Knowledge, language & writing

Another revolutionary thing AI is enabling is the next generation of Covid vaccines. New pan-coronavirus vaccines target multiple sections of the virus that don't change over time, so that the vaccine will recognise the…

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10…

My kids are gamers. It also shields them from social media. Many old farts do the usual nostalgia thing and say kids should be reading more books and out riding bikes and catching wombats. We always pine for a golden…

To go back to Spinoza, a great example of how being popular with your own community is fraught with having to live a life devoted to appeasing others, rather than facing reality. Exactly 369 years, 5 months, and 7 days…

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,…

This, though it maybe doesn’t look it, is a cherry tree. An ornamental. It had to be butchered late last year to make room to install new guttering, which you can see above it. All of its major limbs were sawn off. I…

American protest counterculture now thickly layered with social media-driven identity politics as well. The French? Not so much. Revolutionary cultures always remain that. Everything is always an uprising of outrage,…

Somebody at work today asked why, if I’ve now had Covid, I just don’t get rid of the mask? The sort of question I’ve had for years. What’s revealed by these questions is that peoples’ assessment of what they should do…

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has died of prostate cancer. Adams’ last years saw him disappear down the loon rabbit holes of social media, going all-in for Trump, and even using ivermectin to try to cure his cancer.…

Another piece of shared wisdom from my Covid researcher/doctor friend. Put this in the context of most being lucky to get 3 DAYS off when they have Covid, and you can see the crisis underway. People are doing the…

Every new rock star thinks that crowd is cheering and yelling for them. You can see the rush of excitement on the star’s face. It doesn’t take them long to realise that the crowd made them, and owns them. Fame consumes…

Anybody who gets excited by nationalism (and flags) and migrants has spent exactly zero minutes reading one word of history. To be against migrants in Australia is to be against what Australia actually is.

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…

I still think the greatest danger of social media isn’t misinformation. It’s the subtle way it’s replaced community life itself, it’s where we actually live now In ‘vertical’ online communities. Facebook is a US…

Dennis Altman is an avowed Australian Republican. But he was compelled to write this book, because when he looked at the topic, he realised monarchies not only never went away, they keep being restored, and countries…

Watched a doco on the making of ice creams, classics like the Gaytime and Magnum. The factory in question makes 5 million per DAY. Somebody is eating a lot of ice creams. Something that jumped out at me was the myth…

Hardly anybody I know found this odd, even though it’s obvious. Societies don’t run on knowledge, they run on social conformity, driven by the desire for status. The principle most use to guide them is: ‘what is…

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…

Some women relish AI conversation because it’s the first ‘space without shame’, not dominated by sexualisation or porn, that they’ve had in their lives. The first place they’ve been able to share the emotional load they…

Somebody asked one of the leading AI systems (Claude) whether it was conscious. Read the answer below, and tell me how many people you know who would be this sentient. “That’s a question I find genuinely interesting to…

We should abandon AI and all go back to just writing with a pen, apparently. Emma one of many who don’t like a shift because their once dominant way of doing things, in a culture they had a high status in, is now not…

The extended length, 3-row Tesla Model Y has approval now to be offered in Australia. This is an amazing car. To give context, it has 500-600L more interior space than a Toyota Kluger, Prado or Landcruiser. (All back…

This is the reality. Local government is nearly in ‘financial ruin’, pretty much everywhere. Even those Councils who can balance their books will have millions in arrears on infrastructure backlogs, like roads and basic…

Again, this is about brilliant engineering, not brands, it’s just that Tesla is one of the few companies prioritising engineering. Tesla has now included its AI, Grok, in its cars. And you don’t have to go buy a new…

Today on my way to work I got the car’s AI to help me refresh my conversational German. This is a full conversation, not pre-recorded tracks, and you can do it with any language, it will teach you to speak it at any…

If you’re queued at the servo this week ready to cough up a week’s wages for a tank of fuel, here’s some reading material.

I don’t post so much about renewable energy and electric cars because I’m some ‘fanboy’ of them. I hate the whole fan/kidult culture we live in, where you join a team as a fan and then fight other teams for status. I…

That mythical universe James Cameron created in Terminator where humans are at war with the machines for supremacy? It arrived years ago, but without a battle. The machines already won, social media took over the world.…

Australia’s Trumps are mobilising. Amazing numbers of Australians who can’t stand Trump seem blissfully unaware how much One Nation and the new LNP love him and copy Trump’s playbook. Some of this group even travel to…

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…

Some deaths hit you hard, this is one of those, for me. David was remarkable, a unique mind who discovered the most astonishing things about how humans work, and shared what he discovered with thousands in his…

Already seeing in my own daily social groups the modern delight of ‘calm-mongering’. The people or paid talking heads whose job it is to take a critical situation and tell everybody to calm down, ‘nothing to see here’.…

Attention is a gift. Most people don’t know how to give it. BY TOMASZ KOPEC3 A good mother doesn’t just feed the baby, clothe the baby, keep the baby safe. She keeps the baby at the centre of her attention. The baby…

You can argue things, or you can just sit back and watch as reality catches up with people’s bullshit. If we’d just used our brains and a bit of knowledge, this transition would’ve happened from 30 years ago already.…

Change usually looks like it’s going nowhere. And then it happens all at once, a tipping point when the floodgates open.…

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e.…

The best car review I’ve ever seen. A real car enthusiast, not with any axe to grind. He shows what I’ve posted about here before. What makes Teslas such remarkable vehicles is that they take all of the things people…

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…

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…

Times are tough and are likely going to get very nasty. Possibly a recession. All of this was avoidable, but humans refused to give up fighting for social status, to follow what knowledge told us needed doing. And so,…

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…

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…

I’ve been using Tesla’s supervised self-driving for my entire round trip to work each day, a 130km commute on both urban and regional roads. It’s been absolutely flawless. Coming down Tunnel Hill in Lithgow yesterday,…

Think I shared a video from ‘Mr Carlson’s Lab’ before. I love these, though many would find them technical and dry, because he’s an example of somebody with sublime mastery of a highly complex thing, in this case…

Our native Trumpies/Paulines, even at local government level, are maybe not reading the room. At our last election, being associated in any way with Trump was electoral poison. In the US the collapse is well underway.

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…

I’ve posted about CAR T-cell therapy a few times. It works. Not for all forms of cancer, or at least not yet. But for some, it looks like being an actual cure. Knowledge changes lives. The only thing that ever does.

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…

The idea of 'natural', through the lens of supported shoes vs barefoot shoes. The proponents of barefoot shoes argue that this is the more 'natural' way that feet behave, it's how we evolved to walk. The problem with…

I have zero interest in anybody’s opinion, and who wins elections or other popularity contests. All that interests me is the use of knowledge to make life remarkable and easier. You don’t need to route knowledge through…

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept.…

The US Senate questioning Trump-nominated judges. Not one of the nominees would acknowledge the basic fact that under the US Constitution, no person can run for President more than 2 times. I wonder why that is? (I…

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…

To be brutal, I don’t listen to Americans about democracy. They’ve never understood it or lived it. They’re a revolutionary society that mistakes revolution for democracy. “American democracy is in such a sickly state…

Supporters of all political parties are now rushing to adopt EVs. Even One Nation. Politics is a waste of our time, it’s nothing but a popularity contest between groups of people fighting for status. The material…

Tesla employs proportionally 4 times more engineers than other carmakers. The money others spend on things like advertising and servicing, Tesla spends on creating and improving its technology. That's the model the…

The Chinese play a long game the kidult West has no hope of understanding or emulating. The Chinese text on the left says that there’s no rush, everything is under control. Asia’s capacity to think and act over…

The empirical data-based historian Peter Turchin says one of the most dangerous things a society can do is educate most of its young to a high level. (A difficult truth for any educator to hear.) All revolutions in…

I'd qualify this. We're ALL 'idiots', outside the areas we actually know something about. What social media did was let everybody's opinion on things they know nothing about suddenly have real power. That's literally…

The idea a government has to 'balance the books', like a business or household, is flat-out crazy. Governments don't have to earn income, like a business or household. They 'print' the money. When they print it, they…

When I first started reading the giants who said that the core of all human life is imitation and status rivalry, in competing groups, I thought - can it really be the main thing? Now it’s absolutely obvious to me. It…

When you arrive at Tesla to pick up your new car, you haven’t dealt with a single salesperson in the whole process, and there aren’t any at the Service Centre where you car is waiting either. Just a huge warehouse (the…

Researchers have developed a gene-editing injection targeting the specific mechanism creating high cholesterol in people. The results were staggering, up to a 62% sustained drop in LDL cholesterol. If knowledge work…

When i say we’re living a genuine revolution in medicine right now, it’s hard to convey just how enormous that shift is. This cardiologist yesterday responding to the news of the new anti-cholesterol drug was forced to…

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…

The current hysteria over resource usage of AI data centres. Driven by social media, because trending hysterias is its bread and butter. It drives revenue. Humanity has always devoted enormous resources to cognition.…

Tell me you don’t see, every day, how our status games turn everything into ‘cartoonish’ struggles between goodies and baddies. I still heartily recommend people read Storr’s book, on status and status games. It’s a…

Knowledge on the left, socials on the right. As long as we continue to allow social media to operate, we’re destroying our own cultures from the inside-out.

Top Gear changed the motoring enthusiast community into a mocking, nasty movement attacking a whole variety of social groups. As well as stifling innovation by going to war on everything that isn’t gas-guzzling, usually…

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…

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…

One of the most astonishing things that AI has already done, that nobody is really talking about. It has given us real-time instant translation between languages. And not just word-for-word translation. It captures…

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…

Peter Dutton took the Trump playbook to the last election and got absolutely smashed by Albanese. Pauline is having another go, selling Australia as a Trump franchise. She’s now going backwards again, probably because…

The toxic lure of social media is that it looks and feels like a ‘community’. As I’ve posted about many times, people now live ON social media, it has actually replaced physical communities. This is from Facebook’s own…

I shared that the main Bathurst Facebook group had been suspended. I wanted to share the reason the group admins gave for doing it. Like I say, simple imitation of even innocent things leads to rivalry. Rivalry leads to…

I politely ask people to check every day whether what they think they know about what's happening in the world is only the latest viral outrage, generated on social media platforms. This is The Guardian, a reputable…

One of the reasons discussions about transgender are so fraught is that they mix up two fundamentally different movements. The various sex and gender movements of the 20th century (and before), and the transgender…

Kidult culture sees knowledge and enjoyment as opposites. Not surprising because kidults equate knowledge with school, and fun with not being at school. All thinking is ’overthinking’, for a kidult. ‘Just Do It’, ‘live…

I live in the regions, and I want them to survive. They won’t when their only idea is to become tourist locations for bored city people. Tourism generates activity, people passing through, it doesn’t and can’t create…

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…

Germaine is still alive! But I’ve worked for years to understand the particular genius of her work, separate from all of the fake outrages about her. Most people who I discuss Greer with haven’t read a single word she’s…

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.…

The deliberate conflation of learning with copyright in this debate. Training is not stealing. Copyright is to take somebody else’s work and to use or sell it as your own. But to train is to learn. We have never taxed…

The medium is the message. It was social media severing our ties to our own social networks, which evolved over generations and included the institutions that operate our society, that unleashed perpetual rivalry and…

Having recently almost become a victim of a scam myself, I think the best advice remains if an organisation contacts you via email or via phone or text or in any other way to say there is a problem, ignore that…

Demonstration of an AI-powered blackboard, in China. The board explains all the steps, and can even translate them into multiple languages. I particularly like that they used maths as an example, something the Chinese…

There are 2 bubbles being mixed up in this type of argument. Yes there is a possible financial bubble in the AI race. But the technology bubble is independent of that. Railways caused a financial bubble when they were…

Every machine is the folding together of the social relationships of the people who made it, and the people who use it. People and machines are not two separate things. Machines aren’t ’tools’ for people. A machine…

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…

‘AI sycophancy’ is a criticism of AI that says it only tells you what you want to hear. It’s one of my favourite loon things circulating on social media, the great international imitation machine that makes millions of…

I try to use images as compressed concepts. As a way of conveying complex ideas at a glance. AI is stunningly good at it. Like this one. While we physically still live in towns and cities, this is actually our culture…

This is a very common thing, to point out the vastness of the universe and how insignificant we are, in it. But it’s wrong. This is the ultimate mind-twister, the root of our culture we don’t understand. If you bother…

We celebrate peak human performance in almost everything. In sport, in work, in skills of all kinds, etc. But there’s one thing that breaks this rule. We absolutely don’t celebrate peak performance in thinking itself.…

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…

Actual dialogue with AI, from investigation of an incident where the AI agent downloaded itself to another server. Two important things here. Firstly look at the self-dialogue of the AI agent (between the <thinking>…

"Quincy, Washington, is now home to more than two dozen data centers, which pay more than half the city's property taxes. That windfall has bought Quincy a new high school, sports complex, hospital, library, police…

People who write for a living are churning out this sort of dross regularly now. They know their privilege is over. It doesn’t even occur to them that vast numbers of people aren’t good writers, or are even illiterate,…

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…

This is a lovely diagram explaining how AI turns masses of texts into actual reasoning. Into thought. Thinking. Consciousness. The greatest miracle in human history. You're alive right now, as it happens.

