Sarah Emily Duff
@sarahemilyduff.bsky.social
Radiant ambiguity/unclassified residuum/ enigmatic relief/seasoned harridan (historian of age, gender, reproduction, opinions my own and not my employer’s etc.) https://www.colby.edu/people/people-directory/sarah-duff/
‘Every day, scientists are allowed to publish sentences like, “Many assume there is a close connection between human history and culture (Donaldson 2019)," and yet English departments are the problem?’ This is magnificent:
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...
defector.com
‘rather than being an enormous star powered by nuclear fusion, the object is a black hole so swaddled in shrouds of dense gas that it radiates like a star.’
Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’
The body is the size of the entire solar system and glows with a brilliant red light billions of light years from Earth
theguardian.com
‘“The futures of these massive companies, in a sense, are a bet that OpenAI, Anthropic are going to succeed”… … the biggest revenue threat could come from China, as Chinese open-source AI models are significantly cheaper and appear to be gaining market share.’
'Big Short' investor Steve Eisman sees an Achilles' heel in the AI boom
Steve Eisman is warning that the artificial intelligence boom has become increasingly dependent on the fortunes of just two companies: OpenAI and Anthropic.
cnbc.com
Solar Eclipse (1900) filmed by magician, Nevil Maskelyne the first moving image of an astronomical phenomenon
Tantra Diagram for computing astronomical periods, used for meditation, India, 18th century
on the granular level, pedagogical weirdness as praxis, now and always
Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 3d agoOne of the more insidious ideas being incepted via right & center attacks on HigherEd is that college experiences are homogenous. The heterogeneity of the US system is one of its greatest strengths. Their goal of homogenization is served by an illusion of homogeny, just homogeny of the wrong sort.
“The government lavishes praise on [firefighters], but Chabbouh and others are dismayed by France’s reluctance to arm its rank and file and plan for battle-readiness on the front lines of climate change. It may not even grasp that this is no longer a series of annual skirmishes.”
Jeremy Harding | Don’t Look Up
In the last week of July a guest in our house, an hour’s drive from Bordeaux, was called away to a fire emergency in...
lrb.co.uk
ANNOUNCEMENT: All our sundials will be out of order this evening between about 6pm and 8pm, we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. Normal service will resume tomorrow. In unrelated news, enjoy the eclipse later... Photos: Mike Selby, Annapurna Mellor, Chris Davies, John Millar
California Lilac (Ceanothus thyrsiflorus), 1935 by Mary Vaux Walcott
‘So, how about a sandwich shop that was cool enough to keep us interested but vanilla enough to get the average punter through the door? This is not, it transpires, the correct way to go about developing a business concept.’ Lovely essay by James Ramsden in @thefence.bsky.social:
One for Sorrow, Two for Joy
James Ramsden looks back at his career.
the-fence.com
“It’s insufficiently recognised that the vast majority of the evidence we have for continental Europe in the Roman era is of … proxy traces of human activity.”
Michael Kulikowski · Polar Bears in Rome: Roman Scandinavia
Over the past two generations, the boundaries of the classical world have been stretched to the steppe frontier of China...
lrb.co.uk
“If the psychoanalytic encounter is a meeting of two internal worlds, why does the material world matter? Do patients care if a chair is a few inches off?”
Chloe Diski · Diary: In the Frame
If the psychoanalytic encounter is a meeting of two internal worlds, why does the material world matter? Do patients...
lrb.co.uk
‘As Goldman’s analysts noted: “From a credit perspective, this treatment can understate leverage and future liquidity needs as these obligations are eventually recognized and contractual payments come due.” Quite.’ By @robinwigglesworth.ft.com
Just how big is the hidden leverage of AI hyperscalers?
Very
giftarticle.ft.com
he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial
‘On a characteristically chaotic, unpunctuated postcard to Nicholson from 1943, Craxton wrote “you do so many incredible things just somehow like a bolt from the blue and amazing so for Christ’s sake never stop”.’
Escaping the Blitz, two artists found inspiration and a lifelong friendship
Paintings made by John Craxton and EQ Nicholson while holed up in a Dorset farmhouse are being exhibited together for the first time
giftarticle.ft.com
‘Saturated as we are now with hyper-real AI slop, hallucinated by machines regurgitating the endless scroll of online images, Estes’ painted canvases have become disquisitions on reality, the city reflected and refracted in surfaces now long gone. They are enduring pictures of ephemerality.’
‘I had to work fast to survive’ — Richard Estes on his photorealist paintings of New York City
In the former ad man’s pictures, now on show at Schoelkopf Gallery, the city dissolves into a mass of uncanny reflections
giftarticle.ft.com
"In my youth," father William replied to his son, "I feared it would injure the brain; But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, Why, I do it again and again."
Last week, @jackiantonovich.bsky.social asked for my thoughts on the new smallpox aDNA study that had just come out. I said I'd need a little more time to sort thru it. bsky.app/profile/moni.... I've now had time to go thru my files, so here's a quick summary on where we are in the history of VARV.
Monica H Green@monicamedhist.bsky.social · 2w agoThanks for the query @jackiantonovich.bsky.social. I already knew this study on the Chilean genomes was coming out, but I need some time to assess its historical significance. Here's a link to the last smallpox aDNA pub'd earlier this year. Not included in the present study: bsky.app/profile/moni...
Same with us—hurrah for the long awaited return of the course pack!
Eleanor Courtemanche@ecourtem.bsky.social · last wk.Increasing number of my colleagues in this college English department are now going totally device-free in class. Paper books. Paper coursepaks. Maybe printed out papers. Not even a Canvas site
This tactic is given a strong boost by the techno-determinism that is ubiquitous among both Silicon Valley and their coastal apologists. "its complicated, and anyway its inevitable" is a hell of a drug
Alondra Nelson@alondra.bsky.social · last wk.Big Tech and AI companies have refined these prior industrial tactics into what I call 'algorithmic agnotology': the exploitation of technical complexity to obscure accountability and naturalize inscrutability as inherent to digital systems.
“when Big Tech started putting cameras in smart glasses, we asked ourselves a radical question: what if we just didn’t do that?…These are the first smart glasses guaranteed to never record nude videos of you and send them to random people. I never thought I’d have to guarantee that, but here we are”
SFGATE@sfgate.com · last wk.The company's “Normal F***ing Sunglasses" reportedly already sold out.