Tessera

browsing an absolutely wonderful anthology of Akkadian literature, and I find, as ever, the universality of human experience so moving. a 4,000 year old incantation baked into clay, intended to help ease a difficult birth - "bring out the sealed one ... let him come out and see the light!"

THE BABY IS STUCK!
The woman in labor is having a difficult labor, Her labor is difficult, the baby is stuck,
The baby is stuck!
The doorbolt is locked, about to end life, The door is fastened against the suckling kid, ...
The woman giving birth is covered with death's dust, She is covered with the dust of battle, like a chariot, She is covered with the dust of tuffets, like a plow.
She sprawls in her own blood, like a struggling warrior, Her eyesight is waning, she cannot see, Her lips are coated, she cannot open them ...,
Her eyesight is dim, ... she is alarmed, her ears cannot hear!
Her breast is not held in, her headbands are askew, She is not veiled with ..., she has no shame:
Stand by me and keep calling out?), O merciful Marduk,
"Here is the confusion, I'm surrounded, get to me!" Bring out the one sealed up, created by the gods, Created by humankind, let him come out and see the light!

TIL that "omicron" in the greek alphabet means "little o" and "omega" means "large o." little and large; micro and mega

pochy @pochowek.bsky.social · last mo.

nice argument. however, i've already depicted myself as the chad boethius, smiling over my hindu-arabic numerals, and you as the soyjack pythagoras, struggling to match my calculations with your reckoning board

a 1503 woodcut showing a contest between boethius and pythagoras, representing the algorists and abacists respectively; the former using the new hindu-arabic numerals, and the latter counting boards

Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 2mo ago

very much enjoyed that the bible of relativity, the 1973 textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, ends with this helpful illustration:

This is bombshell stuff.

Together, alongside the mundane fare of a typical thought leadership conference, the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power. The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO's supreme allied commander Europe and the head of US European Command, who took the post in July 2025 and is recorded on the leaked list as having attended Dialog gatherings since 2021. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.

Those executives appear side by side with senior US officials overseeing their industries. Auren Hoffman, Dialog’s chairman, founded the location-data broker SafeGraph and the identity-resolution firm LiveRamp, two of the most important suppliers in the consumer data economy. He appears in the directory alongside Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.

Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, whose software runs case management for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data fusion for the Pentagon and intelligence community, is listed in the same society as Army secretary Dan Driscoll and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees agencies Palantir contracts with.

dell cameron@dell.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NEW: A trove of internal records from Dialog, the secret society cofounded by Peter Thiel, was left exposed online. WIRED obtained a second cache of records that reveal who's really attending, how they're screened, and what personal details they were promised would stay private.

What a fascinating story - Fernstedt is like a character from a Joseph Mitchell piece - the homeless man (and former journalist) living in the porch of the UKs most expensive house www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

It was Britain’s most expensive house. Why is its only resident a homeless man who lives on the porch?

2-8A Rutland Gate had jewel-encrusted bathroom suites and gold wastepaper bins in its 45 rooms, but has lain empty for years. With many people desperate for secure housing, what does the abandonment o...

theguardian.com

advertising has really reached some transcendent peak over on X, the everything app

screenshot of a tweet/post from twitter/x showing a deepfaked image of nigel farage covered in slime running through the studio of BBC's question time

for some reason i had not seen this animation of DESI before and i find it very beautiful - it's amazing how we've essentially recreated a compound eye, with a focal plane formed of 5,000 individually articulated fiberoptic strands, all shimmering under the night's sky

had a conversation with a writer friend and we concluded that the worst thing that could happen as a result of AI text generation - the very worst - is if people lose the will to write; if we begin to believe that there is simply no need, no reason to try, and elect to stay mute

i i often wake up early against my will, around 4am, and response is to soften the blow by making pancakes, strong coffee, and listen to something soothing, usually radio 3's The Essay. anyway, i can really recommend this recent one on insect noises: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Insect Singers, 1. Let Those Bugs Sing

