi this week? To me the answer is always the same. Think. Learn. Don’t try to find a team to ‘stand with’, our usual populist kidult response to everything now. This…

Robots are going to change the world. For a long time the challenge was making them physically capable of doing complex tasks. But they’ve been able to get them to do even backflips already for years, the challenge…

A different way to see life. We privilege working life, because economies are all about work. Childhood we see as preparation for work, and old age we see as ‘retirement’, again from work. Without getting all New Age…

The new BMW IX3 electric is part of BMW's 'Neue Klasse' vehicles i.e. they're getting very serious about electric. Seems to be a superb vehicle in every way, great range, handling, efficiency. The stumbling block for me…

2026 is here. It's interesting that we view time like a river, flowing along. Like 2026 was always going to 'arrive', and we're just swimming in that river, dipping in and out depending on how long we live. Time doesn't…

Probably the most important work on Covid I've seen in a long time. Because it goes right to the heart of the fantasy that we're 'living with' it. David Cutler is an economist at Harvard, who's estimated what Long Covid…

Hopefully the FB groups trying to run Bathurst saw this. The bats in Bathurst were part of a mass starvation event. Well over a thousand pups died in Machattie Park alone. This matters in huge ways, because bats…

We should have been highly sceptical from the start that the financial industry was asked to determine how much super people need in retirement. It's very lucrative business for them. The 'comfortable' rating for…

An El Niño means cooler ocean temperatures off Australia. But right now, that ocean is 2.5-3 degrees hotter than normal. That’s ENORMOUS. The difference between heat (energy), and temperature. 2.5-3 degrees doesn’t…

When you look at adult life, socially little changes from your days at school. Take the fake debates over EVs, as an example. Grease put to music that cars have always been a key rallying point for particular social…

As a Part 2 to the Chicago anti-EV piffle circulated by the mind midgets at SKY News Australia, the irony is the same city has seen the same propaganda before. In 2011 hundreds of petrol cars were abandoned because the…

You won’t find a State or town in the country who has anywhere near enough money to provide the basic services people demand, like repairing these roads. We as the public need to start to make some tough decisions about…

The ‘live with the virus’ slogan has driven a huge escalation in anti-vax beliefs and behaviour. We’re told that vaccinations will protect us from Covid, but nobody is getting them. And they’re also stopping their…

New York has declared social media a public health hazard. Which it is. It’s also a hazard to every other part of society, generating continuous tidal waves of bullshit to obstruct the most basic essential services. It…

Appeared in my feed from 10 years ago. Bittersweet memories of CSU again, from the time when leadership had disappeared and people sat in meetings like these all day, trying to figure out what the organisation should be…

Not really dressed for the desert. If only the photo had recorded sound too.

As anybody whose kids have left home has felt I’m sure, it’s a difficult transition. For them, and for parents. I think it goes beyond our usual ‘homesick’ type explanations. For most human history families didn’t…

One of the FB groups that makes me chuckle is dedicated to photos of people who find their own likenesses in art galleries.

Lots of sick Covid people today. Start of school has taken what was already a large outbreak and pushed it even further through the community. I'm genuinely curious when people think this nonsense will end, catching a…

I think she’s remarkable. But I’ve never liked live shows with lots of people on stage, including dancers. One of the magic things about rock shows was just 3-4 people on stage, making all the sound. It felt raw and…

Reality is rapidly catching up with this toxic fraud. A bullshit con artist, who destroyed what’s left of American democracy. Thankfully the law still holds against these modern populist dictators.

Australia has a love affair with trades. But almost complete indifference to sophisticated engineering. Like this artificial heart, made of titanium, with the only moving part a single spinning disc suspended in a…

Many of these new food delivery business models are rank piracy. Often they set up webpages for local restaurants without even telling the owners, and then customers order through these websites, with the food delivery…

Beautiful. Can’t remember the name of the digital artist.

One of the reasons I never pursued music as a career is that the industry is so depressingly stupid. Part 2 to my Adele post the other day. Covid got her.

I think the greatest mistake we made for the mental health of our entire population is to use a model of social life for popular kids, of lots of social mixing, as the ideal for all people to aspire to. We’re all…

I love that of all the things Welsh men could have chosen to do in life, right near the top of their list was to sing. This is music, there’s not much that can rival an all-male choir for goosebumps. Lithgow has a lot…

I love the story in here about a location in Iceland that was touristed almost to death, because Justin Bieber filmed a video there and millions then visited. Now closed to visitors for all but 5 weeks a year. Travel is…

Here’s something less well known about the measles vaccine, that makes it even more of a good idea. When they started vaccinating kids for measles, child mortality dropped significantly. But it wasn’t just because kids…

Chinese EV makers and Tesla are crushing traditional car makers. Honda and Nissan, arch enemies, working together now on EV development. Japanese car makers have been ridiculously and surprisingly slow to move on EVs.…

In Asia they use strong government to drive investment and innovation. More than a decade ago they identified electric cars as the way of the future, and began developing EV batteries. They now pretty much own that…

Agora Garden is a building in Taipei, now complete but with greenery still growing. The model shows what it will eventually look like when all the gardens have grown. It harvests rainwater, and the greenery blocks noise…

As a part 2 to my other post about vaccination, have a look how far down the list the Covid vaccines are. Not because they’re bad vaccines, but because Covid is a bastard to control. If you’re not getting boosted at…

Rod decided to do his own road repairs, because his Ferrari kept bottoming-out (we all feel for him). Part of a trend that’s obvious everywhere. No money for councils to fix roads, the public and their 5-car families…

I think we’ve wasted so much time in health thinking about nutrition. Most of our health is due to the microbes in us and around us. But here’s where the two overlap. Eat porridge. Porridge is food for good microbes in…

When this song came out I remember it being mesmerising for just about everybody. Very few knew who it was at first. Its influence also goes way further than many realise. This one song was the main inspiration for…

I’m so bored by rock stars and music more generally. Also why I’m so critical of gig culture. The reason we have no kids doing subjects like maths or science now is that all of our role models are fucking musicians. And…

Brilliant shot of The Beatles watching Jimi Hendrix perform, in shock. I love the contrast with the face of the woman on the far left, relaxed enjoyment. Popular music (and all human activity) is about social status.…

Have posted a few times how our bodies are not pulled down by gravity. That we’re all ‘weightless’, here on the surface of the Earth. Part 2 of this story is just as interesting. The motive force for all of your body…

I was called ‘transphobic’ and unfriended by somebody for posting on transgender issues. It’s too important for people not to speak out, children are being harmed, sometimes irreversibly, by these theories that few have…

EVs are already on-par with ICEs on price. And way, way ahead if you include fuel and maintenance costs. EV batteries, by far the most expensive part of an EV, are projected to drop in price by 50% this year. Meanwhile…

I walk every lunch time, and see this quite a lot. Really rude and selfish, I’m able-bodied so can easily divert onto the road to get around it, but I shouldn’t have to. If you’re old or in a wheelchair, this can…

In a week dominated by the question of violence against women, the Council of Europe provides an excellent summary on the topic. “There is no single factor that can explain gender-based violence in our societies, but…

I call Gen X the sandwich generation. Sandwiched between the boomers and millenials, taking the worst financial hit of ageing societies while having to plan and fund much of their upkeep as the population ages. Massive…

A technical guy I know recently bought a BYD Seal. A no-nonsense bloke. His review below (note he uses standard grid power to charge at home, you can get much cheaper rates again than what he's using). I got a BYD Seal…

Mum went to hospital nearly 2 weeks ago for serious heart and lung issues. Was to be discharged tomorrow. Not now. I don’t think people really understand that viruses travel in networks. And it’s all the people who…

“I can’t take Michael Bublé seriously. He’s got absolutely zero original to offer anything, so why does he even exist? Just re-rehashing songs in a big band style, exactly the way that Sinatra or Dean Martin or whoever…

The solution is there already. Saw another BYD Seal in Bathurst yesterday. There are at least some smart people out there.

Sting once said a band is a way to avoid growing up. It’s why he left The Police, because he didn’t want to be a teenager forever. When you read the history of most bands, you’ll find the same thing, how for members it…

This photo was taken 122 years ago, in 1902, by German scientist Adolf Miethe. We expect pictures of times long past to look old. It’s quite jarring for the people to look as alive and fresh as the people we see every…

Underneath fame and celebrity is often a prodigious talent that people forget is there. There’s not a popular younger artist today I can imagine being able to do this. Well, Jacob Collier obviously. But not many others.…

I’ve been talking about Covid for the entire pandemic. Here’s a good example of why. I posted that mum was in hospital, for serious heart and lung issues. About 10 days later she was due to be released, but had a bad…

If I felt that the people who ask me why I still wear a mask could actually read a graph, I might share this one with them. The relative risk of neurodegenerative (A) and cerebrovascular (B) disease, after being…

Musicians only become billionaires in societies where adult life has been replaced with adolescent life. Just a social fact. Not a judgment about musicians. Definitely a disaster for societies, where adult life…

Listen to the bitchiness of it. Obsession with status. Artists who ascend the status hierarchies of the industry to the level of ‘cool’ could shit in a cup and people would swear it was the best thing they’ve ever seen…

The idea of using AI to re-create another artist’s voice. Some are horrified, but how is it different to millions of guitarists all using the same Fender Stratocaster? All AI is doing here is make a famous voice into an…

From November in NSW this year, you can get up to $2400 from the NSW Government to add a battery to your solar installation, as part of their Peak Demand Reduction Scheme. They should have been targeting households a…

Jimmy Fallon is part of a new breed of talk show host where everything is about him, the host. And part of the spreading culture of commercial radio too, where everything is about cutesy pranks and stunts. Imagine being…

‘Manspreading’. Sitting with your legs spread is actually much healthier for your hip joints. When you’re sharing a tight seat, sure, put the legs together. But men sit like that naturally because that’s the way the…

It’s NSW money, Paul. It didn’t belong to the ‘former NSW government’. It wasn’t a gift from them or the NSW Nationals. Unless we want to start calling the Sydney Opera House the NSW Labor Opera House?

A provocation. I think Cold Chisel are probably the greatest band of all time. The greatest songwriters at least. Unlike The Beatles or Elvis or any of the other huge names, the songs found a way to marry white and…

People who swear that the best music is ‘subjective’ can’t explain manias. Where millions of people suddenly all swarm around a single act. That’s not subjective, when everybody likes the same thing. Humans don’t desire…

Alan is Trauma Director at Nepean Hospital, works at Royal Hobart and is also a clinical Associate Professor at USyd. Knows his shit. At a time the population is ageing rapidly and needs exponentially increasing amounts…

Heat exhaustion is a horrible death. The blood thickens, kidneys fail, your muscles start to liquefy, the person becomes disoriented and confused, the heart stops. What’s tragic about it is sufferers rarely know this is…

Vale to a wonderful Canadian, Dorothy! You can always tell a great actor by the fact they’re totally believable in every role they play. They become the character so seamlessly. Sutherland was like that, playing sweet…

Kell and I don’t share personal lives much on social media. But this kid did something amazing this year. Headed off to uni for 4 years. Then told us one day (we thought he was joking) that he’d been awarded a…

I’m not on any ‘side’ of trans debates. People with a brain don’t play team sports with ideas. But I do tend to listen to smart women, on the future of women, more than I listen to crusading men.

The saying that the eyes are the window to the soul. But the eyes are a black hole, at the centre. A chilling void, if you look ‘into’ somebody’s eyes, as the romantic line goes. They’re not a window. It’s the eyelids…

17 years ago today, dad died. That's him on the left. From the generation whose young lives were taken by war. Never spoke of it. Part of that huge wave of European migration post-WW2 that transformed Australia, with…

You’re 1700% more likely to have a heart attack in the week after a respiratory infection, than at any other time. No infection is good for you, most don’t build your immunity, and even those that do create long-term…

From within our own region. Loved the response from the ute-driving moron in Rockley. We worship the ute-driving moron, by all buying gutless utes we don’t need that handle like tractors on the road, and guzzle fuel.…

Between May and November 2021, the world named 13 variants of Covid. You may remember some of those names, like ‘Delta’. Then, because this highlighted that the virus was evolving i.e. it was out of control, when we got…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering…

I don't think you could even make a movie this bad.

When I was a kid, nobody talked about energy. When Wang opened in 1957, nobody did either. We just left it to engineers to sort out, the best possible power grid for Australia. And got on with our lives. That’s what’s…

Some days feel like being at work. The line that is still potentially live (the street still has grid power), laying on the street, is behind two sets of signs to prevent people driving on that part of the street.…

Australia will win gold medals in Paris. But none of those athletes will come within light years of achieving what Australian biomedical engineer Daniel Timms has done. I posted about him once before. Here he is,…

Ideas constantly improve things. Mostly it’s unnoticed because everyday things seem simple. Like my new dishbrush. I paid a bit more for this one, but was a bit sceptical because it didn’t look very strong. The bristles…

There’s a huge train crash coming for aged care. Many working in that industry say it’s here already, which is also true. But it’s about to get much, much worse. There is no easy answer to this, apart from importing…

The phone is the tool that transforms life into social media. And it’s not a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a circular self-referential loop, where we use the world to feed our social media feeds, which in turn…

Bling is back. Katie Ledecky has POTS. (Has had it for years.) Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Meaning a fast heart rate, dizziness and fatigue when going from lying to standing. Often a chronic after-effect…

The smoke-filled room experiment I think is one all people should know. Because this is the principle that runs all of our lives. Have a watch, it’s short. We think that the peer pressure of school is left behind in…

The Tesla app, part of the car section. Defrost mode gives you a heated car with defrosted windscreen, turned on from the house. Bioweapon defence mode turns on HEPA filtering of outside air (good for bushfires or heavy…

Important to understand this story. Firstly it doesn't mean people are buying petrols or diesels instead. Like the rest of the world, they're buying hybrids. 'Range anxiety' has them spooked, they want an EV, but are…

The best EVs currently available are in the medium car part of the market. Tesla Model 3 and Y, and the BYD Seal. You can see how EVs are smashing all opposition there. BYD mid-sized SUVs will start to add even further…

How does it feel to be part of that blue line?

Freddie Mercury was an Asian rock star. His family was from India. In a lot of photos this isn't obvious, but in others it's unmissable. Part of his genius was to hide both his sexuality and his ethnicity, in an Anglo…

Nick Cave is not a genius. It’s funny that he thought he was. He’s a very common popular music type, he’s ‘cool’. Just high school life imported into music. The cool at school are nearly always morons and bullies with…

The breakdancing made me think. Those who either aren’t good at dancing, or have no experience at it, often feel too intimidated to do it for fear of ridicule. Modern social dancing has no structure at all, which is…

All of the things described as problems in this article are the things I use to remove our energy costs completely. Smart meters rock (I asked to have one years ago). Time of use rates rock. A home battery gives you the…

Nothing will set off the loons faster than a combination of EVs, and them being ASIAN. The terror! The comments are hilarious. Channel 7 being part of the jingoistic sewer culture of modern Straya even calls it an…

FB’s resemblance to the old social pages and classifieds of local newspapers hides its danger. All social media platforms are lethally dangerous to societies, because our beliefs are backwards. We don’t get that being…

Oprah led the world in making everything about ‘me’. Here she pays tribute to Phil Donahue by posting a photo that obscures him behind her, while hitching a ride on the publicity around his death with a story about…

The dirty unspoken truth of social media is one we don’t want to admit. Like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where the character spends his days spying on other peoples’ lives through the windows of his…

Happy Birthday to this perennial smiler. In a world full of stupid bossy people, and weak smart people, Kell is that rare smart bossy person. Those people will save the world. We love ya, even though you’re old.

Jordon Steele-John on radio this morning outraged at changes to the NDIS. The example he gave was a deaf person no longer being able to order a bespoke washing machine (through the NDIS) that will notify them via…

Spot what makes the Irwins a smart family.

Adult life has the same structure (now) as teenage school life. We’re all looking for status, in a group of some kind. To be recognised, accepted, and admired. Tell somebody their favourite band sucks and watch how much…

The most common health advice for people is to exercise, eat well, don’t smoke or drink. But check this. Research shows that people at the lowest rungs of an organisation, with the lowest status, are 4 times more likely…

A litte something about bats for the social media armchair experts. Yes you can make lots of noise to try to scare them away. You can see what that does in the picture, scares the bats, who all fly around lots, and then…

Sheep, despite their reputation, are very smart animals. Unlike people on social media.

The crazy thing is, beating Covid is actually quite simple. Covid isn't everywhere, all the time. It spreads from small hubs, where it breeds. Mostly schools. You can see it in the data. Infections take off every time…

'Kidman shared this sweet photo to mark their 18th wedding anniversary." Obviously a photographer was hired to capture this spontaneous moment. It's not just celebrities staging their whole lives now this way. We're…

I’d be sceptical about the fitness industry’s claims about ‘core strength’. The core is not a group of muscles (usually they mean the abdominals). That part of our body is a sophisticated interplay of a range of things,…

Very interesting research shows that if conspiracy theorists engage in long conversations with AI bots, their beliefs can be shifted in ways that doesn’t happen if they’re only presented with alternative facts, or have…

Jacob Collier is rightly considered to be a musical prodigy. The confusing thing about that though is, that he can’t seem to write music. Only perform it. I listened to his latest album, and all of the songs are…

Queen have completely overhauled their first ever album. I'm not usually a fan of remasterings, but in this case the band had almost no control over the album, not even any booked studio time, they had to record when…

I think we should all book a trip to Bali, or buy a ticket to a gig or musical, to help them out.

This is a team sports battle going back decades, Mac vs PC. PCs (and Windows) are rubbish, like the ICEs of computing, only dominant because of historical trickery from people like Microsoft. No integrated hardware and…

Living with Covid. DIY health care coming, start reading up on MCAS and endotheliitis.

It’s the light in Monet. The changing light, throughout this painting. The whole thing resonates with light, the objects in the painting are secondary. Turning paint, opaque, into light.

Photo of the year.

Do you reckon we started building houses with gold walls and diamond windows? Or did we maybe just start using houses like casino chips, bidding up the value on the same stock, to get quick capital gains? Only once in…

Melody is one of life’s great mysteries, that I don’t’ think gets a lot of attention. A melody follows no rules, unlike harmony, which does and can be applied to any melody almost mechanically. A melody is alive, it has…

Nothing creates the ‘starving artist’ more than the idea that all art is subjective. Why would you pay for somebody’s subjective fantasies? If we valued art, we’d value artists.

Do you know people younger than 50 suddenly developing cardiovascular pathologies, like strokes and heart problems? You’re going to see a lot more of that. We’re in tragic denial. What is not understood by the public is…

The heart is just the start of the Covid damage. Endothelial damage is an organ destroyer.

There’s beautiful counterpoint in music hidden in some older songs. Take this oldie from Nat King Cole, listen to the second verse from about 1:05 onwards. There’s the main melody he’s singing, and alongside that the…

Electric charging stations will be modelled more on airports than service stations. Petrol and diesel fuel stations are more like the Tinder of energy supply. Wham bam, 10 minutes, out of there. Energy brothels. Here’s…

12 men walked on the moon. Only 4 are still alive. I was born just as the Apollo program was doing this. I’d sit for hours staring at the NASA photos of all the missions, amazed by the audacity of the engineering and…

We were a bit slow getting to this show. I always thought the Lord of the Rings (the books and films) story began when all the most interesting stuff had already happened. The fight against Sauron when at his most…

Ah, petrol and diesel. Meanwhile Florida EV owners are charging at home and getting a headstart on the highways out of there.…

Bathurst elects its next Mayor and Deputy Mayor today, streamed live for your viewing pleasure from 2pm, on the Bathurst Regional Council YouTube page. (Link below.) The stream will come online a bit before 2, and just…

A few notice the transformation of all adult life into high school life. In my 50s I decided to say enough. I now break all the rules of that adult life, probably alienating many I know. I refuse to play those status…

One interesting thing to consider when buying a car (which should be an EV of course), is insurance. Teslas for example are expensive to insure. But it’s not an EV thing, becaue BYDs cost about half as much to insure.…

Somebody standing around that yellow arrow (for example) is the reason I think big gigs are not about the show or the music. They’re about people liking being in a crowd. You couldn’t pay me to do it.

If you know somebody whose personality changed significantly after Covid infection, particularly towards dark thoughts and depression, the most likely cause is dopamine senescence. There are neurons in the brain that…

The whole nonsense around housing. ‘Supply’. Explain to me why any developer or builder would suddenly start flooding the ‘market’ with cheap houses, to undercut other houses (which they also build).

It’s rumoured that the world’s biggest selling car, the Tesla Model Y, is going into first production of its new version (‘Juniper’) from tomorrow. The picture below is just somebody’s guess how it will look, based on…

For me our fundamental misunderstanding of what love is is shown by how we see jealousy as a negative. When it’s actually the root of all love. The only healthy part of love in fact, the part that remembers that the…

The kitchen Mozart grew up in, in Salzburg. If those walls could talk.

