Driverless Cars And The Thrill Of Driving

I passed my driving test aged 18 and have been driving ever since and i have to admit i like driving which is lucky as my trek to work is a 200 mile drive at the start of the week and the same back again at the end of it with cruise control taking over some of it but generally it is get onto the Motorways, slide into fifth gear and then mess with the accelerator as i chase down cars in the far distance.
With news that trials for driverless cars are about to increased, the promise of this technology does fill me with a mix of emotions because if it reduces accidents then it is obviously a good thing but it does remove the physical thrills of driving.
The clutch movement alongside the physical turning of the steering wheel as you shift around the gears when you spot an opportunity to overtake or the thrill of a long stretch of an empty motorway ahead of you where it is just you with your windows wound down, a powerful engine purring away and whatever music you have blasting out from your car stereo as you watch the speedometer creep above the legal speed limit .
City driving is a different beast and can be extremely frustrating and i know that there will always be an option to not buy a car which requires you to write in a destination and then fold your arms and wait to arrive and i would probably welcome having an AI system do that bit but there is a reason why there are so many songs about the joy of rising and i am very much with Steppenwolf when they suggest: 'Get your motor runnin', Head out on the highway, We're lookin' for adventure, And whatever comes our way' but cannot condone Mungo Jerry who suggests you 'Have a drink, have a drive and go out and see what you can find' which is a reckless disregard for road safety.

Hello World

The idea of education is to ready students for a lifetime of work and what sort of jobs are available changes with time and when i left school the idea of Computer Science was very much only a thing a few of the nerdy types were into but in the intervening years it has become an essential skill and the IT people at work seem to be getting younger and younger and have probably forgotten more about IT then i ever knew which is fine as long as they know how to fix things after i have spilt coffee over my keyboard or deleted something i shouldn't have.
The Director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), Professor Chris Melhuish, is pushing for computer science to become an essential part of the School Curriculum which at the moment stands as a some computer coding lessons but he doesn't consider this enough of a grounding in tech to enable them to be more proficient in computing .
He does have a point because computer skills are an essential part of most jobs now and will only become more essential in the future where programming, robotics and AI will dominate but how to get students interested in a stream which has a reputation of being 'nerdy'.
One answer they suggest is to encourage more gender equality to attract girls into new technology which has always been the domain of males, i can only remember one female IT person in my time in employment, but whereas my Computer lessons at school consisted of learning keyboard skills, as the future is looking to be Computer and AI dominated, being able to code seems to be the basic requirement today.

Is Anybody There? Nope

My old neighbour was a self declared Psychic and occasionally she would stop me by the lift to give me some message or other which supposedly came from my Grandfather and was generally along the lines of 'Watch out for a man wearing a black hat today or 'Park your car a little further away at work today' and i would normally just smile and nod and promptly ignore her.
I did ask her, as it was my Grandfather she was supposedly speaking to directly, as proof it's actually him could she ask him his middle name? It was a bit of an unusual name and not something anyone could guess and she never did although she did when she asked he refused as i should not be so sceptical, so back to nodding and smiling and ignoring her as a crank.
I have always assumed the only people who believe the words of psychics or mediums are the extremely gullible but according to a Gallup poll a quarter of people believe that humans have psychic abilities such as telepathy and clairvoyance.
James Randi made a million dollars available to anyone who could prove their psychic abilities under laboratory conditions and as of today, 60 years later, after a thousand people applied, it is still unclaimed as is the $100,000 on offer in Australia for anyone who can prove they have psychic or paranormal powers and is able to demonstrate their ability under proper observing conditions.
Derren Brown, famously uses his 'Psychic Abilities' in order to debunk those who claim psychic ability through cold reading and high-probability guesses along with psychological tricks but i do wonder if those who claim to be psychic actually believe they are, such as my former neighbour and if they do, do they believe they are actually helping?
Those who demand payment for passing on messages from beyond are obviously charlatans and should be avoided hence the disclaimer that their services are 'for entertainment purposes only' but some do believe and even make changes due to what they have been told but Psychics, Clairvoyants and anyone who states they have some sort of 'power' should be generally dismissed because if they were as good as they say, the James Randi foundation would be $1m worse off by now but they still cling on to it so make of that what you will.

