Technology

We already know that for about the past 150 years, the US has been an oil company with an army. And people still want to back in that technology. Be free Australia, go electric.

Our home battery (Tesla Powerwall 2) has a warranty that says it’ll still provide 70% of its original storage after 10 years. So still perfectly usable well after 10 years has passed. But if I run the diagnostics today,…

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.

Robots are getting really, really good, really fast. It won’t be long now and we’ll get the ‘but they’re not as good as humans and they can only do what humans make them do’ lines. Always the last act of the play. Of…

There will come a day in the not too distant future where the old (the world is going to be full of old people) will be able to buy a humanoid robot to do most of their house and garden tasks, as well as offering self…

Somebody said to me that Tesla's Level 2 self-driving isn't that great (drove me the entire way to work today), that makers like Mercedes already have Level 3 autonomy. The problem is Mercedes' system only works in…

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

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn…

I never predicted the end of my working life would involve working with insurance. I’ve loved it. Insurance is great because it and the actuarial analysis that underpins it completely ignores people’s opinions on…

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

Helping to care for the vast and growing number of old people in the world is one of the major reasons humanoid robots are under development. I’m sure many will have an immediate reflex ‘ugh’ to the idea, but this could…

The Zeekr 7GT. Coming to Australia this year. The performance AWD version will take you from 0-100 in under 3 seconds, and has air suspension. The aerodynamic efficiency of this car is amazing, it slices through the…

The reason monarchy is pretty much all of human history is that it's a technology to control status rivalry. Modern minds don't understand this. Take the rituals around royalty, which modern republicans see as outdated…

Toyota is famous for reliability. I have one. Tesla is even better. I also have one of those. Toyota reliability costs you an annual service. The Tesla requires no servicing.

People of a certain age (like my age) might remember a great sci fi TV show from late last century, called Blakes 7. One of the characters in Blakes 7, a favourite of mine, was a supercomputer called Orac. Only the size…

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

Have a look at how far China has come with robots. They'll be in our lives soon, with inbuilt AI.

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…

This is actually a great deal, and decent EV. In reality they used a Chinese firm's design and hardware (Deepal). Japanese and European carmakers make big bluff and bluster statements about how 'the combustion engine…

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…

These mega-fast chargers are great, and already operate in China. But this is also a response to nonsense anti-EV people made up (they make something new up every day). The only time an electric car even needs to use a…

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still…

London’s Frameless Museum, this remarkable exhibit a combination of AI and digital projection. Only 30 seconds, watch the whole thing, truly amazing. AI doesn’t destroy art, it augments it.

Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he…

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

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…

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

The perfect day to sell your combustion clunker and buy an EV. Iran just closed the main shipping way for 20% of global oil, to sweeten the deal for you. Tesla isn’t your enemy. Your combustion clunker funds Trump’s…

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams.…

The new BYD Seal 08 will have 1000km of range, and be able to be charged with BYD’s megawatt chargers in just 5 minutes. BYD is following Tesla’s lead and is installing chargers in China and Europe right now. They’re…

There seem to be credible hints that Tesla will release Powershare for Juniper models, in homes that also have a Powerwall, some time this year. Apparently the needed power electronics are already onboard. It looks like…

This is Omar Yaghi. You may have seen hm in the news recently, he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He invented a technology using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) that will pull moisture out of air, even in…

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

Matrix LED headlights, which solve the problem of losing visibility when you have to dim high beam for oncoming cars, are another engineering innovation that Tesla brings to ordinary drivers. Previously this sort of…

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

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…

It looks like Tesla will release the Model YL 6-seater in Australia today. Perfectly timed, with the pressures on fuel. We’ll probably get one, and will be free of fuel bowsers forever. When these were launched in China…

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same…

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

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…

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re…

The continuing surge in popularity of Chinese cars in Australia, easily the dominant vehicles in sales in Australia, and have been for a while. Their brilliant EVs are now rushing out of salesrooms. Tesla’s Model Y is…

Here are some electric Tesla semis, charging at one of Tesla’s truck charging stations. Tesla builds the whole infrastructure when it builds vehicles, including the charging for longer distance travel. The genius of…

For those who like everyday comparisons, Kell just quarter-filled our Kluger (hybrid). The fuel cost $55, for a quarter of a tank. To fully charge the Tesla costs us either nothing, if we use solar and the home…

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

Redwood Materials, a company headed by one of the engineers who set up Tesla, takes old car batteries and stands them up in the middle of the desert, linking them and controlling them with software. This creates massive…

This was always going to be one of the phenomenal benefits of autonomous driving technology. It could extend the driving life of older people for years. At the other end of the driving spectrum, it also allows…

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.…

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

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

As an engineer, the thing that attracted me most to Tesla, and which I think is genius and rarely spoken about. They managed to take all of the things people usually love about cars, like performance, driveability,…

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

Again, for kidults reality is just an endless series of shifting trends. Tesla was hugely unpopular in Europe for a while there, when Musk was chummy with Trump. The kidults, like groups of kids in a playground, said…

Working for a Council, complaints about potholes are one of the biggies. What’s not often said is how much people’s choice of vehicle causes this problem. Modern utes and SUVs are heavy. EVs are often accused of that,…

How good is this? Sharing this one not just for the brilliant engineering, but because it illustrates how cars are being reinvented. Cars are moving away from being ‘mechanical’ devices. The basic mechanical drivetrain…

This is a collision testing machine for vehicles, one of the tests that gives them their safety rating, out of 5 stars. As another window into the genius engineering that sits inside Teslas, when Teslas were tested on…

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…

Toyota is often thought of as the pinnacle of reliability in vehicles. With some justification, they pioneered affordable quality engineering for cars. But this would be about the sixth critical recall issue we’ve had…

This is the much bigger, profound shift that autonomous driving technology is bringing to roads. It’s not just replacing human driving with machine driving, it’s changing drivERS themselves. It’s stripping away the…

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

The robots are coming, and fast (literally). Driven mostly by the Chinese and their engineering genius. But also by Tesla. They’re going to change the world in fundamental ways.

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

A street in Shanghai. Teslas abound, because EVs abound. China doesn't have the obstructive adolescent whine of social media to prevent social progress.

A lovely indication of just how sophisticated Tesla self-driving has become. The driver here wasn’t sure why their Tesla had pulled up well short of the Stop sign. Then it became clear - the car had seen the…

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

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

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

The energy market regulator has a dilemma. Paying for network upkeep is done on the basis of a daily supply charge based on how much electricity people use. But because millions of Australians have now installed solar…

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

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

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.…

Taking delivery of one of these on Sunday. Paul Meric is a ruthless reviewer, and here’s his summary, that cuts through all of the adolescent pro- and anti-Tesla nonsense. “I think this thing is absolutely…

Tesla autonomous driving prevents the owner being T-boned by somebody running a red light. Note the car on the right had a red right-turn arrow, which is why it didn’t move forward.

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away…

Another reason I went with Tesla is that they, by design, allow you to integrate all of your energy use in the one brilliant app. This includes your vehicle use, by far the largest energy use of any family, as well as…

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

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

Over 48 hours into the 72-hour test, Robot Bob has sorted over 60,000 packages.

How to see kidult culture. Culture is like water to fish, mostly invisible to those living it. In the 19th century, Jules Verne created magical stories. About travelling to the moon, and amazing submarines exploring the…

I’ve been driving the newer Tesla Model Y all this week, the YL. Patrick gets why this is the best car ever made. But it’s now even better, the YL even has adaptive suspension that allows you to move between fast…

Senior doctors in the US are now demanding that autonomous driving technology be prioritised. They see its impact as equivalent for health to preventing smoking. Humans are appalling drivers, in direct proportion to how…

How AI is changing the world. This is the BioHive-2 supercomputer. Developing even a single new drug used to take years. This computer can do over 2 MILLION drug experiments every WEEK, simulating thousands of different…

Not only the best car in the world, I would say the best car ever made. And people vote with their buying. Best-selling car in the world 3 times, at a time EVs are still scary to many and there's huge anti-Tesla…

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

Tesla introduced AI to its Powerwall units, to help explain to people in real time what's happening in their energy management. For a lot of people who don't engage with the more technical side of things, it's a…

It occurred to me a while ago that the closest existing car category to put a Model Y or YL into would be GT cars. Grand Tourers (GTs) are cars that combine effortless long-distance comfort, high-speed stability, and…

This was the energy use of the new Tesla, driving 62km to Bathurst yesterday. To translate that into a comparision with a petrol or diesel vehicle, the standard dual cab ute (Australia’s favourite cars), if it could use…

In NSW, no P-Plater is allowed to drive the Tesla. But all of them are allowed to drive the Wankpanzer.

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…

Cancer vaccines currently under trial. Hugely exciting times. Mostly mRNA vaccines. A wonderful technology, when combined with AI it makes vaccine development orders of magnitude faster and more targeted. The mRNA/AI…

The only alternative to catastrophe for human progress (catastrophes create most meaningful human progress) is to BUILD things. We have this bizarre idea that progress comes from people talking to each other. That can…

Volvo make lovely cars. Their new EX60 EV though shows again the elephant in the room. It copies Tesla in just about every detail, including with mega-casting construction. But doesn’t have the self-driving, just for…

What China has done in the last 50 years is miraculous, unprecedented in all history. It’s lifted 900 million people out of poverty. In doing that it also made the rest of the world richer, most countries’ economies…

When ATMs were introduced, there was fear they’d make bank tellers redundant. Like the fear right now that AI will replace humans in their jobs. It wasn’t true. Automation rarely replaces human jobs, there are too many…

What’s another passion of adolescents? Historically, their cars. So we should expect to see that reflected in a ‘kidult’ culture, where adults think, feel and act like adolescents. Australians have more than 4 times as…

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 post about how only catastrophe brings meaningful social change. Cars are a good example. Until World War 1, horses were the dominant way people got around in their daily lives. 8 million horses died in that…

I’v been tracking for a long time what Tesla might be doing with V2G and V2L. The Cybertruck already does it, and there were rumours Tesla was finding a way to allow later-model Model 3s and Model Ys to do it as well.…

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…

I’ve discussed with a few people the idea that Chinese technology spies on you. You know what does spy on you, relentlessly, every moment? Social media. You’re the product. It collects vast data on you and on what you…

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…

An extra dimension to autonomous driving. The what - drive safely according to road conditions and rules - is the usual assumption for what an autonomous system should do. But the *how* it's done i.e. the degree of…

While people keep playing their goodies and baddies status games inside social media bubbles, Tesla keeps building things. In this case its 1000th Supercharger in Australia, in Byron Bay. This is big investment in…

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…

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

Tim is a traditional car guy. A 4x4 guy. Who bought a Tesla. And now has been trying its self-driving. He's blown away. Great engineering makes human hot air irrelevant.

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

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…

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…

I talk to people every day on the socials who tell me the AI apocalypse is upon us, and capitalism this and oligarchs that and Big Brother etc. And yet funnily, most of the world is falling over itself to use it. Far…

Horrendous driving conditions tonight. Driving rain, dark, blinding headlights from the other direction, hydroplaning, hopeless visibility. The Tesla held the road like it was glued down, and could see even in…

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.…

And the Tesla Model Y is now Australia's biggest-selling car, including all petrol and diesel cars. Overtaking the RAV4, and not before time. The Y is 10 times the vehicle the RAV4 is.