So encouraging to see women now feeling secure enough to share photos of themselves topless as part of a publicity campaign. You can't make this stuff up. People love affliction now, it gives them infinite scope to talk…

Freddie Mercury recording in 1982, in Munich. I was living in Germany that year, and saw him live with Queen only a few months after this shot was taken. Sharing it here for a different reason though, it was on the tour…

F1 hybrid engine. Hybrids are the fastest race cars in the world, both F1 and also sports cars. Hybrids were introduced at Le Mans in 2012. They've won every race since. When you drive a hybrid though, you very quickly…

The social basis of technology was my postgraduate work. It’s one of the reasons I talk so much about cars. Vehicles are central to our culture, and to our identities. Take the modern ute. Useless as a ute. Useless as a…

Artist’s guess at the appearance of the new Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world.). I don’t think it will look quite like this, but they probably have key details right. This is a family SUV, with the…

Heh, re-write this headline as ‘Fears Australia will be inundated with cheap, high-quality cars’. The Americans and Europeans are green with envy. NewsCorpse is a rotting maggot-ridden sewer at the heart of all Anglo…

I was so excited a few years back when I found out about ASMR recordings. For years I’d wondered why sound itself could be so profoundly relaxing for me, sometimes the most trivial things, like people turning pages in a…

Peer pressure runs societies. We never leave high school. Here's a story that shows it. This is Dan and Fran Keller, from Texas, in 1992. Standing trial for child abuse at a childcare facility they ran. Children from…

Dr Phillip Alvelda (senior research scientist in biotech, used to work for NASA) talking about the mass delusional tragedy that Covid now is, a friend's daughter and her insurance company, Kaiser as an example:…

Two clear things here. Full-EVs are still only a small part of the Australian market. But that rate of growth tells the real story. Many are hesitant to be an early adopter, for any product, and that's a sensible risk…

We will probably buy a Tesla next year. Because I finished school almost 40 years ago, I don’t play the “we don’t like Elon so you should all avoid him” games. This video is a great set of reasons (there are others) why…

Richard Hammond says EVs are ‘ boring’, and he much prefers his 1968 Mustang. Probably thinks music stopped in 1978 too. Likes the ‘vroom vroom’ noises (a car farting). To me what’s most boring is people getting to…

Peter Dutton often uses Canada as an example of nuclear power driving down power prices. It made the Canadians laugh with disbelief. He's a dangerous bullshit artist. The fact he's competitive in the next election is a…

The impression given by Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is that it’s nuclear vs renewables. Actually it’s nothing like that at all. He doesn’t even deny renewables will generate by far the most electricity into the future,…

The CSIRO has done detailed modelling of bushfire risk into the future for each part of Australia. You can plug in your postcode to see. Lithgow is at the upper end of increased risk. This will flow through into higher…

We’ve moved from the Stop the Boats part of the campaign, to Bash the Blacks. All the old-time favourites.

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Have been saying this for years. Makes you about as popular as haemorrhoids. Travel is the most stupid and destructive part of our…

Observe the culture we live in, and you will always find status driving nearly everything that happens. Whether it’s homes, food, cars, watches, or whatever, there’s an increasing push towards high-status luxury or…

EVs were 10% of car sales in Oz in 2024. That number is projected to be 20% within two years. The number of fast-chargers doubled in 2024. We're on the 'ramping up' part of the innovation curve.

The battle between gig culture and Covid can only have one winner. Ariana Grande has cancelled all her touring for 2025. (She contracted Covid filming Wicked.) Maria Carey has just had to cancel some of her Christmas…

In August, 100 notable ‘creatives’ (writers, musicians etc.) boarded a ship in the Arctic circle, for a 15-day cruising adventure through the Arctic waters. Over 50% of them contracted Covid, on the trip. Some are now…

“There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence.” Meister Eckhart (probably drove an EV).

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our…

Elsa Dreisig is a wonderful French-Danish soprano. Opera singers are extraordinary, physically what they do is harder than most elite sports, plus they have to play a role as an actor, as well as have advanced music…

Just as Trump makes satire impossible, everything he says and does is beyond satire, it’s incredible really that Spinal Tap is now reality. All the things they mocked in the music industry went on to become the normal…

This is the cultural shift that’s almost impossible to talk about without people of that age taking great offence. (People identify themselves individually with demographic groups, but these are cultural rather than…

Have others noticed how smoking has made its ugly way back into films and TV again? At the turn of the century it had been virtually eliminated from TV and film. Now whole films and shows are like ads for smoking. You…

Imagine places are people. Which of course they are, too. We had these Time Life books as kids, and I’d sit and look at different locations in the world, for hours. Now people just go there. They travel. Let me argue…

Why do I persist with attention to Covid? This graph helps explain why. What’s not widely known is that we had a global pandemic through most of the 20th century. Heart disease. Some really bad science made us think…

The Great Divergence, where economic benefits are flowing overwhelmingly to the old, is the flip side of eternal youth culture. Part of the ‘circle of life’ is a passing of the baton to younger generations, including…

In saying Happy New year, I’d like to focus on the Happy part. So often in history the times of their lives when people found the most purpose, meaning and often even happiness was when they were confronted with a…

Work colleague has tonsillitis. Australia desperately short of antibiotics to treat it (she had Covid last year). Global shortages, driven by infecting the whole world like it was a fun thing to do. No end to the…

We got the whole family vaccinated for flu last year. Nobody caught Covid until Kell right at the end of the year. Given flu shots are also showing strong impact against heart diseases as well, I can’t think of a better…

Life in permanent high school, Part 347. Rock star dies: “Vale rock star, such a tragic loss.” 77 people die in a week from Covid: “Here’s a pic of us all at the beach!”

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s unique about Lithgow, in Australia. I’ll likely never leave. I think that it’s the transplanting of a British industrial village, into the Australian landscape. The picture below is…

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of…

I gave up pretty much all alcohol years ago, for health reasons at the time (I was isolating possible causes of a heart arrhythmia). I still have the odd celebratory champagne for birthdays etc. Australians get drunk at…

I don't engage much with the Australia Day debates, it's pretty much the same tired arguments every year. But one thing I always do remember, is that the people who arrived in 1788 mostly didn't want to be here. They…

Henry Ford is famous for having said that his customers could have any colour they liked for their Model Ts, so long as it was black. There was a reason for that. Firstly Model Ts began in a range of colours, but when…

Up watching the start of the 12-hour. I’ve wondered in recent years if the track could be improved by adding more corners to the lower sections. The Chase really improved Conrod Straight. The bottom part of the track is…

While societies collapse under the weight of multiplying disasters, meantime the thing that exercises the minds of the latest generation of kiddults is the apparently outrageous assertion by JK Rowling that only…

Come and work in childcare. We’ll pay you less than a kid working at Maccas, let you get Covid 4 times a year, and throw in some other bonus viruses if you sign up now. People do know society is falling apart right in…

The theories I agree with, that suggest most of our chronic diseases are actually caused by infections, continue to grow in strength. Be vaccinated for everything you qualify for a vaccine for. Including an annual flu…

I don’t like over-ripe fruit. I like fruit to be firm, even crunchy (like a good crunchy pear). Eating a super-ripe piece that dribbles down your chin - gross. The same for bananas, once they start to get really ripe…

The Rolling Stones still tour regularly. But they haven't recorded an album in 18 years. Elton John of course is constantly on the road, though his last album was 7 years ago. Genesis did a tour in the last couple of…

I’ve never watched MAFS, but is it: - they actually marry strangers at the start - then do everything they can to get them to cheat on each other immediately, and - film the jealous reactions? Is that the whole show?

The range of a horse and cart was way beyond what the cars and trucks that replaced them could offer. Unpacking the slogans and spin that now dominate our lives, nobody said ‘I can’t buy a car, what about the range?’…

This is the $3.6 billion Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. This is a post about why I post about electric cars. It’s not just because I like them (though I do, I think people will wonder in a few years why we ever drove…

Got my second and final shingles shot today. The most painful thing about the whole experience was the cost, about $600 for two shots. But it’s a great investment. People have probably seen the research I’ve posted…

I use Tesla as an example for EVs, because they’re the world leaders. What they’re doing is remarkable in all sorts of ways we never hear about. For example a few years ago, they hired an ex-LEGO executive to head up…

Most countries have the same problems right now. Big jumps in cost of living, the need to reduce emissions. The problem is the solution. Dramatically reducing household energy use goes a long way towards fixing both…

A trick people use is to suggest that going electric will take some enormous amount of minerals (which they imply either don't exist, or will cover the world in mines). Lithium is one of the key elements mentioned.…

"I think it's very hard to leave a band, after a certain point. Because a band is like a teenage gang, it's like a street gang. You don't want to be in a street gang for the rest of your life, you can't mature, you…

Australia makes about $70 billion a year exporting iron ore, for other countries to turn into steel. If we created the steel here with renewable energy, and then exported it, we could turn that $70 billion easily into…

Servos are transforming into drive-through grocery stores. Fuel is already only a marginal part of their business, and will become negligible in the next decade.

I’m a materials engineer. Most people have never heard of it, but it’s the heart of the modern world. The basic engineering principles in most fields haven’t changed a lot in centuries. What’s changed is new materials.…

Scrolling past all of the happy social lives on FB made me think of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Compare the two images. The variety of passion and emotion in Da Vinci’s picture, and the monotonous single ‘living our best…

WIndows still going in, huge job. Trims to add, inside and out. One of the things I love about these particular windows is the uPVC the frames are made out of. Very common in Europe. It’s a polymer, a superb insulator…

Autochrome was one of the first technologies to produce colour pictures. This picture was taken in 1915. It hasn’t been colourised. A bit jarring to see this and feel like it’s today, when it was taken 108 years ago.…

Three more autochrome pictures. Mother and baby, 1910. Man, 1907. Young woman, 1913. Autochrome was invented by the Lumiere brothers, who are also famous as early pioneers of cinema. They used potato starch to help…

John Farnham’s term with LRB wasn’t very successful. But it was I think the greatest singing in the history of rock music. Farnham was at his peak, and the harmonies were like nothing anybody else has ever done live.…

Australians have been taken for a ride by offshore fossil fuel companies. Other countries make more in relative terms from their fossil fuel exports in a year than we’ve made in the past 30. That’s no accident, the…

'Remastered' in music industry terms means 'it's the same music, but please pay us for the same album all over again'.

The Streets as Shared Spaces program in NSW is part of a global urban design push towards ‘placemaking’. Taking back urban space from the car. Making those spaces shared spaces again, for everybody, not just cars.…

A study compared the response of an artificial intelligence bot (ChatGPT) and doctors, to patients. The AI won hands-down, for both quality of information, and empathy of response. There’s some fear about AI, probably…

I thought this photo was a nice example of the toxicity of social media to our social lives. A standard sort of photo you see shared, a happy couple, others would see it and feel a whole range of emotions, depending on…

When you get solar installed, a good installer will give you projections of how much you will generate per day, for every month of the year. This is ours, for those interested. They’ll also give you an estimate of how…

This iceberg in Conception Bay (yep, it's a real place) in Newfoundland is attracting attention. The photographer lives in Dildo, Newfoundland (also a real place). Every detail of this story appears to be legitimate.

I'm not young, so no special pleading here. But the old better start making some effort to understand what's being done to young people. It's outrageous, and disgraceful.

I continue to share Covid things because nothing has changed, including the fantasy that it’s over. This research was for healthy people under 40, not people in aged care homes. Covid is a vascular disease, not a lung…

I posted before how the epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century is likely to have been caused by earlier infections, not diet. The Spanish Flu one likely culprit. Research now showing Parkinson’s Disease may be…

The older I get, the less driven I am by social life, 'living my best life', all the stuff that gets equated with having a good life. The things that drive me, that I'm passionate about, are understanding things, and…

In a world where our collective memory rarely lasts longer than a day, replacing all custom and tradition with what’s ‘trending’ on social media, I think we should pay close attention to the coronation. I’m no…

There’s nothing to rival a huge church organ, full choir and herald trumpets. It shakes the ground if you’re there. Makes all other music sound trivial. Hair stands up on every part of your body. Gotta play it loud to…

Speed picking has given guitarists tremendous freedom to move around the fretboard. It does remind me though of something George Bernard Shaw once said in his work as a music writer. Shaw said all instruments should be…

I shared recently how Multiple Sclerosis is now known to be caused by long-term (chronic) infection with Epstein Barr virus, the virus that causes glandular fever. Now they’ve discovered the chronic infection that…

Formula 1 is planning something pretty amazing, even if you’re not into car racing. They’re taking their current hybrids (best engines in the world, I may have mentioned, once or twice). But they’re making them even…

In the UK, who we follow in everything, the country is so broken that they’re talking about using kids as doctors, without training. Nothing to talk about here? Apart from the trip or restaurant you did last,…

Two things weren’t common before the 20th century, and that tells us that we’ve probably been looking at them the wrong way. Those two things are heart disease, and obesity. Both rare before last century. We even link…

Stewart said she wanted to show that people at her age can still look ‘great’. Like looking 81 is not great, and instead you need to spend thousands on plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures so you look 40 or 50…

Written around the time he was running Robodebt. And yes, it is that Stuart Robert.

I often post about how most of our chronic diseases (cancer, heart disease, MS etc.) are probably caused by chronic infections i.e. getting infected in younger life and the pathogen then living in your body for years,…

Enormous numbers of Australians are hugely under-vaccinated for Covid. Here’s how dangerous that is. The latest boosters, which are shot 4 or 5 for the smart ones still bothering to get them, have an effectiveness of…

At the moment it’s thought between 10-20% of people who get Covid will also get Long Covid. Or in simpler words, will end up with chronic disease, potentially lethal, or potentially lifelong if it doesn’t kill you.…

Preface: I like dogs. But I think the reason they're so enormously popular is one not often spoken about. I was thinking about it while watching Get Back, the Beatles film. The band were fighting, on the point of…

A study has found significant brain inflammation is common a year after even mild Covid infection. I post a lot about the longer-term chronic impact of infections. Polio had it too, as you can see. MS is glandular…

Remember Tupperware parties? The brilliant idea that to break down resistance to people buying things, the smartest way is to get your own friends to flog them to you. This is the secret to understanding all society and…

I have a passion for glass. It’s magic, invisible as air, but solid. And as a materials scientist knowing about it was my initial training. There’s a secret about glass, next paragraph. The thing about glass is, it’s…

The only part of the renewables shift the Flat Earthers tend to support is Snowy 2.0. Using the Snowy scheme as a big pumped hydro battery. The problem is, it’s a disaster. A typical example of private sector firms…

It's time Australia and the world dumped the 'pub test' and replaced it with the smart test. Society will never progress if the only thing that can be done is what people pissed off their tits can understand. Here's a…

For the cricketing fans, what do you make of ‘Bazball’, the new English approach to test cricket? I think it’s marketing spin. Indistinguishable from the style of cricket the Australians under Taylor and Waugh played.…

Smart words from Finn Peacock again here. Note that the system in this common scenario would pay for itself in under 3 years. And that you win on cash flow too, by doing this you have more money each week, not just when…

This is from the official news for GPs. I don't make this stuff up. Warnings of a 'pandemic of cardiovascular disease', caused by Covid infection. Just as Spanish Flu likely caused the pandemic of heart disease we had…

Australians are increasingly drawn to the outback. The idea actually makes no sense at all, what does ‘outback’ mean? What I think it means, and why I think Australians feel increasngly drawn to it, is everything we…

The implosion of the Titan sub reminded me of air pressure. There’s a column of air 100km high resting on your body every day. If you hold your palm out as in the drawing, you have air from that column pressing down on…

We probably won’t ever find out, but I’d have a bet that the bodies of the 5 men in the Titan are actually there, directly beneath where the sub imploded, on the ocean floor. Just as the debris they found was, as James…

The Olgas, I just flew there in Apple Maps. Cost of AvGas = 0. I don’t usually succeed convincing people of the absurd ideas that run our travel cultures, but I’ll keep trying. Take Australia’s interior, it’s become a…

Imagine a perfomer approaching 80 headlining Woodstock in the 1960s. An elderly person, old enough to be a great-grandparent. It would never have happened, it would have been seen as ridiculous. But here we are. I love…

I don’t often talk about myself or my family here, because I still remember a time when that was the most boring thing a person could do. But because many seem to live their lives through social media now, and interpret…

SBS has a great series right now looking at the fundamental shift in research on Aboriginal Australia. The recognition of a vastly more complex culture than we realised. Here’s a clip (whole series is on SBS catchup),…

The idea of place is why I’m so critical of travel, which has a very problematic relationship with place. The Bathurst 1000 is another way to explain it. I like this picture because it captures the two aspects in one…

Today’s thoughts on travel come from G.K. Chesterton. I’m a stationary traveller, I travel from my couch. This will seem a laughable thing to a travel culture, but bear with me. Here’s me at the Devil’s Marbles, in the…

I post a lot about why I think travel is a symptom of a sick culture. But not as much about what I see as the alternative. The alternative is both simple and impossibly hard - we need to rediscover what the term ‘home’…

Leading the world. Have been for years. About the only smart thing Australia has done in the past 30 years. (I’m actually all ears if you can think of anything else.) That and control Covid, but we stopped doing that.

Observations from Marta Dusseldorp, film/TV producer, about how to ‘be in a place’. Exactly what I post about, with travel. Dusseldorp moved from Sydney to Tasmania. This is somebody who actually moved, the long process…

Word for word what I’ve been saying about cars in Australia, for several years. Notice how Australian life has changed, the Toyota Corolla used to be our most popular car. People considered smart things, like fuel…

We were in Broken Hill to visit Kell’s sister, who’s a doctor with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. The old hangar is featured in 7’s RFDS series, and you can see the pretend offices they’ve set up for filming. (The…

This is so interesting. Where vaccination rates are high, for any disease, deaths from malignant cancer are lower. Cancer is (I’m sure, based on research underway globally for a while) heavily caused by infections. As…

Read British journalism when England is doing well in sport, and you get a window into the psychology in play there now. ‘Little Britain’ as some call it. Desperately clinging to old ideas of empire and world…

I’ve worked with Michael Pascoe on a couple of things, a smart guy. Here he explains why the real problem with housing is that we stopped building public housing. We privatised the process of providing housing to poorer…

One thing I never did as a manager over almost 20 years, is delegate my work to other people. In nearly every larger organisation now, this is the pattern you’ll see. One of the first things a new senior manager does is…

In some ways I have real affection for schools. I worked in them, and was a student in them. But I now realise they’re probably the most stupid thing humans have ever invented, and may yet destroy us all. I’m not…

32 years since Freddie died, amazing. I don't think it's well enough understood what a tragedy his passing was. Not just because he was so young and we lost so much music that never got to be written or performed, but…

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see…

Have a listen to Professor Kevin Anderson (short, promise it’s eye-opening), a professor of energy and climate change, talk about how action for climate change is really only an ‘incremental’ change for most of us. The…

I’m pretty critical of gigs. To explain why. As a teenager and young adult, I was passionate about them, found them thrilling. Now they mostly bore me. Partly because they haven’t evolved a lot, they’re still using a…

Another way to see the shift in culture. U2. A fantastic band. Still active, so much so that they’ve been the highest-earning musicians in the world 5 times this century. Bono is worth $700 million. Let’s add some…

Music was always my greatest passion, and the thing I was best at. But have posted before how I listen to it less than I used to. It nearly always leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied now. Like it’s pointing at a…

Claims we’re ‘living with Covid’ are all bullshit. Good example here of the music industry. Lots happens behind the scenes to try to keep shows on the road. Often it fails, and even where tours go ahead most lose big…

Nothing cuts through the bullshit of peoples' opinions faster than insurance (a big part of my current job). For example, you can believe climate change isn't a human-induced disaster, or that you can 'live with Covid'.…

I’ve been called a ‘germaphobe’ a few times in recent weeks. Because I still wear a mask. I couldn’t care less, the people who said it are like most people in this pandemic, dumb as a box of hammers. Covid isn’t ‘germs’…

Over 3,300 people died because of Covid in the first 4 months of this year, in Australia. That rate of death is still climbing, and is projected to be even higher in the next quarter. Thousands upon thousands of deaths.…

"Australians now travel further throughout Australia than ever they did before, as tourists; in recreational vehicles of all kinds they penetrate into the remotest areas, driving thousands of kilometres to see…

Every year the same dumb traditions play out. Would your backyard catch fire? No, because you maintain it. The reason we have huge bushfires is because we leave most of the country unoccupied, while we huddle on the…

Lots of good sense here about housing, an area of Australian life with traditionally no sense at all. Anybody who tells you 'supply' is the issue is part of the problem. Note the important point that Councils approve…

This is a very standard story most days now. The wholesale price of electricty is negative across the country. In other words, generators will pay retailers to use it - they’re not just giving it away, they’re paying…

Some have 'range anxiety' about getting an EV. Apart from the fact nearly all Australians travel less than 40km per day, which is easily charged at home from a power point at the end of the day (like your phone), if you…

‘Closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people. What we mean by that is a paternalistic attempt to have them ‘catch up’ with us. Us modern, ‘advanced’ Australians. But the gap is actually the other way around. Australia, the…

Fewer than 5% of Australians tow anything - a trailer or caravan/camper trailer or boat. And yet so much of the EV narrative is around range, and range is mostly an issue for people who tow. Which relatively speaking is…

There’s a double-dip in demand for electricity every day in NSW. One at about 3.30-4 every morning, and one around 1pm. By far the biggest dip is that 1pm dip. The ’when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’…

Bathurst in the 1930s. Right at that point where horses were being replaced by cars, and both were on the roads. The guy in the foreground with the horse and cart will be saying 'ha, look at those cars, always catching…

I was taught this too at school, that the earliest paintings of Australia were fantasies, painters trying to make the bush look like England. But the story is much more interesting than that. This IS how Australia…

Dreams don’t happen inside the brain. The brain is a lump of electrified meat, it’s incapable of holding images. It’s like trying to see the images inside a TV set. They’re not inside the TV set. The TV is just one part…

I love that you can't even start a petrol or diesel engine, without an electric motor. And that they need to sit running (idling) even when they're not going anywhere, otherwise you need to fire up the electric motor…

One of the most interesting theories is that the Spanish Flu pandemic caused the 20th century epidemic of heart disease. The flu virus took up residence in peoples' bodies after they thought that pandemic was over, and…

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

In simple terms, catching Covid is likely just the on-ramp for the virus to take up residence in your body. It may persist there for the rest of your life, causing potentially crippling and even fatal disease.…

Populism is the political system we now live under. It’s not Labor, Liberal, National or Green. It’s not Left or Right. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a politics that says what is most popular, is right. It replaces…

Can’t believe this is nearly 10 years old. And still spot on, actually a very smart way to understand just how stupid social media is, by translating what happens there into real life situations. The platforms are…

David is a friend of mine and a leading specialist on this topic. There is not one way that Daylight Saving is a smart thing to be doing. If we want an extra hour after work, work an hour less. Don't change the clocks.