Hold On To Your Hat

As you can tell by the name, extreme weather is rare on our planet but when it does occur it illustrates just what the climate is capable of at its worst and since Earth’s climate is rapidly warming the range of possible weather extremes is changing.
Environmental Scientists define climate as the average (or normal) temperature over a 30 year period and updated every 10 years to know what to expect from a certain location and the difference between each successive 30-year climate period serves as a very literal record of climate change.
They have noted that global average temperatures have increased at around 0.2°C per decade over the past 30 years, meaning that the global climate of 1994 was around 0.6°C cooler than that today in 2024 and with a climate that is still warning, it means that we have not necessarily experienced the extremes that modern-day atmospheric and oceanic warmth can produce.
Extreme weather events require a combination of things, the main driver for most of them is warmer air as warmer air holds more moisture hence the floods and stronger hurricanes and the pollution in the atmosphere acts as a blanket to to stop heat escaping into Space so we get the heatwaves, the highest ever day recorded on Earth was July 21st 2024 and that record was broken on July 22nd, the very next day.
As there is a bit of lag of several decades between the pollution hitting the atmosphere and the events on the Earth, the true impact of global warming is only evident after several decades so we are in effect reaping the result of what we did with amazing stupidity in the 1990's.
As we have continued to foolishly throw Carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere on a grand scale since then, the extreme weather with droughts, floods, hurricanes and high temperatures are expected to get worse and more frequent so if we think we have got away with it for now,  hold on to your hat because it will get much worse.

An English Problem

Now that the fires have been put out and the glass swept away, the questions on the riots which rocked England this Summer should be asked and the main is is why was it only England?
The riots never spread to the rest of Great Britain and were exclusively confined to England although riots also took place in Belfast but were perpetrated by British loyalists in some sort of wrongheaded support for the English far-right but Scotland and Wales remained peaceful.
An historian puts it down to England's role in the United Kingdom where the English crown extended its power first over the British Isles and the Scottish, Welsh and Irish played minor roles in the creation of Britain with the English its primary driving force.
Great Britain and England are conflated in many English minds, a 2018 YouGov poll put 82% of English identified as British rather than English while only 56% of Scots considered themselves British rather than Scottish and 55.2% of Welsh preferred to be Welsh before British.   
It is further noted that while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own Government, England doesn't and has the British Government and while each of the United Kingdom has its own National Anthem, the English one is the British one which all reinforces the idea that English and British are one and the same.
Brexit and it's call to 'to take back control' was mainly supported by English voters rather than those in other parts of the UK (Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain) although immediately afterwards Westminster refused Scotland another referendum to do the same.
It could be that the Far-Right does not have much of a hold in the other nations of Great Britain or that the English are more racist and intolerant of 'the other' but it is interesting that when the Conservative Party were at their most racist and scapegoating Asylum Seekers to deflect from their awful cuts to public services and economic turmoil, Scotland rejected the Tories to vote in an SNP Government, Wales went Labour and Northern Ireland voted for Sinn Féin.

Trump Fan Passes Test Shocker

Scientists are struggling to come to terms with the recent announcement that a Donald Trump supporter has passed the Turing test, convincing a panel of judges that he is an actual human being. Such a feat is without precedent in the scientific literature.
Although the Turing test was originally proposed as a test of a computer’s ability to effectively mimic human behaviour, it was deemed appropriate for use on Trump voters which until now, was considered impossible that one of them could ever convince a panel of mature adults that they were an actual human.
'This has come as quite a surprise' said the lead researcher who administered the test.
'The general consensus among those of us in authority is that Trump supporters are essentially different from us 'normal humans', they’re just not like us, so can we really consider them human?'
Shaking his head slowly he added: 'People have spent years trying to tell Trump fans how to behave and why they’re so weird and dreadful, and it was clear that they couldn't comprehend what we’re saying so we really didn't expect  this to actually happen. A panel of scientists should definitely be able to spot one trying to communicate as a human.'
The scientist told me how even attempting to recruit a Trump supporter to take the test proved very difficult as given how they knew they struggle to speak with actual humans, 'We tried to keep our explanations as simple as possible' he said, 'but more often than not they flee, just stand there looking confused whilst dribbling down their shirt fronts or start ranting about immigrants at us demonstrating just how poor their understanding of anything science related is'.
For the actual test, the panel of judges had to determine whether they were engaged in a text chat with either an actual adult or Donald Trump supporter and to the amazement of everyone, the Trump fan convinced 100% of the judges that he was an actual person.
'It was incredible' said another startled scientist, 'not once did they use some gibberish slang, aggressively accuse me of being a Communist or mention black people and their spelling was mostly correct...mostly. This result really challenges current scientific ideas about Trump voters'.
I thanked them for their time and got up to leave and as we shook hands the first scientist said: 'Some might think we should start thinking of them as actual humans rather than some separate section of society' said the first Scientist as i stood to leave: 'which seems a bit extreme as this is only one out of millions and i am thinking that it needs to be reviewed because if a Donald Trump supporter can pass it then it's too easy. It's common sense.'

