Dennett's Real Patterns in Science and Nature How the concept of a pattern, as understood in information science and applied in contemporary AI, can address deep questions in science and philosophy.The

This new book of essays on Real Patterns looks really great: direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edi...

Really sad news. Ronnie taught me at Edinburgh 1985-1989, and was one of the sharpest minds, most interesting thinkers, and kindest people I came across there. I'm very sad he's no longer with us.

Job Opportunity at Lancaster University: Senior Research Associate in Machine Learning for Speech Processing Senior Research Associate in Machine Learning for Speech ProcessingDepartment: Phonetics Laboratory / Linguistics and English LanguageLocation: Bailrigg, Lancaster, UKSalary: £39,906 (pro-rata if part...

I’m hiring an 18-month postdoc to work on physics-informed machine learning for acoustic-articulatory speech inversion at
@phoneticslab.bsky.social

🗓️ Deadline: Friday 10 April.

🔗 More info & applications: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

📣 Please share with anyone who might be a good fit!

Screenshot of Futures of Language landing page at https://futuresoflanguage.org, with tagline "Human interaction is too important to be left into the hands of merchants of hype." Text continues: "We study artisanal and artificial ways of languaging to better understand language + technology, and to reimagine our linguistic futures." Features a tricolour image of strands representing the three lines of work in the project.

Screenshot of Futures of Language library page with two recent posts. One by Samira Ibnelkaïd: Sara Ahmed & the Killjoy Ethics. One by Mark Dingemanse: The Stories we weave around "Technology".

Screenshot of lower part of Futures of Language landing page showing a quotation by Prof. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo: "Creativity is so much about trying out new weird things - and AI is so much about averaging. It's the people invested in playing in that space of the anomaly and playing with the unexpected who will continue to thrive." Page also shows some logo's of the home base and funder of the Futures of Language project.

We've revamped the Futures of Language website! Read about the project, team, papers, and other news at futuresoflanguage.org

Also, our weekly updates are collated in the Futures Library, a growing collection of short pieces on ideas & people that drive the project: futuresoflanguage.org/library/

Mahmoud's policy itself is abhorrent, but it's also profoundly stupid in terms of the UKs long term interests

Little red dragon with blue horns and golden wings, surrounded by gold foliage, illustration from illuminated MS.

A little marginalia.
Dragonlet, Book of Hours, Paris c.1410.

Hares boxing surrounded with leaves, painting.

March Hares, Vicky Yeates, 2012.

we should also point out Oxbridge have the resources to hire people from other institutions who find their own institutions struggling to support SHAPE disciplines in a situation of falling enrollments. There's an old Yes Minister quip: we must protect Britain's great universities, ... both of them

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue.

The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea.

From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt:
arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

Hannah Spencer walking into Westminster, sucking her teeth, tutting, and muttering "tell you what, you've had some cowboys in here."

"These centuries-old connections between language and the environment challenge dominant views of how best to protect habitats. Scottish Gaelic’s vitality as a living language would surely suffer if fishing were to be curtailed, and much of the knowledge bound up in it...would be lost too."

I imagine it was extremely disturbing

ah, the wonderful right-hand head rule!

word

Comic depictions of the first page of research papers in the language sciences, with titles that include the following: Just what the hell is a word anyway? See how this single cognitive process or brain area or neural oscillation or gene explains language! Based on the shapes of these old bones, Homo erectus could sing .... don't @ me. A baby looked at one thing more than the other, now we know the secret to grammar. If you think about it, every language is fundamentally the same, amirite? We taught a load of undergrads a made-up language, lol. On the staggering diversity of the many languages across the world. Remember the thing you said only humans could do, here's a video of a monkey / dolphin / corvid / octopus / honeybee doing it. I trained this AI with 80 billion tweets and it became head-writer for phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To accompany all those Bluesky science/academia #starterpacks, how about we also share introductions to the literature of our different fields. I present here a handy guide to main types of papers in the language sciences (inspired by the amazing @xkcd.com).
#language #linguistics #science #academia

Hmm. Yeah I don’t think anything I said was particularly incompatible with your comment so I don’t think I did misunderstand. But I am skeptical you can factor out the language/reasoning stuff from the content given current architectures. I think you’d lose robustness in those areas

agree hallucinate is a bad term (I was using it as it's what the authors use). Do you mean misunderstandings in the paper, or that I had misunderstood it? Or that because LLMs are language models, we shouldn't expect them to automatically have a connection with reality? If the later, I agree

We know the Code of Practice is wrong in law. But we need your help to make sure it gets sent back. Write to your MP with our quick and easy tool, here 👇

The most insane thing is that "British (and Irish) citizens who are also citizens of another country will be ineligible for an ETA, meaning they can no longer use a foreign passport to enter the UK."

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

"An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library." Pubpeer, journals are next!
theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-...

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts Medical device makers have been rushing to add AI to their products. While proponents say the new technology will revolutionize medicine, regulators are receiving a rising number of claims of patient ...

When AI was added to a tool for sinus surgery: “Cerebrospinal fluid leaked from one patient’s nose. In another… a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured”

www.reuters.com/investigatio...

10 January 1993 Caller (w): 'Can you tell me about Clone Zone?' Me: 'yes it's a shop selling everything from lycra shorts + underwear to leather harnesses + nipple clamps. Predominantly gay boys but some women use it. Why, what do you want?' (thinks she's looking to buy a dildo) Caller: Well I've just found an access receipt in my husband's pocket!' ！！：

Reading @tashwalker.bsky.social and @adamzmith.bsky.social ‘s amazing new book The Logbooks and this call to Gay Switchboard they quote had me in hysterics #lgbthistories

Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue

yeah, metonymic extension of word meanings via function does not imply an ontological shift (do submarines swim - not in English, but planes do fly!) There's also a confusion between simulation and theory which I think interacts with this

A red squirrel on the ground. It almost looks like it is in superhero pose with one front paw and one back paw on the ground. The other front and back paws are raised in the air, its head is forward ready to run towards the camera.

What we all need to see is a red squirrel in a power pose.
You're welcome.

What makes it more challenging is that "convict" optionally takes "of Y" as a complement, so your brain reaches "convict", decides it's a simple transitive verb, does that long object, then has to reanalyse "convict". It's sometimes called a 'garden-path' effect. Ok, too much syntax for the morning!

I think it's: "who convicted [X] of murder", where X= "the policeman who kneeled on GF's neck". It's grammatical, but just very difficult to process because "of murder" is so structurally distant from "convict". bw, your friendly neighbourhood syntactician :)

Illustrations from the beguiling Clavis Artis, a German alchemical manuscript which claims to hail from the 13th century and have pages made from dragon skin: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/clavis-artis

Photo of Lindsay Lohan with jungle background Below, Entertainment--Lindsay Lohan bitten by snake on holiday in Thailand Above, I don't understand how a snake even begins to organiseva trip like that.

One more time, syntax matters. I do hope the snake had a good time, though.