The Sun revolves around the Earth, y’know. © P J Croft 2014

I was listening to Dr Karl Kruzelniczki on 720 this afternoon. He told us that among other depressing statistics, 16% of Americans don’t accept that DNA in our cells determines our characteristics, 25% of Americans don’t believe the Earth revolves around the Sun (they believe the opposite, that the Sun revolves around the Earth!) and 51% believe the Earth is only about 4,000 years old, i.e. the Creationists’ argument. 51% !!

This in the “world’s greatest country”, with one of the best education systems. I shake my head in wonderment.

Then the next call from a Perth guy:  “Why is salt added to milk?” To be brief, he’d read the label which says “sodium 16mg/L” or some figure like that and assumed it’s been added. He didn’t realise that it’s the natural composition of milk.

Then the next guy took issue with Climate Change. He wouldn’t accept Dr Karl’s figure of 99.9% of the world’s climate scientists (embracing all the co- and sub disciplines). He pronounced them wrong, getting angry about it and calling it bullshit, effectively calling Dr Karl a liar. He was really angry. He didn’t have any qualifications himself, of course, he just knew it was all wrong from his reading. As I’ve been saying.

Then a guy rang with a seemingly innocent question about the Big Bang. “Why did the Universe shrink to a singularity, then explode again in the Big Bang.”  Dr Karl quite politely said, well, no, there was nothing before the Big Bang. We know that as well as we can know anything.

The guy then spouted pseudo science that the Universe was only about 4 million years old and humans have been on the Earth less than 4,000 years. Why does he know? Well, there are no records to prove otherwise because there was no-one to observe humans alive.

As I said, never overestimate the intelligence of Western Australians.

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Along the same lines, it seems to be impossible for Australians in general to say, “G’day Bob” or John or Mate or whatever, without adding “How are you?” They have to add this! We’ve already been told scores of times that the announcer is fine but the next caller will say again, “How are you?” Over and over again all morning and afternoon. You can tell that the announcers get sick of saying “I’m fine, thanks” but they’ve given up the fight.

What is wrong with people? This is a disease. It really amounts to a speech impediment. No, that’s wrong, it’s actually a brain impediment. See above.

On the same theme, there is a world wide pandemic of “You know”. Many people use it every third or fifth word. They can’t make a sentence without using “y’know” every few seconds. I’ve even heard quite intelligent speakers, such as a former WA premier, now a uni professor, unable to speak without saying “you know” over and over again.

Enough!! It’s Shakespeare’s 450th anniversary this year. Oh for some clear, intelligent, lucid speech. Y’know?

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I’m building up a new computer at the moment. This one is 5 years old now and although adequate for most things, is prone to crashes and can’t handle my Trainz simulator graphics.

What a pleasure the latest components are to use. The Fractal Design case is glossy white and all the edges are smoothed and rolled. All the connectors are clearly labelled. All the drive bays have caddies that just slide in and click into place. It handles eight hard drives and two optical drives! I need most of those. The m/b has ten USB 3 ports. Wow.

My boot drive is a 256GB SSD. I put one into my laptop a couple of years ago and it cut the boot time to about 20 seconds from the three minutes it used to take.

I’m writing my life story for our reunion magazine at the moment and I’ve been reminded of my start in PCs in the early 1980s. First was the Microbee, then my first IBM PC in about 1985 (?) with an 8086 processor, 1MB of RAM and a 5 1/4″ floppy. No hard drive. No Windows then, only DOS and config.sys and autoexec.bat. Ugh! What a difference now – it’s so easy now! It was hard work then.