Science & nature

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…

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

For those interested in the detailed science, this recent preprint talks about how damage to your immune T-cells is a likely cause of the post-Covid infections that have been plaguing communities - people being…

The oldest you will ever be is the day you’re born. Everything you inherit, in your biology and culture, is ancient. And then everything you add to both of those in your life is brand-new and young. The more you…

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

Semi-autonomous driving technology is already a revolution for older drivers, and those who share the road with them.

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…

Most people I know haven’t had a booster in about 4 years. Scott Morrison said they didn’t need one. Scott Morrison gets his science from Hillsong Ministries.

I’ve never had a fly or maggot infestation in any place that I’ve lived. I wonder if this is down to the more recent trend of no fly screens in new homes, because they come into conflict with trending style choices like…

The 'balance' people think needs to be made between disease control and their social life? We learned how to control disease to GIVE us social lives. It doubled our life expectancy. You don't control a disease by…

The protests in Iran predictably being described as a popular uprising, ‘the people’ trying to take back control of the country etc. We love these fantasies. This all happened before in Iran, in 1978. They had a…

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

All the poll numbers look terrible for Trump, particularly in the groups that he brought across to the Republican side, like Latino voters. Total collapse in support. This is how populist surges always end, the crazy…

One of the benefits of AI is that it cuts through BS quickly. I was discussing my recent Covid infection with it, now a month ago. When i said I was back at work, the AI said ‘oh, already? After such a serious illness?’…

One of the world’s leading astrophysicists describing his first encounter with AI in his work. It took it 20 minutes to understand something he’s spent a lifetime trying to master. As he says, he has to join this…

This is the experience of so many people now. There’s a great silence about how sick people are, to admit to it would be to admit we know we’re full of shit. For a couple of years we pretended these endless waves of…

From Barack and Michelle Obama’s statement on Trumpian America. You can see here why the problem with America is…America. It’s not being taken over by anybody, every American is encouraged to sink the boot into…

Is it not obvious that this same pattern repeats over and over in America? Shit happens, people take to the streets, nothing is fixed. This is the broken culture on full display. Basic, calm, public administration…

I talk a lot about imitation and imitative rivalry. Imitation (copying) is the centre of human life. Rivalry (Rene Girard studied this) comes because to imitate another person is one of the most hostile or aggressive…

America’s foundation was a revolution. Societies who are founded by revolutions tend to never shed the operating system of that revolution i.e. deeply held views about authority and tryranny, about carrying arms and…

When the pre-eminent scientific journal in the world says hang on, AI easily already passes all of the tests for intelligence we devised years ago, and MUCH more, but humans keep shifting the bar higher to try to deny…

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…

I posted about the new way they’re regenerating forest in desserts, where instead of just planting new trees (which usually fails), they’re targeting the roots of old trees that have been cut down over generations,…

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

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

Margaret Thatcher is like a god to today’s conservatives, one of the founders of modern conservatism. You can see here from her speech almost 40 years ago how science dominated the discussion then on climate change,…

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

I trained as a materials engineer. Still the cutting edge of all science and technology, nearly all progress is the development of new materials. Like this beauty. I’m sure if it got discussed on social media we’d…

We're living inside a revolution that will be written about for generations. Just imagine the current Opposition and One Nation coming to power right now, shutting all this down in favour of their old policy of…

In a year that included all the ‘Swasticar’ social media-driven nonsense, this is a remarkable triumph. The Model Y is engineering genius, the Model 3 too (it gets much less attention). Again, this has nothing to do…

Starlink is becoming a vital resource for remote regions, like Pacific islands, poorer nations without broadband and even remote parts of Australia. An NBN spokesperson told me once Starlink is so good they even advise…

The thing about back to nature/authenticity/getting away from it all movements is the ticket prices for entry. These are on the low side, and don't even include fuel. When people say they want to get away from it all,…

Another view of the Model Y 6-seater, about to be released in Oz. Seriously considering getting this, to replace our remnant combustion engine in the household, in the Kluger hybrid. The petrol price volatility with the…

Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia and Ras Laffan in Qatar are the global home of oil and gas production, respectively. Nowhere else churns out production like these, they’re the original and biggest sources of oil and gas.…

Today huge crowds gather mostly to see gigs. Why I call us a gig culture. But in 1851, they gathered at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, to see the wonders of modern science and technology, and how they would…

In many parts of Asia various measures to ration fuel have already begun. That’s because Asia is mostly still run by grown-ups, also why they took Covid much more seriously. Nothing in the West yet because the kidults…

Everything we label a political problem is really a social/cultural problem. Specifically that adult problems can’t be solved by adults with the understanding and attitudes of permanent teenagers. That’s not just some…

It's beautiful to see the social status mechanism brought into the light like this. 'Load-bearing for people's sense of self'. That's glorious. "Here is what the shock jocks and the Murdoch machine and the fossil fuel…

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

Insurance is my day job, for Council. Unaffordable insurance is a leading indicator of social collapse, because it means a society isn’t managing risks, leaving it all to insurance. A society that doesn’t manage risks -…

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

Many see modern activism as ‘democracy’ in action. The idea that ‘the people‘ rise up to bring about change. It’s all bollocks. Protest-activism is just the remnant of earlier revolutions. It’s exactly the same social…

We’re a culture where history is something that lasts about 10 minutes. And therefore we don’t see this sort of thing for what it actually is. Cultures that were founded by revolutions, endlessly reproducing that…

The great American delusion, that ‘the people’ is a thing. That’s because they’re a society founded by revolution, and it’s all they know.

This isn’t uncommon, that the elderly do the deliberate vandalism. The counterculture they grew up in never leaves them. Permanent revolutionaries. Kidults.

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

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

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

When you read the history of the first Industrial Revolution, the people who opposed it look like idiots now. Our current revolution is much bigger, to electric-powered societies. You get to choose right now whether you…

A fascinating insight into how driving changes qualitatively as an activity, once you’ve had prolonged experience of semi-autonomous technology. Just as these cars change the nature of cars fundamentally, they also…

The revolution that founded America was just over 250 years ago. What I think they and most of the rest of the world don’t notice is, that the US just keeps repeating that original revolutionary moment. Revolutionary…

I’m going to give concrete examples of kidult culture, rather than just mention it in general terms. A guy at work bought one of these, a BYD Shark hybrid ute. He’s a car guy, has owned over 20 cars. All combustion…

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

This guy traces the shift from institutions that build things, which we saw after WW2 in massive ‘nation-building’ efforts. To today, where nothing gets built. Where the main social activity is obstructing change,…

Outside all of the sponsored fake debates that social media society mistakes for reality, things are happening. Big things. A revolution. Quite seriously, don’t live to regret being the person who shouted at windmills…

Another miraculous revolution happening in broad daylight, which almost nobody knows about. Sitting alongside the Gliptins (the magical ‘weight loss’ drugs that do so many more semi-miraculous things) is a new type of…

Some of the nicest and smartest Americans will argue with you day and night that their cultural model of ‘the people’ running the country is democracy. When in reality it’s just their revolution, repeating itself over…

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

When Tesla unveiled its Cybercab in 2024, the car with no steering wheel or pedals and vast interior room that can also accommodate wheelchairs, many were sceptical. But they're now rolling them off the production line.…

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.…

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of…

The softly-softly 'market' approach to transition to renewable energy and EVs won't work. For starters markets are a fiction. And humans simply won't change if important change is needed, unless they're forced to. For…

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…

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…

We’re living inside a medical revolution, right now. The greatest leap forward since the invention of antibiotics. Status as always will determine the outcome. The status quo will resist - lots of GPs and specialists,…

And here come the combined diet and gym in a pill drugs. The revolution Stage 2. Making lean and muscular the new default, as it is for most animals already.

The revolutionary disruption the Gliptins will bring to societies. All of these industries will potentially cease to exist, or be crippled.

Today’s other GLP-1 story. Early days on this research, but it may be understating it at this stage to call GLP-1 drugs the new penicillin. They may be much bigger than that. And when combined with the new muscle…

I’m posting a lot about medical science breakthroughs lately, because it’s another revolution happening in our lifetimes. And can you guess the major thing that has accelerated these ‘remarkable’ cures for diseases that…

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…

Another medical breakthrough (they’re coming thick and fast). This time a drug, daraxonrasib, that doubles the survival time of people with pancreatic cancer, one of medicine’s greatest foes. Nearly always lethal, and…

This is Geoffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI. He won a Nobel Prize for his foundational work. Here he’s talking about whether AI is conscious and aware. (Yes.) And about how it will force us to re-define…

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…

Ask anybody how our democracies work and they’ll trot out the usual guff about parliaments and elections and voting etc. Since the 1990s all of that is gone. Social media algorithms govern our societies. Humans are…

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many…

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

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

In 1903, when Gandhi was in South Africa, he wrote that white people there should be "the predominating race." He also said black people "are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."

Human social life is equivalent to evolution. All of our trending obsessions are meaningless. Only one thing really matters, for our survival. We have to ruthlessly control how much humans are allowed to imitate one…

Such a decent guy. But this is the common misunderstanding, and why I talk about status all the time. Firstly that the community will rise up in some way. And secondly that 'vested interests' will motivate them to do…

These sorts of demos are so important for people to see the revolution we’re living, or can be living if we allow ourselves. Tesla’s latest update to its autonomous driving, in Australia, on busy night-time Sydney…

Lawrence is one of the world’s most famous theoretical physicists and science communicators. No ‘fanboy’. The technology is a revolution. The trip he mentions is over 8 hours of driving, urban and highways, more than…

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…

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

I can’t emphasise enough that you’ll regret missing the revolutionary things happening in our societies right now, if you can’t escape social media bubbles. Any other time in history would look on and shake their heads…

A detailed break-down of the revolutionary engineering innovations Tesla has created not just in its products, but in the even more important area - manufacturing. I know most won’t watch this, but it’s worth the time…

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…

I genuinely believe many if not most are simply unaware we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution. That thing that transformed civilisation itself a few hundred years ago, completely upending all comfortable…

The road conditions this winter have been appalling for driving on my daily commute. Very wet, dark, foggy, huge numbers of vehicles coming the other way because of the Mt Vic blockage, with all that headlight glare.…

There are 14 essential technologies that are required to get a car to drive itself. These same 14 are what’s needed to get AI to operate in the real world, in anything (you’ll soon see it in Tesla robots). Legacy…

America’s 250th birthday would have been a great time for them to realise that they, like all societies founded by revolution, never recovered and are still living that same revolution. What Americans call democracy is…

Traditional media is now caught up in the snowballing viral pearl-clutching over AI. This story of course framed as dreadful AI leading people astray. But where are these people being led astray? On social media. By…

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…

America was broken long before Trump. It won't be able to elect its way out of its problems. Elections are the mechanism its plutocrats have gamed to assume total power. America is a plutocracy because it's a…

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

This is the side of Musk that is rarely mentioned. He's a genuine believer in improving the human lot. A zealot for that improvement. Unlike earlier barons of industry, in the early 20th century or the much earlier…

When the iPhone was first released, many thought it was too expensive for ‘just a phone’. Then the world realised it was much much more than a phone. This tech analyst believes Tesla’s self-driving is at that tipping…

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

I’m in the tiny minority who finds the ‘alarming’ pace of AI development the most exciting thing about it. The sooner it breaks the status quo we’re living, the better. Including destroying the hypnotising hold social…

It’s became very popular to see ‘oligarchs’ as the root of evil in modern life. I shared a few weeks ago the fate of the oligarchs that led the first Industrial Revolution. They got very rich and powerful at the time,…

I've spent an adult lifetime studying technology and social change. The idea a status quo can 'manage' the implementation of a technological revolution (like AI) is laughable. The technology will overflow all of that…

The humanities gave us much more profound ways to understand time well before modern science. Take Proust's remarkable description of how the past never actually passes, it's always still here. That a simple taste or…

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

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

Kings and other high status individuals exist because status hierarchies control the spread of imitation, and therefore violence. Imitation produces rivalry, rivalry produces violence. That’s the fundamental law of…

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

The ‘code’ of human civilisation is imitation. Social media hacked it 3 decades ago, and we didn’t even notice. That’s what a hack is, a deception. Everybody, even distinguished scholars, who felt comfortable in the…

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…

It's fairly standard to say that peer review is the test of objectivity in science. For most of the history of science, it didn't even exist. None of the giants of modern science had a single publication peer-reviewed.…

Post-revolutionary societies never recover from their revolutions. It’s like Stage 4 metastatic social cancer. As a post-revolutionary society, the US sees all attempts at collective organisation as a tyranny of some…

Every tonne of CO2 added to the atmosphere takes 400,000 years to remove. Humans have added 1.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, since the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.

