Sitting here crying while after getting WhatsApped the photo on the right, so let me tell you a little story about how we got here from the photo on the left and why repatriation research matters!

Gospel Book of Otto III c. 1000 Manuscript (Clm. 4453), 334 x 242 mm Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich This is another miniature from the Gospels of Otto III (folio 139r). It shows St Luke with a piles of manuscripts in his lap (their bindings studded with jewels) exalting all the Old Testament prophets who foretold the coming of Christ. Web gallery of art image: https://www.wga.hu/html_m/zgothic/miniatur/1001-050/1/1gospel5.html

I love this photo of Saint Luke with piles of manuscripts in his lap from the Gospel Book of Otto III (c. 1000 CE)
(Manuscript (Clm. 4453), Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich). Probably projection, but he looks traumatized by all the reading he still needs to do before the end of the semester.

Eastern N. America folks, it's just about go time for the start of the ~3 week peak migration (unless you're on the Gulf Coast, in which case it is go time NOW). Expect waves of incredible birds for the next month and a half

Turn those overnight lights off to protect them!

[stolen from local news]

Comic. [Sign above four people. A person sits at a desk working on a laptop. A person with ponytail is talking to person with white hat. A person with short hair walks away.] SIGN: It has been [-0.00000000000000044] days since our last floating point error

Day Counter

xkcd.com/3228/

I also never want to hear a liverpudlian (or, hell, anyone) say 'girl' for the next 3 weeks, please.

a black and white photo of the beatles with the words " won t you please please help me " on the bottom Alt: A gif of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Start standing in a line in front of each other, performing "Help!" with the lyrics "Won't you please, please help me?" written at the bottom of the screen

my husband and I decided it might be fun to rank our top 10 songs by certain bands/artists, starting with the beatles. (miles davis is probably on the list.)

so I'm listening to the beatles' catalogue, & to the early albums in full for the first time.

it is not a consistently enjoyable experience.

WNBA Players Had an Ace Up Their Sleeve in Pay Negotiations: A Nobel Laureate Harvard economist Claudia Goldin helped WNBA players win a nearly 400% raise. Starting this season, players’ average salary will top $580,000.

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics, she got hundreds of invitations.

She accepted three.

One was advising WNBA players on a labor deal. She helped players land the biggest % raise in US sports history.
www.wsj.com/economy/wnba...

Close up shot of Solaster endeca surface pink and bubbly. By Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/4371752155/

Red and orange projections as a close up shot of Crossaster papposus surface. Photo by Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/4372503348/

Closeup of sea star skin, unknown species. Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/8447618289/

Close up of Crossaster papposus sea star skin. By Alexander Semenov: https://www.flickr.com/photos/a_semenov/8448703898/in/photostream/

My god. Have you ever seen close-ups of sea star skin? 🧪🌊🌿

mixed media (graphite, watercolor and digital) sketch of a woman dressed in green, in the woods, holding a knife made of jade or green glass

nymph with a green knife

I also knew that after that point comes illness and death and did not particularly feel like starting a trilogy ending by Brian Herbert. (I did recently see someone who said they *only* liked the Brian Herbert Dune books, which was actually an opinion so bold that I was surprised to see it.)

I do not have time to do this, but this thread is making me want to reread Dune through God Emperor (which is the last book I read last time; I liked how brazenly weird it was but it felt like a solid conclusion).

a strange fleshy landscape, sort of volcanic-looking, with some abandoned industrial equipment in the background. there are some birds in the sky & a tiny human figure carrying an umbrella

& the other realis illustration. salted meat moon (???)

Fern Brady wearing a camera helmet on Taskmaster and opening the task, which has a red wax seal, and reading the contents. She has a purple set of coveralls on as well, which is just fun.

"Open the Strait of Hormuz. You may not receive the help of any other sovereign nation. Fastest wins."

'Blackbirds & Ravens' contemporary ceramic sculpture by Kathleen Sukiennik

long stretch of worked roman stone on Hadrian's Wall.

If you ask someone today to name the builder of Hadrian's Wall, they would give you a funny look. But historical memory is odd, and right up to the 1800s we forgot who built it.

Until in 1840 John Hodgson, an obscure Northumbrian clergyman, published the LONGEST footnote in history... 1/22

Photographs of a dinosaur-looking bird, the shoebill, and popstar Sabrina Carpenter, overlaid with a height comparison showing both are 152 cm, with visual graphics saying the magazine's name SSWAGGER and some Chinese characters

Photographs of a shoebill and popstar Sabrina Carpenter overlaid with a height comparison showing that, yes indeed, both are just 152 cm

I can't even begin to describe this photograph. I think that might be Taylor Swift on a night out with Sabrina Carpenter. But Sabrina is photoshopped to have a shoebill face and talons, with wing-tips coming out her coat but still Sabrina's hair

Just incredible shoebill awareness-raising from this Hong Kong teens' magazine

𝕭𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖑𝖊 𝕭𝖊𝖊𝖙𝖑𝖊 ✦

As someone who went on the Internet for the first time in the early 90’s, I fucking loved the Internet. It has given so many things in life, and afforded me so many incredible experiences.

