We have 472 guests and no members online
On the 17th February 2020 Wendy and I set sail on Queen Elizabeth on a two week cruise up to Papua New Guinea, returning to Sydney on 2nd March.
 |
After a stop in Brisbane on the way the ship headed north to Rabaul, returning by:
Kiriwina Island; Milne Bay (Alotau); the Conflict Islands; and Cairns in far north Queensland
Sydney to Rabaul is around four thousand kilometres
In September 2019 we left Turkey by air, to continue our trip north along the Adriatic, in the Balkans, to Austria, with a brief side trip to Bratislava in Slovakia.
'The Balkans' is a geo-political construct named after the Balkan Peninsula between the Adriatic and the Black Sea.
According to most geographers the 'Balkans' encompasses the modern countries of Albania; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Bulgaria; Croatia; Greece; Kosovo; Montenegro; North Macedonia; Serbia; and Slovenia. Some also include Romania.
I've long been interested in the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). It's a central theme in my fictional writing (The Cloud and The Craft) and is discussed in my essay to my children 'The Meaning of Life' (1997-2017). So, I've recently been exploring the capabilities of ChatGPT.
As today, 26 January 2024, is Australia Day, I asked ChatGPT to: 'write 1000 words about Australia Day date'. In a few minutes (I read each as it arrived) I had four, quite different, versions. Each took around 18 seconds to generate. This is the result:
As we all now know (unless we've been living under a rock) the only way of defeating a pandemic is to achieve 'herd immunity' for the community at large; while strictly quarantining the most vulnerable.
Herd immunity can be achieved by most people in a community catching a virus and suffering the consequences or by vaccination.
It's over two centuries since Edward Jenner used cowpox to 'vaccinate' (from 'vacca' - Latin for cow) against smallpox. Since then medical science has been developing ways to pre-warn our immune systems of potentially harmful viruses using 'vaccines'.
In the last fifty years herd immunity has successfully been achieved against many viruses using vaccination and the race is on to achieve the same against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).
Developing; manufacturing; and distributing a vaccine is at the leading edge of our scientific capabilities and knowledge and is a highly skilled; technologically advanced; and expensive undertaking. Yet the rewards are potentially great, when the economic and societal consequences of the current pandemic are dire and governments around the world are desperate for a solution.
So elite researchers on every continent have joined the race with 51 vaccines now in clinical trials on humans and at least 75 in preclinical trials on animals.