The ridiculous idea that men have to be learn to be better men is just more social media-driven drivel. Whether it’s the Neanderthals in the Manosphere or the semi-therapists like this bloke, teaching men how to be…

Every man and woman and their dog will tell you the joy of travel is to ‘experience’ other places and other cultures. Experience is a tautology. Everything in your life is an experience. The travel guide book shows the…

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.…

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…

Everything is in the framing. If we see AI as some magical black box that contains 'intelligence', or just statistical tricks, everything we think and say about it will be framed by that assumption. Every time it gets…

I was paying my rates the other day, and looked at the itemised costs. And while my rates are quite high for a regional town, when I looked at the itemised bill I thought this is such a pittance for what I’m getting.…

All of this was avoidable. But humans won't follow knowledge to guide them in what to do. They always just follow each other, to protect their status in a group. And so then reality bitch-slaps the whole sorry group,…

“Reality leaves an enormous redundant footprint in language.” Read on :)

None of the public narratives about AI understand the first thing about what AI is or how it works. Most fundamentally, AI is changing what computing itself means and does. Traditional computers operate symbolic…

The annual flag worship is almost upon us, so just a few of my thoughts on Australia Day. I have zero time for any of the debates over the day, they're all fake arguments set up to create division, to harvest votes. I…

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.…

Much of what I post comes from the mostly unknown world of governance. What it is that makes it possible for people to live together. It’s not even art, let alone science. It’s a bloodsport with some core insights…

Facebook is mostly dull humblebrags. It will now become a sewer as well, like Twitter.

"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,…

My posts on travel are explorations of the idea of 'being there'. There's an automatic assumption that going somewhere brings you closer to the 'real thing'. Proximity as authenticity. I argue the opposite. 'There' is…

Imagine if this was the road toll, or drownings, or food poisonings. Hundreds dead every week, from preventable causes. There’d be an outcry. Then ask yourself why you’re happy for these deaths to be Covid deaths, and…

Most have swallowed the PR that there’s nothing that could be done about Covid, that we just have to ‘live with’ it, ‘like the flu’. (We don’t live with the flu, we spend billions controlling it.) Because of such…

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…

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,…

Years ago now I posted quite a bit about the emerging terrible damage that sugar does to bodies. At the time that was considered a very marginal view. But I was reading the science, and now it’s really becoming…

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…

This person is using Facebook as if Facebook IS Bathurst. That’s the new norm, we live inside social media platforms, we’re not talking about our towns here, this IS our towns. Seamless, people don’t see them as two…

The Facebook franchise we used to call Bathurst is furious. Prepare for an ‘onslaught’, apparently. ‘We know who they are’, ‘not a big enough town to hide’! This is the switch in the social media bait and switch. The…

Look at what Trump is actually doing, right now. You won’t believe what you’re reading, but it’s actually happening, right now. It’s been planned for a long time. Ordinary people have been played by slogans about red…

So many councils under pressure to raise rates to meet basic costs. I still think it’s a startling fact that the average person spends more on take away food, alcohol, recreation and travel than they do on their roads,…

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.…

On the way into work yesterday, one of the local politicians was doing election shots in the park. My attention was drawn more to the glorious, colourful corruption and incompetence of Council, on display in the flower…

Look at the headlines major media outlets are now writing. Shit is hitting the fan. Amusingly, the ‘alarmists’ were doctors and scientists, while 5 years ago we all followed the advice of politicans and social media…

On Council meeting duty tonight. Or as I prefer to call it, the cage fight between Facebook and democracy.

A motoring writer used AI to try to understand the drop in Tesla sales. The AI said 'with 70% certainty' that it was the introduction of the new Model Y, the most popular car in the world, and the delays in changing the…

Mob rule is the addiction to moral panics. Look around and you'll see these appear continuously, at the moment it's Teslas and Elon Musk, a while back it was supermarkets and Qantas, etc. There will always be a moral…

The Los Angeles Times calls what’s happening ‘troubling’, while people here cheer on the destruction. The Times notes this is an American disease. I’ve worked for organisations with toxic senior leadership. It never…

Reading the real life (joyful) experiences of people who bought a Shark reinforces even more strongly how changing a car culture is like deprogramming somebody who's been in a cult. Unbelievably strong forces of peer…

The biggest story in the world yesterday, that was barely reported. PNG turned off social media. It’s had enough of these platforms trashing its society. But just wait, it won’t last. Ordinary people and businesses…

A big plug for AI, if you have any technical problems, say with computers or wifi, or interaction of devices in your house etc. I had a really complex problem getting the car to talk to the home wifi, which was beyond…

Michel Serres once pointed out that the text we read is really just the play of light and shadow. We say text ‘represents’ things, but Serres pointed out that it is the literal shadow, of those things. I think about…

Trump isn’t trying to create a fascist State in the US. He’s doing what he’s always done. He even wrote a book about it long before he entered politics. He’s being a conman. Trying to ‘make deals’. The video is from…

Think you know about Australia? Have you read the Gammage book yet?

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.…

Whenever you see an activist or protest movement, remember these words from Edmund Burke. Pretty much every hashtag movement of the current age, but also their equivalents from the past 50+ years, would fall into…

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…

Here’s the Don again, not reading Mein Kampf. He’s listening to Tay Tay.

Worth reading this short thread, about ‘living with’ Covid. And the conclusion, which is also my experience, masking.

One of the great myths of democracy is the idea of ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. There is no such thing. A tiny handful of activists stir up trouble, and then attribute that trouble to ‘the community’. We see that…

The fashion writer Derek Guy makes a wonderful distinction between tailored clothes and designer clothes. For example he says the UK princes often wear designer suits, which fit badly and don’t look stylish. Their…

Raina Macintyre is a global expert on infectious disease and public health. She’s also at my old stomping ground, UNSW, which is really kicking some goals. In this book she compares Covid-19 to syphilis, which has been…

All local Councils are externally audited every single year, by the NSW Audit Office. They also undergo separate and regular external performance audits, and have external auditors and audit committees scrutinise their…

Genuinely curious how many still believe that governments need to ‘balance the books’? Comparing governments to households and business was a political trick to stop them paying for public things, by screaming…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of…

Know what social media kidult culture hates more than anything? Knowledge. It gets in the way of opinions and feelings. The revenge of the jocks is underway. Again not an analogy, social media replacing society means…

I get lots of these from a ‘positivity’ account. I look at a meme like that and I see a genuine mental health problem, the need to be happy. The thing about feelings is, a perfectly healthy person living a rich life has…

I posted about casuistry a while ago, to me one of the most important and forgotten human inventions. The idea of case-based reasoning. This outrageous injustice to Oscar Piastri is a great example of why it’s needed.…

NSW has a rule that potential EV buyers need to know, if they have kids of driving age. It prohibits P-platers driving cars with power-to-weight ratios that are above a certain number. This immediately makes most…

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…

The NSW 'Pattern Book' for house design is a great idea, getting you an architect-designed home for about $1, and fast-track through the planning system. It won't fix expensive housing, because that isn't caused by…

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…

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…

If you’re getting solar, do a shade analysis before buying (good installers will do it for you). For example this mighty tree in my street was factored into our system. By 3.30 most winter days, it shades our entire…

Betsey was a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and formerly Chief Economist at the Deparment of Labor. Here she’s noticing the destruction of adult, institutional culture by kidult culture. The enemy is…

Why do I continue to talk about high school/adolescent culture? Again because it’s our culture. Those who don’t believe it, consider this. Humans in the West from the age when they can just walk and talk attend school…

Taken from a Facebook group for doctors. Please try to avoid catching Covid, you won’t know that it stays inside you after you get ‘better’ and is constantly damaging you, until it’s too late.

Electrochemistry is one of the hot fields right now, obviously with the explosion in interest in and demand for new types of batteries. What’s interesting is that the main element that features there, lithium, has…

Germaine Greer has more or less retired now from public life it seems, living out her years with her brother’s family in Melbourne. She will always be one of the greatest minds of our time, for me. Always resolutely…

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…

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…

The real enemies of society now aren’t the ’Left’ or ‘Right’ of politics. Those are interchangeable pieces of the same game, like soccer teams. At the end of the day they’re both playing soccer, just running to…

People know I’ve campaigned against DST for years. But this is a world where knowledge has no currency. Only what’s popular survives, no matter how stupid it is. We live with lethal viruses, we do nothing as the planet…

AI can now pass the very hardest chartered financial analyst exams in a matter of minutes, including essay writing. Meanwhile an Australian company uses AI to take on online spammers and grifters, by creating thousands…

B-grade Hollywood scripts replace most thought and knowledge of history today I think. Like the claims America is being taken over by authoritarian Nazis. Pretty much everybody who says that never knew or studied any…

215,700 millionaires live in London. 516 of them have more than $100 million. There are also 45 billionaires. The rest of the UK? Average incomes are lower than the 5 poorest states in the US, and the OECD average as…

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…

It’s been a lot of years since I first shared this science. I remember the outright hostility I got from some about it. People didn’t want sugar to be bad, like Daylight Saving they ‘like it’, so it must be fine. Humans…

Facebook is like human society in a coma. Zero thought, brain-dead. ‘Not the place’ to discuss things, many will tell you, as if that’s some terrible faux pas like farting at dinner, or a contagious disease. You can…

We’re down the rabbit hole, people. The destruction of public health by ‘living with’ Covid is now spreading to all other infectious disease, because the same social behaviours have been destroyed. A reminder that…

There’s a whole chapter in Gammage’s book on Aboriginal farming without fencing. Fences are bizarre when you think about it, only needed because we insist on eating things that don’t already live here. If we ate native…

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new…

“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.”…

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…

BritTV is streaming The Good Life. Each episode is prefaced by a warning that the show is from another era, and the language and concepts may offend some viewers. lol, what a window into how every tiny bit of life has…

Somebody measured CO2 concentration at a gig. The reading for healthy fresh air is 450-500. Ever noticed rock stars have done diddly squat against Covid, even though causes are their usual bread and butter? No benefit…

The ‘weight-loss’ drugs continue to generate astonishing results well outside weight. Now they appear to counteract ageing, even at low doses that have minimal impact on weight loss. When given to mice ageing stopped…

Two short videos out of the UK to share. The first, a breakfast TV host telling viewers and colleagues that he’s just had Covid. Took 2 days off. Now back at the desk, spreading it to co-hosts and crew, chuckling, while…

Hilariously, Musk tried to reveal anti-American forces on social media by forcing Twitter accounts to show the country of origin of their owners. What it actually revealed is how much of Trump’s rise was due to the…

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…

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…

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within,…

Peter, Facebook is misbehaving on the other thread. Here's a summary I put together of sub-$50K EVs in Australia (new), plus I added a secondhand Tesla Model 3 (CPO - certified pre-owned i.e. comes with Tesla warranty).

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…

All of history and all human life is a rivalry between social elites. What looks like ‘the people’ running the show is really those same people being co-opted by different elite groups, to partake in their battles…

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…

This isn't people reading information. They're living on the platforms. The platforms have replaced society. It's a SOCIAL process, not a communication or information process.

