Albanese’s Lie about Social Media and Teenagers

As has been widely reported, the Australian government has introduced a ban on people under 16 years of age using various prescribed social media. The ban is based on the proposition – widely accepted – that social media are harmful to teenagers, and in particular, cause suicide.

So I thought I would have a look at the numbers to see whether this is true.

It is not.

The figures are at https://www.aihw.gov.au/suicide-self-harm-monitoring/resources/download-data-tables. They run from 1907 to 2023, and it is possible to extract the suicide figures for teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19. Here is a graph of those data. Blue is the boys, orange is the girls, and green is both of them.

As we can see, the numbers remained pretty constant until about 1970, and then rose quite sharply for boys until 1990. Since then, the number has gone up and down, but today, the number of teenage suicides is rather less than it was during the 1990s.

“Online Safety”? No: It is is censorship of the People

The UK government is bringing the “online safety” legislation into force. They say it is about protecting children. None but the gullible believe this. It is real impact is to prevent freedom of speech, and to impose censorship. In other words, to impose government control over who can say what.

The legislation is hundreds of pages long. Let us look at just one section. Section 179. It is in the following terms:

179         False communications offence

• A person commits an offence if—

• the person sends a message (see section 182),

• the message conveys information that the person knows to be false,

• at the time of sending it, the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, and

• the person has no reasonable excuse for sending the message.

If you fall foul of it, you are liable to be sent to prison.[1] What is a “message”?  Almost everything, including whatever you might type into your keyboard.[2]

This notion of falsity these days, in the current climate of government, is a tricky one. In a whole load of areas, things which are true are now deemed to be false, and vice versa. For all intents and purposes, the law deems that the climate is changing as a result of carbon dioxide emissions, and that there is no difference between men and women, and that it is possible for man to turn themselves into women, and that Covid vaccines are safe and effective, and that Lucy Letby killed all of those babies. However ludicrous these assertions, it is not permitted to take a contrary view. If prosecuted for contradicting these shibboleths, can we defend ourselves by saying that we believe what we say? I would not bank on it.[3] 

Square Rockets?

I do not spend much time wondering about the design of military rockets. But I do find myself utterly perplexed as to why they make these things with a circular external cross-section.

If you are not bothered about whether your rocket is going to be trackable by radar, or even if you would like your rocket to be trackable by radar, then obviously a round cross-section makes a lot of sense. Round shapes are nice and visible to radar. And you get the maximum internal area, and avoid the problem that corners are particularly vulnerable to internal pressure. So yes, I can well see why the rockets which we send up to launch satellites, or to replenish the larders of the international space station, would have a round cross-section.

Conversely, if you do not want your rocket to be shot down by an anti-missile missile, you might be better off if the external shape of the rocket consists entirely of flat surfaces. That is how our modern fighter planes are made. They look a bit weird, as if designed by origami enthusiasts with a stack of black cardboard. But they have a much, much, smaller radar profile. So why not make your rocket out of square hollow sections, with a pyramid shape at the nose?

Rotary Valve Engines

Vaztec prototype rotary valve

I do not ordinarily spend much time thinking much about the workings of the internal combustion engine. But inexplicably, I woke up yesterday wondering about valves. Why on earth did the people who originally designed and built internal combustion engines go for poppet valves, instead of the much simpler solution of rotary valves? Rotary valves, one might think, would be much simpler and more effective?

Usually, with this sort of thing, it turns out that other people have also looked into the possibility, and it turns out that there are rotary valve engines. There is a chap in New Zealand who successfully developed one some years ago. And a company in North Carolina, Vaztec, working along the same lines.

The principle is pretty straightforward. You have a cylindrical valve with a slot in it; as it rotates it either does or does not let the fuel into the combustion chamber. Or, in the case of the exhaust valve, it either does or does not let the exhaust out. Obviously there are engineering challenges. How to cope with the thermal expansion as the engine gets hot? But one would have thought that these are the sorts of issues that modern engineering could cope with?