iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Trish Greenhalgh @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Every summer I repost this article on how to spot drowning. Please read it and pass on. In the last few years I’ve had SIX messages from people who saved a kid’s life after clicking on the link from my feed. slate.com/technology/2...

slate.com

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.

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Buckinghamshire Archives @bucksarchives.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

We’ve been told our content needs to be more informative so here you go

An incredibly silly meme with an image of Buckinghamshire's waterways. The following text is around it.

'Can't remember the names of the rivers and waterways in historic Buckinghamshire? Try this handy mnemonic!

"Roman roads really ran right resiliently"

[The first letter of the following words (R) is highlighted]
River Thames
River Great Ouse
River Wye
River Thame
River Colne
River Ouzel'

There is an image of an otter in the bottom left with a speech bubble says 'It's easy!'

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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

An infinite number of mathematicians enter a bar. The 1st orders a beer. The next says: "I'll have 1/2 of what he ordered" The next says: "I'll have 1/2 of that..." The bartender stops them, pours two beers and says: "I get it, but you need to know your limits."

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Jonathan Calder @lordbonkers.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

The RAF 80 Wing was formed in 1940 and comprised a team of specialist wireless operators who sent radio signal beams to throw German pilots off course, tricking them into releasing their bombs away from their intended targets.

liberalengland.blogspot.com

How Charley fooled the Luftwaffe and saved Midland cities

Here's the blurb for one of the short Secret Leicestershire features on BBC Sounds – The secret RAF base which foiled the Nazis : Slightly...

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Colin Gorrie @colingorrie.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

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Dr. SkySkull @drskyskull.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

I get the joke here, but it is important to stress to folks that we're taught a lot of stuff that most of us will never use, because: 1. learning it makes you better prepared for whatever path your career eventually takes, and 2. learning abstract math trains one's brain to *think*, in general

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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 18/11/2025

Beam Dump xkcd.com/3168/

Comic. [Person with ponytail pointing at diagram while speaking to three other people] PERSON: If the emergency stop is activated, any riders on the waterslide will be diverted into the beam dump, a large graphite block which will safely absorb their momentum. [caption] We regretted hiring an accelerator physicist to design our water park.

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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 16/11/2025

British and Australian chemists have discovered a powerful new antibiotic called pre-methylenomycin C lactone, hiding in a well-known soil bacterium. This molecule kills drug-resistant bacteria without triggering resistance. buff.ly/YlXaONo #ShareGoodNewsToo

buff.ly

Scientists find hidden antibiotic 100x stronger against deadly superbugs

A team of scientists discovered a hidden antibiotic 100 times stronger than existing drugs against deadly superbugs like MRSA. The molecule had been overlooked for decades in a familiar bacterium. It…

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Kit Yates @kityates.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

Why shouldn't you trust someone you see drawing on graph paper? They're definitely plotting something.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 01/09/2025

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.

Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

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Dope, a meme chamber @dannybirchall.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

the scenario we all feared

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Micah @rincewind.run · 26/07/2025

platforming sections in games that are not designed to be platformers are almost universally terrible and should not be added

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Dan Snow @thehistoryguy.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Not for the first time I am begging angry people to put the phone down, walk through actual streets, go to actual pubs, stand on the touch line at local sports clubs, browse Saturday markets, chat with ramblers on footpaths and rediscover beauty & contentedness.

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Sean Jones KC @seanjones.org · 23/06/2025

By the time you’ve reached your forties you will have lived to see the newspapers that insisted that the country you grew up in was on the verge of social collapse portray those very same years of your youth as a period of blissful social cohesion.

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Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

If you read down this Mail article long enough, you get to this grudging admission: "76% of pupils at Kobi Nazrul are meeting 'expected standards' in reading, writing and maths. That compares with a local average of 71 per cent and an average of 61 per cent in England." . archive.ph/wip/lmv8G

Mail headline: the school where NONE of the pupils speak English as first language

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Trish Greenhalgh @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Thanks for the reminder @janemunday.bsky.social. Every summer, I repost this article DROWNING DOES NOT LOOK LIKE DROWNING. To date, I know of FOUR kids who were saved after someone who'd clicked on the link learnt how to spot actual drowning. Take time to read and pass on. slate.com/technology/2...

slate.com

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect.

