iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

This petition was rejected. I'm extremely puzzled by the idea that the government is not responsible for whether the government posts on x dot com or not.

email reply from no-reply@partition.parliament.uk:

Sorry, we can’t accept your petition – “Stop using X.com for all official purposes”.

It calls for action relating to a particular individual, or organisation that the UK Government or Parliament is not responsible for – except where the organisation’s role or powers are set out in law, and the petition is to amend that law.

We can't accept petitions which call for actions with regard to named businesses.

We only reject petitions that don’t meet the petition standards:
https://petition.parliament.uk/standards

If you want to try again, click here to start a petition:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/start

Thanks,

The Petitions Team
House of Commons

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Reposted by Nathaniel Virgo

John C. Baez @johncarlosbaez.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Local Woman Just Thinks Flaming Forest Could Find More Peaceful Way to Protest Climate Change. theneedling.com/2026/07/02/l...

A roughly 70-year-old white woman, clearly rich (nicely done hair, haughty expression, elegant understated clothing), looking out the window of her house to see a flaming forest. From

https://theneedling.com/2026/07/02/local-woman-just-thinks-flaming-forest-could-find-more-peaceful-way-to-protest-climate-change/

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

I was surprised to find there isn't an official petition.parliament.uk petition asking the UK government to stop using X dot com. Do I know 5 people who would support a petition along the lines of the image? You don't need any qualification other than being a UK citizen.

Petition title: Stop using X.com for all official purposes

What you want the UK Government or Parliament to do: Recognise the danger that X.com presents to Britain, in terms of the influence of a foreign actor and lack of political neutrality, and immediately cease using it for all official and promotional purposes by government and individual MPs.

More information about your petition: Since its purchase in 2022, X (formally Twitter) cannot be seen as politically neutral. Its algorithm actively promotes the personal views of its owner, and entire sections of British society have stopped using it due to the overwhelming prevalence of extreme right-wing ideology on the platform. Yet X is still used as the primary social media outlet for outreach and promotion by the government and many of its MPs, leading to an extreme bias in who the government communicates with.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Does anyone reading this have a working Amiga emulator set up? I want to remind myself what the Workbench fonts looked like (Topaz, Diamond, Emerald, Garnet, Opal, Ruby, Sapphire), but it seems like no images of them exist anywhere online.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I'm a lot happier since I signed out of my Stack Exchange account and didn't sign in again

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

This didn't work in Japan because of the humidity, but here in the UK it's surprisingly effective. Air cooling by evaporation.

A box fan stands in front of an open window. In front of it is a bowl of water, into which is dipped a wet towel, which is suspended in front of the fan by hanging it on a ruler, which is held in place by a precariously balanced book acting as a counterweight. The fan blows air past the towel, evaporating the water that it wicks up from the bowl. The cooling can be boosted every now and then by pouring a little water over the towel to wet the top part.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

If you're in the UK you should read this, even if you don't think you know anyone affected. It buries the lead a bit tho: * the UK is mandating discrimination agains trans people, including what amounts to a toilet ban * this is a deliberate action by the Labour government 1/3

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Reposted by Nathaniel Virgo

Katy Montgomerie 🦗 @katymontgomerie.com · 22/05/2026

I can't believe how many politicians are saying "let's ban trans people from public life, but in a way that is respectful". Are you fucking thick? Who is this for?

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Reposted by Nathaniel Virgo

loren schmidt @lorenschmidt.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

intuition is valuable, but it's worth learning some precautions. internalized ideas, however miserable or out of place, will often feel like intuition. bias often feels like intuition.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Extremely niche academic UX complaint: why is it that every single journal have a login system that's incompatible with my browser's password manager?

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Proving stuff in Lean is the most addictive game I've played in ages

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

The whole is less than the product of its parts

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Idle wondering: are there readily available light sources that are outside the RGB gamut? It might be kind of cool to have a lamp that's an orange or aquamarine or visible violet more intense than we're used to seeing on screens.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

In this thread I'll review every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This will be going on for a while, feel free to mute it.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 19/10/2025

It's hard to remember the smell of a place when you're not there, but when you're in a place you love where you haven't been for a long time, it really hits you.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Does anyone know a good estimate of the total amount spent on open access fees / article processing charges by the UK government (or really any government)? I'm only interested in public funds, i.e. total cost to the taxpayer.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

I wish there was a browser that just didn't have the concept of tabs at all, but instead just kept track of your history in an organised way, such that you can always restore the state of a page you visited previously but never actually have more than one process running at once.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

Question for mathematicians: what do you do when your progress on a topic surpasses your ability to easily explain it to another person? It seems like sometimes there's a big gap between this point and the point where you're ready to present it - how do you keep your motivation going in this period?

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 12/04/2025

An actually useful use for AI would be if my system spellchecker could figure out that "operadic" and "retrocoalgebra" and "submanifold" and "submanifolds" and "shipbound" are words and not bother me about them, while still alerting me if I mistype them.

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Reposted by Nathaniel Virgo

Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

This is fantastic! This website allows you to watch TV stations from around the world. I just watched 2 minutes of Afghan volleyball. All the small regional TV stations from Germany are here too. Spread the word! Source: tv.garden

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Dumb question, but how do you find good music these days? Not music "for studying" etc. but music that has something to say. I feel like good new music used to just be everywhere but now I don't know how to access it at all. Is it just me getting old or is it genuinely harder to find?

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

A thread for some attempts at generative art. I'm trying to keep it as naive as possible, just writing Python scripts that spit out RGB arrays.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

I wrote an equation that I thought was great, so I drew a star next to it, but then I realised it was wrong, so I drew a sad face on the star, but then I realised it was right after all, and now I've got pages of notes about "the sad star equation".

some handwritten string diagram equations, one of which has a sad star drawn next to it

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

In this thread I'm going to write some science fiction. It's not going to have any characters or plot, it's just some wild speculation about what we'll find in the Universe in the coming decades. It's not meant to be a prediction, it's just a plausible story invented for fun.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 14/12/2024

There's a Wikipedia app that you can install on your phone, which has a *map mode*. It's a really fun way to find obscure yet notable things nearby.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 12/12/2024

Go home mathematical typewriter, you're drunk

A series of three equations from an old monograph written with a mathematical typewriter. The equations have so many subscripts and superscripts that they just look like wiggly lines of letters meandering across the page.

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Please tell me a cool theorem or mathematical fact that you learned about recently

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Nathaniel Virgo @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social · 13/11/2024

It's long past time I gave this site a go. How do I find all the category theorists and other fun maths people?

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