And to see it, and technology in general where they are today is kinda soul crushing.

Tag yourself

TIL (a) Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana, married into the family of Frank Lloyd Wright (b)because FLW's 3rd wife believed she was a spiritual conduit to her dead daughter (also Svetlana)(c) both Svetlanas married the same man, FLW's wife's daughter's husband (d) FLW had a communal,"cult-y" compound

brother ignatz the bittern about to be mercilessly thwacked for his many crimes

Brother Ignatz you wretched beast, you rascal, you miserable scoundrel

one downside to marrying someone from a totally different climate: needing to be the expert on ice damming when, in fact, you yourself know next to nothing.

That ice is FLYING off of the roof right now, though.

A horse rider with spear and an incredibly badass conical goblin helmet

A woman in some kind of blank faced habit with the top of her head on fire, she looks like she’s manipulated genetic lines for 10,000 years to make sure you were born and you turned out to be a soft as shit dickhead

A load of couriers all wearing face mask sat around a yurt at the feet of a dude in a gold suit sat on a throne with his own face a pitiless void

A dude on a horse, the horse has fucking antlers and somehow that’s not the gnarliest thing here, again his helmeted head reveals a terrifying Stygian abyss where his face should be

Seen a couple of clips the past week from some 1995 Kyrgyzstan documentary The Universe of Manas and had to check out the whole thing. Just absolutely fucking unreal levels of drip here

youtu.be/jgJZCaOI5KE?...

Me when most cats yawn: that is a cat yawning, how cute

Me when the smaller of my two cats yawns: that is the spirit of death come to ferry me across that nameless, lonesome river

(It looks super freaky because of both colouration and how much she retracts her lips?)

Images were essential because of another important point. The ideas presented here only developed slowly, in combination with seeing the book in the flesh, then working with the digital images, making lists and diagrams, and assembling a paper model that, it is proposed, reiterated the structure and size of the original. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist famous for his explanations of creativity, has argued, creativity rarely relies on fast flashes of insight. This article and other installments of assumption-challenging research are the result of a slow burn, whose requirements include digital images, access to the originals, graphic tools to aid in visualization, plus time to think, often over years. Now that the solution to the manuscript's structure is on the table, it seems obvious. But it took about two years to develop. Part of those two years were taken up in just coming up with the right question to ask.

One of my favorite things about Kathryn Rudy's manuscripts scholarship is the candor with which she describes her method and her advocacy of the value of slow, intensive scholarship that combines access to digital materials with first-hand examination. Here she is on the Bolton/Blackburn Hours. +

A screenshot of the results page of a game. It reads "42.53/50. Genuinely unsettling accuracy. Please find a hobby. dialed.gg" There are 5 squares of colour: 3 greens of different shades, a yellow, and a plum purple.

"Turns out I’m bad at remembering colors. 42.5/50. Worse than you?" dialed.gg

New discovery: During excavations in Cologne, archaeologists have unearthed a lararium, a household shrine, dating back to the 2nd century. This discovery is considered unique north of the Alps. Similar examples were found in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...

🏺

OBELISK WITH PHOENICIAN INSCRIPTION, C4 BCE. THE BRITISH MUSEUM This refined and elegant epigraphy is Phoenician, a language spoken in the coastal cities of the Levant and in Carthage. The obelisk is a funerary stela found in a cemetery in Kition in Crete. It says "This pillar which Arish, chief of the brokers, erected to his father Parz, chief of the brokers, son of Menahem, chief of the brokers, son of Mashal, chief of the brokers, son of Parsi, chief of the brokers (or the brothers?), to his mother Shamzebaal of Azar, chief of the prefects (?) are their? resting place for ever." The Phoenicians were mad for commerce and the title "chief of the brokers" meant something like "head commercial agent". This script, in which letters represent separate vowels and consonants, and not ideograms or syllables, was functional and adaptable: our own alphabet derives from it.

#EpigraphyTuesday offers us this beautiful obelisk in the #BritishMuseum with an #inscription in #Phoenician from the C4 BCE. Our own script derives from these letters, passing first through archaic Greek and Latin. When this was carved, those alphabets had already split off. #AncientBluesky 🏺