3 March 2025
This week I accidentally stumbled upon an excellent resource created by the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) called Keep It Real Online. This website has content targeted at youth, as well as content for teachers in Primary and Intermediate/Secondary School.
4 March 2024
I'm a bit of a fan of internet drama - at least the kind where someone is accused of wrongdoing. The to and fro of accusations, rebuttals, evidence, and eventual apology video, with a backdrop of hundreds of eager new YouTubers hoping to gain followers by creating reaction videos, giving their own commentary, or even adding to the investigation, is fascinating to watch, and its online nature means that everything is easily accessible from the comfort of my living room. I can watch half a dozen videos, then go searching for background information, piecing together my own picture of who the main players are, how they're perceived within the online community, and just how screwed their internet “careers” are.
14 March 2022
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a video from a YouTube channel I keep an eye on for its coverage of cryptocurrency scams that looked interesting - the tale of Pixelmon, an NFT project that had recently sold over 7,000 NFTs for a grand total of around NZ$100 million. By the end of the week, Stuff and 1News had covered the story. Why did this project make the news here in NZ? Because the NFTs had been unveiled, and they were abysmal. And why did this story pique my interest? Because the person in charge of the project had been “doxxed” (had their identity revealed), and a screenshot of their LinkedIn profile in the video I watched showed that he had recently graduated from the University of Waikato - so it appeared he was one of our own, a Kiwi.
3 January 2022
As a programmer, I love a good story about buggy software. Maybe it makes me feel better about my own mistakes! So when I recently heard about a fun bug in the strategy game Civilisation, from way back in 1991, I was intrigued. Apparently the fallout from this particular code error (no pun intended) was that the peaceful world leader Mahatma Gandhi would suddenly become very fond of amassing and using nuclear weapons - a quirk that has been named Nuclear Gandhi.
16 November 2020
It was show weekend here in Canterbury. Another long weekend to squander in the garden and pottering about the house. I've also been thinking about why on the Xbox game Assassin's Creed Valhalla my son chose to stand up for the seemingly uninformed and offended peasant, rather than the man of medicine (aka warlock) who was bemoaning the general distrust in knowledge. Perhaps it was the jaunty animal skull head-piece the warlock was wearing that made him look more like the bad guy, or perhaps it was just the promise of better loot...
1 February 2015
Where popular culture is given a skeptical mark
1 May 2014
The game is … on. I've recently rewatched the new Sherlock and my partner always reacts to that misquote.
1 August 2008
Charlene Makaza went into hospital with an acute Aids-related condition in the first week of 2007. By the time the 10-year-old Zimbabwean girl died 18 hours later, doctors had decided she'd been murdered (Sunday Star Times, 25 May).
1 May 1994
Peter Lange mentions in his review a common creationist claim -- the lack of intermediate fossil forms. Someone whose name I've lost, recently wrote the following on sci.skeptic about the subject: