@libroraptor@mastodon.nz

Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 29, 2026

Replying to @gdc@typo.social

@gdc@typo.social this is the one thing about letterpress that I miss doing, now that I don't have access to a printing shop

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 28, 2026

Replying to @megatronicthronbanks@mastodon.social

@megatronicthronbanks@mastodon.social @space_environmentalism@mastodon.social if only we could crowdsource a few constellations of satellites whose sole function is to clear the skies

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social I love how the US can name a place after one of the most holy objects in Christendom, one of almost zero earthly things that ascended physically into heaven, and then, within a political theatre of grand Christianistic performatism, go out of its way to trash it.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social Even as a man, I felt this – I wanted to stay home and look after our baby but that restriction on women is so profound that daddy-at-home means that the whole family misses out.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 24, 2026

Replying to @RnDanger@infosec.exchange

@RnDanger@infosec.exchange @simonzerafa@infosec.exchange @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io No to biometrics, and NO TO BABY CARL SAGAN TOO!

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 16, 2026

Replying to @fskornia@glammr.us

@fskornia@glammr.us @RandamuMaki@mstdn.social This is true. There's even a variety of pedagogical theories that address it. I find the stuff on relevance dry and fairly boring but I took strongly to William Perry's scheme of intellectual and ethical development. It doesn't tell you want to do in class; it merely describes levels of epistemic engagement and the motivations that go with them. It's so much easier to accommodate students whom you have some way to understand and empathise with. Then there's Ed Deci and Rich Ryan's self-determination theory, specifically the part about intrinsic motivation. Incredibly powerful.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 16, 2026

Replying to @twobiscuits@graz.social

@twobiscuits@graz.social It completely evades me that, in the decades since I learnt about the science teacher shortage and the centralisation of nature of science in our science curriculum, that neither has been addressed in any serious way at all. New Zealand's science education system wasn't that great when I was in school, and what my son's getting now is almost total shit. The government sets the curricular core but doesn't even try to have the schools follow it in any but the shallowest possible way. In fact, they set many of the assessments too and use those to block proper implementation, so the kids aren't hearing about Fritz Haber at all. It shouldn't be for parents to fill this in. I can't do more than an unjustly superficial touch – my period's early modernity – yet even the little nature of science that I covered with my son tonight may well be more than the sum of every chemistry teacher in the whole country over the entire year.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 16, 2026

Just been helping my son with chemistry, and accidentally flipped the narrative. He was looking at the Haber–Bosch process for making ammonia. I asked him about what ammonia's good for, the timing of the development, the timing of World War 1... He was so suddenly interested like he's never been interested in chemistry before. Then we got onto older ways of extracting nitrates from urine, something that Germany also had an advantage in because they drank so much beer. And then to the initial extraction of phosphorus. And then to calculating that, if only one person were involved, it'd take about a decade of collecting urine to replicate Brand and Kunckel's work. Apparently the chem teacher never talks about things like this. Even though we've been talking about the importance of doing so since the 1990s, and it's supposedly REQUIRED by the national curriculum. #school #chemistry #histSci #histSciTech

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 03, 2026

Replying to @sstrader@masto.ai

@sstrader@masto.ai @dbattistella@mstdn.ca It's one of the many missing verses from Genesis. You can find a lot of them in the Red Sea Cave papyri that didn't make it into the current canon. The relevant fragment for us is RS 332a6: "And the Son of the Son of Adam took a stick, and turned [it] in the soil against another, and saw that it cut a [furrow] and the furrow was good, and his wife, seeing the stick, honoured him, calling it Plow for that was his name."

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 03, 2026

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@dbattistella/116840120508755510 Historians of science have spent about thirty years battling hagiography and hero-worship. Quips like this show how ineffectual we historians are.