For several years I’ve been posting about how existing carmakers are on the way to becoming extinct because of their inability to shift to electric technology. Look at these numbers and tell me you don’t see it.

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…

One bit of advice I’d give to people as homes and lives become increasingly powered by electricity, is the value of sticking within the one ‘ecosystem’. Sticking to a single brand for your different electrical products,…

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…

Globally birth rates fell off a cliff at the exact moment of the introduction of the smartphone. At the same time the amount people socialise also fell off a cliff. But in reality they were shifting to socialising…

Human versus self-driving. Guess who wins. (The Tesla saw it happening, slowed down to avoid the wankpanzer human.)

With this change, due this year, Tesla drivers will be able to verbally tell their cars in precise detail what they want them to do. Like ‘go to William Street and park near the post office, in the public car park.’ Or…

The most trivial, tiny social transactions are now processed through these platforms. The idea social media is an ‘information’ technology is nonsense. It’s a social technology, it replaces social life. How do people…

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…

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

Australia. Now the land of ‘community consultation’. Meaning a handful of twits in each town running obstruction for anything that was built after about 1810. The Australia of my youth wanted to be at the forefront of…

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…

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…

I encourage everybody to learn some actor-network theory. Our world is divided by most into two apparently distinct domains. The human, and the ‘technical’. The first has creativity, purpose and intent; the second is…

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

The standard story goes, we once were naive and believed in transcendent things, but now we don’t and believe only in facts. I don’t think that’s right. History instead is the passage from the transcendent, to the…

Tesla's supervised self-driving has now completed over 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometres) without ONE fatality. Not one. Statistically, the same number of km driven by other vehicles would produce (on crash…

A short highlights package of some of the things Tesla's autonomous driving technology can do. If you can look in 9 directions at the same time, all around your car, 30 times per second, then you win. (And you're full…

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…

I’ve posted before about how social media is confused with social networking, which came before it. The two main differences that turned social networking into socially toxic imitative rivalry, were: 1) the creation of…

The genius of electric motors is that you can alter the torque they put out in the tiniest amounts, within milliseconds. This means that once you have them in a car, software updates can create all sorts of abilities…

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

Fuel already at or over $2/litre. In just a few days that jumps another 16 cents per litre. We shouldn't be subsidising rubbish technology.

Cities are remarkable in a way I only recently came to understand. Throughout all of history humans have struggled to find ways to live together, without violence and death. That’s because humans relating only to other…

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

Teslas can avoid potholes too. What's fascinating is that this is a feature they were working on, but haven't released formally yet, but the AI has figured it out by itself. It's an emergent behaviour. There are 10…

Tesla is finalising another genius bit of engineering. If you have the home battery and wall charger and vehicle, it will allow you to use your car batteries to top-up your home battery, as needed. This is a post about…

Watching netball at the Commonwealth Games and it makes me think again how I’ve completely reversed my thinking on free-to-air sports broadcasting. I used to agree major events should be available on free-to-air, to…

Was at a tyre workshop chatting to the owner while they were working on my tyres. We were talking about tyre wear on EVs, which can vary depending on how you drive, the road surface etc. He said ‘it’s just that they’re…

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more…

It takes a diagram to capture what Tesla is really doing, and it goes so far beyond cars. It's a breathtaking idea of using continuous feedback between people and the technologies they use, to create an entire culture…

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

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won…

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…

Far-UVC light is UV light at a wavelength that doesn't harm human skin or eyes. But it's lethal to airborne pathogens. I've posted about it before, and the research and engineering has now progressed to a point where…

It’s a pretty brutal demonstration of just how much trouble the big German and Japanese car makers are in, as the world shifts to electric. Not one German brand, and only one Japanese brand (in position 18). Also a…

The emergence of a near-transcendent force of destruction in the Manhattan Project created the fear of global annihilation. Instead that transcendence ushered in an era of almost unprecedented peace, via the threat of…

There is no ‘pushback’ against AI. Just as there is no pushback against wind turbines, or EVs. These are just viral trends on idiot social media. I would welcome pushback against social media, but it turns us into…

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those…

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

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…

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

Look at what AI can do. For years I’ve thought Formula 1 racing isn’t really racing, that its results are more about entrenched technological advantage in key teams. So with AI I looked at whether the results of the…

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…

The times they are a 'chargin'. The Bathurst Tesla Superchargers used to sit empty most of the time, except on busy holidays. (Which is normal, most charge at home.) Absolutely packed today, and a new car arrived with…

Tesla self-driving shows that the debates about whether AI is just a high-powered copy-and-paste machine are nothing but hot air. If AI couldn’t generate its own thought and only copied what it saw elsewhere, Tesla…

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…

Modern mobile phones have NPUs (neural processing units) to carry out artificial intelligence/machine learning operations, on the phones. iPhones and Android phones have had these AI chips for nearly 10 years. The…

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

‘Community opposition’ to AI is like community opposition to Tesla. Tesla sales in Australia are off the charts. And half the Australian population can’t get enough AI. Life on the socials is a delusional outraged…

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…

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…

The Swiss were once famous for making beautiful precision watches and clocks. Now Apple’s genius for design and software is in partnership with one country, to produce modern precision timepieces. China. Apple say none…

This is BYD's Tesla Model Y competitor, that I've posted about here before. The price looks like being amazing, as always with BYD. Australia is now one of the best places in the world to buy a car.

Very close to the reveal of the new Tesla Model Y. A big event, the world's biggest selling car. Autocar has done this rendition based on leaked photos, it should look pretty much like this. The Model Y to me is a…

Actual picture from Tesla now of the new Model Y. Nice job.

Mazda is one of the major Japanese car makers that has been bullshitting us all, telling us that it can continue to make petrol and diesel cars, no need to shift to EVs. In reality, like all the other Japanese car…

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

Cars are a cultural thing, social groups align around them. They talk technical, but it's really about keeping the group together. Also why a major change to car technology triggers such resistance.

The price wars continue, again what a beautiful time to be a car buyer if you’re Australian. Sucks to be a European or American right now. Hyundai have slashed the price of its brilliant EV the Ioniq 6 by $20,000. 20…

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else…

Club Crypto is backed by all the good people, hey @[783412914:2048:Kyle]? ;) https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/20/donald-trump-meme-coin-price-melania-token

Just look at this amazing technology. America is toast, nobody will want to buy junk US vehicles.

KIA have done an incredible job with their EV3 and EV5. And with an established dealer network, those with some EV anxiety really should look at these models. Even their software is now world-class. And the price is…

I do get that Elon Musk is putting many people off Tesla in any form. But Tesla is 130,000 brilliant people, doing urgent things the world needs. For example way bigger than its cars is its provision of battery storage…

This is the car Kell and I just bought. Not the actual car in the picture, but the exact same model, colour etc. The Model 3, Long Range. People know I spend a lot of time looking at all the EV options out there. What…

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

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

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

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

The anti-Tesla mob must be making Evie happy. Once you’re in a mob, you don’t get to choose what it does.

The simplest car buying experience I’ve ever experienced, by a country mile. Pleasurable, even. Included a trade-in. Did it all from my couch, on the app. I see Tesla sales are well down globally this month, the big…

Did my calculations long ago for the new EV. If we stick with grid power to charge it at home, at full grid price (not special EV price), it’ll cost about $15 a week to ‘fill’ the Tesla. That’s for 300km of motoring per…

What I really like about Tesla, and a huge reason I went with one of their vehicles (already had the home battery) is in that underlined bit. A ‘fully integrated’ home energy ecosystem, to create energy independence.…

A 'wit' shared this with me the other day. Loving the Tesla, loving sailing past poor combustion clunkers madly down-shifting and revving, trying to keep up. Loving no fuel costs, no servicing, loving the 17-speaker…

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

The top level of the Tesla app showing the solar, house battery and car all currently being charged for free by the sun. The app has many more layers and functionality, the best software I’ve ever used.  Feels really…

I have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and…

Saving the world one haircut at a time. Probably all selling their Teslas now too.

That’s Lithgow to Bathurst. It’s one of the main reasons I went with Tesla, that efficiency almost unparalleled in electric cars. Most of them struggle to do less than 20 kW hours per hundred kilometres. The Tesla did…

The only thing stopping Ford’s bankruptcy is its sale of big utes, Rangers and the F-series utes. BYD is targeting both. As Sam said, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Far superior technology, for about 40% less dollars.…

It appears many of those refusing to buy Teslas are...people who were never going to buy Teslas. 'Huge demand'. The Model Y is (deservedly) the biggest selling car in the world, genius design and engineering, with a new…

Australia might go one better. It might elect a halfwit who wants to spend $600 billion (of your money) on foreign nuclear technology that nobody needs. Imagine the roads, schools, trains, hospitals and affordable…

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…

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

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

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

I'm genuinely curious what all the those who support the anti-Tesla protests have to say about this. There's no washing your hands of it, no half-pregnant membership of the mob. 130,000 employees and millions of Tesla…

What Musk is trying to do with Trump in the US, Australia already did, with Robodebt. He wants to take over government departments and replace them with software. For that, Tesla property and Tesla owners have become…

To give a bit more of the flavour of insanity that passes for public life now, you'll see these Foxtel dishes all over Australia. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you think Murdoch is a cancer on democracy (and he…

This has nothing to do with me owning a Tesla. It's to do with mob behaviour. How many carmaker CEOs could people actually name? Do they know their political positions on things? Do they happily support the brutal Saudi…

Tesla sales in the UK surged by 20% in February. Overall EV sales there are up over 40%. The Tesla Model Y is the second most popular car in the UK, the Model 3 is the 3rd most popular. Sales also surging in Korea and…

Filled up the hybrid this morning. I drive hundreds of km every week, split 50:50 between the Tesla and the Toyota hybrid. The hybrid cost me $100 in fuel for the fortnight. That’s a hybrid, it’d be $200-$300 for a full…

1 year of free fast-charging. Tesla offering 5000km of free fast-charging on run-out stock of the previous Model Y. Incredible bargains out there. In the UK not only have EV sales surged, petrol and diesel sales have…

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

It’s politicians who approve building on flood plains and who do nothing against climate change. They need a distraction, and insurers are always it in natural disasters now. Queue the next mob pile-on. Heck it may even…

The Sealion 7 is now for sale in Australia. Like most BYDs, you're getting a LOT of high quality car for a small price. This is BYD's Tesla Model Y challenger, though it's not as hard to challenge Tesla in the current…

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

The thought of the MAGAs now buying Teslas to emulate the Great Leader amuses me. The thought of even more social media mob zombies heading out with spray paint doesn‘t. It’s like living in a childcare centre for…

A President doing an infomercial for his largest donor, with the White House as the backdrop. The US is over. Buy a Tesla, they're phenomenal cars. They'll survive much longer than Musk or Trump. Not buying them won't…

We believe what our gang or team leader says we should believe. Nobody is paying any attention to the actual details. It's all team sports, your team against somebody else's team. The team leader can say completely…

Toyota, which has pretended that we don’t need EVs only because it was caught with its pants down (in the background they’ve been in panic mode trying to build them). Its bZ4x is OK, this new C-HR+ looks much better.…

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…

They can now recycle and re-use every square millimetre of an EV battery. How much petrol or diesel can you recycle in a vehicle? None. 70% of it doesn’t even move the vehicle, it goes straight out the exhaust as heat,…

Listen to this very short clip of the chief vehicle engineer and chief designer at Tesla explaining how they design cars. The genius of what they’ve done, and why I ignore the pile-on moral outrage on Tesla right now.…

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

The survey of Germans which last week showed that no Germans would ever buy a Tesla again, now shows that nearly 70% WOULD buy a Tesla. Nearly half a million respondents now. The anti-Tesla mob hysteria will pass. Just…

Two Australian Tesla owners discussing their car servicing. I honestly do pity those bogged down in social media anti-EV (and now anti-Tesla) tripe.

