People tend to forget the US constitution's provision that if a sitting president is not reelected, and feels the election was unfair, and is subsequently elected to another term, every day of that term shall be that president's birthday

Pondering the AI transcription "the reopening of the Strait of Hormones is a really big deal"

I found a cache of emails from 1994, when my cohort was scattering to jobs and postdocs. I wrote to a friend: Saw a documentary last night about an English woman canoeing down the Zambezi, and it made me think of you. Pushing off into the wide brown flood, jungle in the background, she put a […]

The 2015 blog post about the Google Doodle in honour of the Mundaneum is still up (and still has the Google+ logo at the bottom), but the actual doodle is gone: https://europe.googleblog.com/2015/08/google-pays-tribute-to-belgiums.html . Fortunately there's the Wayback Machine […]

why don't we have a word for the cluster of crescents you see on the ground when a partial solar eclipse is filtered through leaves? it takes me by surprise every time. (This time only vicariously, we're too close to the edge to get crescents)

you know, I can remember when a billion dollars was a lot of money

It's a strange world where I can choose to read your book on a site that renders it in big chunky sans-serif letters or one that uses an elegant serif font, but I can't have meaningful page numbers until I get hold of a print copy

Hitler did preservation photography https://curt-bloch.com/en/magazin/2nd-volume-no-32/18/adolfs-kunstkonserven/

2nd volume, no. 32 - Curt Bloch

curt-bloch.com

there's a medievalist in every crowd > "The Vikings didn't row across. They sailed across the ocean," Lappen said. "They rowed up rivers, but they sailed the ocean." https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/viking-row-contrarian-9.7266360

Our provincial goverment's AI plans for its technical estate are coming together https://thevelocitywhitepapers.com/ - the "How these papers were created" section of the About page is particularly striking, if that's the word I'm looking for

The Velocity White Papers

How the Government of Alberta is leveraging artificial intelligence to rapidly and securely transform its technical estate.

thevelocitywhitepapers.com

If England barely fights off the Norwegians, but then is too exhausted to resist France, you do realize we’re getting a tapestry about it

A dispute about intellectual property that doesn't involve AI should be a welcome relief, but this just makes me sad. https://www.comicsbeat.com/cleves-dq-henry-sheldon-museum-release-statements-on-charity-sylvia-controversy/ My take: I can't find it in me to dislike either of them, but I think […]

I've never got hooked into digital games, but this might tempt me if ... if only ... if only it had ligatures https://store.steampowered.com/app/3119540/Scriptorium_Master_of_Manuscripts/

Save 20% on Scriptorium: Master of Manuscripts on Steam

Make and share the most beautiful and bizarre medieval art imaginable! Manage and grow your manuscript workshop by illustrating manuscripts, using friendly tools and a massive range of drag-and-drop artworks from the deepest reaches of history. Welcome to your very own Scriptorium!

store.steampowered.com

How local labor history research worked in Sweden in the '70s (Lindqvist, Dig Where You Stand):

#uspol #worldcup

The OED gives us another metaphor for the use of an LLM to write your paper: "Devil", 8.c: "A person employed by an author or writer to do subordinate parts of his or her literary work under direction. More generally: any person who does work for which another receives the credit or remuneration […]

The Obama Presidential Center has good hips

What I'd like is a local app that would track my reading of various worthy blogs etc, and at the end of the month it would divvy up my monthly subscription allocation among them accordingly. That way I'd have a fixed monthly reading cost, and I wouldn't have to worry about spending money on […]

"There was no sound of power tools; the letter appeared to come off by hand." The news just gets weirder and weirder

Project Gutenberg is closing its gopher service https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org/116731808775549671

Project Gutenberg (@gutenberg_org@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image Service Changes at Project Gutenberg On Monday, June 15, we will be making some modifications to the official Project Gutenberg mirrors. We will be sunsetting the rsync mirror at aleph.pglaf.org (use gutenberg.pglaf.org instead), the gopher server hosted at gopher.pglaf.org, and the FTP server at gutenberg.pglaf.org. Other rsync and FTP mirrors are still available: https://www.gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL 1/2 #Ebooks #PublicDomain

mastodon.social

On my way to my daughter's commencement - I hope the kids get to boo AI!

RE: https://mas.to/@udcmrk/116667574114470813 Lucky me: this is around the corner from my place of work! Note: you may want to follow (or mute) the #IIIF hashtag the coming days, while the annual conference is held in Leiden and The Hague.

As I work on the talk, I’m getting really excited about this keynote I’m giving next week at the University of Toronto—"A Skeuomorphic View of Book History" builds on a series of talks over the past few months but—because it’s been evolving/improving—I think gets to some novel & exciting new places

Keynote: "A Skeuomorphic View of Book History"

Ryan Cordell will be delivering the opening for the Thinking Through Printing symposium. The term "skeuomorph" was coined by archeologists to name ornamental features that evoke a...

libcal.library.utoronto.ca

So Hamilton might get a data centre on the old Stelco site on the waterfront, and it might be for DRAC? https://blundervalley.ca/blog/steelport-data-centre/

The Steelport AI data centre(s): what we know so far

Here's everything I've been able to dig up so far on the Steelport project in Hamilton, Ontario

blundervalley.ca

finally added "enshittification" to my desktop's dictionary

Toby flexing #CatsOfMastodon

If (like me) you're at the point of having the mechanics of local #LLM use under your belt and you're struggling to get to grips seriously with the HSS research applications, here's a book which I think is giving me a lot to build with […]

The view from here https://thebeaverton.com/2026/05/danielle-smith-announces-fall-referendum-on-concept-of-referendums/

thebeaverton.com