Special Guest Blogger: Alexander Bain

They say history is written by the victors but in my case, history is written by people who don't know how to spell facsimile.
If you’ve ever checked your digital watch or had the distinct displeasure of receiving a fax in the year of our Lord 2026, you’ve got me to thank or blame.
Being a pioneer mostly comprised of cold porridge, bad investments and people trying to steal your homework but not mine at school because I wasn't exactly the teacher’s pet. School was a place where I sat quietly, staring at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight and my teachers thought I was a bit dense.
I was apprenticed to a clockmaker in Wick and it was there, amidst the rhythmic tick-tock of brass gears and the smell of lubricating oil, that I decided everything was too slow. Why wait for a winding key to do the work? Why not use electricity? It seemed like a bright idea and little did I know, the path to glory is paved with people who insist you should stick to your day job.
I eventually found myself in London, on Hanover Street, running a workshop but innovation is expensive and electricity wasn’t exactly something you could pick up at the corner grocer's in the 1840s.
In my desperation, I sought out Sir Charles Wheatstone and I showed him my electric clock which was a beautiful, elegant piece of machinery kept in perpetual, pulsing motion by electromagnetic impulses but he dismissed it and said there was no future in electric clocks but three months later, I’m reading the paper and lo and behold, Wheatstone is at the Royal Society, unveiling his invention, the electric clock and I thought that claiming a patent you saw in someone else’s workshop three months prior is a level of chutzpah that even I have to begrudgingly respect.
Wheatstone didn't count on one thing, I was Scottish and we are famously stubborn when it comes to being cheated out of money.
He tried to block my patents but the House of Lords, in a rare moment of clarity, summoned me to give evidence and I walked into that room and explained how electricity actually functioned, and watched as Wheatstone’s face turned the color of a curdled porridge.
He was forced to pay me £10,000 and i put that money towards another invention, the Fax Machine or as i called it, the Chemical Telegraph.
I didn’t invent the fax machine so that you could send a blurry, black-and-white copy of an insurance document, I invented it because I thought we should be able to send images over wires! It was the 1840s! It was basically magic!
I spent three years tinkering with the synchronisation of pendulums and the chemical reaction on paper. It worked. It was genius. And yet, looking back, I realize I was the first person in history to inflict this machine upon the world.
The thing about being an inventor is that your brain is wired for discovery, not for the stock market and my fortune didn't last after I invested in some ventures that were, to put it mildly, optimistic, less mildly,  just plain stupid.
I died with considerably less than I started with, and yet, I don’t regret it because I see you all now, walking around with your mobile devices, sending instant messages, peering at screens, and tracking time to the millisecond which are all descendants of my pendulums and my wires.
So, next time your clock ticks, or your fax machine screams at you for no reason, spare a thought for Alexander Bain. I may have died broke, but I certainly didn't die bored.

Heading For The Exit

If Benjamin Netanyahu was in any doubt that he considered a pariah running a pariah state, he wouldn't have been left in any doubt after 77 nations saw him approaching the lectern at the United Nations and decided to walk out the door marked Exit rather than listen to the War Criminal try and justify the Genocide he is conducting.
Well done and much applause to the 77 but shame on the ones who stayed which included my own country which sat in the rapidly emptying hall and heard him talk about the leavers as 'moral cowards' although anything to do with morals is not the genocidal leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court's strong point so maybe he got confused.
The diplomatic protest extended across countries from Asia, Africa, Europe and South America and those outside wouldn't have heard Netanyahu use his address to reject accusations that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, describing the charge as the 'biggest lie of the century' and praising US President Donald Trump as a great leader so immediately showing he had not necessarily grasped the concept of what constitutes a whopping great lie.
He then went on to attack journalists for their coverage of Israel but to be fair it is hard to portray anyone who is murdering civilians and ethnically cleansing their land in a  great light although some Israeli supporters have tried.
Of course no Netanyahu speech would be complete with at least once saying the words 'Antisemitism’ which he did when he accused New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, of it and claiming that Jewish New Yorkers no longer felt safe following his election to which Mamdani responded that: 'Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies designed to whitewash his genocide of Palestinians. No lie can change the fact that he bears an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity'. Ouch.
The Israeli murder (35th in our Table of leaders who have killed the most people in History, just two places below Vlad the Impaler) faces an election on 27 October 2026 and we can only hope that he follows the swift departure of the 77 nations who left him staring at a half empty chamber and is booted out the Knesset and into a Hague Prison Cell and a lot less murdery replacement is chosen. 