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes…

M3 = Model 3 Tesla. For those suffering from range anxiety, notice he drove Brisbane to Bathurst with no issues at all. And it’s true what he says, the driving is so pleasurable you almost hate getting out of the car at…

This UK car dealer bought a used Tesla with 350,000 km on the clock. Listen to him explain here what servicing had been done on the Tesla in those 350,000 km. (Summary: virtually nothing, except changed tyres and wiper…

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…

The fascism/Nazi rubbish on social media, in relation to both Trump and Tesla, is historically ignorant (no surprise there, this is social media), but even worse misdagnoses fundamentally what's happening in the US, and…

The piece Waleed Aly wrote about justice 6 years ago is still so important. Do people notice the increasing, even violent righteousness that is dominating how we respond to things now? The Tesla attacks are a great…

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

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

If you want to see how social media allows the widespread manipulation of public opinion, this is a bot farm. Automatically searching for particular topics, like climate change, renewable energy and EVs, and then…

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

So, who’s getting a battery? Tesla batteries are still the best, which will challenge the Nazi-shy, but that ridiculous hysteria will be a memory soon. This should have been done years ago. There’s an ocean of free…

Electric vehicles preceded combustion vehicles. Combustion vehicles were considered a joke: loud, inefficient, spewing pollution, gutless. That’s because they were a joke, and still are. Rubbish technology. Only cheap…

Marvel at the engineering. A Tesla electric motor is only around 20 cm long and round. It weighs just over 30kg, you could carry it. Compare that to the combustion engine in the front of a car, weighing around 200kg.…

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

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

The new Model Y is getting 5-star reviews across the board. As Toby Hagon says, ignore the Elon the Nazi rubbish, this is the best-selling car in the world for a reason. Once you drive a great EV like this, you'll…

Classic example (in an otherwise good review) of a misunderstanding I think we're seeing with the Shark. (And yes, it's an older article, posting to highlight thinking in it, not to share a new review.) "Once the…

Once you electrify and network your car, all sorts of things become possible. I’d always imagined parents for example having greater control over their kids’ unsupervised driving (still the leading cause of death for…

This can be true, and why I encourage people who are thinking about going electric to skip hybrids and go straight to full-EV, unless they're doing lots of long distance driving in remote areas. For example our trip to…

When you're in the middle of a wave of outrage and euphoria, like we've had for women (metoo), Tesla, and here for climate change, it feels like you're changing the world. You're not. Sometimes protest movements cash in…

I love the dappled light and colour of an autumn garden. The genius of it is the complex filling of almost every available niche in space, without sacrificing the capacity of light, air and water to pass through at the…

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

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

I took this yesterday, to capture everybody’s two favourite things. Tesla and local government 😉 (Plus that beautiful blue sky in the building facade.) Spot the wankpanzer revving up through the gears to try to get…

I remember when I posted about semi-autonomous driving technology, and many would say that it will never work because humans will always be better drivers.

The beaten dog syndrome, when you inherit a pet that’s been beaten by a broom for example, and then for the rest of its life every time you sweep the dog panics and hides. I’ve noticed a similar thing driving the Tesla…

A secondhand Tesla is probably the best value used car out there. This one has done nearly 300,000km and still has 90% of its original battery capacity, and drives flawlessly. It also shows just how much value you get…

The irony is that these memes are shared on social media, a technology infinitely more dangerous than AI. How do we not see it? It's invisible to most now, just how they transact their entire lives, unthinkingly. These…

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

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

Estimates of payback times for home batteries. The more electricity prices go up the more these payback times go down. Worth remembering too that a battery isn’t just useful to save money on electricity, it also gives…

Had to do a quick trip to Sydney today, and it reminded me again of how human life is all about status. Driving that Tesla is a wonder of the world. Supercar levels of performance, totally silent gigantic torque on tap,…

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

Combustion engines are a technology people still defend, just crazy. And you may say yes but they're better than this now. Actually they're even worse, because the pollution particles are now much smaller and invisible…

Look at that huge surge in sales for Tesla in Australia, in May. Meanwhile all the Nazi-Tesla memes on social media have disappeared exactly as predicted, with no meaningful change to anything. Trump is still there.…

See, now you can buy a Tesla and be batting for the anti-Trump team.

One to share with social media 'I do my own research' people, who wet their pants over mRNA technology.…

More views of the new BYD Tang-L. Not sure if it’ll be called that when released here. The motors are also the most powerful electric motors in the world for vehicles, they’ll spin at up to 30,000 rpm. It will also ship…

What applies to fashion also applies to cars. The distinction between status and functionality. The idea that you can either have a practical car or a stylish car is rubbish. The Ferrari here is clearly the higher…

BYD and Tesla both doing this, releasing cheaper variants of existing models. You’re not losing much, a lot of it is more premium features gone that aren’t really necessary anyway. $23,500 for a large sedan! Game on.

The prosecution rests. Adulting 101 classes. It’s not about skills. The adult world itself ceased to exist, to use the skills in. Replaced now by social media transacting the personal, social, professional and…

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…

The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are the least stolen vehicles in America. That’s delberate design at work again, they’re extremely difficult cars to steal. Every movement of a potential thief is captured automatically by…

"...the new Model Y, which was – BY A LONG WAY – Australia’s best-selling EV in May 2025." I don't post this to say I told you so, but to plead with people to stop confusing social media with society. Those eating a…

Sigenergy has become the number one home battery in Australia. Fantastic technology. Personally I don’t think quite as good as the Tesla battery, particularly with Tesla’s software control and analytics, but either are…

Also why secondhand Teslas in particular are an absolute steal. Better than any new ICE car you could buy, at a fraction of the cost. ICEs not only stop working over time and need continuous maintenance, they become…

It really is an episode of Utopia. Who would we be defending ourselves from, China? Our largest trading partner and the only thing keeping our country afloat? The US are grifters, this is a forced looting of national…

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…

I often call petrol and diesel vehicles rubbish technology. To clarify, I mean that in a very precise, engineering sense, it’s not just a casual insult. Here’s one of the specific ways they are. The energy produced by…

Tesla is now moving to a model where you don’t even need to go to a dealership to pick up your new car. The car will drive itself to your home. My car drives me to and from work most of the way now. Of course I…

This would worry some people, AI generally does. It shouldn’t, AI is us, it’s a technology to magnify our own intelligence. You know what should worry people? The fact that another technology has taken over health care…

Tesla is one of those rare examples of the design of something breaking through the imitative behaviour of humans. The Model Y became the biggest selling car in the world at a time EVs weren't even close to being a…

Japanese car manufacturers have been playing tricks, running lots of stories about how EVs aren’t the future. They’ve been trying to buy time while they rush behind the scenes to catch up with the Chinese and Tesla, on…

We could trade our 4-year old Toyota Kluger for a new Model Y Tesla, and the financing of the balance of the trade-in would cost the same as what it costs us to put fuel in the Kluger every week. What we’d save in fuel…

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

A RAM parked next to me today. The size of a tank. I saw the label on the side and remembered when a high litre number meant something interesting or even exciting. Now it seems embarrassing. For comparison, my Tesla…

For those with range anxiety. Brisbane to Bathurst and return, Tesla Model Y.

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

EVs reduce exhaust emissions to zero in cities and towns. And they also reduce the amount of brake dust by up to 83%. EVs use regenerative braking rather than brakes a lot of the time, meaning the electric motor spins…

I think it’s important to close the loop on social media hysterias, because in the middle of them no thought is going on at all. And then afterwards nobody takes stock of what a delusional and hysterical situation it…

Another interesting piece from a couple of years ago about the engineering innovation in both Tesla vehicles and also in their manufacturing of vehicles more generally, where they’ve innovated hugely. I’m not a Tesla…

You can only ask your friends and loved ones to avoid infections. There are a million life-saving reasons to avoid all infections. Yes you’ll survive a lot of them, at first. But you don’t go around crashing your car…

Couple of guys let their Tesla drive them to lunch, while the car uses AI to at the same time translate their conversation with each other alternately between English and Hebrew. Or you could buy a car that just makes…

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

A Tesla Model Y, at Uluru. Range anxiety is a mental health condition.

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

This is the much bigger picture of autonomous driving technology. Humans are incredibly vain and think they’re all wonderful drivers. Driving skill is only one component of road safety, you can be the best pilot in the…

The reason Tesla succeeded (until now) even though Musk is such a dickhead, is that he allows his designers and engineers free rein to surprise people. Every over-the-air software update can contain the most unexpected…

The ‘split seconds of inattention’ that are given as the cause of the majority of accidents here are the greatest reason to adopt semi-autonomous driving technology. That technology is paying attention every second…

The new portable, 12V digital combined tyre pressure gauge and compressors are fantastic. A lot of servos now either have no air at all, or their units are hopelessly inaccurate or broken. I tried one of the new…

Just half the line for diesel at Wilcannia. People chuckle because it takes 10 minutes to charge an EV. Hitching the van to a wankpanzer to see the country is the new hula hoop. Also for remote trips, a diesel generator…

Tesla just launched their new 6-seater Model Y in China, a longer version of the current Model Y. All 4 back seats fold flat with the press of a button like the existing Model Y, creating a cavernous 2500L boot space.…

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond…

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…

It’s rumoured Tesla supervised full-self-driving will be released in Australia tomorrow. I will always feel more comfortable sharing the roads with that technology than I will sharing it with the humans I see out there…

Latest Tesla data on vehicle crashes, using autopilot versus human-only driving. You're 10 times safer, using the autopilot.

One of the first reviews of Tesla Full Self-Driving in Australia. And it’s brilliant. Many have doubted this sort of technology would ever work. Here it is, working. Remember also it’s ‘supervised’ FSD, meaning a driver…

Gav from NZ does wonderful reviews. Got to test the Tesla full-self-driving. Loved it.

Have a watch of a long road trip through Sydney at night, with a full-self-driving Tesla. Some of the busiest streets in Sydney, including across the Harbour Bridge, in the dark. Hypnotic to watch, and interestingly the…

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…

It was electric windows closing too fast. Fixed by a software update overnight for owners while they slept. Clickbait headlines.

It’s fascinating to me to see how little societies change over time socially and culturally, despite looking entirely different because of the technologies of a given time. For example the obsessive focus of life in…

A wonderful example of how autonomous driving is much smarter than humans. The reviewer here happy with the way the car overtakes on the freeway, but says he would have done the move earlier and merged back earlier. But…

Does Tesla Mobile Service still exist in Australia? From feedback I’ve seen on various online forums, it appears to have been quietly removed as an option? All the service options in the app direct people to one of the…

Remember Monty Python’s ‘I Like Chinese’ song? Its time has come. For years we thought about a robot vacuum, but the cleaning wasn’t always great, and the AI not good enough. The Chinese have cracked it. Dyson has tried…

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

So we had our little social media performative hissy fit with Swastikas and Nazi memes, about Tesla. Where people joined teams and cheered on the memes, and the mob riots and burnings. Fast forward a few months, and all…

If you have the terrible mental illness, EV range anxiety, check out the new Tesla Model 3 Long Range.

