Alistair K

@NZChineseGenealogy @dantheclamman If you can get as far as Nelson, they appear annually at the local fish and chip shops. Occasionally muttonbirds, too, if you're into those, but they're in plastic buckets these days rather than kelp sacs.

Talking with a bank today, wondering where the money went that I sent to them. Apparently it can take two or three days for electronic payments to process, and they generally don't happen on weekends.

Who knew that even the computers took weekends off?

While oysters lack ears, they still can hear, using statocysts, their balance organ. Researchers have found playing the soundscape from a healthy oyster reef attracts larvae to settle! They have evolved to settle on their ancestors to build reefs, and sound is a useful cue of a good spot! […]

It is not easy to book a Cook Strait ferry seat these days. No availability for two weeks!

Last time I travelled by ferry, I got a seat the very same day I looked for it (prompted by Air New Zealand cancelling a flight that morning). That was only a couple of years ago.

What's happened since […]

A mantelpiece, reminiscent of Tudor gothic style.

Just saw this posted, free to give away. First thought: façade for a doghouse!

Was chatting with an ex-teacher about my disappointment with my son's physics teachers for two years in a row. Was told that, oh yeah, that guy's shite and always has been. And that there is a whole economy of physics tutors that pick up after him.

Yet another example of a system biased towards the interests of the fishing industry and that fails to protect vulnerable protected species. 🐬

Kill protected species, lie about it, get slapped with a wet bus ticket. Go back and do it all again.

Absolutely unacceptable. This needs to change […]

Looks like my demands for identity theft insurance and monitoring might have paid off!

#managemyhealth

@phil_stevens our mayor here in Nelson says pretty much the same thing! His facebook rants come across as a pathological obsession.

I just had my day interrupted by a phone call: "I am Ben, an AI agent from [I missed this bit; two syllables with short 'e' sound in them]. How are you today?"

Auckland number: 09 242 4723.

Anyone know what this is?

Anyone know why an AI would give a damn about how I am today?

Thinking about […]

The Right Honourable Christopher Luxon grinning; caption below reads "Labour six points ahead of National".

I like this photo: Luxon is so clearly pleased with the poll results!

Finally starting to wake up. Overloaded the brain a bit last Saturday and have been having to sleep it off all the way to today.

Worldwide premiere of the Orange Roughy song! 🚨 🎵

Some amazing and talented Greenpeace volunteers made a song supporting the plucky #OrangeRoughy campaign for #FishofTheYear

You heard it here first!
(and please go vote for this delightful fish from the deep […]

[Original post on mastodon.nz]

Image from the paper showing a cloudy urban sky, where the clouds brighten the sky. A building with a satellite dish on top is a dark silhouette.

15 years ago, I co-authored my first paper in the field of #LightPollution studies: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0017307

Up to that point, work on artificial brightening of the sky had been done almost entirely by astronomers, who (for obvious […]

[Original post on fediscience.org]

@sundogplanets I always set up a Jitsi link for safety, especially for on-line exams. Teams has never failed to give shuddering speech, as a minimum. But we always start there because it's institutional policy. We have no policy to prevent us from going elsewhere when it abandons us part-way […]

@grumpyyetamusin.bsky.social Can't they just say the True Name of God backwards?

Oh, it's the Evangelicals ... they still haven't learnt the True Name of God.

@grumpyyetamusin.bsky.social That's what I felt about school boards, too. You have to "declare" your conflicts of interest, and then make some boilerplate statement that you will "manage" them. And then you manage them however corruptly you like.

@sellathechemist The Bayeux 'tapestry' is pretty much a celebration of under-taxed rich dudes to begin with.

@petersuber I'd be especially interested to see how this affects academics' searches. We have long had problems with good knowledge disappearing because it isn't indexed in the small set of databases that we use; for a while Google was something of a saviour on that front, bringing up grey […]

New study: "Our results also show #AI #search surfaces significantly fewer long tail information sources, lower response variety, and significantly more low credibility and right- and center-leaning information sources, compared to traditional search."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13415

@johndcook I've been drawn to these particular identities for decades – they hint at so many possibilities that evade being dug out. Even now, it still feels mysterious to me that one transcendental can de-transcend another. But in this case I persuaded myself that it's an artefact of these […]

@grumpyyetamusin.bsky.social My current one once told me that she'd talk with the DHB and St John's about their handling of people in psychiatric distress (a psychotic friend, specifically, deep in hallucinations and paranoia, whom I'd been calming down while my wife phoned for help that never […]

@SimonCHulse @cloventt We clearly need a feline precedent...

@SimonCHulse @cloventt so my cat to driving a car is not illegal in the same way as for a Tesla algorithm driving a car? Because I don't recall any laws forbidding cats from doing this. Nor much else – plays right into the hands of those who say (erroneously) that the Law recognises the rights […]

@cloventt I suspect that this is because we have old laws written by people who reasonably presumed that cars would have human drivers, and therefore didn't explicitly legislate a requirement for one.

@lucky automation of so many kinds saps the joy from so many things

@jackyan We have a strong hunch that she wasn't in danger of death, but certainly in danger of sickness.

He stepmum was there but, having taken sleeping pills, couldn't help. But had also taken the girl's phone away so there wasn't a way to call; she ended up messaging my son and another friend […]

@tillmanreuter Nice idea! Maybe I'll remember t try it next time I hit 29.

My son told his mum that he'd eaten a good healthy breakfast of eggs.

He avoided mentioning that the eggs were in the form of pavlova.