The Essay celebrates the sheer musicality and beautiful noise of Earth’s insect singers.

bbc.co.uk

entranced by this unfinished canvas from Turner. the subject is unknown but i like the interpretation that it was inspired by Shelley's Masque of Anarchy, which reframes the biblical rider on a pale horse as the anarchic violence of the state unleashed at the Peterloo Massacre

an oil painting, only half finished. the bottom right corner is a pale cloud; in the top left quadrant we see a skeletal torso astride the white silhouette of a horse. the torso is headless and reaches out with one skeletal hand

bought a huge bottle of dr bonner’s almond shower wash on a whim and now realising I’m going to spend the rest of summer smelling like battenberg

Chris Baraniuk @chrisbaraniuk.com · 2mo ago

someone told me this today and I didn’t believe them: the dashboard of a car originally referred to a barrier at the front of carriages that shielded the occupants from dirt “dashed” by the horse’s hooves

! This is fab. Might not be 100% accurate. I checked some places I know definitely have AC and they're on there. One that does was listed as "likely" though. But v helpful to have an indicator, and to see a list for every postcode etc.

Anthony Dhanendran@dhanendran.co.uk · 2mo ago

This via r/LondonFood is very cool ❄️ Someone has scraped the UK government's register of air conditioning inspection reports for commercial premises and created a database of London's cafes, pubs and restaurants with AC:

Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It’s hard to overstate how up Marc Andreessen’s ass the media was in the early ‘90s. He was 24 on the cover of Time. I think it’s helpful to understand him like a child TV star or an athletic prodigy. A boy wonder for whom fame came early, & in the wake of it there is a hollow man.

Sarah Weinman@sarahweinman.com · 3mo ago

lol - "I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is corner and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams"" bsky.app/profile/sara...

Olga Tokarczuk has issued a statement about her recent AI comments (they were translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones and sent via her US publisher, Riverhead)

Statement from Olga Tokarczuk (via her US publisher Riverhead):

Like any other conversation, remarks made before a live audience at a public event can be incorrectly understood.

I did not write my forthcoming book – to be published in fall 2026 in Polish - either using AI or with anyone else. For several decades I have written alone.

I state briefly and firmly:

1. I make use of artificial intelligence on the same principles as most people in the world – I treat it as a tool that allows faster documenting and checking of facts. Whenever I use this tool I additionally verify the information. Just as I have done for several decades by reading books and by exploring libraries and archives.

2. None of my texts, including the novel that will appear in Polish this fall, has been written with the help of artificial intelligence – except for using it as a tool for faster preliminary research.

3. I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is cornered and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams.

Olga Tokarczuk, May 19, 2026, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

warrior cop @wyattprivilege.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I GET LOGGED OUT. BUT I LOG IN AGAIN

re: guardian top 100 novels, i'm really curious what the equivalent top 100 from le monde, el pais, la repubblica, etc, would be — and then what novels would have the greatest overlap (proust? mann? hugo? the latter weirdly not appearing in the guardian at all...)

just remembered some of my favourite recent poetry: journals of medical students dosed with ketamine and accompanying explanatory notes

"Eatherly began filming himself berating black people in public. It’s a strange way to make a living, even in 2026. But it’s not unique to Eatherly." the odious, depressing nexus of resurgent racism and an online ecosystems that incentivizes extreme content: www.thebulwark.com/p/the-rights...

The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot Someone

Meet “Chud the Builder.”

thebulwark.com

carlo rovelli making an argument against the hard problem of consciousness, which I might mushily summarize as: it's all qualia, therefore nothing is www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-...

There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ | NOEMA

Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.

noemamag.com

"What is different here is the drone unit commander mentions repeatedly that there is no time lag in the video link [...] Operators can be based in another area, or on the other side of the world." - how long until we see offshored drone warfare? www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...

Ukrainian FPV Operators Pilot Drones From Long Range

Ukrainian drone pilots use a remote system to operate FPVs, bombers and other drones from long distances with negligible time delay. This could change drone warfare.

forbes.com