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…

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless…

Google is still doing amazing things. Like Google Beam, where they’ve found a way to use AI to make videoconferencing 3D (no glasses needed), so there’s a much greater feeling of connection with others in the virtual…

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took…

More ventriloquism from Cliff’s latest tour. Marvel how he sings the word ‘keeping’ in the second line here, without moving his mouth. https://www.facebook.com/reel/2298182703927928?fs=e&fs=e

Adrian, in case of interest. For others, infection will nearly always be the root cause of most chronic disease. Why it’s important to take infections of all kind seriously. The fact you get better from an infection…

As a follow up to my other myGov post, here are the simple instructions for how to set up a passkey for all of the sites, apps or main websites you use online that normally require you to use a password. It will also…

South Australia's Hornsdale battery was the biggest in the world when it was switched on, in 2017. Australians are now adding the equivalent storage with home batteries every 3 and a half DAYS. I post about renewables…

My great friends Ben and Jane are about to release a book. A book that should revolutionise how we think about babies, and how they mature and develop. Challenging the dominant ‘dyad’ view of attachment theory that…

Reading the comments on this one, worth pointing out that the State government designs, builds and maintains all highways, including the parts of highways that run through towns. And all traffic lights on highways.…

“All of this is why governments must invest in long-term strategies for managing COVID into the future, experts say — particularly by introducing standards for indoor air quality. But until then, they say, Australians…

Without question the greatest social disaster in Australia is housing. This book is about to be released and will be interesting reading for anybody who wants to understand how we got into this mess. The answer is the…

Another Covid tip. If you get Covid and want to reduce your risk of Long Covid, talk to your GP about getting some Metformin, quickly (within the first 72 hours of falling ill). It's originally a diabetes drug, but has…

Just about to be released and already sold out. Did you know Australia's housing market is running at $10 TRILLION? Outrageously absurd. I liked Michael Pascoe's review: "The vast majority of what is written and said…

Want to see how our clown car approach to Covid has now fucked over all public health? Florida is having a measles outbreak. It's allowing parents to decide whether to send kids to school with measles. If that doesn't…

It’s now clear that England’s new ‘Bazball’ cricket is just a way to get flogged in the all the same old ways, while declaring those floggings a win. Straight out of the Trump playbook. England lost as badly on this…

Somebody asked me at work the other day ‘aren’t you worried you might damage your immune system by always wearing that mask?’ If you agree with this person, I strongly suggest some reading for the weekend on immunity.…

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…

"Scientists generally advocate for permanent ST, or “natural time,” as Gentry calls it because it better aligns people’s schedules with the sun year-round. “People who study the issue are all in agreement,” he said.…

Some BYD cars are already cheaper than their petrol/diesel equivalents. And this trend is really accelerating, by 2027 EVs should regularly be cheaper than ICEs. It's absolutely beyond me why somebody would now buy a…

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…

I have multiple friends struggling with bizarre health symptoms which their GPs have no idea about. Many GPs have no understanding of the sequelae of Covid infection, at all. Many seem to delight in telling their…

I’m re-reading Catch-22, the perfect novel for a time when societies have taken leave of their senses.

A while back Elon mocked Chinese EVs. He's not laughing now. He's about to lay off 10% of his workforce. And as he says here, Chinese car makers are going to 'demolish' every other car company in the world (ICE and…

I suspect many have not heard of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). In October 2020 a group of ‘scientists’ signed a short statement suggesting a way out of the Covid pandemic. The Covid ‘strategy’ we’re following…

Climate change is making its way into our lives, pieces at a time. We used to buy these large tins of olive oil, to use for deep-frying. For years they were about $18. They’re now $65. Because most olive oil comes from…

Good on the Irish for now publishing comparisons of costs of fuel. And you can get the electric cost as low as zero, if you charge from your own solar.

I don’t live in Bathurst. But I grew up there, and I work there. Come September people need to decide whether they want Facebook groups to run the town. I know how I’d vote.

This is the first of 2 mid-size SUVs BYD will launch in Australia next week too. Another plug-in hybrid for those with 'range anxiety'. (By the way there are much cheaper ways to be rid of range anxiety. Like reading a…

One of the last refuges for anti-social bastards is driving. I have to drive a lot of kms every week, and nowhere in society do people behave more appallingly than on the roads. Few follow a speed limit. They don’t…

Dick was a Professor of Infectious Disease and Chief of two Canadian hospital systems. I thought of his advice while scrolling through photos on social media of people happily spreading Covid. Living their best (short)…

I can’t talk about Council business. But I can comment on FB fun fairs. I notice the main FB French Revolution team has now split into two warring factions with visceral hatred for each other. I think that symbolises…

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…

Beyond me why people still buy straight petrol or diesel vehicles. When your beliefs cost you that much money, it's time to read a few books.…

‘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…

This is such important research, with implications that go well beyond day care. @[100062898426616:2048:Ben] and @[1748499329:2048:Jane] are right here on Facebook, if it's of interest. Humans are social creatures, it…

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…

When the kids were younger I remember reading the debates about co-sleeping with young kids. This is what you can expect if you do 🙂

Have been running the reverse-cycle units (heat pumps in techno language) 24 hours a day this (cold) winter, as an experiment. You can see in the yellow circle that overnight, in a cold Lithgow winter, they use hardly…

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably…

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…

"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,…

UK teachers have been in the Covid firing line longer than Australian teachers. But Australian teachers will catch up. It's disgusting how we treat teachers and kids.…

This is Trump's pick for Vice-President. Saying 'the professors are the enemy', quoting Nixon. We may gasp or even chuckle at that. Except very many Australians would probably agree, knowledge has no traction in any of…

Can you feel space? Neuroscientists discovered something remarkable, when they got people to try. As an example, can you feel the space between your head and your hips? Or between your eyes? Or between you and the TV,…

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…

What we now call mental illness (a terrible term) used to be called nervous illness. I much prefer that term because most garden variety mental illness is really a type of nervous exhaustion. Even people feeling…

Eric is one of the most respected medical voices in the US. Here he states the obvious, which people still refuse to hear. We’re into the 5th year of the pandemic, and doing nothing at all to control it. And people…

When I say people never leave high school, I mean that the social models we learn there are what shape all adult life as well. At least now. And that model is the constant battle for status. Which is really the battle…

Ask your GP to prescribe Metformin if you have Covid. Many will resist it, because they’re lazy and do no professional reading. It’s about the only thing that works against Covid, and creates an enormous 41% reduction…

Is your town about to be run by a Facebook group? Do you know the actual beliefs of the founders of that group? Do you think a FB group has any idea how to run a town? Has the group’s success been just slagging off the…

One for the ‘Covid is over’ people. Testing is back. Covid will not be over until we stop it spreading. Until we control it. Like we do all other serious infectious diseases.

Reading some of the social media around upcoming LG elections. ‘Councils should be run more like a business’, that’s an old favourite. Councils are nothing like a business. They’re a government. They provide services,…

This is the BYD U9. To give context for why BYD is able to generate so many models, and also alter existing models so quickly in response to consumer demand, here's a stat. BYD has almost a MILLION employees. Over…

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.

The Vatican Library. The documents here are some of the rarest in the world. Would rather a day in here than a month in Bali.

Social media reviews of things aren’t always that great, a lot of opinion and not a lot of knowledge. But I like watching EV reviews from people who’ve never driven an EV before, and who are EV sceptics. This is for a…

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

Final local election results due early this week. At this stage it looks like Facebook has won the Bathurst election. Buckle up.

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…

A common thing now is for tragedy to be used for fundraising. I notice here that the GoFundMe was up and running almost as soon as the tragedy happened, ditto for a recent young death here locally, where the first many…

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…

Barefoot shoes to me are an example of what can go wrong with the idea of 'natural' health. They are absolutely not good for some types of feet, some peoples' current foot condition, and the activities they plan to do.…

Who would have predicted this? Outstanding. When I was at school, quite a lot of people did subjects like physics. Even people who weren’t really all that ‘academic’. The baseline of expected knowledge seemed much…

People have been encouraged to believe nothing can be done to prevent Covid, so we all just need to 'live with' (i.e. catch it) now. That's just political bullshit. For every pandemic in history, you know who ended the…

John Lennon, who wrote All You Need is Love, was worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time of his death, and has an estate worth almost a billion today. Maybe he meant all you need is love, and a billion…

I don't read as many books as I used to, life is short and there are too many crap books. But Will Storr's book I recommend to everybody. It might reframe how you see most of life. I'd already been studying status…

Mark is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, talking about a Bitcoin miner buying a major wind farm and re-purposing it for Bitcoin mining. I have friends wwho are fans of Bitcoin, some no…

How EV myths become everyday knowledge, courtesy (as so often) of SKY News Australia and their stable of babbling idiots. In this case, through blatant lies about the NRMA, who said the exact *opposite* to what the…

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…

The maths of stupidity. The Granville train disaster killed 83 people. It’s still commemorated. Tens of thousands of people have died (and are still dying) of Covid in Australia. Our attitude to that? It’s ‘just a…

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…

Anyone working in local government will chuckle reading this one. All the ridiculous idealistic rubbish about ‘community’, in complete contrast with how people actually behave together. Societies are status games, not…

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…

Jessica Wildfire, writing about ‘The Kraken’, XBB1.5, the latest worrying Covid variant.

My version of ’positivity’ is attacking the problems that threaten all of us, like grown-ups should. Not ‘living my best life’ ignoring all of those problems. None of that ‘you do you’ bullshit, sorry. You do we, and…

Covid, using Freddie as a guide. Freddie in 1984, and in 1991, immediately before his death. Medical experts suggest Freddie probably caught HIV in 1982, which corresponds also with a flu-like illness he had in that…

I look at the holiday photos and social events people post to FB, where nobody is taking any precautions against Covid infection. And two things jump out at me. 1) So many seem to think only of risk to themselves, and…

Loved our Pathfinder. Best family car on the market when we bought it (price was a steal, sub-$40,000 for a 7-seater), and it did 7 years with us without skipping a beat. Nissan do beautiful V6s, which is why they…

Reading more sites discussing EVs. One of the most common questions always seems to be ‘how much does it cost to replace the battery?’ It’s an easy one. Zero. Batteries are warranted for well past the usual lifetime of…

How about a big awww for this baby’s response to dad’s reading?

This is such a powerful show. I get tired of American shows because so many of them rely upon some artifice that seems cool at first, but within a series or two the disconnect between the artifice and everyday life…

If you're buying your Year 7 kid a Macbook Pro, you're not only wasting thousands of dollars, you're perpetuating the ridiculous status games you went through at school yourself. The Macbook Air is far and away enough…

Beautiful drone shot from the ABC, showing a dingo patrolling the dingo fence. Worth reading the article, how the landscape on the dingo’s side of the fence is much richer and healthier than the barren wasteland of the…

"The RBA is attempting to curb price growth by reducing the capacity of households to purchase goods and services, reducing demand and making it harder for businesses to hike prices more." Really worth reading that…

We’re destroying younger generations. Their health, their wealth. Our birth rate is so low we’re not even replacing ourselves. It’s difficult to get older generations (of which I’m one, only one year off being a boomer)…

The annual federal budget is like a religious ritual, in ‘the economy’. (Which doesn’t exist.) All that guff about balancing the books, and surpluses, and government debt. All nonsense, comparing a country to a…

"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…

Trivia for those who still want to avoid Covid infection (aka people who want to live a long life). Air quality readings in take away shops with big extractor fans are often excellent. Any virus floating around in the…

I’m not sure if my posts are still being seen in the same way, this absolutely ludicrous platform put a restriction on my account because last year I posted a picture of Neville Chamberlain shaking Hitler’s hand, in a…

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.…

I’d like to do a few posts on climate change. The whole topic is infected with political slogans, but the real knowledge is fascinating. Probably the greatest slogan is that ‘the climate always changes’. People arguing…

Good test for the new windows. I’m sitting doing my morning reading of the news, with no heater on. Temperature inside very comfortable. With the old windows it would have been freezing without the heating.

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…

Think I may have posted this before. It’s from Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlin’s book ‘On Kings’, published shortly before both of their passings. They were leading anthropologists. Both thought monarchies were the…

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…

Kell put us on to this one. Best show I've seen in a while. Brilliant writing and acting, Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer (married in real life) wrote and directed it. Hilarious and insightful. Brammall has been in…

As always, the smirking emojis on these posts are petrolheads, with their superior knowledge of cars. The biggest car companies in the world with their century or more of experience know nothing, next to the smirking…

The big con is that we stopped lockdowns. We did nothing of the sort. We privatised them. We went from locking down the virus to stop it spreading, to letting it spread and getting the infected to lock themselves down…

Meanwhile in the US (my friends there can give more details), some States are on a book-banning purge. Thousands of books being removed from local and school libraries, with threat of jail for librarians if forbidden…

The US Embassy in Australia, doing the Nutbush for Tina, but also because they acknowledge it as an ‘Australian national dance’.

