Posts Tagged: technology

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  Luddites—the machine breakers

  I have just visited my dear old mother in my hometown of Scone NSW. While there, I visited the grave of George Robert Baker in the church cemetery. My mother, was an English history teacher at Scone High School in the 1970s and 1980s. She had also been active in the local historical society and […]

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  Artificial intelligence making the news

  Everyone is talking about the free-access Chat GPT released in early December last year (2022). It uses artificial intelligence to generate reasonably sophisticated copy. One journalist wrote an article for the ABC that suggested it was good enough to pass some medical exams. Another from the Sydney Morning Herald got the bot to write the article. The […]

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  Two good reasons to understand rare earth elements (REEs)

  WHY ARE RARE EARTH ELEMENTS IMPORTANT? No doubt you have recently read or heard about rare earth elements (REEs) or rare earth metals. They are becoming an important aspect of our lives for two reasons: firstly, they are an important requirement in components of electric vehicles and wind turbines; and secondly, the majority of the […]

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  How do you tell a robot from an android?

  Words for artificial humans The science fiction (sci-fi) genre has created many near-human creatures. There is a whole vocabulary that has grown to describe human-like things that are not humans: robot, android, cyborg, humanoid, and many more. But researching these sci-fi words I found that many of them and the artificial creatures they describe have […]

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  Isotropes of unobtainium found

  Forms of unobtainium have been used in science fiction from the beginning of the genre. HG Wells used the fictional Cavorite to overcome the power of gravity and get his heroes to the moon in The First Men in the Moon. Star Trek uses dilithium crystals to power the warp drive.

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  How did modern vehicles get their names?

  Petrol-driven vehicles are inventions of the late 19th century and 20th century. Many of their names have been borrowed and adapted from older vehicles and from other cultures. Their original meanings and how they are derived can be quite extraordinary. Car Car is a very old word, it comes from the Latin carrum, the name […]