I recently read a fascinating book by Simon Winchester entitled ‘Knowing what we know’1,2. I have a soft spot for Winchester, as he also wrote the book ‘The map that…
Four and a half years ago, I wrote a piece about how advances in battery design were increasing the energy density of batteries. Energy density is measured in Watt-hours per…
Earlier this year, I wrote an article about the 1961 Drake Equation. This is the equation which is used to estimate the number of advanced civilisations in the Milky Way…
The website ‘arXiv’ is a curated research-sharing platform open to anyone. It was a pioneer in digital open access, and now hosts more than two million scholarly articles in eight…
After mucking about with ChatGPT some days ago for a piece I wrote about the origin of the myth of opals being unlucky1, I decided to have a crack at…
ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by Artificial Intelligence that allows a human to have human-like conversations and much more with the “chatbot”. The language model can answer…
I have just finished editing a manuscript on the development of the Opal industry in Queensland and apart from annual reports from the state’s Mines Department, much of the content…
There are two world wars currently under way: one between democracy and totalitarianism; and one between people and money. This is about the first. The one that everyone knows about…
Badham, V. 2021. QAnon and on: A short and shocking history of internet conspiracy cults. Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 469p.1 I cannot remember where I heard about this book initially, but…
There are a few cookers* who follow me on Twitter, probably to see what non-cookers are doing. I had an … um … interaction with one a couple of days…