Michael Pleyer

@symbolicstorage.bsky.social

nerd. cognitive/evolutionary linguist. Assistant Prof at Center for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland (he/him) www.michaelpleyer.com @symbolicstorage@scholar.social @symbolicstorage

The only taxidermied blue whale in the world, 1865 CE, now housed at the Natural History Museum in Sweden. The public was allowed to enter the whale up until a couple was found having sex inside it. Now the whale’s jaws are opened only for special occasions, such as Swedish election days.

Malm whale in Sweden

Great apes reassure one another to maintain the peace Our new study shows that friendly touch before stressful events, like embracing, patting and even kissing, promotes tolerance and peace in chimpanzees and bonobos. Some BBC coverage 🙂 open-access paper below! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Great Apes kiss and cuddle to keep the peace, says study

Hugging before stressful events may be an ancient way of building trust, say scientists studying apes.

bbc.co.uk

Things That Are Awesome About Poland: Going to the Cinema! - I love Cinema City, tickets are cheap (I paid 23.10 zł - around 5,30€ to see the Odyssee on Kinowa Środa/Cinema Wednesday - And they show lots of movies in the original with Polish subtitles

Picture of the Cinema City CinemaPicture of the Booking Screen for The Odyssey

Things That Are Awesome About Poland: Fast and Cheap Internet and Mobile Data Fibre is everywhere here and it is cheap. - 83% of Polish households have access to fibre. In Germany it is 48.8%, and only half of those actually use fibre connections. - Screenshot is my WiFi in my flat in Toruń.

Screenshot of a WiFi speed test at my flat showing 635 Mbps

Revised! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies

The ubiquity and ease of use of large language models makes it easy to overlook the interactional and interpretive processes at play. To understand the attraction of this technology we need to trace i...

doi.org

Things That are Awesome About Poland: Żabka 🐸 . Żabka ("little frog") is a convenience store chain and it is everywhere (There are about 12,500 of them across Poland and they open about five new stores PER DAY).

A picture of my local Żabka

Things that are awesome about Poland: Allegro and Paczkomat parcel lockers everywhere. Allegro is the largest e-commerce online retail platform in Poland (10x bigger than Amazon) and you can basically get everything there and can send it to a Paczkomat of your choice, often with next day delivery.

The allegro logoHolding up a parcel in front of a parcel locker