If you feel stiff or tight, as most do as they age, reframe how you think about it. Don’t try to stretch the tension away, or try to release it. Stiffness is your body already stretching. That’s why it feels tight. Just…

My boy is 18 today. A grown up. Still the most gentle, sweet, considerate and smart person you’ll ever meet. I sometimes tell him that only the truly strong can be gentle. It takes enormous skill and patience and…

Lovely to beat Queensland in 3 grand finals on the weekend. But they didn’t start Daylight Saving like us, so that gives them the win on grown-up things that actually matter. I’ve found a way to work around the stupid…

The interesting question here is, what are they going to make people 'aware' of? 'Hey people, lots of you are having heart attacks, please stop'? I'm betting it won't be 'Covid, even mild cases, and even if you're…

People patient and smart enough to continue avoiding Covid will be rewarded with new tools that are coming quickly. Nasal vaccines, that will give (long-lasting) immunity not just to severe disease, but to catching…

I post a lot about cars because they’re the centre of a whole universe of social behaviours that need to change. The car is the most anti-social part of societies, and ‘drives’ (pun intended) a whole swathe of other…

Historical photo of Bathurst's famous street lamps being installed, a century ago. An interesting bit of trivia is that this caused community outrage at the time.

My dad once said it’s every generation’s responsibility to plant trees. That way every generation gets to enjoy them. It’s cheap, and quick. Imagine every street looking like this, mid-Piper Street in Bathurst. Not even…

The true motivations of the No camp are now clear, because they know they won and now don't care about saying what they were really thinking. Tony Abbott already back out saying we need to get rid of the Aboriginal Flag…

When these guys got famous in the early 1990s I thought they were the only interesting new band I’d heard in years. Fantastic live too. Then they split up just as they were becoming really big. Very few bands come back…

I wonder if young people today aren’t really into band/live music culture as much, and this is the pandemic accelerating a trend that was already happening. Nothing anchors people permanently in adolescence more than…

Over 100 communities are now building their own power stations, owned by them with profits going to them. Solar farms. They're cheap, and quick to build. There's a farmer here who doesn't like what it will do to his…

The waltz was considered scandalous when it began, due to the close touching of male and female bodies. We can laugh at that now, but what replaced it? Modern dancing is mostly individuals making stuff up (very often…

Hard to photograph the number of bats in Machattie Park in Bathurst right now. They’ll be here for months, the sky is a constant stream of bat piss and droppings, which coats everything underneath. The places the bats…

1970 and 2023 are the same distance in time apart as 1970 and 1917.

Michael was a film from 1996 that doesn’t rate a lot of mentions, but which I really enjoyed. Travolta plays an angel on a mission. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was his passion for ‘battle!’. That’s what…

We’re very close to a time when there will be no living Beatles. I think that will be jarring for us as a culture because they marked the real escalation point I post about a lot, where adult life was replaced with…

I find this sort of thing amusing, when guitarists aren't really musicians and go down the rabbit hole of scales and modes and have no clue about actual melody and rhythm. People get lost playing the same pentatonic…

I’m a Spinozan. Life has only one joy. Understanding. All of our other happinesses and joys are really this one thing, understanding. Love, pleasure, food, travel, music…whatever. All are derivative from this one and…

Molly had her last uni class ever last week. Absolutely smashed uni, blitzed every subject, a river of distinctions and HDs. Never got many awards at school. A typical pattern for the genuinely smart kids, finally freed…

The bats are as good as gone in Bathurst for now, and unsurprisingly social media hysteria had no part to play in fixing anything.

The smart thing Tesla understands is that a big part of making the shift to EVs will be a social shift, not engineering. The engineering is a no-brainer, ICEs are rubbish and the sooner they’re gone, the better. Tesla…

There’s an oppressive social framework hidden in our passion for music. The economy of ‘cool’. Musical acts are central to the way people shape their social hierarchies. You can see it here in Luka Bloom’s fun take on…

Consent fails time and again in law because it’s as nebulous as a fart in the wind. It’s a fad, a fashion. It will fail, because it already has failed, always, for years. It misunderstands the problem completely. This…

Broken Hill is getting a new type of energy storage, using compressed air. It already has over 250MW of solar and wind farms, which are often switched off because the grid can't cope with the extra power. Now they'll be…

I realised the reason I’ve become so bored with rock gigs is that they’ve lost their theatre. Plenty of acts use big light shows and effects, but they’re not coordinated into a show in the same way. A great rock show is…

My favourite part is when she gets to the dangers of ‘emf, infrasound and nanoparticles’. From windmills. Good on FB, providing a mechanism to allow all of a community’s most stupid people to obstruct important things.

The reason live gigs are trending more and more towards huge stadiums. Hint: it isn’t anything about music.

Watched this. Keanu is a lovely guy, but these movies are rubbish. One continuous fight scene from beginning to end, gratuitous splatter, I found myself reading a book waiting for the fight scene to end and something…

It’s an international embarrassment that the LNP went to COP28 and advocated for Australia to do nothing, and just wait a decade or more for nuclear power to be built. Reactors that don’t even exist, that nobody wants…

Race cars rev like crazy at the start of a race because petrol engines have zero power except at high revs. It’s exciting, goosebumps, the sound. Though that’s just the cars farting, literally. Some equate the sound…

It’s so accepted now that friendship is a vitally important thing that nobody really questions it. And it is a vitally important part of life, but it has its time and place. It’s also the most powerful way to stunt a…

It's the hottest ever start to summer on record. Those who still deny climate disaster talk about the Earth being this hot in the past. Yes it was, when dinosaurs were alive, tens of millions of years ago. Reptiles…

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. The…

What made Eddie Van Halen the best rock guitar god of our era was that he was the greatest musician of all the rock guitar gods. Others would try to play flashier things, but that’s like the Eveready Bunny musically.…

Scrolling through Christmas messages is a fascinating cultural exercise. Like this photo below, wouldn’t know these people from a bar of soap, but their personal lives are here, shared far and wide. The problem for me…

The untold story of this distribution of global energy is the efficiencies. Say this pie chart was in kg instead of percentages. So 100kg of energy used by the globe, and 64.2 kg of that energy comes from fossil fuels.…

Watched a short series on Prue Leith and husband John Playfair, building the garden in their new home. But what stayed with me more was something about love. They’re elderly now, and watching them together the word I’d…

Wanted to share this about HIV, because this is the huge risk we’re taking with Covid. On the left, the ‘primary infection’ (both graphs) is the point you catch the disease. Like when you get Covid right now. But the…

I can retire in 5 years so this stuff doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But I feel for the people who work for local government who are subjected to nothing but a steady stream of ignorant abuse, day in and day out.…

I reckon quite a few in the second group are going to start the year with another assault on the immune system, courtesy of NYE.

How epidemic diseases trick us. It’s all in the downwards part of the waves. The red arrows. This current Omicron outbreak for example will likely end in about 2-4 weeks. Will it end because Covid is beaten, the…

Thanks to Nancy for sharing. This is what’s happening in supermarkets, staff off sick with Covid. When will the farce of ‘living with Covid’ end? Why do we meekly accept such rubbish? Imagine if we had tuberculosis…

In talking to people, the thing I find that is creating the greatest risk to us all is the old favourite - ‘live with the virus’. A political slogan, that millions repeat with no thought at all. Politicians have…

James is a smart operator, a very nice guy who also works inside the NSW Government. Has been in the press recently about his own experience with Covid. Nails it here, we’re back in 2020, except this time we’re paying…

Let’s be smarter than this constant bullshit, hey? About this being about ‘panic buying’. It’s not. It’s about thousands of workers being infected with Covid. The politicians would like nothing more than for us to start…

Excellent question that very few are asking. You can’t just keep giving booster shots. Ultimately you have to stop the spread of the virus. That’s what ‘elimination’ means. That’s why the smart people who deal with…

I wanted to talk about 2 things we’re told not to talk about, but I think we must. Politics and religion. My views on them, so people have a reference point. Politics first. My personal political leanings are to…

Parents to supervise classrooms with mass staff infections. (Let’s see how many volunteer to do that.) Kids to be swabbed twice a week. Come on people, let’s be grown ups. Just as you wouldn’t send kids to school in a…

Returning to this, over 100,000 people caught Covid in NSW between Christmas and New Year. It takes about 3 weeks for cases to start translating into deaths. That’s what that explosive growth in deaths line now is. That…

For Valentines Day, back to my (unpopular) suggestion that the essence of all love is jealousy. (I took this from Proust, blame him.) If you're not jealous, you're not in love. We treat jealousy as some character flaw,…

'We have to live with it'. I get told that a lot. Do we live with HIV? Or cancer? Heart disease? Even flu? Do people even know how much money and effort goes into trying to eliminate all of those things? Do they notice…

There’s a wonderful theory in here, that I think is spot-on. We turned the pandemic into a 3-act film, because our perception of reality is based on the structure of films. Even the Covid protestors just copy films, as…

Paul Keating, in 1997. Back when we had leaders, and not just marketing men spewing empty slogans at us. Read this and then turn on the news. "The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech…

Have a look at these 3 slides. Why isn’t this reported or widely known? Because - then people might question if we’re actually getting back to ‘normal’. Or they may not, they may just shrug and go to restaurants, pubs…

To this day I struggle with the idea that even Lithgow falls over itself to vote for the National Party. It's testament to the skill of the State LNP in rorting targeted grants that the impression is given that the Nats…

I should apologise to my friends in advance that I won’t be taking part in ‘normal’ social life until Covid is at some sort of manageable level in the community. I’m not being part of the political attempt to wish Covid…

If you work with fencing disputes, you’ll get deep insights. The world would be a much better place I think if we stopped assuming people fundamentally like each other. They really don’t. Paradoxically, the world would…

Check out the chuckle near the start when he talks about how QR codes became just a con job, to dupe people into going out again. And how sending kids to school had nothing to do with education or children at all, it…

Wikipedia so rocks. This news is already updated there, amazing. Was curious to see Barty cites missing being at home as part of her decision. That's something other Australians can learn from Aboriginal Australia, what…

Another from the Roy Morgan report. Australians hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at that astronomical jump in love for national lockdowns in 2020. (The 2008 jump was Kevin Rudd’s…

There’s been extensive use of actors from a variety of ethnic/racial backgrounds in Bridgerton. That’s likely a response to the attention in recent years to the lack of diversity in TV and film. I wonder if this has led…

I put this in the category of stuff you REALLY need to know. Something that isn't said in public discussion, that I've seen, is that for a long list of workers (below), if you catch Covid-19 it is PRESUMED in law that…

I share facts that aren’t reported. It’s not an obsession. It’s trying to be a small part of saving society from morons, for my kids.

Smart people overseas, asking the questions Australians aren’t asking.

This guy does instructional guitar videos on YouTube, and is charming. It made me think about how times change. I figured out this beautiful Fleetwood Mac song on guitar, by ear as a teenager, using a record player.…

Bit longer post, but (to me) a mysterious, magical topic. This is Tollund Man, buried in a bog in Denmark for 2500 years. Many cultures mummified or embalmed dead bodies. Today very few cultures still do, we’re…

This project is a disgrace. $500 million! Brendan Nelson’s wet dream. Turning a genuine war memorial into a hangar for big boy’s war toys. The existing War Memorial had plenty of space, and the large exhibition hall…

Got my flu shot today. Some researchers I admire have thought for years that heart disease in general may be due to ongoing chronic infection, and/or damage caused by previous infections, from things like the flu. This…

When I drive through the Australian countryside, I notice how almost completely unoccupied it is. Apart from the odd farmhouse, the countryside is as good as empty of people. That’s not an accident. Like the Americans…

"The textbooks say, In 1900 most people died of infectious diseases, and today most people don't die of infectious disease; they die of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's and all these things. Well, in ten years I…

Covid is just the shorts before the movie. It gets a lot worse from here. By the way, this isn't 'negativity', it's reality. 'Positivity' is people running away from reality and living in a fantasy. But I think there's…

Good on Michael for peeling away the happy clappy Covid is over bullshit. Wait until young kids start needing liver transplants here, or die from Covid-hepatitis, as is happening overseas now. Will we still put…

It's staggering to me that a man who is bone-idle, part of a weird religious cult, and a master at blaming everybody else for things he's supposed to be doing, still rates higher as preferred PM. You have to really be…

Watch the UK, we follow their Covid ‘strategy’ (i.e. do nothing). Covid is like HIV, Long Covid is like AIDS. The AIDS part of Covid is ramping up now. Like AIDS it will carry on for generations.

Superb. Damien is bureau chief for the Australian office of the NY Times, now living in Sydney with his family. The same guy who realised what was unique about Australia through his kids joining the local surf…

The AIDS part of Covid biting. Still not seeing much evidence most people realise the magnitude of the disaster they're living inside.

Popular music isn’t a hotbed of smart. Eric’s finest work since his expletive-laden racist rant on stage in the 1970s.

Scientists are now almost certain multiple sclerosis, a terrible and often fatal disease, is caused by earlier infection with glandular fever. Mononucleosis. Many of us have had it. It can take years to turn into MS,…

There’s one simple logic to all elections I think. It’s not about personalities, or even about policies. We live in a representative democracy. We delegate problems to our representatives to solve. We don’t want to deal…

The secret sauce of Lithgow for those who don’t live here, is that it’s one of the few places where the entire town is a community. Most larger and newer towns are fractured now by cars, people live in widely dispersed…

It's inspirational to see young, smart and cashed-up Australians calling enough on decades of obstruction to needed change in this country.…

It’s like having everybody snort asbestos every day, and then waiting a few decades until they all start to drop dead. (Remember HIV takes 8-10 years to develop into AIDS.) Where’s our backbone, our fight to protect our…

The pollies announced they were shifting away from reporting deaths from Covid, to report 'excess deaths' instead. Excess deaths are deaths above the normal number of deaths expected in a given time period. It was a…

Saw an American reviewer say (correctly) that it was questionable value to pay over $450 for nosebleed seats to see Paul McCartney, whose voice is gone. He sounds like a wrinkly at an aged care home singing happy…

‘Base load’ power does NOT mean ‘a base amount of energy needed to keep society running’. That’s politicians using slogans to change the facts. Base load power is the amount of power we all need to USE, to prevent…

In the last 7 years the world's biggest resource companies have made $138 billion from Australian resources without paying us a single cent in corporate income tax. I paid more tax than those companies. It's time to be…

My favourite take on the current energy crisis is "this is why we need more coal-fired power stations". Like the ones currently falling apart and costing a fortune to run, which no business will touch with a stick. A…

In 1974 NY photographer Daniel Sorine snapped a couple of mimes in Central Park. 35 years later he looked at the negatives and realised one of the mimes was a young Robin Williams.

This film opened closer to World War 2 than to today.

This shows how many people are being reinfected with Covid, in the UK. So they've had Covid before, this is their 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. infection. Huge skewing to children, because we're sending them to school with almost…

Posted here before a similar reduction in heart disease risk, with flu vaccination. Most of our chronic diseases may turn out to be caused by infectious disease. DIseases like cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis…

As people now start to become re-infected with Covid, be aware that the new strains, BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be both much more dangerous (doctors I know reporting intubations firing up again), and also as contagious as…

Today is the anniversary of my dad's death. Here he is with mum many years ago. He'd have been 92 today. I'm like him in many ways, and not in others. He only rarely ever tried to deliberately teach me anything or…

Driving through the Australian countryside again yesterday, I think we’re blinded by too many landscape paintings. The thing that should jump out screaming at us (I think), is that there’s nothing in it. Trees here and…

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They…

Every grinning ‘wheeee the pandemic is over’ photo I see on social media, with people ‘living their good life’, makes me feel more like the situation is beyond hopeless.

Nothing is sexier than smart. When malls sucked civic life out of communities, they ended up recreating many of the things they stole. And now, just maybe, the community may steal them back. It’s that sort of smart I…

Grease is a script high school teachers see all the time. Where smart girls decide the best way to keep the ‘bad boys’ they can’t resist on the leash is to mirror them. Some do it for an entire lifetime, consoling…

“…actor Ezra Miller has announced they have begun treatment for complex mental health issues.” I’d suggest that ‘they’ there is part of it.

We bought one of these. Kluger Hybrid. Obviously fuel costs are a part of the decision, plus cheap (and local) servicing. But it’s also a ‘self-driving’ car, which people know is a real interest of mine. It isn’t…

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see…

Novated leases are a massive government subsidy to petrol and diesel vehicles. Good to see them under the spotlight, so we can finally start to get affordable full-electric vehicles in Australia. We have 3 decades of…

The greatest epidemic of all time is likely the heart disease epidemic of the 20th century. Took off early in the century, peaked about the 1960s, and in decline ever since. The usual explanation for this is we ate bad…

In the UK people are mobilising to refuse to pay extortionate electricity bills. The often claimed efficiency of private industry, which nobody actually checks to see if true. Well, reality has now checked. This never…

I love that Daikin has a level built into its brackets. And I quite like my photo :)

The astronaut Charles Duke left a framed and signed photo of his family on the moon, during the Apollo 16 mission. The light in space is very white, which is what struck a lot of the astronaut photographers. The yellow…

I think heat pumps are incredibly sexy. They can deliver up to 15 times as much energy as they consume. Which makes them actual producers of renewable energy. A country can cut its entire energy bill literally in half…

Imagine a country run by smart women. Who aren’t corrupted by donors, and do the obvious things that need doing. Exhibit A.

This research is now well known. And still National Cabinet today will (almost certainly) do what it always does, reduce protections against Covid even further. Shifting isolation from 7 days to 5. Most people will be…

Radio interview with a medical researcher confirmed again for me the genius of my friend David Gorman. The topic was back pain, the famous ‘bad back’. And how every method and technique that’s been tried to treat back…

In the pandemic Australia has sacked over 40,000 of the smart people who do this sort of work. Meantime TAFE will again be free, to fund the desperate shortage of tradies, a shortage that’s mostly an already bloated…

I’m a fan of the monarchy. What I think is so important about it is two things mostly, one being that it’s a form of government that puts custom and tradition at the heart of what we do. Institutions. The second being…

Those who say coal and oil are cheaper energy always leave out the part about the Australian taxpayer subsidising those industries to the tune of over $11 billion per year. Even with those subsidies they're still way…

A friend (not pictured) had shingles which infected her scalp and eye. I think it's worth remembering that the more accurate name for shingles should be 'living with chickenpox'. It's the result of chickenpox infection…

“The glacier itself contains enough ice to raise sea levels by more than 60 centimetres. But it also acts as a buffer, holding back a large part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. If that is released, it will raise sea…

A land tax of only 0.1% would wipe out the $500 billion debt we incurred fighting Covid. Who resists it? The people who own most land. Who owns most land? The wealthy. Who are the wealthy? Overwhelmingly the boomers…

This is probably the world’s best car, the Mercedes EQS. All electric, but what’s interesting about reviews for this car is industry journalists now saying they won’t qualify a car as ‘luxury’ unless it’s electric. The…

Telephones seem a good example of just how fast change can happen. This was a telephone when I was growing up. Any non-local call was timed and cost a lot of money. The latest prediction I saw today says they won’t even…

There are ongoing trials in the UK and elsewhere on a 4-day working week, The Project had a story on it last night too. I think it's about bloody time, and this is also an important point about why it's giving workers…

“The EV future will be revolutionary, and it's a revolution car people will want to be a part of.” This is World Car of the Year, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, full electric. While Tesla gets most of the EV attention, at the end…

Australian dams are overflowing, dams in the US are dry (as ours were only a handful of years ago, and will be again). The problem with dams I think is that they remove water from the landscape itself, and treat it like…

Crocodile Dundee is like the Frank Sinatra or Elvis of the Australian landscape. The whitefella substitute for the culture we didn’t understand and mostly destroyed. Elvis and Frank mined black music heavily, and became…

Lithgow is being left high and dry by having political representation at all 3 - local, State and federal - levels by a party that denies this emergency is even happening. That party’s own core constituency, farmers, is…

I often talk about gravity, and how the Earth is pushing UP underneath you in everything you do, rather than you constantly falling down onto it. Here’s why I think people rarely notice this miracle. If asked to feel…

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me.…

Todd Sampson's two-part doco on social media premiered last night. Included in it was research that showed more than 80% of social media posts are about the person who posts them. Also why people encourage those posts,…

As a counterweight to the standard ‘here we all are ignoring Covid’ FB fare. In 2 parts. Part 1.

Part 2.

This is a real crisis for all forms of football. There’s no obvious solution to this apart from not to play.

These are neutralisation assays, tests done to show how our antibodies (the main part of our immune systems that fight infection) respond to different viruses. These are people who have had 3 doses of vaccine, and a…

"Furthermore, the data showed the increase was most significant among individuals ages 25-44, who are not usually considered at high risk for heart attack."…

From the government who tears up planning controls so people can build on floodplains, we now get politicians deciding to remove concrete and steel from major projects, saying engineers are overdoing it. It reminds me…

Smart thinking. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2022/oct/31/raising-warragamba-dam-probably-cant-stop-floods-theres-a-simpler-solution-closer-to-home

A game Kell and I play when watching Grand Designs is checking out what happens to the houses after they're finished and filmed. We haven't found one yet that wasn't sold within a year or two of being finished. People…

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much…

The new Eglinton lakes. I’m sad my photo going across the Eglinton Bridge didn’t work out, it was breathtaking amounts of water.

Great summary piece from Finn (electrical engineer) on how car batteries will become a central part of our new grid. And covers the new terms, V2L, V2G and V2H.

