I suppose the biggest news of the week has been that Cambridge Analytica has sold the data of fifty million or so Facebook users. Am I shocked? Not really. Do I think it was a good thing to do? Not at all. Am I surprised? You guessed it. I was reluctant to join Facebook at…
It’s Saturday again. Happens every seven days, regular as clockwork. And that means I write my weekly blog post. This week we had the Ides of March (et tu, Brut?), which conjures up Julius Caesar, Shakespeare, and Cassandra. We had St Patrick’s Day, which conjures up the myths of the Irish, four leaf clovers, and…
Today, 12th March, is the third anniversary of the death of Sir Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, a number of books not set in Discworld, and co-author of three books bringing serious science to the masses (The Science of Discworld). He was only 66. During his life he authored many books. There are…
I’m not much of a movie watcher, but there are some films which attract my attention. I sat down and watched a few last week – well – two and a bit, really. The first was Dunkirk. There was so much hype, so many plaudits. An old man who’d been there for the great evacuation…
The Winter Olympics is over for another four years. In 2022 it will be Beijing’s turn and I’m sure that will be lovely for them. In 2020 the Summer games will be held in Tokyo, and the Football World Cup (the round ball game) will be held in Qatar in 2022. But we’ve also got…
Today I want to talk (very briefly) about Barnaby Joyce. (For non-Australian readers, he’s the deputy Prime Minister, and leader of the National Party. His marriage is on the rocks and his new partner, who was a member of his staff, is pregnant.) IT’S NOBODY’S BUSINESS. The man has a wife and four kids who…
I’m old enough to remember when the supermarkets did away with big brown paper bags and replaced them with plastic bags. The reason? To save the trees. Looking back it sounds crazy. These days everybody is wringing their hands over plastic and how it pollutes everything. Paper is basically organic matter, and will break down…
The Big Event of the week was, of course, the Super Blue Blood Eclipse moon. Forgive my jaundiced lack of excitement. The so-called super moon is just a shade closer to the Earth than a common-or-garden-every-28-days full moon. Nobody makes a song and dance when the Moon is at apogee (furthest away from Earth), but…
It’s the 26th January, 2018. Today is the 230th anniversary of when Captain Arthur Phillip planted the British flag at the site of what became Sydney in the state of New South Wales. The place is New, it’s in the South, and it’s a bit weird, like Wales. Get it? The Dutch were even less…
While my friends in the Northern hemisphere complain about the short grey days and the long cold nights, we in the South are either enjoying long summer days, or complaining about soaring temperatures. Many of us are also enjoying the summer holidays. For us, Christmas signals the beginning of the big break before work resumes…