Quoting

DB 🌱💦 @dbattistella@mstdn.ca

The problem with Jeff Bezos' ideology is that it's based on a false premise. The idea that "6,000 years ago someone invented the plow" is based on a faulty belief that ancient humans functioned as individuals. They did not. Ancient humans were collectivist. Archeological evidence demonstrates that for hundreds of thousands of years, early humans congregated around communal gathering places, like the fire, and engaged in problem solving and passing on of shared learning down through generations. Additionally, the plow (and tools like it) were developed by humans in Mesopotamia, Europe, Egypt, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa as well as other places - not in one place by one person. This is known as parallel development. Believing that the plow was invented by one 'genius' is like believing language was invented by one person. It is a silly myth and represents the projection of current moral standards onto past events. Collectivism is how we both survived and progressed as a species. #HumanEvolution #genius

Open quoted post

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 02, 2026

Replying to @libroraptor@mastodon.nz

@WellingtonChineseHistory@cloudisland.nz Here's the wrap-up video for the recent making-stuff programme. There's Chinese in there! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QQlhvloKw

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jul 02, 2026

Replying to @WellingtonChineseHistory@cloudisland.nz

@WellingtonChineseHistory@cloudisland.nz Around here, the Chinese are doing their own thing for it so the trade-with-China-and-milk-the-tourists exploiters behind CLW can't monopolise it with their "knee how" rubbish any more. I saw something promising advertised for Blenheim, and one of my friends in Nelson is holding a sound-based qigong workshop. She studied with a Shaolin lay-disciple for many years during childhood so it should be a bit better informed than "knee how". Someone down in Dunedin's holding an outdoors calligraphy workshop. We could do with a bit more Cantonese in there. The hard bit is finding people to do it. Everyone in my parents' generation has been quick to complain about how bad my generation's Cantonese is but slow to lift even half a finger. At least they stopped telling me off about it when I started asking them who decided to switch our households to English when I was five. But really they need to take responsibility for this before they're gone. The localisms fade fast; soon no one will be left who knows the old village slang. Our generation isn't in a position even to document that. It'd also help if the universities took NZ heritage seriously, recognising that Cantonese is a deep part of that. But they sold out to the tourism–trade junket long, long ago. I remember that the head of Asian Languages at Vic wrote a newspaper opinion a few years ago that promoted Chinese purely because there's money to be made from exploiting Chinese people. With an election coming up, we need to recall also that Sepuloni supported CLW – she was doing the Ministry of Culture & Heritage stuff then as Ardern's lackey. I asked her what was going on there and she dug her anti-Chinese heels in.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jun 30, 2026

Replying to @deepmud@mas.to

@deepmud@mas.to @ktdoggett@c.im Reminds me of Mao's reply when Nixon blabbered about human rights in China!

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jun 30, 2026

I asked a friend a few weeks ago whether she could show our workshop group how to paint 梅花 plum blossoms, after I'd just shown the basic techniques for painting bamboo. She said she didn't know how. So I've been mulling it since then, and trying it for a few days and it looks like the beginnings are just starting to come together tonight. #mastoart

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jun 26, 2026

Replying to @kajord@hachyderm.io

@kajord@hachyderm.io @inthehands@hachyderm.io @PallasRiot@social.treehouse.systems How long before we start complaining that so-and-so speaks like a LLM? I am thinking of those who do things like quoting Foucault or Lacan except that they quote things that no one else in the room can recall from Foucault's or Lacan's works but it seems like it might be a free interpretation of something that you do remember. So of course you get curious and ask them about it, and they come up with excuse about how it's different in the original language and you wouldn't really get the true sense if you only read the English translation. So you switch to French to signal your openness to discussing it at that deeper level without translation bias. Then it surfaces that they don't actually know French but only read about it in footnotes of a translation whose translator they cannot recall. One of the most common bluffs I heard is "If there's anything that we've learned from Foucault, it's that ... " It may take me a few days to recover a straight face if ever I see that in a LLM-generated essay.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Jun 03, 2026

Replying to @xssfox@cloudisland.nz

@xssfox@cloudisland.nz @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io Can't wait for actual biologists to front up to court as expert witnesses.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 26, 2026

Replying to @noodlemaz@mstdn.games

@noodlemaz@mstdn.games @JohannaForster@mastodon.art Before you get to harvesting the rhizome for sushi, you might like to try the greens growing on top. The rhizome takes a year or two, during which time the plant yields a generous supply of leaves and stalks. They're good pickled, or slipped inside a grilled sandwich with cheddar.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 24, 2026