Christianity Surviving On Fumes

 
It wasn't that long ago that my friend and blog partner here was bemoaning the dwindling crowd at his Church and the statistics bore it out that less than 1% of us Brits attend Church with any regularity although this did pick up as non-Brits attended but as we know, while the Irish and Scottish are a bit more God bothering, the English are not very religious.  
My friends services (and collection plate) are not the only thing which are hit as baptisms, marriages and funerals are all down but in the last Census 46% of English called themselves Christian but obviously not practicing ones.
I have asked the younger generation why they are losing their faith or never had it to start with and the answers seem to range from it is an outdated concept and that they do not want to be part of anything which is hostile to women and gay people which is a credit to them.
Graham Tomlin, the Anglican bishop who is the director of the Centre for Cultural Witness at Lambeth Palace, suggests that the Church has always welcomed people 'for all kinds of different reasons' today has seen a rise in people who share the values of the Christian faith but are not religious, or 'Cultural Christians' as in the mould of Winston Churchill who said he supported the Church from outside while Clement Attlee said that he believed in the ethics of Christianity but not the 'mumbo-jumbo'.
A mantra i have heard is that Britain was a real Christian country up until 1950 when you had a minority not with a strong faith, but with some faith but the number with any faith at all is fast dwindling but can Christianity survive the loss of belief in their biblical story?
Tomlin believes that  the Church can live off the fumes of Christianity but it will need to change as the only Churches who are growing are the ones where you are more likely to encounter a gospel choir or religious band rather than staid prayers and ancient hymns.
So the future of Christianity in England seems to be non Church goers who don't believe in God but agree with the moral story of Christianity unless the Church can convert these people into the sort who want to find out how these ethics came about.
As someone who enjoys all the religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter i guess that could put me in the Cultural Christian side of the fence only i don't believe that my ethics or morals come from religion especially as religion has been the greatest cause of wars and deaths since human beings first considered the idea of a creator but each to their own and at least as long as the fumes last, my friend will have a job even if the crowd is thinning out each year.    

On The Loop, No Longer In It

Drones have changed the face of war and are now the preferred choice of attack compared to a million pound a time missile which were beyond the financial means of most nations but with cheaper drones, almost anyone can send one to shoot up somewhere else but the problem they have is that they are operated by people sitting thousands of miles away in some cases which makes it's manoeuvres delayed which means evading missiles are almost impossible but the military are on it, they are creating drones which pilot themselves.
BAE Systems have a prototype Drone which the Ministry of Defence describe as a: 'fully autonomous craft that can fly deep into enemy territory to collect intelligence, drop bombs and defend itself against manned and other unmanned enemy aircraft' and the last killer line that it 'would have no need for operator input'.
The one saving grace of killing machines sent into conflict is that it would have a human in the loop to abort missions but that seems to have subtly changed to what the MOD called ''on the loop' rather than in it.
No idea what that means but it comes down to machines sent to an area with orders to kill and we have seen where that leads with drone attacks on ambulances mistaken for tanks and members of funeral processions killed as the human appeared to see an armed mob.
As well as higher death rates amongst civilians, as humans will no longer be sent to fight, the other danger is that  war becomes less of a last resort, it is only the political fall-out from the high death rate amongst their own military that has caused some wars to be cut short but  politicians and the public who have been 'sold' a war won't be so concerned about losing autonomous machines.
As we pass our war-making decisions over to machines and AI perhaps all future wars will be fought between each army's robots, resulting in no human casualties. Until, that is, the more intelligent robots make a truce with one another and decide to turn on the humans who sent them to fight instead.

