Peter Rhodes on driverless cars, a dose of Covid and does dark matter matter?

According to one headline, self-driving cars will be approved “to hit roads next year”. The obvious question is, what else will they hit?

The Association of British Insurers welcomes self-driving cars but counsels against “unrealistic expectations” with this stern warning: “For the foreseeable future, we don’t expect these cars to have sufficient back-up features to allow drivers to completely disengage from the road.”

Or to put it another way, as with so many things in modern life, progress will be dictated not by engineers or politicians but by loss-adjusters and solicitors.

I am reminded of a fabulous yacht at a boat show many years ago. The salesman admitted it was not the most exciting of boats but its selling point was that in the event of total inversion it would bounce upright in a matter of seconds. “Designed by American lawyers,” he explained.

Many thanks to my readers for their kind words about my Covid experience. Like so many other cases, my infection was a non-event. My symptoms were just a tickly throat and, in the early stages, a mild headache. But I decided at the outset not to write about this disease in a light-hearted or dismissive way. Some of my friends, jabbed and unjabbed, have been through hell with Covid and I dare say many readers have suffered badly or been bereaved. I was simply lucky to dodge the bullet a couple of times, postponing my infection until the virus was weak and the vaccines strong.

If Covid can get me, an unsocial desk-slug living at the end of a farm track, it can get anyone. Time to book my next booster shot.

One kilometre deep beneath the Australian town of Stawell, scientists are hunting for dark matter, a mysterious substance so vital to the universe and to every living creature that, according to research I just made up, 99.99999999 per cent of humans don't give a flying fig about it.

Intriguingly, the list of things banned from Oz's super-sterile and light-proof laboratory includes bananas, on the grounds that they are “slightly radioactive”. Bananas also happen to be one of nature's finest heart-helping, gut-soothing, mood-calming, energy-boosting snack foods.

The irony is that millions of us could benefit more from bananas than from pretending to understand dark matter.