Gareth Wilson
4.9K posts
In a just world, New Zealand’s answer would be Rewi Alley. But for now the answer is Drew Ne’emia
Charles Bramesco@intothecrevasse
One of my favorite games is “Who’s the Most Famous Person in the World,” where you pick a country and guess who the most famous person from there is. Some are easy (Barbados—Rihanna), but I’m now wondering about France. Probably some footballer, right
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@ESRogs @MattZeitlin The plot of Moana, where Polynesians avoid long-distance ocean travel for a thousand years, is based on actual Polynesian history.
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@MattZeitlin - New Zealand was settled after Hawaii
- Vikings made it to North America before anyone made it to New Zealand (that we know of)
- New Zealand has no native land mammals
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australia and new zealand were settled 50,000 years apart
Ramin Nasibov@RaminNasibov
What historical fact sounds fake but is true?
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@RaminNasibov Senator Chuck Grassley has lived during the reign of five British monarchs.
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@GGarethwilson @blogboynick If you could memorize your English phrasal verbs without even knowing what they were, you can figure out which verbs go with which Polynesian passive suffixes. Back to the books, buddy.
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@liamvincent26 Was it also blessed by the Bishop of Waikato and Taranaki?
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A brand new wing of my local hospital with state-of-the-art facilities just opened and people in the local FB page comments are moaning about it having a Māori name and being blessed by local Iwi.
Perfect summation of 2026 New Zealand.
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@ClintVSmith Did you expect increased enrollment when you were designing it?
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Fees free was about not sending young adults into life already heavily indebted (I was part of the team that designed it)
It worked
since fees free was introduced: the number of NZ-based Kiwis with student loan debt has fallen by 113,000 & their total debt has fallen by $550m
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Regardless of whether it's gas-powered or battery-powered, this humie's brain doesn't seem to be running, period.
Not going to lie - a battery-powered intercontinental airliner would be amazing in its size and complexity, but even stupider than this humie in the end.
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@SCShipyards Tom Clancy had them deployed to Israel to enforce a peace deal. Several problems with that, but militarily they could have handled it.
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The best part is that the Swiss Guard are no-joke "hard".
I mean, they're a tiny military force in the grand scheme of things, but they train incessantly, have some decent hardware, and know what they're doing.
The "drip" is just an absolutely awesome bonus.
GIF
Mando Wookie@MandoWookie
@SCShipyards Im of the opinion that the US would be a much healthier place if most of the US Secret Service went around dressed in Revolutionary War uniforms doing silly walks & being goofy goobers, but are all retired SF with P90s & MP7s under their coats.
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@NerdCraveYT @JJ_McCullough Veronica's rich dad in the Archie comics was very proud of having a computer that paid his bills for him.
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To be fair, everything is automated and can be done on your phone back then you had to wait for a bill to come in the mail. You probably had like 10 of them and you had to write a check and mail it back to them or physically take money to a Brick + Mortar office for each individual bill. It was a much bigger deal back then.
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I don’t know if this is because I am a renter or what, but I must say “paying bills” is a much smaller part of my grown-up life than the TV shows I watched as a kid had led me to believe.
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@guyatthediner Larry Niven had all the pregnant Belters stay in a 1-g habitat until the baby was born.
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I'm surprised more scifi doesn't begin with the premise that Venus and rotating space stations are the only places in the solar system besides Earth that humans can colonize.
Pinboard@Pinboard
Whether there's ever a settlement on Mars depends entirely on whether healthy human embryos can develop in 0.38g, an open scientific question immune to stock incentive plans.
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I've heard land acknowledgment statements before (not as often as Twitter would make it seem, maybe like once?)
But I have never seen a land acknowledgment *button*
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@ClintVSmith Our most American PM would support a war that most Americans don't?
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I was surprised people thought Luxon's ambiguity on the Iran War was about not pissing off the US by publicly opposing them
Just seemed obvious our most American PM, who spent years there and peppers his speech with American phrases, would be reflexively pro-Trump and pro-war
Jamie Ensor@JamieEnsor
Coalition crisis talks were held in the Beehive last night. The Herald obtained emails appearing to show PM Luxon wanted to give explicit public support for war in Iran. Winston Peters said this would have run “counter to NZ national interests”. Big story from @coughlthom ⬇️
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Trying to figure out what's the modern day Dodecahedron, an object that everyone uses and is trivially common to us but that would stump people in two thousand years
Rome@ConsulofRome_
These are Roman Dodecahedrons. Hundreds have been found across Europe dating back to the 2nd century and they are used for
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@TexasTesler @MikeRGlenn Both in the movie and in the real-life inspiration, the whole mess started because the Marines were firing across the border for no reason.
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@MikeRGlenn they lose two good marines to dishonorable discharge, a Lt Col kills himself and a Col gets sent to jail over a loser marine who couldn’t keep up. And we wonder why we don’t win wars any more.
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I've always thought "A Few Good Men" was a stupid movie because the story rests on the notion that a battle-hardened Marine Corps colonel can get so rattled by a Lt. j.g. JAG officer that he admits to a felony on the stand.
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@mattyglesias One life lesson of mine is that even very wealthy people can live lives of quiet desperation.
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no shade the only person that could really tell the MICHAEL JACKSON story in the way it should be told, the good, bad and ugly, is… and I really do hate to say it… RYAN MURPHY.
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@IAmARobot0101 @nise_yoshimi I thought that was "rapture Elon".
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alright im easy prey. this stuff made me smile in a wry and disaffected way
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@tothcsabatibor "Trouble at work? Low pay, long hours?"
"I have no complaints."
"Long lines at the shops, bad food?"
"I have no complaints."
"Then why do you want to emigrate?"
"Because then I can have complaints."
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I will never forget the Communists for what they did to my family
- being able to buy more than 1 pair of shoes
- a flat to raise kids in
- running water with a water boiler
- a Skoda and a Trabant to carry the family around in
- lake resort vacations at Balaton on trade union membership
Bastards :(
Eastern Bloc Visuals@eastblocvisuals
Ezustpart SZOT IV resort on the shores of Lake Balaton, Hungary, 1980s.
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@GregTrayling @Quasilocal Asimov's father told him once that he was halfway through the book and was enjoying the suspense of whether they'd find a rational square root of 2.
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@Quasilocal I started to read about stuff like that about then, mainly from some Asimov book and a few others in the grade school library. Grade 6/7 is the perfect time. You may change the course of a life with that.
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Tomorrow I'm going to show some 7th graders how to prove the irrationality of \sqrt{2} -- is this too ambitious?
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