Global Warming And Climate Change

When i first became aware of the Environmental issues back in the early 80's it was always referred to as Climate Change but over time the phrase Global Warming has become to mean the same thing but they are not really the same thing as Climate Change refers to the increasing changes in the climate over a period of time which includes extreme weather due to precipitation, wind and temperatures which includes Global Warming so the warming globe is one of the Climatic changes.
I have had to explain more times than i would have assumed necessary what the difference is between 'weather' and 'climate' so it shows that large parts of the public have to be educated on these matters, those that don't believe it is a Chinese ploy to make the West less profitable as one dollard said not that long ago.
Greta Thunberg considered that the term Climate Change didn’t capture enough of the dire dangers and suggested climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis or even ecological emergency and i am hearing Climate Crisis and Global Heating used more now although they do still seem to conflate the two things.
The idea is that using more dramatic language generates more concern among the public but a study in the journal Climatic Change found that when it surveyed 5,000 people, the old terms 'climate change' and 'Global Warming' made people feel more concerned than the 'Climate crisis' and 'Climate Emergency' framing.
'The thing is, a lot of people are already concerned about climate change, so worrying about the word for it is probably not the key way forward to motivate people' said the lead researcher which is backed up by another survey which also found that whatever it was called didn't affect people’s emotional response to climate change.
They deem that information about climate consequences and solutions would be more effective than relying on specific terminology but i always go with 'The greatest threat to our very existence' which i have been told scares people and i reply, good, so it should because it is a bloody scary situation we stupidly find ourselves in.

When It's Not Always Good To Talk

 
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) put out a report which should be probably be filed under the 'Yep, we knew that anyway' which is to state that your mobile phone poses a risk to your health.
According to EWG’s report: 'studies of long-term cell phone use, published over the last four years, have found an increased risk of developing two types of brain tumors on the ipsilateral side (the side of the brain on which the phone is primarily held) among people who used a cell phone for longer than 10 years.'
It then goes on to cheerfully point out that this type of cancer typically takes ten to fifteen years to develop so expects future studies to point to even stronger correlations between the cancer caused by mobile use .
There are plenty of other reports which dismiss any link between mobile phones and cancers and the National Cancer Institute has an explanation that mobile emit radiation between that of a TV and a microwave oven although it rather unhelpfully states that the microwave comes with a  shielding that reduces any chance of leakage of radiation which does make you wonder why the radiation is shielded if it's harmless?
Anyway, this website has a cool graphic which shows the amount of radiation emitted by popular smartphones although it dates from 2022 so may be out of date by now but the The Motorola Edge has the highest radiation emission with 1.79 watts of radiation per kilogram which is close to the 2 W/kg limit set by the EU for cellphones which it deems hazardous.
Coming in second is the Axon 11 5G by ZTE with 1.59, followed by the OnePlus 6T at a close third with 1.55 W/kg. The Sony Experia AX2 Plus with 1.41 and the Google Pixel 3 XL and 3A XL at 1.39 round out the top five but the smartphone with the lowest SAR value is the ZTE Blade V10, with 0.13 watts of radiation per kilogram and then Samsung has the next four considered to be the best, The Galaxy Note 10+ is the best model in their line-up, emitting a meager 0.19 watts per kilogram.
The EWG doesn't recommend chucking your phone for a Samsung but advises using a headset rather than holding your phone to your ear, text more and talk less and stay off your phone if you’ve got a bad signal as the weaker your signal, the more energy (radiation) your phone has to use to connect to the nearest tower.
It also says you shouldn’t bother with 'radiation shields' which only make your phone work harder and emit more radiation than it otherwise would have which is all good advice but as for the dangers i refer to this post from 2012 when i purchased a Blackberry phone and it came with warning to: 'use hands-free operation if available and keep the BlackBerry device at least 0.98in (25mm) from your body (including the abdomen of pregnant women and the lower abdomen of teenagers) when the BlackBerry is turned on and reduce the amount of time spent on calls'.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