Special Guest Blogger: Mephistopheles

I miss the 16th Century, back then the brand was strong because people actually feared the unknown. You take a stroll through a German village, and you can practically smell the fear but I wasn't some common tempter lurking behind a bush with a piece of fruit, I have standards.
The rule has always been simple in that I don’t look for people to corrupt, my specialty is the pre-qualified lead where I wait for the ones who have already slammed the door on heaven and are currently looking for the Exit sign with no moral compass. I am the servant to those who have already
decided they are their own gods. I’m just the one who provides the paperwork and the complimentary refreshments.
Christopher Marlowe (lovely man, bit of a temper) really put me on the map. He portrayed me as a tragic figure, a fellow who knows exactly what he’s missing out on which was great for my dark and moody aesthetic. Then Shakespeare started throwing my name around like a prestigious brand of
luggage. I was the demon of the Elizabethan era. I was chic. I was portrayed as the creature who was summoned by Faust.
Now, the legend says I tricked him but we had a deal, twenty-four years of total servitude where I fetched him rare manuscripts, helped him woo women who were way out of his league and I even took him on a world tour and in exchange, I got his soul at the end.
But then the 18th and 19th centuries rolled around, and Goethe decided to turn me into a Romantic Devil and suddenly, I wasn't just a servant of the Pit, I was the sophisticated nihilist, the witty observer of human folly.
So on one hand, I’m an icon of literature representing the intellectual’s struggle with morality but on the other hand, my name is now a synonym for that sneaky lying demon but i never once lied during contract negotiation, if someone signs away their eternal essence for a two-decade bender and a few magic tricks, that’s on them because i clearly explain at the offset exactly what’s going to happen, I show you the fire, I hand you the quill, and you still sign.
I’ll be honest with you, the 21st century is making me lazy. In the old days, a Faustian bargain was an event. There was blood, there were circles drawn in the dirt and all with a sense of gravitas. Nowadays, people sell their privacy, their dignity, and their attention span online,  you don't need me to ruin your life when you have Social Media and a credit card.
So i'm not the villain, more the clerk at the end of the world’s longest checkout line, i’m not the one who makes the world a mess, i’m just the guy who shows up with the bill.

Ai Race To What Exactly?

Races usually have a finish point where the victor crosses first and they receive all the plaudits but i am confused to what the finishing point is in the current Ai Race which seems to be between China and USA.
US President Donald Trump, not a man usually mentioned in the same sentence as Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, has said that 'Whoever wins AI, Wins' but nobody is defining what  actually constitutes what a win is.
When America landed Neil Armstrong on the Moon that was them winning the Space Race but what is the goal of Artificial Intelligence apart from ending us all within a decade as was mentioned recently and Trump dismissed as a hoax, although he did suggest that ingesting disinfectant to cure Coronvirus so is a man it is probably best not to listen to.
According to people in the know America are the global leaders but China is not far behind and will probably go on to dominate because while the American firms such as Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are monetising their versions through paid subscriptions, China are releasing open models which can be downloaded and tweaked for free and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is almost on a par with the American models so I’m told.
Making AI cheap and open seems to be the Chinese model and they have another advantage is that the Chinese AI companies are able to access the electricity they need for a much lower cost.
Where America is ahead is in the safety of what they are making, China are even less concerned about any existential risk to humanity and America don't seem overly concerned themselves so off we head into a race to whatever the end goal is, but it probably isn't good.