Can see here why Tesla and other EV brands prioritise minimising aerodynamic drag in their vehicles. From 90 km/h wind resistance (yellow line) takes off and dominates forces acting against the car.

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

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…

Pathetic, as pathetic as our attempt to use the 'market' to create affordable homes. The market doesn't exist, it's code for 'letting everybody do whatever they like'. And what does that produce? People copying each…

The power of semi-autonomous driving. This footage from a guy letting his Tesla drive for him just outside Dubbo in the middle of the night, pitch black. Suddenly the car slowed and he didn’t know why at first. You’ll…

Here come the apples.

Europe and China are rapidly arriving where Japan has already been for many years. No younger workers left, to service huge elderly populations. Look at Japan, it’s pretty much at 1 working person for every 1 retired…

The trials are coming in. This for those with Type 2 diabetes, assessing whether giving them GLP-1 ‘weight loss’ drugs impacted their progression to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers, Parkinsons and any…

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

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

A used Tesla is hands down the best value car you can buy. You're getting astonishing value for money.

Nathan’s Tesla has done 404,000 km. The only maintenance he’s needed is some work on the air conditioner, and on the suspension at 345,000 km. He’s paid not one cent for fuel, or on regular servicing. Fuel savings alone…

And given that virtually nothing ever goes wrong with the motors, you're looking at a car you could theoretically own your entire adult life. And it'll have the performance of a supercar that entire life, and will cost…

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

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

Car brands are a fascinating study if you want to see how human societies are really just status games. Only five global companies own most of the brands of vehicle that people buy. It’s like laundry detergent, where…

Singapore's Polyclinics are probably the future of healthcare. The great logjam in the Australian system is actually the GP. GP practices are fairly small, don't cover a large range of health services and often act more…

The notable thing for me in this story is that the car was serviced 100 times to meet the milestone. The Teslas I’ve shared here before with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on the clock received either one service…

The bizarre thing is that ‘sports’ cars are built to drive on public roads. The people who buy them will drive in anti-social ways, why spend the money otherwise? We need to reframe what ‘good driving’ means, away from…

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

Because they don’t need to make room for a whole range of mechanical things, smaller EVs actually have more room inside than much larger petrol or diesel cars. I noticed this with the Tesla Model 3, which doesn’t look…

It's so hard to talk about anything today without people defaulting to their team in whatever fake 'debate' has been set up around it. Like discussing Tesla things, it fires up the anti-Elons and the anti-EVs and…

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

For Australians, I think a hugely important security tip. myGov is our government access point for our core services, like Medicare and your tax, as well as your health record. I highly recommend firstly always just…

This stuff is insidious. SKY News UK, woman on the right is a Professor of Medicine at Oxford. That’s surely a digital filter on her face? Like a dynamic airbrushing. I never get much traction with this, likely because…

Another of the fear-mongering slogans about EVs is that you have to replace their batteries, and it costs a fortune. Tesla has the data on this. After over 320,000 km of driving, the batteries are still at 90% of their…

The most popular EV in Australia, Tesla’s Model 3. Can be bought for less than the price of Australia’s favourite car, the Toyota Hilux. But that’s just the sale price: - fuel costs for the EV can be close to zero -…

Chinese EV makers are in an all-out brawl to offer cheaper EVs. Woe is us :) Some of them may go belly-up this year if they can't find international markets, so the discounting will be on in earnest.…

"The Tesla Model 3 is the top-selling sedan in the country...easily outselling the once-dominant Toyota Camry that is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper." This whole article shows the main reason for the delay with…

If I was in the market for a car right now, this is is what I’d probably buy. The BYD Seal, EV. Designed by ex-Audi engineers, has superb build quality, and the performance version does 0-100 in 3.6 seconds. It has a…

This got the anti-EV mental midgets excited yesterday. Some electric cars having to queue for hours for a charge in Chicago in frigid conditions. Some had to be towed away because they ran out of charge. So, the…

When I posted about this a few years ago many were sceptical it would ever happen. But here it is. Humans are terrible drivers, this technology couldn’t come fast enough.

People using digital filters in real-time on live TV, even very big names like Idris. Look at these stills. He looks like a cartoon. It’s not a resolution thing, his background and shirt are crystal clear. We’re living…

The mRNA technology that anti-vax loons, amplified through social media, made people fear, may within 10 years provide treatments or even cures for some of our most difficult diseases.…

There was only one EV again at the Bathurst charging station when I was there today. (Not this one, it was a Tesla Model Y.) I had a chat to the owner, who obviously loved his car. The hysteria about chargers and range…

Was sad to hear that Christopher Alexander died, nearly 2 years ago. Alexander was a giant of modern architecture, entirely different. His ideas went well beyond architecture, agile software development and wikis for…

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…

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

If you go to a car race, you’ll notice the cars rev like crazy at the start. Internal combustion engines have no power unless you rev the crap out of them. What sounds like glorious grunt is actually a compensation for…

One of the cool things about EVs is that on really hot or cold days, you can turn on the car's cooling and heating remotely so that when you get to the car, it's already at a comfortable temperature. No need to run any…

Rubbish technology, which kills you to boot. 11,000 people in New South Wales die every year from vehicle exhaust pollution. Many of the rest get diseases like Alzheimers. And people not only defend it, they love it.…

Prices on EVs are still tumbling. This is the long-range Tesla Model 3, over 600 km on a charge. Dual electric motors, one per axle, so accelerates like a rocket ship too. Nearly $10,000 off now on this model.

Current car sales figures. EV sales are up over 70% since 2023. The ICE sales here are the filling of back-orders, delays still from the pandemic. ICE sales are flat. Tesla had no backlog, its percentages are all new…

Australians need to decide just how gullible they are. The car companies opposing this change have been selling vehicles overseas to meet the same and even higher standards, for years. In every other country in the…

BYD also cater for the top-end of the motoring market. Like their U8, in the Toyota Landcruiser class. Except it's bigger than a Landcruiser (over 5m long), and can do 0-100 in 3 seconds. It can also 'tank turn' (turn…

Was sitting in traffic the other day thinking about this again, how you have to actually run/idle a petrol or diesel engine even when you're not moving. It's such an obvious way in which you can see how rubbish the…

BYD have phenomenal engineering and design resources. Now they’ve released a supercar too. 0-100 in 2.36 seconds. I mention BYD a lot because they’re now the really big disruptor with EVs, they can get them to scale…

Review from a couple who bought a Tesla Model Y. I saw petrol at $2.50 a litre over the weekend. Anybody who pays that and is still anti-EV? People need therapy.

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

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…

The NRMA’s new charger on the Nullarbor. The Tesla obviously arrived without going flat, no range anxiety there.

I fell asleep behind the wheel a few years ago, with the whole family in the car. (They were all asleep in the car at the time too, we’d had a very early start.) Thankfully we were only travelling slowly and ended up in…

Mobile phone maker Xiaomi has just released its first electric car, the SU7. And it’s a corker, rave reviews from motoring experts. Superbly engineered and built, Porsche Taycan-type performance. Up to 800km range.…

Big jump in fuel prices again overnight. I see north of $2.40/litre for 95 or 98 in Bathurst. The true definition of range for any vehicle: how far can you afford to drive it? 🙂 Imagine being an Australian arguing to…

The reason housing prices don’t come down, no matter how much we build, is because housing is not a ‘market’. In a market, new suppliers can always add new products for sale, which is where competition then happens with…

Crabapples growing wild, street trees in Bathurst. Ran into an elderly European couple last year picking these, to the bemusement of passers by, who had no idea what they were. They were going to make jam, said it was a…

In a sign of the major shift underway in buying habits, the Tesla Model Y outsold the Toyota Hilux in Australia, in March. The Hilux has been Australia’s top-selling car since 2016. This month Tesla increased the pain…

In Nevada, JB Straubel, one of the founders of Tesla, has now set up a new business to recycle lithium-ion batteries. About 95% of a Li-ion battery can be recycled, meaning for every 100 EV batteries for example they…

Musk is a CEO. CEOs answer to boards. CEOs who go to war with nation States are on a fast-track to redundancy. He owns 20% of Tesla stock, which makes him the majority shareholder. But it means 80% of the company is…

The fascinating battle in play. The best selling car in the world last year? The Tesla Model Y (top picture). Yep, an EV was the best-selling car in the world. Now, the rival, BYD. The Sea Lion, bottom. Release…

Another of the hysterical fear campaigns against EVs is that they ‘have no resale value’. As the article explains, when a new technology is being rolled out the resale will be lower at first, until prices of new…

The entire family surviving a 75m fall onto rocks is some sort of testament to the strength of a Tesla. And its battery, there was no fire. A petrol or diesel car would likely have exploded.

Saw a 50-minute video demonstrating somebody's full-autonomous Tesla driving yesterday. The driver still has to supervise, but this is now like aeroplanes, or even trains. Much safer with a machine in charge. Anybody…

The Tesla Roadster in matte black - tell me you wouldn’t like it in the driveway.

I know many are thinking about EVs for their next car. To share my thoughts on the relative merits of the two biggest options right now, Tesla and BYD. Other makers like Kia, Toyota, Subaru and European brands make…

Crimson Snow apples are back, after most were wiped out locally by hail last year. Amazing apples.

Many diehard EV-sceptics are clinging to hydrogen as an alternative. It's almost as appallingly inefficient as current petrols and diesels. And it costs a fortune to produce, and is even more technically complex than…

This is a brilliant video. Renewables, which are near-100% efficient, don’t need to replace all of the energy fossil fuels produce. They only need to replace 20-30% of that energy. Fossil fuel technologies are so…

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for the tip. A BYD Seal, an absolutely superb car which insiders liken to a Mercedes in quality, costs $50K in Australia. That's almost giving it away. In the EU and soon US, the price?…

China will now do what Tesla’s Board and shareholders refused to do. $84 billion is beyond a sick joke for any CEO. Tesla’s EV development has stalled while this dipshit has been off prosecuting his culture wars on…

I’ve wasted so much time at physios over the years. ‘Stretch and strengthen’. The thing is, muscles are not tight. They’re not like like bits of leather, or springs, that need to be stretched out. Nor are they weak by…

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is…

I know people don’t like discussing things like this, because they say it’s ‘politics’, and they don’t like conflict. But putting politics to one side, I’m genuinely curious how people can genuinely believe nuclear…

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…

Up to 70% of road accidents are caused by human error. Humans love to believe they're brilliant drivers, but no human can ever drive (or fly) as accurately or consistently as a machine. There's no need to go as far as…

The tragedy of AF447, where an Air France jet smashed into the Atlantic, killing everybody on board, is a window into the need for proper automation in flying and driving. The jet crashed because the autopilot cut out…

The world has had enough clever technology to let us all work only about a day a week, for decades. That never happens because businesses just use the clever technology to sack most of us, and pocket the savings. And…

Great short video on the main benefit of semi-autonomous driving technology. It makes individual drivers drive in ways that benefit traffic as a whole. Excellent explanation of how even one driver can trigger jams in…

