NASA telescopes’ imagery released this last week is visually stunning, technologically mind-blowing and spiritually, well, how can it not evoke questions of a religious, philosophical or scientific manner. The images are beautiful and reveal a universe which far exceeds the human eye’s capacity to see it. From our new vantage point, the majesty and scale […]
John Smeddle
Sacre bleu! The French have all but banned the iPhone 12 because the radiation it, um, radiates is an intolerable .7 watts over the EU standard of 4 watts. Electromagnetic radiation is measured in wattage absorbed by every kilogram of human. Anyway, 4.7 watts is the amount of radiation absorbed by the body when using […]
We’ve now been treated to the same scene fifteen times. The interminable queue outside New York’s Apple store every time there’s an iPhone launch. It’s such a powerful component of Apple’s brand identity that competitor Samsung even launched an attack on it when advertising their own Galaxy model. Unfortunately for them it merely reinforced why […]
Part One I’ve been browsing for a while now about jobs at risk of being taken over by AI. Not because I’m a sado-masochist (excuse me, my therapist frequently assures me I’m not). But because I want to see if the list changes as AI becomes more powerful. You know, it was only this time […]
9/11 Remembered “Holy s***, John! Some maniac just flew his plane into the World Trade Center.” This was the first of a few voice messages I received from an American woman on that awful September day twenty two years ago today. Two messages later, there was no outrage or confusion in her voice. All I […]
The G20. If you compare it to, let’s say G7 or BRICS, it’s like bringing a hand grenade to a pillow fight. It is the alpha and the omega of geopolitical shindigs. And the party this group is holding right now? It’s probably the most confrontational, uncompromising blast wave-inducing get-together in years. The story so […]
Naval superiority is measured in tonnage. Even in the days of the Royal Navy versus the Spanish Armada, the total weight of all ships would be the first piece of important strategic intelligence to the enemy. Just two years ago, it was reported that the Chinese Navy boasted 2.4 million tonnes of water-cleaving muscle. To […]
For years, the conversation about global population has been about our impending inability to feed ourselves, because there’ll be too many of us. Then the narrative changed to the reverse; a population implosion and the average age of humankind reaching into the non-productive 60’s. These have been the headline grabbers. And they’ve been legitimate, too. […]
The UK’s Electoral Commission (EC) has come clean about a cyber-security breach between 2021 and 2022 that laid bare the data of 40 million voters. This cyber-breach happened around the same time the EC’s systems failed a cyber-security test. The EC is not a government institution per se, but a government-backed independent body. It oversees […]
The guys at Spotify have learnt the hard way about podcast profitability. They’ve ploughed a billion dollars into building a podcast platform. But they’re still showing a loss. By overcapitalizing on podcasts, they’ve had to reduce their losses in other areas, the primary area being a 2% staff cut. But although posting a loss of […]