Rick's Blog

#bunyipsbooksbeyond

Use the menu below to explore "All Posts," or delve into selected topics like "Children's Picture Books", and more.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI quietly released what it called a research preview   of a conversational AI system. The instructions were modest; internally, staff were told not to treat it like a product launch. The rest of the world didn’t get the memo. Within weeks, that low-key experiment – ChatGPT - had become the fastest-growing consumer app in history, crossing 100 million users in about two months. But what is ChatGPT? Is it a search engine with better manners? A glorif

George Orwell  gave us a useful little word for a very modern problem: Doublethink . The ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time, and to believe both. In Orwell’s 1984  it sounded extreme: “2 + 2 = 5” and “2 + 2 = 4” living side by side in the same brain. Today, we don’t have a 1984 Ministry of Truth , but we do have something more polite and better dressed: University leaders who are expected to be wholly dedicated to the public good, while also s

How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you? Assimilate. Ubiquitous. Everywhere all the time. That little string of thoughts could almost be a lost footnote from George Orwell’s 1984 . George Orwell coined the word doublethink  to describe a terrifying mental gymnastic: The ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time and to accept both as true. It wasn’t a bug in his dystopian society; it was a feature. If the Party said 2 + 2 = 5,

When Malala Yousafzai walked onto the stage at the Mondavi Center on November 18, 2025, UC Davis wrapped itself in the language of moral courage. The Chancellor’s Colloquium billed the evening as a conversation between a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May, celebrating a woman who risked her life to speak out against injustice. But outside the glow of the Mondavi Center, the huge entertainment center at UC Davis, a different reality hangs over the c

On burrito nights, I don’t really cook. I drive to a small restaurant, stand in line with everyone else, and order dinner in foil and paper. Burritos for home. For a long time, that was the whole story. Then I started noticing a man who spends most evenings on the sidewalk nearby. Homeless? Unhomed? I still fumble for the right word. Labels never feel big enough for a whole human life. He sits with a backpack, sometimes with a plastic bag of belongings, sometimes with nothing

If you wanted to explain Roger Federer to someone who has never watched a tennis match, you could start with a single, startling piece of math. Over a 25-year career, Federer played 1,526 singles matches and won 1,251 of them - a towering 82% win rate , one of the best in the history of the sport. He collected 20 Grand Slam singles titles and 103 career titles along the way. And yet, in those same matches, he won only 54% of all the points he played  That tension - dominance

In both settings, the veterinary resident is in the middle of a quiet crisis. But the shape   of that crisis, and the forces driving it, look different in a university teaching hospital than in a private specialist practice. Think of them as two parallel worlds with the same young clinician at the center, pulled by different kinds of gravity. Who is the Resident? In a university teaching hospital.   The resident is, officially, a learner  and a teacher .   Patients and client

When your dog is vomiting at 2 a.m. or your cat suddenly stops eating, you aren’t thinking about private equity, holding companies, or corporate structures. You’re thinking about trust . You want a veterinarian who listens, explains, and puts your pet ahead of profit. But behind the friendly faces at the front desk, the ownership of veterinary hospitals has changed dramatically. In many countries, a growing share of clinics are now owned or funded by large corporations and pr

In the past few months, three papers using dogs as models for brain tumor research have landed on my desk, and they’ve been hard to stop thinking about. The first , by John Rossmeisl and colleagues, explores how high-frequency irreversible electroporation (H-FIRE) reshapes tumor-derived extracellular vesicles and nudges the brain’s immune landscape. https://www.scilit.com/publications/4f97ed7da675ba231c52663a0d387ed9 The second , led by Sheila Carrera-Justiz, reports a system

The ginkgo leaf holds two distinct lobes on a single stem. You can think of one lobe as the independent practice  and the other as the corporate practice . They look separate, even pull in slightly different directions, but they’re joined at the same base: the veterinary profession’s oath to relieve suffering, protect animal welfare, and serve the bond between people and their animals. Hold the leaf up to the light and you see those veins radiating out like a river delta. Tha

