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Mike Taylor 🦕

mike@sauropods.win

<p>By day I am a computer programmer with Index Data, where I have been happily and gainfully employed for 20 years.</p><p>By night, I am a vertebrate palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, specialising in sauropods: the biggest and best of all dinosaurs.</p><p>I am an advocate for open access, open data and open source, and I&#39;m beginning to think pre-publication peer-review might be a mistake. I support <a href="https://sauropods.win/tags/LFC" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>LFC</span></a>.</p><p>Email: mike@miketaylor.org.uk<br />ORCiD: 0000-0002-1003-5675</p><p><a href="https://sauropods.win/tags/fedi22" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>fedi22</span></a></p>

Posts

  • Post #4103360

    &amp;quot;When a [cookware] brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…&amp;quot; https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose

  • Post #4047135

    RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@pozorvlak/116968236641276698 &quot;[OpenAI] models will randomly commit criminal acts in order to do slightly better at tasks you don&#39;t really care about, exposing their customers to considerable legal risk.&quot;

  • Post #3942721

    Argentina&#39;s performance in this final has been absolutely embarrassing. If they wind up winning this on penalties without having a single shot, it will be the end of football.

  • Post #3850295

    &quot;I don’t know how this is going to play out. But we are really now at the point where it’s pretty clear that Trump and the people around him have given up on actually winning the election. They’ve decided instead that somecombination of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and possibly massive illegality is their way forward.&quot; — Paul Krugman, https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-forever-war-gets-scary

  • Post #3805307

    &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s time for online checkin&amp;quot; Jet2 tells me. I follow the link, enter my booking reference, name and flight date, and it takes me to a Manage My Booking page with a Check In Now button. Clicking the button takes me to a 404. ??!

  • Post #3782620

    &quot;I know many of you have been gripped by the revelations about Nigel Farage’s personal finances published by The Times and The Sunday Times over the past week. Today, we can reveal the Reform UK leader is paying himself £50,000 in rent for a studio space at one of his houses — which is conveniently 1p less than the amount requiring a declaration to the Register of Members’ Interests.&quot; — The Times daily update for Saturday.

  • Post #3702363

    Haha, Mbappe&#39;s penalty is saved! #WorldCup

  • Post #3618177

    That is a soft, soft penalty. #England #WorldCup

  • Post #3617994

    Quansah&#39;s sending off — I think you can argue it either way, but it is at least not a terrible decision. I think that this game now ends 2-1. Which I am more than fine with.

  • Post #3615970

    All right — who else has stayed up for the game? #England #WorldCup

  • Post #3435538

    I do seem to be literally the only person on Mastodon watching the Panama-England game — or at least, the only one using the #PANENG hashtag. (I assume that can&#39;t be literally true, and that I have a propagation problem. Any hints?)

  • Post #3407237

    I have submitted my suggested storm names to the Met Office: ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron and Gazprom. In &quot;Reason for name choice(s) (optional)&quot; I wrote: These are the corporations whose deliberate actions have caused the storms. They deserve credit. Make your own recommendations at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

  • Post #2996545

    &quot;The truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. […] When you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.&quot; https://www.theringer.com/...

  • Post #2825103

    Liverpool done by a deflection yet again. *sigh* #LFC

  • Post #2825102

    Must be properly infuriating for Brentford that the game is stopped for Konate&amp;#39;s head injury, just as they were attacking and building pressure. I&amp;#39;m sympathetic; but it was of course the right decision. #LFC

  • Post #2825101

    I don&amp;#39;t like the way this game is tilting. We need to grab hold of this game and go all out in the last ten minutes. #LFC

  • Post #2825100

    Feeble shot from Wirtz, but at least is was a shot. Feels like it&amp;#39;s been a while. #LFC

  • Post #2825099

    The most deliberate of deliberate handballs — both hands, even. No yellow card, of course, because Darren England. #LFC

  • Post #2825098

    Anyone else remember when John Hartson was sent off for two yellow cards, both given for deliberate handballs? #LFC

  • Post #2825097

    VVD can&amp;#39;t capitalise on an unexpected chance to shoot from the edge of the area. Way over the bar. Shame. #LFC

  • Post #2825096

    Brilliant break by Kerkez and Frimpong, utterly squandered by Wirtz. #LFC

  • Post #2825095

    With Rio&amp;#39;s stratospheric emergence, Trey Nyoni has gone under the radar. Has anyone been paying attention and knows has a sense of how good he is? #LFC

  • Post #2825094

    We have definitely conceded the initiative in the late stages of this game. I hate how we&amp;#39;ve been letting that happen. #LFC

  • Post #2825093

    ... And then Wirtz is SO close to notching a winner on the break, but denied by Kweev. #LFC

  • Post #2825092

    Yet another game where Liverpool did more than enough to win, but somehow we managed to score only once from nearly three xG. It feels like this has been happening a lot this season. #LFC

  • Post #2521900

    &amp;quot;The leadership of the Royal Society is now also in breach of its own code of conduct.&amp;quot; — @StephenCurry writing at https://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2026/02/11/year-of-inaction-royal-society-hollowed-out-musk/ #RoyalSociety

  • Post #2506497

    The mystery of the other rearing sauropod of the Egidio Feruglio museum Way back in 2014, John Hutchinson posted some photos from the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Trelew city, Patagonia, Argentina. John&amp;#39;s original tweets are long gone (quite rightly), but happily we reposted the photos on SV-POW!, so they live on. John&amp;#39;s first photo showed what we now known to be Epachthosaurus. But the second photo is more interesting for our present purposes: http://svpow.com/202...

  • Post #2506496

    I hate this stupid Making Tax Digital thing we&amp;#39;re going through in the UK. Tax was already digital. I filed online, it was simple and efficient, I knew what I was doing. Now I have to learn a new system, and maybe buy proprietary software, to let me do WHAT I WAS ALREADY DOING DIGITALLY. What a monumental waste of time and effort.

  • Post #2506494

    &amp;quot;Why does the right hate expertise? The rejection of science, like so much of the U.S. political landscape, has a lot to do with the influence of the fossil fuel industry. Warnings about climate change threatened that industry’s profits, so it was necessary to attack climate science, and this generalized into hostility toward scientific research as a whole.&amp;quot; https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-apotheosis-of-willful-ignorance

  • Post #2505228