Urtica Ferox

Peak Technology   Some time ago I had car trouble. My Mazda suddenly wouldn’t go beyond second gear, and because I live an hour’s drive from the city it was a big problem. So I visited my local garage, who passed me on to an automatic transmission specialist. He diagnosed that there was nothing actually wrong with the gearbox. Instead the sensor was malfunctioning, giving a faulty signal, and the car had gone into “limp-home mode”. Then he laughed and said, “Yeah these days we make most of our money fixing sensors. We hardly working on actual transmission systems.” Limp-home mode. Great. I started brooding on how in my younger years there was no limp-home mode in my old Austin A35. You could crank start it if the battery died, and it could be worked on and parts replaced with a socket set and a jack in the backyard. You didn’t have to have expensive, fragile, electronic systems replaced, and it didn’t talk to you. Sure, someone might be able to use a bent coat-han...

The Gentlemen: Thank God, a Movie without a Woke Lecture I walked out of The Gentlemen feeling as if I’d been cleansed. Cleansed of all the bullshit that chokes social media, gushes through mainstream journalism and encrusts every conversation. I’d had a good time, a rare thing these days at the movies, without having to grit my teeth through any left-wing finger-wagging or pointless proportional representation of appropriate identity groups. And even rarer, I hadn’t thought, “Well that might have been better with half an hour cut out”. Hugh Grant is brilliant as Fletcher, the ageing, sleazy journalist who narrates the whole story to Raymond Smith, played by Charlie Hunnam. Fletcher has broken into Smith’s house to convince him that he must be given £20 million to stop him going to the media, and he delights in revealing all the dirt he has uncovered on Smith’s boss, Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey). And there is a lot of dirt indeed. Pearson arrived at Oxford Univ...

On 17 May 2013, then-President Barack Obama  tweeted  “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree:  #climate   change is real, man-made and dangerous.” This is the moment the climate debate changed. With one tweet Obama cast climate change sceptics as looney outsiders, akin to flat-earthers and believers in ancient aliens. They became  deniers . Let’s face it: there comes a point when it is simply unreasonable to be sceptical. If tough policy decisions on economic development, the environment and public safety need to be made, it is simply irresponsible to pay attention to fringe beliefs, no matter how poignant references to Galileo battling the world view of the seventeenth century might be.  Steven Novella, a  clinical neurologist  at Yale, discusses the distinction between  deniers  and sceptics in detail. He argues that in situations where “ you yourself lack appropriate expertise” then “deference should be t...