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Helene von Bismarck @helenebismarck.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

So,as a little thought-experiment, tell me something about the United Kingdom that works well and is actually quite impressive. I am not trying to sound like some boosterish politician. I just genuinely believe that making people believe that all is lost is a convenient pretext for shady characters.

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Lee Hurley @hleehurley.com · 26/05/2025

Hinckley Times doing more actual journalism than most of the mainstream media and platforming an actual trans person.

Hinkley Times full page artcile featuring large photo of Katie Neeves - ‘Supreme Court gender ruling is unworkable, it’s discriminatory and it sets us back 50 years’
TRANS ACTIVIST KATIE TALKS ABOUT CONFLICTS OF LAWS AND HOW IT’S NOT ABOUT TOILETS, BUT FEARMONGERING...

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Peter Smith @redpeter99.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Sharing a beer and a smoke with fifty something white blokes isn't an insight into the Northern working class. It's an insight into the shallowness of Farage's understanding of the North.

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Anna Mazzola @annamazz.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

It’s Mary Anning’s birthday, so time to share @katebeaton.bsky.social’s brilliant cartoon again.

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Mike Sowden @mikeachim.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

OK, this is wild. In September 2023, geophysicists across the world started monitoring a very odd signal coming from the ground under them. It was picked up in the Arctic. And Antarctica. It was detected everywhere, every 90 seconds, as regular as a metronome, for *nine days*. What the HELL? 1/

Unsplash image of the Earth, mostly the nightside with a tracery of city lights on every continent.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 11/05/2025

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather

This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...

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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

What Labour should be doing is creating a new narrative about immigration - about welcoming people who make a contribution but reducing the numbers who don't. Pretending to be super tough pisses off liberals and won't be believed by Reform voters.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 09/05/2025

Discworld QOTD, from Snuff

It always embarrassed Samuel Vimes when civilians tried to speak to him in what they thought was “policeman.” If it came to that, he hated thinking of them as civilians. What was a policeman, if not a civilian with a uniform and a badge? But they tended to use the term these days as a way of describing people who were not policemen. It was a dangerous habit: once policemen stopped being civilians the only other thing they could be was soldiers.

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Emma @dilemma-emma.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Recognising that I'm a few years behind the times (as usual), but Line Of Duty is pretty good, isn't it?

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Kit Yates @kityates.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

As Liverpool win the Premier League for the second time, they complete the opening of a quite remarkable sequence, 33 years in the making. #Fibonacci

A table showing the number of imes teams have won the Premier League in ascending order.
The sequence goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 - the first seven terms of the Fibonacci sequence.

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Amnesty International UK @amnestyuk.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Today, thousands gathered across the country - from Hastings to London to Glasgow - to say: we will always stand with trans people. Trans rights are human rights. 🏳️‍⚧️

Someone holding a sign saying: Respect existence or expect resistance.

Parents holding up a sign saying: "this mum says trans rights are human rights" and "our beautiful daughter is trans."

Someone holding a sign saying "you can't legislate us out of existence."

Someone holding a sign saying "i love my trans self. I love my trans friends."

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The Mary Rose Museum @maryrosemuseum.bsky.social · 15/04/2025

On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, we thought we'd answer a question that's often asked, "If they raised the Mary Rose, why not raise the Titanic?" Allow our scaled diagram to explain...

A light blue diagram depicting the sea, with the water's surface at the top, and just below it is an outline of the Mary Rose, with the depth (12m, 40ft or 6.7 fathoms). There is a line showing the seabed, which takes a rapid dive into the vertical...

