“Dive deeper in AI Mode” 💩

This summer school has 4 courses: intro level courses on Latin and reading medieval documents and advanced courses on wills and inquisitions. Check it out #Skystorians and tell your students (please and thank you) 👇📚🎓📜

Hiding in plain sight: two (?) new women poets from 1589 Seven or eight years ago I was reading in the British Library a collection of strongly Protestant Latin verse published probably in Germany in 1589, dedicated to the English poet and diplomat Daniel R...

Some new Latin poetry by women (or possibly one woman using two names). Hot off the press!

😡

Gosh, brought a tear to my eye to see the amount he’s raised so far. Well done all round, and fingers crossed that the forecast holds! (I only ever look at the Met Office one anyway.)

Cover of book entitled “Il latino per avere successo nella vita” (Latin for Success in Life) showing a businessman in a suit ascending a grand staircase towards a radiant classical portico in the clouds.

This raised a wry smile. #onwardsandupwards

The 49th Latin and Palaeography Summer School, 27-31 July 2026 The School, formerly the Keele Latin and Palaeography Summer School, returns for its 49th year. In 2025 The Ranulf Higden Society took over the organisation of the Latin and Palaeography Summer Sch…

Calling #Skystorians #MedievalSky the 49th Latin and Palaeography Summer School (formerly the Keele summer school) is open for bookings. 27-31 July in Birmingham. 👇

palaeography.uk/study/short-...

I can imagine! Sometimes with Stoppard it helps to have got the jokes in advance. I’d actually meant to reread it (25-odd years down the line) before seeing it again, but couldn’t find my copy. Happily I think they did a great job of making it easy to follow without this kind of cheating.

I caught this the previous night, not far from your seat. A wonderful production with plenty of pitch-perfect acting and lots of laughs from the audience. Would likewise have been very happy to see it all over again!

Lawn o’ Dune

You shouldn’t go far wrong with the conveniently online DMLBS as your first port of call and the OLD for when something doesn’t make sense or needs confirming. Failing that, I’d try other dictionaries (most obviously the TLL and Souter) before venturing into the treacherous jungle of Lewis & Short.

Gosh, it hadn’t occurred to me that people might do this. Thank heavens for the photostat (and its cheaper successors)!

Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature The feature, which Grammarly shut down Wednesday, presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—without their consent.

The feature, which Grammarly shut down Wednesday, presented editing suggestions as if they came from established authors and academics—without their consent. www.wired.com/story/gramma...

(The shorter top stroke can also be seen in ‘significatione’ and ‘oblate’ in the line above.)

I’m going to break ranks and say ‘septimanam’, with the first ‘a’ partially obscured by subsequent damage.

Excellent use of funding. In bocca al lupo!

For ‘January’ read ‘May’ and for ‘June 6’ read ‘June 9’.

Screenshot of pop-up headed “Other users also viewed these articles”, with a button labelled “Download (6) PDFs” and a list of articles entitled “Influence of Genes on the Lifespan of Long- and Short-Lived Families”, “Clinical characteristics and outcome correlates of Chinese patients with takotsubo syndrome: Results from the first Chinese takotsubo syndrome registry”, and “Eastern Bering Sea shelf environmental and lower trophic level responses to climate forcing: Results of dynamic downscaling from CMIP6”. Faintly visible in the background are parts of the article that prompted these recommendations, on a Parisian mathematical controversy from 1843.

I just downloaded an article on a C19th mathematical controversy, and Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform popped up to suggest some PDFs for me to download from the Hellenic Journal of Cardiology, the International Journal of Cardiology, and Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography 🤡

PS. Snopes link for anyone who needs it: www.snopes.com/fact-check/f...

Trump threatens to halt trade with Spain over air base access Trump lashed out after Spain barred the US from using its military bases to carry out strikes on Iran.

The problem with the Spanish is that they don’t have a word for armada. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I have departed colleagus whom I miss dearly and whose advice I would love to have. If someone decided to give me AI slop disguised as "expert advice" from them, I don't think I'd be able to control my reaction.
Butlerian Jihad Now (both the Dune one and whatever holy war Judith Butler would fight)

Ed Miliband These Strikes Are Wrong robot YouTube video by scenaldio

If only Labour had a consistent moral message to trot out at times like this! youtube.com/watch?v=_g4i...

Stockholm Codex Aureus - Wikipedia

For my fellow ignoramuses: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockho...

No notes?

It's frustrating that there's apparently no way to inspect the relevant “testing” corpus. Torres Aguilar mentions “the editors transcription” (p. 15) but the only reference that he provides is a link to the manuscript on Gallica, where there is no transcription. Unless I'm missing something…?

That's theoretically possible, sure. But I can see no suggestion anywhere in the article that Example 3 is really *two* examples that have been combined to save space; and its components are separated by the vertical bar that was used in Example 2 with its conventional signification of a line break.

Thanks for digging up the manuscript! I see that the source lines were clearly non-adjacent (line 19 + line 17). This does not suggest “the careful curation of ground-truth data” using “deep expertise” (Torres Aguilar p. 4) but a reckless confidence in the unverified results of an automated process.

Folio 48v of the 1501 edition of the Dictionarius pauperum (aka Summa de abstinentia) attributed to Nicolas de Biard, from chapter 33 (De ebrietate), including the two sentences mentioned in the post.

You can see both sentences here (first one 6 lines down, second one 8 lines up from the bottom). Would be interesting to know how they got mashed together in your quotation. Did the source manuscript have two columns that were mistakenly transcribed as one? www.digitale-sammlungen.de/view/bsb1101...

Still makes no sense because it’s stitched together from: (1) Ebrius servus est omnium peccatorum, quia ex quo diabolus cepit portam claustri, de facili totam familiam suam introducit. (2) Si quis haberet vas quod corrumperet vinum quando esset infusum, stultus esset qui de meliori in eo infunderet.

TV show pitch: ‘Tome Team’, where a group of rare books librarians and book historians are sent to investigate an uncatalogued library for interesting incunabula, marginalia and provenances - and they have just three days to do it.