at last we have an answer as to what happened to local crime boss Phineas "the Centipede" O'Sullivan in 1862.

I am guessing that a small bunch of underfunded nerds heroically and depressingly trying to track hate speech and lies on the internet are the 'Global Censorship-Industrial Complex'

"Of those infected, 145 were unvaccinated, three were partially vaccinated with one of the recommended two-dose measles-mumps-rubella vaccines, one was fully vaccinated and four had unknown vaccination status." www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Year 1 data on congestion pricing in Manhattan… * Vehicle traffic: -11% * Foot traffic: +3.4% * Storefront vacancy: -0.9% * Pollution: -22% * Revenue for mass transit: $548M So YES this has been a huge success.

Lol wait, you too?!? (Guessable URL that someone guessed)

10/20 for me! Guessed most of them, except the "plays with elves".

So • I feel like you can't save harbor your way out of text you created • I saw this dude play at the Tasmanian arts festival and he was amazing

Not now, haunted Victorian shoes

It's Christmas Quiz time. 20 festive questions which are probably too hard - sorry. Please share so others can suffer forms.gle/MK5tb1SkK2LS...

Measles- three more cases announced today Auckland and Wellington. Lower Hutt location of interest. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

I always try to uphold the annual New Zealand tradition of the Nativicado.

Hornets don’t holiday, so please continue to keep an eye out for this unwelcome visitor to our area. I was happy to contribute to another article, to help promote the fight against the yellow-legged hornet. www.1news.co.nz/2025/12/23/m...

We have three wet lab genomics positions open, all supporting our sequencing for public health Two permanent snr tech roles will be trained for accredited Illumina and ONT workflows (apply for both) nzcris.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/nzcris... nzcris.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/nzcris... (1/2)

OMFG, this is amazing. A foot-treadled Singer sewing machine hooked to a Hurdy Gurdy with a self-made mute (so he can play notes instead of the steady drone of the typical hurdy gurdy) using a theremin as a flange. I was instantly transported back to the 4th Doctor Who.

Photos from yesterday. The usual subjects.

Bioinvasions impose significant burgeoning costs to society. A reminder from 2023: www.watercanada.net/new-study-sh...

Especially relevant in NZ, where funding for the Archives NZ digitisation programme of official records was axed in 2024.

Based on the wikipedia list of Iwi names, as of when I write this 467 accounts on Bluesky match at least 1 Iwi (though this is based on text searching so I need to note this includes hits where a geographic region is also an Iwi) in bio details. 583 bios use the term Māori

In memorial, here are the graphs from the report for the final week of questions (the report is on the website)

New Zealand just recorded its first-ever day of zero coal- or gas-fired electricity. In fact two days, 20 & 21 December. (Still some co-gen, about 1.8%.)

We need to get control of deer numbers (& exotic ungulates) in NZ before widespread forest ecosystem collapse ensues. This piece I wrote for @theconversationnz.bsky.social in 2022 is still very much true today especially with the push for herds of special interest theconversation.com/despite-the-...

FWIW, the jury is still out on Gen AI being good at text summaries. Because it shortens & emphasizes text based on distribution, not meaning, it’s less of a summary (ie, salient points highlighted) than a compression (ie, the most frequently asserted terms in the distribution). Not the same thing!

Great stuff. Hobby hunters are trying to normalise the idea that these invasive pests should be farmed, for their convenience, in the native forests we all own. (Imagine if possum trappers tried this nonsense!) We non-hunters who love our forests outvote them. Let your MP know.

(standing in the NARA reading room, “feeding” a raft of unpublished government documents into AI somehow, as the archivists are definitely applauding me, telling it to find the important stuff) “Look at me, I’m a historicalian!”

As someone who writes software tutorials on the regular, this is a niche that Generative AI absolutely has covered.

Not now, enormous 68-million- year-old egg nicknamed 'The Thing'.

Hilariously, in an Australian Senate inquiry into climate change misinformation, an anti-wind power group was exposed as using false and made up sources in its submission, which came from AI.

This is slightly more complicated than that, given that several of the keystone examples are of women getting tagged with It. Yes, homophobia is part of the cultural mix here, but there’s more. Suspect a key target is the notion of earnestness.

Disappointed authors, dead-end addresses and the .co.nz book publishing website with no NZ staff

This *seems* like common sense—but what about, for example, making a selected publications list for academics for their Wikipedia page? We trust Google Scholar and DOIs and don't read every paper—and nor should we have to! My fear is that fake papers like these have infected Wikidata.

How much worse can it get? Way mo’!

Working with the data from a little over 2200 AoNZ Bluesky accounts. Commonest way of referring to the country - Aotearoa Commonest occupational term - writer Commonest interest - politics (barely over climate) Commonest placename - Wellington. Commonest pet - cat

Had a student who used Grammarly to tidy up language etc and all the references that were formerly fine got changed to nonexistent ones by the software

We created a new tool that uses prescription label information to identify where your drug was made. It also lets you see if and when that factory was inspected for quality and safety violations. Try it out 👇

Russia is trying to reverse engineer the Bob Semple tank otherwise known as the deadly assault shed.

Really enjoyed this fantastic piece by @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social and @cnygren.bsky.social Here are few favorite pull quotes of mine + one little quibble at the end:

Authentication on a bunch of servers and services may fail if their admins use the Boulder NIST NTP time sync. Check your NTP sources.

We are already in a Kessler scenario (which is a spectrum anyway), it’s just slower than imagined.

This photo is making my brain tickle and I've been trying to see it properly for most of today. #photography #brain #tickle

Wellingtonians DO NOT DRIVE NORTH ON SH1, there's been a huge crash and everyone is being forced to take the Tawa offramp, queue is currently all the way back to the Churton overbridge

Once again, LLMs are useful in identifying practices that need to change. If citation-as-signaling is expected in your field, such that the citation is not a record of any actual engagement, then stop that practice. It is not providing any intellectual benefit. It is human-produced slop.

I updated the gist with the latest data from the respiratory dashboard, adding the last 3 weeks of atypical summer flu cases (A/H3). My opinion- no likely slowdown before New Year given increased Christmas period contacts, but then we have the summer isolation period.

So, today I'm wrapping up People Watching. Massive thanks to everyone who has supported it & all the cool people I've met and drawn. I wrote an article in the Sunday Magazine today talking about the lessons I've learned doing it - and there were so many. www.thepost.co.nz/culture/3609...

[In approx] "117 million children born during 1994–2023, routine childhood vaccinations will have prevented approximately 508 million lifetime cases of illness, 32 million hospitalizations, and 1,129,000 deaths, at a net savings of $540 billion in direct costs and $2.7 trillion in societal costs."

When “AI-enhanced pathology diagnostic systems” were presented with radiology results, they tended to identify demographic information from the images then use those demographics as the basis of diagnosis. Leading to errors in 1/3 of diagnoses for Black patients.