Replying to @joe@f.duriansoftware.com

@joe@f.duriansoftware.com It's environmental psychology – what matters is affordances, not affordings. The affordances communicate inherently, whereas affordings are the rubbish that low-ability UX people fob us off with. A lot of them don't know the difference and say "affordance" to mean both affordings and features, rarely meaning affordance.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 15, 2026

Replying to @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io My biggest gain from LinkedIn is which of my 'friends' are actually exploitative superficial users and – the network splits quite cleanly between people I'd like working with and Hollywood wannabes.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 14, 2026

Replying to @GodsoeWilliam@ecoevo.social

@GodsoeWilliam@ecoevo.social @sundogplanets@mastodon.social @tod@hci.social Even the -20°C nights in Connecticut and western New York are beyond belief here (in New Zealand). I was telling someone a few days ago how it's not cold enough to produce good snow here and was told "But – but – but – it used to be colder – so cold that Lake Rotoiti froze and people went ice skating on it" and really they don't have the physical-world reference to imagine very cold at all. Nor that snow could be anything other than the two kinds that they've experienced.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 13, 2026

What's going on at the Privacy Commission? They told me to e-mail them to follow up on my Manage My Health complaint, but their mail server tells me that the address that they supplied "is no longer active" so my e-mail's been blocked by "a custom mail-flow rule created by an admin".

It was just an update to say that another fifty days have passed since I last reported that MMH still haven't addressed my query about what personal information they hold about me. I first asked them this on 23 January. The law requires them they have to respond in a lot less than the several months that have passed thus far. "Requires", apparently, does not mean "requires", when it comes to New Zealand law.

I can't help but wonder whether MMH CEO's been spending time in the PC's bed. That might be what the Commission website means by "working together".

#managemyhealth

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 12, 2026

Replying to @veronica@explains.social

@veronica@explains.social "deserves" is their dirty distraction from "is, by right, entitled to" – it's an old tactic, famously used to victimise the "undeserving poor". "Do they deserve it?" is also a powerful distraction from "Am I meeting my responsibilities and obligations?" The saddest part for me is how easily we fall for this tactic. We've been falling for it for centuries. It's a primary foundation of US society and gaining ground in far too much of the world.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 10, 2026

Replying to @river@takohs.cc

@river@takohs.cc @chu@climatejustice.social Just wait 'til you see the analysis of _which_ crimes!

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 08, 2026

Replying to @BarneyDellar@mastodon.scot

@BarneyDellar@mastodon.scot @runoutgroover@cloudisland.nz She speaks Hochdeutsch; she learnt it school since she was about seven. In any case, Hochdeutsch is what all germanophones speak with germanophones from other areas because even in Germany the dialects are pretty hard to understand elsewhere. It wouldn't make sense for me to know her local dialect. She may well have forgotten that I know that she's Swiss, even though we've known each other for years.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 07, 2026

Replying to @runoutgroover@cloudisland.nz

@runoutgroover@cloudisland.nz I greeted a Swiss person in German not long ago and got a stern "I'm Swiss, not German" back. What a weird interpretation, I thought – it isn't only Germans who speak German. She routinely speaks German with her husband! Greeting me in Chinese is a minefield challenge, though, and maybe a similar situation. If you're clearly a state servant, I take "níhǎo" as an oppressive political assertion. My great grandfather was locked in a cage, too small to stand or lie down in, by the Red Guard. That was after they'd forced him to dive into the village pond, searching the icy muck for several hours to find a couple of guns – which never turned up. After they released him he tried to hang himself but was brought down and eventually revived by my great grandmother and his sister. His daughter in law, my grandmother, went through years of being taken from the house in the small hours of the morning to confess her capitalist thoughts while kneeling on shards of shell and glass. That Red Guard is whom you side with if, as a policeman or whatever, you greet me with "níhǎo". But if you're just an everyday person, it's fine! I speak a little of the common dialect, too, and do understand the newfangled informal greeting when it doesn't come from government.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 06, 2026