The Tesla Model Y is a brilliant mid-sized SUV. It’s also the world’s best-selling car. You can buy the base model in Australia now for less money than a Toyota RAV4 hybrid. It’s a much better car than a RAV4 hybrid.…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

The number 1 place most people catch Covid (or any respiratory disease) is at home. And they catch it there mostly from their kids, who pick it up at school. I had to consider the best way to protect the family in…

Last Thursday one of the big generating units at the Loy Yang coal power station tripped, just before 2am. This caused a frequency collapse in the national grid (red line). That's a very bad thing, it can stop…

Scientists are excited, because it appears China has reached peak fossil fuel, with electricity from renewables now becoming its dominant energy source. Massive investment in renewables and EVs in China has done what…

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…

Tesla’s Model Y, a mid-sized SUV, is the biggest selling car in the world. People love mid-sized SUVs. BYD is after them, it’s launching the SeaLion 7 in Australia this year. It’s slightly bigger than the Model Y. And…

Ford researched American driving habits, when considering their EV models. More than 50% of Americans only travelled over 200km, 4 or LESS times, every year. The 'range anxiety' debates on EVs assume everybody is a…

I mentioned this one earlier in the week. Mid-sized full electric SUV to compete with Tesla's Model Y. And of course with the hybrid RAV4. BYD doesn't muck around, they're looking to double sales every year, to overtake…

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.…

Tesla’s dog mode not only allows you to leave air con or heating on in the car for dogs (or older kids), for hours if needed. (An EV can run heating or cooling for days.) The Tesla app on your phone also allows you to…

If you want a sense of the reality of what’s happening in the car world, rather than the social media bubble filled with whining petrolheads, have a look at the staggering number of EV utes under development. The Nissan…

Another cultural observation. I often hear ‘cheap Chinese crap’ when there’s talk about Chinese goods. The Chinese are master manufacturers, just as the Japanese learned to be, very quickly. Or BYD, now making big…

The BYD Seal and Tesla Models 3 and Y are the leading EVs to buy right now. I’ve done an exhaustive comparison of the 3 and the Seal, competing sedans. It’s very hard to split them, both are a jaw-dropping bargain for…

The Chinese engineering juggernaut continues on. An updated version of the BYD Seal due this year already, with big increases in charging speeds, addition of semi-autonomous driving technology and rumoured even fancier…

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…

A very common sight at the Bathurst Tesla superchargers. No vehicles. It might look like nobody is interested in EVs. But it’s showing the reality of something I post about here. Nearly all EV charging is done at home.…

Nissan’s profits dived 99% in a single quarter. The reason? Like other Japanese makers, it’s way behind in building EVs. This is again where getting your news and view of the world from social media completely distorts…

Tesla’s quicksilver colour, with black alloy wheels, is easy on the eye. You can buy one of these for much less than the cost of a wankpanzer ute. And it’ll need no servicing, no fuel, and win you every green light…

Tesla do brilliant software, this is just one small analysis the Powerwall does. Showing how much money we haven’t needed to pay for electricity since installing solar + Powerwall in December 2022. On track to pay off…

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

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

Great honest assessment after nearly 100,000 km of driving a Model Y, from somebody who isn’t a Tesla fan. Notably, obviously zero fuel costs, except cheap home electricity. And not one service or repair needed, in…

We're going to see more of this, car companies also offering charging options. Tesla of course has its own superchargers. This is clever, subsidising home charging instead. Much cheaper and easier for the company. Free…

This is Jonnie Irwin. People who watch UK lifestyle shows will recognise him. Jonnie died earlier this year of lung cancer, aged 50. Had 3 very young boys. I mention it because many assume lung cancer is only about…

You can see here that in 1916 it was only Rockefeller's cheap oil that knee-capped an obvious technology. It's taken us a century to come to our senses. It costs trillions to drill and refine and transport oil, to get…

Just one of a huge numbers of ways you can slice and dice your energy use, with the Tesla battery software. You can see the clear increase in use (blue) in the winter, with heating. And the clear decline in solar…

‘Bots’ on social media. All automatic, software-driven, to generate insta-crowds with preferred opinions. EV posts have lots of these too.

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…

The Chinese are on track to completely smash the Western car industry, with Tesla. And that industry has nobody but itself to blame. VW also owns: Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Ducati, Bentley, Cupra, Skoda and Seat.…

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

China is literally saving the world right now. Which is why Yellow Peril politics is being ramped up, our existing status quo knows the threat. China is not only single-handedly building more renewables and EVs than…

Ths shows the whole new set of possibilities EVs bring to something like camping. An EV carries enough energy to run an entire house for days. So sleeping in air conditioned/heated comfort while camping is a doddle.…

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

I think the Tesla Model Y is probably the best car in the world. Probably why it's now the biggest selling car in the world. Nothing else can really match it for the blend of style and functionality and technology, at…

Old-fashioned (racist) ideas about China still dominate. For example, why do so many Western countries have their things manufactured there? Listen to Tim Cook. It’s not low labour costs, which we always assume because…

I share different EV posts for those who aren’t as familiar with them and interested in what’s out there. This is the Model Y’s interior, you get a sense both of the sort of space available, and also the premium feel of…

Tesla is rolling a new car out of its Shanghai factory every 30 seconds. Deliciously, these are the best quality cars Tesla produces, because of Chinese engineering. Their first cars came out of American factories, and…

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…

Kudos to the engineers who work on mapping software for our phones. Our trips to and from the Gold Coast were almost 1000 km, each way. For both journeys, the mapping software predicted our arrival time at the exact…

I think it’s important to hear ordinary Australians speak about their experience of buying EVs. To cut through the fog of misinformation on social media. Like this guy’s 20-second summary, who’s now owned his Tesla…

There are now a lot of people with long-term experiences to share of owning an EV. A couple more today, Teslas again though all the EVs are good. Tesla I think are the best combination of engineering, efficiency,…

This is such an important window into long-term EV ownership. 165,000km of driving. No servicing required that entire time. Battery still with 90% capacity. The car looks brand new, both inside and out, incredibly…

KIA and Hyundai make superb EVs. They’ve been too pricey until now. But this is really big, the EV5 wil compete with the RAV4 and Tesla Model Y. That mid-sized SUV is a huge segment, and KIA is being aggressive on…

First Australian review of the BYD equivalent of the Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world). The Sealion 7. It’s the Seal, up-converted to a mid-sized SUV. And it’s brilliant. What will really make Tesla…

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

They should invite BYD and Tesla to enter a team each in the V8 Supercars. Sadly it won’t happen, not least because the electrics would be half a lap ahead already on Lap 1. And for those wondering how they’d recharge…

It's a great time to be Australian. The new BYD Sealion7 (their response to the Tesla Model Y, the world's biggest selling car) *starts* at nearly $90,000 in the UK. They haven't released pricing for here, but it will…

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…

Just to add another contender for best EV (there are many new Chinese cars coming to Oz, we're very lucky). The Xpeng G6. A competitor to the Model Y i.e. mid-range SUV. Superb quality, much bigger than it looks in…

BYD again are incredibly fast to respond, with their vast toolmaking and engineering resources. The Sealion 7 is their Model Y competitor, to be released in Oz early next year. (Doesn’t it look great). They’ve upgraded…

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

To give an indication of how remarkable the Model Y is as a car, it’s the biggest selling car in the world even though Tesla does next to zero marketing for it, or any of its vehicles. It’s word of mouth, people buy…

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

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

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…

One of the profound changes EVs bring is the degree of remote control and diagnostics drivers have. Tesla pioneered this with the extraordinary Tesla app (which if you have a Tesla home battery also integrates with your…

Good on Gav. The argument I make about combustion engines can be seen in a single picture. Ridiculously complex, needing constant maintenance. And after all that work, they can only use about 20% of the energy you put…

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

BYD sold more than 2000 Sharks in its first day of release in Australia. An additional 1000 were immediately ordered from the factory, and even more are being organised. Some suggest it may become the biggest selling…

The Zeekr 7x is one to look out for next year. Another full-electric mid-sized SUV to compete with the Tesla Model Y. The Y will have to work hard to equal it. The Zeekr has 636 horsepower (yikes). 0-100 times are as…

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.

On suspension, some interesting recent examples. Teslas are famous for having bad suspension, by which is meant uncomfortable. They’re ‘sprung’ for cornering and speed, Tesla has a bit of a hoon culture. BYD on the…

I find off-roading usually a bit of a wank. Take the most extreme form, rock-crawling. The thing that always makes me chuckle about this, is if you just hopped out of the car and went on foot, you’d be over the obstacle…

SeaLion7 (BYD Tesla Model Y rival) reviews now coming in. A beautiful piece of engineering again from BYD, near flawless. And for the price, just astonishing. Mid-sized SUV with luxury comfort and supercar performance.…

Watching the V8s (on TV) in Adelaide this weekend. The formula struggles now to find a relevant car, nobody much drives Camaros or Mustangs. They don’t even make the Camaro any more I don’t think. Make it a contest…

In the inevitable transition to electric cars, the existing industry throws up one fake scare campaign after another. Like ‘they all catch fire, or ‘range anxiety’. Or now, ‘they have no resale value’. One of the most…

This is what the Bathurst Tesla superchargers still look like most days. Not because nobody owns Teslas in Bathurst (there are lots), but because fast-chargers are used mostly by travellers, not locals. Unlike petrol…

KIA are doing a fantastic job with their EVs. And not expensive. This is their EV5. More than other electric car makers they’re creating a more seamless transition to EV driving, including more conventional buttons…

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

Lots of people hate Elon Musk, and fair enough. But have a look at this for the magnitude of the engineering achievement at Tesla. Who cares who the CEO is.

Again, look to China for where we’ll be going next. Car dealerships from legacy Western brands in China, like BMW, Mercedes etc are closing in their thousands. 2000 per year in 2021, 2022 and 2023. 4000 in 2024. That’s…

Just sayin'. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/legacy-automakers-in-trouble-nissan-stellantis-and-volkswagen-struggle-to-stay-afloat/news-story/5a807368fbf644b7628e3c0902c5d198

Get into it, Bathurst. Everything from BYD Sharks to BMW i4s, BYD Seals, Teslas, Polestars, KIAs, Hyundais etc.

BYD’s latest plug-in hybrids will do 2100 km on a tank of fuel. Hybrids will disappear over time, they’re a transition technology for most driving, but BYD is keeping an eye on the ‘range anxiety’ (mental illness) trend…

Imagine if it had been an electric bus, I can just see it now, demands that the technology be banned or at least claims that it can’t be trusted. The train Molly came home on last night was a diesel as well. It caught…

Ed is a UK technology and financial journalist. Great breakdown of the carmageddon happening to Western car makers. All their own fault.

Today Peter Dutton releases laughable ‘modelling’ to say nuclear power is the best option for Australia. Do you know anybody who’s ever worked with nuclear technology? I do - me. I can tell you right here, nuclear power…

The Shark wins car of the year. Hugely deserved, it's reinventing that stupid category.…

Just saying BYD Auto Australia, if you as the second-largest battery company in the world did for home batteries what you’ve done for cars, offered the same fantastic technology but much cheaper, you would absolutely…

Tesla has some of the best electrical engineers in the world. They're scathing about Peter Dutton's nuclear plan, correctly pointing out that the grid won't function with that much 'baseload' power, and millions of…

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire…

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” The energy problem is already solved. You can live it right now. You don’t have…

The Zeekr 7X is confirmed for Australia next year. This is a very special car. Mid-sized SUV, so competes with the world’s best-selling car, the Tesla Model Y, which is about to have a new model within the next few…

You’ll see this in many new EVs. It’s a monitoring camera to check if the driver is falling asleep. Just one more safety technology that is desperately needed for driving, so many accidents are related to fatigue.…

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’…

I love engineering and technology. But you won’t get me in a helicopter. Too many moving parts, great in theory but far too little margin in the risk sense.

