Time for a European GitHub?

Wild fires above the Elan Valley. I drove over there on Sunday evening and it was quite spectacular.

Remind me again what Google Android is built on? Oh and what is that operating system underlying the Google Chromebook? 🐧

Watership Down.

Bright Eyes, shining like fire.... Art Garfunkel will now be in your head for the rest of the day 😂

If only we'd thought of doing something like that before 🤔

There's a widespread view in Europe, which I happen to share, that the US is lost - for a considerable time. It's unlikely to be a dependable ally for at least a generation.

This is going to hurt Europe, but in the longer term US isolationism will hurt the US more than it will hurt the rest of the world. It makes a lot of sense for the opposition party in the US to be trying to prepare the ground for a repair of those relationships if and when they gett into power.

Good luck to them, but I think it's going to be too late.

Because anti-fascist groups are more dangerous than actual fascists, obviously. 🤔

I feel the orange man-baby's manhood has just been insulted.

This really isn't surprising, as more and more we're being discouraged from visiting our GPs. Things I would have gone to see my doctor about 20 years ago I know wouldn't even think about bothering, because it's such a palava to even get an appointment. So I just hope for the best and hope it will pass. Sometimes that might mean something that could have been prevented isn't prevented.

And then of course there's diet. But let's not lose sight of the state of healthcare.

Weird. One moment (only this weekend) I'm reading about Pine Marten reintroductions and how that's helping red squirrels reestablish themselves, and what a success that's being. And the next I'm reading about the demise of the ref squirrel and how something needs to be done about it.

Whilst this particular article is new, the story has been out now from other sources for a while. And it looks like the US has shot itself in the foot here, because that's been cited as at least part of the motivation for the EU looking to become independent in banking and technology from the US.

Well, good. It should have happened a long time ago; better still the situation should never have been allowed to arise.

Congratulations on managing to offend the Iranian, Israeli and USian regimes all at the same time. Best laugh I've had for weeks 😂

Milk of Magnesia. Coconut milk. Dandelion milk. These are all descriptions of very long standing (100s of years).

Shame about all the tracking cookies on that site, and turning them off involves going down a very long list. That's not compliant with European cookie laws as I understand it - opting out is supposed to be a simple "I don't want cookies". (And their "legitimate interest" to track me is of no interest to me).

Tough, they're a private company now. They need to make money. And if they can't, they either go under or they get nationalised. Whoever could have foreseen a situation like this? 🙄

It seems to me that nationalisation might be a good option right now. Just maybe it shouldn't have been privatised in the first place. 🤔

Actress Mali Ann Rees said inclusivity was key to encouraging more people to speak Welsh, with "no excuse" for unconscious bias.

There's a huge irony here for me. I called out such unconscious bias once, which was actually perpetrated by a black Welsh speaker against an Asian from South Wales. She called me a racist for calling her out! And Reddit being Reddit, she was then upvoted and I down

I won't forget that. It still intensely annoys me. So thanks Mali for taking my side here.

Data are plural, as my PhD supervisor always used to say.

It still feels wrong to me when it's used in the singular, especially in formal communication.

Not for him, no. But it's deeply concerning that this should have been allowed to happen. How many attacks never make the news, because the victim is not so infamous? And might some of these have been wrongly convicted?

On which subject, I (here in Cymru, not part of the Palantir NHS England problem) received a letter in the post this week asking if I wanted to take part in a large survey for the NHS, which would involve giving a blood sample for analysis. The address given was in England, and so I'm guessing it's a joint project with NHS Cymru and England.

I have to say that I am not intending to reply to the letter because of Palantir; it feels horribly like a data gathering exercise funded by them.

Does anyone else know about this?

This is pretty frightening stuff. I also bothered to take it through a fact check. The only error I could see was the only error that was picked up by my fact checker - that is, the author doesn't know their Tolkien well enough (the Palantiri did not belong to Sauron, he just happened to acquire one of them and use the net work of Palantiri for his evil purposes).

It's definitely worth a read.