Excellent: even though Labour won our election outright, they’re bringing the Greens on board with a couple of Minister positions using their expertise on Climate change, homelessness, sexual violence (provided Green members accept the deal). It’s not a Coalition though.
When bots are used to fight for good: More than 200,000 abusive tweets towards female candidates during elections:
a tweet goes through … filters … once it scores 90% ‘most likely to be toxic’, the bot replies with a positive tweet.
Worth a read.👍
It’s meant to rain today — we already had a brief but heavy fall around 4 am. As I look east I see very dark cloud over the hills, and some weird rolling waveforms.
The day has all but disappeared and many tasks remain undone. Read an excellent book though whose details I can’t reveal at the moment so that was a real bonus.
Cannabis will remain illegal in Aotearoa New Zealand. That means that instead of state control on quality and distribution, it will remain in the control of gangs and other criminals who will take profits without regard to the humans affected.
Disappointing result on cannabis law reform. Final results could change as remaining votes are counted:
The euthanasia referendum has passed the public vote, with 65.2% voting in favour, but the cannabis question has 53.1% voting ‘no’
Glad to see the End Of Life Choice 👍.
Amazing video: Interviews with Titanic Survivors done in 1979 about the events of 1912.
Lining Figures are also available in Apple Pages, as the screenshots attest. Art Kavanagh wrote:
I just posted “Lining figures” in Microsoft Word: You learn something new every now and then.
I've found some old archive DVDs and am importing them to my MacBook Pro. This video from December 2000 shows my then 16 year old Blue Burmese and 10 year old Fox Terrier.
Woohoo, after I suggested our local Library buy this, the Library replied 📚:
… Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. The library has reviewed your suggestion today and the item will be ordered as soon as possible.
I’ll get to read it after all. 🤓
Oh yes, my favourite crime show trope (along with ‘enhance’, of course): zoom in on the security camera footage, zoom, zoom, zoom a bit more and we have the number the victim was texting! 🤳🏻
One for the Scrabblers: tmesis —
separation of parts of a compound word by the intervention of one or more words
For example, un-f****ing-believable!
First used in 1550.
Last night, while watching Discovery, I had a new experience of my own: shimmering at the top and right edges of my vision in both eyes. No pain, no nausea and I don’t think I’ve ever had a migraine. It cleared up in about 15 minutes, but was very disconcerting. Monitoring…
For a holiday in March 2021, my draft itinerary is
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Day 1: Drive with bike from home to Paeroa: 6 hours.
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Day 2: Bike Paeroa to Waihi: 6-7 hours (inc. sightseeing), 24 km. Stay 2 nights.
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Day 3: See the sights in Waihi.
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Day 4: Bike back to Paeroa.
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Day 5: Drive home.
I’m looking into options for a small holiday early next year. It’s so frustrating when websites make it difficult to find the prices. I don’t fall into the category of people who don’t need to know how much a thing costs. How many people do?
I’ve suggested to our local Library that they buy Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley 📚:
A new, feminist translation of Beowulf … a tale of entitlement and encroachment, powerful men seeking to become more powerful, and one woman seeking justice for her child,
It’s time to sell my (not very) old bike — I just don’t ride it now I have an electric bike. The Avanti Cadent ER 2 is so light though! And fast. Sad to see it go, but the space and the $$ will be very welcome. Took it for a last very short ride today.
Siouxsie Wiles & Toby Morris: Covid-19 and the Swiss cheese system:
Twenty years ago, James Reason, a professor of psychology at the University of Manchester in the UK, published a paper in the British Medical Journal in which he described what he called the “Swiss cheese model of system accidents”. Reason was trying to move people’s thinking from treating mistakes as individual errors by “bad” people to a systems approach that accepts that humans are fallible and mistakes are to be expected. Rather than blaming individuals for failure, we should try to understand how and why the failure happened to prevent it from happening again.
But what has Swiss cheese got to do with all this?
The idea behind the systems approach is to build in layers of barriers and safeguards. In an ideal world, each of these defensive layers would be impenetrable. But in the real world, they aren’t. So Reason likened each layer to a slice of Swiss cheese – it has holes in it. To be fair to the Swiss, they have lots of different cheeses, many of which don’t have holes, so it’s probably more accurate to call Reason’s model the “Emmental Model”.
Multitasking. Watching NASA Live | NASA (starts now):
Live coverage of OSIRIS-REx spacecraft touch-and-go (TAG) maneuver to collect sample on asteroid Bennu
while working on my email InBox and updating subs payments and database for the Waikawa Beach Ratepayers Association.
