Like many inquisitive kids, I was fascinated with dinosaurs and knew the names of lots of them. When I was employed, I’d commonly see kids as young as 5, who could tell their parents (and me) the names of dozens of dinosaur genera. When I was about the same age as them, I was given a book on dinosaurs from the How and Why Wonder Book series. This series was turned out in large numbers on many topics, of which I had a few, but the dinosaur volume was my favourite1.
The Boyer Lectures are a series of talks by prominent Australians, presenting ideas on major social, scientific or cultural issues, and broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Radio National. The lectures began in 1959 and a couple of years later were named after Richard Boyer, the ABC board chairman who suggested them.
The first car I ever drove was my parents’ red and white EH Holden station wagon in which I started to learn to drive, with my father partly terrified in the front passenger’s seat. It had a radio which, when I could, was mostly tuned to whichever AM radio station played the music I liked (Beatles, Rolling Stones, and suchlike). My first car was a white second hand Mazda 1300 with whitewall tyres and rust in the bottom of all the doors.
In my palaeontological peregrinations, I occasionally refer to papers that may be everything from months to nearly two centuries old. For instance, one of the seminal papers in the early study of trilobites was a paper by Ignaz Hawle & August Corda entitled ‘Prodrom einer Monographie der böhmischen Trilobiten’ (Prodrome of a monograph on Bohemian trilobites)1.
Back in late 2017, less than a year after I started this blog, I wrote an item about how climate change deniers lied about sea level rise1. Later, in October 2023, I wrote an item about how the rate of sea level rise was itself increasing. The average rate of increase in sea level between 1993 and 2015 was 3.3 millimetres (mm) per annum, while the average sea level rise between 2013 and 2022 was 4.62 mm per annum2.
I wrote a rant a while ago about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has developed into a very different war with drones of various types forming a huge part of the Ukrainian arsenal. This was by way of introduction to a story about the development of unmanned underwater vehicles, one of which will be entering service with the Royal Australian Navy in early 20261.
Everyone knows that politicians and their supporters lie. Not long after I began this blog in early 2017, I wrote a piece about how politicians lie and I gave some examples of the different types of lying. They include such types as barefaced lies, butler lies, coverups, lying by omission, false advertising and several others1.
In March 2018, David Roberts wrote a piece in Vox bemoaning the state of the op-ed page of the New York Times; the main thrust being that these pages do not have enough diversity of opinion, but particularly, he stated that while it carries some conservatives, these authors do not reflect the madness of US conservative politics; they are “alienated from the animating force of US conservatism, which is Trumpism”1. One of the paragraphs that struck a chord with me was the following: