JoNova
A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Here is an interesting movie from 1959 called “The Atomic Submarine” that combines the nuclear submarine genre, alien invasion and UFO genre and the presence on board of a civilian scientist who is a pacifist who has shamed his career military father. B&W and made with a budget of US$135,000. Duration 72 mins.
https://youtu.be/Lr_W_BiAg18
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atomic_Submarine#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DThe_Atomic_Submarine_is_a%2Cby_Allied_Artists_Pictures_Corporation.?wprov=sfla1
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B&W? Not trying hard enough.
Colourised version:
https://youtu.be/H8po5D6xFS0?si=DCDRCxdJO-lE_04g
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One of the ultimate acts of self-destruction of a nation, apart from unlimited immigration of unskilled people who do not subscribe to Australian or Western values and beyond capacity to build housing for them, nearly 100,000 Feb 2026 alone, is the destruction of the energy supply.
Apart from destruction of power stations they are even destroying the coal mines. For example, they are going to turn the Hazelwood open cut coal mine into a lake which will take between 10 and 15 years to fill.
https://www.hazelwoodrehabilitation.com.au/engie/hazelwood/proposed-pit-lake
Even if Australia got a rational Government, the Hazelwood mine and coal resource will be permanently destroyed, as is no doubt the plan.
According to Gulag AI:
Of course, until a few years ago, the mine was fully operational and economically viable, which once produced some of the cheapest electricity in the world before Australia’s very own Nerobefehl Nero Decree, modelled after the National Socialists.
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Germany is turning its big open coal mines into lakes
You are not alone
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Let me see; Germany has abandoned nuclear, abandoned cheap gas from Russia, now wants to abandon coal. What happens when the next Dunkelflaute happens.
The last one got Norway and Sweden talking about cutting supplies to Germany (via Denmark) due to the cost imposed on their citizens. And Finland doesn’t want to join up and send their cheaper nuclear to Germany. Poland might be some help with their coal-fired generation. The French will be less likely to (as they were last time).
Perhaps the UK could export electricity to Germany? I forgot, they want their citizens to go back to burning wood and cattle dung.
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They are also going to destroy the following open cut coal mines.
Yallourn Mine: Scheduled to close by 2028, then destroyed.
Loy Yang Mine: Scheduled to close by 2035, then destroyed.
Anglesea Mine: Already closed but yet to be destroyed.
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Remember years ago, when Victoriastan did not want any more
water storage devices, like dams etc?
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Would water from a former open cut coal mine be considered potable? I would have thought the heavy metal content might be “questionable”.
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We keep hearing of earlier times when hydrocarbon fuel reserves were stored for a rainy day at a bigger % of need than we have now.
Liquids like oil, diesel, petrol are typically stored in big metal tanks.
Have these big old tanks from a more secure past also been willfully destroyed in a hateful way, like dynamiting old coal power stations?
I suspect so, because “experts” are talking of the new huge $$$ cost of bigger future reserves in an attempt to turn the public off hydrocarbons. Geoff S
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The numbers don’t lie, we are awash with immigrants, but the boffins say its in our best interest.
‘In 2019, Australia had the highest share of migrants* in the OECD after Luxembourg, at 30 per cent of the population. This was more than twice the OECD average (14 per cent).
‘Migrants boost the labour productivity of Australian‑born workers. On average, a region with a 10 per cent larger migrant share (e.g., 33 per cent instead of 30 per cent) has a 1.3 per cent larger regional wage difference, which indicates a positive link between migration and labour productivity.’ (OECD)
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‘ … unlimited immigration of unskilled people …’
The majority of immigrants are skilled and the unskilled are their immediate family members.
My doctor is very professional, he and all the medical practitioners where he works are immigrants. Out in the rural and regional areas we really appreciate the service.
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Like 3,000 from Gaza? What skills do they bring apart from obvious unwanted ones? Even Arab countries refuse to take them.
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That is the humanitarian percentage, it would be better if they were Estonians.
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Better again if they were white South Africans!
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https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/04/u-s-is-ramping-up-its-refugee-admissions/
Trump seems to have gotten the message?