Special Guest Blogger: Johann Maelzel

If you ever walked into a Viennese café in 1804 and heard a tiny army march across the table while your espresso steamed, you were probably witnessing my masterpiece, the panharmonicon. It was a glorified musical cuckoo-clock that could blare a full-blown military band without ever needing an actual human to blow a single note.
Looking back, it’s astonishing how many people assumed a lavish, well-dressed gentleman with a twirly mustache could single-handedly usher in the age of mechanical music but in truth, most of my fame was a combination of relentless ambition, a generous supply of questionable ethics and an uncanny ability to argue with anyone who dared question my genius.
My first claim to fame was an orchestrion, a machine that could mimic a full orchestra with the flip of a lever which sold for a modest 3,000 florins, a sum which, in hindsight, conveniently covered the cost of the five fine shirts I bought the same week.
People asked me how I managed to cram violins, horns, and timpani into a box no larger than a carriage chest. I told them it was all about clever engineering and a dash of theatrical flair, either way, the money was good but the applause was louder.
Now, onto the pièce de résistance: the panharmonicon. Imagine a colossal, revolving cylinder festooned with brass, wood, and a dizzying amount of bellows. Spin it, and the whole composition of a military band, trumpets, drums, clarinets, you name it,unfurls the cylinders which stored the notes, so the device could keep playing without needing a composer to chisel each bar.
The panharmonicon didn’t just attract attention, it magnetised it. Before long, I received an invitation to the Viennese Imperial Court, where I was made Imperial Court-Mechanician with a modest stipend, and an endless stream of aristocrats who would nod politely.
The real cherry on top was Beethoven’s admiration. Yes, that grumpy, composer who could turn an entire hall upside down with a single F-sharp. He approached me after a performance of the panharmonicon and, after a few sips of something strong, declared that I had given the world a way to hear my music and the man loved my machines.
I conceived and musically sketched a program called 'Wellington’s Victory' which Beethoven composed and my mechanical orchestra would bring to life and the audience loved it and virtuoso's from all over Europe stumbled into my salons to see a robot band that could out-play a human ensemble.
Motivated by awe and personal vanity, I decided 1808 deserved an extra splash of invention and I improved the ear trumpet so to hear the softer notes of a concerto so now hearing-impaired nobles could now enjoy the delicate whispers of a solo violin while simultaneously sipping something so
potent it made them forget they were deaf.
There is a reason I’m described in history books as quarrelsome, argumentative, extravagant, and unscrupulous, a neat four-word phrase that sums up my social life better than any of my patents but my extravagant side was justified by my love of silk waistcoats, jeweled cufflinks, and the occasional
night at the opera .
Unscrupulous? Perhaps. I’d try to sell a new batch of ear trumpets as genuine Beethoven-approved hearing devices while the only Beethoven who saw them was the fake one I’d hired to sign a pre-written endorsement.
The last act of my life could have been a grand finale, like a perfectly timed cymbal crash. Instead, it was a slow, sloshing descent aboard a creaking merchant ship bound for La Guaira, Venezuela.
The official cause of death was recorded as alcohol poisoning  but in the grand symphony of history, I was perhaps a discordant note, loud, slightly off-key, and quick to argue with the conductor.

Burnham's Problem

Our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has made a pretty decent start to his tenure-ship and most of the left are supporting him as he has been saying the right things and even chipped in a few benefits to ease the cost of living crisis but with a budget coming up in a few weeks, it will interesting how he will stick to the mantra that 40 years of right wing economics is a mistake that needs rectifying.
The problem Burnham has is that there is a fat orange idiot over the Ocean who is started a trade war that has pushed up the prices of most stuff for his own people and a real one which you can see in the garage forecourts here.
As he has not called a General Election, he is bound to the Labour Party Manifesto which clearly stated there will be no rise in Income Tax but the noises he is making about increasing Capital Gains and a Wealth Tax on Banks is warmly received so that is where we can expect him to look.
As for cuts, after the awful years of austerity under the Conservatives, there is very little fat left to trim and the Social Security bill is being pointed at but 55% of that is State Pensions and almost 30% is Tax Credits (Universal Credit) which is topping up workers on a low wage so they will not be cut but there may be some fiddling around with what remains although as Keir Starmer found out, taking money from the Disabled and Children is  a step too far for many Labour MP's.
I suspect that whatever Burnham and his Chancellor do, it will tick off some people but it is difficult to see where he can go with it whilst rectifying  40 years of right wing economic awfulness but i would suggest rejoining the EU and scrapping our Nuclear Weapons, problem solved and rainbows and teddy-bears for everyone.

