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26. SOCIAL DISTANCING VS PHYSICAL DISTANCING
16/06/2021
How blindly we adopted a term that someone somewhere mooted to describe a very new situation, without questioning the underlying concept. Social distancing is the culprit. The term 'social distance' is usually measured by the amount of social contact between groups. So not measurement by metres but by the extent to which people from different...
"It will soon be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world so simply that any individual can carry and operate his own apparatus." Before reading further, take a guess at when this quote was published. You'd be forgiven for placing it just before the 'wireless revolution' of the 1990s. In fact, Nikola Tesla suggested this in 1909...
24. WHAT'S IN A NAME?
21/04/2021
A few blogs ago, close on the heels of perhaps the most (in)famous footballer of his generation, I wrote about the influence of numbers on our way of thinking. Now, with COVID-19 vaccines in the spotlight, and the very recent name change for one that has been beset by controversy, I turn my attention to the way names and their...
In October 2020, Australian rock band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard released the separate audio components of the song Automation, a fairly opaque riff on human reliance on machines. The explicit instruction was for fans to create remixes and upload these to YouTube. YouTube had other ideas: its automated copyright detection system compared the...
22. VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR … 4.0
17/02/2021
In 1980 The Buggles came up with the one-hit single, Video Killed the Radio Star, a kind of lament for the old and the heralding of the new. The lyric "rewritten by machine and new technology" was not only a sign of the times but a foretaste of the digital age to come. Yet nobody could have predicted, despite...
In which country did Spanish Flu emerge? If you said Spain, you'd be mistaken.
20. THE NUMBERS GAME
17/12/2020
Downing Street, Pelé, Diego Armando Maradona, the basis of the metric system, fingers and toes, scores and ratings. 10 is a bit of a common denominator for the way we organise things, and often a number synonymous in sport with the 'playmaker'. To wear the number 10 shirt somehow sets one apart. The death of a genius on 25 November got me thinking....
When it comes to measuring intelligence, Stephen Hawking's opinion was that "people who boast about their I.Q. are losers" - yet you'd be hard-pressed to find an interview which doesn't identify him as a genius or other similar label. In recent decades, conceptions of intelligence have come to encompass diverse but connected elements such as...
18. LIFE IN THE SECOND WAVE
20/10/2020