Showing 1 - 10 of 21
Exploding pagers: What was the point?
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 20/09/2024
» The exploding pagers that killed at least 12 people and injured 2,800 others in Lebanon and some adjacent places on Tuesday were mostly just a new wrinkle on the exploding cellphones that Israel has used to assassinate its opponents in the past, but there was one major innovation.
The who and why of Gaza hospital blast
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/10/2023
» The blame game has gone into high gear. It started with the massacre perpetrated in Israel two weeks ago by the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip for the past 17 years. US President Joe Biden called it "sheer evil", and a chorus of other voices said the same.
Trump: The mills of the gods grind slowly
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/08/2023
» 'The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine," wrote Sextus Empiricus, a Sceptic philosopher who lived mainly in Athens and Alexandria almost 2,000 years ago. Justice may be slow to come, but in the end the wicked will be punished. The mills are turning.
Putin provides a shot in the arm for Nato
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 12/07/2023
» When Nato held its annual summit in Brussels two years ago, all 31 presidents and prime ministers of the alliance’s member states dutifully showed up, but their hearts weren’t really in it. France’s President Emmanuel Macron had publicly declared Nato “brain-dead” in 2019, and nobody could find a good reason to disagree.
Starship: The Iterative Design Methodology
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/04/2023
» 'Obviously, this is not a nominal situation," said John Insprucker, a senior engineer at Space-X, who was doing a webcast on Thursday's launch attempt of Elon Musk's gigantic Starship rocket. So why did Mr Musk's employees, hundreds of whom were watching live, cheer when it blew up only four minutes into flight?
The molecular line between life and death
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/03/2023
» 'We are but one very small company [among] many hundreds of companies using AI software for drug discovery and de novo design. How many of them have ... the know-how to find the pockets of chemical space that can be filled with molecules predicted to be orders of magnitude more toxic than VX?" This is a warning that requires a little explanation.
Prepare for a fossil fuel fire sale
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 26/11/2021
» An article with the innocuous title "Reframing Incentives for Climate Policy Action" slipped out in the scientific journal Nature Energy three weeks ago and got very little attention, presumably because of the hopeless title. But it's not innocuous at all. It's explosive.
Shipping is worse than aviation
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 30/03/2021
» 'We're waiting on food goods like coconut milk and syrups, some spare parts for motors, we've got some fork lift trucks, some Amazon goods on there, all sorts," said Steve Parks of Seaport Freight Services in England, who is awaiting twenty of the 18,300 containers aboard the Ever Given. Which of those things cannot be sourced from somewhere closer than Asia?
Turkey's anxious Erdogan takes on the world
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/02/2020
» Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not an "Islamist", in the extreme sense of the word. He doesn't wear a suicide vest, he doesn't behead people, he doesn't even go around holding one finger up in the air to signify his hatred of those who fail to acknowledge the One True God. But he certainly does like the Islamists a lot.
Is Pakistan's dilemma self-defeating?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 01/11/2018
» 'India is shrinking the flow of water into Pakistan," said Pakistan's Chief Justice Saqib Nisar on Saturday, renewing a ban on showing Indian TV shows and Bollywood films on Pakistani television. "They are trying to [obstruct the construction] of our dam and we cannot even close their [television] channels?"