World’s Greatest Explorers? Guess What? They Are Not Even Human



Make that two machines.















Sneaky Kiwis Win America’s Cup Again












Tinder And Grindr. Waste Of Time.

I cannot get over how much the dating landscape in the 21st century seismically shifted.

When I was growing up, meeting someone for a relationship, was reasonably upfront. Give or take the odd, unexpected left turn. There was the at work option, or at a party, pub or bar. See. I’m so old fashioned and out of touch to be talking about this. Then along came Internet dating. I never had an issue with that. Never bothered me in the slightest. In fact I warmly embraced this development. It was such a perfectly, reasonable, rational not to mention respectful way to meet a potential partner. But now we have something completely different. I call them the devil’s children of Internet dating. Not that I am passing some kind of moral judgment here. I’m not. Far from it. I just have a lot of personal issues with Tinder and Grindr. And, it is not because they’re a couple of smartphone applications, used primarily by people to have casual sex. Actually, “casual” is way too nice a word. It’s because they live in a world where people and sex are disposable commodities. To be used and discarded, There’s no love, no deep connection, no personal investment of any kind to be found in Tinder and Grindr apart from the kind you get from self-gratification. But for some of us, maybe even many of us, these two apps have fundamentally changed the way we go about things relationship wise and not in a good way, in my view.

So I was quite interested and bemused to read a story with the headline: “ How Sex Is Killing The Live Music Scene Thanks To Tinder And Grindr.”

The story suggested that we forget breath-testing, lockouts, or downloading – Sex is killing live music, or at least the search for it is, on Tinder and Grindr.

That’s the provocative but serious claim, made by a music venue owner and live music booker, James Young, who says that more and more people prefer to “stare at their phones and swipe left or right ” rather than head out to a bar where they might meet somebody.  Sounds pretty sad to me.

“Grindr, the gay app, came out about two years before Tinder and has destroyed the gay hotspot [in Melbourne],” Young says. “That is a textbook, identifiable case. And here we are, two years later, with Tinder following in its footsteps”. He says young people are hanging about (probably at home) hunched over their phones instead of going out to bars and clubs.

It should be pointed out that music venues don’t simply exist for the sole purpose of enabling a romantic meeting between two people. Of course not says Young, but “bars are fragile businesses” and anything that affects even three or five percent of business on already thin margins can be hard to recover from. “And what we are talking about is 10 per cent loss of business and for some businesses, that’s their profit margin.”

Young, who owns and books music for three bars in Melbourne argues that “sex has always been a big part of rock ‘n’ roll but we’re not saying the sole purpose of venues is to pick up”. It is, however, a problem that carries a ripple effect because people used to meet – or hook up in the modern parlance – at venues where music was being played.

“If there are less people at the bars, that’s going to affect sales and there is also a parallel issue in the type of dates you go on,” Young says. “A Tinder date is a super casual date so ‘let’s meet at a cafe, let’s meet at the latest, chic pop-up restaurant’. He says first dates used to be at a rowdy live music event. Not anymore. But people don’t really talk to each other anymore. They hook up.

He says in Sydney you can add lockouts and earlier closing of bars to the Tinder-effect. Young also raises another fear, that “Netflix, Stan and binge TV series watching have become the new dating”, with the simplicity of an affordable entertaining option capped off by the fact that “you’re already on the couch”.

What a huge yawn. I prefer the personal meet and greet, the spark, the meeting of minds, the possibility of what might be and then discovering that it is, any day over any smartphone app. As far as I’m concerned Tinder can go up in flames and it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. I know. So old fashioned.

Modern Apps Killing Monogamy. Stick With A Dinosaur






Options, that are just a click away.




How sad is that?








See I told you. I am a dinosaur.

Hey Baby Boomers. You Are NOT Team Players

I have just learned that I belong to a generation that seems to be causing no end of trouble for everyone else in the world. Certainly for Generation X and Y. Put simply, they think we have too much of everything. Too much money, so we buy property that freezes out potential first homebuyers condemning them to live in the eternal rent cycle. We have too many assets, we get way with too many superannuation lurks and perks. I can say all of this, because absolutely none of it applies to me. I wouldn’t have two beans to rub together. Living off the old age pension, will be the life for me. I changed jobs a lot. Didn’t have a proper superannuation fund etc etc. Anyway, that is another story.

What I find remarkable is the assertion, that yet another black mark should be added to Generation Baby Boomer. When it comes to the workplace, and let’s face it there are still a large number of my generation who abandoned thoughts of retirement, long ago, they are lone wolves and not team players.

The 21st Century workplace, is a different beast these days, according to market research that has just been published. It’s all about being touchy-feely, hot-desking (sounds obscene) and butcher’s paper brainstorming. Older workers are apparently not into any of this. Not only are they not into it, their non- participation could actually be causing a problem in terms of lowering worker productivity.

A recent study by the accountancy behemoth, Deloitte, found that unlocking what it described as the ‘power of collaboration’ added $46 billion to the Australian economy with the potential to add another $10 billion if companies embrace and encourage the trend. Now, I recognise that this applies in an Australian context but you can take it as read, the same is happening all over the world.