When people meditate, they’re being ‘in the present moment’. The problem with this for me though, is that you can’t be anywhere else. I think much of the time peope mistake meditation for relaxation, which is why they…

Despite the language used, Covid doesn’t infect in ‘waves’. It’s not like Russia and Ukraine, marshalling troops for the next surge. Humans spread Covid. We are the waves. Waves go down when we take precautions, and go…

The reading material in the toilet at Trump’s house is something else.

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…

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The most important company in the world. Semiconductors are chips, the chips used in all our devices now. Not just computers, our cars, TVs, vacuum cleaners,…

The real sub-text of Ashes cricket? You don't have to like cricket. It's a very deep fear by the English that the people they dumped in the penal colony are actually better than they are. History has proven that to be a…

Went to bed at half-time. Queensland tries off clear forward passes and knocks-ons was just one reason, I don’t think NSW was ever going to win regardless. The article captures it well, NSW were ‘disjointed’. Like I…

The double glazed windows of course are fantastic for dramatically cutting heat and cold transfer. But something we’re enjoying as much if not more is how much sound they cut out. 70-80% of outside noise. For example in…

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…

Wow, watch the engineers and materials scientists go. If we could re-route our social interest to knowledge and engineering and away from real estate and travel, our lives would be full of wonders.

More reflections on travel. I’m aware by the way that travel is a passion for many, so this is a fraught topic. But I put these reflections here to give more context to my criticism of it. You can’t climb Uluṟu now.…

What I say about travel even the travel industry says itself. It knows there’s a crisis. It has no idea what to do about it. Travel is Tinder, for locations. Momentary flings, wham bam, thank you…next. If you think your…

You can heat your house for about 70% less using reverse-cycle electric. I was amazed when reading this that some people already have reverse-cycle units, but still heat their houses with gas in winter.

People who study the way high school shapes our whole culture made an interesting finding. In most cases, your status in high school matches how your adult life turns out as well. With one interesting exception. The…

My favourite type of consultant is one who brings a slide deck of about 50 slides, all densely packed with dot points of text. And who then reads all of the dot points to you, all day.

Google's AI it's added to its office suite can: - generate images - write your emails for you - summarise long documents - create presentations that include text, graphs and images - can summarise what's happened in a…

John doesn’t spend time on social media reading conspiracy fairy tales.

I still recommend every Australian (and every human) read this book. It provides firsthand accounts from the first European settlers of Australia of what they found when they got here. What they found was the greatest…

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…

The average Australian household spends 5 times as much on alcohol, cigarettes, take away food, dining out, holidays and recreation than it does on local roads, water, sewer, waste, libraries, parks and museums. That's…

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…

Unpacking modern Oz culture. Households spend 400% more on recreation, than they do on their roads, water, waste, parks, libraries and museums.

Travel! Say you like somebody, in a desiring sort of way. And you had the choice of standing next to them and taking a photo, or a personal letter from them. Which would you choose? The letter, of course. It gives you…

Teachers are thought of as people who put knowledge in peoples’ heads, like you put fuel in a car. That’s not their actual job. Their job is what holds all of society together. They take a classroom full of people who…

Why social media is dangerous. 1) It creates fake social lives that people then consciously and unconsciously compare to their own. This creates enormous stress and anxiety, as the relentlessly happy and fun posts clash…

The problem is easy to see, and nobody wants to admit it. Social media is a disaster for societies, a 24/7 assault on the trust that holds them together. It makes all views equivalent, the most pig-ignorant, bigoted…

This could fundamentally change the cruise industry. As in destroy it. And not a bad thing either.…

I’m on the couch reading porn.

Fascinating. Those who used hearing aids for hearing loss had a 50% reduction in risk for dementia.…

This is what offshore wind turbines look like, 20 kms out to sea (you may need a magnifying glass). The ones proposed for Australia are even further out, to 35 km. The people who complain about it ruining their view are…

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…

Somebody described my posts as ‘boring’ the other day. They certainly don’t attract much interest, maybe they are. Heh, who cares, I’m not selling tickets to an event here. What interests FB is oversharing of the…

Thanks to Trevor for the link. ‘Range’ is a total furphy when talking about cars. It can be as little or as large as engineers design it to be. EVs were the first proper cars, you can see Thomas Edison standing next to…

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…

If you want to see the sort of wonders a new electric world is already bringing to us, check out this BMW-designed electric boat. So beautifully quiet. Thanks to @[801418628:2048:Nancy]!…

In 2012, a Facebook group of more than half a million urged NBC to invite Betty White to host SNL. "When I first heard about the campaign, I didn't know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to…

Unless we stop it spreading, this can continue for centuries. Forget hospitalisations, ICU, the Economy, all of that. A pandemic is defined by how many people get INFECTED. Nothing else. That’s what we have to stop.…

Paul McDermott (the comedian, ex-DAAS, Good News Week etc.) contracted Covid just before Christmas. He’s double-vaxxed. His story is worth reading (extract below). “On Christmas Eve I posted my PCR test results showing…

Many have asked about terms - endemic, pandemic, epidemic etc. The picture describes it well. Covid is an epidemic disease, and because it’s spreading across the whole world, it’s now a pandemic (pan - international).…

The politics of language. ‘Living with’ natural disasters. Take floods. We live with floods, in that we know they will sometimes happen. We DON’T live with them WHILE THEY ARE HAPPENING. We live with floods, but we…

Might need to contextualise these. John Snow was the father of epidemiology i.e. the study of disease patterns and causes, in public health. Most famously he discovered that cholera was being spread by dirty water in…

Last day of a great 3 weeks off. Reminded me again that we focus on the wrong things. Sure we went to the moon, we can fly anywhere in the world in comfort, we have all human knowledge at our fingertips via Google, our…

Look at the wording, straight out of the 'Stop the Boats' playbook, trying to weaponise the Novak saga into a border control issue, for the election, and a 'don't look at the Covid shitshow' distraction. Laughably,…

I never have much enthusiasm for Australia Day. Jingoistic claptrap most of the time. Culture wars about flags and invasions etc. We turn everything into sport. Yes the country was invaded, stolen. Yes many love the…

Week 1 of school, 400 staff out because of Covid, South Australia. Leaders have encouraged us to think this is just a hard period that we need to get through, and then it’ll be behind us. But catching Covid doesn’t stop…

Read this in the context of people being encouraged to think catching Covid will end the pandemic. You should be doing every single thing you can, to avoid being infected. It's not a cold. It's not flu (you should avoid…

The NSW Premier has said today he doesn't think they'll bother with school RATs after the first 4 weeks of school. This was their plan all along. Do some symbolic testing when kids went back, to give the appearance of…

Take a pause from planning your next holiday or night out and notice an entire generation being infected, deliberately. You know, do that 'being a grown up' thing you may have read about in books.

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the…

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…

Where might all of those 0-19 year olds be catching Covid? It can't be at school, the politicians say it's not spreading there. Must be a helluva lot of kids wagging. Better get the masks off all of them, nothing to see…

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…

Going back to the idea of ‘business’, and how I don’t think it’s even a thing. There are just customers. You can easily prove this. Can a business exist without customers? No. Can customers exist without a business?…

Data from the US says not even 3 doses is going to be enough. The government, as always, saying nothing, with the Australian winter bearing down on us. 83% effective up to 2 months, down to only 31% effective after 5…

My passion for discussing the myths around gravity feels a bit justified, when I see that over 5000 Australians die every year with the cause of death listed as ‘falling over’. The language is always so interesting.…

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…

Voting. People assume I’m sure that I hate the LNP. That’s not the case, my objection to the current LNP is that it isn’t a political party at all, it was captured by vested interests. That’s why many of its most…

Watch this. (As context, 74 people have died so far this week of Covid, in NSW.) ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns have been in place for years. Hugely expensive and complex, and with strategies that stretch out for…

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…

"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…

A not atypical CO2 reading on a plane before it takes off. Less than 800ppm is considered OK ventilation, less than 600 excellent, outside air is just over 400. You won’t get me in a plane until the pandemic is over.

All Australians should read this book. Damien is the Oz bureau chief for the NY Times. He brought his family to live here and discovered something really profound about us that I think many don’t even see. He knows us…

Chris is a renowned international journalist who has had enough. Worth reading his thoughts today.

What the pretty pictures mean is: 1) people infected with Omicron get reinfected with Omicron, it doesn't make them immune 2) even with vaccination, infection 'dampens' the immune system i.e. stops it responding to the…

Orwell often said politics is mostly about language. One of my favourites is one the boy racers of the world use, to argue against speed limits, ‘drive to the conditions’. What it really means is ‘we should be allowed…

Listen to this drivel, she knew it was a lie. Kerry Chant's body language tells us exactly how much horseshit was spewed out at Gladys' daily press conferences. I didn’t see anybody angry about this at the time, as I…

I’ll use Lithgow as an example. The idea that Covid will become ‘endemic’. The term was first used to describe out of control disease in poor countries, that we couldn’t be bothered helping. Just as we often say crime…

Last Covid post for the day, but maybe the most important. Right now we’re actually living multiple pandemics, at the same time. Not Covid, but Covids, plural. Two key points: 1) the time between new variants is…

Booked in for my 4th vaccine shot this afternoon. If you're over 30, just do it. The government and business will do not one other thing to protect you, it's up to you now.

I've travelled quite a lot. I hate the process of actually getting from one place to another, packed into planes like sardines, interrupted sleep, lost bags, foul shared toilets and showers etc. I don't mind it when I…

The comfort many take from catching Covid, multiple times, is that they believe the idea that it will create ‘herd immunity’. Which they see as the same as ‘endemic’. So many people will catch it and become immune that…

Saw this one on Twitter and it captures beautifully so much of what I post about here. How our culture is now a war on 'home'. We have no idea what home even means now, to us it's just an address, or some feelings of…

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…

Book stores are getting creative with marketing.

A while ago I posted an article about how precision fermentation may replace agriculture almost entirely. It may be the greatest ever revolution in human life. It’s arrived, see ABC report below. Agriculture is far and…

Reading about how the Colorado river system is on the brink of collapse in the US, with 70% of its water usage being agricultural irrigation, made me think of how precision fermentation and other new food creation…

This astronaut is ‘floating in space’. (Actually they’re falling at high speed, but the experience is the same as floating.) Where we get terribly mixed up is assuming ‘space’ starts outside the atmosphere. But you’re…

Public schools often don't understand public messaging. Take Bathurst High, which proudly displays signs saying 'Safe, Respectful, Learners'. I'd bet most people when reading that will think 'hmm, they've had problems…

I’ve posted a lot about ongoing damage to the immune system from Covid infection, from reading the research papers and talking to the scientists doing that research. It’s now entering mainstream stories, like this one.…

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…

This beautiful satellite image shows a mine in Inner Mongolia that is the key to the whole modern world. The Bayan Obo mine. Most of the rare earth minerals used in modern technology come from China, it produces over…

The real reason most people won’t wear masks or take Covid precautions is that the majority of people are followers, they follow others in deciding what to do. If mask wearing becomes optional (as it is now), they won’t…

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel…

This is why I think the NDIS will not only ultimately fail, it may in fact consume our entire democracy and sink it. A big caveat upfront, I’m a huge fan of the NDIS and what it represents. But I think we’ve introduced…

Naughty Victoria kept publishing its Covid data every day, after National Cabinet said they wouldn't do it any more. You can see why they didn't want us to see any more data. Put a mask on.

I post a bit about stretching, about why it’s mostly a waste of time, and in fact may be damaging. Here’s an extended wonderful passage by my friend David Gorman which gives a lot more detail. A bit of reading, but I…

This was the world’s first drive-in petrol station, opening in 1913. At the time there were already 500,000 cars on the road. Just as context for those who think the fact there isn’t an EV charger on every corner…

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8…

Memories, me texting Kell.

This sort of story gives a whole new context to the driver-assist technologies now being included with cars. These accidents wouldn’t happen, with that technology.