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Micah @rincewind.run · 25/03/2025

Discworld QOTD, from Carpe Jugulum

“Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that - “

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes -“

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

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Emma @dilemma-emma.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

If I've learnt anything it's never put any furniture on e.g. Facebook Marketplace for free, because you will get the worst time wasters in the world. For example: multiple messages back and forth only for the guy to pull out on collection day because I didn't respond to a message quickly enough 🙄

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Emma @dilemma-emma.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

👉 Entschuldigung or genau 👉 Lemgo with my parents or Berlin for two of my friends getting married or Heidelberg with friends or Darmstadt for science. There's been a few amazing trips to Germany 😊 👉 Duolingo 🦉? Had to study French at school

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Moudhy Al-Rashid (she/her) @moudhy.bsky.social · 03/02/2025

This is such a great question that I think it deserves a whole thread. The cuneiform writing system included numbers, and we know how to say the names of many of these numbers in both Akkadian and Sumerian (languages that cuneiform was used to write). Let's start with Sumerian.

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Novelty Cistern @noveltycistern.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

ME: *writing in my journal with the sole aim of pissing off future historians and archaeologists* I returned to my home - which is built in the usual style - by the normal way, and prepared and ate dinner in the way I often but not always do

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Fishbourne Roman Palace @romanpalace.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

That's not a Roman Beaker. THIS is a Roman Beaker...

Beaker from the Muppets with a clumsily photoshopped roman helmet on his head.

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millyallen.bsky.social @millyallen.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

Wondering around Leicester before first Vernacular Architecture Group winter conference. This is the spectacular guildhall building with a rich history! #Leicester #historicbuilding #archaeology

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🍂Violet Vanguard🍂 @violetvanguard.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Copied (with permission) from a discworld group I’m in if anyone can help even if it’s just a share

Hogfather million to one chance search

Hi everyone, this is a huge longshot but wondering if any of you lovely folk might be able to help. My partner just told me that her dad (who sadly died more than 20 years ago) gave her a hardback copy of Hogfather, but it got lost in one of her moves not long after he died.

I doubt we'd ever find it, but it would be an amazing New Year miracle if we could discover it and I could buy it back if it's still out there. It's signed in the front cover "To Anthea" and probably says from Dad or similar.

Like I say, it's a million to one chance...

Thanks for reading.

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Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 26/12/2024

About a 10th of the number of Ukrainian refugee children state schools took in without any panicked coverage. Such nonsense.

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cal? @calgif.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

For sale: ship of theseus Condition: used, like new

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Rosy Favicchio @rosyf.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

Just as a clinician can, with some studying, understand how nuclear physics or mathematical modelling are used, so can teachers, lawyers, plumbers, engineers, librarians, nurses or shop-keepers. Job status and educational achievements are not the bottleneck here, science communication is. #scicomms

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Jay Hulme @jayhulmepoet.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

I wrote a whole essay in my journalism degree years ago about how the destruction of local news is, in fact, a huge contributor to the destruction of good news reporting more widely, and enables the degradation of society as local communities are unable to see and react to injustices locally.

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GUINNESS @guinnessisacat.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

WHEN YOU ARE RESTING AND ALSO HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

Close up of Guinness the black cat. He has a haunted look suggesting an existential crisis.

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Natural History Museum, London @nhm-london.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

👋 It's 15 days until Christmas but our first day on Bluesky! Our festive animatronic T. rex says hello!

An animatronic T. rex dinosaur wearing a white, red and green patterned Christmas jumper, standing on fake snow with cardboard presents behind

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Jack Monroe @jackmonroe.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Someone needs to invent some kind of online calculator whereby we Brits can put in our recent healthcare appointments/meds/experiences and it’ll calculate what it would cost on average in the USA. Just to hammer home how bloody lucky we are to have the NHS and how fiercely we need to protect it.

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Hell-a Bambust 🏳️‍⚧️ (alleged transsexual)(spooky) @ela-bambust.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Who is excited to learn Roman numerals together? I, for one

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