Mark

En dashes: They’re here to serve.

We can apply industrial design, engineering and smarter regulation to incorporate resource recovery into product lifecycles. Or we can continue to follow the market fundamentalist dogma and delusion of single-use petrochemical extraction-consumption-pollution.

Our infrastructure isn’t ready for what’s coming.

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.

An alloy bicycle frame on a wooden surface. The raw metal of the frame is polished and buffed.

Another even more extended break due to being overloaded with teaching and research this year, but we’re so back on this bs.

This next step wasn’t particularly interesting or smart but the results were satisfying. Final passes of sandpaper at 800, 1000 and 1200 grit then metal polish and buffing.

Oh they’ve done a wonderful job of building this up over the past two years, doing popups, exclusive parties with Kiwiana/music themes... Even their UX research into NZ homes was repackaged into marketing. Ingratiating themselves into the monopoly structure of NZ’s feel good corporate ad landscape.

Screencap from the article: ”Auckland Airport chief executive Carrie Hurihanganui said the new route would boost the New Zealand's tourism and business links.“

How tho?

If you want a picture of NZs future, imagine a stick shoved into the spokes of a wheel and toppling over from the self own, forever, etc

Wouldn’t it be great if NZers and their mouthpieces cared as much about urban light rail, bike lanes, double tracking rail corridors, coastal shipping and other normal country things as they do the opening of IKEA? Am not an IKEA hater but this whole thing is giving corporate cucked country vibes.

'Bluesky is too small to be a threat to our children' may be the most depressing thing anyone has said about this site ever.

“We completely blew out the value of a life. I’ve never seen such a high value put on life.”

Proving the enduring rule that the most consistent ‘hobgoblin’ of the right wing mind is psychological projection.

About a third of global emissions come from countries that 'dont matter'

Newspaper photo of a young man smiling. Caption reads: Gary McGrath, chariman of the IV League.

I should have posted this yesterday for World AIDS Day but better late than never. This is Gary McGrath, I did my honours history thesis on the work he did to set up the world's first national needle exchange in NZ in the late 80s. Gary had been living in Melbourne prior to his diagnosis in 1984.

Even just a ‘vibe shift’ could be the catalyst for more focused organising and community resilience. People do their best work under urgency. But right now, the urgency for profit is driving collective human actions, while everything else is relegated to the domain of individual responsibility.

We need to acknowledge that the texture and colour of our problems are a result of our own cultural nuances (Kiwi specific flavours of managerial stupidity and neoliberal zeal as well as ‘tyranny of distance’) but the structure of our problems is the same as virtually everywhere else in the world.

NZ is not going to change for the better without a mass shift in awareness and understanding around how government and capitalism interact. The more things remain miserable, the more people are going to be angry, but the risk is that they follow the trail of breadcrumbs to far right rhetoric.

Thinking about the possibility of an international political movement against ghouls and ghoul behaviour that is harming our wellbeing (whether it be austerity, advocacy for corporate rule or culture wars).

Ghouls must answer for sucking the life out of society and the planet.

Oh that‘s well thought out.

Charter School Agency reveals enrolment numbers after telling schools to keep figures under wraps The number of enrolments had been kept under wraps after the agency told the privately-run, state-funded schools not to reveal their numbers while still setting up.

This is fewer students than in some of our big first year courses with extensive funding and a whole new govt agency and administrative function brought in to support it. Where is the sense of perspective on any of this?
www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

I would recommend starting with SVG as a constraint as it can be edited/labelled manually in vector graphics software and generated from data in most programming languages. Don’t need D3 etc unless it needs to be interactive.

On display from both politicians and ideologues hacking at the curriculum is a deep contempt for genuine engagement with systems of knowledge and critical thinking. It‘s one thing to not understand learning; it‘s another to forcibly cut children off from these opportunities.
bsky.app/profile/maet...

People complain about academic writing being opaque and verbose but the wanton anti-intellectualism in govt sources misquoting a literature review, ripping it wildly out of context, and using it as an example of wokeness gone too far is not something that can be solved by improved communication.

The full quote if anyone was curious: "Critical pedagogies recognise the importance of mathematics and statistics as tools for understanding, interpreting, and addressing issues of power and inequity, both in the classroom and in the wider world."

Almost everyone who interacted with the insane husband girlies were elderly. And maga. This is what actually sent me down my research path that led to me finding an alt right AI pipeline.

(Obligatory paper link: link.springer.com/article/10.1...)

Another factor is the enshittification of graphic design and typography not being recognised as a valid area of skill and practice. Also general turn towards motivated reasoning in society: few opportunities for interesting visualisation when nobody cares to ask questions or test hypotheses.

Careerism doesn‘t get a lot of direct attention in comparison to other societal problems, but is a huge contributor to all the slop and rot in academia, politics and business.

I think plenty of it speaks to the state of the media, but an obvious one is that Vox and Vanity Fair barely investigated her and that she managed to commit an unforgivable journalistic crime before getting a book deal and walking into another prestige job, while plenty of others are being laid off

My D&D book of playable New Zealand native wildlife is on sale and if you by before the 6th, should arrive in time for xmas. Includes 18 playable species, tons of monsters, and a mini-adventure to kick off a campaign.

DTRPG: www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/5...

Lulu: www.lulu.com/shop/kelly-w...

NZ’s draft science curriculum favours rote learning over critical thinking Critical thinking is an essential skill students should be encouraged to develop as part of their science learning. NZ’s draft science curriculum fails the test.

Not only is science education going to suffer from the manufactured crisis in maths education, the science curriculum itself has also been under attack to remove components of critical thinking and epistemological foundations.
theconversation.com/nzs-draft-sc...