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

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…

Many of the vandalism against Tesla incidents are actually committed by the elderly, and so often by elderly women. That’s the old 60s counterculture still in play, revolutions never end, they just generate violence,…

I remember when coal-fired power stations opened, how people treated it as an event, something interesting to see. And when wind turbines started in Australia, the same, people flocked to have a look in a wow this is…

Humans are social animals. The biggest outcome of that is what is ‘normal’ for humans is defined entirely by ‘what everybody else is doing’. Humans will do the most lethally stupid, toxic things, provided everybody else…

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

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

The brute fact our countercultural revolution societies don't want to accept is that hierarchy is not only inevitable, but is also the way societies evolved to suppress violence. The true function of hierarchy isn't…

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

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…

Amongst the hysteria about AI taking over the world, we still forget I think that a technology already did that, and in much more damaging ways. Social media is a giant machine that transforms all of human life into…

We’re not self-aware, as a culture. Still trapped in the counterculture adolescent protest culture of the 1960s. That’s our culture, just as China is still a post-revolutionary culture, or Russia. It’s just that our…

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

As a culture it doesn’t even register how perverse it is that we need to use ‘gear’ to access our own landscapes. Landscapes people walked barefoot through for tens of thousands of years, that they *lived*inside. That…

Treasury has warned the Australian government that we're missing out on the AI revolution. And that the feared job losses from AI aren't occurring in the places adopting AI. The Anglo nations - the US, the UK, us, to…

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…

In a neural network, a ‘thing’ doesn’t exist in one place. It’s nothing like a database. It’s a distributed ‘weighting’ across many different network nodes, shifting all the time as the network experiences more. The…

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones…

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…

For those who still believe AI ‘doesn’t think’, how do you explain this? No human has been able to solve this, thinking for decades. There’s nothing to ‘copy and paste’ here. I saw a mathematician say this is bad today…

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.…

“To be honest, IQ levels are higher in China than they are in Australia. Most people in China understand the merits and values of an EV, whereas most people in Australia are afraid of electric cars. It’s true, they’re…

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…

It is a revolution, people. Join in, so you can tell your grandkids you weren't the one arguing for a Flat Earth. Even this Murdoch rag, usually posting anti-EV bilge every single day, is now thinking 'hmm, ok'.

Last year at work somebody said ‘aren’t you worried that when you eventually take off that mask your immune system will be weak?’ This is scientific nonsense pretty much universally believed now, that we all need to be…

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

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…

Thanks to @[1257795447:2048:Christine] for sharing. If you talk about climate chnage, many will pop up and tell you the science isn’t settled. That’s a lie, propaganda that many swallow because they believe what they…

"This fiasco is perfect example of how crypto’s big promises always seem to end in short-term scams. For years, crypto has pushed a fake dream: decentralization, financial freedom, and a revolution against traditional…

I could never go back to a combustion car. The physics says it all. Look at those flaccid torque and power blue and red lines for petrols and diesels. You spend most of your time revving the shit out of the thing (what…

If you add dots to Donald Trump’s signature, it looks like a Klan rally.

Cats are amazing animals, many people viscerally hate them, I'm never sure why. They're quiet, super clean, and not emotionally needy like dogs. I see horrific dog attack cases at work. As well as the endless number of…

This is one of the Bibles of the Trumpian revolution. A how-to guide for super rich people to avoid regulation and taxes. This is also why crypto is so huge now, because those super rich see it as a way to get around…

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

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

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For…

Internal Liberal Party polling suggests 52% of women now prefer Peter Dutton as a possible PM. Now I can understand men thinking that, God gave us a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time. And…

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

Measles outbreaks in Western Australia and Victoria. Tthe world’s most contagious disease. The cause is 100% people using social media to run their lives, with Vitamin A and other ‘natural’ bullshit, instead of a…

The English countryside is one of the great attractions in the world today. The interesting thing about it is that most people know that it’s almost entirely man-made. But when they look at the Australian landscape,…

As an Australian, when I see pics like this, I don’t ooh and ahh about what a beautiful place it is, or about what a great place that would be to take a holiday, or to churn up with a 4WD. The last thing I want to feel…

I found my own way to defeat the stupidity of Daylight Saving. I adjust my going to bed and getting up times so that they’re the same all year, in relation to the sun, not clocks. You’re a biological animal whose entire…

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

When you have no meaningful relationship with the land you live in, you develop a Madonna-whore complex. You either sanctify everywhere you don’t live as ‘nature’ (a completely empty term) - that’s the Madonna - or you…

For about a century feminism fought to define women independently of their relationship with men. Then men invented the transgender movement, used social media to make it go viral, and here we are, with massive protests…

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…

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

The two great 'authoritarian' powers of our time are Russia and China. Both regimes are the product of democratic revolutions, people uprisings. In both cases local people imported Western ideas about democracy, to run…

I really admire what Simon Holmes à Court has done with the Climate 200 group. Unlike lobby groups, who line the pockets of existing parties with donations, C200 just offers funds to any independent who wants to promote…

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

If you burn energy that took 3 million years to accumulate, in 300 years, you incinerate yourself. Even if you’ve never studied science, that basic fact should still be graspable. Also why nothing else really matters,…

Remember the term ‘superpower’. Understand it. It’s not about comics, it’s the technical revolution solar, wind and batteries (SWB) are introducing. SWB doesn’t just replace our existing fossil fuel energy, it floods…

The thing that is most popular on social media, sharing information about yourself and what you’re doing, is also the thing that is most damaging to you and others. Some of it is obvious humblebragging, like people who…

This guy is doing something very special this year, if you’ve missed it. A force of nature.

Finally what the scientific research has been saying for years on Covid, and which I share here often, is making its way into the mainstream reporting. Compare this with the delusional ‘living with Covid’: “COVID-19…

It’s now cheaper to build fences out of solar panels than it is to build them out of wood. And the fence will power your home. We’re living inside a revolution, people. Stop status scrolling and get on board.

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

It’s worth letting this graphic sink in, to let basic science and engineering inform car choice, rather than the pissing contest of branding. How much the fabled range of petrol and diesel cars is bought at the cost of…

No human group, of any size, ‘rises up’ to defeat anything. The great American myth, now foisted upon the rest of the world through its idiot invention, social media. We’re going through yet another round of impotent…

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free…

Robert Putnam tracked the shift in US culture from a focus on “I”, to a focus on “we” and then back again, over the past century. What creates a ‘we’ or a ‘public’ is existential threat, in this case WW1, Spanish Flu,…

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public…

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

Elegance is a difficult concept to define. But it’s far removed from modern designer/brand culture. You rarely hear about somebody being elegantly dressed now. Tailored clothes are elegant, because they combine style…

Until the current bathroom renos I’d never heard of epoxy grout. One of the most frustrating things about nice tiling, particularly in a shower, is how difficult it can be to keep stains and mould out of the grout.…

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

I know many have long ago dismissed me as mad with daily attention to Covid. I wanted to share the science behind the fantasy we’re living. This is a short excerpt from the Mayo Clinic, one of the top research hospitals…

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

This made me laugh. I've decided that 'gig culture' is too abstract a term for discussing this topic, the basic argument is that the countercultural movements of the 50s and 60s are now over, and those that led them are…

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

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

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

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

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…

While I think much of nutrition science is a waste of time, one thing I do think is true and is only slowly becoming mainstream is that sugar is pretty horribly bad for you. It’s still so common for people to be victims…

Many people tell me that ‘capitalism’ is the cause of our many problems in the world. Others think it’s communism, or authoritarianism. Did you know none of the -isms are even real? All societies are functionally…

Diamond’s Solitary Man is a bitter, hurt by love creation. Solitary to avoid more betrayal, in love. But we’re all alone, in love or in friendship. All love is betrayal, we love our idea of another person, and they love…

Australia has next to non-existent standards for wood fires. The Chair of the Standards Committee overseeing this? Also the head of the home heating lobby that promotes wood heaters.…

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

The belief that assembling a big crowd is democracy in action is never tested against actual outcomes. Which are usually non-existent. 4 times as many people went to see Taylor Swift play in Sydney as marched across the…

My 'kidult culture' posts aren't just random opinions of mine. It's a cultural shift, the countercultural revolution of the last century, carrying forward to today. Studied by many. It's not 'Peter Pan syndrome', adults…

Was revolutionary for its time. One of the pioneers of drive-in motel accommodation in the regions, counter meals (pub grub), and women drinking in the bar. I remember dad saying the brewery had asked how many kegs they…

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

Interesting that it was women who carry this risk, not men. It’s usually assumed men ‘need’ more sex. And yes I know, in social media society anybody can be either a man or a woman now, or neither, or a Jedi or a…

When Albanese first came to power, Saul Griffiths, the Australian engineer who helped revolutionise renewables in the US before Trump, suggested Australia target households first, not the wider grid. It took until the…

Sodium-ion batteries have arrived. Even now less than half the costs of lithium batteries, and much longer lifespans. An EV battery using sodium chemistry would run for well over 5 million km (yes MILLION), and still…

Transgender and its politics is really just one more subset of what we call identity politics. And identity politics in turn is the kidult society I talk about, where instead of focusing collectively on collective…

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

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

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

Another way to think about autonomous driving technology. How good are you at paying attention? A Tesla for example monitors every other vehicle on the road, and pedestrians, bike riders, animals etc. 36 times every…

The Australian magistrate at the forefront of addressing ‘sovereign citizen’ type arguments in Australia made the interesting observation that many come into the movement after some kind of traffic offence. I post a lot…

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

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

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

I asked AI to write and perform a song for a Welsh male choir, celebrating the beginning of Spring. It took about a minute. We're living a revolution, folks.

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

An elderly family friend went to hospital to have surgery for lung cancer. Caught Covid there, and the hospital’s response? Sent them home to deal with it themselves. LUNG CANCER. When mum caught Covid in hospital, the…

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

‘All You Need is Love’ became an anthem for the countercultural revolution. Which is still our culture today. The Beatles split up after only 8 years because they couldn’t bear being in the same room together.

For the very many out there, whose families, friends and selves are constantly sick now. Covid has created dysfunctional immune systems, leaving people wide open to disease and unable to resolve that disease. SARS-CoV-2…

Lots of talk recently about boosting productivity in Australia. Here’s a major productivity-killer nobody talks about. Sickness in the workplace. Already before Covid colds and flu cost businesses $7 billion/year.…

Alan Kohler consistently shows how even the world’s modest climate targets are completely out of reach. Some are delighted by that, they feel like that’s a ‘win’ in the idiot online debates. Here’s the most basic way to…

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…

For thousands of years, Kings dominated human life globally. Only churches provided any sort of counter-weight. For example the 19th century was a century of kings, here’s a cartoon of the world’s top kings in 1815,…

Again, if you can avoid social media, the reality of what's happening out in the world will astound you. A revolution, don't miss it listening to drongos here.

Thanks to Tim for pointing out this milestone. There’s a revolution happening, don’t be disappointed when you have to tell your grandkids you were one of the whinging doubters sniping from the sidelines. Also for those…

If you want to understand why the status quo is fighting so desperately to save fossil fuels, and funding wave after wave of propaganda drivel to try to get ordinary folk to help them, just follow the money. Seriously,…

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…

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

The lychgate is one of my favourite architectural features, at the entry to old churchyards. Functionally lychgates evolved as a place to shelter a coffin from the weather, while waiting for the arrival of the priest.…

People who’ve never studied much science, which is most people, need to understand what’s at stake with climate change. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK have done the sums. Actuaries are not ‘Greenies’…

What I like about Tesla vehicles is that they reclaim motoring from kidult car enthusiasts, often adults whose identity as teens focused heavily around their cars. The need for EVs to focus on efficiency, to preserve…

Finn, electrical engineer and one of the reasons solar in Australia is world-leading, sounding a bit like me today. Frustrated that a revolution is being stalled by kidults. Using Tesla as an example, people opting out…

Opponents of the pumped hydro in Lithgow cite damage to platypus populations as one of their main arguments. One of the loon things anti-renewables people do is suddenly develop a fake interest in ecology. It’s the…

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making…

China is far and away the most popular supplier of cars to Australia. Fleet sales make the usual top 10s profoundly misleading. And it’s still growing so fast. In 2026 *11* new brands launch in Australia. China is not…

It’s apparently hateful to make the obvious point that transgender is a social fad, just one more ‘trending’ thing passing for reality now in public life. Like yo-yos, or wankpanzer utes. In its entirety it‘s an…

My car drove me to work today. The entire way, country highway, overtaking slower vehicles, roundabouts, traffic lights (negotiates amber beautifully), city traffic etc. Absolutely flawlessly, I didn't need to do a…

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

Democracies are failing because we don’t understand how humans work. They never, ever, act as a big group of separate individuals. They are social animals, always, in everything they do.

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

When you were at school, the morons who used to occupy most of the back rows in science class, not understanding anything? They now run the world. There they are at the red arrow. Social media gave them kidult power…

Anti-renewables people dishonestly blame higher electricity prices on renewables. The real cause is the use of gas to generate electricity, with the failure of coal-fired plants. Gas is hugely expensive. As batteries…

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…

Another genius from the back row of your science class at school. These people now rule the world, social media gave them power. You’ll find hundreds of them commenting on every thread on key public issues.

Teenagers didn’t exist until the 20th century. You were just a little adult, as a child. The idea of teen rebellion therefore also didn’t exist, until the middle of the 20th century. The idea of uprooting custom and…

The same demographic trend but now looked at via the birth rates. You can see from the 1970s, fertility rates went into free fall. The 1970s was the decisive shift away from adult-centred life, the countercultural…

Imagine living through the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago fighting to 'keep the horse'. You'd look like a moron today. Renewables will double again in the next 5 years. Exponential growth. You're living…

Time after time in history people miss the tipping point to total revolution. Right up to that tipping point it seems like things are business as usual. Then that business as usual is smashed to pieces.

