Dr Karl Kruszelnicki: ‘I took my hands off the artery – blood squirted up and hit the ceiling’ | Television & radio

You are about to give a series of conferences on the history and the explosion of the AI. What is your favorite fictitious robot?

I suppose that the robots in general by Isaac Asimov. He came with the three laws of robotics, which are essentially that a robot must obey a human, he cannot injure himself, and he cannot harm another human. My favorite robot is a [from Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man] It served a family for many years – in fact, generations – and ultimately become human.

If you could change the size of any animal to keep a pet, what would it be?

To put a Downer on it, we are full of children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren, so we do not want pets. But I see the value of a pet. It’s delicate. In Australia, cats kill one million birds a day. The dogs are nice, but when I was a doctor in a children’s hospital, once I realized that dogs will tear the faces of 15,000 children each year, I have somehow fell in love with big dogs. So I think dogs. Reduce them. Border Collie, they are the smartest dog.

What do you do when you can’t sleep?

Get up, work a little, then go sleep when I feel tired. If I’m awake enough to do things, I will do things. I love to read. My job is to read scientific literature and transform them into things that people can understand.

I have read articles on how we have this history of human diseases in the past 37,000 years, and how many diseases have really invaded our DNA, or how some frogs will simulate death to avoid sexual relations, or how the French in the early 1800s had the great wars of mustache, or the viewing habits of dog television. Or the word “cool” – where does it come from, and what is the concept behind this? Or the amount of energy used from AI to make a single image, as opposed to a human, or why you get traffic in the middle of nowhere, or how you use ear tops as a diagnostic tool. Or, if you get a shark and turn it backwards, about half of the species will stop moving.

And it’s just reading today!

What is your most controversial scientific opinion?

The two large ones should be climate change and vaccination, and the controversy behind them is simply useless. Do you know how insurance companies make it more expensive in certain areas to ensure due to extreme events caused by climate change? Ok, so when do you think the insurance companies started doing this? 1973! [It wasn’t until 1980 that] Fossil fuel companies, with a budget of up to a billion dollars a year, have started to deny climate change. And that’s why I have this so-called controversy.

What is the oldest thing you have and why do you always have it?

I have a little rock of a mining site dated 1 billion years. I also have a meteor that my father saw the earth in our garden before when I was a child, and the next morning, we went out to dig it. I think it would be a few billions of years. This is roughly the size of a golf ball. It is now on the display shelf halfway from the stairs.

Do you prefer to die at the bottom of the ocean or in space?

Probably space. But it depends on how it happens. One thing I learned as a doctor is that everyone has to die, but you should have a good death. We had a patient who had cancer of everything, and she was really going to die. We have made our personal project that she would have a good death. We ended up throwing her morphine from 5 mg per day to 30,000 – it’s a big jump, right? Her legs were the diameter of your wrist when she died, but she is not dying in pain. So that convinced me, I want to have a good death.

If you are, let’s say, a submarine, then the pressure overcomes the structural integrity of the ship walls, then you died in about a tenth of a second, a hundredth of a second-while in space, it could take a while to die, perhaps a few minutes. So whatever the fastest. But the view is more pleasant in space.

What is the strangest work you have ever had?

I started working in WollonGong steelworks when I was about 19 years old. I ran a small aluminum boat measuring the acidity or alkalinity of the water in this small stream inside the steers. Depending on whether it was green or orange, it varied between incredibly acidic and incredibly alkaline. And anyway, he would eat through the skin of the aluminum boat in about six months.

At the time, I was taught: “The solution to pollution was dilution” – throws it into the ocean; No one will never notice it. It was pretty bad at the time, and he hasn’t improved much since then.

What is the most chaotic thing that has ever happened to you at work?

I was in an operational theater. I was attending. I was really tired. I had made an incredibly long -term number of work, tens of hours in a row, and I was asked to rely on an artery. I started falling asleep, and the surgeon said, “Hey, wake up, Karl!” I got up with a fool and removed my hands from the artery – blood slipped and hit the ceiling.

If you were to add color to the rainbow, what would it be?

All over the world, the number of colors that people see in the rainbow varies between four and 16 years. The reason we have seven colors in our rainbow is because of Isaac Newton. In addition to being one of the real geniuses, he has also spent more time on biblical studies than on science. And throughout the Bible, number seven appears all the time. Based on him, following the work of certain Muslim scientists, he had an experience with a prism – like the cover of the album on the black side of the moon, which, by the way, is wrong from a physical point of view.

Anyway, he sees these colors. Six colors. But he likes the Bible, and the Bible has seven everywhere, so he sticks in a fucking stupid. What kind of color is indigo? It’s just blue! So I refuse to add another color to the rainbow. I will go in the other direction; I will remove the indigo and come back to six colors.

Finally, please settle this debate for us once and for all, scientifically: should the tomato sauce be kept in the refrigerator or in the closet?

The problem you want to avoid is a bacterial or fungal infection of tomato sauce. Now, the tomato sauce, I imagine, would mainly be water, then it has a variable mixture of fat, proteins and carbohydrates, which would be food for bacteria and yeast. If you stick it in the refrigerator, you really lie down the time before bacterial or fungal proliferation becomes dangerous. But you find yourself in the terrible situation you shake and shake and shake the bottle, and first no one will come, then the lot will do because it was frozen with a solid bump.

So the argument for not having put in the refrigerator is that it will pay more easily. In this case, you must really observe, and if you start to see the first suspicion of bacterial or fungal contamination, feed it with the compost and get another bottle.

You seem to be a pro-cupboard, pro-observance.

Well, life is complicated. Nothing is simple. I’m sorry. I probably go beyond life.