Watching a soccer world cup game. Professional soccer is amazingly boring. 99% of the game is players dribbling around going nowhere, with every tackle causing excruciating pain and appeals to the ref that look like the…

Nick Cave is one of those artists I feel people are supposed to like, he has cred. I've never heard him do anything that interests me. Each to their own. Bowie a bit the same, liked some of his songs, but musically not…

Neil Diamond retired from performing 5 years ago when he developed Parkinson’s Disease. He has such incredible songs, underrated masterpieces of pop. I find this clip of him at a musical opening about him in New York…

Enormous icebergs keep breaking free from the huge Antarctic ice sheet. There are 30 million cubic KILOMETRES of ice in Antarctica. That’s 90% of the world’s surface fresh water. If it all melted, the oceans would rise…

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best…

A friend who’s a public health professional, who lost his own daughter to Covid, compiled this chart to show how every time we remove protections, people get sick and die. Our politicians call those protections…

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own…

We’re trying to infect our way out of a pandemic. Like saying you can overcome domestic violence by letting people beat up their partner repeatedly, until they become immune to it. It’s literally that stupid. Protect…

There’s a storm brewing in Covid vaccine science, and it’s a biggie. One of the key weapons your immune system has against pathogens is immunoglobulin, or Ig for short. Also called antibodies. They’re proteins which…

Dose 1 of this today. For shingles prevention. I really believe the most important thing you can do for your long-term health is to avoid infection of any kind. Everything from heart disease to cancer is likely caused…

Just a handful of comments on an article The Australian released saying sales of electric vehicles have tripled. Imagine being part of this community of fruit loops.

Great observation from an information expert this morning, calling Donald Trump a ‘superspreader of misinformation’. Time to ditch all the free speech nonsense and start shutting down the loons in our midst, who play on…

Liberace became a bit of a self-parodying joke, like a later stage Fat Elvis. But the man had talent, and could entertain. Also reminds me of a time when to admit being gay was social suicide. And watching all these…

I love this version, and sometimes hearing a ‘cover’ reinforces just how good a song is. No matter how long I’ve been involved in music, I always get reminded that it’s the songwriting that is the most important thing.…

See and smell the fear. Trying to overthrow your own government with violence will get you sent to prison, who knew. Well, smart people knew.

Some very smart people jumped on the anti-lockdown wagon last year. I thought they might have done a bit of checking and found out there is no such thing as a 'lockdown' in public health, it's a political term invented…

Julie Anthony (and Freddie Mercury) understood anthems. Look at this, at a footy crowd, she has the whole (singing-reluctant) audience on their feet inside a minute-and-a-half. Anthems are supposed to energise you, fill…

“What I’ve learned is that we all need a place we can put our heart in. A place where we can build our habits and routines.” Our only glimpse into the true wonders of life is habits and routines. Travel is the breaking…

How do those who support the NSW Government and Gladys possibly justify that only 1% of the $177 million of bushfire relief money went to Labor electorates? And that the Blue Mountains electorate (Labor), that had the…

See how desperate the LNP are to destroy super? First they let you raid it in the pandemic, rather than them give you money. Then they suggested first homebuyers use it to buy a house. Now they’re gradually replacing…

Brendan Murphy, main adviser to government at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020. The Brits started the pandemic saying they’d just let everybody get infected with a lethal virus, to make them immune. They were an…

What happens when you try to share a photo of Monty Python on Facebook.

Well said, Delma. A retired teacher. Smart people, teachers.

Since the beginning of time I think there have been accusations that the stories people read or watch 'influence' them to act in certain ways. It's never turned out to be true. If it were true you could run the world…

How many generations of women were taught from a young age to keep their legs together when they sit? I use this as an illustrative thing about the current toxic masculinity debates. There's no good reason either men or…

I remember posting this before and people thinking I was some sort of misery guts. But I think it’s only when you really understand this that you become a good friend and lover. You stop looking to the other person to…

The overture to the Magic Flute. Just wow. I find classical music buffs always find a way to rank Mozart below Bach and Beethoven. Pig’s arse.

"At the heart of this conflict is wages: The RBA wants to get them up, the government does not, because the Coalition holds to the outdated belief that higher wages cost jobs, because profits and investment get…

In countries with voluntary voting, the main way parties win is by stopping people voting who will vote against them. Voter suppression. An art form in the US, but also in much of the rest of the world. Conservatives in…

A story of 2 pictures. In 1996 John Howard came to power. From that date union membership collapsed. A big part of why is people felt well off (and gave Howard the credit). The other picture tells the real story. Howard…

Many, maybe even most, people in the developed world experience the world largely as if they were occupying a space behind their eyes, looking out. The dominant idea that "I" am located inside my head, in my brain. So…

I posted about this when it happened. LNP fans defended the decision at the time, because as always they just swallowed spin without digesting. It was always a ludicrous, corrupt decision, a populist brain fart with no…

Smart man. Look at that laundry list of goodies. There's much more to add to that list too. Unions are much more than workplaces, they're the way the majority of ordinary people once had their interests represented in…

About 40% of urbanised areas are devoted to roads. Nearly half of our cities. And traffic is gridlocked. Ideas always determine everything - to 'move' is a myth. To get from 'A to B', you have to connect them, but then…

Australians love dams. Mostly because they see water as something only for human use, ignoring its complex role in the landscape. They also think they drought-proof places, which is about as smart as thinking you'd be…

Hieronymus Bosch's 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' dates to about 1500. The details of this painting when you look at it carefully are awesomely trippy.

What can we do when we're told ecosystems are collapsing? We can become 'environmentalists', but then what does that mean? Wrapping the landscape in cotton wool? That doesn't work. We can try to scientifically 'manage'…

Agency and landscapes. Aboriginal rock art can look like some sort of primitive attempt to draw. I don't think it has anything to do with art as we conceive it. Aboriginal people gave agency to all things in the…

I've had a book of Ainslie Roberts' Dreamtime paintings for years, and they've always fascinated me. It seems for aboriginal people, the key is to have eternal ('everywhen') agencies at the root of your society. Imagine…

After royally stuffing up the entire pandemic, the UK government has been trumpeting how it ‘leads the world’ with its wonderful vaccination effort. Actually all it’s doing is hogging all the vaccine for itself, ditto…

Nick's law of applying for jobs. Nearly every job ad you look at for a new position will tell you some shit work that a manager doesn't want to do, and has managed to find budget to employ somebody else to do. In the…

Humans are ultimately desiring creatures. Everything we think, feel and do is I think caused by either a desire, or a belief. A belief is a temporarily fixed desire. It's for this reason that the current debates about…

Passing the pub test says a lot about thinking. One of the great fallacies about thought for me is that ordinary life is somehow practical and grounded, and 'intellectual' things are abstract and removed from ordinary…

This is Nordlingen, in southern Germany. Over 1100 years old. (Trivia - also the city shown from the air at the end of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) Look how beautifully self-contained cities were before…

Germany is probably the only country that figured out a way to turn integrated small-town life into global economic superstardom. Read this if you want to understand some of how it does it. Almost impossible to copy…

Bushmen like the fictional Dundee I think are Australia's way of romanticising the chasm they all feel but rarely admit to, between themselves and the country they're living in. The Dundee archetype plays on that deeply…

The film, Gravity. Landscape, and travel. The battle of our era. Begins with humankind's desire to be free of connections to the Earth, to fly to the stars. Travel. Then as the film progresses, the lack of those…

Same story, the world over. When indigenous peoples are displaced, they don't say 'hey, that's my piece of harbourside property, I'm negatively gearing it'. They say 'we are the land'. The land is an integrated part of…

The famous Australian 'Bell Bird'. The Bell Miner, technically. The greatest bully in the Australian bush. Birds sing to create territory, and Bell Birds sing without a pause, all day. A forest where you can hear bell…

The problem with maps I think, is that they're designed to help you navigate, but we see them as pictures of the world. We think they look like the landscape, without noticing that nobody actually lives in the viewpoint…

The Blue Mountains looks like a 'natural' wonder. But actually it's a landscape in serious trouble, once again because we either trash it, or treat it with kid gloves (make it into a national park). The Madonna-whore…

I find you have to take the vitamin C research out of the whole 'natural' wellness movements, and away from other vitamin stuff, to appreciate it. It's not part of that world. Vitamin C is not really a vitamin in the…

Another beautiful photo of the surface of Mars. Patterns appear everywhere in the universe (obviously one of my passions). When physics de-animated the universe, made it full of dead and inert 'matter', it had no way to…

This makes about as much sense as saying that if 5 out of every million people play croquet, the rest of us have a 0.0005% chance of playing croquet. Actually the vast majority of us have a zero chance of playing,…

An actual photo (not drawing) of Saturn, taken by NASA's Cassini probe.

One last astro photo. Jupiter's moons Io and Europa, orbiting Jupiter above its Great Red Spot. Again a photo taken by Cassini, the NASA probe.

This one looks a bit dry, but is important. Indications are immunity created by vaccines might last a year. That would mean the massive rollouts in places like the US and UK, that are attracting admiration, will…

Straya worships tradies. Tradies are in my family. But there's a reason you can mostly DIY your own plumbing, carpentry, painting etc., but that you can't DIY your own MRI, or commercial airliner, mobile phone or hip…

The word 'scientist' was invented in 1833. Before that time there were just scholars, who studied across the whole curriculum. The closest thing to what we see as 'science' today was natural philosophy. It's been…

A random part of the UK countryside, a pattern seen around the world. Look at the total saturation of paddocks, of farming. Nothing allowed to exist in the landscape except us. About 75% of the UK landscape is dedicated…

The pandemic is a long way from over. No country can vaccinate their way out of it, despite what politicians are telling you. The virus will continue to mutate to try to outsmart the vaccines, if it's allowed to keep…

There are all sorts of theories about why bad things happen in the world. Capitalism, power, inequality, toxic masculinity, Left, Right, etc. etc. None of those things are real, I don't think. This photo to me…

Was in a webinar with John Skerritt this week, head of the TGA, the body that approves vaccines in Oz. A nice guy. This quote from him though shows the danger of medicalising a pandemic. "By being vaccinated, we're not…

Country towns now seeing the sort of road congestion you see in cities. And we keep making the same mistakes, thinking that more 'traffic' means we need more and bigger roads. Traffic is not a thing, its not like a flow…

Isn't 'broad musical taste' an oxymoron? To 'have taste' is to to be able to pick crap from quality. There will always be a minority of art (or anything actually) that is truly great. I remember one of the great…

Photography encourages a snapshot view of reality. As if reality is just one thing, that you can capture. Paintings are better at showing that reality constantly shifts and reveals more things, as you engage with it. A…

This is a painting. The likenesses art produces fascinate us. But do we understand why? Paint has lollipops in it. It has anything and everything in it. How is that possible?. When we say art 'looks like' something -…

This is a drawing, using just a blue pen like you'd use at school or work. Nothing else. Oscar Okonu. The soul of this man is now living in ink as well as flesh, art extracted it and gave birth to it in a new material.

One more painting tonight. It really is a painting. You can feel the presence of this girl? Some call that the soul. It's the eternal part of her, of all of us. Only art can show it, give it life in a new material.

Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi is the most expensive painting ever sold, at $578 million. If it was found to be a fake, its value would drop to about a dollar, immediately, even if the copy was impossible to distinguish from…

The latest craziness from the US. People 'identifying as' vaccinated, to bypass vaccination and mask rules. I guess once you start down the rabbit hole of identifying yourself as something you're not, this is where it…

Look at this, the US will likely need to start its mass vaccinations all over again, as early as September. The UK will be the same. Microbes evolve to fight back. Why you need to control the spread of the virus, as…

The Overton Window of public discussion. Debates are 'framed' (I use that word a lot - this is why). Ideas that get listened to have to be within a 'window' around that acceptable-sensible part of the continuum. From…

Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Hilarious story behind this one. He'd bankrupted himself investing in Cook's voyage to Australia, on which he was supposed to be a passenger. He pulled out. Being friends with the…

Boris leads a party that killed over 120,000 in the UK. Why did they do it? Journalists have now unearthed this quote from him, at the start of the pandemic: "If I was 80 I wouldn't care, I'd be more worried about the…

Those topics people say you shouldn't discuss (politics, religion etc.) are exactly the things we should talk about. Why are we surprised when the world turns into a toilet, when we don't discuss anything important? In…

Part of Darwin's beetle collection. Science was part of empire, it 'collected' the world, to categorise it. Placing the world in classifications, and on maps. The voyages of exploration were also mapping voyages, each…

I know many have a chuckle with my anger at Daylight Saving (DST). But it's part of a greater slavery, to time itself. As this article says, clocks don't measure time - they create it. Until we understand that, we will…

Before 1847 there was no such thing as 'time' or 'space' in England. Each locality was a whole universe unto itself, with its own rhythms of life driven by things like seasons and cropping, and didn't see itself as part…

For more than a year we've had to listen to how smart NSW's approach to the pandemic has been, avoiding 'lockdown', to minimise disruption to the Economy. The actual costs show that to be nothing more than political…

Heard on radio. Not all funny people are smart. But all smart people are funny.

Was I: A. Trying to get to work, or B. Filming a car commercial?

You can find this on Netflix. It's an extraordinary film, made by Peter Galison, a scholar in my area who studies scientific imagery in particular. It's the story of how they captured the first ever image of a black…

I don’t do favourites, but I doubt there’s ever been a more beautiful piece of music.

Fascinating that we smashed flu last year - you can see its death spiral at the start of the big national lockdown in Feb-March 2020 - but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021. It's just non-existent. Despite NSW…

Social media is the old newspaper, pulled apart and the sections monetised into a particular app. Facebook is the old personal pages and classifieds. Instagram is the old social pages, where you'd look at pictures of…

Australia’s 4-part plan released this week uses the same nonsense about the flu. We’re back where we started 18 months ago. We haven’t learned a single thing.

It would have been so much better to not call it ‘classical’ music, genre labels drive people way from things they should hear. Figaro is the greatest of all operas, many think. God really was ‘singing through this…

I study political strategy. It used to be part of every child's education, in Ancient Greece. I think we're suffering from the loss of that. Right now, for example, you'll see daily pile-ons at people not following…

A photographer from regional Victoria. Her anger is at a public health measure, designed to save thousands of lives. That isn’t even mentioned. Her collapse in income is her only focus. No doubt that’s extremely…

‘Ring-fencing’ suburbs and even whole regional towns is about as effective as trying to avoid a fart in an elevator, by standing on the opposite side. The NSW Government again asleep at the wheel. Watch the toilet…

You’re born old, and get younger every day you’re alive. How does that work? You are the accumulated inheritance of all of your ancestors, going back billions of years. Babies start with this ancient inheritance, you’re…

Talking to a manager of a Big W store the other day, and they revealed that annual stocktake regularly reveals a discrepancy of about $500,000. Mostly attributed to shoplifting. Shoplifting is interesting, it was…

Great piece from a public health professional about what our lives with Covid may look like into the future. The 'burden of disease' point is critical. Politicians and business people are desperate for people to believe…

Part 2 of previous post. The 'but' is looking at cases outside the locked down areas. They have exponential growth, where virus leaked from SW Sydney. And it's doubling fast, every 5.4 days. This pattern will continue…

Greg is a smart chap. The people who say we need to ‘live with Covid’ haven’t realised yet that what’s happening in NSW right now is what that looks like.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is an Israeli complex systems specialist who studies pandemics. On the right here is the strategy every part of Australia apart from NSW is using. (He thinks Australia is amazing.) On the left in red is…

Burns victims sometimes aren’t aware that the damage they have is terminal. NSW is very close to that point, the damage done in the last 2 months may be irreversible. This may be just the start of the horrors, it’s as…

Again, avoid anything politicians say in a pandemic. Listen to people on the front-line, like this doctor. The so many people taking comfort from the daily weaponised spin from the NSW Government aren’t aware yet of the…

How much better will you sleep knowing that the PM has ignored expert advice to end the pandemic, and is quoting Batman movies instead?

My grandmother died this month. My last remaining grandparent. Nanna. Because of Covid she got no funeral, though at some point we’ll get together and commemorate her. That’s her on the left, holding either me or Mike…

Another quote from Nicolas Rothwell. About writing, but it could be painting, fixing a car, raising a child, playing or writing a song etc. That mysterious nature of all things to act in ways we don’t control. If you…

The ‘National Plan’ to exit the pandemic. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s a re-election plan for the PM. Look at what it does. It makes meaningless claims about the vaccination rollout being as good as over when 80% of…

Writers are often our most entertainingly insightful gifts. John Birmingham wins the internet today firstly for ‘Morrjiklian homunculus’, and then for nailing the exact politics in play right now, around children and…

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate,…

Morning music trivia. Which US band copied the format of this famous Stones clip almost to the letter, in a massive 1980s hit?

You can only go for so long telling every kid at school that they're as smart as every other kid, before the shit hits the fan.

I think my frustration with social media is exactly this, it's called the 'Spiral of Silence'. See excerpt below, but the link is only a page of reading too. People simply refuse to engage in discussion most of the…

Australians are much more Aboriginal than they realise, I think. Not only does the landscape shape us in ways we don’t understand, but our encounter with aboriginal people has become part of our cultural DNA. Take the…

Feedback suggests some people like a different perspective on the pandemic, beyond the endless repetition of meaningless political slogans like 'live with the virus'. So I'll keep at it. Today - hospitalisations. "It's…

This is what both frustrates me and gives me hope. Numbers are how many days until each age group reaches the vaccination threshold (70, 80, 90%). I've circled NSW in red for the 90% threshold, you can see by about…

Those who back the NSW Government the way they might back an NRL team often defend what they do by also praising NSW Health. It’s been many months since the NSW Government listened much to NSW Health. Now they’ve…

“Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara did not understand why the customer was So Fucking Angry. All of the customers were angry. The man at the counter was waving his plate at Farsith,…

As a younger person, I was terrified of standing in front of a crowd. It stopped me ever going into music as a career, or doing public speaking, debating, dancing, even going to parties. About a decade of teaching beat…

NSW is ‘open for business’. Also open for sport, music, swimming, visiting friends etc. The fact he only mentions business is just more evidence that NSW is run by business, for business. Here’s a thing. ‘Business’…

The world seems more stupid today. I know a lot of people feel that. It's not because individual people are getting dumber though, I don't think. It's because a huge part of a society acting intelligently is its…

Found this photo on my phone, I must have accidentally snapped it when out for a walk yesterday. We treat the Earth beneath us as just ‘the ground’, like an inert mass we fall onto and rest on with our ‘weight’. In…

So often the smart and right thing to do won’t be the popular thing to do. Have a look at this excerpt from a BBC interview in 1967, of a female government minister introducing drink driving laws. Don’t go along with…

Probably the greatest thing I’ve ever learned is that how an anglepoise lamp operates is also how our bodies work. They support us in whatever position or shape we choose at the time. Standing, sitting, walking etc. All…

I could understand if people who have a passion for slogans voted for this federal government. They do a lot of slogans. I’m yet to find a single other thing they do. (Smart observers are suggesting the money may be…

Kit is a smart person. A mathematical biologist in the UK deeply involved in the pandemic.

So many of the things we take for granted as part of our lives are things clever engineers worked a long time on. Do you think the handlebars on a bike are for steering? I bet you’ll be surprised. Watch this.

The Omicron Covid variant is infecting people who have had 3 doses of vaccine. The vaccines won't prevent infection. You may think, following politicians, that this doesn't matter, because the vaccines will keep you out…

A medical friend made a great comparison yesterday. We like to think of Covid as 'like the flu', because flu and colds are part of our normal life. But medically, infection with Covid is much more like concussion head…

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle.…

From inside NSW Health. Worth a few minutes. Insight into what’s happening inside pathologies and hospital For the past few days there has been a huge amount of misinformation regarding COVID testing and as a healthcare…

By the way, had a lovely Christmas, except for part of the family suffering from Covid. So let’s talk about Covid! That thing infecting your friends and loved ones, in the pet and Christmas pictures. (It’s even…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. I don’t think we see our culture as a culture, we see it as just as how things are. Take the idea of ‘having a good time’. While nearly every part of the planet…

When our collective orgasm of disaster and disaster appeals is over again, will we listen to those who say it’s all as simple as more hazard reduction burning? Or to those who want to lock up these spaces again as…

I think all civilisation is the management of one basic fact. Stupid people are too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. That sounds like some cheap shot or judgment, but actually it’s a deep reflection on how…

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by…

Thanks Peita for this quote: “Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” Laurence J. Peter

More vortex tubes. You can buy one for about $50. Nobody can explain how they work (I suspect Archimedes could, but nobody reads him now). They defy modern physics. Simple compressed air in the top, instantly splits…

Both Proust and Tarde said people don’t fall out of love, they fall in love with somebody else. A desire is always overpowered by another new desire. You don’t stop liking vanilla ice cream, you start liking strawberry…

Surely the greatest photo of all time.

Big concerts now are sitting with lots of other people watching movies, while a band does the soundtrack. A bit like the old cinemas.

Finally got around to seeing this. This is the 4th film version of this story, going back nearly 100 years. I’m actually a bit surprised that the basic premise of the story isn’t more laughed at - that a woman’s success…

Have you ever watched a show or film, and noticed that you’re not observing something the camera captures, you’re occupying a point of view? There’s no person ‘in’ the film with that point of view. But it’s also not…

I was thinking about why the anticipation for an event is so often much better than the event itself. The red carpet arrivals, the tension before a band appears on stage, the night before Christmas etc. It could be…

Happy Birthday Peter. I hope you see a great film!

For me the two greatest prisons for our minds. Clocks and maps. Clocks make us think time is a series of ‘instants’. Maps make us think space is a collection of ‘points’. We even mix them together, talking about ‘points…

For events, what does ‘live’ mean? For example, I can see and hear more of any sporting or musical event from the comfort of my lounge room. Yes it’s not the same, but then if I were there ‘live’ I wouldn’t ever…

Each to their own. K.D. Lang getting a lot of praise for her performance at the relief concert. I found it overwrought, prostrate on the ground at times wailing like somebody giving birth, with little art in the singing…

Travel makes all places equal, they’re just points on a map you can move between in comfort. But those points are also where people live. So I think you have this constant tension introduced at the heart of society,…

I wanted to go back to this photo of the King and Wallis Simpson because it has something unusual about it that I love. It looks like they’re smiling at the camera, at us. But I think those smiles are for each other,…

This from a discussion on domestic violence. Our domestic situations are isolated, and isolation breeds violence. Cars helped us do it. We need to think much wider than the gender politics that wants to turn this into…

This is a precision fermenter. These may replace most farming in our lifetimes, as they’ll be able to make any food (including meat), and a lot more we’ve never dreamed of, from the microbe level up. Food will become…

This actual photo of Jupiter proves that the Van Goghs had a holiday house there.