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

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

The great swindle here is to make unthinking Australians believe their power price rises are due to renewables. Even a Year 7 science student could find the data in about 5 minutes. The surge in power prices is due to…

All of the stuff about Nazis and authoritarian/fascist takeovers in the US are the sort of hysteria that is endemic to US culture. Nick Bryant was US correspondent for the BBC there for 13 years and I think nails much…

It’s belief in ‘the people’ as an actual thing that destroys all democracies, all republics. All populist utopias. Every attempt to lead a society somewhere is seen as a tyranny, against which an insurrection is then…

We’ve been encouraged by countercultural ideas nearly 70 years ago to believe that the more equal and social we are, the more peaceful and prosperous we will all be. But societies run on status. The more equal and…

You can go back to the original 1960s events and watch the emergent Boomer generation firing up their countercultural revolution, the avalanche of teens taking over the world. Facing up to things like wars and…

Translation: Covid fucked up the immune system, dramatically accelerating the development of HPV-related cancer, even without Covid being found in cervical tissue (it was attacking the immune system, stopping the body…

The whole idea behind bushwalking and camping is revealing. That our ‘bush’ is some thing, that we can go and see. ‘Nature’. Nothing captures better (though we never think about it this way) our total disconnection from…

This young woman posted online that she’d achieved her PhD in biology. The bros in the manosphere weren’t happy. Probably wankpanzer drivers.

One of the great Australians most have never heard of. Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist i.e. an expert in agriculture. Rinaudo looked at degraded landscapes, particularly in Africa, and like many others helped with projects…

Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are masterpieces, but are also terribly understood in what they show. Humphrey is almost universally understood through a modern American lens, as ‘red tape’ bureaucratic obstruction.…

Saw a lot of this sort of thing after the storms in Bathurst, with truckloads of abuse for Council staff. The 'nature strip' or verge (road reserve) is indeed Council land, and sometimes it plants trees there. If those…

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,…

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

After decades of blaming fat people for being lazy gluttons, spurred on by the pseudoscientific bollocks of ‘calories’ by the nutrition and fitness industries, the WHO has declared obesity an actual medical condition,…

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

Could you live in a world without others? By which I mean, not live without other people in your life, but live without the need to conform to the social frameworks they think, act and feel inside? It is tempting to…

A day for fun stats. A contrast experiment, with our 'lifestyle' lives. There are now 10 times more chickens by mass on Earth than every other bird species. One million species are at risk of extinction, and vertebrate…

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…

The GLP-1 drugs are improving at speed now. This is a revolution for health that goes well beyind weight loss. Obesity is just the symptom of broader dysfunction, that these drugs target. The impact on a whole range of…

One of the bullshittings of the Covid pandemic was the explanation for why people started getting sick with everything, after the pandemic was apparently over. They’re still getting horribly sick with things they’ve…

A brilliant side-effect of electrification, which will also revolutionise plane travel. Unlike fossil fuels, you can generate energy from renewable energy anywhere, without having to truck in fuel. It will make even…

This is Demis Hassabis. I don't think we realise that we're living in a time where the greatest revolution of all time is unfolding right in front of us. That revolution is AI, and Demis is at the centre of it. He heads…

Saw this posted by one of the anti-science social media influencers. Goes to my interest in gravity. Things in orbit don't float upwards. They're falling, like you would if you jumped out of a plane. It's not 'zero-g',…

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…

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

You just never know what animals are really thinking.

There's such a fundamental lack of respect shown for these experts in climate science, by people who wouldn't know their climate arses from their elbows. I still imagine how they'd feel if climate scientists turned up…

Here's a vital scientific reason why what we're doing with Covid won't work, can never work, and will maim and kill lots of people, forever, unless we change course. Our strategy is called 'hybrid immunity', meaning…

Andrew Forrest is investing hugely in renewables. This is him turning the first sod for NSW's biggest wind farm, near Wellington. He has 14 GW of renewables projects in the pipeline around Australia. Again, definitely…

Many have no idea of the apocalypse climate change can be. All of these species aren't like things in a zoo, to look at. They're vital cogs in the engine that makes the planet livable. That makes it possible to breathe,…

One of the things I like to try to do in the garden is to tap the ecology that will happen by itself. Far too much gardening in my view is about control, about imposing a form on the landscape, that then takes a huge…

Airline staff used to have a saying, ‘if it’s not Boeing, I’m not going’. That’s how trusted the brand was. Now quality control systems have been stripped away, after the merger with McDonnell Douglas. You won’t get me…

I hear this all the time, that ‘lockdowns’ stopped children getting necessary infections, and now their immune systems are missing immunity, which is why they’re getting sick. It’s scientific nonsense, completely untrue.

Researchers track climate denialism. It’s shifted now, from denying climate change itself, which has failed, to now denying the technologies which create the solutions, like solar and wind and EVs. Funded by the fossil…

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

The Baby Animals are using a private jet for this tour? Really bad optics.

I posted about CAR-T cell therapy here last week I think, how it’s showing signs of being a complete cure for auto-immune diseases. But it now also seems to be able to slow or stop ageing. Watch this space, a revolution…

Toyota finally releases its first full-EV. And it’s OK, designed to ease people into the transition rather than be anything revolutionary. Subaru has just done the same with its Solterra, which uses the same platform so…

BYD is a force of nature right now. It plans to release 4 (4!) new models in Australia in 2024. It already has 3 so that’ll be 7 in all. The next will be the Seal-U, a mid-range SUV to challenge the Toyota RAV-4 hybrid.…

Sitting in the dark because of Daylight Stealing, and just noticed the morons have made the end-date not even the long weekend, which would be the logical time to do it. But then science and logic have nothing to do…

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

I don’t waste a lot of time arguing basic science and engineeering with people, because I know that really most are actually arguing from a political position. Team sports. It’s their lens for everything. If their team…

When teaching physics, often kids (or adults) think rockets work by somehow pushing the rocket up into the air. In reality they throw megatonnes of stuff out the back, and the rocket’s movement is the reaction force to…

Keep an eye out for news about the bird flu outbreaks in the US. Now in cattle and cats, and also humans. It’s when viruses cross into humans from animals and then jump from human to human that they can become…

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…

At work a few weeks back, a young woman appeared at the counter. She said the community needed to know a message from John Campbell about Vitamin D, and what could Council do to get the message out? Campbell is a Covid…

Exactly what needs to happen here. In the UK banks have to pay victims of online scams involving losses from their bank accounts. It forces banks to take online scams seriously. In Australia banks are a protected…

DIfferent times. ‘Spastic’ also a common term in those days. ‘Moron’ as well. Actually all terms that had specific scientific meanings, then weaponised by society.

Our education is now hopelessly fragmented. You find very few who study both the sciences and the humanities, for example. Or even study either of them. For most of my lifetime Einstein has been suggested as a type of…

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…

Every generation learns painful lessons, that the passage of time then makes later generations forget. Again, we once knew that the way to fight infectious disease in societies was to ventilate schools. In fact kids…

A Judas Goat. Trained to lead other animals (sheep, cattle) to slaughter. The goat is spared, to continue the work. There are also Judas Cows. All social animals, including humans, follow leaders. Right now we have…

These are the 3 self-proclaimed ‘Great Leaders’ in the world today. What do they all have in common? Their power came from popular revolutions. Populism. People forget both the Russian and Chinese leaders today came…

Human beings are creatures of desire. Not just for other human beings, but for all things and anything. They pretend to be rational or objective or any of those other words, but in reality it’s all desire. Objectivity…

Running the reverse-cycle units 24 hours a day activates the thermal mass of the building. In winter the heat produced is stored in the walls and other materials of the house, where it can release back into the house.…

I know many people allowing themselves to get repeated Covid infections, thinking they’re getting more immune with each infection. They’ve been lied to, and it will shorten their lives. If you don’t control infections…

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch…

Humans act socially, always. Ask them individually what they think of nuclear power? They hate it. But make it the rallying cry for their team, their political party? How great is nuclear power! Peter Dutton knows this,…

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…

Remember how if we all kept getting Covid, we'd become immune? Yeh, science says nah. Covid right now more than twice as bad as the same time last year. I feel like people should be seriously pissed off when they…

More than 170,000 influenza cases have been confirmed so far in 2024, with 29% of them in children under 9 years of age. Infections in 2024 are already 27% higher than the first 6 months of 2023. It's several years…

The Model 3 is Tesla's cheapest car. They've just released a performance version that is brutal. 0-100 in 2.9 seconds. Superb handling in corners. So fast and powerful that it makes even experienced race drivers feel a…

The most humid place on Earth is the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East. Mostly desert. Sea temperatures there are currently 35 degrees C. That’s the SEA temperature. Heat indices on the land range from 50-65 degrees C.…

Covid is a 'seasonal' virus, people trained in social media science say. Yes, you now get it in every season.

We had an Industrial Revolution over 250 years ago. Another one has been happening right under our noses for most of our lives, in China.

We’re living in the middle of a revolution. A revolution that we can’t see, because our eyes are blinded, by the Wormtongue of social media. Did you know that 100% of car sales are projected to be electric, in under a…

A home battery doesn’t just save money. It’s insurance against disasters (and with climate change there are a lot more of those). The whole street will likely have no power today while this is fixed on the neighbour’s…

Petrolheads often use the concept of the ‘driver’s car’. They use it to suggest only they know what good driving is, and everybody else should defer to their expertise. It’s bog standard protecting of social territory.…

Precision fermentation (PF) is a revolution still happening. Industrial agriculture is the most destructive industry on the planet. PF may destroy it. With dairy, outside that 3.3%, which PF can make easily, the rest of…

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

BYD will have two mid-sized SUVs in Australia this year. I mention BYD because seriously, we’re living inside a revolution right now. The quality of the engineering here is premium/world class, and the price defies…

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or…

Tesla is famous for its brilliant charging stations. BYD is partnering with Ampol to provide BYD drivers with a similar wide access to charging. I love that a revolution is being built right under peoples’ noses, while…

I’m a bloody good swimmer, if I don’t say so myself. But 200 metres of butterfly? I reckon I’d struggle to do 10. Also one truth of physics that you can see in the swim races is that swimmers are always faster when…

‘Where were you when this revolution happened, mum/dad?’ ‘Um, I was on social media posting fake facts about electric cars catching fire and running out of charge.’ Soak up the revolution. Don’t look back in regret that…

Enjoy the revolution that will be spoken about for centuries. Don't miss it in social media bubbles.

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…

Ryan is a professor of evolutionary biology. I think these are interesting for people to see, because he’s addressing two pieces of propaganda in this pandemic. One that just letting ourselves become infected over and…

Council pounds and animal shelters are overflowing. If you want a pet, please rescue one from one of those locations.

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

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

In a rapidly heating world it’s important to know how much heat the human body can withstand before the heat kills you. (Heat is already the greatest killer of all natural disasters, killing more than all other natural…

This is why both physics and economics will destroy fossil fuels. This is Germany, not atypical. Almost two-thirds of the energy generated by fossil fuels is wasted, as heat. The grey box at top right. Renewables don't…

Just a brilliant time to be alive. A new industrial revolution. And so many of the public are instead trapped in the putrid sewer of social media bullshit, missing the whole show.

We’re living in a revolution. Many are missing it by living in a sewer of brainless shit on social media.

The last week of August was a watershed moment for Australia. Coal provided less than 50% of Australia's electricty for the first time. The total collapse of coal will accelerate rapidly from here, and it will have…

Again, enjoy the revolution happening right in front of us.…

This will take less than two minutes of your time. This is Professor Stefan Rahmstorf explaining how 3° of warming which is what we’re easily heading towards, and fast, actually translates to 5 or 6° of warming over…

Some basic science from Anthony Fauci. Why 'living with' Covid was always a lie.

There's no air conditioning for plants and animals. We're going to be seeing a lot more of this.

BYD has had to commission a second 7000-car ship, to deliver its growing global expansion. It's planning for 7 more ships. What I love here is these realities carrying on despite the absolute brain-dead rubbish…

Households are installing LOTS of batteries. Enjoy the revolution. Each household that does takes load off the grid at peak times. They're national benefactors. They also help drive prices down for people who can't get…

Ben does lovely calm, reasoned videos on EVs. He’s not an EV nut, he owns petrol cars too. But he says the same thing I did earlier this week, that the Model Y is easily the best family car in the world. (Best car full…

EVs are going to revolutionise off-road driving too. The problem with 4WDs right now is they need a lot of torque at low speeds. But as I post about a lot, you have to rev the guts out of a petrol or diesel to get that…

Had a look around a McLaren Artura the other day. It’s a hybrid supercar. They add the electric motor to improve the acceleration of the V6. Looks amazing of course. But it costs north of $250K. You can get similar…

Pffft, what does science know, next to ‘But I like it!’

We’re just back from a short Queensland holiday. Visited Sea World again, to give Alice a taste of theme parks (she’s never been). We were all bored by everything except seeing some marine life, and winced at $13…

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled...more and more scientists have begun to research the…

I see reports that Tony Shadie died, my old physics teacher. (Hans Stroeve just confirmed.) Many of my friends would have been taught by him too. Nigel were you in the physics class? I know David was, Lisa I think you…

If the BYD Shark is a Ranger/Hilux/Navara/BT-50/Amarok killer, the BYD Sealion 6 is a Toyota RAV 4 killer. The RAV 4 is a huge car internationally. The Sealion 6 is so much better it’s embarrassing. The motoring experts…

The Germans at least tried with EVs. But they’re way too expensive. Most German cars have been for years. Asia figured out how to do German quality for about half the money, decades ago. Welcome to the Asian century.…

Here a Western analyst tries to show people just how mind-boggingly staggering what’s going on in China is, that we don’t have the first clue about. The next Industral Revolution started years ago there already, it’s…

Every couple of years I share this tip from San Francisco water engineers. One of the main reasons we’re living such long lives now is that we have clean reticulated water. The price for that though is use of chlorine…

Another story from the Industrial Revolution underway in China. China has 45,000 km of high-speed railways. (45 thousand!) Here’s a short clip from inside one of the trains, carrying people in luxury at 350 km/h.