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…

One of the less known impacts of Covid infection is aging. It causes cells to age much more quickly. Laura Miers had a mild case of Covid, before developing Long Covid. She’s now had to change her identity picture in…

Tesla say they’re very close to releasing full self-driving. The important thing here isn’t fully autonomous driving, it’s that the push for it is delivering amazing driver-assistance technologies, even if it’s not 100%…

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…

One of the coolest electric motors people own right now, is the ‘digital’ motor in a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Dyson needed powerful and small (see pic of James Dyson comparing the size of a traditional household electric…

EVs again. Range is a biggie for many. The average EV even today has enough stored electricity in its battery to power the average Australian vehicle for two weeks. (Newer Teslas - 4 weeks.) And costs less than $20 to…

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…

To get a sense of how little maintenance is required for EVs, have a look at Tesla's maintenance summary page for its vehicles.

The battery in a Tesla car will last for between 500,000 and 800,000km. That's between 3-5 times more kms than the average Australian drives a car before upgrading. 30-50 years of motoring. It's just finishing…

Toyota does this so well. And it won’t cost you $5,000 extra like it will in a Tesla right now. My Toyota still drives me to and from work every day, for most of the trip. Safer, and saves me fuel too.

Tesla get a lot of attention with electric cars, for good reason. They saw what was coming and went hard, early. Look at those stats, who would bother with an old combustion clunker? This car would beat a Formula 1 car…

I love Douglas Adams’ observation, sharing the same idea as Steve Jobs, that if you’re calling something ‘technology’, you’ve already failed. It should just be something that works without anybody even noticing.

My honours year in engineering was research on these superconductors. Great that they’re now at least at liquid nitrogen temperature. You don’t need to replace the whole grid with them, just key sections. Engineers…

The ridiculous tax on electric vehicles will be fought in the High Court starting this week. At a time when Australia and the world desperately need to shift to this technology, taxing it is, as the headline says, one…

The federal government heavily subsidises the use of diesel fuel. The public money it spends on doing that could buy 125,000 Australians a free Tesla EV every year.

When a commercial plane flies, it occupies an area in space. But it also occupies an envelope of time. A schedule. This spaces planes out to allow them all to fly as quickly and as safely as possible. This is a key…

This is the profile picture of a senior manager, seen on Linkedin. (Some people here may know him, I won’t identify him.) It caught my eye because while digitally altering your face is now rife, with filters on social…

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

More than 11,000 people die each year in Australia from diseases caused by the breathing in of vehicle exhaust emissions. And yet people still cheer on crap petrol and diesel technology, which not only kills them, but…

Lovely exponential curve. Not even the pandemic slowed the momentum much. You can be on the wrong side of this history, it'll just mean costing you a lot of money and pride. And think about the benefits: - no more…

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…

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

The Tesla Model 3 is already significantly cheaper than owning a Toyota Corolla, over 5 years of ownership. (It has next to zero maintenance costs, and electricity is much, much cheaper than petrol or diesel.) The…

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

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

As a kid I remember wondering, why can cars do speeds that are more than twice the actual speed limit? Isn't that a waste of energy and engineering? And the answer is - yep. But they had to do it for a reason that isn't…

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…

A terrible crash between 2 utes on the Barton Highway, 4 dead. 94 percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused by dangerous errors made by drivers. Many of them excellent drivers too, it’s not about skill. With…

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

Hybrids are marketed to the public almost exclusively as fuel-saving vehicles. Some reflections on driving one now for nearly a year, and why I think that marketing is a mistake. Firstly because for quite a few…

I'd factored in using surplus solar (credits on the electricity account) generated over summer, spring and autumn in winter, to make up for any grid power needed then because of much shorter days, and needing to heat.…

The Tesla Powerwall home battery has had another price drop, this time to $12,900 (uninstalled). Still the best home battery, including for its outstanding software. The software is as if not more important than the…

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…

You can also use a home battery with no solar panels at all. For example, you could use it to store off-peak electricity overnight, to use in your house during the day. That alone can cut your electricity bill in half.…

CATL is the world’s biggest producer of lithium-ion batteries. This week it did something huge. It announced its new batteries have a storage capacity of 0.5 kWh per kg. That’s about double existing batteries. This will…

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

Fun little tidbit in this story. The Tesla app allowed Kyrgios not just to track the stolen car, but also to slow it down.

Why battery software is as important as battery hardware. The home battery did this while we all slept last night, monitoring the weather and charging the battery to capacity from the grid, in case the severe winds…

This is the greatest engine ever built. The Mercedes turbo-hybrid F1. The battery is on the right. Normal combustion engines run at a thermal efficiency (how much fuel energy they convert into movement) of 29%, max,…

The Owen Magnetic Tourer. Probably the world's first hybrid vehicle. 1915. The technology lost without trace after that for more than a century, replaced by absolute rubbish petrol and diesel cars. Now hybrids are back.…

$2 billion for green hydrogen in last night's budget. Hydrogen is a dead-end for Australia I think. With our vast renewable energy resources of sunshine and wind, and spare land, we're crazy to invest too much in…

My mother said she’d be appalled if I posted twee crap about Mother’s Day to FB. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree 😉 I should say Mothers’ Day is a particularly special day for our family, because I was…

Even with today's technology, an EV's battery will last 20 years. Most people get rid of their petrols or diesels in a much shorter time than that.

If you sit like this as many do, you will over time get tight hips, neck, shoulders and torso. If you go to a physio, they will give you stretching exercises for each of those areas, and maybe tell you your ‘core’ needs…

One of the engineering wonders Tesla has introduced into car making is the use of die casting to create whole sections of vehicles in one quick press. Until now carmakers assembled vehicles a piece at a time, using…

Great piece on some of the engineering behind the electricity grid. And how the shift to renewables, batteries and inverters, EVs and a range of other technologies is making the grid much more resilient, sustainable and…

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for…

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

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

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

Another provocation, a genuine question, for the travellers among us. Venice. Completely overrun by tourists. So bad, that the locals are planning to move out. Some projections say there will be nobody living there by…

Tesla’s Cybertruck looks a bit like it was made in Minecraft. But the specs on this thing are something. Designed to be Tesla’s ute. The glass is armoured. It’ll do 0-100 in 2.9 seconds. It’ll be able to tow up to 7…

Grid-scale batteries coming in a rush now. Three are listed as possibly coming to the Lithgow LGA. Tesla 'megapacks' are common batteries used (as in the pic). 3 MWh (enough to power 3600 homes for an hour). Can be…

Sharing the details of your personal life and that of your friends and family, on a global platform. Adults, think about what you’d feel now if intimate details of your life had been shared on global platforms for the…

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

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…

We have the history of Australia backwards. Take the conversation about the ‘Voice’ right now. Like all conversations about Aboriginal Australia, the starting point is the idea that post-1788 Australia, the European…

A story of three photos. Of European genius and American swindling. Have posted before that the electric motor was invented over 100 years ago. By Michael Faraday, holding the glasses. The first workable cars were…

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

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to…

This article was an excellent window again into the almost impossibly complex world that is the real Australia. And how we who think ourselves advanced because we can build cars and aeroplanes and computers, have not a…

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

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…

If you have a Tesla (I don't, but am always tempted), you don't need to get your car serviced. If anything does go wrong, you just tap this in the app, and they either fix it over the internet (there are hardly any…

Swaps places with Toyota from year to year as the world’s biggest car maker. But what would they know next to some guy somebody saw on YouTube. The combustion engine was dead when it was invented in the 1870s (50 years…

One of Australia's most popular 'cars' (more like a tank). A friend was driving one last night back from Melbourne, and it broke down in the middle of nowhere. 5-hour wait for help. The tow truck driver that eventually…

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

@[1112555254:2048:Dan] and I both noticed this trend. There's a huge, extremely rapid shift to electric mowers, line trimmers and other garden tools. Why is it happening so fast? Because no idiot turned it into a team…

An example of what the new AI can already do. The Wharton business school is one of the most prestigious business schools in the world. It pitted 200 of its graduates against ChatGPT (AI software) in a competition to…

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

I worked at a nuclear facility. Here’s what the proponents of nuclear power never say. Nobody wants the waste. What does somewhere like the US do with its nuclear waste? Nothing. It’s all sitting at the nuclear plants…

Say you buy a new car, and drive it for 100,000 km. If it's a petrol or diesel car, the fuel over the lifetime of the car will cost you around $25,000. if you buy an EV, the electricity to drive 100,000 km will cost you…

I still see people buy standard petrol and diesel cars now, and wonder how much thought they’ve put into it. Not only are they massively more expensive now over their lifetimes, we’re very quickly approaching a point…

Trades won’t escape automation. This Australian-invented robot brick layer will lay 300 bricks every hour. 24 hours a day. Love the name too.

Even without climate change, the world would shift to solar and wind power. Because it’s enormously cheaper. The energy industry is like any business, it will go where it can make the most money. And it makes huge…

Having a home battery opens up many doors, not just your own use. Amber Electric one of the new companies that allow ordinary people to access wholesale electricity, rather than retail. This can be a way to make big…

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…

As an indication of how amazing this technology now is. The solar panels on our house generate enough energy every week to drive an EV from Sydney to Perth. Just from sunshine, on one roof. That’s up to $1000 worth of…

Tesla Powerwall sales in Australia are booming. The thing I love about the Amber wholesale company is that it allows people with batteries to sell their excess power into the grid at peak times, which is the only time…

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is back in the news, with a multibillion new gas project approved for Santos. They swear it will be ‘carbon neutral’, that they can capture the carbon through CCS technologies. CCS is…

The mining industry is one of the fastest to adopt EV technology. This truck is entirely electric, battery-powered. It will fast-charge in only 30 minutes, and carry nearly 250 tonnes. It will use its massive weight to…

Watch Jeremy Clarkson, who generally hates EVs, race Tesla’s 7-seater family SUV against a 600 horsepower, V10 Audi R8.

Many mistake the prices for the early adoption of a new technology with the mature price, as it gets rolled out. A Model T car cost the equivalent (in today's dollars) of nearly $30,000 in 1909. 15 years later it cost…

Sales of Teslas by year.

Tesla have the market almost to themselves because the rest of them can’t get their act together. (Ferrari is a highly niche market with huge markups.)

I don't generally like American cars, they're mostly woeful. But Tesla is different, innovative engineering. Have a look at their new Roadster, the fastest car in the world. The acceleration you see in this short video…

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…

Tesla semi again, so many amazing stories about this one. The engineers designed the truck to drive just like a car, so that (get this) the truck is less likely to disrupt other traffic. They recognised that a lot of…

Final on the Tesla semi for now. Jay Leno had a long chat with Tesla engineers and took one for a test drive. Quite a long video but fascinating at every moment. Little brilliant design details, like steps into the…

The only thing keeping our coal industry afloat is China. Imagine the irony of that export now collapsing, as China shifts at warp speed to renewables, leaving us with nothing. While we have all the natural advantages…

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

Look at the number of EV models out there already, and how many are from Asia. Tesla doesn’t even make the top 20, in number of models.

