Mike Dickison

Digging into digital knowledge: Wikimedia meets archaeology in Aotearoa Over the next six months, a collaboration between Wikipedian Mike Dickison (Giantflightlessbirds) and the Christchurch Archaeology Project will bring the archaeology of Ōtautahi and Aotearoa into the ...

The archaeology of Ōtautahi Christchurch and Aotearoa New Zealand is being brought into the digital spotlight, through a collaboration between Wikipedian Mike Dickison (@adzebill.bsky.social) and the Christchurch Archaeology Project.

www.wikimedia.nz/christchurch...

I think Poland? Very common over there.

I found the phone number and email! It was hidden under a weird little phone/envelope combo icon I’d never encountered before so missed it the first time round. Fantastic design there.

Selection from my 2021 review of Phil Lester’s HEALTHY BEE SICK BEE: “Wasps are also a significant threat to hives, especially in the warm dry north where can overwinter in gigantic meganests. Luckily beekeepers now have Vespex, a targeted poison that's attractive to wasps but not bees. We should be more worried about Asian hornets, which are just a dodgy shipping container plus a little climate change away from getting a foothold in Auckland and marching their way down the country, devastating bees and, oh, incidentally, our native insect species as well.”

Struck by my prophetic abilities back in 2021. Someone should give me a job in science communication or something.

Literally, at work this morning:

Clinician: Patient should stop medication A, but must keep taking medication B.

AI VR transcription of this: Patient should stop taking medication B.

Seriously NEVER LET A DOCTOR USE AI FOR YOUR APPOINTMENTS. NEVER. UNDER ANY FUCKING CIRCUMSTANCES.

Rare fossil discovery rewrites history of NZ bird evolution The discovery of a rare fossil in an ancient Otago lake shows the evolutionary history of Aotearoa birds is much more dynamic than once thought.

www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

My test case is “I’m a journalist/prospective student/potential funder: what is Dr X’s email address?” On Massey’s website I can eventually find a staff profile with an email; on UC the staff profiles pop up first but there’s no contact information on them!

Rakiura is about the only place in the world where you’ll see kiwi in broad daylight. Numerous tourists were excited about seeing kiwi by the road on the West Coast, and we had to explain to them what a weka was.

Scratch that, my etymology seems to be wrong. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(b...

Oh for heaven’s sake, how hard would be it to spell out “General Impression of Size and Shape”?

An historic black and white illustration of a paper nautilus floating on the ocean. There are boats, a city and hills in the background.

🎉 Huge news for BHL: The Field Museum is taking over the hosting of BHL’s website, servers & infrastructure, ensuring long-term stability and access for its 63+ million pages of open biodiversity literature. Learn more:
blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2026/02/tran...
#BHLTransition #ILoveBHL 🌍 📚 🧪

Wow! I just bought BetterMouse and deinstalled Logi Options and Options+, thank you for pointing this out.

Well the hive-mind is not wrong. The people want climate adaptation, electrification, rail, and ferries, way before, massive road projects. And least of all- subsidised fossil fuel infrastructure.

Table 1: Deviant author assignment strategies (selection), listed chronologically. It contains year, authorship assignment strategy and reference.

Reviewing some old links before deleting my Twitter account I was reminded of "Civil disobedience in scientific authorship: Resistance and insubordination in science" (doi.org/10.1080/0898...) which contains a great table on deciding authorship order:

This is where I YET AGAIN encourage people, especially creators, to have, develop and actively maintain their own websites where people can find you, away from the social media sites you don't own and/or can't control and/or whose discoverability algorithms are at the whim of billionaire weirdos.

3. The fund is supposed to compensate authors for sales lost by library lending, not be a perpetual Xmas gift for writers. So if you want to count school libraries or ebooks, great. But you should stop getting compensated when your book’s out of print. Fair’s fair.

1. We didn’t get a bigger payout in 2025 because some other authors missed out: that would have been easy to check.
2. For years Public Lending Right was obscure even to many authors, but if all this publicity means everyone eligible signs up the fund will be further diluted, well done chaps.

The National Library’s login portal didn’t work for me last year, sending me into an infinite verification loop. The needless shift to RealMe has been a disaster and should be scrapped. A simple system of confirming your details with an email each year was working perfectly well.

I use a Norwegian service called Whereby, which is pretty good and fairly minimalist. Better than Teams!

What a great episode! The heavy hitters of cities for people, right here.

Some lessons here for Christchurch as it tries to entice ppl to live in the city centre after earthquake rebuilding: where are the public schools, services, hardware stores etc?! Instead we get endless townhouses for airbnbs.

Yes, “OK” in anything British before 1920 (let alone Game of Thrones) is like nails on a blackboard.

Google Ngram viewer for use of the phrase "in your DNA", which basically doesn't occur before 1980.

I can handle the anachronistic needle drops in MARTY SUPREME, but when Marty, in 1952, says to someone "it’s in your DNA"…

if there’s one thing clients do, it’s constantly change their mind and sabotage their own projects no matter how much you, the consultant, do your best to shepherd them to better decisions

how’s an llm going to fix that

What I said about Prince Andrew in 2011 Yesterday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew the Duke of York, was arrested in connection with his time as a British trade envoy.

i was telling someone the other day about the now show piece that @johnfinnemore.bsky.social did about andrew mountbatten-windsor in 2011, and what do you know, john's put a transcript up on his blog:

Probably Elizabeth Moody.

I think I went to the same one. Stuart Devenie as Algernon perhaps.

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

'Common misunderstanding': AT says many Aucklanders unsure what is and isn't a driveway It comes after an Auckland man was fined $70 for parking outside his house for lunch.

Handy diagram shows where driveway actually begins.

An X-ray of a penguin showing the knees much higher up than you'd think

Turns out penguins do have knees. They're just not where you think they ought to be.

(Can you tell I'm trying to distract you from our collective sense of impending doom by putting out the most random content imaginable?!)

Apparently “sheep casings”, and they’re precooked in water with red food colouring. At least artisanally.