v3.3_bonus: Interstellar space and a doorbell for fish

It’s time to talk Techin’ Eejits and Techin’ Legends again, and this week Elaine is joined by Dr Jessamyn Fairfield while Jenny takes a holiday.

If you’re a HeadStuff+ subscriber, you can check it out at the link below. (If you’re not, you could consider becoming one or just try to cobble together our conversation from the tidbits below – your choice!)

As Jessamyn so neatly puts it, this episode covers the whole spectrum from things of wonder to things that make you wonder why.

Why, for example, are so many posts claiming ‘#IrelandIsFull’ and ‘#IrelandBelongsToTheIrish’ coming from outside of Ireland? These hashtags and the term ‘Newtownmountkennedy’ saw spikes in usage on X when violence broke out between Gardaí and agitators at a site earmarked for asylum seeker accommodation in the County Wicklow town.

But an analysis from Sky News has demonstrated that our guest Liz Carolan’s warnings of a “proxy culture war” being stoked from afar were not misguided.

In other recent tech news, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, has been talking to an AI version of himself and thinks this is going to help people better communicate... hmmm. Let’s just say we have some thoughts on the real merits of “making an autocomplete based on yourself”.

But, as always, we have some good tech news to share as well.

Jessamyn gave a shout-out to the Immersive Empathy project from the University of Galway in partnership with the Simon Community, which is helping to communicate the real-life experience of homelessness using augmented and virtual reality.

And Elaine was very excited to talk about a doorbell you can ring to help fish travelling through Dutch canals. 🐠🐟🐡

While the Fish Doorbell is impressive in a hacked-together-community-led-tech sort of way, perhaps the most impressive tech achievement of all time saw an incredible new development in recent weeks.

Voyager 1, a space probe launched by NASA back in the seventies, is still going and, decades later, even as it hurtles through the expanse of interstellar space, scientists have managed to get it back online after a five-month hiatus. What a triumph of human engineering! 🛰️

It all made us a bit philosophical, chatting about how we, as humans, can make contact with interstellar space and ring doorbells for fish.

It’s amazing we still found time to talk through more tech news, like the Miss AI pageant and the surge of AI sex work. (Really makes you think just how self-involved the tech bros can get with their AI doubles. 😳 )

Let’s just say this jam-packed episode is worth the subscription fee!

If you’re a fan of getting your science and tech news in entertaining ways, you should absolutely check out Bright Club, a comedy night that Jessamyn runs in Dublin, Galway and Cork, and her upcoming show, We Built This City on Rock and Coal.

And if you’re interested in learning more about Voyager 1, we can’t recommend Emer Reynolds’ documentary The Farthest highly enough.