Well… Douglas Adams cared.

Despite our better judgement we all seem to be attracted to someone who is so clearly not right for us at some point in our lives.

It seems that in an increasingly material world lust is getting the upped hand, but the idealist in me hopes that love prevails.

I feel like wombats are underrepresented in our top-level fauna.

All you ever hear is that something is being tested… it seems that there is more money to be made in ‘support’ medicines

In terms of crises both on a local level and inevitably on a global level, how can art make people think differently, and what is it’s responsibility in such times of crisis?

AI engineers might be doing what engineers do, working in a reductionist way on a discrete part of a problem with the ethical contexts left to someone else. The commercial drive to develop better and better AI should make us all nervous unless we have absolute transparency, ‘commercial-in-confidence’ is not helpful here.

Adding a signature to an e-petition or sharing a post to support a cause on Facebook has become second nature to us, and they fill our news feeds. The internet and social media has made it incredibly easy to create a noise.
But does the sharing and e-signing actually make a difference? Was activism more effective in ‘simpler times’? Google something like the anti-conscription rallies in Melbourne during World War I, or the petition by women wanting the right to vote. This was activism on a scale we don’t see any more, and yet we’re more aware and there’s no shortage of people. So has social media made our activism lazier? Were we simply more bored ‘back in the day’ and staged large protests? Is social media both the best thing and the worst thing when it comes to effective activism?

New technologies bring banal, transforming side-effects worth visualising.

I’m annoyed by the illogical and racist emails that I receive from friends whose parents or grandparents came here as so called economic migrants or refugees. Ever since people like Pauline Hanson have come on the scene I’ve seen a change in our culture. I’m sure most Australians don’t want to live in a racist country.

Some countries use a year of compulsory military service as a rite of passage for young adults. Looking at our 18 year olds today, some might say we need to bring in this kind of enforced ‘gap year’ for the good of the individual and of our whole society. And of course, it would strengthen the country militarily to have a national service corps. But at what cost? Would this be worth it?

I have always been called an expat, not an immigrant. But shouldn’t that be the same thing?