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Alex Weatherall

@aweatherall.bsky.social
1K followers 388 following 1.9K posts

Physics Teacher (England and now Aotearoa New Zealand #NZEd #UKEd) Technical-co-founder @teachertapp.bsky.com Software dev for 12 years and teacher for 14 Love music, the sky, and my now antipodean home. Also on mastodon and no longer on twitter.

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Reposted by Alex Weatherall
Tom Fitton @tomfitton.bsky.social · 21h
Small, shy and clad head-to-claw in black, New Zealand’s karure, or black robin, has been crowned the country’s 2026 Bird of the Year. edition.cnn.com/2026/09/21/t...
edition.cnn.com
This tiny ‘goth’ bird was nearly extinct. Now it’s New Zealand’s Bird of the Year | CNN
Small, shy and clad head-to-claw in black, New Zealand’s karure, or black robin, has been crowned the country’s 2026 Bird of the Year.
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Prof Ian Hall @ianhall.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
23,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. That’s the amount of heat the oceans absorbed in 2025. A number so huge it’s almost meaningless…until you realise it’s roughly 40× humanity’s annual energy use. The ocean is buying us time. We’re running out of it. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
theguardian.com
World’s oceans absorbed record heat equal to 40 times annual global energy use
The injection of thermal energy comes amid an increasing rise in sea levels and continuing acidification
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Alf Dubs @alfdubs.bsky.social · 19h
I'm so very sad to hear of the death of Esther Ranzen who played an important role in reuniting me with Nicky Winton - the man who saved my life. It's so desperately sad that she couldn't choose assisted dying as was her wish.
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 11h
I went to Geneva a few weeks ago and spoke on a panel about the nature of time for a Geneva Watch Days event. While I was there, on a lark, I entered a competition to most precisely calibrate a Swiss watch. And today I found out that I won! 😃 www.instagram.com/reel/Dd6hUTB...
Me peering through a little magnifier at a tiny watch mechanism connected to some monitoring equipment, while making adjustments with a small screwdriver
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Riding With Robots @ridingrobots.bsky.social · 11h
Happy New Years from Mars. It's the first day of the new Martian year, which lasts 687 Earth days. According to the internationally adopted timekeeping system, this is Mars year 39. The Curiosity rover sent down this view from Gale Crater today.
Black-and-white photo of a rocky desert landscape with hills of layered rock.
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
UI take.
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Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I’ve been a writer and illustrator for decades, and the rise of genAI slop has only provided further proof that many of the clients who hire creative professionals need them as much for their judgement as they do for their skills.
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Grant Jacobs BioinfoTools/NotJustDNA 🔬🧬🖥️✍️📚🇳🇿 @notjustdna.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
#NZpol Saw this excellent quote-reply to Simeon Brown’s latest attack on Labour. Worth sharing.
David Peez @RebelEkonomista

"The truck driver in Pakuranga helps pay off a lawyer's loan." No, Simeon. He doesn't. Not a cent.

When the government lends a student money, it creates the dollars and credits their account. No tradie's tax was collected and posted to a law degree. When the graduate repays, those dollars are deleted, drained back out like tax. They don't land in the truck driver's pocket either.

So nobody foots the bill. The worker and the graduate aren't on opposite sides of a ledger. Setting them against each other is the trick, and it runs on the same myth as "add it to the tab", that the government is a household counting coins. It issues the currency. The real limits are real resources and inflation, not a truck driver's tax bill.

"Someone always pays." Sure. Just never the person you keep pointing at.