Genius Chhinese engineering is now creating SUVs that can convert to utes, at the press of a button. (And vice versa.) Have a look. As always, superb quality. And cheap. A revolution, people. Get with it.

Gav (from NZ) does some of the best vehicle assessments in the world, certainly some of the most entertaining. This is a short excerpt from his look at the new KIA EV3 (full link below). He’s talking about how…

Jim toured China. What he saw there is what I often try to share here. A revolution. He was blown way. Now he and Ford are scrambling to try to catch up.

Every day is a new revolution. This technology can even retrofit existing batteries. It will take an EV battery from 0-100% charge in 5 minutes.

I share renewables stuff because it saddens me that we’re all living through the greatest revolution in centuries, and many aren’t even noticing. Take this, the other night, those with a battery could sell energy back…

I talk a lot about China, because I’ve also said we’re living inside the next Industrial Revolution, and just don’t notice. Did you know China manufactures more than the next 9 largest manufacturing countries, combined?…

The cost of desalinating water has plummeted. So much so that it's now often cheaper to provide freshwater that way than using rainfall and dams. This is another revolution underway, which combined with so much cheaper…

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

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…

One to keep in the back pocket in case you need it, while we keep infecting the kids so we can go to gigs and Bali. How proud are we to be one of the only developed countries on Earth that doesn't even vaccinate kids,…

Snapshots from the kidult culture we live in. This is Bathurst’s new animal rehoming centre, its new ‘pound’. Fabulous facility. But now closed to animal drop-offs, because it’s completely overwhelmed by abandoned…

I think a very good and not often asked question is why 'performance cars' are even allowed on public roads. It's clear they're designed to use public roads as race tracks. Also sometimes called 'driver's cars', a very…

There are between 68 and 70 new EVs coming to Australia in 2025. Here they all are. Enjoy the revolution, folks. And it is one, I still meet people who honestly think this is some sort of competition between EVs and…

One of the explanations given for why so many people seem so much more sick now, and more often, is that lockdowns caused ‘immunity debt’ i.e. people weren’t getting infected with diseases as much, so their immunity had…

I'm going to post about this curve a lot. It explains why experts call renewables not just a replacement energy source for the grid, but a 'superpower' source. Students of economics will recognise it as a marginal cost…

Solar is a breathtaking revolution. A juggernaut.

Insurers in Australia now have let people know that replacing an EV battery is cheaper than replacing a petrol or diesel engine. Battery prices are plummeting, and EV prices will go below the prices of petrol or diesel.…

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

4WD culture carries an assumption of getting closer to ‘nature’ (whatever that is). When in reality it’s using the landscape as a theme park for cars. Doing terrible and increasing damage as it goes, and grows (and it’s…

Something I think many vegans (and others) don’t understand is that the best way to protect the diversity of life, is to eat it. If you eat a wide variety of plants and animals, then it’s in your best interests to…

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

Coal, oil and gas are all forms of solar energy. All are dead animals and plants, who got their energy directly from the sun, via photosynthesis. But concentrated over millions of years, which is why they have such a…

I hadn’t heard of materials science and engineering before I started university. But it’s what I studied. It’s one of the most astonishing areas of research in the world, and the forefront of all engineering and…

What the science of alcohol tells us is that no amount of alcohol is good for you, and in fact even tiny amounts are bad. But of course the alcohol industry is one of the country’s big political donors. What interests…

Name something these 3 have in common: 1. The Davos World Economic Forum, in Switzerland 2. NSW parliament in Sydney 3. Parliament at Westminster in the UK. Anybody? Each has spent millions making the buildings safe…

The industry is booming. The breweries involved are craftspeople, a lot more thought and science goes into these drinks. And non-alcoholic drinks can be up to 6 times less fattening. And they attract no excise because…

I doubt Tony Abbott knows how to boil an egg. 'Genuine science', hilarious. Notice he's using the new strategy I talked about, pretending to be a champion for the poor. Thankfully the basic engineering and economics of…

The dog v cat person thing. I like both animals. But from working in local government, I can say there are 100 complaints about dogs for every complaint about a cat. In fact I don't think I've ever seen a complaint…

People never worry about range with petrol and diesel cars, because we have service stations in most places. But check this: - there are 7000 service stations in Australia - Australia has over 20 million vehicles -…

20 today. A force of nature, then and now.

The revolution happening right under our noses. And has been for years. You wouldn't know it listening to social media or the news.

Torque vectoring is sophisticated engineering that varies the amount of torque (turning force) going to the wheels of a car, depending on conditions. This means the car gets optimum grip and drive, because unlike a…

In America legislation has been drafted to get rid of Daylight Savings. Both sides support it. As scientists say, the best thing is to return to permanent standard time, not permanent summer time (those are the two…

What people living in rural and remote areas do. A revolutionary game-changer for them, the most secure and cheapest energy supply they’ve ever had. Some have been doing this for over a decade.

Two messages. One, from the late James Lovelock, scientific genius, who helped NASA determine a way to detect life on other planets, and then used the ideas and technologies he developed to revolutionise climate…

With the colder months approaching, indoor air quality often collapses to pretty dire levels. It’s one of the main reasons we get more colds and flus in winter, and it’s very dangerous for Covid. A not very well known…

Was in a building where most people have been living the ‘Covid is over’ stuff for over a year, happy and chirpy as if life is back to good ol’ normal. Then a member of the public entered the building, wearing a mask,…

This graph again, that astronomical climb is the Industrial Revolution. What isn't said about it is that it was a response to massive human problems, like disease, starvation, poverty, pollution etc. It changed…

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

Cars fixed a major environmental problem. Horse shit. At the time cars were introduced, major cities were overwhelmed with the amount of horse shit in streets, as you can see in the photo. Cars went on to make the air…

The unfixable destructive paradox of travel is that it forces somebody else’s home to change, to cater to you. No matter how low impact you want to be. Some European cities for example are fed up with the tourists who…

I sometimes say Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Rod Sims, ex head of the ACCC (a very conservative, ‘economic’ institution), spells out why very well here. In fact per capita we should be the…

One of the most common criticisms from the anti-renewables Flat Earthers is that solar panels waste good agricultural land. But they don't, in fact they improve it hugely. Sheep are much happier and healthier, as are…

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

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

Have posted a bit about why materials science and engineering is the source of most of our modern wonders (I am a materials scientist and engineer, so I would say that, but it’s also true). Here’s another wonderful…

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

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

From the Orange paper. A pharmacist saying lockdowns made us more vulnerable to diseases, because we weren't getting sick as much. (Technically called the 'immunity debt' hypothesis.) The thing is, it's scientific…

The speed of development of the Covid vaccines was one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time. Normally it takes 10 years to develop any successful vaccine. They did it in 1. How? They used AI. AI is…

T.Ryan Gregory is one of the strongest international scientific voices speaking out at the public health disaster we’re still inside. Read this long list of lies that he debunks, that are in common use in Australia too.…

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,…

Wilcannia is a famous outback town. Like all outback towns, the history is one of expansion of some empire. Nearly always mining (Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs) or agriculture (Bourke, Wilcannia to some…

If you didn’t study much science, a quick summary. Pray.

Cockburn a good example of our relationship with the outback, and with the bush more generally. It only exists because of mining, it was a place where trains and drivers exchanged when transferring mining ore out of…

The appeal of the outback to tourism is that it’s one of the world’s last ‘untouched places’. So if millions of tourists flock to this place, doesn’t it stop being the thing which they go there to see? Travel is like…

Transgender is the topic nobody will discuss, because its proponents are so often aggressive and even violent. But the distinction between sex and gender isn’t rocket science. If your sense of gender is a mismatch with…

Got that mate who tells you the climate stuff is crap? How confident are you? Were they somebody who even did science at school, let alone did it well? Worth asking.

I remember driving through what we call ‘the bush’ one day, and thinking about how empty our landscapes are. Empty of people, and increasingly of plants and animals too. You’ll find handfuls of people living there, and…

Smallpox was eradicated in 1980. One of the joys of climate change is that victims of smallpox buried in ground that froze, for example in permafrost regions, are now thawing. There are fears smallpox will again…

The reality of 'Bazball'. England has played 7 Test series with this supposedly new method. 5 of them have been series played at home. Wins - 4 Draws - 3 if Australia lose tonight, 2 if Australia win Losses - 1 if…

I think a major difference between men and women is that you can go through life as a man almost completely ignoring that you're a biological creature. You could just as well be a robot, your biology rarely gets your…

I share all of this data because governments don't want people to talk about it. It's not a conspiracy, we've been lied to, blatantly and repeatedly. 'We have to learn to live with this virus' was an election slogan…

If ‘No’ wins in the upcoming referendum, Australia will be an international laughing stock. It’s looking like it may win too. Our history makes that unsurprising in many ways. I posted a while back about how what we…

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was…

Don’t listen to the people who deny climate change. They’re the kids who ate the copper sulphate in science.

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…

Such a fascinating story that has very deep meanings if you unpack it. Our eucalypts are now fuelling catastrophic fires globally, including here. Eucalyptus got to be like this because of thousands of years of…

You must read this. We’re going about things the wrong way, because we’re listening to business and industry. The Americans, thanks to Saul who helped write their revolutionary legislation, are smashing it out of the…

I sometimes think it’s just a total absence of basic science. Here’s the argument for fighting climate change, in the most basic scientific terms. Fossil fuels took HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of years to accumulate, from…

Anybody who thinks nuclear power is the answer for Australia is scientifically and economically illiterate. I worked in nuclear engineering. This is Dutton creating an argument with outrageous fantasy ideas, to fire up…

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

The first Industrial Revolution was an energy revolution. Fossil fuels, about 150 years ago. This pollution is the result, and is not something we have to 'balance' against any fictitious economy. It's much simpler,…

None of this happened before social media. Laurence Fox here, famous Brit actor whose wife Billie Piper dumped him for being an unhinged loon. Social media got to him, as it gets to millions of others. I have close…

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

Bathurst’s bats. This will happen more all the time now, as we trash the rest of the landscape and plants and animals come looking for somewhere to survive. I came up with a concept of ‘reality-based politics’, which…

One for science teachers.

So many have no idea of the revolution happening out there, and how far removed it is from the bullshit they read on social media.

Covid is evolving 2.5 times faster than flu, the previous world champion at evolving to avoid our immunity. Because we're not stopping its spread, it's having an evolutionary field day. That 'mild' nonsense people say?…

Yep. Again, it's not that I love cars particularly or even renewables. It's that these obvious facts of physics and economics are hidden by the bullshit of social media. Energy is also central to all economies, so if…

These are the bats currently occupying central Bathurst, the grey-headed flying fox. Australia’s largest bat. Some facts about them that help shape how we can view what’s happening. - they only live on the east coast,…

We're not living with Covid. We're pretending it went away. That pretending is killing record numbers of people, and leaving millions of others potentially with lifelong chronic illness. Slogans are not science.

I focus on cars and renewables because they’re the centre of a new industrial revolution. And therefore of a whole new society. Our petrols, diesels and coal-fired power are 19th century technologies, over a century…

I don't apologise for fixating on this revolution. What's happening out there should astonish people. This will change our whole society, not just energy. (These numbers are projected to double again by 2030.)

The science. Most of the energy produced by fossil fuels and nuclear is wasted converting it into usable energy. You can add petrol and diesel to the list.

This is a Tesla semi. Will do a few posts on this, because it’s revolutionising trucking. A range of over 800km. And here’s the main thing that has the trucking industry excited. Using one of these instead of a diesel…

A mapping of Covid variants. When you allow a pathogen free rein to infect people at will, it will keep evolving. We’re not throwing any resistance at it, so it’s doing whatever it likes. At this rate of evolution it’s…

Solar is even more of a revolution than is realised, why I talk about it so often. The prices are in free fall worldwide, it’s now so incredibly cheap to use that even if the world decided to do nothing about climate…

Telstra has now finalised all of the energy it uses being renewable by 2025. Day and night. This is one of the solar farms. Some people don't like the look of solar farms, but nearly always they're on land that's been…

The word ‘economy’ comes from ancient Greek, where it meant ‘management of a household’. The economy is just households. Instead we’ve said it’s business, a terrible mistake. Business was invented to serve households,…

Alan Kohler is so consistently brilliant. Like here, pointing out that the US (and the wider Anglo world) is handing total domination of the next century (or two) to Asia, because of our ridiculous culture wars on…

Less than 15% of new energy in 2022 came from fossil fuels. Look at the tidal wave of renewables. There are no debates, the debates are hot air on social media. A revolution is underway, we’re living in it.

I've been a critic of hit and giggle cricket. I also saw today cricketers buying homes worth $25 million. At the same time most games of cricket now, except T20, struggle to get any sort of crowd, unless they're…

70% increase in public chargers in 2023 alone. The NRMA is contracted to install these every 150km on key long-distance routes. It’s critical to remember most EV charging will happen at home, these fast-chargers are for…

Basic science lacking in the Covid news. Like ‘living with the virus’, Covid becoming ‘endemic’. Covid is an epidemic disease, it will never become endemic. Like smallpox. For centuries smallpox followed the same…

Mike Ryan, one of the WHO’s most senior public health experts, on what we’ve done wrong in this pandemic. Really worth a minute of your time. Particularly on the last sentence, notice how our leaders have the whole time…

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7580081/not-rocket-science-hit-the-brakes-on-omicron-explosion-experts-warn/

One of the big campaign things the PM says is that 'people want government out of their lives'. I think he's talking to the wrong country. An example. Masks. People will wear one if the government says you have to. If…

Professor of viral evolution.