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

Watch all of this play out in real-time. BYD (another Chinese manufacturer) is less than 12 months’ old in Oz. Only Tesla now sells more EVs than it does. The different Chinese brands are competing with each other here…

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…

See the purple light at the back of the room here? That's germicidal UV light, used to sterilise the air. It would likely be invisible to people there, but the digital camera picked it up. Lots is done to protect…

The pace of change is so fast there’s almost a new announcement like this every single day. All of these projects will be completed inside 5 years, some inside 2. It’s very quick to install a big battery, remember Tesla…

The owners of Iowa’s last nuclear power plant are turning the facility into a solar farm. You can’t get a clearer picture of the global shift in play. And incidentally, it takes 20-30 YEARS to decommission a nuclear…

In this last week leading up to Christmas, where people will want to be socialising heavily, a quick story about the current Covid variant. One of Sydney’s elite schools, which has invested in clean air technology and…

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

Happy 92nd birthday Wolfie! I hope wherever you are you can figure out the computer well enough to read this.

Some say technology will fix climate change. The same people who think military hardware wins wars. We developed nations have war machinery unrivalled at any time in history. But…name the last war we actually won.…

In my lifetime already I predict we’ll look back at internal combustion engines and wonder what the hell we were doing using them as long as we did. Rubbish technology, hopelessly inefficient, thousands of moving parts…

Have been following this technology for a few years. I think it might change the world. It could mean no more colds, flus, or Covid.…

I fear for Lithgow’s future. The end of coal and of coal-fired power won’t come gradually, it will be sudden and brutal. It won’t be because of ‘greenies’. It’s basic economics, already happening everywhere in the…

One of the urban myths I’ve heard from several car enthusiasts now is that around the world there are electric car graveyards, where electric cars are dumped because it’s more expensive to replace the battery than buy a…

On Tik Tok people are saying that petrol now has no smell. A technological wonder! That loss of smell is brain damage caused by Covid infection. Wear a mask.

Another example of how Australia just slept through a disastrous 10 years, under the previous government. We're seriously on track to becoming a third world country.…

A Crimson Snow apple. Amazing flavour, something really new. Can’t get enough of them.

For those who have or are thinking about getting solar, and would love a battery but the price of a battery makes them go pale, here's the cheapest battery by far you can use instead. An electric hot water heater. A…

This technology isn’t well known. It’s not just a fan, it’s a vortex fan. (Thus ‘vor-nado’.) It creates vortices, which then swirl around your room. It’s what they call an ‘air circulator’, for that reason, rather than…

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…

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

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

Excellent run-down. New petrol and diesel vehicles will quickly become stranded assets. Fuel prices are about to climb quickly again, OPEC is planning to cut supply to boost prices and profits to themselves. And the…

I do a long commute, about 120km round trip per day. So I tried an experiment. One week I did the whole week in manual control of the car. The next I used cruise control for most of the driving. The result? I used 20%…

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…

“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…

Have mentioned buying a Kluger hybrid and discovering by accident it's also a self-driving car. I do a daily round-trip commute of over 120 km. So in the past week I tested the self-driving technology. With me of course…

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

Out of interest I rang the local Mitsubishi dealer to ask what the waiting time is now on the Outlander hybrid. 13 to 14 months. The reason for this (which the salesperson didn't tell me, but I already knew) is…

This is Tesla’s car-making plant in Shanghai. It had the capacity to roll out 750,000 Teslas per year. They’ve just upgraded that to make it 1.1 million per year. It’ll reduce waiting times in Australia significantly,…

Something not often mentioned by the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy folk is firstly that we obviously still manage to have water when it isn’t raining. We use storage. But the big sleeper here…

Brilliantly simple. We could have been doing this for the past 20 years and energy would be as good as free right now for Australians.…

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next…

If your muscles feel stiff, it’s tempting to do what this person is doing, to try to stretch them. To think that your muscles are either loose or tight. But muscles adapt precisely to what you’re doing, if they feel…

To give an indication of the catastrophe uncontrolled spread of Covid could be in China, firstly for the Chinese, the health and hospital system isn’t great, and they have millions upon millions of old people. They’re…

Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s…

Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s…

Last solar post, just as a comparison. Cloud gone, so system close to full generation. Over 9kW going back to the grid, so could run another 3 houses just off the surplus. (That 1.7 kW still the washing machine and…

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

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

Poorer countries surging ahead, while we in lazy and entitled rich countries cling to our ridiculously 19th century technologies like kids who won’t give up a teddy bear.

An electric taxi in the early 1900s, New York. There’s an assumption that electric vehicles today are the new technology, replacing petrol and diesel. But electric cars were built 50 years before either petrol or diesel…

“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.)

Those of my friends who went to KHS but haven’t seen the recent project to re-build the old school virtually, you can see the end product from about lunch time today, at the link below. There are 2 things to look at, a…

Those who wear glasses, what’s your experience with self-tinting lenses? I’m told the technology has improved a lot.

Another area of life where consent was a false God. For the same reasons, what people 'agree' to is never quite clear, even to them. We seem to think we live in a highly idealised fantasy world where people operate with…

Underneath all of the stories we tell each other about life, are patterns that explain it all. This messy graph says something profound, I think. The more advanced and technological we become, the more hierarchical we…

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

This to me is a remarkable group of people. Because none of them actually exist. They're all computer-generated.

I destroyed the motor on a few tape decks growing up, because I constantly rewound songs. Sometimes to work out a guitar part, but more often because most songs are about 90% padding. There will only be a few moments…

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

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for…

This is the earliest ever recorded sound. It wasn't intended to even be a sound recording, but engineers were able to extract it from nothing more than scribbles of ink on a piece of paper. Posting this as an example of…

Traffic apps seemed a solution to avoid traffic. But what they do is push the traffic into residential streets, where the jams now occur as well. The secret to understanding all of this I think is to stop believing in…

Speed bumps one of my favourite examples of how morality and technology are not 2 separate things. Speed bumps only exist for moral reasons, to slow drivers down who won't do it of their own (moral) accord. There is…

Thanks To Dave Roma for this shot. They're doing extensive renovations on the court house at the moment, I watch them every day. Another example of how technology is really morals wrapped up in materials. When you build…

People-years is a measure I think we should use more. The International Space Station took the equivalent of 3 million people-years to build, or 26 billion work hours. Technologies don't just hold our morals, they're…

Fascinating that we smashed flu last year - you can see its death spiral at the start of the big national lockdown in Feb-March 2020 - but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021. It's just non-existent. Despite NSW…

Even robots dance better than me now. (P.S. engineers rock. We need more engineering, and much less business studies and marketing.) https://youtu.be/fn3KWM1kuAw

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

This is a wonderful, digitally-interactive article, describing all of the action that has been long underway by industry to change Australia. Really, really worth your time, don’t believe any of the political nonsense…

John is an American friend who works as a computational biologist, applied mathematician and software engineer. Here pointing out the ridiculous perversity of the idea that we’ll all stop being infected by Covid, by…

In this excellent new Dracula, at one point there’s a chilling dramatic device where he says that people shouldn’t choose cremation because ‘it hurts’, and then allows us to hear people buried in a cemetery screaming to…

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…

This is a precision fermenter. These may replace most farming in our lifetimes, as they’ll be able to make any food (including meat), and a lot more we’ve never dreamed of, from the microbe level up. Food will become…

I wonder if these months of children doing their learning online might change education. I was watching and helping my kids yesterday, and it was a fundamentally different experience to what school is. More personalised…

Bloody awesome idea, I feel for the public health people doing all that contact tracing manually. And it's open to gaps, whereas this would be fairly automated and fast.…

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…

They did it 100 years ago. They didn't even have many communications technologies to stay in contact with one another or be entertained. They were resilient. And they went hard, and early, and in multiple layers, and…

When the park owner talks about all the safeguards and technology he has in place to control the dinosaurs, Jeff says 'um'. Cabinet and the CMOs talk about 'suppressing' the virus. Microbes are way more lethal and…

Scientists have developed software that will allow your phone to see around corners. I kid you not.

Scientists have invented a piece of software that can write any number of Beatles songs you want. I think if you believe in and understand education, then this shouldn’t actually be threatening or wrong in any way.

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…

Was listening to talkback radio yesterday, and the question was - what’s something you learned at school that you actually used in later life? And it made me think about how education has failed, that this is such a…

Unemployment, the loss of ‘jobs’. We need to think harder, like Dave Graeber: “Well, you could also just replace them with no jobs. Great economic thinkers like John Maynard Keynes were predicting that technology would…

An example of how the body works as a single integrated system. You've probably seen pictures of people meditating like this. Notice how the palms of the hands face upwards. That might look like an incidental detail,…

Sad to hear of Dave Graeber's death. The anthropologist who pointed out most people are stuck in 'bullshit' (meaningless) jobs. That all those people sitting in front of computer screens at work are mostly 'processing'…

Very important people understand this I think. A pandemic is not a medical problem to solve. What's interesting is that as communications technologies and data analysis improve, the distinction between individual and…

Our technology would allow all of us to work a lot less. But we don’t, because workers have little power. In the US, workers are not entitled to *any* leave, at all, unless their employer wants them to have it. I’d like…

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

If you're an LNP person, I'm curious how you justify this behaviour. Corruption of the highest order. Destroyed the lot, hard copies & digital. 250% more money than the Sports Rorts affair federally, that cost a…

Germans are often seen as efficient, orderly, logical etc. Actually I think that’s a misdiagnosis, you understand so much about Germany when you understand they’re a nation of craftsmen. That’s where their apparent…

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…

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

In the 1970s, rock shows as we know them today were invented. It was an exciting time. But since then, has anybody really invented anything new with them? Better lights and sound technology, big screens, sure, but those…

Binaural beats are one of a range of sound technologies used now to target specific mental states. They play a slightly different frequency in each ear, and if done correctly your brain waves become ‘entrained’. So they…

Space and time. Ramesses II died over 3000 years ago. This is him. Some suspect him to have been the Egyptian Pharaoh who dealt with Moses. Recent studies suggest he may have died of tuberculosis. If you found a machine…

Bought this apple slicer on a whim today. Genius.

Could you see ‘society’ without some sort of screen, a TV or computer, for example? What if that’s all society is, a representation of ourselves, on screens? How else would you ‘see’ society? We’re the actors AND the…

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

There are plenty of people out there who think ‘real’ driving is driving a manual. Gears in cars are actually only there because internal combustion engines are crap technology and have narrow power bands. Electric cars…

Why doesn't a television strike people as a miracle? We're so blasé about these things. Yes it's clever technology, but that doesn't explain anything. The miracle is that images and sounds can be taken from one place,…

Our world is mostly driven by algorithms. Techniques and machines for producing automatic knowledge, from basic arithmetic with pen and paper, through to computers. We wet our pants over artificial intelligence, but…

Capitalism, socialism, communism etc. Do any of these things even exist? Watching a debate on TV. They're spoken of like they're a computer program you plug into society, a type of operating system. I think all of these…

Isn't it a bit strange that the people worried that artificially intelligent machines may take over humanity, are often the same people who will tell you technology is 'only a tool'?

