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  If anyone has any accessibility issues with https://hex.constituencies.org.uk/ please let me know. I* have tried to make sure all the hex maps are keyboard navigable with tooltips that should work with screenreaders. *with help from people like @gilesdring and @christianp over the years

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  I've been dipping into this continuing thread on and off https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750 I feel I should have had some 🍿 to hand.

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  Every single electricity company I've used has billing that deliberately makes it hard to easily compare periods of time. They must have people inventing ways to make it more confusing.

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  I get bothered about standing charges on electricity bills. Because they act in two ways that are counter to what we should be doing. Firstly they've basically doubled compared to gas since 2022. This discourages the switch from gas to electricity. Secondly, because they add a floor to how much you get charged, they discourage people from lowering electricity use. Gas put the costs of network operation onto unit prices but electricity puts it on the standing charge. These are choices.

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  Leeds folk, Leeds Stand Up To Racism are having an event to make the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Holbeck Moor.

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  In the 1930s the Blackshirts were defeated at the Battle of Holbeck Moor in Leeds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Holbeck_Moor) then again, a week later, at the battle of Cable Street in London (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street).

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  Does the average centi-billionaire (where 1b is 1000m) employ a thousand times more people than the average centi-millionaire?

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  I once played a very brief game of cricket in the Lovell Telescope (after a resurface but before it got properly tuned) because we wanted to recreate a scene from The Dish. We used a tennis ball to avoid damage. The Chief Engineer was wicket keeper. I'm bowling.

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  The exact amount to tax the wealth of the super rich, and the level of wealth it should kick in at, matters less right now than doing *something*. Endless arguments about it being 1% , 2% or 5% etc or start above £10m, £100m, or £1b etc just act to stop any wealth tax from happening. And that works to keep the richest gaining an ever larger share of everything.

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  The estate agent contacted me to tell me I hadn't paid my rent. Except I had. The amount they were after was an odd amount. It turns out they've increased my rent by 6.7% but I hadn't received any notice warning me about that. Hmm. :(

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  We all know Reform UK is an _English_ Imperialist company so follows long traditions of subjugation. Yes they'd want to destroy many of the languages of these islands (I'm surprised they will supposedly allow Welsh) but this was most likely a direct response to leaflets being made available in Urdu and Bangla recently. https://bylinetimes.com/2026/07/13/reform-uk-plans-to-jail-candidates-for-using-irish-gaelic-or-cornish-on-election-leaflets/ We should be standing in solidarity with the...

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  We have eyelids but we don't have earlids.

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  #SilentSunday #Scotland

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  When I see something like https://thenoisyroom.com/ I immediately start thinking about the problems. It seems very much from the perspective of there bring *one* public. That a "national poll" applies across many different countries. In all likelihood most of the world would be presented with US polls as what is "normal". Then there's the big owned platforms inevitably skewing the presented numbers for their owner's wishes. We can't jus...

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  A lazy Wednesday afternoon resting

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  In 2018 Theresa May promised to bring in a ban on LGBT "conversion therapy" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58683038 In 2020 Boris Johnson also said plans would be "brought forward" but then opened a public consultation instead. Liz Truss had no time to deliver on a previous promise. In 2023 Rishi Sunak was going to bring in a draft bill https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sunak-conversion-therapy-gay-trans-b2432375.html By 2025, Keir Starmer&...

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  I often get a bit frustrated when the UK publishes statistics that compare the nations of the UK where an "England" figure (England having roughly 10 times more people than Scotland) hides the systemic geographic disparities within "England".

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  Work blog post: Our archive of Bus Open Data https://open-innovations.org/blog/2026-04-30-our-archive-of-bus-data Where I suggest that somebody could take it on.

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  The York "zero post"

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  Someone in my community has asked me if I'd make an A4 poster for World Bee Day on 20th May. I started looking up information about bees and I found this Friends of the Earth bee identification guide: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/nature/bee-identification-guide The question is, why didn't they call it "Bee or not a bee?"?

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  This is one of the fish and chip restaurants near me. It was the original Harry Ramsdens (before they became a big, not great, chain). This resturant once described itself as the largest fish and chip shop in the world. It is now the Wetherby Whaler but still retains the grand, over-the-top, chandeliers. There is also a man who plays piano versions of hits of the day whilst you eat your chip butties.

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  RE: https://front-end.social/@benschwarz/116445796505977800 The hexes drew me to this post. Obviously. Then I spotted our Leeds wards hex map in the "Research and inspiration" section. I was a little surprised by the 10kB but then realised that was gzipped and that made more sense. I'm glad others are seeing that pre-rendered SVG for hex maps is good for multiple reasons.

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  Will an "open" project finally be allowed to be open today? 🤞

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  At the turn of the Millennium I remember people talking about how the US was likely to decline during the 21st Century. Back then I hadn't fully taken in how much the US would actively force themselves into decline and how much they'd decide to violently damage the rest of the world as they did so.

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  As I will be away on holiday next week, I have voted in next Thursday's local elections for both Town and City councils.

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  Been making up my hanging baskets. #bloomscrolling

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  500,000 people's data is taken out of UK Biobank and put up for sale on Alibaba: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/news/a-message-to-our-participants-uk-biobank-data-security-update/ UK Biobank demonstrating exactly the reasons I objected to these sorts of "Trusted Research Environments" that seem to give way too much unearned trust to "researchers" assuming that "legal contracts" are good enough to stop bad behaviour. But a contract doesn...

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  Would you be surprised to learn that the 10 UK MPs being given the most money from outside of their full time jobs are all Conservative or Reform MPs? https://open-innovations.org/projects/RMFI/

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  The company I've worked for for 10 years is winding down: https://open-innovations.org/blog/2026-04-14-it-s-goodbye-from-us

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  I asked HMRC what open source software there was for "Making Tax Digital". Their answer: use their software-finding tool. I'd asked them the question because their tool doesn't make that information available. Does such a thing exist?