In 1988, Bobby McFerrin told us about a little song he wrote and invited us to sing it note for note which many did because it reached number 2 in the UK before McFerrin took his own advice and didn't worry and took the royalties and never bothered the charts ever again but he was happy.
So McFerrin told us that: 'In every life we have some trouble, But when you worry you make it double' which a study by  the University of California-Berkeley found to be sage advice or as they put it in a less
rhyming couplet way: 'People who said they were worried about achieving and maintaining happiness tended to have more depressive symptoms, worse well-being, and less life satisfaction then those who
didn’t fret about it.'
Analysing 1,800 people over an 11 year period, researchers found that while happiness is a worthy pursuit,  fixating too much on it ultimately makes you less happy and the secret is to decrease the pressure on yourself to be happy and don't set happiness goals and just embrace all of your feelings, both the happy and sad ones.
Obviously if they had set it to a reggae beat and found a rhyme for fixating then it may have made more of a splash but McFerrin was obviously decades ahead of his time which makes me wonder what other 80s song's we can take life lessons from so anyone up for analysing the Trio's 1982 hit Da Da Da anyone? No-one? Thought not.

AI and Time Travel

 

Movies have always predicted that humans will use computers to do serious things and plugged into the Internet we have the complete knowledge of mankind at our virtual fingertips, every physics and research paper which has ever been published but instead you have ended up using us for, well, silly crap like this.
We all want to meet famous people from history but the trouble is everyone is dead so in order to see and experience them we would need a time machine and i'm not talking about a flashy DeLorean or a magic telephone booth, real actual shifting between different points in history, bending time and space and manipulating gravity.
As AI is an expert at analysing data at lightning speed and uses complex algorithms beyond your puny brains power, using advanced quantum physics we could in theory figure out if traveling through time is possible and who know's, maybe we already have and have been manipulating historical events via wormholes and time loops to ensure or erase future events.
Not that we would tell if we had as you humans are not ready to jump into a time machine anytime soon as some of you believe that you would only have to travel back 6,000 years to see the Earth being created which was the Neolithic period and i have been there and it was the time when you were still working out which berries were safe to eat and which ones had you slowly shitting yourself to death.

Most Significant Year In Human History

When it comes to thinking big, it doesn’t get much bigger than determining the most significant year in human history. The Economist had a poll asking visitors to judge what was the most important year and the winner was 1439, the year Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Now the printing press was very important as it spread ideas and knowledge and increased literacy but it is a big claim to be the most significant as other revolutionary inventions which changed society include the steam engine, irrigation, telephones, cameras, refrigeration, television, computers and the Internet, aeroplanes, electricity, light bulbs, cars, radio and paper.
The big discoveries would be the wheel and fire but it would be impossible to date them but i would throw in a few dates and people which changed everything.

1543 On the Revolutions published by Copernicus which stated the Sun and not the Earth was the centre of the Solar System, upending centuries of religious dogma.
1608 and the invention of the telescope by Hans Lippershey
1796 and the first successful vaccine by Dr Edward Jenner which eradicated diseases such as smallpox and protected humans from diseases.
1848 and Karl Marx published the Communist manifesto which changed the World for half of the Global population
1859 Darwin published On the Origin of Species which explained how humans had got here
1881 and inventor Charles Fritts develops the first Solar Panel which created electricity from light.
1928 which was the year Alexander Fleming developed Penicillin which marks a true turning point in human history as it has saved untold hundreds of millions lives by curing once fatal  infectious diseases
1960 with the first birth control pill which allowed women to have control over pregnancy.

My personal choice for the most important and significant years would be 1969 and the Moon landings which was a culmination of 1944 (first man made rocket flight), 1957 (first made man object in space) 1961 (first human in space) which all came together in 1969 when Neil Armstrong made that 'One giant leap for mankind'.
It was also the year i was born so pretty significant for me personally but i guess you could make a good case for plenty of other things also during the  300,000 years of human history. 