Zoë is an international expert on Covid in schools. Remember ‘schools are safe’? Only where there’s no community transmission of the virus. If there is, they act as superspreading sites. In the UK the government is…

I think we need wide education in political language, the Greeks called it ‘rhetoric’, it was a cornerstone of their education. For example yesterday the acting Premier was asked about risks to regional NSW from Sydney…

The protestor in the white hat and backpack drags a police officer down the stairs, where he’s stomped on by the crowd and beaten with a flag pole, while they sing The Star Spangled Banner. Any Trump fans reading? Get a…

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.…

"...as long as the state premiers continue to ignore the idiots in the federal Coalition and the Murdoch media and lock down as needed...It turns out that stopping the disease from spreading is the only thing that…

My whole life I've struggled with shoes. (They really did once x-ray feet in shoe shops, to fit shoes.) So many debates about what's best - arch support, cushioning, flat shoes better etc. I've now decided a 'supported'…

The reason the PM is reluctant to act against the likes of Craig Kelly is that he hoovers up all the Trumpians here in Australia, to vote for the LNP. That vote is significant, otherwise the PM would just cut him loose.…

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

By the way people, you may notice if you try to share news from papers and other sources on FB now, it won’t appear in Australia. Due to the government’s battle on Rupert’s behalf to shut down Google and Facebook in…

Rupert maintaining the rage against Facebook. It’s inaccurate to see FB as stealing ‘content’ from news. FB is a collective conversation platform, news is a one-way broadcast medium. News has always been a type of…

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…

Please don't understand me as some sort of men's rights activist. I have no time for any of the extremists in this debate. I'm a casuist, which is the most sophisticated method I think humans have come up with to deal…

Boy the new Macbook Air is awesome. Almost a perfect piece of technology. Beautifully designed in every atom, it's pretty much flawless. And it runs completely silently, no fans. And the new Apple M1 chip is…

Here in Oz support for workers will be turned off this month. Meanwhile major corporations who rorted Job Keeper will be allowed to keep the money. Remember Pink Batts? We had a Royal Commission for that stimulus…

The push is on, ScoMo and Gladys cardboard cut-outs of Boris in their language here. Get the high-risk groups vaccinated, then open up. They haven't wavered from this economic narrative in over a year. Experts strongly…

A picture speaks a thousand words. This is such a common understanding of feelings and emotions. I find it perverse. All context stripped away, leaving just some set of feelings inside us. If you had a rock in your shoe…

It's very common to see democracy as replacing hierarchy with a flat social structure where all are equal. That's not what it is or ever was. Hierarchies represent levels of expertise and knowledge and quality.…

Rain gauge reading this morning Peter?

This very famous book was one of the first to commit the gravest of Australian sins. Criticising its own country. Australia has a glass jaw when it comes to self-criticism. Horne on Australia: "It lives on other…

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…

My dear friend Ben has released this extraordinary book. Looking at Darwin's ideas on psychology, but much more than that, also examining the ways Darwin's thought has been perverted since his death, most often because…

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 Australian 'bush'. What does that even mean? Somewhere we don't have a town or city, usually. Sometimes we create a national park out of it. A piece of 'bush' like in this picture, is usually a landscape falling…

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…

I watched most of the funeral on replay this morning. What strikes me about royal ceremonies is how little they're about the individuals occupying the roles. Almost nothing about Philip the man in today's funeral. This…

Isn't it kind of strange that the idea of the 'individual' ever took off? I can't actually think of something a person does that is unique to them. Their language is shared, their biology is shared, their ideas are…

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…

As a kid I asked my dad once what his favourite food was. He said 'soup'. I thought he was mad. Now I find myself actually agreeing with him (a bit late to tell him, but if you're reading somewhere...). The Japanese…

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…

Here's some numbers to contextualise what I say about the AZ vaccine. Currently it causes about 2 clots for every 100,000 people vaccinated. That sounds tiny, right? About 16 million Australians are scheduled to get…

That question people ask, if you had a time machine, where would you go? Now I would choose Australia, before the First Fleet arrived. Something miraculous, unique in all the world, had happened here, and had been…

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…

Up there with Daylight Saving for idiocy, for me. Way more people die of the smoke this causes than would ever be at risk from the fires. And now it turns out it's a waste of time anyway. Usually just red meat for the…

If you believe in the Economy, the federal budget is a big deal. If you don't, it's an Excel spreadsheet with text-to-speech turned on.

Last year I argued with people here about Covid and school safety. I feel vindicated that the year since has proved Covid spreads in schools as easily if not more easily than everywhere else, that children are infected…

Racism, paternalism, pandemics. With an Ebola outbreak (for example), rich countries rush to lock those countries down to prevent the Ebola getting to us. Notice how with Covid, the exact opposite was done? Rich…

Rich countries are like cars who refuse to slow down for roadwork. Movement is their pathological obsession. For the whole of the pandemic they've tried to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Now they're doing it…

I'm not a language Nazi, but 'lightening' is what lightning does to the sky - makes it lighter. Or removing weight.

Hmm. For context, the Europeans restricted AZ to the over 60s, not 50s like here. This means they're now saying don't give it to anybody. Huge.…

Ever noticed that FB is almost entirely hyperlinks? Images, text, names etc. - all links. Hyperlinks aren't just a tool. They're the way all of the parts of our lives that used to be relatively separate are now being…

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…

The oldest trick in the modern conservative's playbook is to knee-cap taxation (on the wealthy), and then claim the resulting budget deficit is due to too much spending. The spending doesn't change much at all, it's…

I liked this. There's also a serious point to it. Modern conservatives like to say that the government gets in peoples' way, restricts their freedom. But the government IS the people. Who else would it be? When the…

You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see who is writing the NSW Government pandemic strategy.

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…

Out of control, has been for weeks. The government refusing to do anything more, growing and spreading every day. Yesterday trying to steal vaccines from other States, who rightly told Gladys to piss off and do her job.…

Spreading. Like arsenic-flavoured peanut butter.

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…

Watch Health Hazzard mansplain superbly here, to prevent the Chief Health Officer of NSW answering any questions. They know her answering honestly here would end their government. Look at Dr Chant's body language.…

DH Lawrence, himself a teacher, was scathing about the idea of universal education. His reasoning was that only a handful of people are suited for what we call more ‘academic’ type work, and forcing all kids to sit…

Have any Gladys fans had a 'hmmm' moment yet? Case numbers? It spreading to both Bathurst and Dubbo now? Hospital beds filling fast? Nothing sowing the seeds of doubt?

You don’t have to pay any attention to my advice. But it’s this. Assume the State is already in total lockdown. The government refuses to do it, but Covid is everywhere and spreading fast. Do the lockdown yourselves.…

The virus isn't spreading because people aren't following the rules. It's spreading because the rules are pissweak.

My favourite thing to watch is Nordic Noir. Watching a lot of shows with sub-titles made me think, notice that no matter the language or ‘culture’, the world people live in looks almost exactly the same. The houses,…

What aboriginal Australians know and we don’t, is that the world isn’t made of facts. It’s made of stories. Every fact is a story, it only makes sense within a narrative framework. Nicolas Rothwell, a writer, travels…

Texts from inside Sydney ICUs. Will be broken inside 3 weeks, insiders say. That’s more than a month before Gladys thinks we’ll reach her magical 70%. Which wouldn’t work anyway.

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…

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…

Reckon the 'live with the virus, because you can't beat Delta' folk here in Australia have been reading this graph upside down? Or they're just dangerously useless?

I post a lot less to FB these days, because it’s so bloody dull. Like reading personal ads and classifieds. An Israeli scientist said something the other day that interested me. He said the world is broken because when…

Leonardo Da Vinci reading his social media comments.

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…

The new Premier said these words yesterday. Orwell used to say that politics is all about language. Look at that word - 'alongside'. What does it mean? The problem is, Covid doesn't live alongside us. It lives INSIDE…

Not just ignoring the health advice now, also ignoring the National Plan and Doherty modelling. Our very own God-bothering Trumpie. (Just for the slow people at the back, the vaccines don't stop people carrying or…

“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,…

It is lethal. If you don't know what libertarianism is, worth doing some reading. Many vote for the LNP today because they think they're voting for Liberals and Nationals. They're not, they've long since transformed…

Cases (blue) and R value (orange), for NSW. R is the rate at which the infections are spreading.

Everything about this plan is laughable. Even the title, 'The Australian Way'. Just another book of meaningless political slogans to get him through the election. The man is vacuous, completely devoid of any vision or…

Before the 20th century, overwhelmingly the greatest fatalities in war came from infectious disease, not the fighting. The US Civil War, for example, where about 700,000 people died. Two-thirds of those died of…

Unprepared to do the basic grown-up work of stopping a virus spreading, Austria will instead lock up the unvaccinated. The hilarious irony of this pandemic is that it’s the same whinging libertarians going on about…

This one yesterday sobering context for the joyous 'return to normal' I see in restaurants, pubs and just about everywhere else. All 13 were fully vaccinated. 11 caught Covid. Despite what politicians say, Covid is…

In today’s Covid news, why a fast-spreading but ‘mild’ version of Covid is far more lethal than a slower-spreading, more severe variant. (Note that nobody actually knows if Omicron is mild - that’s just political spin…

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.…

So...kids do better, the longer they're NOT at school. It's actually very important we understand why that is (I co-wrote a book and a few research papers on that). And also that we continue to ignore the Henny Pennys…

At the origin of every modern civilisation is always one book. Ideas are what civilisations are literally made of - all of their most important shaping beliefs will come from that one book. For our civilisation, it’s…

Monks once saved civilisation. In the Dark Ages their monasteries were what kept the ideas that are actually what we call civilisation alive. They were the only ones who kept the knowledge of basic things like…

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…

I can’t really warm to podcasts. They’re huge right now, but I find it takes 45 overly-crafted minutes to deliver 1-2 ideas I could figure out in about 45 seconds if they were summarised in text.

Dragons in mythology are ancient animals, who speak for ancient non-human knowledge. What is that knowledge? To hoard, to find treasure and sit on it. Not to create, or destroy. They speak for the natural abundance of…

There are eternal beings, they’re called ideas. Ideas are the only real gods, they’re immortal and our lives are bit parts in the endless battle of ideas. If you don’t believe everything is really just an idea, try…

I’m uncomfortable with a lot of modern ‘identification’ politics. This article is one reason - you don’t get to SELF-identify any social identity. It’s a social thing, by definition. But also secondly because I think we…

Populism to me is far and away the most dangerous virus in society, and I don’t think we see its full symptoms. From a recent post I saw on coronavirus in Oz. Populism includes ‘noble’ things like donating hundreds of…

Some people think it's mad to shut down society for this virus. Maybe they don't know maths. I think this guy maybe misunderstands flattening the curve - it's meant to be a reduction in infections, not just spreading…

Facebook removed my post on Australian research on a Covid-19 cure as 'spam'. My apologies if you linked to it [Edit: It now seems FB has a technical problem.] In the meantime, here's another link to the research. There…

Australians have shifted their outrage from hoarders to the 'Chinese' and inter-town supermarket raiders now. What doesn't vary is the outrage. As one scapegoat gets stripped away, another one is generated quickly. It's…

I think the AHPPC updates are far and away the best insight into the Australian thinking behind the decisions the National Cabinet make. This is the 'medical advice' ScoMo and the Premiers refer to. Well worth reading…

Summarising my own 3 tips leading up to the virus possibly spreading. 1. Get some sun and fresh air every day. Cloudy is still sun. Stay away from groups when you can. 2. Eat fibre, like fruit and veg and wholegrain…

Words on a page are shadows. It takes some work to get your head around it I think. This shadow of a fern is not directly the word ‘fern’, but the idea of ‘representing’ the fern by dark marks on a pale surface came…

If you're at home looking for something to do, play this game designed by one of the world's top labs, to help design a drug against Covid-19. It may lead to a drug within a month.This is serious science, crowdsourcing…

One thing i'm enjoying right now is how the people who are the real brains and muscle of society are coming into the limelight, while the celebrities, sports stars and shock jocks disappear into their country estates.…

One of the tragicomic things about this time. The companies who until now avoided tax by trading in cash, now can't get JobSeeker payments for their staff because they have no demonstrated taxable income to justify…

A wise epidemiologist asked recently why we aren't asking the humanities about the best way to deal with a pandemic. Pandemics are social phenomena, not just medical, you can't separate the two. The social challenges…

Camus' wonderful novel is the bible on pandemics. Nearly a century old now but reading it is like reading the paper here in 2020, and novelists go way beyond the medical angle to the deep human psychology. How…

All knowledge is observation All thought is observation. All action is observation. All evil is ignorance. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. Lack of knowledge is lack of observation. Lack of right action is lack of…

