There’s a Ferrari that drives down my road every night at about six in the evening. There is both a high-pitched howl and a deeper base note to the exhaust noise as it changes gear adjacent to my house. Every evening, the same gear change at the same spot. I use the word ‘noise’ a […]
John Smeddle
Let’s start with a fact. The Boeing 737 MAX has killed more than 300 people so far. I’m not sure what Boeing’s top brass were expecting when they fired Ed Clark, Boeing veteran-turned scapegoat, this week. Jubilant bells ringing in Wall Street? Millions of frequent flyers skipping, dancing towards sunset on the yellow brick road, […]
We’re all too aware that our privacy is being eroded by the power of technology coupled with the insistence of people who want us to buy things. I personally thought that IoT (Internet of Things) was probably going to be disassembling of our last vestige of solitude. By 2030, there’ll be almost 30 million machines […]
Last week at the Singapore Airshow, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China showed off its C919. The nose design is a copy of Boeing’s 787 and Airbus’s A350, and its elegant wingtips mirror the raked elegance inherent in the latest advances to reduce aerodynamic drag. The backend of the plane is nothing to write home […]
Who’s Kidding Who? We’ve been seeing a lot of media attention recently about OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta putting limits on AI to protect the electoral process this year, so that the ‘will of the people shall be served’ (jeez, I nearly typed ‘severed’ there!). OpenAI will stop its tools from pretending to be human, […]
We Brits love a good recession. It gives us something else to complain about, other than the weather. (In the interests of transparency, I’m using the royal ‘we’ from the warmth of an early South African autumn.) At 07h00 GMT today, that’s exactly what we got. A much-predicted recession just in time to arm the […]
This year, there’s going to be a significant amount of traffic to the moon. The reason for this is to confirm the presence of water and to figure out how to extract it. 53 years ago… Signs of water vapour were first detected by Apollo 14. More evidence has surfaced since, around the moon’s poles. […]
Last night, 120 million Americans were treated to a nail-biting win by the Kansas City Chiefs over the San Francisco 49er’s. It was a hell of a game which went into that rarest of moments at this annual affair; overtime. The final score was 25 – 22 That same audience was also treated to Usher […]
Almost every day, headline-hogger Elon Musk manages to fill our screens with news that excites, sickens, surprises, revolts, frightens, amuses, angers, etc. Name any particular emotion, and Musk evokes a daily dose of it, and the opposite. On this particular day, we offer up a fact a lot of people know. But how many have […]
Live on CNN this weekend was the personification of everything wrong with social media. Mark Zuckerberg. On the twentieth anniversary of Facebook, the founder of Meta attempted to deride his own company’s research. But first he apologized to parents whose children have had mental health issues – some resulting in suicide – then insisted that […]