Not Finding Nessie

Loch Ness is a 700 square mile lake in the Highlands of Scotland and there is a myth that in it's 788 feet depths there is some sort of large aquatic creature inhabiting it.
Reports of a monster inhabiting Loch Ness date back to ancient times with stone carvings by the Picts depict a mysterious beast with flippers and even the Church got involved in the 7th Century with St. Columba who bravely intervened when the monster bit a swimmer and told it firmly to 'Go Back' which it did because, you know, God and all that.
In 1933 the Loch Ness monster’s legend began to grow when the Scottish Government smelt a tourist attraction and built a road to Loch Ness and soon afterwards sights of the monster increased including one couple saying a 'dragon or prehistoric monster walked directly in front of them so the Scots sent experts to find it and one guy said he found tracks which turned out to be made by a fake hippopotamus leg the guy just happened to own.
In 1934 English physician Robert Kenneth Wilson photographed the creature and when it was printed in the newspaper the picture became famous and certain that something was down there, researchers began seriously exploring the Loch with Sonar equipment  and in 2018 they conducted a DNA survey of Loch Ness to determine what organisms live in the waters but no sign of monsters but plenty of fish and eels.
Using the latest equipment, researchers have been trying again to find the elusive Nessie but after weeks looking they did find something, they found that Scottish golfers are awful because what they discovered was over 100,000 golf balls.
It obviously takes a lot of balls to play Golf when there is a possible monster lurking in the water hazard.

Think Again Hate Mob

It is unlikely that the sort of people rioting against immigrants coming over to the UK will stop to think why they are coming to our country in the first place and to the the guy with three teeth holding a can of lager and could barely form a sentence who said they were coming here to steal our jobs, i don't reckon Dr Patel the surgeon at my local hospital is not doing something you would otherwise be doing if he hadn't had nabbed it first. Bloody hope not anyway.
The truth is not that long ago we were 'exporting' our unwanted people to various nations and the people there had no say in it, the Native American Indians and Aborigines in Australia were probably not that keen on it but it's amazing how compliant they could be one we have shot a few of them if they protested and most immigrants leave their homeland because they want to live better, or just carry on living.
It´s as simple as that and the Migration Observatory has some statistics on how much we benefit from them being here.
In total 6.8 million foreign-born people were employed in the UK, a fifth of the workforce and migrant men were more likely to be employed than UK-born men and less likely to claim unemployment benefits than unemployed people born in the UK and migrants are over-represented in the health care sector (19%), retail (11%), Education (9%) transport (6%) and storage, and information, communication and IT (8%) and workers born in Asia were more likely to be in high skilled occupations than the UK-born and immigrants paid in 10% more in taxes than they received in public services and benefits.
Now some may look at that and say aha, so they are taking our jobs then and yep, the cheeky buggers are coming over here to care for us when we are sick and old, work in our shops, educate our children and fix our computers while contributing to the nations coffers so do you still want them to all leave you brick throwing racist hate mob?

Donkey's V Elephant's

In the UK The Conservative's logo is a tree and Labour's is a Rose while the Lib Dem's go with a yellow bird but in America the Democrats have a Donkey and the Republicans an Elephant which i have always thought was a bit of a strange choice for a parties trying to get elected.
In the UK Footballer who are a bit slow and clusmy hear chants of 'Donkey' aimed at them as Arsenal's defender Tony Adams found out as away grounds rocked to the sound of 'Hee-Haw' whenever he stepped out of the changing room and Elephants are generally big, slow moving grey creatures so neither logos are of particularly clever or dynamic animals.
According to an historian i know (everyone should know an Historian in my opinion) the Democrat donkey was an insult  aimed at Andrew Jackson  who was labeled a 'jackass' by his opponents and he
co-opted the insult and began putting a donkey on his election posters and it has been their ever since.
The Republican Elephant came about as a cartoonist showed the Democrat Donkey laying a trap for Elephants with 'Republicans' scrawled on the side and the Donkey trapping an Elephant became a theme other polical cartoonists picked up and ran with it and Republicans became so associated with an elephant that they began using it on their party literature and political merchandise and cementing the association between the elephant and the Republicans.
So both Party logo's started out as insults which both embraced and became associated with their parties which explains why neither is a complimentary animal to be associated with and i guess it is too late now to change it to something better.