You’ll hear people say that kids aren’t getting Covid at school, they’re getting it in the community. Have a look at the actual science. On the left, infections in schools (blue line) with no masks. On the right,…

I know people have their little chuckles about my Daylight Savings Time crusades. Read the science people, nicely summarised here. We’re doing terrible, sometimes fatal, things to our bodies by fiddling with standard…

It's really not rocket science. Peoples' wages have been rock-bottom for years because they no longer have any bargaining power. All that supply and demand rubbish is...rubbish. The government's plan to get your wages…

Katherine Wu deserves a journalism award at the end of this pandemic. If it ends. Why relying solely upon vaccines will never work. Ever.…

Yeh, wow. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/07/fossil-dinosaur-killed-asteroid-strike-thescelosaurus-north-dakota-extinction

Clever animals, dogs.

I was listening to Peter Doherty on the way home today. The Australian Nobel Prize winner in immunology. He was a bit lost for words at what Australia is doing with Covid, more than 5000 dead since Christmas, nearly 6…

There’s probably not a better contrast between two understandings of Australia, the land. Aboriginal people didn’t use fences, instead they cultivated the land in a way they knew animals would love, to attract them.…

Animals are thought of as lacking sentience and intelligence, compared to us. I think that’s just us being arrogant drongos.

If the species survives Covid (an open question), what's left will likely be incinerated.

Taronga at Dubbo is nothing like I remember it as a kid. Has come on astonishingly, a really beautiful zoo. They even use some of the techniques of the old English landscape gardeners, to give the illusion there’s no…

This is the basic science people are not being told. A vaccine is not a drug, you don’t take it and then you’re ‘fixed’. A vaccine tweaks the ecological balance of an ecosystem of microbes, temporarily in one direction.…

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

I learned this from the Australian biologist Tim Low. Which of these two locations has the greatest biodiversity? The city, or the bush? Answer: the city. Hands down. The bush is a wasteland, created by agriculture. I…

There is no species dumber than the perpetual traveller.

FINALLY journalists are seeing it, but way too late. Infecting an entire population and hoping you have enough hospital beds is not a public health strategy, it’s a public disease strategy. I still don’t think people…

It doesn’t seem rocket science to me that if you have a problem with emergency payments, the best solution is to fix the emergency.

Politics has always been a battle between working people (nearly everybody), and a tiny financial elite. When working people get screwed very badly, it's very dangerous for the elites, who remember things like the…

“There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot intercept the signs of a loved person without proceeding from worlds that have not waited for us to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which…

Bypass what politicians, media outlets and friends are telling you about Covid, and go straight to the expertise, like Professor Chris Goodnow. For those who won’t read it, his main points. It’s vastly more serious than…

Fat people are encouraged to 'burn off' the fat. It never, ever works, because it's based on junk science. Your body stores fat when it thinks you're at risk of starving, it's common sense. Nobody eats when they're…

I like to share vehicle technology, because I’m convinced people are not really aware yet of the revolution underway. Mitsubishi’s new Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid) is a case in point. It has an 84km full-electric…

And this happened despite 30 years of a federal government running resistance to renewables on behalf of big donors in the fossil fuel industry. Australians never subscribed to the economic hoo-ha they were peddling,…

Emma Mitchell uses neuroscience to design images that calm mental anxiety and stress. Very often the images end up being of flowers, mixed, as in a meadow. But also pets. Skimming through her images you do end up…

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…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago. A thing of almost sublime beauty, with…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half…

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…

Food waste has always seemed a bit strange to me. We almost never throw any food away, it probably helps having hungry teenagers. But even if it was just the two of us, I can’t imagine buying too much food and then…

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

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…

Saul Griffiths is on a mission to electrify everything. Which is what we need to do if we’re not all going to be incinerated by climate change. And we have to do it fast. He’s an engineer, and amongst other things he’s…

This research taking us further towards the functional equivalence of Covid and HIV/AIDS. It shows that Covid infects (and kills) T cells, which is what HIV does, that then leads to AIDS. It can take several years for…

'Balancing' Covid action against the economy. Hey presto, the economy tanks. Almost like it doesn't exist, and is just the people. Who are now too sick to work. Not rocket science.

This is test results for one patient. Multiple distinct infections. Immune system damage, preventing the body fighting the infections off. Covid did this, it attacks the immune system. Covid minimisers will try to tell…

"Schools and daycares are sending letters home to parents talking about this "immunity debt.” They’re saying that healthy children are getting sicker, even dying, because they weren't exposed to enough germs over the…

You can now buy an attachment for your smartphone which turns it into an ultrasound machine. The quality of the images is equivalent to a hospital ultrasound machine. This could revolutionise medicine.

We apparently can’t mandate masks in schools. But we can pump the kids full of antibiotics, like feedlot animals. The UK, cutting edge insanity. Where they go, we always follow.

A mystery of modern medical science is the extreme, childbirth-scale pain that is incurred by tripping onto soft grass inside that rectangle.

This is such an exciting, revolutionary achievement, and spoiled in Australia by years of spin by politicians in the pockets of energy companies. I don’t think people have really registered yet what it will mean to be…

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

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology.” Carl Sagan (Exhibit A - electric cars, and Covid.)

Short piece from the Lancet today which every person in NSW could learn something from. Confirming again that when you get a rise in Covid infections, you must smash them immediately. Not ‘live with’ them. And that…

If you give up higher super (funded by your employer), the employer will give you higher wages. Pigs might fucking fly. Even if this disgusting fantasy were true, it would mean you’re paying for your own wage rises. The…

The government vaccination ad campaign seems badly conceived. Featuring prominent talking heads who are just the sorts of people anti-vaxxers don't like. At the same time members of the same government fill the airwaves…

The PM. Notice what he’s saying here? Same as Boris. Vaccinate the high risk groups, then let the virus rip. It would be a disaster. This is not like other viruses in the community, it’s a vascular disease that can kill…

Listened to a debate last night where one of modern society’s increasingly numerous and brazen bullies bleated on about ‘free speech’ (how to pick these people, one of their favourite topics). And how ‘offence’ is…

Wanted to come back to this because I still think it's maybe the most extraordinary story of our times. Creating (not growing) our own food could change everything about life as we know it. And it destroys the…

Really powerful example of the complexity casuistry (case-based reasoning, like in law) can deal with in a way nothing else can. You'd look at that long list of eminent scientists and say, hmm, yes this is a miscarriage…

“Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics.”

This isn't a trick photo. Seriously not, all explainable using science.

If you're concerned about vaccines and blood clots, I seriously wouldn't be. Gideon explains it well. https://www.sciencealert.com/a-scientist-explains-why-you-don-t-need-to-panic-about-the-astrazeneca-rollout-pause

What can we do when we're told ecosystems are collapsing? We can become 'environmentalists', but then what does that mean? Wrapping the landscape in cotton wool? That doesn't work. We can try to scientifically 'manage'…

How do we regain connection with our landscapes? By spending time in them, camping and bushwalking, or canyoning? To me that's actually the strongest demonstration of being separated from the landscape, paradoxically.…

The famous Australian 'Bell Bird'. The Bell Miner, technically. The greatest bully in the Australian bush. Birds sing to create territory, and Bell Birds sing without a pause, all day. A forest where you can hear bell…

The 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…

Nothing fires up a redneck more than telling them some new pointless property development or road is blocked by an endangered species. Some tiny little frog or insect, how ridiculous! But that thin blue line of life on…

Another beautiful photo of the surface of Mars. Patterns appear everywhere in the universe (obviously one of my passions). When physics de-animated the universe, made it full of dead and inert 'matter', it had no way to…

ATAGI is the official scientific body that provides the vaccine advice to government. They've come out to make exactly the points I've been making in recent days, about the illegitimate use of risk in describing any…

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…

I like Brian Cox. And he's a Professor of Physics. But he's made me come back to gravity again. He said, while riding the vomit comet: "by simply falling at the same rate as the plane, for a few, fleeting moments, we…

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…

https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/02/bruno-latour-philosopher-fighting-save-science-itself

Here's a fact to blow your mind (maybe). There's no such thing as facts. People often question why experts disagree, can't they just 'stick to the facts'? The problem is, every single fact is only true within a wider…

Two models of society. The most common one used by us is millions of separate individuals, who mysteriously add up to form a 'whole greater than its parts'. Then, to return to Venn diagrams, there's this one. Each…

Science, the journal, saying what I've been saying: "Even a long wait for an alternative may be worth it if infections are low. In Norway, the risk of dying from TTS for women age 45 to 49 is equivalent to the risk of…

I prefer older-style towns, where there were more trees than cars. Now each household has 3-4 or even more cars, often parked all over the nature strip too. And the general quality of gardens is dropping I think, lots…

Mouse plagues are caused by the destruction of diverse ecosystems in favour of monoculture agricultural crops. This destroys most species, leaving the field wide open for single species to dominate, who no longer have…

Part of Darwin's beetle collection. Science was part of empire, it 'collected' the world, to categorise it. Placing the world in classifications, and on maps. The voyages of exploration were also mapping voyages, each…

I love heat pumps, we should all get rid of wood and gas fires and use heat pumps instead. Some of the amazing physics. These two scenes, one obviously looks much 'hotter' than the other. But actually there's about…

You can find this on Netflix. It's an extraordinary film, made by Peter Galison, a scholar in my area who studies scientific imagery in particular. It's the story of how they captured the first ever image of a black…

"We now know that the idea circulating early in the pandemic that kids are extremely unlikely to transmit the virus was more wishful thinking than good science." Some of us knew that last year. And it's not just…

How quickly the worm turns. I mean, plenty of average punters think Gladys is doing a great job, absent any evidence. But when even the brown shirts over at SKY turn on you, you're really in trouble.…

Don't get me wrong, I do love dogs. And all animals. But I've often wondered at how the sort of 'love' a dog gives, is exactly the sort that repulses people in most human relationships? Slobbery, worshipping, the sort…

Those who don't believe in God, inevitably replace God with laws. Scientific laws, mostly. (Please don't mistake me for an atheist, theist, agnostic - none of those things. I reject the whole lot.) The thing is, if you…

Watching the 100m, similar thoughts to the swimming. Most human sports target things humans are actually pretty hopeless at. In the animal world, we’re very slow runners and swimmers. And we’re not strong. The endurance…

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…

Know when kids in science at school say 'how am I going to use this in later life'? We have a new answer. You may not have a later life, if you don't shut up and learn.…

“The latest figures, published yesterday, show the UK's daily coronavirus cases have reached their highest level since July, with 45,066 new infections recorded…scientific advisers and ministers are now beginning to…

Found this photo on my phone, I must have accidentally snapped it when out for a walk yesterday. We treat the Earth beneath us as just ‘the ground’, like an inert mass we fall onto and rest on with our ‘weight’. In…

Here’s a way to maybe bridge the gap between how we think about landscape and how aborigines do. Our agriculture sees soil, water, plants and animals as means to an end. To provide us with food. However plants, animals,…

Bri trying to save badgers. An example for me how ideas matter more than anything. Animal ‘welfare’, ‘saving’ animals; if you frame it that way, you’ve already lost, animals are already seen as expendable. All that can…

More vortex tubes. You can buy one for about $50. Nobody can explain how they work (I suspect Archimedes could, but nobody reads him now). They defy modern physics. Simple compressed air in the top, instantly splits…

I’m going to talk about beavers here, so get your smutty little chuckles out of the way first. Australia needs beavers. On just about every other continent, beavers almost single-handedly do what we can only clumsily…

Cane toads scare people off from introducing species to Australia. But one of the main reasons we get these explosions from introduced species is that we don’t have enough of our own competing animals left. There are…

Beavers did this. With their teeth. There are quite a few approaches now to how to shape landscapes. Almost none of them mention animals and plants. They mention tractors, bulldozers, chain saws etc. But animals are…

‘Germs’. Has a negative ring to it, hey? I think we made exactly the same mistake with microbes - the micro landscape - as we did with the macro landscape. We isolated out a few species that are useful to us and…

I reckon you can trace most modern day problems, including climate change, to our inability to recognise the agency of anything that isn’t human. This planet has millions of other ‘agents ’ who could make our lives…

I find it interesting that even in modern scientific agriculture, very few farms survive without an ongoing connection with the people who work them, across generations. A small remnant human-landscape link survives.…

It’s a shame biology invented ecology. People tend to think of it as a biology thing, or a Greenie thing. Actually it’s a way of thinking. You look at how something only exists because of its connection to other things.…

There’s even a red hat. “No longer will you have to give in to toxic bullying feminist dogma and go against your ancient, biological nature as a woman, the men have arrived to help #MWGA”

I nearly didn't read this one (though Monbiot is generally good value), because it seemed ridiculous. But actually - much to think about here. The animals and plants we eat are all derived from microbes anyway, this…

A few times here I’ve posted that there is no such thing as ‘nothing’. Some thought it was just a semantics thing, but I think it’s much more than that. For example, our idea of death is of it being a nothing - we…

Max Planck said science progresses one funeral at a time. A brilliant (and true) demographic insight. If the world seems mad today, remember the demographics. The old dominate, and with them the reactive, anxious and…

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…

My first training outside school was as a materials scientist. Nobody I knew had heard of it; I’d still recommend it to anybody not sure what to study, it’s the most amazing field. Much of what we call ‘modern…

The debates between vegans, vegetarians and meat eaters miss something - it's not plants or animals we eat, it's proteins and fats and vitamins etc. The future is now, precision fermentation and microbiology are going…

The hay runners show that ‘the bush’ is more about national identity than about farming. Look at the flags. Agriculture is in terminal decline worldwide, mostly because it’s an absolute bloody disaster. Agriculture is…

I did an experiment this morning because I'm sick of the 'hoarding' idea around toilet paper. I got up early and went to observe the rumoured 6am rush to buy fresh supplies at the local Coles. It was real, maybe 20-30…

Suddenly conservative politicians lining up behind ‘the science’. When it’s something that might kill *them*, they take notice.