Read more: http://therebeleconomist.substack.com
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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 28/09/2026
‘What underlies the sense of affront is the assumption that the “people of England” are, as it were, a settled question, that the days of large-scale movements belong to the past, or ought to.’ Ferdinand Mount on immigration and emigration in the English imagination. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Ferdinand Mount · Modest and Misunderstood: Wretched Strangers
In the great immigration panics of today, sympathy is focused on the home team. We are the ones who are being hurt. It...
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Dizzygirl @dizzygirl.myatproto.social · 27/09/2026
It's super-diddly-duper intelligence.
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
U.I. Unintelligence
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Physics World @physicsworld.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Researchers have now found a new way to improve weather forecasts - by incorporating satellite measurements of water vapour isotopes. 🧪⚛️ physicsworld.com/a/heavy-wate...
physicsworld.com
Heavy water isotopes make weather predictions more accurate – Physics World
Incorporating satellite measurements of water vapour isotopes into weather models can improve weather forecasts, particularly when predicting heavy rainfall
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Tony @tiletony.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
It was a crime the first time he made the offer, and it's still a crime tonight.
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Easy Block. A 4 year old picture. Yesteryear...
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
@nsousanis.bsky.social for your collection
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Alom Shaha @alomshaha.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Physics Teachers! I’m sure you teach your students about the way in which the discovery of the motor effect saved millions of women in particular from drudgery - the invention of the washing machine and vacuum cleaner being two obvious examples.
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Terence Eden @edent.tel · 20/09/2026
A password manager. Something like BitWarden will pop up an autofill *only* on the real site. If you visit a fake site, the option to fill your password won't appear. That's the best way to stop accidentally logging in to scam sites. I wrote about this a few years ago: shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01...
shkspr.mobi
That's not how 2FA works
Another day, another high-profile website cloned to phish credentials. Tess Rinearson@_tessrIs this a phishing attempt? Goes to "githubverification.com" and asks for username and pw (if so, it nearly...
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Robin Ince @robinince.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Off to bed - thinking of Joe Harkness and all of those battling - the world as illustrated by the media and politics is not the same world as the one where so many are ready to listen to you
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Russell Garwood @russellgarwood.co.uk · 15/09/2026
Interested in how species diversity is split between major animal groups? Here is the infographic for you! 🧪⚒️🦀🦑 #evosky
An infographic showing the number of described and estimated species for major animal groups. There are more insects than anything else. Of the remaining groups, arachnids and nematodes are the most diverse.
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Radical Centrist @procedurepols.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
#NZPol www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...
rnz.co.nz
Possible hung parliament as Labour and National slump in latest poll
Both major parties are below the 30 percent mark with less than two months until the election, according to a new poll.
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Anand Menon @anandmenon.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
That’s selection for ya 😉
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Tim Harford @timharford.ft.com · 13/09/2026
I've been checking the source of quotes for my forthcoming book, and the performance of Gemini is extraordinary. I paste the quote into Google, and Gemini will barge in with the wrong answer over and over again. It's not an occasional thing - it's reliably wrong. Very odd.
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I say this as a science teacher. This late curriculum release is a mess.
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
When the new phase 4 Arts curriculum links to the science curriculum pages you know the MoE are trolling you #nzpol
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
A stake in the blame and the too-big-to-fail funding when this all comes tumbling down because they can't afford to continue to build this unsustainable technology that companies like theirs have wired into the very fabric of internet and OS's and SAAS for the last 4 years.
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026
Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.
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Adam Bienkov @adambienkov.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A reminder that Delo previously pled guilty in the US to violating money laundering protections and agreed to pay a $10 million fine for "willfully” breaking the law with his BitMex platform, which was described as "in effect a money laundering platform.” This is who owns Farage now
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
...we said "a prompt management program". There are not separate chatbots at work, they are not "interacting" or forming civilizations god help us. It is *one* LLM, being repeatedly queried by a program which uses the results of queries to build new queries in a structured way
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Make a band edible: Wheat Wheat Wheat
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Steve-o Stonebraker @sstoneb.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Units of measure history #ITeachPhysics
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Alom Shaha @alomshaha.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Sharing this shamelessly because this is the sort of thing that makes up for all the crap I went through writing my book and the awful experience I had with the other people who were supposed to be on my side when writing it.
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Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
If this wasn't a right wing group, they'd be proscribed as a terrorist organisation by next week. You know it, I know it. It's deeply shocking, what has happened to ostensibly centrist British politics.
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Schools Week @schoolsweek.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
❗ Schools have been warned 'there will be consequences' if Reform UK rules forcing them to regularly sing God Save the King are broken schoolsweek.co.uk/reform-there...
schoolsweek.co.uk
Reform: 'There will be consequences for not singing anthem'
Braverman believes parents will tip her off if heads don't follow her anthem and hymns rules
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Daniel Pomarède @pomarede.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
On this day, 49 years ago, September 5, 1977, Voyager 1 lifts off Credit: NASA flic.kr/p/2sz6avf 🔭🧪
Voyager 1 aboard the Titan III/Centaur lifts off on September 5, 1977, joining its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2, on a mission to the outer planets of our solar system. It made its closest approach of Jupiter on March 5, 1979, flew by Saturn in November 1980, and today continues its journey through interstellar space.
Credit: NASA
Image Number: 9141932
Date: September 5, 1977
Credit text: NASA on The Commons
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Governor Tim Walz @governorwalz.mn.gov · 05/09/2026
Good news: he lost.
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Ben Newmark @bennewmark.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
At some point soon someone somewhere is going to insist their school or department produces all resources using AI for "consistency" and I am getting ahead of this and saying this is a dreadful idea that needs to be destroyed at inception.
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ionchy @ionchy.ca · 05/09/2026
it's always disappointing to me when I see a silly online vote that is not some form of ranked choice voting because if it is not in the psyches of even the nerdiest online how are we ever going to get electoral reform anywhere IRL
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
But he knew about the polling... And that was deliberate obfuscation of money and providence. Appalling.
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Teacher Tapp @teachertapp.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
August was a busy month — GCSE and A Level results day kept our Head of Community, Grainne Hallahan, in high demand across the media amplifying YOUR voices! 📻 Here's a clip of her on Radio 4 discussing regional gaps in education👇
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Euler vem.
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Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I’m sure there’ll be hundreds of articles specifically about this in the press.
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Yup, it's a red flag!
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Andrew... Andrew... Andrew... Andrew.
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Author Krishna Prasanth Guttikonda @krishna-author.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
#booksky #books #Kindleunlimited #thriller #suspense #romance #novels #geopolitical #mythological #darkromance #women #contemporary #fiction #fantasy #crime #amazon #sifi #readingcommunity #writingcommunity #author #readers #indie
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Alex Weatherall @aweatherall.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Eulerv them.
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Chris Addison @mrchrisaddison.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Somewhere in England, a tired man turns off Channel 4 news and wearily puts on a bin.
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Daniel Moser @dmoser.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Pollution levels in London after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.
Map showing Lower Pollution levels in London after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.
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David Henig @davidheniguk.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Declaring a national emergency on day one to make it clear the rules don't apply to you is straight-out-of-the-textbook fascist.
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Captain Mark Kelly @captmarkkelly.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Before losing her life in 1986 aboard Space Shuttle Challenger, Christa McAuliffe was set to be the first teacher in space with plans to teach a lesson to kids around the world from orbit. Today is her birthday, and even now, her courage and dedication to education continues to inspire.
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