There is a Ginkgo tree at the end of my street .... In summer it is almost forgettable. Just another green shape among poles and power lines. But in late autumn it does something extraordinary. Overnight, the leaves turn a clear, unwavering yellow, and then, sometimes in a single windy day, they let go. The footpath becomes a carpet of fan-shaped coins, as if someone had spilled a jar of sunlight at the cul-de-sac. Standing there with a rake in my hand, it’s easy to think thi

In climate science, we talk about tipping points , externalities , and a just transition . These are not just abstract terms for melting ice sheets and coal plants. They are also a remarkably accurate vocabulary for what is happening to veterinary medicine in 2025. Veterinary care, like the climate, is being reshaped by powerful economic forces that gather momentum quietly and then suddenly feel unstoppable. The question in both arenas is no longer whether change is occurring

There were two paintings in my childhood home that felt less like decoration and more like members of the family. One hung above my father’s desk: The Macquarie River near Dubbo, NSW by Colin Parker , painted in the early 1960s. The other watched over my mother’s room: Through Winter Trees  by Colleen Parker , dated 1984, and purchased by my mother after my father’s death. For decades I thought of them simply as Dad’s painting  and Mum’s painting . Two separate choices, two

There aren’t many marketing professors who become household names, fewer still who manage to turn balance sheets and antitrust policy into compelling storytelling. Scott Galloway , NYU Stern professor, serial entrepreneur, podcaster, columnist, and now commentator on masculinity, has somehow done exactly that. At a moment when tech feels untouchable, politics feels tribal, and a lot of young people feel lost, Galloway has positioned himself as a kind of blunt, data-driven unc

When Georgia O’Keeffe arrived in New Mexico in 1929, she described it as love at first sight. O’Keefe said: When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. Her words would later echo through decades of tourism campaigns and art history textbooks, shaping the mythology of O’Keeffe Country . A place imagined as vast, empty, and waiting to be claimed. But from an Indigenous perspective, the land O’Keeffe called mine was never hers to take. It a

In Marvel Comics, the Juggernaut  (aka. Cain Marko ) has a brutally simple power set. Once he starts moving, he cannot be stopped. Gifted with mystical strength by the entity Cyttorak , he becomes a living avalanche. Walls crumble, streets tear open, heroes scatter. And yet, for all his brute force, he has a weakness. Remove his helmet and telepaths can pierce his mind, slow him, even bring him down. The Crimson Gem of Cyttorak: Where the Power Comes From Juggernaut was not b

I was walking along a cobbled street in the heart of Kraków, half tourist and half daydreamer, when the scene unfolded. It was one of those soft afternoons when the light seems to linger on everything. On the stone facades. On the tram wires overhead. On the small clusters of people drifting between cafés and churches. A busker a block away was playing something vaguely familiar on an accordion. The air smelled of coffee, caramel, and city dust. And then I saw them. Four nuns

In Part 1 , I asked a simple question: Where, in 2025, does our profession openly and respectfully challenge one another’s ideas? We talked about the demise of letters to the editor, the rise of VIN and WhatsApp groups, and the strange new world where LinkedIn has become a kind of global hallway conversation for veterinary medicine. But there’s another question sitting behind all of this, and it’s more uncomfortable: Who benefits when veterinarians say less in public? Because

Once upon a time, if you wanted to challenge an idea in veterinary medicine, you wrote a letter. You read an article in a journal, you disagreed with the conclusions, or the statistics, or the ethics, and you put pen to paper. A few weeks or months later, your letter appeared in print alongside a reply from the author. The whole profession could see the debate, in black and white, preserved for the record. It wasn’t perfect, but it was authentic  and ours . It was slow, thoug

Leonardo of Pisa, better known as Fibonacci , never saw a sunflower. Yet the sequence of numbers he revealed in 1202, namely 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, describes the hidden architecture of nature itself. Spirals in pine cones, seeds, shells, and galaxies all whisper the same mathematical poetry. Each new term born from the sum of the two before, each life form echoing the balance between order and chaos. Fibonacci and the Logic of Life In plants, Fibonacci numbers are not a