Grant Whitehouse

@Tocelot @tmhammer @FlyAirNZ has had that feature since 2011. The seatbelts are configured to work. Got upgraded to one coming back from LA a few years back…slept like a baby.

@tmhammer Hmm true that might be tricky to make work

United Relax Row - convert 3 economy seats into a lie-flat couch starting 2027. this is going to seriously upgrade family travel!

AI is gonna take your job and your girl.

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story. A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island? It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel. These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time. Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’ Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’ Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind. Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world. I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived. I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life. Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet. 1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output. The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice. Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet. And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.” This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one. We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

Five years ago today, Donald Trump urged his supporters to attack Congress and the Capitol over a proven lie. More than 140 police officers were injured. Trump then pardoned the attackers. He betrayed his oath and his country, and we won't ever forget it.

And THAT, is how you correctly “do your own research”‼️

@HaurakiGulfWx Cloud this morning were very cool.

The cold upper low responsible for the rain and thunderstorms over the last 18 hours affecting parts of the upper North Island is moving right over the upper North today. This means a larger temperature gradient between the surface and the mid troposphere triggering more instability and a higher chance of hail with any thunderstorms that develop. Keep your eyes on the sky & radar again this afternoon if you are outdoors, especially around northern Auckland, lower and eastern Northland.

@HaurakiGulfWx Thanks for your mahi. Hope you have a great 2026.

Good-bye 2025. The last day of the year will have an unsettled afternoon and evening with a strong northerly flow containing showers and downpours from the weakening low in the Tasman. The heaviest of the showers will be mostly contained in the corridor from lower Northland to South Auckland. Best to keep an eye on the radar and sky wherever you are today and this evening. 2025 was an overall wetter and milder than normal year for upper North Island. The most extreme weather events were the Mangawhai tornado 26th January and Ex-tropical cyclone Tam on 17th April. Here were some observation highlights across the upper North Island over the year up to 7am 31st December. Max Temp: 30.9°c, Whitianga, Coromandel Peninsula 7th Dec Min Temp: -1.2°c, Ahuroa, Auckland & Waihi, Coromandel 23rd July Ave temp for 2025: 16.6°c at our HGW climate station. Wettest place: 4540mm, Pinnacles, Coromandel Driest place: 881mm, Gulf Harbour, Auckland Min air pressure: 986.8 hPa Howick Auckland Max wind: 84 knots (155 km/h), Cape Reinga 17th April Thunderstorm days: 16 days Space weather Aurora sightings: 1st June G4 solar storm Cyclones: Ex-TC Tam 17th April Tornadoes: An EF1 tornado @ Mangawhai 26th Jan Snowfall: Kohukohunui, Hunua Ranges 19th August Number of earthquakes: 61 Largest felt quake: M3.4, 35km East of Whangarei Heads, 16th July Tsunami: 15cm wave height @Great Barrier Island M8.8 Great Russia quake 31/7 (Sources: Private stations, council rain gauges, GeoNet and Land Information New Zealand)

@RBReich Job loss. But thank you for your content this year…it helps. Hope you have a cracker.

In the spirit of the awful year that’s just about to end, let me ask this question: What’s the sh*ttiest year you’ve lived through so far? Let me know your thoughts. robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours…

Wow

@dandcaldwell No. She is 100% right. kyivpost.com/opinion/66329

@FringeViews He stops to reload. White man got shot later after throwing rocks at shooter. Nothing to see here, move along.

What is the man in the white shirt doing? Is he pointing something at the shooter? Why does the shooter immediately stop, lower his weapon and back off after the man points/signals to him? (slow motion replay w close up in second half) Bondi shooting

The lies & evasions are piling up. We are at 25 and counting. These guys just keep lying themselves into new contradictions. defiance.news/p/the-boat-str…

@alex_prompter Playbook please

ChatGPT just became the new Google. Except people don't compare 10 tabs anymore. They ask once. Buy from whoever gets mentioned. Done. The problem: Most brands aren't showing up in those ChatGPT answers. Some companies like Webflow figured this out early and built content specifically for how AI reads and cites information. Result: 614% more traffic. Chime did the same and got 3x more mentions across AI search. I just got access to the actual playbook these companies used internally. AirOps dropped it for FREE. Here's what's inside: → How to track your brand across ChatGPT & Perplexity → 37-point checklist for AI-citable content → Real case studies with revenue numbers Comment "PLAYBOOK" and I'll DM it to you.

18,000 released emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Yahoo account confirm that prosecutors opened a money-laundering investigation running parallel to the #Epstein rape trafficking. It was shut down by US officials to prevent exposure of major institutions and individuals. #OpDeathEaters #3E 🧵 spookyconnections.com/2025/11/09/the…

Jessica Tarlov is cooking Trump, again: “She’s right, our allies have figured out the cheat code. Treat him like a toddler playing king, hand him a fake crown, and he’ll trade away America’s leverage for applause.” The most fragile ego in politics masquerading as strength.

One day in the future there is going to be a kid in the US and he’s going to find his grandfathers mask and ICE patch hidden in the attic and be extremely disappointed.

“This Week in Democracy – Week 32: 'Maybe We Like a Dictator,' Says Wannabe Dictator Donald Trump” Zeteo's project to document the ongoing, pressing, week-by-week growth of authoritarianism in Donald Trump's second term. zeteo.com/p/this-week-in…

The president of the United States is wearing a tacky red hat saying he was right about everything while bragging about all the tacky gold he decorated the Oval Office with. This is how empires die.