Billboards on the Highway of Life

"CO2 at all-time high in human history"?

"Human history" is a tiny blip in the history of the earth. CO2 levels are in fact at historic LOWS

You'll find this more objective data in a number of places.

We are currently at 400 ppm. The all-time record was 7500 ppm, and the level has been higher than now for almost all of the planet's history. (Also note the lack of correlation between temperature and CO2)

Every engineer knows that central, large scale generation of electricity is always going to be an order of magnitude more efficient, and have massively less carbon footprint.

In the street-wise 21st century the IT Skeptic hoped that people would be sceptical of anything a computer produces but it isn’t true. Put something on a screen and it gains instant credibility. It must be the backlighting.

A leading cultural assumption in the business world is that anything we do should be benchmarked against world’s best practice. But why pay for gold when copper will do? Rob England says don’t aim for best when there is no business driver to do so.

Organisations are wasting resource and damaging themselves unnecessarily chasing a “best” standard for everything. Save “best” for focused areas where it counts. Organisations that do this will gain an efficiency edge over those who chase it everywhere.

The technology world has gone mad, as techno-freaks are allowed to design user interfaces that nobody wants and nobody can use. The IT Skeptic wants a DVD that plays movies, a stereo that plays songs, a phone that makes phone calls, a screen that surfs, and a TV for watching.

Remember when a phone had a dial on the front with numbers, a TV had a volume knob and a dial with channels on it, and a record player had two controls: volume and speed? Now:
• I have six remote controls on the TV room table, with more buttons than a 747

There is much excitement about the potential for Web 2.0, in particular what is known as the Wisdom of the Crowd. Wikipedia becomes the repository of all knowledge, Google search statistics are the zeitgeist of the times and MySpace is the face of the world. Page rank is a measure of authority. Corporations appeal to the public for solutions to problems. The ivory tower is replaced by the democracy of the commons; the proclamations of the cathedral displaced by the hubbub of the bazaar. Not so fast.

When one spends 50 or 60 hours a week immersed in an activity (does anyone reading this still work 40 hours or less?), it is easy to lose one’s perspective on just where that activity should rate in our lives.

The world is full of those chasing fame and fortune on the internet. The glittering lures of e-commerce, Adsense and cult-hero-dom draw them from far and wide, looking for easy money, good hours and groupies. It is not like that.

My son is twelve years old. This is the first year in his educational life - starting from age 4 - that he has had a male teacher, and it is only for about 1 hr a day. When I look back at my education and count the inspirational teachers, the great majority of them were men. Boys need male influence at school.

I think there are three factors at work here:
- teaching is treated and paid as a menial task, and women still predominate in such roles
- the radical feminism of education administration - at least in NZ. I'd go so far as to call them anti-male.

The Economist is one our the few papers to report genuinely good news, such as the fact that child mortality is falling rapidly.

Why doesn't the government ban foods containing radioactive carbon-14?

Fact: Carbon-14 (a.k.a. "radiocarbon") accumulates in the human body and releases damaging radiation.

Fact: Carbon-14 causes millions of cancers

Fact: Carbon-14 has a half-life of over 5700 years!!

Fact: Carbon-14 is more radio-active than Uranium

Why is nobody doing anything about it?

In fact their are signs of a government conspiracy about this. Why does the US Department of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms require a MINIMUM level of radiocarbon in alcoholic drinks?

It is a simple fact of physics: the sun drops about 1kW of energy on 1 sq m of Earth.

This must be one of the most politically important 4 minutes of video ever made, surpassing anything Bronowski did

Never in human history have we seen another time when a technology increased it's price-performance by six or eight orders of magnitude within a lifetime. For that technology to be a technology of the intellect is doubly marvelous. Forget the Gutenberg press. Forget parchment. Forget the invention of language. Nothing, but nothing, has ever ever changed within one lifetime how we think and experience the way that digital technology has. Ever. This is a first. And you are alive to see it.

In 1985 the elected French government was exploding nuclear devices in the Pacific on the other side of the planet from France, despite concerted and strident objections from the surrounding nations that had to live with the fallout. They persisted in this practice from 1966 to 1996. This was not a major political issue for the government with their electorate in France.

(Note the Yanks did it too until 1966, and the Brits used the Australian desert)

I was asked how I define and achieve happiness.

Stability. I work harder on my family than anything else in my life: on my marriage and my relationship with my son.

There is a quite amazing new statisitic: information increases by 66% per annum, faster than any other artifact of the human race. Here I was thinking I was just getting slower at coping with it all, but indeed I am drowning in an exponentially increasing flow. What about you? How do you deal with it? It is exponential: how much harder has it become in the last two years?

Telesales advertisers and other hustling snake-oilers no longer use images of “thousands of dedicated” white-coated scientists and bubbling test tubes. Science is out of favour with the general public due to the rise of post-modernism, new age, alternative this and that, and other bilge thinking. The only positive to this gradual erosion of the Western world’s intelligence is the demise of science as an image of credibility with marketers.

The same has not happened with computers.

I drove a 1974 (or was it 1975?) Holden HQ Kingswood from 1986 until 2002 when I stupidly left it behind in Australia. Last time I cried in public. Really.