self-publishing since 1997
Located one-point-one-five billion light years from Earth, the behemoth galaxy, at one-point-seven-million light in years in length, somewhat dwarfs our home, the Milky Way, which measures in at a mere one-hundred-thousand light years across. Using kiloparsecs as a metric, the size difference between IC 1101 and the Milk Way, the comparison comes into sharp focus, [ ]
I m still reading through Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg s recently published vision of an AI future, but this paragraph jumped out at me: Humanity is not a monoculture. People s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with everyone s opposing interests and values at once. [ ]
Strathfield is a suburb located in the west of Sydney, Australia. I don t know many people living in the area, so I m not there often, but have occasionally wandered the streets near the railway station. About a third of residents were born in Australia, while a reasonable number of people hail from Nepal, China, India, [ ]
Since the volume of slop-in-general is of epidemic proportions on the platform, it makes perfect sense an AI agent write actual AI slop for consumption there.
The Voyager 1 space probe is almost one light-day away from Earth. But the craft has been on its trajectory since being launched in 1977. Deep space flights carrying people will need to move at far greater speed if they are to, for example, reach Alpha Centaur, the star system closest to the Sun, in [ ]
Tangentially related to the previous post. A few days ago Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published the company s latest AI vision. Or the one for this week at least. And the future is rosy, incredibly rosy. If Meta has it their way, everyone will have access to their own exceptionally capable agent — must Meta use [ ]
There s good news and there s bad news, but in reality not much is really good. The good, such that it is; AI bots could well put scammers out of work. The bad; the AI scammers are far more effective at deceiving people. Disturbingly though, these are scams that involve entering into a fake relationship with [ ]
We re talking about things like mass extinctions and major geological events. Scientists are not exactly sure why momentous upheavals seem to occur at approximately the same intervals, but they have theories. These range from Earth s position in space over time, relative to our galaxy s mid-plane, to the (extremely slow) process of heat transfer within the [ ]
Tech bros across the world have been giving everyone a right ear-bashing in the last few years about their AI agents, and the need for data centres to power them. And they ve been crying foul in response to the environmental concerns many have expressed. Tech bros worldwide are annoyed we don t want to share our [ ]
Foto is a photo sharing platform I should really use more often. I originally signed up just over a year ago, but haven t really used it much lately. Possibly because of my attitude at the moment to apps, and anything that is too much like social media. Nonetheless, I ought to post a little more. [ ]
I ve been talking about time-travel stories recently, so here s another one, this time a book. Time Travel for Beginners, is the latest novel by Sydney based Australian author Jaclyn Moriarty. If you can find a shop called the Time Travel Agency, located somewhere in Sydney, then you too may be able to travel through what [ ]
We missed the sadly short-lived stage adaptation of the 1985 time-travel escapade movie Back to the Future (BTTF), during its brief Australian run, in late 2025. I did however catch A Future on Stage, trailer, a documentary about bringing the original film to the stage as a musical. The words we didn t think we could [ ]
British musician Charli XCX released her eighth studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, in July 2026. Not so much of the glitchcore this time around, though there s one or two (digital) scratches in the mix.
The popular weekly email newsletter, written by Melbourne based Australia curator and publisher Kai Brach, has actually been published five-hundred-and-seventy-nine times, but earlier editions were written under another title. But who s counting? True to its tagline, one email worth opening, every week , Dense Discovery (DD) is something I ve been reading for years. Er, this is [ ]
Queanbeyan, NSW, based author and visual artist Omar Musa, has been named winner of the 2026 Miles Franklin Literary Award, for his 2025 novel Fierceland. Fierceland is Musa s second novel, and tells the story of two siblings returning to their home in Malaysian Borneo, for their father s funeral, having lived overseas for years: After many [ ]