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social…

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre…

If resolution is your thing with images, here are some numbers. The old 35mm standard film for cameras would need a digital camera resolution of about 175 MP to capture the same amount of detail. Go to 4x5 inch pro film…

More of my love affair with analog photography. Look at the breathtaking quality of light in this shot. So many nuances that digital algorithms couldn't possibly capture here, I think. I'm a huge fan of the freedom and…

Tesla once said "if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." I think he's right and I'd add to that - resonance.Resonance is the way objects interact, and humans…

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social…

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

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…

The most tedious thing about modern sport for me, at every level, is the constant attack on officials. Technology feeds it, endless replays and slow motions and microphones and projected ball trajectories, and 20…

This is a Feynman diagram, used in quantum mechanics to show how particles interact. Posted because there's one extremely cool aspect of this diagram, and your mobile phone and TV and computer use this every day. See…

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…

Notice how the more sophisticated and powerful technology gets, the smaller it gets? Micro-electronics is what lets us have instant global effects from wherever we are. Dang if that micro part of reality isn't key to…

I've lost count of the times I've heard: 1) 'technology is just a tool', and 2) 'machines will take over humanity'. 1 and 2 completely contradict each other. To me technology is really just us, and the most social part…

A huge proportion of the world's houses are either badly maintained or not maintained at all. If people move out of a house it quickly falls apart, like this one. Technologies are I think our most social things. You can…

I think this is the most astonishing thing I've ever read. It's the story of how the US has grappled with the Mississippi River over the past couple of hundred years. It makes Jurassic Park seem like an episode of the…

A car is an institution. I think all successful technologies are institutions. For a car: - the car company itself is an institution - the parts and spares industries are institutions - road building and maintenance are…

Microsoft Excel is considered by some to be the most dangerous piece of software on the planet. Tens of billions of dollars of financial transactions worldwide are managed with Excel spreadsheets every year, as well as…

I periodically talk about negative ion generators, because they're pretty amazing. Clear evidence now that this simple technology strips the air of pollution like dust and spores, but also bacteria and viruses. In fact…

One of the things keepers of slaves and domestic servants discovered was that they introduced all sorts of obligations and responsibilities for owners. They had to be looked after as well as ordered to work. This shift…

This computer would now fit in your watch. Things get smarter when they get smaller. And I'm no expert, but is that a nice pair of ladies shoes?

This is a contradiction I see. On the one hand, people say technology is just a tool. On the other they say it's taking over the world. Both can't be right.

If a person eats too much, we don’t say they have a plate, fork and knife problem. And yet when people spend too much time on their phones, it’s a ‘device’ problem. We have the bizarrest set of ideas around technology.

Chloroplasts turn sunlight into energy. Chloroplasts were built by bacteria, swapping genes and other bits and pieces. We humans aren’t so clever. In fact we were built by bacteria too, they mastered nanotechnology…

More on ideas. What are technologies made of? Ideas. From the materials they’re made from to the expertise in putting them together, it’s all ideas. I don’t think we often see ideas as material things. That pink car is…

Self-driving cars are already hugely safer than humans driving cars. It's interesting that we hold them up to a much higher standard than human-driven cars. Cars are much more than just modes of transport - they're the…

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

Call me old-fashioned (it’s about the only time me and fashion are in the same sentence), but tennis was better in the days before the first pump. It’s like watching robotic ball machines, far too much focus, not enough…

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess…

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

It is interesting how we will tolerate carnage caused by human error, but one mistake by a machine is scary. It says something about how we view identity and machines and moral responsibility. This technology will…

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

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…

Last year the financial services sector took $31 billion in fees, from super. That’s almost as much as the age pension costs, and it’s growing. What could go wrong? If the government hadn’t been so keen to privatise…

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

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

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…

A theme for the day. "All the processes we attribute to brains and computers alone might fill the world. In the same way that the legs code the program of walking, unknown information is inscribed in the patterns of…

Marshall McLuhan used to talk about how our technologies shape us. One way that I think is less seen is how our 'writing' technologies shape both how we think, and how we work. For example, tables and spreadsheets. If…

Everybody experienced the Laurel vs Yanny debate now? (It's all Laurel for me.) The explanations given by audio types, where they pull the track apart and show two voices at work here, don't really wash with me. Older…

I love the term ‘telepresence technologies’. Like telephones. They don’t just transmit sound, they transmit presence, if you watch somebody talk on the phone they’re animated in a similar way as if the person they’re…

It’s easy to look at the world today and assume it’s falling apart. But that maybe because we only look at how humans act with each other, and don’t look at how the things they build and maintain act to glue society…

I think machines are the most social parts of our societies. Tracey Kidder, an American journalist, spent about a year visiting a major computer manufacturer, observing how a computer was made. He wrote up his…

Our politics looks like society is at war, but actually we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. It’s impossible to understand that paradox I think if you only look at humans. An example - trains.…

Offshoot of another discussion. Data and visuals suggesting strongly that today is easily the most peaceful time in human history. Also shows that States or governments - the things many have a passion for destroying…

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…

This is William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner as part of the team that invented the transistor. The transistors are in the pic with him. There are over 2 billion transistors in the integrated circuits we have in our…

The modern world seems peculiar. On the one hand life has never been more complex and connnected and rich. But on the other we seem to often be in a state of panic about it all, for example: - belief in conspiracies is…

A prominent journalist on the weekend said that nobody in the media could think of a way to save serious journalism. In a situation like this, it usually means I think that the ideas we’re using don’t fit. In the case…

James Gibson noticed that the things in our environments have meanings. Normally we say that only humans deal with meaning and purpose. Every object or technology has what he called affordances, ways in which the thing…

The bridge collapse in Europe overnight. Stories. The story of the collapse is ‘wasn’t properly maintained’. Which means the story of maintenance wasn’t one that resonated with enough people. Vast amounts of the…

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

George Bernard Shaw, before he was a famous playwright, was one of the world’s leading music critics. (One of my favourites was him suggesting a steamroller be used on the chests of people coughing at the opera.) One…

Hotel keys were an example I was once given of how morality and technology are inseparable. Many hotels for years would attach large key rings to their keys. The reason for this was to try to stop people accidentally…

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…

Traffic ‘calming’. A big area of my own studies and research, how non-human things have agency. We like to say they don’t, but our societies wouldn’t function if that were true. We could ask drivers, for example, to…

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.

Won’t be buying this Trey, listened to the Live Aid tracks and they’ve done what they did with the Milton Keynes release, ‘cleaned up’ the mix and balanced all the instruments and vocals. In the process they’ve stripped…

Maybe labouring consent here, but it's topical (and fun - apple of my armpit!). My view is consent is what we have left, once we remove all the more sophisticated rituals of courtship we used to have. It's another…

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…

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.…

Here are some huge companies. If somebody asked you ‘where’ these companies are, what would you say? If you were asked ‘please take me to Coles, the company’, where would you take the person? The corporate headquarters?…

Check out the idea of peoples’ ‘second selves’, the self they curate, alongside the self they traditionally live. I think we’ve always had a social self, a second self, it’s just that now it’s much, much bigger than it…

This is one of Ancient Rome’s sewers. Still surviving, great engineering. I don’t think it’s well recognised that technology is what actually binds us together. For example, bridges in the US currently need more than…

3 out of 4 Australian homes now have air conditioning. With rising electricity prices (some of which is due to the extra demand from air conditioners), these cost a bomb to run and make the climate warmer in the process…

Cars need to be reined in, without screwing the poor in the process, who need them the most. Cars are filthy (because the internal combustion engine is shit technology), they take over every space they're allowed into,…

Talking about road safety brings up interesting comparisons with air safety. Private planes are nearly as dangerous as cars. Commercial flight (much, much safer) went the way that driving and cars are being dragged…

Marshall McLuhan was a thinker well beyond his time, many didn't understand him when he was writing in the mid-20th century. A conservative professor of literature, he took on the job of trying to understand the modern…

Whenever the world gets too unequal, the push from the people who have been excluded is perceived as a threat to those who aren't. The silliness and emotion in Western politics right now is just the reaction to this…

"Your daughters are watching you. They look to you as an example of how to be a woman, so when you stand around in packs in order to whisper, and gossip, and cut other women down, don’t think they don’t notice.…

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…

Michel Serres talks about legend, as having two related meanings. One as a type of story, and the other as the legend on a map, which tells you how to read the map. Serres says the two meanings are connected. The…

eBay's most popular current categories confirm what iPhone users already know.

Playing computer games is the equivalent of exercising. http://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/05/03/virtual-gaming-makes-easier-workouts-a-reality.html

Happy birthday ! Saw your post about marking, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree :)

That's how to open a rock show. The robot , 1977. Memories.

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

The end of the clunkiest, most inefficient and stupid technology - the internal combustion engine - is in sight. Also a huge victory for air quality and sound pollution.…

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.…

This is one reason I'm looking forward to more automation in cars, what's sometimes called self-driving cars. (A bad name for them, because the idea in most cases is to help the driver, not to replace them.) I once had…

Do we really understand smartphone ‘addiction’? A common criticism is that smartphones are making people anti-social, because they’re constantly glued to them everywhere they go. I think that’s backwards. Smartphones…

You can look up the way technologies like CDs, film, digital encoding, magnetic tape etc. ‘work’. But there’s a mystery, even a miracle, that won’t be explained. How is it that images and sound are able to be captured…

Hmm, what was the last time we had a public policy that was "technology-agnostic", as a quick political fix? NBN? What could go wrong?

Technologies don't change the world, because technologies aren't a thing. Put a computer in the middle of a paddock somewhere and see if it changes the world.

The world repeats the same patterns, and I think we often get stuck in just one part of the pattern and miss the wider movement of what’s going on. Take the music and film industry. For years they’ve been talking about…

The Space Shuttle weighed over 2000 tonnes. To escape Earth’s gravity, it had to reach speeds of over 40,000 km/h, going straight up. Imagine the force needed to propel something that weighs more than 2000 tonnes,…

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

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/09/08/fans-arent-going-pay-music-anymore-thats-ok/ Steve Lukather (net worth about $40 million) was a good recent example of a muso without a clue, complaining about how real quality…

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

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…

So much nonsense gets spoken about the brain. Finally some common sense! (P.S. your brain is just a piece of electrified meat) https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

The planes we fly in are on auto pilot a lot of the time, have been for years. Just a matter of time.…

Not a zealot on this, I love cars too. But I don't think it's well enough understood just what shitty technology the internal combustion engine is, and how we desperately need to get rid of it.

David Hockney refers to the Ghent Altarpiece in his brilliant book on the possibly big use of lenses, mirrors and other optical technology by important painters, including Caravaggio. The Altarpiece is important says…

As we get older we tend to feel that time is flying by, more than when we were young, Pierre Janet provided a great explanation for this in the 19th century (hasn't time flown ;) )…

The serial social media quitters, its not just the famous who spit the dummy. Many of them come back. A bit strange that they blame the technology rather than the way they use it.

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

New light-field technology gives empirical evidence for the truth of Gibson's ideas, which were were discussing the other day. I took a shot of a tomato plant earlier, see:…

just fell asleep sitting at the computer. (He woke up to type this, yes thank you smart-arses.)

thinks Mr Darcy is probably a robot.