Deloitte claims it’s being driven by big advances in technology making it easier than ever for employees to communicate and work together on projects, either in the office or from home.

The trend was reinforced by global Human Resources firm, Randstad, in its latest, quarterly Workmonitor survey, which found that two thirds of workers say they spend more time collaborating with colleagues than they did five years ago.

But things got a bit messy and pear shaped when they tried to compare the responses of Generation Y workers, with their Baby Boomer counterparts. Almost two thirds, or 59 percent of Gen Y, who were surveyed say they perform better in teams compared to only 33 percent of Baby Boomers. Collaboration and teamwork are far more important to Generation Y than it is for the grey nomads they share the workplace with.

There’s no doubt it’s a generation thing, according to a Randstad company representative who was commenting on their survey. He said workplaces have changed radically over the past 20 years. Technology exists now, where we can share information in real time and Generation Y is clearly the strongest in this area. They have grown up in an education system that focused on collaboration, so group assignments are second nature to them.

Interestingly, Generation X, recorded similar figures. Fifty percent of those surveyed say they perform better in teams. The vast majority, eight five percent of respondents, said they believed that collaboration was now more important than ever with the advances in technology.

The evidence appears to suggest that Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom are lagging behind Asian countries when it comes recognising the importance of working collaboratively in the workplace. In the boom economies of China, India, Hong Kong and Singapore, eighty two percent of workers surveyed said collaboration is not only recognised, it is also rewarded. The general feeling is that there is a lot of catching up to do if we want to be competitive with these countries.

The Randstad company representative offered some advice along with his survey results. He said the best way for businesses to change the way they operate, to encourage collaboration, is to establish the right platforms and lead by example. They need to abandon the idea of measuring performance based on individual effort. To take the sporting analogy, if your team focus is on scoring goals, then you’ll have most of the team obsessed with scoring instead of working together to win the match.

You can have the best salesperson in the world, who sells a lot but if they can’t work with others their value is limited. He or she might achieve their personal goals, but that does precious little in helping their company to grow. But if your sales team is collaborative, shares leads and supports each other, then everyone is working towards achieving a better outcome.

So there endeth the lesson.

Here’s my gratuitous advice to my fellow baby boomers. Chill baby. You know what they say. You are never to old to learn.

Are Smart Phones Turning Us Into Dummies?









Now I am going to add a disclaimer.













On that point I agree with her.

Has The Rot Set In For Apple?

Something very serious is happening to Apple. I am not given to melodrama or overstatement. And it would be overstating by a considerable margin to describe Apple as rotten to the core. But the fruit of a once great company is looking seedy, tarnished and blighted of late. It certainly isn’t the way Steve Jobs would have done business.

Apple was once a brand synonymous with reliability and innovation. It drew in customers with its magical, consumer friendly, wizardry. Gadgets, that looked state-of-the-art, attractive and did phenomenal things. But I think it’s now safe to say the magic has left the building. It’s been replaced by one blunder after another. And the product launches, proudly proclaiming the latest innovation, are looking more like catch-up than innovation.

The company keeps doing dumb things. Firstly, there were the holes in its security you could literally drive a truck through. Hackers were able to exploit the security weakness and gain access to the private photos of celebrities. Many of the photos showed people in a state of undress. These photos were then scattered over the internet. Things got a whole lot worse for Apple when it was revealed it knew about the security hole in its system, for six months, but did nothing about it. The carefully crafted Apple image of being an impenetrable fortress where all of your very private information could be kept securely, evaporated overnight.

Then just recently, the launch of the much, hyped iPhone 6. This was touted as Apple’s answer to the market gains of its major competitor, the Korean giant Samsung. Once again a very different Apple fell from the tree literally. A technical glitch meant the live streaming of the event didn’t work. Oh my God. The old Apple would never have allowed this to happen. It would have worked flawlessly just like their products. But in keeping with all Apple announcements, there was that expect the unexpected moment: the release of the new Apple watch. This was more like the Apple of old. The kind of breakthrough innovation that Steve Jobs would have been proud to put his name to. It is a device that takes all of the shortcomings already known about these kinds of devices and fixed them in one gorgeously designed bundle. Then Apple dropped the ball completely. It did not say you can go immediately into any Apple retail and online store and buy the Apple watch. That would have got everyone excited and believing again. Instead, the watch won’t be available for six months. Talk about an anti-climax. What were they thinking?

Then Apple delivered the coup de grace. It was a PR disaster of epic proportions. I am talking about their not so great, U2 music promotion. What seemed like the most generous music giveaway in history, installing the new U2 album, Songs of Innocence, directly into the library of the company’s half a billion iTunes subscribers, very quickly turned to custard. Social media was awash with people complaining they were getting a product they didn’t want or ask for. It was meant to benefit both Apple and the band but Apple was forced into creating and releasing a tool so that iTunes customers could remove the album from their library.