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This will tie in well with cooling the proposed Data centre…”$10 billion data centre planned for Hazelwood in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley”
“Singaporean asset manager and operator Keppel Ltd plans to build a 720-megawatt data centre worth $10 billion at a 123-hectare site near Morwell.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-22/keppel-data-centre-latrobe-valley/106123748
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Believe it or not, Australia was not always totally dumbed-down (present company excepted).
Newspapers even published circuit diagrams for crystal radio sets and other radio designs.
This example is from The Sunday Mail, Brisbane, 3rd of July 1932.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/97929915/10204138
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So we *were* always totally dumbed down?
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Quite the opposite! I was actually being nostalgic for our higher-order thinking.
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Alas the crystal set diagrams will not be very useful with the demise of the AM radio network…..
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There are no plans to shut down broadcast AM in Australia at this time despite it being shut down in some other places like Europe.
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Local ABC Perth just transitioned from AM 720 to 102.5 FM
Will create a dead spot when you travel south on the Albany Highway until you can pick up AM 558 (Narrogin?)
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As teen, I had such a crystal radio, an amazing toy. 🤗👍
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You can still make them and there is a substantial following of the hobby.
One problem is finding a genuine, not fake, obsolete germanium diode which is necessary because of its much lower forward voltage than silicon so weaker stations can be demodulated. You can find new old stock at significant expense sometimes. Certain Schottky diodes can be used as adequate substitutes. E.g. 1N5711, BAT41, BAT43, BAT46. Or make your own point contact detector like they did, back in the day, e.g. galena. You can even use a rusty razor blade with graphite pencil lead as a detector as they did in POW camps in WW2 (foxhole radio).
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In the East we took the opposite path of development – PNP ranter than NPN. The diodes were no problem, nor high impedance headsets.
Do not know the real reason, there must have been more silicon than germanium around.
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A tecchie guy I know has imported module after module from a microelectronics manufacturer in Taiwan. He has assembled them physically, then written to code to operate the final product, a tiny camera. It operates in visible and IR, has 3 separate focal lengths of lenses, its own people-safe laser for range finding, flash etc.
Why do I mention this? Because the total cost of the Taiwan parts was about $20 Australian + postage (small).
I shall watch his tests over the next few weeks.
There are important inferences to draw about the management of national microelectronics industries in Taiwan and Australia. They are not dummies. Geoff S
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Copied from Gulag:
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FWIW – some limits to “judicial wisdom”
Today’s Coffee and Covid newsletter – starts at
“It’s really very funny how things work out sometimes. Just when you think all is lost, and you’re staring at Life’s Pink Slip, Providence turns around and hands you a bonus instead. So it was with this week’s Reuters story, headlined, “COVID shots, newer vaccines in limbo after US court halts Kennedy’s advisory panel.” Reuters didn’t mean the good kind of limbo, where you take coconut rum shots and try to dance under a pole.”
More at
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/going-f-shaped-thursday-april-23?
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FWIW
“The UK and EU Increasingly Resemble the Soviet Union With Their Sham Democracy and Rigid Ideology”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/23/the-uk-and-eu-increasingly-resemble-the-soviet-union-with-their-sham-democracy-and-rigid-ideology/
And
“Britain’s Skyrocketing Green Energy Prices are Forcing Internet Providers to Ration Access”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/23/green-energy-prices-are-forcing-internet-providers-to-consider-rationing-access/
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FWIW
“Happy St George’s Day From the British Prime Minister Who Can’t Bring Himself to Say ‘England’ ”
“Nobody who is in charge of a Western country is in as much hot water right now as Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It’s so bad, France’s Macron heard Starmer ask to hold his beer, Germany’s Merz is hiding behind a tree, and not even the risible and much despised PM of Australia, Anthony Albanese, comes close to the amount of incoming fire Starmer is receiving on every conceivable front from every conceivable angle, friend and foe.
It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving weasel.”