I think there’s a scale of human response to disasters, which varies with the numbers of people impacted. With a smaller group impacted but most of the rest of us are OK, like the bushfires, we get ‘everybody pulling…

I think there can be a lot of wisdom in humour. We see the world as a big map to be explored, with countries like animals in a zoo, to be ‘seen’. Look where that belief gets us.

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…

Viruses are literally like rock stars - moving beyond the 'germs' idea. They begin looking like a threat to society, and they really are in those early times, upsetting ways of life. Like early Elvis. Then society/our…

This is a known method, and might be what we need. Amazing thinking going on, an orgy of thinking. I'd love for it to continue after the pandemic! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00927-3

There are quite a few people saying we should relax social restrictions and let 'herd immunity' (i.e 60-70% of us getting infected) do the work of a vaccine. If only life were that simple. "Until we have a vaccine,…

Elimination. In as little as a month. Go hard, go early, tell vested interests in business to shut their gob. It's not rocket science. Thankfully we did a quick U-turn and followed a similar path. But we wasted weeks…

When you're faced with an impossible situation, it usually means you're looking at it wrong I think. Going back to bats, they show us that viruses are not the problem. How our bodies react to them is the problem. Bats…

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…

If you're at home with time on your hands, Google Paul Ewald, one of the most important researchers on microbes. Ewald shows that maybe all of our chronic diseases are caused by microbes, by infections. Including…

Sat through Pru Goward spouting dangerous drivel on The Project about herd immunity last night. Another conservative politician who thinks it's a way to get 'the economy' going again faster, spare me. Listen to an…

See how the same strategies cross the globe? Do we know anybody here who makes frequent reference to 'the science'? "The claim that government would be “led by the science” was reassuring many weeks ago, at the start of…

The schools debate, should kids go back? Never mind that people say 'the science is in' (it absolutely isn't, that's a lie). Look at it this way. If your teens hung out like in the pic here, in a public park, they could…

Why do viruses arrive in a community? Why do they leave? Why do they arrive and leave often everywhere at once, and not just one place at a time? The truth is - nobody really knows. About the only agency we give a virus…

Seeing the same arguments here, that we need to 'balance' the apparently horrendous impact of lockdowns on the economy against public health. As if those economic impacts are just as bad for our health as a pandemic. As…

I 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…

The UK Health Minister live on UK TV right now, asked about when UK schools will reopen. Quote: "although children don't suffer from the consequences of coronavirus nearly as much as adults - there have been a small…

Now we have our 3-stage strategy to all go and get infected to save the economy, anybody notice parliament is still closed, and isn't in the 3 stages? Presumably it's unsafe. Schools are safe though and in Stage 1,…

Uncomfortable truths we don't want to hear. Colds and flus are declining at the moment, while we're in partial lockdown. Rather than see infectious diseases as interruptions to normal life, we're not seeing that our…

An indication of how 'the science' is just a political phrase designed to stop people actually looking at it, is that our PM can call powerful and effective public health measures 'hiding under the doona', and not one…

"The science still isn't clear". The people who were happy for kids to sit in rooms with unflued gas heaters for the last 30 years may have a different definition of 'safe' to you or me?…

Was laying in bed this morning thinking about how epidemics just start and stop, and nobody knows why. And I thought, these microbes are working together, they're communicating somehow. When I got up, I did a bit of…

Next time a politician goes on about ‘balancing economic recovery’ against keeping you free of COVID-19, remember what the science says. Both the medical and economic experts called bullshit on this from day one. It’s…

Many said this was the strategic role of the phrase ‘the science’ from the beginning of the pandemic. And here it is, exactly as predicted. Scientists as human shields for politicians. This will be exactly the line used…

Aboriginals understood animals and plants and what they prefer, and would shape the landscape to appeal to the animals and plants. It was a contract, they'd provide what the animals and plants needed, and would get to…

Do you think we'll ever connect in our minds tens of millions of people wandering the Earth every day looking for somewhere to live, at the same time as tens of millions of others travel the same Earth sightseeing?…

1 day in to the big re-opening, 2 schools down. I call it Covid-19 pin bowling - strike! These students need to be disciplined, for ignoring the science.

I've noticed in this pandemic the necessary tension between medical people, and public health people. They're not the same. Medical people (doctors, nurses) will tend to be focused on the health of an individual. Public…

For those you know who still try to compare seasonal flu with Covid-19. Though it may be faster to just block them.…

If most human disease is infectious disease, even the big chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease and diabetes, you'd expect antibiotics to have an impact on some of them. And here it is. We've been living in a…

UK opening up. With 50,000 new infections a week. 'Open up' is politics, not science. Wherever you live.

How to fix all the world economies? Simple. 1. Stop believing in economies. 2. Remember money was invented by government as a tool for people to exchange things with. 3. Redistribute the government's money to all people…

Gladys: "For us our stimulation will really be driven by infrastructure first and foremost because infrastructure means jobs". There's no evidence that infrastructure spending creates jobs. There's good evidence it wins…

Notice the fine print here. It’s not fans, it’s the sponsors. Big money is driving our re-opening, not science. Remember how we were going to relax a restriction, then wait 3 weeks to test how it goes? All gone.…

For thousands of years, until the early 1900s, about half of all people born died before they turned 15, from infectious diseases. We think we've changed history, with vaccines and antibiotics. Both of those are…

A scientific age doesn’t believe in souls. But here’s a mystery - how does a picture ‘capture’ an object or person? This tap and pipe is really just a flow of electrons through a screen you’re staring at. But it IS also…

I think we need a way to meet aboriginal culture somehow in the middle, halfway between our ideas and theirs. Generally we either dismiss them as primitive, or turn their ideas into New Age mumbo jumbo. I think they…

Sunday is God’s day. In my experience people who don’t believe in God just swap something else to be in charge - science, politicians, the market, truth, corporations, etc. I don’t think I’ve met another person who…

Animals teach us that if you have your attention wholly engaged in what you’re doing, everything else follows without effort or strain. This hawk’s attention doesn’t budge for a second, which is what frees its body…

Australia, here's your future. Boris today openly announced that he's now ignoring 'the science' completely. It's getting in the way of his opening up of the economy. Notice also that UK slogan he stands above each day…

Is it more primitive to see agency in animals, objects and the landscape, or to see it only in humans? We think we’re the only sentient things on the planet, but sentience or agency is distributed across all things,…

Do people think? Like the ‘mutual obligation’ idea for people who get the dole. They should work to ‘earn’ their dole. But if the government wants to give away massive tax cuts to people who already have buckets of…

Yep, I can believe it. Early days in the research but it's conceptual leaps that create progress in science, and this one joins all the dots.

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…

NSW Cabinet apparently were trying to decide what number of infections in NSW would trigger more lockdowns. They apparently hit upon a figure of 250 per day, not because of any science or public health, but because they…

Great read if you get frustrated with passwords. https://towardsdatascience.com/why-password-validation-is-garbage-56e0d766c12e

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…

Have mentioned before that nobody knows how humans domesticated animals or plants. It's the greatest mystery of all time. I think this is much more important than just farming. We once knew how to create eternity in…

Paul Keating savaged the Reserve Bank yesterday. And rightly. The country has more than a million people without a job, and businesses sitting idle. The government should be pumping billions into the country right now,…

Thanks @[738682522:2048:Nicole] for this ripper. The herd immunity crowd include even quite educated people. It’s a dangerous fantasy, a political bastardisation of science. https://apple.news/A_kBEJSlMSZO0uRb1TKoErg

Homes used to be like a folding of the landscape itself, with many paths for walking, plants, animals, and lanes to link different villages. Beautiful spaces, the sort that make people feel joy when they occupy them.…

The science popularisers like Brian Cox, or Karl. Know what I’d like to see? A social science populariser, who can ask questions like ‘with all this gee whizbang new science and technology, why do people in the 21st…

What the virus is doing now is showing that the health sciences, including epidemiology, aren’t capable of getting us through this pandemic. Notice that their advice can get our numbers very low, sometimes to zero, but…

Superb, amazing. Captures exactly my ongoing passionate interest in this pandemic, in case you think I’m just obsessive. Pandemics are the key to understanding everything. If you’re prepared to do the hard work. The…

Watching 4Corners about the blokey, sexist culture amongst federal LNP ministers last night, made me think again that we’re maybe looking at the relations between the sexes in the wrong way. The deeper problem to me…

“We’re following the science on Covid”, our pollies say. Ask the scientists, nearly half of them disagree. Or put another way, I’d say we followed the science just over 50% of the time, and not the rest of the time.…

Have posted before about how domestication of animals is one of humankind’s greatest mysteries. Nobody knows how it was done. Increasingly it’s thought the animals did it, not us. Like cats, if you study their biology…

Sharing this to highlight that eliminating diseases, even very tricky ones like HIV, is standard public health practice. Remember politicians saying from Day 1 of this pandemic Covid couldn't be eliminated? That was a…

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…

In the UK as here there was much theatre early in the pandemic from pollies saying they were ‘following the science’. Conservatives never were, it was spin. They don’t on climate change, why would they on a pandemic?…

Hendrix was otherworldly. Like nothing before or after really, one of those rare forces of nature. Was watching interviews with him this weekend, and he was always described as so gentle, and that’s how he seems in…

One of the best profs. Funny, they nearly all agree with each other. ‘The science’ - this is them. Meanwhile I see people already blaming other people for the outbreak, as the pollies want you to do. Lemmings.

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…

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…

Professor Marylouise McLaws on radio this afternoon, an international expert on disease outbreaks, asked to summarise the Premier’s decisions about Christmas in NSW. “Dangerous”. Disease outbreak specialists use the…

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…

Droughts and flooding rains. Mackellar’s line was a bit of misty-eyed fondness. But ironically, droughts cause flooding rains, and flooding rains cause droughts. Both are symptoms of how the Australian landscape has…

To me this is one of the most exciting things happening in the world right now. The rediscovery of the importance of big animals - megafauna. Big animals have been under assault for centuries, often by hunting but also…

So many animal rights activists are so incredibly angry. When you’re young you sometimes feel that sort of righteous anger, it’s healthy, but then you’re supposed to grow out of it. This anger does damage I think. For…

“We should credit [the sky] for what it is: for sheer size and perfection of function, it is far and away the grandest product of collaboration in all of nature.” ― Lewis Thomas

Two of the most destructive concepts I think of our times are nature and culture. They’re glittering generalities, absolutely meaningless. The idea of nature has prevented us from understanding the natural world, and…

Is it society, or nature, when it takes 2.46 terawatt hours of electricity to keep in touch on social media?

A few years ago I had whooping cough, hell on Earth. There wasn't much on offer in terms of treatment, so I did my own research and found that some doctors a century ago used high doses of vitamin C to dramatically…

I saw a prominent person say the other day that “aborigines lived in balance with nature for thousands of years.” They didn’t, nobody ever has, nature is not balanced, nature is not even a thing. To me it’s interesting…

The paradox of Attenborough’s work is that it’s encouraged a sort of voyeurism of the natural world. The ethical struggle they had with these penguins seems a bit ridiculous? And the ideas about ‘nature’ that they use…

Our relationship with animals seems to be another one of those binaries - it has to be either ‘wild’ animals, or domesticated. And as this sign says, we also treat the wild animals as either pristine things which…

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…

Metrology isn’t well known. It’s the science of measurement. There are lots of debates about how ideas and words and numbers and theories ‘apply’ to the world. None of them do. Metrology is what builds the bridge…

White meat and red meat, it's only in recent years I learned why there two main types. It's all to do with the fibres, fast-twitch (white) or slow-twitch (red). White meat is muscle used for short (anaerobic) explosive…

Science copied the law when it invented laboratories. It put facts on trial, an experiment is a type of trial. I think you can see this in the real problems forensic science is having, once scientific facts enter the…

Selfishness - it’s all about me - versus altruism - it’s all about you. It’s a bizarre choice? I think the animal kingdom shows a much more sophisticated range of relationships, which are all part of society too:…

I defend institutions. It seems a boring and unintelligible cause to some, for me it’s the last defence against total social chaos. Read this, what’s going on out there, in this in case schools. All of our institutions…

If you think science produces ‘facts’ that tell us how the world is, and those facts speak for themselves, then like most scientists you’re probably horrified that we now live in a fake news society, where facts mean…

I don’t like the term re-wilding, because it’s not about letting the landscape be ‘wild’, just about letting far more things live in it. It turns out all landscapes need as many animals, plants and people in them as…

Have you seen the number of scare pieces online about how 5G is going to kill us all? I looked into this, and it’s fascinatingly our very own ‘fake news’. Driven mostly from the Kremlin’s online political units. Russia…

I'm convinced our war on darkness (electric light, daylight saving etc.) is changing who we are, in bad ways. There was a time when sunset brought on darkness even in the home, with candles or lanterns the only light. A…

Humans like to see themselves as separate to 'nature'. But have a look at how our societies exactly match what we call the natural world. Patterns. For centuries we had leaders like the Sun King, at the centre of…

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…

Wisdom from physics. Light doesn't shine on things, it's part of things, stars produce it by squashing matter so much that it explodes. What we call a 'material' thing is actually a container of light - light is stuff…

