Mike Dickison

OK, I've been told it's something to do with "decades of struggle by the organised labour movement".

Freelancer here, and the idea of taking weeks off but still being paid sounds like an amazing idea; how do I get in on this? Also, do I have this right, someone pays me when I’m sick?

Sharks aren’t a “species”. Humans are a species. There are over 500 species of sharks.

Rather than build new houses on dodgy land because half of Christchurch’s new builds are bought by investors for AirBnBs, council could…ban AirBnBs. Or just regulate them. Bang, thousands of new homes for people who don’t want a lawn to mow.

YouTube video by thejuicemedia Honest Government Ad | Social Media Ban

The Australien Government has made an ad about the Social Media Ban for Under-16s, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.

Published just under 400 years ago, and not subject to copyright, yet the intellectual giants of the University of Oxford claim to apply terms, prohibiting commercial reuse, to its reproduction.

They use a CC licence. CC say their licences can only be applied to copyrighted works.

#CopyFraud

"according to the Court of Justice of the European Union which has effect in UK law, copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author's own 'intellectual creation'. Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as 'original’. A November 2023 Appeal Court judgement (THJ v. Sheridan, 2023) by Lord Justice Arnold clarified that, in the UK, no new copyright is created in making a photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional public domain artwork.” From Wikipedia on “sweat of the brow”.

I’ve sent them a polite enquiry quoting this:

here are Ranganathan’s 5 Laws of Library Science.

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader their book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A library is a growing organism.

they can be read as a directive for technical efficiency. i read them as an ethical commitment. 📚

Well put!

I am very grateful for the "go away forever!" button.

My @politicshome.bsky.social story from the summer about the AI-generated "I rise to speak" phenomenon in Parliament has made it into @nytimes.com 🇺🇸

(sadly, without credit)

Screen grab of Taskmaster where Nick Mohammed is walking towards Alex Horne. Nick is dressed like Dracula. Alex is standing next to a wooden wall with yellow gloves sticking out. There's a big puddle of water in the frame, and we can see Alex's reflection but NOT Nick's, because Vampires don't have reflections.

In S17 of #Taskmaster, Nick Mohammed dressed as a vampire for his tasks. The production scrubbed all his reflections when he's dressed like this, but the only way I knew is because someone told me about it. It's subtle and very cool.

Standards Australia - Wikipedia

Wow that’s incredible. A publicly-funded business-unit, a branch of MBIE, whose job is to sell copyrighted standards developed by volunteer industry labour, not just make them all available for free. The Australian org has been under pressure to do this at least: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standar...

Something, mānuka, pōhutakawa, but the image is so low-resolution it’s now worth having in Commons. Why don’t we just ask Auckland Museum about getting high-resolution scans into Commons? They’ll be at the online meeting in a few hours.

Yes, they’re full of surprises.

Anyone know where I can buy pearl sugar in Ōtautahi Christchurch? I don't want to pay $14 to have a little box shipped down from Auckland for Xmas baking.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nib_sugar

Friends, I seek recommendations! I'm going to be on the North Island (of NZ) for a 3-week driving holiday in February. I'm keen to hone my photography skills. Where would you go if you were me?

I know Wellington pretty well (and Zealandia 😍🐦), other places not so well. Not keen on Wairarapa.

If you contact Friends of Tiritiri you can arrange to stay overnight in the bunkhouse so are guaranteed an amazing dawn chorus and the chance of a kiwi sighting.

A really good (and hilarious) essay on the problems of people using AI as search engines

There are also paintings by Audrey Eagle and Matilda Smith; more info here: www.nzpcn.org.nz/site/assets/...

Watercolour of Adams mistletoe.

Apart from this one by Georgina Burne Hetley? commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lo...

Congratulations to @tiagolubiana.bsky.social for shepherding our paper to publication & to all my wonderful co-authors. "Wiki Loves iNaturalist: How Wikimedians Integrate iNaturalist Content on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons" can be read here doi.org/10.3897/biss...

Zombies clawing the skin off a grapefruit.

A dozen Stoppards covering his career from Ros and Guil are Dead (1966) to Leopoldstadt (2020)

Cover of Arcadia with a Greek temple in stately English grounds.

59. After Tom Stoppard died I revisited my tiny Stoppard library and read ARCADIA again after 20 years. Still a fine piece of theatre, maybe I’ll get to see a production one day.

Such magical thinking for a text-extrusion tool.

Some good news for a change: the beetles and fungus introduced to control Tradescantia actually work, sometimes spectacularly. This is a game changer: this horrible plant smothers huge areas of forest floor and is a pain to eradicate by hand, regrowing from the smallest fragment.

This Pluribus ad on a fridge caused a schizophrenic woman named Carol to be hospitalized.

I’m waiting for John Wilkes Booth from ASSASSINS.

Things that will interest Bluesky; Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, replaces Melvyn Bragg as host of In Our Time.

Australian airport security is the worst, in my experience.