'Sir' David Kirkwood MSc MIET MSP

It seems to me that our governments are enthusiastically doing the bidding of an international network of psychopathic megalomaniacs. If you have a better explanation for the state of the world today, please let me know.

@WingsScotland Can't he just unpick the weaving?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

@MartinKnight_ That's a shame, I preferred the dark chocolate version. And I was looking for a Topic earlier today! All together now: What's got a hazelnut in every bite? Squirrel sh...

Red Bounty bars have been quietly shelved. The dark chocolate version was discontinued in 2023 & despite Mars saying they were working to bring it back - they haven’t. It’s joined Topic in chocolate bar cemetery.

@SamaHoole #Moffat Farmers' Market is on every second Sunday of the month except January. See you there? facebook.com/share/18tF8PUT…

Every English market town had, until about 1990, a Saturday that meant something. A Saturday in Hereford, 1962. High Town. Six in the morning the stalls are going up. By eight the first customers are arriving. By ten the place is heaving. The cheese stall. Norman runs it with his wife Joan. They drive in from a farm at Whitchurch in a Bedford van. The cheeses are stacked under a striped canopy. A wheel of Single Gloucester from across the Severn, a wheel of Double Gloucester from the same dairy, a wheel of farmhouse Caerphilly from the Welsh side of the border. Norman cuts you a corner to taste before you buy. The butcher's stall. The Tudor brothers from the family farm at Madley. The meat is from animals they raised themselves. The Hereford beef hung for four weeks in the cold store at the farm. The lamb is theirs. The pork from a pig fattened on whey from the dairy. The sausages were made on Friday morning by their mother. The fish stall. A man from Birmingham who drives down on Friday nights and is back by lunchtime Saturday. The fish is off the Grimsby boats the day before. He has cod, plaice, smoked haddock, kippers, and a tray of brown shrimps from Morecambe Bay. The greengrocer. Vegetables from three farms within ten miles. Apples in season from an orchard at Putley. Plums from a man at Tarrington. Asparagus from the riverbank field at Eardisland for six weeks in May. The egg lady. Sits on a folding chair behind a trestle table covered with brown eggs in boxes. Mrs Powell from Bromyard. Twenty boxes, gone by eleven, never any left. The baker. Hot loaves brought in from the wood-fired oven at his bakehouse in Bishops Frome. The smell carried halfway across the square. Time to do the week's shop: about an hour. Food miles: in the low double digits. Stallholders you would still see at the school nativity in December: all of them. In 2026 the High Town Saturday market in Hereford still technically runs. Six stalls. Phone cases, second-hand books, an artisan candle pitch, a man selling olives from a tub. The cattle market that used to feed it was closed in 2011 and the site is now a £90 million shopping centre called, with no apparent irony, The Old Market. It contains a Costa, a Subway, a TK Maxx, a Waitrose, and a vape shop. The market still exists. It is in its last decade. If you live in a market town: go on Saturday. Buy from whoever is left. Tell them you'll be back. That is the entire intervention required.

Today is a great day for all of Scotland's "trained journalists". wingsoverscotland.com/the-final-robb…

I'm enjoying a lovely afternoon in the Ayrshire sunshine at @blairquhan , raising money for @whiteleysayr . A big crowd here, all having a great time.

The real victims of Murrell’s crimes are the ordinary Independence Supporters who gave their hard earned cash to the SNP with the express purpose of furthering the cause of independence. They will want to know how their donations could have been embezzled for so long without 1/6

An amusing anecdote about the fake working-class hero @AndyBurnhamGM

@is_glasgow Many years ago I tried to buy one of these from the company who made them (Town Art?) but by the time I had tracked them down they had gone bust.

More of Stan Bonnar's wonderful 1970s Stonehouse Elephants. #sculpture #stonehouse #publicart #lanarkshire #stanbonnar

@hellothisisivan Not if you use Brave browser.

The brutal irony of watching anything from the BBC Archive on YouTube is that it will be regularly interrupted by the ghastliest of modern advertising

my friend and his dev team got laid off today and the backstory is too funny they got hired together a month ago as full stack mern devs. for the first few weeks they were acting like absolute tech gods. they were merging PRs left and right and flexing on everyone about how fast they were shipping features turns out they were shipping pure garbage zero tests. infinite react loops that basically DDOSed their own database. they were literally hardcoding passwords straight into the repo. it was so bad the company had to hire a completely separate squad of senior devs just to fix their mess the seniors spent two straight weeks doing nothing but rewriting everything my friend's team built just to keep the servers from melting, the second the codebase was finally stable management fired my friend and his entire team on the spot now he is in the group chat begging for referrals like he wasn't just a walking liability. the delusion is unmatched.

@PicsRobs @YesterdaysBrit1 @helen79523614 👍

@dakppc @YesterdaysBrit1 @helen79523614 A wise chap.

This is the Daddy of all puddings. Just add milk 🥛

@PicsRobs @YesterdaysBrit1 @helen79523614 Both! My grandson suggested it.

@dakppc @YesterdaysBrit1 @helen79523614 Chocolate sprinkles or those multicoloured sprinkles?

@ComputerLove_ But it didn't reach its peak until 3.11. All downhill from there.

On this day in 1990, Windows 3.0 was released

@STVNews Given that I have lived in Europe's first Dark Sky town for nearly ten years, I'd say they've missed the bus. #Moffat #DarkSky

Highland Council could become the first local authority to set out a Dark Skies planning policy, taking light pollution into consideration when approving future developments. i.stv.tv/4uXT2NY

@anon_opin I knew you were going to say that.

Speech is an insanely slow method of communication. The fact that we haven't developed telepathy by now is an outrage.

@MyNamesGuy @MattCas04807118 👍

@dakppc @MattCas04807118 You're right, the lock would need to be on the 9.

We had one as making a call was an expensive thing for a one parent household.😊

@MyNamesGuy @MattCas04807118 And with the lock in that position you can still dial 0.

@dakppc @MattCas04807118 In the UK this allows you to dial the emergency services on 999 and non-local calls tend to start with a zero.

@travelingflying It was just called Star Wars when I dogged a physics tutorial to see it.

Did someone here see Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in theaters when it came out in 1977?

@YesterdaysBrit1 @helen79523614 It was real posh, had sprinkles on, so all gone. Sorry 😋

@dakppc @helen79523614 Did you save me some?

@KenGWiebe @engineers_feed It's going to be interesting when an engineer gains a meaningful position in government...

@engineers_feed The same analysis works with political systems. Analyze and democratic political party using the same approach. The result is interesting, and explains much about why our governments are so awful.

Engineers don't just build things. They think differently. 4 mental models that separate engineering thinking from everything else: 1. First principles Don't assume. Break every problem down to what's physically true. Elon Musk on battery costs: "What are batteries made of? What's the market value?" Start there. 2. Failure mode analysis Before asking "will this work?" ask "how will this fail?" The best engineers design failure in – slowly, visibly, safely. 3. Order of magnitude thinking Approximate before you calculate. Being 10x right matters more than being 1% precise too late. 4. Systems thinking Nothing fails in isolation. Every component has a relationship with everything else. The weak link is almost never where you're looking. These 4 models built everything that works.