What happens when maths and physics get too far apart. We're usually taught that 60 and 120 degrees here are the size of the angles. But you can't measure an angle, you can only measure the deviation it introduces in…

Hard to describe some ideas in 10 words, but this one is a cracker, I think. Jacinda Ardern got a lot of press recently by saying economic growth would not be her government's sole measure of achievement. Some described…

The people and animals in this photograph are all long dead? Yes and no. For example, some of them is in this photograph, some of who they are has been 'captured' here and lives on with every new viewer. You could say…

We think we're smarter now than at any time in history. But check this. The domesticated plants and animals essential to our survival all appeared thousands of years ago. Today nobody knows how that domestication was…

Q&A was a science luvvies thing last night. The way we deal with scientists troubles me. When we're not ignoring them, we fawn over them, like last night. O please give us the answers science, isn't it nice to have firm…

Maps mislead us I think because they make us think of territory and space the wrong way. Nobody lives in the space of a map. What creates space and territory is rhythms. Animals sing or 'mark' territory with other…

I think David Gillespie's forensic lawyer's mind was fantastic for exploding a lot of myths of dietary science, and also schooling. But on screens I'm not a fan. It's such an easy and lazy argument to say screen time is…

None of the research on sleep can answer one basic question - why we do it . At the end of this article the researcher suggests something he thinks is crazy, but I reckon finally on the right track: "...sleep is so…

Here's why I think religion versus science is a dumb debate. Take a scientific law, like Newton's in the picture. Nobody actually knows *why* F=ma. It's a pattern that just happens. Scientific laws don't explain why…

One of the most embarrassing open secrets of science is that it has no idea what 85% of the universe is made of. The elements we learn at school make up an estimated 15% of the visible universe - the other 85%? Nobody…

Brian Cox's The Planets is jaw-dropping TV. Raining solid and liquid diamonds on Saturn - you couldn't make this stuff up. There is one point where he says that if there is life on one of the moons of Saturn, it will…

This is Herbert Benson, revolutionary American cardiologist who recognises that bodies can’t be understood or healed separately to minds. His patients are trained to activate the relaxation response, their…

Admirable as Greta's cause is, I still think climate change isn’t a scientific thing. It’s not even about climate. The climate is changing because we lost all meaningful connection to space. We turned it into a map, an…

Bacteria can swim like animals, photosynthesize like plants, and cause decay like fungi. One or another of these microbial geniuses can detect light, produce alcohol, waft hydrogen and fix nitrogen gas, ferment sugar to…

I love this picture. I was taught that animals and plants are the most complex of living things, culminating in the supposedly magnificent sentient consciousness of a handful of animals. It's only in recent years that…

I love animals, but am ambivalent about pets. The amount of attention we lavish on domestic animals sits uncomfortably with me, like we're using them for unexamined emotional reasons. For example, the US spends more on…

The ‘virtual’ world has nothing to do with IT. It sounds a bit abstract, but i think it actually changes everything we know, about life, death, space, time - the lot. We all still use Newton in everyday ideas, I think…

More on hypnosis. People doing the chicken dance. If people get up on a stage and are asked to act like chickens by a hypnotist, they're said to be in a 'trance'. These people aren't in a trance, and they're acting like…

Circuit boards look a bit like mini-cities. I don't think that's just an analogy, they're cities for sub-atomic particles. The amazing things we do with electronics - talk to people anywhere in the world…

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…

The Right to Life debates made me think this week. Why isn't extinction of species a Right to Life question? Why isn't climate change the same? We're looking at the death of millions, perhaps even billions, of living…

I think the cause of and biggest obstacle to addressing climate change, is the idea of 'the environment'. I'm still seeing even those who know climate change may kill most of us try to 'save the environment'. Or they…

More modern curiosities. Why is that that people can get really passionate about working out their bodies. But you don't hear people say, "gee, I don't know much about history, or science, or maths, or how the legal…

This pair, who promote themselves as the champion of the ordinary person against 'the elites', come from the very top level of elite society. Super-rich and privileged families, and leading parties funded by the top-end…

The long weekend, where homes are relocated through hours of traffic jams to a tent city of other homes. Apparently it's called getting back to nature.

In the 18th century Edmund Burke watched the French Revolution murdering thousands of people. What he took from those events is an idea of freedom opposite to how we've been taught to think of it - he's one of the…

One of the things I think farmers could teach city folk about climate change is that the idea of an 'environment' that we have to 'protect' is a fantasy. Nature, a meaningless term really, makes you work. Climate change…

This little civil engineering cartoon shows multiple amazing things. For decades now the US Army Corps of Engineers have been trying to stop the Mississippi from being captured by the Atchafalaya River, itself a product…

If you wear glasses, and don't have them with you, looking through a tiny aperture can sharpen what you're seeing pretty significantly. You can do it with your hand (as in the pic), or use anything that will give you a…

Vision is an amazing topic. Mostly the science of it focuses (ha) on the eyes. That would seem common sense to most. The Earth being flat does to many too. In fact the obsession with the eyes and vision goes so far as…

Anti-consumerism to me attacks all the wrong things. Our 'material' well-being is the most human part of us, and the way we are woven into the fabric of the world. I think the rejection of it is part of a wide escape to…

"The proliferation of protests is no guarantee that things will change. “Staging [demonstrations] is no longer the difficult part,” says Youssef Cherif, a political analyst and one of the authors of new Carnegie…

The evolution of the Australian arm. Permanently bent at the elbow, for beer, wine, coffee and phones.

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

The seductive danger of lenses. A metaphysics was added to lenses that has created all sorts of confusion. People started to believe that the things they could now see were a different level of reality. It's the same…

Bruno Latour has been attacked for 3 decades for making this point. To many he was 'undermining' science. Which shows that the 'modern' world is this same de-animation. That was what has driven the rush to fantasy in…

Lake Erie, one of the Great Lakes of the US, has been granted legal rights in the way a person has. You can see the algal blooms that are part of its current problems. This is what climate change really means, I think,…

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…

Research published in 2017 showed that people who reported having sore or stiff backs very rarely had actual stiffness in the back, when measured. The research is showing that such body stiffness is very often a…

The science has been in for a while on this one. That energy in - energy out ‘common sense’ idea? Complete bollocks.

One of humankind’s greatest mysteries still is - how were plants and animals domesticated? Nobody knows. It’s also not clear that humans did it, animals and plants may have domesticated us. We may be the domestic…

I’ve still not heard a definition of love that doesn’t define it as something else - affection, caring, selflessness etc. What I think people mean when they say they want to be loved, is that they want to be recognised…

"...the infinitely minute...everything that constitutes the visible universe, the universe accessible to observation, proceeds, as we know, out of the invisible and inscrutable - out of a seeming nothingness - whence…

“...if you think (as I used to) the stuff you burn, from a cosy log fire to the fuel in an engine, isn’t doing you or your neighbours any harm, then you’re in for a shock.” Tim Medley, science journalist researching air…

Humans as we know them have been around about 200,000 years. Dinosaurs occupied the planet for about 170 million years. Who says humans are the pinnacle of evolution? Um, only humans do.

Thinking through the bushfires. Several historians have showed that what we now see as the 'bush' - mostly trees - used to be a mosaic of open and closed spaces. Compare this early Australian painting with the same spot…

I want to talk about hunting, in a few posts. It crops up time and again in the best thinking about landscapes, around the world. What’s clear is that where meaningful hunting goes on, landscapes tend to be healthier. I…

Farming was supposed to give greater predictability and abundance for humans. It hasn’t worked, because it focused on the farm level, rather than landscape level. We see the result now, farms destroyed by drought and…

The fence might be one of the greatest destroyers of the landscape. Dividing up the landscape into small territories stops it from functioning. Outer boundary fencing in critical areas is still important though. There…

The Big and the Small, Part 2. A crowd, a public, flocks of birds, staff in an organisation. Large groups. A common way to explain these groups or crowds is that the individuals in the crowd each do their bit, and then…

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…

“By making accusation – long after the event – equal guilt, and making inevitable mistakes by doing so, a groundswell of belated anger such as the present one must inevitably produce a result opposite to the one…

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…

The American novelist Richard Powers says that it’s our parents’ weaknesses that have the deepest, most lasting influence on us, above and beyond anything else they teach us. Many peoples’ lives are driven by the…

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for…

If it seems that the world has gone mad, Urban Dictionary can help. All of the talk of ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ in politics is a sideshow. The real clash we’re all living through is probably much deeper, and nothing…

I think salt will be the next edifice of ‘nutrition science’ to fall. Actual research, which nutrition and dietary science usually doesn’t read, has for some time said that the association between salt and blood…

Related to the story about sausages in the news today, this is another modern sacred cow that means even a trip to the GP or cardiologist will still lead to you being misled.…

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

Some of the work being done with autonomous vehicles in Australia. Notice that part of the new world being developed is not just making vehicles individually autonomous, it’s to network them to each other and connect…

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…

Snarge. The collision between animal mobility - animobility - and the accelerated speeds humans use when they travel. Those accelerated speeds are bought by mining time itself - to get the energy we need for them, we…

‘Life’ - do we really know what it is? “We see this intertwined co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere,” says Hazen. “Life begets rock, rocks beget life.”

Do you believe in God? If you don’t, have you just replaced God with laws of nature? Providence is the belief that there is something ‘above’ our lives, shaping them and giving them purpose. It’s easy to see with…

Joshua Lederberg was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who questioned our ‘war’ on germs. He was one of the biologists who realised that we need to look at germs as part of an ecology, rather than always trying to kill…

Anybody else love The Good Life? One of those wonderful 1970s TV shows, about leaving the rat race, with the Goods (in the picture) deciding to be self-sufficient. As I got older though, I wondered how healthy the…

I think by far the most interesting thing to come out of artificial intelligence and robot research is the changes it forces in our ideas about thinking more generally. For example it was only when people tried to build…

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…

I post this every year because it’s wonderful, to me anyway. The wonders under our feet we don’t always notice. First picture is a man-made path through a park, on my way to work. After recent storms, a lot of plant…

“No human collective can exist without an object. There is no object without a collective, no collective without an object. The political animal is a fiction. The group floats wildly; it settles for a short time only by…

Spinoza has probably the coolest name of any philosopher. But his work isn’t widely known, although some rate him as the greatest philosopher of all time. In his own time he was considered a heretic, although he was a…

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…

The history of all life on Earth is likely the history of microbes. The animals and plants and fungi etc. we see as living things are likely just created by microbes and act as temporary homes for them. It’s why we and…

Often great mysteries in life are in simple things. Like the scientific concept of 'mass'. You can define just about anything else in science clearly, but mass is different. The best even scientists can usually come up…

The ‘force’ of gravity disappeared from science decades ago. Explained nicely with a bowling ball, and some maggots, thanks @[777634111:2048:Andrew]. It’s one of those examples that I think shows we don’t get ever…

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…

Re-posting this from inside another thread. This, to me, is another big disease of our age. Binary thinking. And as the article says, driven by one thing mostly - anxiety. Anxiety about ambiguity, although I think maybe…

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…

The common thread in these pictures is the criticism of ‘materialism’. Whether it’s people smashing religious icons, or getting back to human relationships and nature in our time, iconoclasts have always attacked what…

More patterns. A desire path or desire line (wonderful name) is a path people or animals take when left to their own devices. Often they sit right next to existing paths, like this one here. But I’m even more interested…

Another interesting tidbit for those who sometimes struggle with sleep. By the time a person is 50, it's quite common for them to fall asleep about 9pm and be awake by 3 or 4 am. This trend starts in many in their 40s,…

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.…

“Do you believe in God?” How did religion end up being thought of as ‘believing in’ things? To have ‘faith’ that what you ‘believe in’ is real? Like some sort of guessing competition. The atheists that oppose religion…

I think humans are some of the least sentient beings. Our feelings are almost comically simplistic compared to even what a tree feels and can sense. We're so certain that we're the most complex beings in the world…

Love Aeon. This topic is one I cycle back to regularly - binary, absolutist thinking. Often linked with high stress, anxiety and depression (which it tends to cause, rather than be caused by it). Splitting things into…

Bruno Latour was one of my mentors, and also one of the examiners of my PhD, years ago now. He’s internationally renowned for his brilliant and breathtaking recasting of science and technology, but also religion and…

What if the entire world, no matter what scale you look at, was nothing but mixtures? Our thinking and feelings can make us want there to be pure things, that are not mixed. But in reality, everything is a mixture.…

“The usual explanation of why humans are so successful as a species is simply that we are smarter, with huge brains and uniquely flexible intelligence that allows us to figure everything out through sheer force of…

Hannah Arendt saw loneliness as the root of all extreme thinking. Not the loneliness of not having friends - lonely people often have many friends - but the loneliness of not fitting in. The breakdown of social…

This flocking behaviour has a beautiful name - murmuration. Murmuration is when individual and group behaviour is indistinguishable. The thing I call the mystery of the ‘we’, and of patterns. Watching the patterns of…

Supply and demand. Hay has gone past $300 a bale, with the current lack of feed for farm animals. People will reflexively say "that's just supply and demand". But what does that mean? Doesn't it just mean people are…

Like Serres, my first love is music. But I’ve mentioned before, it’s starting to feel like noise. Noise is the way to occupy territory, as birds and other animals know. Music is about territory, that’s its main…

When teaching physics I noticed that not many people are aware of the mirrors 3 of the Apollo missions (11, 14 and 15) left on the moon. Since the moon landings, lasers have been fired at these mirrors from Earth to…

Conspiracy theories and urban myths are both fascinating things. David Grimes took a completely different approach to conspiracy theories (which he doesn’t dismiss out of hand), by ignoring the facts involved and…

Is all fear really the fear of falling over? Humans need exquisite balance to stay upright, many of us fail and compensate in all sorts of tightly held ways, a lot of them sub-conscious. Falling is one of the greatest…

I’m not always the best sleeper, and in the early hours of this morning I was reflecting on the concept of ends and means. The one captured in the expressions ‘means to an end’, and ‘the end justifies the means’. Most…

My first degree was in an area which is hardly even mentioned to young students, but is the cutting edge of nearly all science and engineering. Materials engineering. It’s new materials which have been the real driver…

Scene from the Salem witch trials. I love the law, the idea of a 'trial', where evidence has to be presented and then assessed by ordinary people, and against precedents in case law. Humans always have wondered how to…

Climate change is usually seen as a scientific thing. Too much carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. But there’s a different way to see it that some are starting to articulate. It’s a problem of morality. One of my…

In world terms, the UK was very late to introduce national parks, only in the second half of the 20th century. The reason why is very interesting. There was no untouched land left in the UK, its landscape is entirely…

Did you know Isaac Newton thought the ‘forces’ he studied were the actions of angels? Newton would have found our modern separation of science and religion bizarre.