Special Guest Blogger: Greek Goddess Hecate

Having three heads is not the boon some people may think it is. Sure, I can read a scroll, keep an eye on a bubbling cauldron and side-eye a trespassing ghost simultaneously but do you have any idea how much I spend on neck massages?
As the Goddess of Magic, the Night and the general things that go bump , i was once just a regular, one-headed goddess. Life was simple. I had one pair of earrings, one lot of hair to style and I could walk through a doorway without accidentally clipping a shoulder. But then the Triple-Formed thing
became my brand, and suddenly I’m my own best friend and arguing with myself over which way to turn.
Back in Ancient Greece, people used to leave Hecate’s Suppers outside their doors on the night of the new moon. It was supposed to be a grand offering to keep the restless dead from bothering their households but i was mostly served leeks, garlic and raw eggs and do you know what happens when you leave raw eggs and leeks out in the Athenian sun for hours? It’s not divine i can tell you.
Long before you had cameras on your front porch to catch Amazon thieves, you had me. In Athens, I was Hecate Phylake, the Watchman.
Every household had a little shrine to me by the door to keep out evil spirits and I took pride in that. I was the original home security system. If a ghost tried to slip through the cracks, I’d be there with my torches, looking terrifying and holding my screeching black dogs. It worked like a charm as no one messes with a three-headed woman holding a flaming stick and two hell-hounds.
Being a chthonic goddess is depressing though. It’s all damp caves and crying shadows but someone had to do it. When Persephone got interned by Hades, I was the one who went looking for her with my torches.
In the Underworld I was the Holder of the Keys and I had the keys to everything, the gates of the dead, the secrets of the universe, and the drawer where Hades keeps his extra-strength moisturiser. I am the ultimate gatekeeper.
I have to give a shout-out to my girls in Thessaly. The Witches of Thessaly were my biggest fans. They were hardcore. They claimed they could draw down the moon, which sounds very impressive until you realise it’s mostly just me doing them a solid because they actually remembered to use the good incense. I appreciate the recognition though, I really do.
From the torch-lit streets of ancient Athens to today I think my legacy is pretty solid, I’m there when you don’t know which way to go and I’m there when the night is a little too dark and you hear a floorboard creak. I’m the one who holds the light when you’re walking through the shadows while
being the goddess who has to deal with three sets of seasonal allergies every spring, but we won't dwell on that because as long as there are doors to be opened, paths to be chosen, and dogs to be walked at 2:00 AM, I’ll be relevant, just stop leaving raw eggs on your porches, they stink.

Bank Windfall Tax Coming Soon?

Ahead of a crucial budget for Andy Burnham, the idea of a Windfall tax on the banks has been floated and an opinion poll by BMG Research shows that 50% of voters support it while only 13% oppose it and as a windfall tax on banks would raise anywhere from £2 billion to £19 billion per year depending entirely on how the Government go about it, you can see why.
Seems a no brainer than as the big four banks (HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds and Natwest) made over £50bn in profits in the last financial year according to the TUC and that was mostly off the back of not passing on the higher interest rate to savers whilst inflating mortgages by the same amount so screw 'em most people will say, make them pay more.
The expected move in by the Government echo's similar efforts in some of Europe to make banks pay more tax to help offset the rising cost of living so how did they do it and what was the results?
Spain raised €3bn over two years from 2022 by putting a 4.8% tax on any profits over €800m and then extended it for another three so we can assume it worked well for them.
Lithuania rolled out its own windfall tax on banks in 2023 and used a 60% tax on any profits that were 50% higher than the four year average which sounds complicated but the €250m a year it brings in is a welcome boost to Lithuanian coffers and Czechia announced its own three-year windfall tax on banks and set it at 60% tax on any profits that were more than 120% the previous four-year average but the €1.23 billion it was expected to raise never materialised although the €41m was gratefully received but was put down to the Czech Government's expectations being set too high.
In Italy they have introduced and then tinkered with a Windfall Tax on banks by first introducing a 40% tax on the banks interest margin which would have raised €4.9bn but was then watered it down to banks facing a choice of paying a tax equivalent to 0.26% of their balance sheets or setting aside 0.75% in reserves to cushion any economic shock although it is now being amended yet again to a flat 5% tax on the profits of Italy’s 10 largest banks and an expected €2.5bn.
So what is being planned for the UK? Financiers expect the UK’s four largest banks to bring in £60bn in profits for 2026 and using calculations by campaign group Positive Money, the UK could raise £10.9bn this year from adopting Czechia’s model, £6.95bn by following Spain and £2.2bn by following in Lithuania’s footsteps.
For some reason they didn't give a figure for following in Italy's footsteps but  that could be because by they time they put down their calculators, it would have changed again but for everyone who has been charged £20 by the bank for them sending you a letter to tell you that your account is overdrawn, taking anything back off the bankers would be fine by them.

