5 August 2024
Those of you who have been skeptically-minded for a while now may remember an Irish company called Steorn who had been promising since the early 2000s that they could make free energy. Back in 2006 they even took out a full page advert in the Economist, which used the Galileo Gambit and said:
3 April 2023
Bronwyn, being the troll that she is, asked if I'd be writing about EV fires this week, after seeing news articles, here and here posted about a fire on the Auckland Harbour Bridge, which involved an EV.
9 January 2023
It was a relatively well known practice in WW2 (and possibly before) that if your torch/flashlight battery was getting a little flat, a few quick touches to a vehicle battery would restore a fair bit of charge. This information became more public knowledge in the UK, post WW2 when times were tough, and a number of articles were published on it. I cannot now find any, but the earliest article I have read was a 1953 one in "Wireless World" by R W Hallows with some designs and an analysis of these simple methods.
12 December 2022
I have a friend who I've written about before who, although she's always had pseudoscientific ideas (like giving her children homeopathic remedies), since the pandemic has fallen down the rabbit hole and is currently at the bottom of said hole, picking up more and more daft ideas as she sits there, wallowing. I haven't seen her in a while now - not since I bumped into her at the parliament protest in February - but I do hear about her recent high jinks, and I see her Facebook posts which suggest that she's given up any effort to think critically.
12 December 2022
I, along with some other electric vehicle enthusiasts, attended the Wai Wheels Featherston fundraising event for our son's school. There were 7 electric cars; a Tesla 3 Performance, a Tesla X, two Minis in British Racing Green, two Kia EV6s and my little Nissan Leaf. Some had attended many events like this, and had just been to the Go Green Expo the weekend before. We happily paid the small show fee, as it was fundraising for the school, but when we arrived we weren't lined up with the other cars on display. Instead we were placed adjacent to the other cars, far away in the back corner, because of some nonsense about EVs catching fire. I was initially taken aback; surely they were joking.
14 February 2022
It's funny how things come around. Last week I watched a fascinating documentary on the Bogdanoff brothers. For those not in the know, the Bogdanoffs are a fascinating case study - two brothers who became celebrities via a TV show promoting science, and then somehow bluffed their way into receiving PhDs in physics despite their theses being nonsensical in places. Many of you might recognise the brothers from their later years, where they used extreme plastic surgery to radically alter their look.
21 June 2021
Last weekend saw the release of a new policy by the government called the Clean Car Discount.