If you're one of the people calling people buying extra toilet paper stupid, what preparation have you done yourself for the coronavirus, except parrot ScoMo's "keep calm" line? Experts recommended people start stocking…

A journey into the heart of populism. Here’s an interesting thing - the law refuses to define ‘administration’. It says it can’t be defined. Most of us therefore hate something that doesn’t even exist.

Few more posts about coronavirus, it’s important. Right now the number of cases in Oz is maybe somewhere near where I’ve put the arrow on the pic. An exponential function. That means it all seems still a bit fine, we’re…

Smart people kinda rock. Let's hope this pans out, unlike all the other possible cures, this one is already approved drugs so can skip those years of clinical trials. Was going to donate to this and noticed they have…

The exponential function in action. It took 3 months for the first 100,000 people to be infected with Covid-19. It took 12 days for the second 100,000. It's taken 4 days for the 3rd 100,000. As the WHO says, if you…

Seeing across the world a desire to 'flood' FB with 'positive' messages. I don't think it's a smart idea to want to flood FB with anything. Every post is another bit of load on FB's servers, and it's the critical…

Mozart can teach us about resilience. I think we often approach life situations backwards, choosing the emotion we want, and then trying to shape our life to get that emotion. We ‘want to be happy’ or positive, or…

I’ve been playing guitar for about 40 years now. One piece of advice I’d give to anybody learning an instrument, that you don’t usually hear much in music teaching. Learn songs. All this stuff about scales and chords…

It's struck me that the idea of being alone and doing nothing has scared many people - there's a sort of frenzy of in-home entertainment being invented, that and increased booze, a frenzy of stimulation. It feels fake…

Have posted a few times about how it's likely not the virus that is killing the poor victims of Covid-19, but rather their over-active immune systems. Cytokine storms, as the researchers call it. And yet treatment of…

This will drive the kangaroo court people absolutely nuts. I thought right from the start that this case would fall over, due to lack of due process. Not because I believe Pell is guilty or not - I have no idea, none of…

It astounds me that we've only been isolating for a few weeks and already some people are saying it's too hard. Ffs, our ancestors lived through nearly 10 YEARS of food rationing in the last world war, and 4-5 years of…

They did it 100 years ago. They didn't even have many communications technologies to stay in contact with one another or be entertained. They were resilient. And they went hard, and early, and in multiple layers, and…

The problem of seeing our current situation as only a medical thing. Have you noticed that as time goes on, a disease caused by the richest parts of the world is being dealt with by cocooning that most privileged part…

I post about the pandemic a lot because to my mind, it's a true existential threat, not just to some people but to our societies as a whole. We can distract ourselves from it for a while with entertainment, but that…

If you're at home with time on your hands, Google Paul Ewald, one of the most important researchers on microbes. Ewald shows that maybe all of our chronic diseases are caused by microbes, by infections. Including…

One of the guides we need I think. By 2050 10 million of us will die of superbug infections each year, at current rates of growth. Ewald is sure most of our chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimers, MS,…

I keep coming back to one insight from Camus. Humans are not free, because there are pestilences. The thing that annoys me most is the choice we're being asked to make between 'normal life' and lockdowns. Normal life is…

What I sense isn't sinking in yet is that our 'lifestyle' is not compatible with infectious disease. Far too much mobility and mixing of people, within and between countries. The feeling I still get is that people see…

See how the same strategies cross the globe? Do we know anybody here who makes frequent reference to 'the science'? "The claim that government would be “led by the science” was reassuring many weeks ago, at the start of…

Seeing the same arguments here, that we need to 'balance' the apparently horrendous impact of lockdowns on the economy against public health. As if those economic impacts are just as bad for our health as a pandemic. As…

I feel explanations of domestic violence rarely talk about the domestic part of the term, focusing mostly on the violence. To me it's a violence intrinsically linked to our ideas of domesticity, not just to gender roles…

I think it's worth thinking about why the trend in this graph is happening at the same time as a dramatic rise in aggressive nationalism and patriotism. And why this same pattern is happening in just about every…

"She says that the phase where we see a tail – after we’ve gone from a flat curve to very low figures – is the most dangerous time to start assuming that life’s back to normal."…

This is part of the old normal that we call 'the economy'. The push to rescue the economy is just a push to not change the (broken) old normal. The disease isn't the virus. It's the old normal. Otherwise we'll all be…

Maybe the 'let's try to control everyday life in multiple dimensions' strategy wasn't the smart one. Go figure. I wonder if the CMOs realise yet that they're ScoMo's human shields.

Was laying in bed this morning thinking about how epidemics just start and stop, and nobody knows why. And I thought, these microbes are working together, they're communicating somehow. When I got up, I did a bit of…

AC/DC preceded and played alongside punk and grunge, and were way rawer and harder than either of them. They make The Sex Pistols look like what they really were - a manufactured boy band pretending to be rebels. And…

Talk of the economy being in desperate trouble mistakes the economy for the budget. The old normal was a tiny group of each society hoovering up most of the money, and the 'economy' then unable to function because the…

If most human disease is infectious disease, even the big chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease and diabetes, you'd expect antibiotics to have an impact on some of them. And here it is. We've been living in a…

This is bloody fantastic news. Another week of those numbers and we could even start talking about elimination, like some of the other States. Note this isn't support for a 'control' strategy - control doesn't reduce…

Gladys: "For us our stimulation will really be driven by infrastructure first and foremost because infrastructure means jobs". There's no evidence that infrastructure spending creates jobs. There's good evidence it wins…

Want to know how deadly the economy virus is? There’s only one reason Mexico is re-opening on the same day it’s had its deadliest figures to date. The US is demanding it. Mexico is a major part of their supply chains.

“An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take…

I can’t eat chocolate, it makes my heart race. But I love it. So a few years ago I decided to try carob again. As a kid it was always considered like the fake-meat version of chocolate. But wow, it’s fantastic. Much…

Chlamydia pneumoniae. Likely the bugs that cause the heart disease we usually blame on fats, smoking and lack of exercise. Also looking like being a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease and arthritis. This bacterium may…

I wonder if it’s common to think that modern medicine means we’re healthier today than ever? Looking at heart disease, including stroke, can be an eye-opener. This is data for the US. At the turn of the 20th century,…

Linda Blair gave one of the all-time great performances here I think, and only 14. Still a genuinely chilling film.

Very few people died of heart disease before the 20th century. And then quite suddenly, nearly everybody did. See the graph. Medicine has no idea why, it usually says fat and salt are to blame, even though we ate even…

Aboriginal and other ‘primitive’ peoples often dislike and distrust film and video recordings. We think they’re just simple. What if we’re the simple ones? What if film and video images do actually ‘capture’ in some…

Nobody knows why pandemics end. The explanation I haven’t seen suggested is that it’s other microbes that end them. We’re so focused on ourselves and the impact a virus has on our bodies that we forget that all microbes…

It’s a bit surprising that we so often hear that the only way this pandemic will end is with a vaccine. There’s not a single example in history of a pandemic ending with a vaccine. Not one. Vaccines are fantastic, don’t…

Movement and travel talk about going from ‘here’ to ‘there’. But...everywhere is a ‘here’. There is no ‘there’. Just ask roadkill. Your there is somebody else’s here, and every point along your journey from here to…

Easy to be furious with these morons (far out, are they real lips?). But look at it this way - who is running a strategy of letting people travel all around the country while there's community transmission happening?…

"By means of the material, the aim of art is...to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations...Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are…

It’s in the data. This is Victoria’s rolling average community spread for the whole pandemic. The red arrow - 2 May - was the day that average started to climb above 1. The same day NSW went below 1. Also the time…

Did you do maths at school? NSW Cabinet didn’t. There are close to 10 transmission chains of Covid in NSW right now that can’t be traced. Even one of those is enough to start an explosion of cases. Exponential growth,…

Secret glimpses into the heart of the economy.

A guy who fights pandemics, speaking right at the start of this one. Very few governments listened. "You have to go after the virus". You have to fight. So many smart and stupid people spending the last few months…

Surveys in the US and UK say up to 50% of people there will refuse a Covid vaccine. The government here talking about making it 'mandatory'. To me this is just another example of the total absence of an actual virus…

More than 25% of Americans believe Bill Gates is using vaccines for mind control. When will we start taking seriously the destruction of our institutions (education, government, journalism etc.), creating this lunatic…

Got an entire continent now trialling the 'learning to live with the virus' strategy. It's not going well. I'm waiting for the learning to live with cancer, heart disease, malaria, TB, paedophilia and poverty strategies…

Wanted to post this separately. Kenny is part of that anti-lockdown brigade who are trying to turn the pandemic into some ridiculous culture war. Now they've realised lockdowns are actually hugely popular, so the next…

Superannuation is the privatisation of the aged pension. Billions of it is creamed off in pointless fees and to create profits for financial services companies. The argument for it was that the government can't afford…

The Economy Crowd. Not only spending their pandemic happily sheltered from the virus while undermining public health action for the rest of us, like demanding borders open to help mates in the tourism and airline…

When a pollie talks about debt and deficit, does it scare you? It shouldn't, it's a steaming pile of horseshit. We have Scrooges in charge, who need to open the country's fucking wallet and start investing in society…

Victorian England. Massive building programs, creation of the sewers, the railways, roads. The time of empire. Do we stop to think about what made all of that possible? Today we flog all this stuff off, to give away in…

We wouldn't 'live with' paedophilia, DV, racism or heart disease. Why do people suggest we should live with the virus?

Economists agree with the public health people. Restrictions save our economy and health at the same time, they're the same thing. Next time somebody says we need to relax restrictions to save our economy, just remember…

Musicians solved the riddle of peace centuries ago. We’re stuck between agreement and disagreement as options, or agreeing to disagree. Bach knew there was another way. Each voice in continuous counterpoint with every…

One of my side projects at the moment is working as part of a small team to reconstruct my old high school, virtually. It burned to the ground a few years ago, a tragedy, it was one of Australia's most stunning schools…

Judith Butler's interview about trans issues has been getting a lot of attention. I criticise a lot of transgender thinking, and wanted to say why a bit more over time. Transgender is defined as a person who feels that…

When you sit or stand anywhere for long periods, stop trying to hold or fix yourself in any way - up, forward, back - whatever. Feel everything that happens in your body as it learning to effortlessly balance without…

Very important people understand this I think. A pandemic is not a medical problem to solve. What's interesting is that as communications technologies and data analysis improve, the distinction between individual and…

This is average number of sexual partners for some countries. It’s a perfect example for me of how we don’t take infection seriously. Having multiple sexual partners supercharges the virulence of STIs. HIV became lethal…

I think every day we move closer to seeing that nearly all disease is caused by infection. Cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, even schizophrenia and other ‘mental’ illnesses. It’s a paradigm shift, to start…

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid…

The parties that say they value individual initiative more than anything else, never give anything to most individuals. The budget last night could have been targeted at individuals, by giving them money. Instead the…

I didn’t know if this was real. For about 6 years from the late 70s to the mid-80s one of the most important and interesting musicians in the world. And then the booze and smokes took over, driven I’m sure by the…

I’ve seen many many people say art is purely subjective. That it’s just a type of personal entertainment. That’s nonsense I think, art is a critical part of how we understand and live life. Take stories. In simpler…

Some say the budget had nothing for women. The biggest part of every Budget is the HouseKeeper program. Worth an estimated nearly 34% of the entire Economy. All unpaid of course. Includes childcare, for which there was…

Proof that the Economy is just people. We imported lots of young, healthy, smart people, it’s why the Oz economy hasn’t tanked in over 20 years. That’s about to stop. The government think building roads and gas plants…

The UK is in trouble, huge infection numbers, worse than their first wave. Attributed in large part to Boris’ ‘let’s save the economy’ subsidy of 10 pounds to people to go out and eat at restaurants. Anybody who thinks…

Nearly 70 years ago. But is this moment now gone, like we often think with time? That it ‘flows’ and what was in the past is now lost forever? Nope. That moment in 1954 is still happening right now as you look at the…

About 1980 was when the world changed. Employers started trousering all the productivity gains, and not workers. When did union membership really start to slide? 1980.

Professors, Institutes. Smart people. They think Victoria has done a spectacular job. They’d be spot on. The rest of the world would do anything to be Victoria right now.

This photo is 119 years old. The kids obviously have long finished their lives. But the longer you dwell on those faces, the more you physically feel their personality, their life. We’re so used to thinking images…

Fake or Fortune is one of my favourite shows. Where they investigate whether paintings people own are genuine or fakes. What’s most interesting for me goes back to imitation, or copying, copies or imitations are worth…

Leslie carried a fart machine with him everywhere he went apparently. It’s a glorious, beautiful thing. https://twitter.com/goulcher/status/1318134542994198531?s=21

“Politically confected libertarian nonsense.” Inspiring when you see truly smart and experienced people at work.

We forget I think that stained glass windows pre-date most people having books, paintings, photographs, films - any sort of imagery. So we forget what they must have seemed to worshippers, a glowing radiance of colour,…

How much attention did people pay to Josh’s big pandemic budget? Remember the tax cuts for all? Have a look at how they almost completely evaporate for everybody except the wealthy, from next year. Apart from being…

If you find modern life challenging, meditate on this photo a while.

It’s heretical to say it I know, but I’ve always found Midnight Oil boring. All didactic art is. It reminds me of that Soviet art of women with shovels and tractors. More PR than art. No real nuance in the music, art is…

If you're smart, you'll read this chart as 'Victoria is leading the world in public health'. If you're somebody who doesn't think much, you'll say 'Dan Andrews mismanaged the virus'.

People scratch their heads about why polls now don't reflect election results. It's populism again, populists see pollsters as part of the same elite 'Establishment' they hate. So they lie to them. And vote for reality…

My photo for every modern election. The Simpsons know. It’s not Left vs Right, that stuff is long over. People are at war with their own institutions. Populism. They’ll vote for anybody who promises to stick it to the…

Everything is ideas. Right now with Trump we’re seeing the endgame of our ridiculous ideas about democracy. That it’s just about the ‘people’. It isn’t, the people have only a tiny role to play in democracy. Most of the…

If I had to give relationship advice to anybody, it would be find the person different to who you are in all the right ways. That person is Kell, for me. Her music is rubbish, she watches rom coms, she hates windows and…

Monet. It’s so often the light that makes a great painter I think. The painting is luminous, painters allow us to see that light doesn’t shine on things, but emerges from them. Objects as containers for light.

This voucher idea is what the UK tried in its summer, to ‘stimulate their economy’ and ‘live alongside the virus’. It killed thousands. We’re in a tug-of-war, trying to crush this bastard virus (the national strategy),…

Abstract portraits show much better I think that our division of a ‘material’ world and a ‘spiritual’ world is nonsense. Just a few simple smears of paint can ‘capture’ the essence of a person, and it will last as long…

You can’t look at this for any length of time and still think images just ‘represent’ things. (Click to see it in greater detail.) That paint is alive, a being of sensation. A sensation doesn’t belong to the person or…

I wonder if we understand or even see our obsession with images. Old aristocratic homes were saturated with paintings. Today our favourite thing to share on social media is pictures. I think it’s usually the most taken…

Han Van Meegeren was the most famous forger of the 20th century. His fakes made between $100 million and $200 million. This is him painting a fake during his trial, to prove he’d created them. The much more interesting…

Around 50% of the art in the world’s galleries is estimated to be fake. Nobody even notices. Art in our time, including music, is obsessed with originality, with ‘authenticity’. The worst sin is to do ‘cover’ versions.…

Pauline. She and any other vaccine-refusers won't get travel insurance even if the airlines did let them fly. Know how morons like this get a say in how things work? When smart people don't engage in the issues of the…

Ah rock stars. Remember Clapton telling “black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans” to leave England? Him and the Van showing here you can produce beautiful music, and still be as dumb as a fresh pile of dog…

Maybe this is all part of ScoMo’s cunning plan to phase out coal.

Many took cheap shots at Victoria rather than focusing on the fact that quarantine in Australia is the FEDERAL government's responsibility, by law. This is now the 3rd 'leak' from Sydney airport quarantine in the past…

A very common loon statement, the 99% thing. 1% of the population of Australia is 250,000 people. Of the world, 75 million people. That’s a lot of people dead so that Ben can have his elephant discussion. On top of…

I couldn’t recommend this show highly enough. Gripping Brit crime thriller, but way more than that. The Brits are peerless with this stuff, so much more sophisticated than the black and white moralising coming out of…

The Beatles were superb musicians. But Beatlemania and the enormous phenomenon The Beatles became were a sickness I think. Even The Beatles recognised that, it’s why they split up. Music should not be what changes the…

Most people would rather join a gym than a union now. Whether you’re Left or Right, rich or poor, the destruction of unions is what’s mostly destroying our societies. Working people being looked after and earning good…

Was Bohemian Rhapsody the ‘best’ movie? Fascinating for me, because this is what Queen always do, force people to think about what’s good and what isn’t. That’s been their entire career, in music and now in film too. I…

“The public is the great arbiter...we did a film for people to enjoy, to laugh, to cry, and to celebrate.” Not posting because I’m a Queen fan, but because everything in that sentence is I think worth chewing over.

Trump. Brexit. Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie). What do they have in common? All massively popular, despite ‘thinking’ people feeling they shouldn’t be. It’s the ‘thinking’ people who need to dig deep here, in my opinion.…

Evidence lurks in interesting places. We wonder how society ends up split between millions of ordinary folk and ‘elites’. In the last 30 years almost no movie that people actually went to see has won best picture at the…

Fleetwood Mac touring Oz this year. This will be the 15th lineup of the band, under the same name. It confirms the underlying stupidity of much of the music industry for me that this goes completely unremarked, whereas…

“It was a salient lesson for the state’s first ever Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence and Sexual Assault, that understanding a domestic violence offender was at the heart of prevention. "It's…

Tennis was my main sport as a kid. I’ve been interested in Federer regularly being called the greatest player of all time. The statistics don’t bear that out, Margaret Court is like the Bradman of tennis, nobody else is…

We’re taught that ‘life’ is this finite thing, between birth and death. And that death is the absence of life. Some people believe there is life after death. (Interestingly, it’s less common to ask - is there life…

I tried watching this year's State of the Union, couldn't get through it. I love America and Americans, so these comments are observations, not criticisms. It always strikes me how pious the US is at root, I sometimes…

Never come between a boomer and a bucket of money. Here's the angry face of old fart entitlement. Oldies currently getting 'refunded' for tax they never paid, to the tune of nearly 8 billion dollars a year (almost…

Popular music, with the exception of Brian May and maybe some vocal groups, has lost its counterpoint? Counterpoint for me is the highest form of music, and maybe of all art. Bach wrote the book. Instead of having…

I’m curious if the main theme of Bohemian Rhapsody (the movie), which Rami Malek talks about here, is well understood? That Freddie Mercury was a persona, not a person. An incredibly shy outsider, connecting with other…

Still seems an irony that people on the one hand are very concerned about privacy, and in the same breath use a global platform as a family photo album. And there's the slide night thing, there was a time inflicting…

Teach your children to be brave. We could start by not always telling them how scary the HSC is. Or how scary being online is, or that scary perverts are trying to kidnap them, etc. Some of this stuff was scarier in my…

Here's the swindle right at the heart of superannuation. The Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) sets the 'benchmarks' for different levels of retirement. For example, whether you want a 'basic',…

‘Drought’ is still a highly loaded word in Australia for me. There’s a tendency to see rain as something that happens, or not, which we have no influence on. But rain is part of a wider water cycle, and we can influence…

“Bohemian Rhapsody is more a crowd—pleaser then cinematic excellence.” Film critic. I still don’t think people see enough how the split in our wider world is all there in a statement like that. The ‘crowd’ is not able…

I've noticed this, how in recent decades art - writing and music in particular - has been obsessed with being 'real' and 'authentic'. Writers and musicians are so often drawn to the pathological in life, because they…

Part 2 of previous post. This book is a ripper. Authenticity is a key idea in our time, for me, with a very dark core. "Musicians strive to “keep it real”; listeners condemn “fakes”; ... but does great music really need…

I think these experiences show a couple of important things. Firstly that freedom is always freedom TO do something, not freedom *from* something. Whether it’s gravity or taxes, what some describe as limits or…

The health benefits of good breathing are really amazing. The problem with being told to ‘breathe deeply’ though is that you kind of have to stop what you’re doing to do the deep breathing. There’s a reason you weren’t…

Journalist talking about the Bohemian Rhapsody film. "I haven't seen it, I've heard it's a very enjoyable but terrible film." Again I don't raise this because I'm a Queen fan. I raise it because of that distinction…

What I mean by the idea that we don't occupy space any more. We live 'in' space instead, we see the world as one big set of coordinates, a map. Look at this Greek village. Nothing there is built to allow easy passage…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re caught. That’s how I see living in a rich and privileged country too, we often don’t see that privilege, we assume that’s just how the world is. For example, the idea of…

An idea for my LM and Alexander friends, or anybody else. Common ideas about gravity and movement prevent many of us I think from ever experiencing our bodies/minds for what they really are. Take the idea of…

Porn has sullied the word, but one thing Tarde did that is unique is reshape all of our ideas, around the concept of penetration. There isn’t a part of life that doesn’t rely on the idea of individual isolated ‘bits’…

Imagine you have a child who is sensitive to loud noises. Then, you go and buy everybody in the house their own drum kit, and ask them to play all day. Then imagine unhinged, violent people who feel like we’re being…

Derren Brown’s best work shows how desire and suggestion are the most fundamental part of who we are. The fascinating techniques he uses here are used by politicians and advertisers too, for example. Suggestion isn’t…

Shouldn’t the fact that astronauts like this come home to Earth often with irreversibly damaged bodies tell us we’re misunderstanding gravity? You’re in space too, space doesn’t start outside the atmosphere. Try this?…

Here’s another reframing. A ‘world in crisis’ is just our usual channels, of TV and film and now social media, feeding back to us the complexity of the world we’d ignored before. ‘No politics please!’ is the voice of…

Elections and leaders to me are like picking the colour of your car. Society is the car, a very complex piece of engineering, needing large numbers of smart people, hard work and tradition to keep running. It doesn’t…

Why I think Waleed Aly is important for Australia. 1) He makes being smart and informed sexy. 2) He shows that answers are complex and usually not where you think they will be. 3) He shows that migrants and Muslims…

I’m proud to say I’m an expert on committees, it’s a big part of my job, I get paid to do it. Some observations about committees from years of working with them: 1) everybody hates them, but take them away and people…

Pensioner, living alone, quoted in the news today. “How a person can live on $67 a day, this is supposed to be the land of plenty. Plenty for who? Not for us," he said. "Our generation, we worked hard and all the…

Selfishness - it’s all about me - versus altruism - it’s all about you. It’s a bizarre choice? I think the animal kingdom shows a much more sophisticated range of relationships, which are all part of society too:…

I do this every day, it’s my workout. It’s not well understood that you can’t feel your body. You are your body, you can’t step outside it to feel it. That feeling in your back, or knees, or neck, or wherever, is the…

This story is now going to cost the Daily Telegraph millions of dollars. I hope it emboldens others to take more Murdoch-driven filth to court, Murdoch thinks he’s a law unto himself, he’s a key player in wrecking all…

Presence, what does it mean? Here's Freddie Mercury just saying hello to an audience (sorry that FB keeps causing sound and vision to go out of sync). This is presence, it electrifies a situation. Anybody could just say…

The bullshit of positive thinking ideas. Just do it, be part of the solution etc. As if you’ll be happy by choosing to be happy, rather than happiness being the *result* of your life working well. Working well because…

Geometry means ‘measurement of the Earth, or land’. Geo-metry. We learn it (badly) as ‘maths’. The original meaning gets lost. Ancient inventors of geometry would measure a piece of land to have a way to say ‘this piece…

Soooo... I got the answer wrong. I am now keeping my word and posting this picture selected by Yasmin so I'm challenging my friends who are logical and smart thinkers, to have a crack at guessing the answer to the…

Muso: social media is destroying music! (P.S. I have a gig this Friday, come along.)