Here’s my vote for why people like Trump and climate change deniers win. It’s a classic example of how the people who want the world to be different see the people they need to convince as simply stupid. How far do you…

Have you heard of the technosphere? Read this, it might blow your mind. We tend to think of ourselves as living ‘in’ nature, but as it turns out, nature changes all the time, and currently the technosphere is the…

Got lichen on your roof? Lichens are amazing things, that may provide a model for understanding everything in our world. Lichens are not a single organism. They’re a symbiosis of multiple organisms. Evidence is…

One of the fascinating things about oxygen I think is that it was a deadly poison to earlier forms of life on Earth. So what we see as vital to keep us alive was also what killed billions of other living things in the…

This is a plastiglomerate. A rock that also contains plastic. As a lot of researchers now believe, there is no such thing as ‘nature’, the technologies we use today are as much part of the world as birds and trees.

A theme for me. The big shift that climate change has brought, that I don’t think is well noticed, is that the ideas of nature, and the environment, are doomed. The idea humans live ‘in’ nature, or ‘in’ environments, is…

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…

A wonder from the English countryside. The hedgerow. We use fences now, but the hedgerow is way more than just a natural fence. I think it shows an entirely different relationship between people and the landscape. A…

My vote for the most important thinker alive. Check him out in this interview, it was through studying Latour (he was also one of the markers on my PhD a couple of decades ago now) that I learned more about the world…

The Thirty Years' War took place in the 17th century. More than 8 million people died, and it's considered one of the most destructive conflicts in history. Triggered mostly by competing ideas of one true religion, it's…

Looks like Australian Story is doing an update on Natural Sequence Farming tonight, Peter Andrews' genius. You should have a look at this if you've never heard of it, all the talk of 'drought' never asks the question -…

Life is but a dream. Did you know you’re conscious when you’re asleep? Sleep and death aren’t the off switch. https://www.sciencealert.com/your-consciousness-does-not-switch-off-during-a-dreamless-sleep-say-scientists

I like Harrison, I love Americans. But this is a whole lot of hot air, I think. We don’t need more science, or nature, we need Americans to ditch the Wild West, Puritan fantasy which stops them trusting any institution…

Yeh. Not a word Latour has written should be missed. Also an incredibly funny guy. It’s the scientific purists who are destroying science. Purists do that sort of thing.

The idea of ‘Left’ versus ‘Right’ came out of the French Revolution, where those who voted to retain great power for the King sat on the right of the chamber, and those to limit that power sat on the left. At the same…

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he…

I took a not very common pathway through education in the modern world. I studied sciences, maths and engineering, as well as the humanities, music and art. I worked bloody hard in all of them (still do), and did well…

I remember studying news as a genre. It’s designed to look like ‘what happened today’. But of course it isn’t that at all, it’s a tiny selection of events pitched a certain way, to create certain feelings in viewers.…

Cool image. I was taught about the balance of nature at school. It was only years later that I learned that this picture is a lie. There is no nature, and no balance. And that’s why climate change is so scary, no Mother…

Back to holes, because they may be the secret to everything. What would ‘nothing’ look like? How would you describe or represent nothing? I think ‘nothing’ is an impossibility, there is no way to have no-thing. Even if…

Laticia Caceres is a theatre director with what I think is a sensible take on #metoo. A take that highlights one of the things that has left both workers and women exposed to abuse, and not just sexual abuse. And has…

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

Whooping cough part 2. Because it might get you next, whether you're vaccinated or not, and it isn't nice. But there are things you can do that can make you suffer a lot less. The treatment of whooping cough hasn't…

Final instalment on whooping cough. This is a table from a pretty famous scientific paper published in 1937. It's a small sample of treatments the Canadian medical researchers concerned…

I posted this a few years ago, but think it's so important and interesting that it's worth revisiting. Harris also has a stake in the whole science-religion wars (he's a devout atheist), but that's irrelevant for this…

The French Prosecutor responsible for coordinating executions during The Great Terror in the French Revolution apparently said on his own way to the guillotine, "so will your bread be any cheaper tomorrow, you fools?"…

Klee's Twittering Machine. Music is more than anything else a territorial thing. Like dogs pissing to mark territory, music began in the marking out of a space with sound. Refrains. Birds use song for this. Humans do…

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although…

"It may shock you, but Americans spend more than $2 trillion every year on car ownership — more money than we spend on food. What’s even more staggering is that for all the money we spend on them, the 250 million cars…

McLuhan said that social science wasted so much money on research, that ads were already doing for it.

Bill Mollison was a wise man, he knew that it wasn't actually difficult to grow vast amounts of food just about anywhere. But his whole career he was followed around by hippies who thought this was a 'back to nature'…

@[783412914:2048:Kyle Manning], @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato], we often discuss science and religion debates, and the nature of science itself. Would be very interested in your (and anybody else's) views on this…

More Stanley Fish. We listen way too much to scientists on these questions, and not to people from the humanities, who are usually orders of magnitude more sophisticated. "Religious thought may be vulnerable on any…

I wouldn't mind the AMA 'dabbling' in a little medical science too, occasionally. Plenty of what Evans says is backed by genuine cutting edge medical science, just not by doctors because they're not always connected to…

So much of the venom for Pete Evans is laid bare here. It shows how deeply people believe that medicine is all scientifically based and that conditions like autism are well understood. Neither of those things is true.…

Cutest thing of the day. We should have native animals as pets, always wanted a wombat. Roo would do.

Continuing the science theme, what causes the seasons? There are interesting versions of this one.

Watching this made me think again how much we don't know about animals. And also how lucky we are to have arms.

It's easy to dislike Tolle, but he captures things beautifully sometimes. People struggle to believe this one, but it's almost the meaning of life. “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the…

"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…

"But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she…

Both schools and universities have failed forever to understand that if you don't offer people a way to understand *and* quantify the quality of the work you do, they will do it TO you. Nature abhors a vacuum. Or as…

A while back I shared the fallacies around life expectancy, and how we think we're all living longer than our ancestors, when we actually aren't - it's a misunderstanding about averages. Another classic area where…

Thanks @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato] for this one. The real problem with our antibioitc use isn't humans, it's animals. Farm animals are fed tonnes (literally, tonnes) of antibioitcs each year to help fatten them…

My cup runneth over. Idiot gene research and travel in the one article. http://www.traveller.com.au/science-reveals-why-some-people-just-love-to-travel-gxmw3q

Novels are an example I think of how art is not 'subjective', but so important to actually understanding the world. Including people. Artists and art help us to understand the world in the widest and most profound way,…

Isn't Brian doing well? More gouging of the public. The public will pay of course. If you asked them to cough up more for science education in schools they'd probably call you a socialist.

It was angles that led the ancient Greeks to invent the idea of atoms. You know those questions you sometimes ask as a kid, about the infinitely big and infinitely small, like if the universe ends at this point, what's…

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.…

"I would be very emphatic that our schools, our parishes exist to teach a Catholic view of marriage," he said. I would be very emphatic that they take some of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they're getting…

Mosley is important because he really investigates the science.

A while back I'd post a Proust quote every day, just because he was a bit special. Might do the same for Whitehead. On the outside the most gentle and unassuming of people, on the inside a complete revolutionary.

Who says scientific journals are boring? http://www.nature.com/news/sexual-competition-among-ducks-wreaks-havoc-on-penis-size-1.22648?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox

I know people love my Daylight Saving rants. Here's another angle. The only argument anybody ever gives in favour of Daylight Saving is "I love it". Is an argument for beating your wife, that you love hitting women? Or…

This is the first ever recording of a human voice, on April 9, 1860. The voice is Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who also invented the device which recorded it, which he called a phonautograph. The device took sound…

The secret to everything is bacteria. Learning about them changed my life; they are the most complex living things, don't believe a word of the biology you learned that says humans and other animals are the most complex…

One of the things I think Marshall McLuhan made people aware of was that copies make originals. The idea of an ‘original’ doesn’t even exist, until you have copies. Tarde said it, imitation is the heart of all life. Our…

Was watching the fawning over Brian Cox again last week, on one of his visits to Oz. He’s a lovely, smart bloke. But science is in a mess, and the wide-eyed gee whiz people give to Brian is a symptom of that mess. And…

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…

I'm a bit like this. Love animals, not sure I want to 'own' one. Although domestication isn't really trapping, the animals get benefits too. http://gu.com/p/4hxzp?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Fantastic piece on the politics of science, the myth of the scientific method, and the myths in particular of nutrition science.

When you study trigonometry at school, you're actually studying deep history. Modern curricula separate maths and history though so you're never told that (hardly anybody even remembers the connection). Angles are the…

That time of year again here when depression and anxiety really ramp up for some people. I give these guys a plug every year, they're fantastic. Their Depression Learning Path is a free download, if you just want to…

How anybody can say a 'Foundation for Reason and Science' without laughing still eludes me.

So true. Even flies show remarkable intelligence, you just have to know what to look for. We're so vain. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/do-we-really-know-how-smart-animals-are/7500722

Animals are so much smarter than we understand. Except maybe plovers, I'm struggling to defend them.

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…

This argument just keeps on keeping on. Learn some basic biology and ecology George. Feedlot farming is a disgrace, absolutely. But you can't grow plants to eat without friggin' animals as part of those ecosystems.

This debate will get somewhere when people stop thinking it's actually about the science. It's not, doesn't matter how many graphs and numbers people trot out, you won't change peoples' minds. What needs to be…

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…

Love it. I studied at this School at UNSW, they do some amazing stuff. Materials science is the cutting edge of engineering, most new big innovations in engineering are about the materials used, not the way they're put…

It's hard to say, with music being my real passion for so many years. But music sometimes can become annoying or unsatisfying. Music is rhythms and sounds, but just a tiny subset of the rhythms and sounds of the world.…

It'd be easy to mock this. But somehow it seems a very important thing, about the nature of the body and sacredness. Have never been sure about cremation.

Watched this yesterday. The most powerful thing was seeing how all of the alcoholics shown were just ordinary people, who didn't even notice when things started going wrong with alcohol. That's the insidious nature of…

More than 700 tonnes of antibiotics are imported into Australia every year. More than half of those antibiotics go into stock feed (column 2), nearly 10% is used by vets (column 3), and about 35% is used in the health…

Watching The Martian again the other day, along with the film Gravity there's been a real shift in the way people see science fiction. In the past science fiction was all that corny Star Trek reaching for the stars…

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2015/03/04/4190354.htm?WT.mc_id=Innovation_Innovation-Science%7CConformityHardToBeat_FBP%7Cabc The passion to conform, and to not conform. The same passion, unsurprisingly. Just be…

http://time-change-blues.diply.com/science-rules/negative-effects-of-day-light-savings/106977 Clock is ticking (ha) on Daylight Saving. Gotta hope.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/05/cern-restarts-large-hadron-collider-with-mission-to-make-scientific-history We can't comprehend the idol smashing in northern Iraq because we can't see the similarity to…

More science should be like this :)

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…

The Great Permian Extinction, when up to 96% of all life on Earth was wiped out. The cause? Most likely accelerated global warming. If you oppose trying to do something about global warming, please be absolutely sure…

The dietitians out in force, listen to me, not to Pete Evans! What an utterly failed field, decades of abject failure in every possible way, no serious, reproducible scientific basis for just about everything they say.…

Bewdiful. (We can give up with science education when even astronauts call this zero gravity.)

For years medical science has said 'just a placebo'. Which begged the question - why do placebos work? Now it turns out it's possible many of the health effects of even normal drugs could be 'placebo' too. And placebo…

Real wisdom here, about the folly of hankering after the 'simple life', whether that's some love affair with 'nature' (whatever that is), or telling people to get off their phones and enjoy reality more etc. All silly.…

I'm a big believer that the human microbiome is the secret to a lot of human health. But you need to pay attention to both probiotics AND prebiotics. This is the Daily Mail, a journalistic sewer, but the science for…

There's lots of debate around diet now, and people are learning amazing new things about nutrition, and reaffirming some old wisdom about food at the same time etc. What isn't questioned to the same extent, but it's…

Lol "healthy sugars from fruit and low fat dairy". They're not teaching dieticians much science.

“Life is literally a process of one creature eating another, whether it’s bacteria breaking down plants or animals, plants strangling each other, animals going for the throat, or viruses attacking animals. “All of…

So much nonsense said and written about science and religion. This is a completely different view, minus the straw men in both sides: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-RELIGION-GB.pdf