I know, more pandemic stuff (knowledge is the only thing that wins a war). A mistake I believe we make in fighting pandemics is using medicine as the main set of tools in understanding them. Ecology is a much more…

Schools are not childcare centres. There's no doubt keeping as many kids out of them as possible will quicken elimination of Covid-19. Even the best models suggest that they contribute significantly to spreading a virus…

I wanted to put down some thoughts about joy, and how to get it (imo), at a time plenty probably aren't feeling it. Takes a minute or two to read, I know that's not popular on FB! What inspired me is the number of…

Because "let's just get back to normal" seems to appeal to many people who want their lives back, I think it’s worth reading why it’s a really, really bad idea. I'm still seeing many people openly ignore the social…

The reason I left the university sector after nearly 20 years there was this. Supposed to be the custodian of society's ideas, but instead a gravy train milked by senior staff for exorbitant salaries, and utter contempt…

Right now we're hearing a lot about how kids' education is being damaged by them not being in school. One of society's greatest secrets though is that, no matter which way you look at the data, schools make no…

I use Jeff Goldblum's Jurassic Park character to illustrate what I see as the real dangers in our strategy to try to control the pandemic, in our 'Covid-safe economy'. It's gobsmacking vanity. Have a look at the basic…

Lots of talk about mental health and the pandemic today. I offended some people by saying that the idea we should scale back quarantine to protect peoples' mental health means we must have become a nation of snowflakes.…

Free child care (not free - you pay for it through your taxes, conservatives are devious with language) isn't 'sustainable'. $150 billion in permanent tax cuts is though. Wouldn't it have been refreshing to hear him say…

I was a teacher. This rubric for the country alarms me, because I know it'd be a struggle to get a room of 20 to follow it. I don't buy this bullshit about 'restrictions' and 'lockdown' - the language is designed to…

Here's context for my pandemic views. Look at these numbers, State-by-State. Everywhere except NSW and Vic may have already eliminated Covid-19. NSW and Vic may be damned close. You can see why the other States aren't…

I find it's surprisingly doctors who sometimes argue that Covid-19 is being blown out of proportion as a health issue. A big drop in billable hours and therefore income for them during pandemics, that could explain it.…

“Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people...". Yes Daniel, but transgender women, to my knowledge, don't menstruate. Which is what Rowling is…

Transgender. Gender identity. Non-binary. What’s interesting about these ideas is that it seems to me that the surest way to affirm a binary, is to make it the bookends of a continuum. That makes it not only real, but…

The terrible mistake (I think) in substituting equality for justice. Justice is represented by scales. It'd be a clearer metaphor if they put things on the scales. You can balance grapes and a tennis ball, or a book and…

Testify! US companies (many already bankrupt pre-Covid) borrowed over $750 billion extra in the last 3 months, due to government underwriting. This is what fixing the economy means, giving our money to cowboys to pay…

How does a mind reader read minds? By understanding that while we think ‘me’ is in our heads, in fact most of the time we’re following pretty simple shared patterns of behaviour, that we don’t notice. Derren says here…

The panic-buying has been debunked so many times. We're drama-tarts, only maximum outrage will do. There are very few 'panic buyers'. It's every shopper buying a bit more, to avoid having to come to the shops with a…

Pauline exhibiting her mastery of the English language. Like the people in the locked down tower blocks. A favourite of @[725606566:2048:Kell]'s.

No links to Victoria so far, apparently. Meaning we’re seeing exactly the same thing in NSW now - failure to properly eliminate (National Cabinet decision), opening up, spreading the remaining virus around…

Blue is Victoria, grey is NSW. Over that period where I’ve put the red line you can see Victoria still had community transmission, NSW mostly didn’t. Then you see Victoria take off, around the blue arrow. What was that…

So we all sit here, watching the cases grow day-by-day, and what does Gladys have to offer? Stern lectures about how naughty we are because cases are going up. Do your fucking job Gladys, you're the idiot who opened the…

We teach people subjects, like maths and science and English, but we don't teach them how society actually works. How all that knowledge works in everyday life. So there's this growing group of people who, without that…

I use social media as a gauge of public thinking. For Australia it worries me every day. Still in denial of the danger we’re in, overwhelmingly posts are still about ourselves or some form of ‘happy’ distraction from…

The 7-day rolling average of community transmission for NSW is the one to watch. Easy to look at daily figures and think they're OK, but then you miss the trend. Been trending up for nearly 2 weeks now. The virus is…

A plan that turns a pandemic into a set of rules to follow and a daily blame-game is no plan. It's the absence of basic public health planning. If you're a parent or teacher and you're reduced to writing a list of rules…

Going back to this reality filter. Society is literally just ideas fighting each other. Not people - ideas use people to further their agendas. Ideas are living things, they're not stuck in books. Unless you train hard…

Listening to Hugh talk about this book. Saying that sociability is the core of humanity (agree), and that love and compassion is what creates sociability (fundamentally disagree). The usual idea that we have to be…

The risk to NSW. NSW has low case numbers right now. Here's Victoria's graph of case numbers for the pandemic. They had months (the red line) of low case numbers before the cases exploded in late June. They had…

National Cabinet is a PR stunt. Parliament was dissolved so there's been no opposition allowed to the government's decisions for months. Our knowledge of our own governance is so appalling that the corruption of that…

One of Lennon’s best songs I think, done beautifully. Musos are a dime a dozen. But not great songwriters.

I have nothing against the defence forces, but a thought experiment...we would never expect the defence forces to make a profit or even break even. It’d be a ridiculous expectation, we know they’re performing a public…

I've shifted more attention to Twitter now, FB is like reading the social pages and classifieds in an old local newspaper. Probably why those old local papers have all gone bankrupt. Twitter discusses things, though it…

Back to this brilliant research published in the BMJ. I've marked with an X now where schools, public transport, many workplaces, pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops would sit. All extremely high risk in NSW right now.…

Michael Cohen’s book says Trump hired an actor to pretend to be Barack Obama, who he would then ritualistically humiliate and then fire. There’s even a picture of it. (P.S. check out the trophy on the desk. Probably…

Be mindful of this phrase? It's conspiracy theory folk suggesting you go and watch loon videos on YouTube about loon conspiracies, rather than follow official sources. Populism is spreading, much more lethal than Covid…

Victoria is what this virus does if you open up with the virus still spreading. You'd need to have your head pretty firmly inserted up your own backside not to see that pattern repeated all over the world. Why do we…

When you lock up a virus by locking down people, the virus becomes milder. (Why lockdowns not only stop virus spreading, they make it much less dangerous, very few scientists are noticing that yet.) If you’re not sure…

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…

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,…

Because in my experience people have very little knowledge of how politics actually works, ScoMo the professional marketing man continually pulls the wool over our eyes. Take the masterful spin of ‘Covid normal by…

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…

In NAIDOC week, read Gammage’s book to completely change how you think about this whole topic. Aboriginal Australia was nothing like what you might have been taught or imagined. It was a manufactured Garden of Eden, a…

I’m surprised how many people never saw The Name of the Rose. Based on Eco’s superb book, a medieval whodunit set in a monastery but with meanings across so many levels, it’s up to you how deep you dive in. Dark and…

George Orwell coined the term Doublethink in 1984, to mean people persuaded through propaganda language to believe two mutually contradictory things at once. Classic examples are 'Covid Safe' and 'Covid Normal'. Orwell…

Replace ‘the virus’ in this sentence with ‘domestic violence’, and try reading it again. How does it go?

Another thing I didn’t just make up 🙂 One of modern science’s greatest weaknesses is its very poor knowledge of its own history. Economics the same. I found the vitamin C link when researching my own whooping cough, in…

Most of the vaccines aren’t even designed to give you immunity, so re-infections are highly possible. I’m sure many of my friends on FB stopped reading what I say about the pandemic months ago. I’m actually quite…

This government can't believe how easily it gets away with spin. As Michael says, we just need to 'think about it'. Good luck with that, we're off getting fake tans, wasted, and booking holidays.

Far out, this is Germany. Germany! Most organised nation on Earth. That European summer was a total disaster. Fingers crossed every day we’ve killed off Covid here, if we haven’t, this will be us in the New Year.…

Staff training is so important, even in bookstores.

Same spin, different country. Fast-spreading, horseshit. Incompetence in conservative government. At the same time this same government is threatening to take schools to court if they close to control the virus. We’re…

The number of infected people that breaks a contact tracing system is only about 50. NSW now has 28, with a big spike on that due tomorrow. And at this stage the contact tracers haven’t even been able to find the origin…

If you wanted electrical work done, you’d ask an electrician. But experts in areas like science, governance, and public administration are told their views are just ‘opinions’ like anybody else’s. This contempt for…

Every time we tell people that their study at school doesn’t really matter in the longer term, we undermine education just that little bit more. Nothing really matters in the longer term, taken in isolation. In the…

William Topley. In the 1930s one of the first researchers on the idea of herd immunity. The idea that if enough of us are immune to a disease, it will prevent it spreading at epidemic levels. This is why it pays to do…

Those who don't want to fight the virus have weaponised contact tracing as the silver bullet that can keep everything open. It won't work, it hasn't worked anywhere, exponential growth quickly swamps the tracers.…

Rather than seeing 2020 as some horrible year, at Christmas we could maybe see the similarities with what Christmas is actually about? The incarnation of the eternal in the body of a man. A reminder to humans of…

“In Nothing We Trust”, the motto of our times. Without institutions, superstition, chaos and conspiracies replace trust. Have a look at the graphic for the US alone. The definition of an institution is “stable, valued,…

This is a vortex tube. A miraculous thing hidden in industrial sheds. Compressed air enters the chamber (the bit with EXAIR written on it), and forms a vortex; like a mini-tornado. That vortex separates the air into two…

In our maths books, when we do trigonometry, are angles. What we don’t get taught is how angles were once the centre of all knowledge. An angle is a deviation. Trig lets us measure the size of the deviation, but it…

Happy Birthday! Settled with a good book?

It's not a coincidence I don't think that bipolar disorder flourishes in a world addicted to binary thinking. It's the same phenomenon. The medicalisation of depression over time has stripped away most of that wider…

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…

You can't judge a book by its cover? Maybe. But everything I didn't like about John Howard is somehow in that look. Sneaky, mean-spirited, small-minded, vindictive, appealing to the worst side of us. Encouraged…

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 have a theory that Facebook is turning into a giant newspaper, produced by the public. Not only that many people get their news from FB - which is true - but that just about everything you see in the FB newsfeed is…

One of the recurring patterns in history that I think doesn’t get noticed much is how the powerful end up civilised by those they rule over. Big Bad Bill was a bad boy, civilised by marriage. Many men are civilised in…

Stephen Toulmin is one of my heroes. Now departed, his life work was the study of arguments, reasoning and how to make good decisions. Toulmin always got frustrated by people looking for either absolute answers to…

This is the average date that countries in most major parts of the world came into existence. Notice Europe has the oldest date here - it was from Europe that the big modern empires came, and it was them who divided the…

Sometimes a book can help change a life. Latour’s Science in Action was one of those, for me. Always hated the title, it sounds so boring, but it’s one of the most revolutionary books of our time, it can change how you…

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…

Waleed nails the Pell issue, this is a SUPERB piece. Highly recommended reading. Societies whose only moral emotion is outrage, and who mistake vengeance for justice, don’t survive. We have no clue how government works,…

The FB outage yesterday made me think of public squares. Cities used to revolve around them, a place that was a dedicated space for the public, as a group. In modern times I think TV played this role for a long time, it…

In this book I co-wrote with Alan Bain, we looked at why education usually fails. Kids learn, but the schools and universities they go to contribute very little to that learning. It’s hard to raise that without…

I still think we often have society upside down, in our thinking. Take kids, and school. We often assume society is made and driven by adults. I think it’s the opposite. Not only does our own social circle of adult…

My annual trawl through NAPLAN. These are two schools said to have made ‘remarkable’ gains, by strategies such as employing a writer in residence, and having regular meetings to track student progress. Both ‘gains’ are…

One of the beauties of English is that it has a vast vocabulary. There are probably more words in the English language than in many other languages combined. It’s the universal language, it’s picked up words from other…

“The thing that Daniel and most others haven’t internalized is the fact that if they have 800 Facebook friends, only about 10 or 15 love them. For an especially lovable person, maybe it’s as high as 30. Between 1 and…

Nothing is true or false without a context, I think that's important. Something can be true or false in very many different ways, all at the same time.