Idiots get leadership positions because, like how much money you earn, merit has nothing to do with it. It's always power. And idiots do power better than anybody. They start young, at school, where they're the ones who…

People find this a depressing insight. But I think until we recognise this fact, we’re living a life that’s a projected fantasy. Love and friendship look entirely different when you start from this point.

10 thoughts about the election. 1. It’s not sport, nobody actually won or lost. Any party who reads election results as being about them, win or lose, will always get smashed by the people eventually. 2. The old still…

Seeing lots of rubbish like this. We keep treating politics as a football game between parties, that we watch on TV. I reckon we don’t stop to think - no, the LNP didn’t ‘win’ the election, like a tennis match. The LNP…

Know that creepy feeling a painting is looking at you? What’s amazing (I think) is that it IS looking at you. To be ‘looked at’ is a detachable sensation and perception, if it weren’t, you couldn’t ‘capture’ it in paint…

One of the greatest human problems, understanding how to balance individual and group. I think music solved it a long time ago, but people don't often go there to answer this one. Melody (individual) and harmony…

I think this is absolutely wrong. You already know what death is like, every night you experience a version of it - you rest in peace. Not metaphorically, life and death aren't opposites, they're measures of the degree…

If a film makes you cry, isn't it evidence that art creates living things with the power to affect us, just like other people affect us?

Michel Serres, maybe the greatest thinker of all time, has died. Was only thinking yesterday while reading one of his books that this couldn't be far off. It's difficult to describe the magnitude of his genius, he was…

Into week 2 of the continued reign of the Lunatic Nutters Party (LNP). Last week religious freedom of speech was the go, this week the Australian Federal Police is raiding journalists' homes and offices. Free speech is…

Sometimes people say Usain Bolt had the time to look around like this in a race because he was so good. But what if that's backwards? What if he was so good because he was the runner in the race not narrowed to where he…

Wisdom from physics. Light doesn't shine on things, it's part of things, stars produce it by squashing matter so much that it explodes. What we call a 'material' thing is actually a container of light - light is stuff…

I guess what makes great artists great is how their works diagnose things. They see into the future. In 1820 Goya saw our world today, where reality has become sport, a fight between opposing sides. Whether we're…

Why doesn't a television strike people as a miracle? We're so blasé about these things. Yes it's clever technology, but that doesn't explain anything. The miracle is that images and sounds can be taken from one place,…

Today a person will often look for the feeling of connection from a relationship that they used to get from wider social institutions - the family, church, the community, etc. So relationships are doing a lot of heavy…

The privileged sing from the same song sheet the world over. Boris is telling the UK these tax cuts will energise the economy. Just as Trump did in the US, and ScoMo here. It's complete self-serving bullshit, all it…

When the Bohemian Rhapsody film was in cinemas, there were many who criticised the approach taken in the film. Here's Brian May responding to those claims. The thing about Queen is, underneath the pomp and spectacle is…

The people and animals in this photograph are all long dead? Yes and no. For example, some of them is in this photograph, some of who they are has been 'captured' here and lives on with every new viewer. You could say…

Our world is mostly driven by algorithms. Techniques and machines for producing automatic knowledge, from basic arithmetic with pen and paper, through to computers. We wet our pants over artificial intelligence, but…

I have an occasional heart arrhythmia. Medicine has no idea with arrhythmias, there are some treatments that work ok, but nobody really understands what's going on. When I'm in hospital, like last week, I think about…

Night Watchmen played the role of police long before there were police. And the name is important - it was the night and darkness that was thought to be the dangerous thing. If you have any interest in Victorian…

Arnott's biscuit factory, April 1938. Ray Olson, photographer, he took some wonderful pictures of all sorts of things, but very hard to find out more about him.

Re-asking a question. Which comes first - a river, or a river bed? And notice how a photo of a river looks like a painting of a river, if you include time in the image? I think painters paint time as well as light.

Maps mislead us I think because they make us think of territory and space the wrong way. Nobody lives in the space of a map. What creates space and territory is rhythms. Animals sing or 'mark' territory with other…

It'll have tourists now. It's hilarious really that a big selling point for travel destinations is whether you'll be bothered by other tourists. The simplest way to fix that is not to travel. But we won't do that, we're…

Bono. Worth $700 million. (His music isn't pro bono.) We condemn American preachers who get rich selling God. But quite seriously, and myself a fan of the music, how is that different to what Bono does?

My Alexander friends use a physiological fact not well known in wider society. Your head and neck 'lead' your body - what happens in your body is determined by what's happening in your head and neck. Head leads, body…

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social…

By any measure, a magnificent photo. From the 1930s, Ray Olson, one of my heroes, a press photographer at the time who captured vast amounts of public life. Cameras are so good now that I find a lot of stuff published…

If resolution is your thing with images, here are some numbers. The old 35mm standard film for cameras would need a digital camera resolution of about 175 MP to capture the same amount of detail. Go to 4x5 inch pro film…

This is sinus rhythm. Your 'normal', beautiful, steady heartbeat. Breathing is a rhythm too, as are your circadian cycles. Medicine has some tricks to help control rhythms, but it has little or no understanding of the…

The SCG in 1903. It was a different sort of ground when there were only a few stands. Probably less comfortable, but somehow more exciting. These old silver coated glass plate photographs have a magical quality,…

More of my love affair with analog photography. Look at the breathtaking quality of light in this shot. So many nuances that digital algorithms couldn't possibly capture here, I think. I'm a huge fan of the freedom and…

William Joseph Macpherson is another hero of mine, he took many breathtaking images of Australia at the turn of the last century. Like this one of The Rocks, where you see both the life of the people (kids in this case)…

"...you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it." (Eckhart Tolle) It's a standard insight from presence traditions. I think it's fascinating to apply it to public debate. Lots of…

I've posted several times about vitamin C, most recently how it's being used to cure sepsis. I think Linus Pauling was really onto something, you don't win 2 Nobel Prizes for being stupid. You need to take this outside…

In a society of ripped bodies and flabby minds (society struggles to solve its current issues), how do you workout our thinking? I think the law knows, and the fact the law is so disliked suggests it's the place to…

When Charles Darwin visited Bathurst in 1836, he made this fascinating comment about the Macquarie River: "The Macquarie figures in the map as a respectable river, and it is the largest of those draining this part of…

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social…

Gabriel Tarde, my greatest hero apart from the inventor of Crocs, saw desire as the root of all things. Even in what seems the driest topic, economics, he saw that desire was the engine of everything: "Economic progress…

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, to a sacred place. 2 million people. The Ed Sheehan world tour: 8.5 million people. Rather than see ourselves as 'modern' and secular, wouldn't it be better to understand how our…

This is an idea I think that is an almost bottomless well of insight if you apply it. Everything in life is individual and discrete, and all continuity, even something like the 'flow of time', is an illusion built from…

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the…

How do you determine what's right and wrong? What's good and what's bad, or less good? In any situation, including what music you like, whether to send your kids to this or that school, etc. This question really…

Consultation with one of the country's top medical specialists. Doc: the test results were great, all good Me: fantastic! Doc: so, we'll start you on a full-time dose of [drug X] Me: um, isn't that only for people who…

It's liberating I think to stop seeing the news as a description of the world. The reason the news reads like the Apocalypse is the same reason the music industry pumps out pap artists now - both industries are…

Have you ever noticed that mobile phones make us immobile? We have to stop what we're doing to use them (why they're dangerous in cars). Not a criticism, I think they're misunderstood. Why do we desire and use them so…

Time began in 311 BC. Invented by this fella, Alexander the Great. Before him there was no 'river of time', where time 'flowed' along some linear path, there were just events, tied to geographical locations. The dynasty…

High definition film of Queen Victoria in 1900. From the Museum of Modern Art.

Queen Vic yesterday made me think. Every 2 minutes humans take more photos than existed in the entire world 150 years ago. There are an estimated 700 billion pictures uploaded to social media every year. Add to that all…

I snapped this in Lidsdale on the weekend. It really resonates with me, because it's an old creek bed. Some of the ancient Greeks divided the world into Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I say we're a civilisation seduced by…

Why I think 'abstract' ideas really matter. Galileo and Newton saw the world as made up of independent things 'in' space and time. Like in the picture, a person 'moves from A to B', with A and B separate points in space…

Some numbers on climate change. Between 1751 and 1987 (236 years), humans released about 737 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Between 1987 and 2014 (27 years), humans released about 742 billion tonnes of CO2…

This is brilliant, and I love the music too. At the end though they say the view from space is obviously the best projection for a map. Which I think goes completely against everything they said up to that point. A…

Here's a perfect example of what I mean when I say maps define our culture. This is the couple the Iranians have detained. The photo shows how their entire trip was motivated by a map, how they saw the world as a map to…

Keynes and Hayek were like chalk and cheese. But they both agreed that ideas are the heart of life. Even 'vested interests' are based in ideas - power and money derive from ideas. Australian public life is a wasteland…

How can people look out for themselves while at the same time looking out for others? Normally we oppose those. I think Dixieland jazz knows. Every musician is a soloist here, at the same time. All of those simultaneous…

Notice how the more sophisticated and powerful technology gets, the smaller it gets? Micro-electronics is what lets us have instant global effects from wherever we are. Dang if that micro part of reality isn't key to…

Isn't the problem obvious here? A whole bunch of individuals (with views I agree with btw), whose only collective action is to stand together and complain. They have an industrial-scale political weapon they can use,…

I've lost count of the times I've heard: 1) 'technology is just a tool', and 2) 'machines will take over humanity'. 1 and 2 completely contradict each other. To me technology is really just us, and the most social part…

I think Venn diagrams could save the world. We're so used to seeing everything as lots of separate small bits that somehow magically create new big things, that we don't stop to think - who said the bits and the bigger…

More Venn. This is how I see people. Say you're discussing a topic, in politics for example. No person is just an issue, that issue is part of their entire way of seeing everything. It'll link to what washing powder…

Hmm, another interesting Venn. So Google+ was conversation? No wonder it didn't succeed. Seriously, once you start looking at overlaps between things, the world comes into focus. Our world is nothing but overlaps.

Learning to ride a bike is one of those early balance skills, like standing, walking and running. Somewhere in the transition between those early years and adolescence, humans do something weird. They stop balancing,…

Venns can be funny, but doing one is a really interesting process, you start to really see the overlap between things, and you don't usually get the outcome you're expecting.

Artists often have amazing homes, it's part of their work. Steve Alderton captured Margaret Olley's in this shot. None of the tedious 'luxury' of modern homes that makes them look more like hotels (because, as…

Two things happened yesterday. Ginger Baker, the drummer from Cream, died, and the refs apparently ruined the NRL grand final. Our response to these two events interests me. Firstly referees - I haven't seen a single…

Extinction Rebellion will probably be in the news a lot this week. I know some really believe protest raises awareness - it must to some extent. But for me again the bad guys are winning because only they have sat down…

This little civil engineering cartoon shows multiple amazing things. For decades now the US Army Corps of Engineers have been trying to stop the Mississippi from being captured by the Atchafalaya River, itself a product…

I like walking on roads when they're empty. Part of it is to reclaim the space from vehicles. But it's also because of one property they have that I find interesting. Road space is unbounded space. The function of a…

Our civilisation is part Greek, part Roman. The Greeks gave us democratic ideas, the Romans built things. Like their roads, in the picture. The Romans survived over 1000 years, the Greeks, just over 300. Maybe there's a…

Cool body stuff. If you do this, the closer to the ground you get, the tighter the muscles in your legs and elsewhere will feel. A common explanation for this is that you’re ‘stretching’ your muscles. In fact you’re…

Anti-consumerism to me attacks all the wrong things. Our 'material' well-being is the most human part of us, and the way we are woven into the fabric of the world. I think the rejection of it is part of a wide escape to…

"The proliferation of protests is no guarantee that things will change. “Staging [demonstrations] is no longer the difficult part,” says Youssef Cherif, a political analyst and one of the authors of new Carnegie…

Some say people are a mind in a brain in a head, on a body. I see people in a very different way, as a combination of beliefs and desires. What they believe is the more fixed part of them, and what they desire is the…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes of the US, has been granted legal rights in the way a person has. You can see the algal blooms that are part of its current problems. This is what climate change really means, I think,…

Some of the ideas I post here derive from the ideas Einstein used. For example, location words like up, down, near, far, there, here, before, after - all of those are words with relative meanings, not absolute meanings.…

The Block is good drama. It’s also a window into Casino Oz. Capital gains on housing are the engine room of the Oz economy. Really it’s just a fancy word for gambling. The trick is flogging off a place for zillions more…

Ideas are my passion. Not least because I think they’re the most dangerous things in the world - they determine everything that happens. Avoiding them just allows bad ideas to win. Most commonly we’re told to ‘just do…

I did some research with Professor Alan Bain about why ideas about education never improve education. The results can be applied to any part of life. Ideas will only change things if they ‘fit’ the actual reality in…

I walked past a woman in the supermarket yesterday who was sub-consciously humming the tune the supermarket had playing. An ear worm, the song ‘stuck in her head’. What fascinates me is that ideas work in exactly the…

Freddie Mercury’s love songs were always very dark, hidden by the beautiful music. One of the artists to explore how dark love really is. Love Kills, one of his other love songs, turned out to be prophetic.

One of the sad things for me about modern life is how it’s framed as either fact or fantasy. We’re taught to believe facts tell us how the world is, and fantasy is pretending reality is something else. You know what…

Another reality filter. Everything we think and feel ultimately can be traced back to an idea or ideas. We often miss that I think because we mistake ideas for the people who adopt them as beliefs. (It’s literally an…

I’ve spent a lot of time working in universities. What’s the function of a University? Actually I think it has only one true function. To teach people to tame ideas. Ideas matter because everything we do is an idea.…

The Name of the Rose. A murder mystery set in the Middle Ages, but with multiple interwoven themes. Eco shows us a world when people lived and died by ideas - the centre of the story is a Library built as a labyrinth,…

In 1952 London had a 5-day smog emergency (picture). About 12,000 people died from the filthy air. Sydney is in the middle of a week of filthy air, the rest of us have been too. The damage that does to lungs and blood…

We are eternal, immortal beings. You could say ‘so why can’t I remember before I was born’? Memory is key I think, firstly can you remember being in the womb? Being 2 years old? 4, 5? Notice that the ‘younger’ you are,…

What we do 'physically' is entirely shaped by ideas. Exercise as a set of ideas has all sorts of damaging beliefs about the body, gravity and movement. Activity is great, ‘exercise’ as an idea has all sorts of serious…

Stupid is winning. Part 2.

Thinking through the bushfires. Several historians have showed that what we now see as the 'bush' - mostly trees - used to be a mosaic of open and closed spaces. Compare this early Australian painting with the same spot…

The Sovereign’s Sceptre, part of the UK Crown Jewels. Includes the Star of Africa, the largest colourless cut diamond in the world (over 530 carats). The Crown Jewels as a whole are estimated to be worth about $10…

National parks, part 2. The Australian landscape at the time of European settlement was overwhelmingly described as a ‘park’. But not in our modern meaning of ‘wilderness’, but in the meaning of the sorts of estates…

How to be stress-free and anxiety-free in 2018. Something I’ve researched for many years, so in case it’s of any use. (There are other dimensions to it as well.) Nearly all the approaches that work with stress and…

Kelso High School was a unique school. The buildings were beautiful, light everywhere, central courtyards with gardens, everything carpeted, long ramps everywhere as well as stairs, it had its own cinema and…

If you never saw The Moodys (or the earlier "A Moody Christmas" - best to start with that one so you get the back story), you have to check it out. One of the most brilliant pieces of TV ever made in Australia, or…

The Big and the Small, Part 2. A crowd, a public, flocks of birds, staff in an organisation. Large groups. A common way to explain these groups or crowds is that the individuals in the crowd each do their bit, and then…

The Big and the Small Part 3. (Look away now Nell, save your sanity.) Rank these in order of size. A shoe. The Coca Cola Company. Mozart’s 5th symphony. Home and Away. A piece of string.

This site is the funniest, smartest take on Straya, it’s like Barry Humphries and Edna upgraded for 2018. Perfect reading leading up to Straya Day. “...the slower mobile data speeds and smaller data caps of three years…

I prefer the old ways in education, where the focus was habit and not our minds and ideas. And we are, in the West, so lacking poise of mind and body. We’re hyper-sensitized slobs, or hyper-sensitized six packs. William…

Europe offers some of the finest food in the world. And art. And architecture. But it’s a popular music wasteland ;)

The Mad Monk has escaped again, this time calling for cuts to immigration. One of the things not many know is that the only thing that keeps economies like Australia's running, is immigrants. Immigration actually fuels…

A puzzle about time. Is there a problem with the use of 'when' in this news story? (The supernova is pictured between the red arrows, if you're interested in that part of the story.) "On Sept. 20, 2016, Victor Buso, an…

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for…

Cars are evil, part 79.

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

Artists are smart.

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…

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…

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…

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.…

One of the things I do in my professional life is work with these guys to help explain why education doesn’t work for most students. I think they’re the only people who have really understood the problems in education,…

There are amazing things happening with sound. Even neurologists are using it now therapeutically. Binaural beats, EDMR, binaural microphones (got some of those myself), to name only a few. Listen to this with eyes…

“The conditions of the microscopic world produce creatures of stunning intricacy. Ironically, it’s a lack of complexity on the part of our own eyes that keeps us from seeing it.” Microorganisms are far more complex than…

Always surprised that people think it is, particularly with the passions they show for their own favourite art and artists. And in every genre of art, there is a canon - a list of artists people generally agree are the…

Joshua Lederberg was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who questioned our ‘war’ on germs. He was one of the biologists who realised that we need to look at germs as part of an ecology, rather than always trying to kill…

Ever had a blocked sink drain? The best two pieces of advice I ever got on blocked drains was to: 1. always go with the plunger first, you’re much more likely to shift things with physical force than with chemicals.…

This is the photo that should be used every time a news story says a fire is 'suspicious'.