More at
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2026/04/23/happy-st-georges-day-from-the-british-prime-minister-who-cant-bring-himself-to-say-england-n3814223
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Youtube started to smell anti-English, eg – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qc1p1fePIk&t=971s
Before it was more anti-imperial than personal
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Starmer is perhaps the best example of a political phenomenon we see frequently. It concerns how leaders and elected reps act when they have been caught doing the wrong thing and/or face abysmal polling numbers. Typically, those on the conservative side do the honorable thing and resign pretty promptly. Conversely, those on the left will deny the sky is blue, hide behind ‘process’, obfuscate, lie and even blame innocent underlings before they are dragged, screaming and kicking out of parliament by their bloodied fingernails.
The UK recently has provided the most stark comparison. Boris Johnson (Conservative) was ‘caught’ having cake and a small celebration in the garden of Downing Street during lockdown. He put up small resistance but quickly accepted he had set a bad example (but not broken any law) and resigned. Just a short time after, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer (now PM) was photographed at his own crowded party INDOORS during lockdown and simply refused to accept he had done anything wrong, remaining leader. The media of course paid scant attention to his faux pas.
The very same Keir Starmer, as PM, has now been proven to have lied to parliament, and appointed a very compromised individual to a plum government post even though the guy was rejected by the civil service for the role. The very same Keir Starmer has had his house and vehicle vandalised on two or three occasions and the perps each time turned out to be Ukrainian male prostitutes. Once again this remarkable story has been studiously ignored by the media.
Starmer still heads the nation and is refusing to accept he should resign, even after weeks/months of steadily-worsening revelations.
No honour and no principles.
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See, there’s good reasons why countries assassinate foreign Heads of State. England would be better off if Starmer annoyed Trump enough!
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Have a look down the bottom of this Victoriastan Government page.
https://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/dontcrosstheline
What flag or flags is or are missing?
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News wise it isn’t exactly a good time to be selective in what flags are considered worthy of recognition – particularly given its ANZAC Day tomorrow and the country is only here in its present form because of factors such as heroism/patriotism/mateship etc.
Lest we endure Ruby Rose and Rebel Wilson currently in the headlines for all sorts of bullying including the unwanted sexual conquest stuff.
PS do you think Salt Lake city council member like Eva Lopez Chavez browse the DM pages?
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Governments encourage the installation of household solar with subsidies and tariff feed-in, and encourage grid-scale solar and wind with subsidies and advantageous policies. This results in less reliance on inertia based generation (coal, gas, etc.) resulting in greater costs and less reliability. This then results in attempts to stabilise the grid (batteries, synchronous condensers), and encourages consumers to install more household systems and, more recently, batteries (with more subsidies). All for more cost. This then further reduces reliance on inertial systems, resulting in even less reliability. And then… you get the idea. So a downward spiral towards less reliability and an upward spiral to greater cost.
I put my proposition to Claude AI: https://claude.ai/share/4dd52d87-2da6-45aa-b369-ab78fd243591
I raised some “objections” to some of its responses and it made the comment, “So yes — more agreement than my initial diplomatic hedging perhaps suggested.” Interesting!!
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While applauding your energy I wonder why anybody would devote any part of his or her waking hours to ingesting this tiresome claptrap when all our nation needs to do is emulate the PRC and set about building coal fired power stations before we are utterly paralysed by the ever replicating cascade of short term renewables installations that so famously did for Spain this time last year.
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Latest One Nation “Please Explain” episode.
Excellent.
https://youtu.be/5xDLO1SrkKI
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AI agent designs a complete RISC-V CPU from a 219-word spec sheet in just 12 hours
AI chip design startup Verkor.io claims, in a research paper published in March, that its agentic AI system, Design Conductor, autonomously produced a complete RISC-V CPU core — taking a 219-word requirements document and generating a verified, layout-ready design in 12 hours, which is orders of magnitude faster than the standard 18- to 36-month timelines seen in commercial chip design.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-agent-designs-a-complete-risc-v-cpu-from-a-219-word-spec-in-just-12-hours
When real AI hits, evolution will be astonishing, and beyond us.
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Well “next week” is about up now and reality’s hopefully kicking in for the masses.
No, buying an EV isn’t the answer! Such silly shortsighted people. 😆
Another truce extension, another delay, and 1 week before Trump needs congressional approval to continue.