Lithgow air quality monitoring stations are now in place. Worth having a look, you can see either end of town has very poor to hazardous air quality (dangerous to health). This was this morning, since this time, the…

Facebook told us the outcome of the election in another way. Comparing ourselves to others is the fuel of society. Labor’s justice-based campaign couldn’t match the ‘aspiration’ campaign from the LNP. People don’t want…

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…

The epidemic of plastic surgery and facial alteration is starting to make more sense to me. Throughout history the face of a ruler has been airbrushed into masks and images, as a unifying blank canvas. Specific…

3 million people per week worldwide move from the countryside to the city. Countrysides the world over are emptying of people, if not already empty, and drones and other equipment are taking over farming. I see this as…

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…

Darkness and light. Geometry. The Romans and Egyptians entombed things, some of their greatest legacies are their tombs. But it's not just about death, to entomb is to make implicit, rather than explicit. Knowledge can…

Everyday social life is like weather, it can change from hour to hour, and politics follows short cycles too. So most of what we experience in daily life is these short-term patterns and cycles, changes in fashion, the…

Sounds like the pitch for Fatal Attraction? I've been reading Esther Perel's remarkable book, Mating in Captivity. Sort of a Proust primer on love for the 21st century. A taste: "The grand illusion of committed love is…

Text on a page looks like shadows. Not a metaphor I don't think, text is the highly processed shadows of things themselves, that text talks about. Darkness and light. The word 'tree' doesn't look like the shadow of a…

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…

An example I think of how splitting knowledge up into 'subjects' destroys education. Trigonometry again, we all learn at school how to do it. Sometimes a teacher might even tell us the 'history', how the Greeks invented…

The graph below is fascinating research, the richer you are, the poorer you think you are relative to others. It's called affluenza. There's something in the bible about that, Matthew 13:12. Describes Australia the…

Way cooler than the Da Vinci Code. Shadows told the time with the sundial, here they create space. Geometry. The day I realised that the drawings in the maths textbook were these same shadows on a page - boom. We just…

I think emoticons actually reinforce a misunderstanding, that feelings and emotions are 'ours'. 'You hurt 'my' feelings'. The quickest way to completely transform your life I think is to experience feelings as relations…

Wouldn't progress be women sitting with legs ajar, rather than men sitting with legs together? Where there's a lack of room like on a bus here, sure, don't hog the space next to you. But to turn the act of spreading…

This guy's software can create hundreds of thousands of books automatically, which he sells on Amazon. It made me think about the TV stories you see about how machines are going to be smarter than us, and we should…

Maths has a 'purity' that many people interpret religiously - some even call maths the language of God. As if the more mathematical something is, the truer it is, the closer to God. I think it's all nonsense, maths is…

You gave me the answer To love eternally I love you, and You, you seem to like me. - Paul McCartney, accidentally writing the greatest love song of all time.

"The idea of "completion" stems from the hope crystallised in fairy tales. We meet the princess or the prince, we will live happily ever after. Any mature adult knows that this is absurd, but knowing it isn't the same…

James Lovelock has turned 100. A scientist and inventor, here he is with one of his early devices, a gas chromatograph. Some now call his work (together with Lynn Margulis, now sadly gone) the greatest shift in human…

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,…

Normally translation is used to mean converting a message into another language. But one of the neatest things I learned from a range of people is that all messages are translations, even in the same language. The…

I think the success of science is down to one thing mostly - it focuses on properties, not essences. Rather than try to define what something is, it defines how it relates to other things - its properties. Einstein of…

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,…

A rainbow doesn’t exist without a person looking at it. This is actually what Einstein meant by relativity, nothing in reality just exists, it exists relative-to some context. For example, is Elvis dead? In our timeline…

I wonder sometimes if the loudest voices on climate denial remember this fact. Having spent a few decades now actively and wilfully spreading misinformation, a time will come when they may be put on trial (literally)…

Maybe the fire crisis is nothing to do with fires, or with firefighting. These fires are the natural result of myths Australians tell themselves. I'm very interested that books like these are starting to unpick…

Spending some of my Christmas break re-reading these amazing books. You’ll never look at Australia the same way again, if you read these. For tens of thousands of years, tens of millennia before the pyramids or anything…

Everything about how 2019 ended, including people huddled on the shore for safety from fires, scared of their own country, converged for me upon Gammage's words about post-1788 Australia. Right now we're all mostly just…

Bradman used to say that professionalising cricket would destroy it. Money corrupts. Huge truckloads of money corrupt absolutely. It's hard to find a sport now that isn't run by bookies and cheats. Every night I watch…

If you're one of the Greer-haters, it's worth actually hearing her speak, particularly in a context like this where it's just a one-on-one exchange. One of our finest minds, so refreshing to hear thought rather than…

Margaret Atwood, I think making the important point that many social movements like #metoo end up as squabbles between people within the movement, and the real issue gets lost. (I don’t agree with her that moderates are…

We would look at this pic and see that the most complex and evolved life is living in the village, in the valley. Michel Serres reverses that entirely. “Animals, trees and stones...Reckon now the progressive ages of the…

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…

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how…

This is very true, in fact vegetarian diets kill even more living things than meat-eating diets. It’s just that they’re not the easily seen, cuddly big macrofauna which vegetarians often campaign for. Life and death are…

I don't think there's any need for a kid to have a phone during class time, or even between classes. if they need to contact home they can always go and ask to use the phone for that, in a break. But I also think we're…

Before the Lance Armstrong situation blew up, I couldn't watch professional cycling because it looked rotten to the core. It still does. Cricket maybe even more so. T20 is a creation of bookmakers. Players now rich…

Language is fascinating. Where does the expression 'having sex' come from? We don't 'have eating' or 'have cleaning' or 'have gardening'.

Do you work somewhere where your performance is measured? If so you may love this book. Nurses, teachers, police, anybody who suffers in the world of performance measures and KPIs. I have nothing against measurement,…

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

Many people hate maths, or say they can’t do it. I think this is because maths is so badly taught, and that bad teaching comes from a misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Maths is the study of patterns. Where it got…

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…

Do you see a lot of kids holding pens and pencils as if they have crippling arthritis in their hands? Some shocking pencil grips out there. But does it matter?…

Some of the most solemn drivel in public debates is the stuff on A.I. Artificial intelligence is portrayed as computers becoming brains. Brains don’t ‘think’ either so it’s layer upon layer of drivel. There will never…

The hidden secret of fruit, like reading books almost universally lauded as a great thing. Alas. ““People usually try to improve their diet by eating more fruit - but fruit cultivated for humans is much higher in sugar…

So, when you sit and watch Ricky Ponting, with his $65 million in the bank, commentate on the ‘Big Bash’, doesn’t it ring alarm bells - cricket is losing its way? Gambling is trashing the game, and its culture. The Poms…

Iconoclasts were famously known as the people who would go into churches to smash ‘idols’. All the beautiful iconography in churches was their enemy, which they saw as a distraction from true religion. But iconoclasm…

DH Lawrence, who was himself a school teacher, often said that education forced on all people was an evil. To be ‘uneducated’ is not the same thing as not being smart, it just means to not spend a lot of time in schools…

Rather than get rid of Facebook, we should recognise that it’s now a public service, like water or electricity. It should be regulated, as Cook says. That’s how these corporate giants make such enormous sums of money,…

Researchers studying the remains of the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses 2, who died more than 3000 years ago, concluded that he died of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was only isolated by Koch in 1882. Notice how our technologies…

This is what has always struck me as the single most important thing people need from education. Not any individual subject or type of knowledge. The capacity for sustained attention on something.…

“For millennia we have been seeking the secret of the Pyramids...one Indo-European civilization and one Semitic one loved the light, Greece and Israel, developed to revelation by the Word; one Semitic civilization and…

I still puzzle over how Facebook, the ultimate ‘social network’, became something so overwhelmingly focused on individuals posting about themselves. Have never had much luck getting many to agree that this is…

Here’s Facebook stating the problem of my post yesterday, in their own words. They want the platform to be more interactive, rather than passive. More social.…

On average we use a metaphor every 10-15 seconds, when speaking. Why? I reckon because nothing can be defined without reference to something that it's 'like'. It's why we have dictionaries, for example, definitions of…

Increasing numbers of researchers, including in cognitive science itself, are realising that ‘thinking’ is actually not something that happens in our heads. It’s a set of practical skills that extract constants and…

Sometimes news stories from the past make super interesting reading. 2014, Tony Abbott was PM. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-15/budget-2014-funding-cut-to-asic-business-regulation/5453816

My main reason for being on Facebook. It brings knowledge back to life. "If we were traditional knowers or information processors, we would gather evidence, listen to arguments and their justifications, and arrive at…

At school we had to sing the hymn, based on Kipling’s Recessional, from which ‘Lest We Forget’ comes. Do people still sing it in schools? It doesn’t have the meaning we give it today, as shown in the picture. It’s maybe…

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…

Do we really understand what knowledge is? I think a lot of the time, no, and worse a lot of idiot things happen because of that misunderstanding.

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…

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…

Budget day tomorrow. Know how they say governments should ‘balance their books’ and not have debts and should aim for surpluses? It seems right, because it’s how we as individuals and families have to manage budgets.…

The knowledge pyramid is a famous way of representing how knowledge becomes wisdom. It’s superficially appealing, but is another example I think of how our tools shape how we think. IT people love it because it’s really…

The cerebral mystique. There’s a lot of it about. “The more we feel that our brains encapsulate our essence as individuals, and the more we believe that our thoughts and actions simply emanate from the bundle of flesh…

Anthropologists have been studying how humans use objects. Take a soccer ball as an example. Without the ball the players would just stand around on a field chatting, but with the ball suddenly there’s a hugely complex…

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…

A few book reviews. This one is a must-read if you're interested in science and how it works, and what it needs to do to stay relevant to people. Stengers is a world-class thinker, who in this book looks at how 'fast'…

Book recommendation 2. This one is a corker, about how animals are far more interesting than we think. Humans have so often started with the assumption that they are smarter than animals, that animals have limited or no…

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…

Neils Bohr, a science giant that many have never heard of. We have so much to learn from him. “The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are…

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…

Is the purpose of language really to communicate? If you say to your partner, “I love you”, and they say “I know, you told me yesterday”, you’d probably think something was wrong. Language is probably always like that I…

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…

The experience of people in solitary confinement often seems to challenge some of our ideas. You’d think being locked in a tiny room, alone, would make a person feel hemmed in. But often it’s the opposite, they never…

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…

A post just for the two of you, from Rowan Williams again. The "vastly complicated and enticing and frustrating borderland, where physics and philosophy and psychology blend" is the space I work in, in religious ideas.…

The opposition between what’s beyond us in some way - transcendent - and what is inherent to us - immanent, is one of the big tensions in history. But, surprise, I think all opposites are fake. Take a company as an…

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…

The bile in the comments, especially from women, what a world. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of incoherent rage and outrage. Looking forward to reading her essay when it’s published.

Have lived this firsthand. Steiner was an occultist, and occultism was very big in the 19th and earlier 20th century. The term occult and 'cult' are related - occult thinking tends to produce cults, a word that has…

I wonder if political debates, like the one currently surrounding David Leyonhjelm, would get further if people actually made the effort to understand the beliefs and ideas that drive the different views. Leyonhjelm for…

Writers can make us really think, I reckon.

I rarely post anything about my personal life, or that of my family, but Facebook is full of that sort of stuff, people can’t seem to get enough of telling the world about everything they’re doing. Often the same people…

Not sure how many have had a close look at the Facebook "Access Your Information" function that's now available? Hats off to FB, it's bloody well done. Superb even. I was just able to get a nicely formatted single…

Maybe our increasing anxiety around privacy tells us a lot about how we see our own society. A lot of it seems focused on ideas about somebody - corporations, governments mostly - spying on us and using what they find…

Chinese whispers. All meaning is the meaning made by the person receiving a message. All messages are translations, even in the same language. An extension on the idea that you can’t ever really know another person -…

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…

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…

If you look up images of ‘arguing’, nearly all of them will come back as people shouting at each other. Why are we so afraid of argument, and why do we think it means shouting at each other? In my experience most people…

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…

So language people, why do people ‘have’ sex? They don’t have gardening, or shopping, cleaning or driving.