We’ve often understood reality using photographic metaphors and analogies. Like we get a ‘picture’ of it. But reality is much more like a hologram than like a photo. If you smash a hologram plate, every piece of the…

“Part of the problem is that we expend far too much effort comparing our behind-the-scenes reality with everyone else’s public highlight reels, posted in envy-inspiring terms, meant to catch our eye and make us wish we…

One of life’s precious jewels I think, right under our noses. Life-changing. Takes a few words to describe, sorry. What is awareness? In simple physical terms we often think it means ‘I am aware’, meaning ‘me’, up here…

Reading is one of those universally loved things. But does it have a dark side? I think so, in a few ways. 1) Books created the idea that knowledge is separate to human beings who use it. It’s ‘in the literature’. The…

This trend has been clear for a while. ‘Grown-ups’ who are still essentially teenagers. Obsession with bands and music, with consumer goods, with fantasy fiction and films, with binge culture, grown-ups having…

Marshall McLuhan used to talk about how our technologies shape us. One way that I think is less seen is how our 'writing' technologies shape both how we think, and how we work. For example, tables and spreadsheets. If…

Every night we all ‘rest’, after our days, as we sleep. The traditional Rest In Peace has usually meant our souls and/or bodies resting in peace, for eternity, with Christ or God. But what if there’s a much more literal…

I don’t think we really understand well enough the magic art does. If we see a painting, for example, we often take for granted the resemblance between the art and what it’s a painting of. But actually, it’s quite…

Why do we dream? And what are they? This picture is a bit New Age, and that’s not my thing, but actually it’s a representation of dreams I quite like, because it portrays dreaming as a movement out into the universe,…

Time is fascinating, so I post about it a lot. We grow up taught that time is like a river, flowing into the future in each present moment, with each present moment then becoming part of the past. It’s not how time…

Watching old movies makes me think about how much language has lost power. Paradoxically the proof is in how accepted and even ignored swearing is today - 100 years ago telling somebody you found their behaviour…

Everybody experienced the Laurel vs Yanny debate now? (It's all Laurel for me.) The explanations given by audio types, where they pull the track apart and show two voices at work here, don't really wash with me. Older…

Boo hoo? I think betrayal is the heart of not just social life, but of all of reality. In love, we hear what we want to hear and project what we want to see, onto the people we love. Friendship the same. A new road…

Often great mysteries in life are in simple things. Like the scientific concept of 'mass'. You can define just about anything else in science clearly, but mass is different. The best even scientists can usually come up…

More love, because it’s a lovely topic. Proust is valuable because he allows us to strip away what Greer called the ‘wretched cant’ of love. The self-motivated projections we put onto other people, that are really about…

Why do fashions change? Have pondered that for years. And now I think it’s pretty simple, all human behaviour is based on one thing - imitation. Humans imitate, in every walk of life. So this article has an interior…

Patterns appear, and nobody plans them or designs them. So they’re pretty mysterious, but maybe also the secret to understanding society, because society is these patterns. They’re not designed or planned by…

In my experience, organisations nearly all make exactly the same mistakes. (A pattern, if you like.) They try desperately to find a way to get a grasp of everything that’s happening in them, to analyse and control…

Think yourself fit. Much cheaper and easier than a gym. We each of us have a fair chunk of mass we carry around with us all day, every day. That mass generates lots of sometimes huge forces, doing everyday things that…

Our public life is becoming a fantasy, like a film set. Celebrities at the front of the church with royalty at the royal wedding, now two TV stars in the White House. (Remembering Ronnie Raygun was also an actor.) I…

You know how everybody is never sure what to eat these days, what’s healthy and what isn’t? And we keep turning to ‘the science’ for the answers? Maybe we have the framework wrong. For millennia who were the experts on…

AI is sometimes much smarter than us. Even if it is in a film.

Why I love libraries. One of the only places in society now which is still relatively silent. Our world is so noisy. Motors and engines mostly, the din is constant. But music too, too much music. Music as noise, music…

I love politics. Lithgow is the only place in the entire region, and the neighbouring Riverina, that doesn't have NBN yet. And it's just been delayed another year. I looked at the Australian Electoral Commission records…

Not owning your feelings, an example. You can’t feel your body. Say you have a sore back, and you feel the pain there. Are you feeling your back? No, you’re feeling the feelings of you ‘going inside to feel my back’. If…

I think machines are the most social parts of our societies. Tracey Kidder, an American journalist, spent about a year visiting a major computer manufacturer, observing how a computer was made. He wrote up his…

Spirit, shall we @[584373168:2048:Peita] and @[100001374621876:2048:Kato]? I'd like to use Rowan Williams again as a starter, one of the great religious minds of our age I think. Spirit as kenosis. The Holy Fool: "Yet…

More people than ever that I know are suffering from stress, at times myself included. And many say that our world is a stressful place right now, in general. I wanted to share what were for me some hard-won lessons…

Now the ‘episodic cycle of rage and grief’ is again cycling back to indifference, thinking finally emerges. When nobody is probably listening, having moved on to their next target for outrage. Also in the same edition,…

Our politics looks like society is at war, but actually we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. It’s impossible to understand that paradox I think if you only look at humans. An example - trains.…

Christopher Alexander, the architect, was one of the first to put me onto patterns as a topic. Alexander noticed that beautiful buildings in history shared some common patterns, basic things like ‘light from two or more…

Is a hole a thing? It’s nothing, an empty space, but then why give it a name? A hole in a bucket or donut or sock or road - part of the bucket/donut/sock/road, or its own thing? Is the inside edge of a donut part of the…

A few days ago I started talking about the occult. Today some more connection to it, when it turns out the person who defaced the Eurydice Dixon memorial was an occultist. This is the fastest growing set of beliefs in…

I remember being fascinated by the idea of infinity as a kid. Many kids are, the idea of something that goes on forever. For example kids often ask, what’s the biggest number in the world? Or they ask, if there’s an end…

Photomosaics may be a good model to show that ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’, or local/global, are not two separate things. Each part of a photo mosaic is itself a whole image. What we call society is all of us, obviously, but…

This is William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner as part of the team that invented the transistor. The transistors are in the pic with him. There are over 2 billion transistors in the integrated circuits we have in our…

This movie was a Soderbergh remake of a Russian classic, and didn't make many waves at the time (although is now retrospectively praised as a work of cinematic art). The theme is interesting - what would happen if the…

“The usual explanation of why humans are so successful as a species is simply that we are smarter, with huge brains and uniquely flexible intelligence that allows us to figure everything out through sheer force of…

This short and honest film by Charlie Lyne explores why conspiracy theories appeal to people, including himself. I think it’s a type of paranoia, possibly brought on by a world that is poorly understood and therefore…

Catacombs in Paris and Rome, tombs in Egypt. It’s important I think that historically people looked for the source of life and the afterlife in the ground beneath us, not up in the sky in some Heaven. Tombs and…

One of our greatest prejudices is against 'the crowd' or 'mob' (of which we're all a part - it's a bizarre set of beliefs). Philip Tetlock is famous for studying expertise, and showing that groups of people - the crowd…

There’s a famous expression, “the map is not the territory”. What people who study maps realised though, is something much more interesting: 1) the map *creates* the territory. There is no country with boundaries, for…

More on loneliness. This short, powerful film shows that grown ups can have dolls too. And that human desire and connection is much more complicated than we probably like to admit. Disturbing too, but the man is very…

Going back to copies and originals. It’s a chicken and egg thing, the original comes after the copy. Before something is copied, there are no originals. With music, rock and pop music is obsessed with originals, whereas…

There are two main stories around climate change. One is that humans have interfered with the Earth’s climate, and the other is that they haven’t. I’d suggest these are actually the same story. Opposites again,…

The Hitler Youth are an example of the power of children. The Nazis targeted children specifically, and nearly every child in Germany at the time became part of the Hitler Youth. The process was so successful that the…

A prominent journalist on the weekend said that nobody in the media could think of a way to save serious journalism. In a situation like this, it usually means I think that the ideas we’re using don’t fit. In the case…

Another lens to view our world through (see link). This example comes from business, but applies to anything society does I think. Most of what’s seen as disruption in business is really that companies are dumber than…

Gabriel Tarde on life in a big city, another paradox. Rich social environments are environments of intense imitation, not of thought. Facebook is another rich social environment - do we see much thought on it? Or mostly…

The farmers we need to support most, I think, are the ones who recognise that a lot of our agriculture hasn’t been farming at all, it’s been soil mining. Stripping the land of vegetation and using whatever nutrients are…

If you look at some of the discussion about film and photography, for a long time it’s been accepted that one thing photography has showed us is that images are in things themselves. Cameras are a non-human eye. Most of…

Masterful example of the way film images aren’t a record of any particular person’s seeing or hearing. From Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. Nearly all of it is a recollection, so is shifted in time, but also each of the…

James Gibson noticed that the things in our environments have meanings. Normally we say that only humans deal with meaning and purpose. Every object or technology has what he called affordances, ways in which the thing…

David Hockney is an incredibly important artist, not least because he challenges a lot of our assumptions around pictures more generally. We live in the age of photography and film/video, and Hockney strongly believes…

This was a superb story, if you’re interested in drought and drought relief, it should be compulsory viewing. Lots of very smart farmers out there, doing incredibly smart things, and using very different ideas about the…

A sort of Part 2 from earlier, about whether organisations should have an 'opposition', in the way politics does. Here's the famous separation of powers in our societies. One thing that's not mentioned that I've seen,…

I find this a powerful image. You can tell an awful lot about a society by what they throw away. That idea is actually quite strange - to 'throw away'. Not many cultures in pre-modern times threw things away. This isn't…

Something about size. If you use a microscope, telescope, or even climb to the top of a building, you’ll feel like you’re seeing more in some ways. But actually that’s not true, you’re definitely seeing things you…

Film makers know that a close up is much more than just a closer view of something. A close up shifts you away from observing a scene towards suddenly feeling present in the scene yourself. Faces are the most powerful…

I’m not an ‘exercise’ person, but am still very active. This long (but brilliant) quote from the great Australian scientist Raymond Dart is the sort of exercise I do, every day, in everything I do. It makes your body…

Like Serres, my first love is music. But I’ve mentioned before, it’s starting to feel like noise. Noise is the way to occupy territory, as birds and other animals know. Music is about territory, that’s its main…

When teaching physics I noticed that not many people are aware of the mirrors 3 of the Apollo missions (11, 14 and 15) left on the moon. Since the moon landings, lasers have been fired at these mirrors from Earth to…

“Our attitude to drought is all soft heart and soft head.” Couldn’t fault a word in it. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/our-concern-about-the-drought-isn-t-fair-dinkum-20180821-p4zypf.html

A gap in our education? If you play sport, it’s obvious that you start pretty badly at it, and then with practice you get better all the time. But with the basic physical things we do every day, like stand, walk, run,…

George Bernard Shaw, before he was a famous playwright, was one of the world’s leading music critics. (One of my favourites was him suggesting a steamroller be used on the chests of people coughing at the opera.) One…

@[783412914:2048:Kyle], @[584373168:2048:Peita], @[100001374621876:2048:Michael], you might like this one about music, and musical genius. How we're all a bit genius really, cos music is just sound, and we're all…

If you float in a pool, you’ll notice that most of the feelings you normally have in your body will disappear. That’s because what we feel in our body is created by the interaction between our bodies and what’s around…

Know how when a gadget plays up, often the easiest way to fix it is to just reboot? Turn it off and on? Reading the work of the remarkable Australian anatomist Raymond Dart made me realise our bodies have an on/off…

There’s a saying, “speak truth to power”. Meaning telling the ‘powerful’ what’s really happening, rather than stay silent because of their ‘power’. I scare quote ‘power’ because just about every photo you can find of…

More Dart. Poise, not posture or exercise, will shape your body in the most perfect, healthiest way, while ‘doing’ nothing. You can be poised during exercise too. But the forces on you are enormous even sitting doing…

If you have Netflix, check out Derren Brown’s ‘Miracle’, a recording of his latest live show. The show itself, as the name says, is about human suggestibility, and miracles, and Brown explores things like faith healing…

Once upon a time if you had ideas, you wrote a book or article, and published it if you could, and hoped people would read it. Most books are never read. What social media has done is bypass the book, and taken ideas…

I’m not always the best sleeper, and in the early hours of this morning I was reflecting on the concept of ends and means. The one captured in the expressions ‘means to an end’, and ‘the end justifies the means’. Most…

Quotas for women in powerful positions is one of those test cases for different worldviews. Those who believe everything should be decided by 'merit' hate quotas. I think the merit stuff is complete rubbish. The people…

Hilarious, but also a perfect metaphor for climate change. We’re used to talking about ‘the environment’, as if we live ‘in’ the environment. That’s like a clean room, where you don’t really notice the room. But I think…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

With the author’s surname of ‘Gross’ the immature part of me giggled at the title of the article. But on a more serious note, with continued discussion of consent and rape, also on Q&A this week, how do we understand…

“It’s a shame Germaine Greer’s insensitivity on issues of deep vulnerability so often gets in the way of her ability to start public debates about difficult issues.‘ I would rephrase that as “it’s a shame those who…

Because I think we focus too much on feelings as isolated things, rather than as always part of a context, we tend to favour ‘good’ feelings over bad. We might see happiness, pleasure, love, warmth etc. as ‘good’…

Can you think of a single thing you think, feel or do that is entirely original? I doubt it, humans copy, they imitate, it’s what they do. I think there’s an extension to this, it means that we are always part of a…

People have probably heard of the 'living wage' idea, where ordinary folk are paid a living income, whether they're working or not. It horrifies those who think businesses keep economies running (or anybody who believes…

I sometimes wonder if the modern fights between atheists and believers are down to the fact that we talk about God, rather than Gods. Historically we arrived at God - singular - via Gods - plural. Like the old Olympian…

I’ve spent a lot of the weekend browsing the Holtermann Collection. Bernhardt Holtermann was a German immigrant in the mid-19th century, and became famous because of the Holtermann Nugget, the largest gold nugget ever…

A child could read for hours and we’d all beam and say how wonderful. And yet a few hours on an XBox and apparently the kid needs to get back into the ’real world’ (never defined). We’re very moralistic about our own…

Our orientation to Earth is so much a part of how we perceive and understand things - so habitual - that it's one of the reasons I think we don't immediately see what our relationship with the planet really is. Turn us…

I wondered about posting this, it seems a topic that's difficult to discuss without some degree of hysteria. This image is one I saw on FB, and lists advice to women for how to avoid sexual assault in public places.…

Welcome to your newly shifted circadian rhythm. Which is really bad for you, but hey, all that extra time to drink wine after work. And extend those stinking hot and getting hotter summer days. Helps us cull all those…

Some classic examples of political framing - feel free to suggest more. This is how smart politicians shape how people feel, and therefore vote. Use the frame enough and it shapes how people think. Tax cut = "tax…

Have you heard of the technosphere? Read this, it might blow your mind. We tend to think of ourselves as living ‘in’ nature, but as it turns out, nature changes all the time, and currently the technosphere is the…

This is a plastiglomerate. A rock that also contains plastic. As a lot of researchers now believe, there is no such thing as ‘nature’, the technologies we use today are as much part of the world as birds and trees.

There are two mysteries about Bohemian Rhapsody (the song). What’s it about? And what is it - what sort of music? The consensus on the first answer (only the band know) seems to be that it was Freddie Mercury writing…

“Do you want to be part of the problem that is causing one of the biggest social issues of our time or do you want to position yourself as part of the solution?” One of the biggest social issues of our time. I remember…

The history of chairs is actually very interesting. Originally chairs were more ceremonial things, reserved for royalty or people in high church office. If you look at some of the old paintings of kings at court for…

Rest In Peace. Everyday wonders - the origins of that phrase is one of them, I think. For the earliest Christians it was actually dormit in pace - to ‘sleep in peace’. Why is this an everyday wonder? I think I posted…

NASA took this beauty from moon orbit in 2015. Some say viewing Earth from space changed how we feel about and experience our planet. But if you live here on the surface, not much has actually changed as a result of…

'an rock iconoclast'. Says it all really, about critics. Can't even write. Imagine a film about Winston Churchill that focused on his sex life - people would (rightly) ask - why? I remember the 1980s, when AIDS was seen…

It's slaying them at the Box Office, number one film in every country it's opened. And it's worth reading this self-serving, delusional piece to see inside the mind of critics, who can't accept that the masses might be…

Incidentally, I do like a huge range of music, not just Queen. But I think they’re the greatest rock and pop act in history, and are hugely misunderstood. Even greater than The Beatles - is there an act or band that…

The Great Super Lie is something highlighted by many more than a decade ago. Super is the financial industry, the messages they constantly give us about needing more super benefit the industry financially. (They’re also…

Queen again, I know. Finally, a reviewer gets it. Freddie Mercury wasn’t a person, he was a creation of Farrokh Bulsara. His music was only one part of his creation, he invented an entire life and persona. And the band…

Here’s a mind bender I think, courtesy of psychology and philosophy. If you see a rainbow, that rainbow isn’t something sitting ‘out there’ whether you see it or not. Your act of seeing is part of what produces the…

I took a not very common pathway through education in the modern world. I studied sciences, maths and engineering, as well as the humanities, music and art. I worked bloody hard in all of them (still do), and did well…

Here’s something I learned a few years ago, that changed my life. An experiment anybody can try. Did you know your body is set up so it automatically follows your attention? Your attention leads, your body follows. So…

Plastic surgery and domestic violence are also a photo finish.

Have now seen the movie. Thought it was great, verged on telemovie in a couple of spots, but it was Queen doing what it knows how to do better than anybody - appealing to the widest possible audience, and entertaining…

Here are some huge companies. If somebody asked you ‘where’ these companies are, what would you say? If you were asked ‘please take me to Coles, the company’, where would you take the person? The corporate headquarters?…

Our tools shape how we see and think, something I was taught but which isn’t common in many schools or universities. Apart from making us think there is a 3-dimensional thing called ‘space’ (there isn’t) and a 4th…

Another example of how perspective drawing fundamentally screws with our experience of the world. Take this standard example, of ‘moving’ from point A to point B. What we call movement relies upon us first isolating…

I think Shakespeare is like the Bradman of human thought, something remarkably above and beyond all others. At school you get thrown straight into the plays, which means many find it a torture. But Shakespeare did…

Sacred choral music, Mozart and Kathleen Battle. Yep. https://youtu.be/vY_zGwyH54s

Marc Martel did the Freddie vocals for the Bohemian Rhapsody movie, and he also fronts the only official Queen cover band, that Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor set up. This is a beautiful performance I think.

Not sure if I posted this before. Trivia question of the day - who is this a photo of?

One of the things that fascinates me about singing is how great singers (and it can take enormous practice) are those who don’t sing with their voice. They sing with their whole body. Singing just with your voice will…

What if ‘big pictures’ don’t actually exist? Of real interest to me, because of the assumptions in play, that there are specific things in our lives, and separate ‘big picture’ things. I could take a photo of my front…

Hmm, Bohemian Rhapsody the movie has made about $700 million profit worldwide. I’m sure FOX will want a sequel. Tricky, that.

So that's a wrap. The Summer Flames got through a season. The Winter Flames may have more skill, but the Summer Flames have more...um...age. Or something. I think we're looking dangerous, the fellas have figured out how…

If anybody can find a video of Joslyn Rechter singing Habenara on the Panel back in 2002, I'll shower them with thanks and appreciation. I can find just about every other musical guest they had, but not her, and she was…

Not a great fan of Michael Jensen, but this today about Hannah Gadsby - thoughts? "But what Gadsby does not go on to offer is a story we also need: a story in which there is forgiveness, mercy, and reconciliation – the…

Start the day with a minute-and-a-half of gentle wisdom. https://youtu.be/tJMa9ywmxnc

Laticia Caceres is a theatre director with what I think is a sensible take on #metoo. A take that highlights one of the things that has left both workers and women exposed to abuse, and not just sexual abuse. And has…

There’s a real elitism in a lot of singing, opera singing is often taken as the gold standard against which singers should be judged. And a lot of the theory of singing derives from there, all the stuff about chest…

Whooping cough part 2. Because it might get you next, whether you're vaccinated or not, and it isn't nice. But there are things you can do that can make you suffer a lot less. The treatment of whooping cough hasn't…

Final instalment on whooping cough. This is a table from a pretty famous scientific paper published in 1937. It's a small sample of treatments the Canadian medical researchers concerned…

Schubert, probably the greatest songwriter ever, not just because he composed over 600 of them before he died at 31 (and amazingly that was only a fraction of the music he composed), but because in the process he was…

Come on Queensland, this is the one smart thing you ever did. Don't change it.

Muso memes to start the day.

Can't wait :) Brian May is an international treasure, and has one of the world's greatest collections of stereoscopic photography. Including these, will be a fascinating insight into this still misunderstood band, which…

Me filming a Coke Zero commercial in bad-fitting sunnies. And some guy auditioning for Karate Kid. You'll never guess where.

Edmund Burke saw institutions as the heart of public life, and that rampant individualism was the source of public breakdown. Modern conservatives have been destroying institutions as fast as they can manage, which puts…

I'm not popular in thinking tourism and travel are a bit of an unrecognised plague on the planet, driven hugely by Westerners who use up other places to try to relieve a deep existential boredom, that they feel but…

Mark Davis, talking about Hannah Arendt and why she was sceptical of the value of political protest. Arendt of course being another person who lived under the Nazis, and who wrote about the 'banality of evil', replacing…

Klee's Twittering Machine. Music is more than anything else a territorial thing. Like dogs pissing to mark territory, music began in the marking out of a space with sound. Refrains. Birds use song for this. Humans do…

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although…

Ever noticed that very, very few great paintings show people smiling?

A little bit of Proust every day, I reckon. Proust used the taste of Madeleine cakes to explain more about memory and how it works. We've all experienced that, how a taste or a smell can immediately throw us back in…

Today's Proust. More on love, a big topic. Each person is an absolutely singular, unknowable being. In love, and especially in its early stages, this is forgotten, and most of the qualities we say we love in somebody…

Today's Proust. Art. Art is critical for Proust because it's the only thing that allows us to experience the worlds other people live. Art is considered 'subjective', but it's absolutely not. “Thanks to art, instead of…

Talking about road safety brings up interesting comparisons with air safety. Private planes are nearly as dangerous as cars. Commercial flight (much, much safer) went the way that driving and cars are being dragged…

Marshall McLuhan was a thinker well beyond his time, many didn't understand him when he was writing in the mid-20th century. A conservative professor of literature, he took on the job of trying to understand the modern…

Why we'll get action on climate change even if the twits in charge don't want it. Smart people just get on with running the world without them.

"It may shock you, but Americans spend more than $2 trillion every year on car ownership — more money than we spend on food. What’s even more staggering is that for all the money we spend on them, the 250 million cars…

If you haven't experienced binaural audio recordings, you need to. Binaural recordings are recordings that reproduce more or less exactly the sounds you would hear if you were actually in a situation, including the…

Painting a big wowser sign on my back by going on about this topic, I know. But it's not about wowserism, it's about self-awareness.