The next major cock-up is something I would never have thought possible. Apple has always done very well with the release of their iPhones. So no surprise iPhone 6 and 6 plus prompted consumers to line up for days to get their hands on the new devices. But it wasn’t long before the complaints started rolling in. Some of them unjustified but others were inexcusable. There were complaints that the iPhone 6 was prone to bending. To be frank so would anything if you apply enough direct force. The second complaint was sadly all Apple’s fault. The company released a phone update that, of all things, took away the device’s fundamental feature: the ability to use it as a phone. The other key feature of iPhone 6, Touch ID also didn’t work. The old Apple would never have allowed something so fundamentally flawed to pass quality control. Maybe it was an indication of how badly Apple has slipped in its market share that it felt the need to rush the release of a product that still had major flaws in its design. Then Apple compounded what was already a disaster by releasing a software fix that didn’t fix the problem.

So where does that now leave people like me who are lovers of everything Apple? Sadly I hear a little voice inside me asking the question: Do I still want to buy this fruit?

How The Rockefellers Became Environmentalists










A Sex Tape Like No Other







The World’s First Computer

Are you ready to be amazed and astounded? OK I may be overstating it a tad. But everyone loves a good mystery and this one is certainly up there with the best. In 60 BC, a Roman ship sailed on a voyage. Where it came from and where it was going to nobody knows. But somewhere between Greece and Crete, it ran into a storm and sank. And for more than two thousand years the treasures it carried faded into history. Entombed in the sandy bottom of the ocean. But you know what? This story really begins 100 years ago. That’s when a group of sponge divers saw a spooky looking hand sticking out of the silt. It was in an area off the island of Antikythera in the Aegean sea at a depth of 75 meters.

The hand was part of an ancient statue. These sponge divers could only spend a short amount of time on the bottom because of the depth but they managed to collect a treasure trove of artifacts. It was an amazing but eclectic collection of bits and pieces. There were bronze and marble statues, jewellery, glass and coins. The statues were beautifully crafted and life-like despite the ravages of time and the sea. The glassware crafted to an exacting standard and brightly colored. The treasure trove could best be described as the sum of many parts but not the whole. Very few of the items were complete. And of course that has led to much speculation about what kind of ship this was. For example, was it a treasure ship making a delivery to a King or a High Priest? Was it a plunder ship carrying the spoils and trophies of war? Or, was it just laden with an assortment of trinkets no longer wanted and destined for sale in some distant market?

But there was one item discovered that at first glance looked like a corroded lump of bronze cogs and wheels. Because it was bronze, it survived well in the sea but it didn’t look like anything anyone had every seen before. A lot of years passed before scientists decided to take a closer look at the object to see if they could identify it.

The first job was to get it X-rayed. And when they did that it looked way more complicated than they first thought. There were wheels within wheels. But what exactly was it? It slowly dawned on scientists that what they were looking at was in fact one of the most sophisticated devices ever discovered from ancient times. Forget about Apple and Microsoft. What they were looking at was the world’s first computer. It was an analog computer that did calculations. As far as anyone knows, this is the only example of its kind anywhere. But what did it actually do? The scientists finally determined it was an ancient timepiece. A timepiece, that worked as an astronomical calculator. A calculator, or mechanical device, that predicted the movement of the stars and the planets. As one astrophysicist said: the device makes mechanical what has been known for centuries about astronomical cycles. Those cycles predict eclipses by the moon and the sun and they have been used to produce a workable calendar. This hand-cranked device was more than likely used to predict which city was due to host the Olympic Games as well as to track the movement of the planets for prophecies and religious ceremonies

Just to put this into context. We are talking 60 BC. The kind of skill and complexity needed to manufacture it did not become evident until the 14 Century.This was ahead of its time by a considerable margin.Centuries. The feeling is that the device probably belonged to a wealthy person who used it for a bit of fun. The scientific community is very excited because they believe they only have half the story. The other half of the device, they believe, is still lying at the bottom of the Aegean sea waiting to be found. So in all honesty, you could say scientists still don’t fully understand how complicated this device could potentially be until they discover the rest of it. One set of gears and cogs doesn’t match the rest so there is clearly more to come.

But as time goes on scientists are learning more and more about the device, which has been called the Antikythera mechanism. Some of the bronze work contains inscriptions. One word stands out. It is the Greek word for Cosmos. Scientists believe another metal plate may actually contain an instruction manual for using the device. It details different gear settings.

But one of the great ironies of this discovery is that true cutting edge technology has now been invented for the express purpose of discovering the rest of this ancient example of high tech wizardry and whatever else might be lurking at the site. A $1.7 million diving suit, which acts like a wearable submarine, has been developed so that an archeologist can use it to explore the wreck site. There are pedals at the feet of the suit to allow the wearer to literally fly through the water powered by thrusters built into the suit’s backpack. The suit’s arms allow for free movement and instead of hands, objects will be recovered using mechanical pincers. The suit has breathing and communication systems and a carbon dioxide scrubber, which means the wearer can stay at depth for an extended time

The whole expedition will cost $3 million and, is being partly sponsored by a Swiss watchmaker. I guess they are also curious about what makes this device tick if you will forgive my punditry.

And now a new search will begin to find the rest of the mechanism.Scientists are certain that it’s down there somewhere. It’s only when they discover this missing second piece of the device that scientists will truly know what they are dealing with. At the risk of talking it up this could become one of the most significant archeological discoveries of the 21st Century.