Replying to @inthehands@hachyderm.io

@inthehands My encounters with Dawkins always ended in frustration about how often he makes things up. Good at slick word patterns but no concern for evidence. He's like a LLM except that he doesn't confess and apologise between fabrications.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · May 02, 2026

Replying to @davemosk@mastodon.nz

@davemosk@mastodon.nz I'm not yet convinced that it really works. I see lots of Bluesky posts via Mastodon but, when clicked on, the majority of them take me to "you can't see this if you're not logged into Bluesky" taunts.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @thomasbeagle@mastodon.nz

@thomasbeagle@mastodon.nz Why not? But if really not, I can assure you that my mum's crêpe pan works on induction and it cost something like $20. She never uses it – it was bought for my son to use when he visits. My wife used it once and concluded that it doesn't work so she bought another, and my son finds that both work perfectly well.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @craftygardennz@mastodon.nz

@craftygardennz@mastodon.nz è così!

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @mwt@mastodon.nz

@mwt @pezmico I find the staff at Hauora (on Collingwood opposite entrance to Buxton Square) good, much better than at pharmacies. Possibly because they don't have to deal with retail pressures.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 16, 2026

I'm intrigued that "viral" now carries positive connotations whereas "bacterial," "fungal" and "microbial" still do not.

#linguistics

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 12, 2026

Replying to @MostlyTato@mstdn.social

@MostlyTato @cobweb Random ads are good, too. Much more interesting than targetted ads – randomised ads tell me about things that I don't know about – surely that's the point, rather than driving me to hate companies that I already get stuff from?

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 11, 2026

Replying to @MostlyTato@mstdn.social

@MostlyTato @cobweb I'd be quite happy with advertising if it weren't intrusive. I still read the ads in paper newspapers. But I can't even read the article in the on-line ones, even the same newspaper, without blockers. And then there are the news sites with auto-play videos. What kind of arsehole makes those? Easy answer: the kind whose news I won't read.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 06, 2026

Replying to @Elizafox@social.treehouse.systems

@Elizafox @jlapoutre ιnδεεδ sο, mγ βεlουεδ ςΗιlδ.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Apr 06, 2026

Replying to @Elizafox@social.treehouse.systems

@Elizafox @jlapoutre So a Hitler-loving, ancient-alien-worshipping toddler, then.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Mar 31, 2026

Progress made with parents!

Relieved the edema in mum's feet; she was all giggly this morning because her toes look like toes again rather than the sausages that she's been putting up with all this time. She did a full lap around Pak'n'save, after weeks of barely being able to walk up and down the hallway. The GP came by to check on her today and was utterly confused by how well she's feeling. He was expecting her to be immobile. These are still the end days, but right now they are good end days.

Also relieved the sciatica in dad's back; he was literally dumbfounded by the sudden absence of pain – he'd forgotten what it felt like after all these decades. Just stood there with the oddest smile. To think that all those physiotherapists, pain specialists and the ACC runaround did not do this at all. He long ago gave up on it and just spends half-days lying on the floor when it hurts.

Much of this week's outcomes are because of two physiotherapists who treated me when my spine and my son's spine were misaligned over the past couple of years, and taught me enough of their knowledge to combine with qigong and Chinese medical soup treatments that I'd learnt elsewhere.

Somehow we need to get this knowledge out to where it's needed.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Mar 31, 2026

Got another evasive e-mail from #managemyhealth, who appear unwilling to tell me what of my personal information they hold. Or, more likely, not intelligent enough to understand that I want a list, not directions to mess around with their website.

Forwarded to Privacy Commission as an addendum to my complaint, qua evidence of continuing to drag heels in poor faith.

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Alistair K @libroraptor@mastodon.nz · Mar 14, 2026

Replying to @domi@donotsta.re

@domi

Long preamble about why you might want to know this. Probably won't get to an answer, but might end by re-stating the question and saying that the question is important.
Long autobiographical preface, most of it digressive and gratuitous rather than prefatory. Followed by numerous photos purporting to document the process, but not really showing much at all. Ends with a trite non-answer about the author's personal experience.

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Alistair K

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