No rush, 18 years in Vietnam eh Trump.
Israel seething, Iran meh’ing, Pakistan “pick someone else”.
Meanwhile packaging in Oz goes up next week starting Monday by up to 25% due to plastics availability constraints.
No good having fuel and products without packaging to ship them in.
Next week things escalate even more. More boots on the way to Iran. More refuelers.
That retirement self sufficient farm will be unobtanium shortly.😉
Oh well, what’s on the box worth watching?
Nothing as usual.
I finished season 2 of Epidemiya, and Pluribus, watched 1st episode of “From” season 4.
Re-runs it is.
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FWIW – some words re “That retirement self sufficient farm” in here –
“Pie in the sky” prepping – or, getting real about our chances”
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2026/04/pie-in-sky-prepping-or-getting-real.html
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So THAT’s why people have been offering me more than my asking price for 10-acres with a house on in Kingaroy!
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Meanwhile in Australia
https://va.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_tdyh3j6QJm1z23obp.mp4
Go Anna!😁
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Country girl.
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I know a teacher in a religious school. She was told in training that she would lose her teaching licence if a child comes to her and claims to be of a different gender to their biological gender and she doesn’t accept it. Her religion only recognises the gender which reflects biological reality, not fanciful woke constructs. But in Sicktoria and I think most of Australia, confused children are not allowed to be counselled about their correct gender even though this is not in accordance with the school’s and parents’ religious beliefs. So much for freedom of religion in Australia. Of course, these rules wouldn’t apply to the followers of the 7th century warlord.
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Next up, dinosaurs and Ark engineering considerations? 😁
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Bad news, four people have been attacked by dingos in Western Australia.
Good news, one of the victims was rushed to Tom Prince hospital.
Bad news. There is NO Tom Prince hospital.
Good news it appears that the person that drove the victim to hospital took them to “Tom Price” hospital
So, AI generated or just shoddy journalism?
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/urgent-warning-at-popular-aussie-campground-after-four-dingo-attacks-in-a-week/news-story/1faad77b37a01be59268e8bca5b4cada
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My money is on shoddy journalism.
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Dingoes are not native to Australia and should be culled.
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There were professional shooters wandering the Australian outback in the 1960s, making a reasonable living out of culling dingoes. The Carlyles, discoverers of the Mundrabilla Meteorite, were well-known. I’m presuming this practice has now ceased.
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UK Biobank health data listed for sale in China, government confirms
The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed.
The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project, was found for sale on three separate listings last week. Ian Murray, the technology minister, told the Commons on Thursday that, after working with the Chinese government and Alibaba, the records had now been removed.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/23/private-health-records-uk-biobank-chinese-website-alibaba
…and it’s gone… Your personal info and money.
Trust ze blob!😁
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FWIW
“Beyond Cookies – How To Stop The Invisible Browser Fingerprint That Tracks You Everywhere”
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/beyond-cookies-how-stop-invisible-browser-fingerprint-tracks-you-everywhere
Via a comment at Chiefio
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On the other hand, in my extended release version of Firefox there are 36 entries in settings related to fingerprint….
I have not yet looked for a more complete explanation.
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FWIW
“The Global Trade and Economic Restructuring That Centers Around Energy Use
April 23, 2026 | Sundance | 9 Comments”
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/04/23/the-global-trade-and-economic-restructuring-that-centers-around-energy-use/
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FWIW
“UN: “War-driven energy price spikes highlight value of renewables” ”
“War-driven energy price spikes highlight value of renewables: UN climate chief
16 March 2026 Climate and Environment”
More at
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/03/16/un-war-driven-energy-price-spikes-highlight-value-of-renewables/
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FWIW
Something to note if you are thinking of attending!
“THE WORLD CUP IS GOING TO BE A DISASTER: EMERGENCY: $150 for a 15-minute train ride at the World Cup. NJ Transit is a case study on government price gouging and an imminent public safety risk that must be stopped before it gets people hurt.”
https://instapundit.com/792207/#disqus_thread
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One Nations Latest Cartoon, 7 minutes, Very much like it is in the Third World that is Australia!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDLO1SrkKI&t=301s
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