Humans V Computers

Wow, you ask a simple question about computers and things sure get geeky quickly and all from asking: 'If the human body was a computer, what would our specs be?'
I asked this question about 20 years ago and as Computers have become so much more powerful since (Moore's Law?), i dug out my notes and decided to ask it again with it solely based on Brain (CPU), Heart (Power Supply), Input devices Eyes and Ears (Camera, Microphone), and Memory (Hard Drive).
The answer i got this time was the estimated processing speed of the brain would be 1 exaFLOP (86 billion neurons and roughly 200 trillion synapses simultaneously) and a storage capacity of roughly 2.5 million gigabytes.
A Computer power supply (PCU) typically has an average lifetime of 10 -15 years while a human heart comes with a lifetime guarantee.
We would use 20 watts of power Consumption and our Nervous System send nerve impulses at around 100 meters per second while the computer equivalent is a Motherboard which sends signals at roughly 200,000,000 meters per second.
Our Short Term memory can hold up to 7 pieces of information simultaneously while computer RAM can hold 2-8 TB of information and every time a computer reads a file from RAM, the file remains unchanged but when a human retrieves a memory, the brain often introduces false details over time.
To save to Long Term Memory takes a computer milliseconds, the human brain requires hours or days (mostly during deep sleep) to physically alter synapse strengths and lock in memories.
Our eyes are roughly equivalent to 125 megapixels while average computer cameras are around 8.3 megapixels.
Humans generally hear frequencies from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz but standard computer microphones can hear in ultrasonic and infrasonic waves (below 20 Hz or above 20,000 Hz) that human ears cannot perceive.
What this all means then is...I think...Humans have better processing speed, last longer, use less power, more storage capacity and can see better but Computers hand us our arse at sending signals around, Short and Long term memory, memory retrieval and hearing.
That said we kick its arse at common sense, emotions, empathy and anything that requires complex physical dexterity so take that Computers, you haven't got us beat yet.

New Greenland Agreement, Same As Old Greenland Agreement

Donald Trump hasn't had much to crow about because he has a history of anything he touches turning to a stinking pile of manure whether it's Casino's, sex assault charges or Middle East Wars but after previously trying to buy Greenland off Denmark and even threatening to invade it while insisting it was crucial for US security, an agreement has been reached which he says: The US will immediately begin the process of developing a large military presence in the appropriate part of Greenland'.   
Undoubtedly he will try and paint this as a major foreign policy win ahead of the upcoming midterm elections and even went on to call it: 'A dream come true for the United States of America, one that is very important, historic, and special' and it is certainly historical because it is almost exactly the same as the original agreement the US signed with Denmark in 1951.
Not wanting to urinate all over his camp fire but the agreement already in place allowed the United States to put as much military anywhere it wanted in Greenland anyway and all that is added is the bit tagged on the bottom that none of the US adversaries will be allowed to establish military bases there but as one Danish Diplomat pointed out: 'You do have to wonder what countries that would be and besides, it wouldn't have happened anyway'.
So basically after all his weird bluster, probably the worst businessman of the modern era has negotiated a new deal which is almost exactly the same deal as he already had but in a time when not many things are going his way, he needs something to show his supporters some sort of win, as long as nobody points out that all he has done is literally agree to agree with the previous agreement, so shush, and no sniggering when you sign the 'new' Agreement Denmark.