Saw this last night, and after having whooping cough last year (and still getting over it) it struck a nerve. We're maybe making the same mistake with vaccines as we did with antibiotics. We set up these extreme…

I do sometimes live in hope that smart is winning over stupid on this one. Seriously one of the most stupid things humankind has ever done. Despite the forces of stupid trotting out smug "is it fading the curtains?"…

@[783412914:2048:Kyle Manning], @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato], we often discuss science and religion debates, and the nature of science itself. Would be very interested in your (and anybody else's) views on this…

The petrochemical industry are basically self-interested arseholes. And the people smart enough in Canberra to negotiate with them, in the public service, were sacked by idiots who said we had too much bureaucracy.…

The Wizard of Oz is not as simple as it looks. The author (Baum) was a political journalist, and the story is full of political allegories and jokes. Here are just some. There was a rise of populism as well at the time…

Edouard Louis understands nasty people. And that they talk a lot about 'free speech' because they want to say things that civilisation already decided are just hate disguised as words. Every generation seems to forget.…

John Lennon has always been beloved by many inside and outside music, because Lennon pursued causes. Like this one, the bed-in for peace. It's decades ago now and in hindsight it might be fair to say this was a total…

3 laps into the new F1 season, and it already looks even more boring than last year, which takes some doing. All the technical changes make it even more impossible for anybody to overtake, and only two cars can really…

Often we see fads as things for kids. Yo-yos, types of clothes, pop music one hit wonders like Gangnam Style, etc etc. But adults like fads too, and it's growing. Types of phone, types of fitness activity, types of…

Heh, even Rupert Murdoch is part of the "Left" now. He owns Sky News, which sacked Latham for being a turd. Lesson there for us all. Anybody who uses the term "the Left" is usually brain damaged in some way.

If we spent the proceeds of the mining boom (one of my pet ideas, apologies if you've had it inflicted on you before) on building high speed rail WEST from Sydney or Melbourne out into the rest of Australia - that part…

The Argument to Moderation, also known as the Golden Mean Fallacy. 'Everything in Moderation'. In this extreme time in history, people feel that the truth 'must lie somewhere in the middle'. In politics, food, exercise,…

"...news from our friends about their families’ triumphs and trials has become omnipresent, unrelenting—a never-ending vacation slide show from hell." 'Oversharers' often see FB as like an extension of their actual…

Here you go @[606028898:2048:Jason], this might give you heart (ha). I did a lot of endurance exercise as a younger man, and developed atrial fibrillation, have always wondered if it was related. Cyclists often develop…

Nicholas Christakis is a professor of medicine and sociology, and studies social networks. What's he's found is amazing, and gives us new ways to understand how our everyday social life interacts with our online social…

There's much more going on in the sharing of personal life on FB than we see on the surface. Lots of it is driven by comparison, under the cover of keeping people updated on what's going on. Comparison is the heart of…

Nomadic Matt trying to assuage his guilt. Not his fault, it's the 'tourists'. He's as much as part of it as anybody else, his solution won't work. Tourism is like the debates around city versus country. In reality the…

"3D" TV and film have struggled to take off every time they've been launched and re-launched over the past century. People usually hate the hassle of the glasses, but even more they just don't think ordinary TV and…

If comedians and musicians can be worth hundreds of millions, why can't somebody who has led the free world be rich? It's a much, much harder job than writing a fantasy novel or joke or song.

It's strange something as abstract as climate change become such a big political issue. Have often wondered why. It's most likely because there are two main responses to the challenges in the world at the moment, and…

Could be a description of a drug problem. No real difference. "The more you travel, the harder it becomes to hit that 'wow' factor when you venture to a new destination. It's a paradoxical conundrum. Travellers seek out…

Happy Birthday Sarah! Part of the elite May bday crew.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, again. Or why dumb people are generally convinced that they're smart, and smart people are generally convinced that they're dumb.

Actual photograph of Abraham Lincoln (red arrow) with the troops, just before giving the Gettysburg Address.

One more Queen goodie. Genuinely unique, blew every other artist off any stage.

We've just lived through two decades of economic 'boom' times. Part of that was people losing perspective around their spending, at every scale, from what they're prepared to pay for a drink or a meal, through to the…

Actual photograph of the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic. Not entirely sure how the photograph survived, as the taker seems to have been still on the ship. (P.S. is actually taken by a rescue ship)

The idiots are winning in the world because they at least know one thing - that morals and values are important. The smart people are losing because they think morals and values are old-fashioned, even (gasp)…

We need cool heads to prevail. TVs seem to be the greatest risk. Some numbers for America: - you are 35000 times more likely to die of heart disease than from terrorism - you are 34000 times more likely to die of cancer…

Oooh baby. https://www.telstra.com.au/thanks/music/queen

Can somebody explain why garbage trucks and street sweeper trucks do their rounds so early in the morning, waking whole towns? I can see a possible logic in a big city, to avoid traffic at least on major roads. But…

Heh, "Employment in the Australian supermarket and grocery industry went down for the first time in 2015-16 and is projected to remain flat for a few years. But staff numbers are projected to rebound again, in part due…

Inequality in history has always been 'fixed' by plagues and wars. (Inequality played a big role in creating those plagues and wars at the same time.) Are we smart enough to avoid more wars and plagues (including…

Ho hum. The worm keeps turning. The article is a good one in that it understands that there is nothing different between everyday tourists and 'authentic' tourism - it's the authentic tourism that opens up new spots for…

Photography can make you think that what is 'real' is what has more detail. Ever noticed how almost impossible it is to get a truly 'real' photograph of a sunset? Look at this photo, and this painting - which one gives…

"A bass player at a large symphony orchestra recently told me that fellow musicians refer to a common programming ploy – a contemporary work played between two popular classical compositions – as a ‘shit sandwich’."…

We tend to think of kids as adults-to-be, as if we adults shape the world and then kids grow up and start shaping it too. But to me kids start shaping the world in all sorts of ways we hardly notice, while they're still…

It's easy to dislike Tolle, but he captures things beautifully sometimes. People struggle to believe this one, but it's almost the meaning of life. “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the…

"...up until about 2010, Facebook was mainly a website for young people. Young people doing stupid things. And it was glorious. But now, I can’t stand it. Now, all it is is one big family photo album full of weddings…

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages…

Andrew Charlton usually says smart things, in this case he notes that societies are so fractured that there's almost no hope of any party sweeping them all together again, in 'the centre'. Instead different parties give…

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days…

Sometimes old expressions have a lot of wisdom. Like 'keeping a sense of perspective'. How many of our problems are due to us focusing really narrowly on things and ignoring the full context? If we stop obsessing about…

Exercise in un-narrowing (I just made up that word). Do you ever get pains while sitting at a desk, in your back or neck for example? Or pains while doing physical work of some kind? Our very common response to that is…

How the rich rip the rest of us off, part 231. There are over 800,000 family trusts in Australia. Family trusts are instruments to minimise tax paid, by distributing income to members of your family so your own taxable…

Scott Morrison is on TV rejecting inequality as an issue, and reinforcing that the LNP will always target 'equal opportunity' instead. (That's why until Turnbull they had next to no women in their cabinet, obviously the…

Bun or bump? There are ethical debates about women and babies - some see a woman as a 'container' for a baby (bun), others see the baby as a part of the woman herself (bump). Echoes of The Handmaid's Tale, the idea that…

Novels are an example I think of how art is not 'subjective', but so important to actually understanding the world. Including people. Artists and art help us to understand the world in the widest and most profound way,…

Didn't see this when it first came out, but have now. Can see why it won the Academy Award. If you haven't seen this doco, I'd highly recommend it if you want to understand how banks and in particular finance are the…

Just hypothetically, if your maths teacher had given you a problem about Mozart and Kochel numbers and hadn't explained anything about how to approach it, this is what I'd do. Just hypothetically. I'd go to this link,…

I'd call myself a frugal person. In an era of debt-funded orgies of consumption, that tends to make you look 'cheap' or 'tight'. But it's not about saving money, it's about a whole way of understanding life. How people…

I don't think this is just about smart and dumb. It's true smart people need to speak up more than they do, but what usually determines what happens in the world isn't thinking - it's power, and status. Most of life and…

Gabriel Tarde, describing most of our lives in one sentence. Tarde showed that there is almost nothing that isn't explainable by imitation. "...it is for the pleasure of change, of not doing the usual thing, that the…

Sitting is the new smoking, they said. What a load of bollocks, some of us said. The bollocks crowd wins, double the risk of heart disease in people who stand all day at work. In fact, until these studies look at HOW…

Many people are not sure what to think about indigenous issues. Even if they mean well, they don't know where to start. Germaine Greer's essay on this from years ago now is brilliant. As with all things Germaine, most…

This winter we shifted our thinking on heating and energy, and it turned out to be a smart move. After previously spending nearly 2 grand for gas heating for a winter with the huge jump in gas prices, this year we…

Tarde was almost unique because he didn’t believe that there was any difference between big things and small things. And as part of that he didn’t think standardisation of things - McDonalds in every town, the spread of…

Watching again, with the same-sex marriage debate, just how hopeless progressive people are at politics. "For example, when Feinberg and Willer asked liberals to write an op-ed aiming to convince conservatives of the…

The Simpsons understood American violence as well as anybody. Itchy and Scratchy are all about the insatiable appetite for violence as entertainment, and the normalisation of violence in culture more generally. Bought…

Shame on The Project last night, reporting on research apparently showing that people who skip breakfast are at higher risk of heart disease. It took 30 seconds to check that research and find that the researchers…

Politics! But hopefully not what you're thinking... There are 2 games in town I think, and mixing them up is what's destroying our societies. There are traditional political parties, like Labor and the LNP here in Oz.…

I never get sick of this photo. That’s where we live, in that thin blue line. We don’t live ‘on Earth’, we live in that tiny thin layer of life which churns the surface of the planet. At school we were often taught that…

Daylight Saving is only one part of our general war against the dark. Also, it’s a genuine tragedy if you can’t see the night sky. “As we discussed a litany of light-related problems, I asked Stevens: ‘Is it a…

Insight is doing a discussion on ‘wine oclock’ tonight. “I feel mandated to be part of the message of hope that recovery and freedom can happen, and to help people see the truth of what alcoholism can look like – that…

You can look up the way technologies like CDs, film, digital encoding, magnetic tape etc. ‘work’. But there’s a mystery, even a miracle, that won’t be explained. How is it that images and sound are able to be captured…

I read a lot as a younger person. But I’m a bit off books now, except for some that are important to me. Text and books are very restrictive and narrow things, and we’ve turned books into a fetish. But hypertext is much…

Henri Bergson was a trippin’ dude, even though he looked like a minister at the local parish church. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, although was actually a philosopher (he wrote very well). His speaking tours…

The fascinating thing about faces is that the muscles in your face are the only ones in your entire body whose function isn’t about movement or support, or keeping you functioning. They’re there to express emotion. And…

Lots of talk about the ‘sanctity’ of life at the moment, and not much about the sanctity of death. Life and death aren’t even opposites. Arguing when life begins and when it ends, for example in debates on abortion and…

Homer's car is today's world. Art is so important. Just gotta pay attention to it.

The secret to everything is bacteria. Learning about them changed my life; they are the most complex living things, don't believe a word of the biology you learned that says humans and other animals are the most complex…

I’ve said no every time we’ve been asked to take part in these studies. A lot of the twin research is genetic determinism, attempting to prove this or that gene ‘causes’ this or that condition. It’s like studying what…

Identity is a fascinating topic. For example, it’s extremely difficult to say what makes you, you, in a definitive way. Or where an individual organism starts and finishes. Bands have been playing without some or even…

If you’re one of those idiot people who post idiot things about Germans speaking like B-grade Hollywood actors in films about Nazis, have a read. You might learn something.

The real function of music.

For a long time street art or murals seemed to often escape tagging and other graffiti. But it seems to be changing? Everything is fair game now?

Happy birthday Shaz! May wine o’clock start at 10am today.

Manners are not just politeness. They balance obligations. I see a lot of this balance being missed with modern etiquette. Not even discussing etiquette is one reason there’s a perception that the world is going mad.…

Is the obsession with coffee a healthy thing? When does liking something tip over into an addiction? Keeping in mind that all addictions don't start as addictions, they kind of creep up on people. When people say "I…

Took the No campaign all of a day to turn really nasty in defeat. Abortion today. Bun or bump? Is a woman just a container for a baby? Or is that baby also part of her? For Cory and his friends a woman is like an…

The world repeats the same patterns, and I think we often get stuck in just one part of the pattern and miss the wider movement of what’s going on. Take the music and film industry. For years they’ve been talking about…

One of the things I think Marshall McLuhan made people aware of was that copies make originals. The idea of an ‘original’ doesn’t even exist, until you have copies. Tarde said it, imitation is the heart of all life. Our…

This is a very common gripe doctors tend to have - administration. Academics are the same. And we’ve all been told to despise bureaucracy. It’s well known that the amount a charity spends on administration has almost no…

Was watching the fawning over Brian Cox again last week, on one of his visits to Oz. He’s a lovely, smart bloke. But science is in a mess, and the wide-eyed gee whiz people give to Brian is a symptom of that mess. And…

I went to a family event on Saturday, a barbecue lunch for a local club. Generously they’d laid on all the food, and drinks were free as well. What disappointed me but didn’t surprise me was what the younger parents…

I’ve discussed this with a lot of friends. Flirting really is a lost art, as the article says, in an age of such appalling manners and almost zero etiquette even being polite can be misread as flirting. We confuse and…

The limit, in maths, is I think also an interesting part of life. A lot of our behaviour is governed by limits. Take drinking, people drink with an implicit sense of what the limit would be, including alcoholics, and…

More old photographic techniques, this an example of a glass-plate photo, where before film was invented images were often captured using an emulsion on glass plates. There’s a quality to these old images that can be…

So much of the behaviour the #metoo phenomenon is complaining about is explained by this picture. How do men and women end up as sexualised objects of desire first, people second? The simplest answer is, as one woman…

From the New York Times, a piece on whether what an artist is like as a person also determines in some way the value of their art. I’d add another wrinkle to this, and say is art devalued by becoming propaganda? One of…

This is HUGE. "Put another way, the scientists chose to set aside the molecular box which has proven so vexing, and to focus instead on the context of the box itself." There's a reductionism in a lot of modern medicine…

If you play an instrument, and if you start to feel at any point that you’re getting pretty good at it, then it’s time for some Art Tatum. (And he was blind.)

Sigh, flamenco. That and the tango, music and movement for grown ups. I joked to Kell that I could imagine being somewhere in Spain with a cold Sangria listening to this live. Her smile tells me that could cost me a lot…

Wednesday morning philosophy. One of my hobbies is trying to show that philosophy is as practical and important as building roads, or fixing gutters. Things don’t exist, or not exist. They *happen*. All things are…

Continuing on stories. People hate politics, but actually it all makes a lot more sense if it’s looked at as stories. The two main sides of politics, around the world, each have their own story. Roughly, these: Story 1…

Christmas music is some of the most special music. Sacred music. The Real Group are a wonderful Swedish a cappella group. This is how Silent Night should sound, I reckon. Pick which one is the bass singer. Can you hit…

My wish for 2018 is that the millions of us working in organisations for much of our lives start to be relieved of the stupidity that increasingly makes every day in them frustrating and stressful. No cheap shots here,…

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/09/08/fans-arent-going-pay-music-anymore-thats-ok/ Steve Lukather (net worth about $40 million) was a good recent example of a muso without a clue, complaining about how real quality…

Stunts growth in art too. When an artist becomes cool, people stop even noticing whether what they're doing is crap. "In other words, coolness is like a game you appear to have won (having skipped many messy stages of…

Can't remember much about the movie, but this was a beautiful piece of music.

When you study trigonometry at school, you're actually studying deep history. Modern curricula separate maths and history though so you're never told that (hardly anybody even remembers the connection). Angles are the…

Brian May and Queen are a different type of hero for our times. Relentlessly smart and curious and inventive, and decent. And able to shamelessly access the power of magnificence and spectacle at a time when these were…

I don't think people should talk on their phones at the cinema. But I'd prefer the whole cinema texts through the whole movie than listen to bloody bags of chips and lollies being rustled.

Prince was such a sad loss. Reflecting on the 'genius' tags that were thrown around a lot at the time though, these things are relative. Branford Marsalis is a true musical genius. Has one of the world's best smiles too.

Still top of my man crush list. http://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2016/may/09/tom-hiddleston-hank-williams-guitar-shop-i-saw-the-light-video-interview?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Not agreeing with Brian. Lennon was wonderful, but a lot of his cred comes from the mistaken idea that songs are weapons. Songs and art do change the world, but not directly in the way Lennon and the other 60s peace…

Heh, this from Rupert's News Corp, who pay no tax. Murdoch's minions got stuck into this guy because they know this is political poison. They have to make sure that the poor get seen as lazy, lying scum, not people…

Commercial radio is like being on a school camp. Firstly you buddy up, because heaven forbid you had to say something on your own. Then you turn everything into some glorified competition version of Truth or Dare,…

THE CHECK UP We go to doctors and dentists for check ups. But this is a type of check up that's even more important, and not as common. To check up or check in on yourself. All it requires is a bit of time, where you…

Philosophy, so misunderstood and so interesting. Time doesn't pass. Philosophers have known it for centuries (boom boom), physicists get all the news stories about time but they usually don't have a clue. If it's 3…

Of course the LNP want to dismantle Medicare. Conservative parties all over the world want to do that, and do it. They already did it once here, under Fraser, it's part of their core philosophy, to not have universal…

Brian Cox is so likeable, that it goes unnoticed that he's actually a fundamentalist, like many other physicists. The entire premise of this series is false. That physics is actually the most fundamental of all the…

The heart of all social life is imitation and comparison. FB doesn't create this, but it shows it so clearly. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/ways-to-use-facebook-without-feeling-depressed/389916/

This argument just keeps on keeping on. Learn some basic biology and ecology George. Feedlot farming is a disgrace, absolutely. But you can't grow plants to eat without friggin' animals as part of those ecosystems.

Keystone habits. If you work in an organisation then this is for you. The amazing thing about habits is that they're all connected, they form a web. If you want to change behaviour, your own or your kids or your…

Vantablack. Artists are feuding over it, it's that interesting, black has always been so important for the visual arts.

It's hard to say, with music being my real passion for so many years. But music sometimes can become annoying or unsatisfying. Music is rhythms and sounds, but just a tiny subset of the rhythms and sounds of the world.…

Big fan of the staycation. Sometimes holidays seem to be going the same way as after-school activities for kids. Family holidays in the past were so often to dodgy, cheap places not far away where you just got to lay in…

HSC time again, this time each year we tell our kids that it doesn't matter if they don't do well, it's just a number and a small part of their life etc. All true, but maybe one of the reasons kids are less resilient…

David Hockney refers to the Ghent Altarpiece in his brilliant book on the possibly big use of lenses, mirrors and other optical technology by important painters, including Caravaggio. The Altarpiece is important says…

Brexit, now Trump. If we really understand what's going on here part of us should be happy, people who have been screwed by both sides of politics have had enough. Now we just need to understand that this means ditching…

Watching The Martian again the other day, along with the film Gravity there's been a real shift in the way people see science fiction. In the past science fiction was all that corny Star Trek reaching for the stars…

La Dolce Far Niente. The Art of Doing Nothing. You can forgive the Italians for the San Remo song festival because they also believe in this. In a world determined to always be doing something, in work or play, they say…

I know there are lots of Brian Cox fans, and he's a lovely and smart guy, but sometimes comedians see to the truth of something faster than anybody else. Laughing makes me cough lots at the moment, so this was a hard…

Finish guy dancing has a part 2. I'm still wondering if the dance is him trying to make some room in his shorts.

Yes, always one of the first laws of propaganda - just keep saying things over and over, until people start to believe them. Like "debt and deficit". Or "Nick has a glorious head of hair".…

If they got rid of noisy bags of food that people scrunch all the way through the movie, it'd be a start.

It may actually not be long until you could die from scratching your finger, as sometimes happened pre-antibiotics. But also an opportunity to rethink microbes, they absolutely are the future of health, including…

Beautiful women always stare at me through the TV too. And at the cinema.

Some of my friends shared this, saying it proved how silly scientists were for saying the globe is warming. Unfortunately for that little a-ha moment, the ice age scenario has been a core part of global warming theory…

Very powerful visual summary of all 2053 (yes, 2053!) nuclear tests that were done between World War 2 until today. Nobody knows how they've affected the health of people globally. They start slowly but watch them…

As nearly always, Greer is way too smart to be understood by the people who hate her. Her view is wise and sophisticated and consistent, over decades. If women aren't even sure what being a woman means, why is 'female'…

I sat next to a Muslim woman on a plane yesterday. She looked very uncomfortable, and was obviously aware of being stared at by many people, in fear. She hardly spoke a word of English and needed my help to figure out…

My wish from what's happened in Paris is that we start doing a bit more brain work and a bit less dumb emotion. Understanding is our only way out of this mess. Starting here, which helps explain why all this is…

I guess age is part mindset. Does anything signal the victory of pragmatism over self-respect better than the big sunnies to wear over glasses?

Sometimes art says things the best

Watching Piers Akerman fart out his mouth, as he always does. He's upset today, hilarious, News Limited in a lather about the freedom of the press. Send some of the NL 'journalists' to gaol, like in the UK, it's where…

Reality is always better than fiction :-) In 1948 the Board of Governors of the BBC asked the head of the Variety Department, Michael Standing, to devise a guiding set of moral standards and protocols for the production…

Politics is just about getting things done, even at work. And rational argument is rarely what works, peoples' emotions are what work. Wish we didn't hate politicians for understanding this, and us not understanding it.…

Watching TKD at the olympics. Martial arts looks a lot more impressive when one of the people doesn't know them, like in movies, so the person who does flattens some redneck with spin kicks. When the other person knows…

Prometheus teaches me yet again to completely ignore film critics. Bloody good movie.

Anyone in this part of the world right now should go out and have a look at the moon.

, the movie.

may start a support group for people who LOVE cold, 'miserable' weather.

says rest your weary head and let your heart decide.

says smile, tho' your heart is aching... (Charlie Chaplin)

agrees that home is where your heart is, but can't remember who said it.