Alex Weatherall

@michaelslav.bsky.social hey there. How are you.

Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternatives

Useful stuff

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Left wing vote over twice the size of the nutjobs, sorry, rightwingers.

Final vote tally as Greens win by-election published at 04:48 04:48 We can now bring you the full voting tallies: Green Party - 14,980 Reform UK - 10,578 Labour Party - 9,364 Conservative Party - 706

Good news to wake up (too early) to:

Worth noting the combined Green/Labour vote was more than double Reform. Didn't even need tactical voting to beat them in the end.

Maybe if they hadn't picked such a useless candidate they would have done better.

We've had no internet all week - national school network upgrade project - this week was our turn. It's been fairly easy tbh.

And the telephone boxes were 5 ft tall.

Do they though

Convergent evolution of pie.

Not in a coalition - no way!
You gave us the cheap lunch debacle. Imagine if you ran the entire ed department.
You don't have a mandate for this suggestion nor the resulting power it would award junior coalition members.
Stay in your lane.
#nzpol

'Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Imagine being paid to write this nonsense.

I have one of this man's biology books from years ago. I have decided not to add it to my charity book donation I am collating because people might see it and think he has something useful to say.

But then her cousins are just like "Oh, you're a boy? OK. Let's have an adventure". They accept them for who they are, pretty much immediately. And they went on to appear in TWENTY more books up to 1963, and stayed as George the whole time, and nobody tried to ban them because of it.

Headline from The Telegraph of an idiotic piece by Matt Ridley: CO2 is simply not a danger to human health, and it's actively good for crops.

Spoken like someone locked in a poorly ventilated room.

ARRGH - who would use AI for an image like this? There are so many actual real examples.

This cartoon of his lives rent free in my brain.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Red Dust Rebellion timeline is still well and truly on track. How did I know this was going to happen, lol :)

Spreading the Teacher Tapp word makes the collective voice of teachers stronger. Download our FREE documents to use at staff CPD sessions, conferences and meetings. Reported by Teacher Tapp.

Make the collective voice of teachers stronger 🗣️

Download our documents to use at staff CPD sessions, conferences and meetings to spread the word about Teacher Tapp.

🌟 Access your FREE downloads here: bit.ly/TeacherTappSlides

Twin Cities tow truck driver returns abandoned vehicles to families after ICE arrests Juan Leon sends a "chase" car to check out where abandoned vehicles are located and arranges discreet drop-offs. Since late December, he estimated they have dropped off 250 cars.

ICE has grabbed so many people from their vehicles that there are abandoned cars across Minnesota.

This tow truck driver returns the cars for free as a public service, and he’s been getting death threats.

They hate the helpers.

Which is why must keep helping.

BRIGHT COMET ALERT: It took a million years to get here, and now “this lovely comet is gracing southern skies,” reports Ian Griffin, who photographed Comet Wierzchoś (C/2024 E1) last night from Middlemarch, New Zealand spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload...

It's been a long time since we've seen anyone in politics act like him. It is depressing.

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New sensor uses topological material to detect helium leaks – Physics World Device works by monitoring frequency of sound waves propagating through a kagome material

Helium is a colourless, odourless gas that barely reacts with anything, which makes identifying helium leaks a real challenge. This sensor detects them by monitoring how sound waves propagate through a topological material – no chemical reactions required. 🧪⚛️

physicsworld.com/a/new-sensor...

Took a Bad Turn FoxTrot by Bill Amend | January 25, 2026

foxtrot.com/2026/01/25/t... #ITeachPhysics

Encrypted qubits can be cloned and stored in multiple locations – Physics World “Elegant” result has implications for a quantum internet

Surprising result has implications for quantum multicloud storage and information loss from black holes. 🧪⚛️ ow.ly/Zcvr50Y1LOH

Is he after Antarctica now?

A reminder, penguins reside in the southern hemisphere.
You ain't going to find them in Greenland.

I was thinking yesterday that if you spent the morning saying that Starmer was doing the sensible thing and indeed any criticism of his approach was our fault for being childish "love actually" fans, that surely meant you were committed to the view that Carney was making a big mistake.