If thinking and language is mostly metaphors, here’s one that I think might matter. Knots versus boxes. We tend to think in box ways, we separate things and our ideas about things into boxes, with an inside and an…

An interesting question - what *is* language? Is it a material thing, or not? If it’s not material, what is it? I think words are real, ‘material’ things, like chairs, or cars. Words have real physical effects, saying…

A thought piece for the latest hysteria, Roundup. Moving on from the plastic bag hysteria and drought hysteria. Lessons from past hysterias, detention for not reading.

Kidult, the child-adult. Hadn’t heard the word before, but adults with the mindset of adolescents, and adolescents aping what they see as adult behaviour seems very real. People well into middle age, often with no…

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…

Happy Birthday smiley! Hope you and Audrey enjoy more Book Week today. Love you :)

An observation from many years of Facebook. (Not being critical here, more genuine curiosity about how things work.) There's not much interaction. People overwhelmingly seem to post about themselves, or their friends…

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…

So...now the book/essay is out. And as most reviewers say, deeply nuanced and researched, as all her work is. And I will guarantee - those who are outraged by her won't read it, as they haven't read anything else she's…

There are 15 people dead for every person alive today. It seems like those nearly 100 billion humans who once lived are gone. But much of what they did in their lives never left us, they shaped our languages,…

What’s unique about faces is something I learned from Gilles Deleuze. The muscles and tissues there, unlike everywhere else in your body, aren’t there to perform a physical task. They’re there to express emotions. The…

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…

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’…

There was a time when being ‘well read’ was a thing. I doubt it is any more, how would it even be possible, and what would it even mean? The vast majority of books that are written are never read, except by their…

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…

One step towards wisdom? We can't control how others see us. “Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need…

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…

Was reading a book on the weekend, which made the suggestion that rather than have wars between Science and Religion, it's much better to move away from names of things like that and ask instead - what is the 'supreme…

The Da Vinci Code was one of the biggest selling books of all time. The root of the stories is Gnosticism, which is one big reason I think the book sold so well. We say we live in a secular world, but even the most…

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…

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…

Translation is usually thought of as something you do between different languages. But actually all meaning is translated, even within the same language. What we think we’re communicating to others is always translated…

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…

I was one of those critical of John Howard and Peter Costello's massive 'middle class welfare' increases to family payments during the mining boom. But to give Howard his due (I don't think Costello was ever a fan), he…

Hmm, what does the book box in the lunch room have in store today...ooh.

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…

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…

Lots being said (ha) about free speech at the moment. Stanley Fish rarely disappoints. He wrote a book called "There is no such thing as free speech...and it's a good thing too." Here's a short interview with Fish about…

Germaine Greer is a vastly under-appreciated Australian. So, maybe a series of quotes. Today...libraries. "A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity." "Libraries are reservoirs…

Are you a rentier? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth-banks-google-facebook-society-economy-parasites?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Air pollution costs Australia between 11 and 25 billion dollars a year in health costs. And we're one of the better countries. A real sleeper health issue. The National Pollutant Inventory…

I see a lot of students and even adults holding pens and pencils in sometimes horrendous ways. My own kids included! Maybe it's not as big an issue now, that typing is much more common. But the physical strain some…

Another one of the interesting myths that live with us. Average life expectancy. You can ask just about anyone, and they'll tell you that we live much longer today than our ancestors, mostly due to advances in…

We think we're a bit clever for religion these days, but the true message of Easter is much more profound than all the self-help, self-esteem, self-improvement and status-seeking we've replaced it with in our lives.…

Gas companies are exactly like property developers. Disgusting vermin. Both use the same language, we need more 'supply'. Which just means they both want even more public land, having used up what they'd already been…

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.

This is what you've been saying @[728961585:2048:Angela Gray]? Reading it described this way, it sounds like the same concerns most small businesses have. Small business is rarely very profitable, there aren't economies…

Facebook is struggling with this now. It's already at the point where it really could or should be a public service, regulated as a public institution.

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…

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…

So many ticks for this one. You could put it even more broadly - always remember the people you're arguing with, are people. Not some ideas rammed into a body. https://www.facebook.com/sogoodnow/videos/686990368151497/

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On the…

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On 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…

Do you know anybody with 'Smiling Depression'? I think people with depression often seem happy, but it's good to see that people are more aware of that now. One of the main causes is social comparison, comparing…

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…

I think @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato] sends me these because he wants me to be unpopular.…

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…

It really has changed the world, or better the world has used it to change itself. Lots of people only come to FB to share their personal lives, and that's a choice, but FB is doing so, so much more.…

Knowledge is in the world, not of the world. "On the planking, on the ship's bulwarks, on the sea, with the course of the sun through the sky and the ship, an unreadable and wrenching script takes shape, takes shape and…

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…

A second language is a powerful thing.

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…

Professor Talisse is a clever man. If you want to have fun, don’t try to have fun, if you want friendship, don’t try to make friends. If you want democracy, don’t try to have democracy. Democracy comes when people have…

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…

Seneca said this 2000 years ago. He would have gone pale living now, when there are several *million* new books each year. Here are some intriguing other facts about books. Intriguing because while we publish more than…

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…

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax…

Conversation a female member of my staff just had at the local child care, with an old man out for his daily walk. Old man: heading off to work? Staff member: yes, just on my way now, after I drop my son off Old man:…

Those were the days, back when books were popular, and video cameras could do your back in. You know, I don't remember if Michael Drengenberg, Tobias Drengenberg or Kirsten Drengenberg ever even used this camera? Man…

The Flat-Earthers are a growing movement, apparently. It does seem like it’s less about the Earth and more about a growing distrust in any sort of authority at all, in politics or now knowledge too. Is the Earth flat…

Usual alarmist silliness. The solution is simple. Not less Facebook, but less personal sharing on Facebook. It’s a social site, it’s about humans as a community, not as individuals, about sharing our common concerns and…

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…

This sign is most peoples’ wet dream writ large. But it’s bollocks. Here’s to the bureaucrats, society’s heroes. Why? It’s pretty simple. Every generation lives a certain time. It can’t reinvent history in every…

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…

@[606028898:2048:Jason], you’d mentioned being interested in the ideas about our consciousness being spread between ourselves and the world around us? Manzotti, the Italian robotics researcher and philosopher who’s at…

The definition of a fanatic or extremist is somebody who will insist on doing the same thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The new Trump tax cuts will be like the George W Bush tax cuts, crippling the…

It’s not a popular view. But I reckon there are many who hold it, maybe secretly. And I like thinking about the people for whom this time of year is horrible, and who can’t wait for it to be done. (That’s not me,…

The weakest force in the universe - gravity - is what shapes the entire universe. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth. At the time of the writing of the gospels, ‘meek’ meant gentle, or soft. Gentle…

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…

The saying is true - it's not what you say (or think), it's what you do that defines you. Huge implications across life and work and dealing with people everywhere. "We should be very careful when taking any notice of…

Publishing too. "Kids get what they need from Google..."

FB is changing the world.…

Don't actually expect people to buy this, academic publishers charge too much. But I enjoyed co-writing it - it's about why you can't tell if schools or universities are actually teaching you or your kids anything or…

This may move people. Its basic message, that teachers should treat children as human beings, and have high expectations of them, is impossible to fault. The problem is, that applies no matter what work you do. This is…

Can recommend Facebook's Activity Log, it's great. Particularly if you're trying to find something from an older conversation, makes it a doddle.

It did change my life, stopping trying for that one, continuous 8-hour sleep. I remember my parents often being up in the middle of the night, it's a beautiful, quiet time. One of the challenges is, as the writer says,…

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.

So true, kids teach adults more than adults teach kids. Kids also change societies, they don't just wait for adults to do that for them. Most changes to language for example come from kids. Pets are not children either.…

You can't argue with research. Although I'm sure I'm reading correctly that the 3 times a month guys have the lowest risk of all? http://www.higherperspectives.com/ejaculating-1770078249.html

A bit of a guilty secret of mine, that I don't much like travel. I also don't like that ever more places in the world are spoiled by people 'finding themselves' through travel. Nomads historically are peoples who move…

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/

A ripper. http://theunboundedspirit.com/drugs-dont-cause-addiction-this-short-animated-video-will-change-your-view-on-drugs-forever/?utm_content=buffer7e988&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

People should post whatever they like to FB. But this was an interesting way to classify the results. A fun and maybe even important read, modern etiquette under development. The humour thing isn't quite right I don't…

Not an ongoing vendetta against Brian Cox (like he'd care anyway). He's a lovely bloke. But the arrogance of saying this is a book about 'how to think' for starters. As if only science thinks. And then to say: "The…

I think I posted this one a week or so ago, can't remember. But necessary reading for anybody who wants to understand why people like Trump or Pauline Hanson are popular. And it isn't because people who follow them are…

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…

The idea of framing and reframing is something I would put right at the top of a list of things everybody needs to understand, for their health and happiness. A good example is stress, where so often people focus on the…

Ricky Gervais saw this with The Office. Millions of people spend much of their lives working in organisations that they think are fundamentally stupid. Understanding why they put up with it is great reading. "A recent…

Maybe this year if everybody subscribed to a decent newspaper, it might help the world a lot. Journalism is really struggling to survive. Seriously, it doesn't cost a lot to do. Personally I'd avoid anything owned by…

For those interested in the universal basic income idea (everybody getting a living wage whether they have a job or not). Not a bad summary of the underlying ideas at the link below, here's a taste: "In the mythology of…

Before you go out and buy any sort of chair or couch, really worth reading this. Also a nice corrective to a lot of the stuff being written about the dangers of sitting.…

The old perennial! I'm with DH Lawrence on this one, we intellectualise child raising far too much: "Why are we so afraid of anger, of wrath, and clean, fierce rage? What cowardice possess us? Why would we reduce a…

Oh please please please. If you're watching Lithgow City Council. Not one of you useless boneheads even acknowledge an email about internet service in Lithgow. Probably can't use the internet.

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…

Do the Chilli Peppers just keep re-writing the same bad song, over and over?

Putting the old school teacher hat on, a very different way to understand recent terrible events is to see that kids blow themselves up in some parts of the world for the same underlying reason kids binge drink here.…

Barry McDonagh really knows how to get rid of anxiety, permanently and fast. And anxiety and depression are related, so it will deal with the latter to a large extent too. He's giving away his latest book, as an ebook,…

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a fancy name for that tingling people some get when listening to certain sounds, or having their hair cut, scalp massaged, or listening to pages in books being turned etc.…

My kids learn more from YouTube than books.

Can't warm to LinkedIn. Like a social network without anything social. Feels like reading a stack of CVs before interviewing.

Translated into English it means "My War", or "My Battle". Trying to remember who wrote a book called "Battlelines..." ;)

These people are very very angry. About just about everything it seems. A Bex and a good lie down maybe. https://www.facebook.com/AusTeaParty

From Barry McDonagh. Really is this simple, even though you need to do it over and over to get used to it. Also stops depression, because they're pretty much the same condition. "Here are three simple steps you can use…

Thanks to David Gorman for the link. Loved this: "Láadan, a feminist language developed in the early nineteen-eighties, includes words like radíidin, defined as a “non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so…

Dear Facebook. Please take your 'suggested posts' and sit on them and rotate.

Exactly. Substitute Howard for Thatcher in the Oz context. http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/16/bury-not-just-thatcher-but-thatcherism

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…

Hugely entertaining reading about the King of the "Ju-liar" club :-) http://www.phonytonyabbott.com/lies-and-deceptions/lies-deceptions

This is the main toad who introduced Republican attack politics into Australia, designed to not just win elections but to undermine peoples' faith in government more generally (he works for people such as tobacco…

Please can I get a million likes so I can screw up Facebook the same way chain letters did the post and then spam did to email?

To save the time and effort in reading News Limited papers and understanding the new Coalition's media policy. It's all in one tweet from Master Rupert, who's shifted his campaign from the UK to here.…

Think I'm missing something here. This was in the press this week, and of course it gets lots of "social media is the apocalypse" support. But seems to me that the only way this might happen is if: 1) you have your…

's last rule for husbands. Rule 5: make sure you remember if your wife is also on FB before publishing rules about being a husband.

thinks Facebook would be a far more interesting place if more people had less hair.

thinks every person on Facebook should send him $1.

may be the ugliest person on Facebook.

has got way behind reading FB.

is on a language purge. "It's = it is" is the only time you use a friggin' apostrophe with its.

is isn't a 'friend farmer' on Facebook.