I am very claustrophobic esp when people are doing things around my face. They give you some sedation, and I asked the anaesthetist for serious sedation - he understood and I wasn't aware of anything during the procedures. Ask for it and you'll be fine.
Dream positions: 3 (!!) PhD placements at the Prize Papers with emphasis on finding students with the following language skills: French, Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages. (Of course, I emphasize the Dutch language!)
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/professional...
NEW: A new pre-print study offers the first causal evidence that outsourcing reasoning tasks to AI can rapidly erode users' independent performance AND their will to persist despite difficulty.
"People’s persistence drops... they’re also not willing to try without AI.”
futurism.com/artificial-i...
People are asking ChatGPT things I would normally just ask a friend, parent, mentor, therapist or medical professional for or about. It takes work to build and maintain those relationships, and figure out who is the right person to ask, but the alternative is a digital tool known for lying to users.
In my country, Australia, the early white settlers were predominantly convicts, who had good reason to believe that the powerful classes sucked and our hearty disrespect for the wealthy and powerful remained for 200 years - sadly not so much now.
The Puritans who were instrumental in the white settlement of America believed they had a covenant with God, and that wealth and power were a sign of divine favour. I still see this underpinning US culture and hero-worshipping of the wealthy. The UK was always a melting pot of various cultures.
We're currently recruiting for five (yes five!) Collaborative Doctoral Partnership awards at IWM See the full list of projects and partners here, with further details of how to apply: www.iwm.org.uk/research/doc...
Yes, they do happen in Australia. One did a heap of damage in Armidale in northern NSW a few years ago - it caused major damage in town, then travelled for more than 20km and flattened a 400m wide path through bushland out near where I lived at the time.
AI doesn’t even make sense in your own capitalist terms! it doesn’t make a profit! it’s just ten of the dumbest bitches on earth passing around the same billion dollars and pretending they’re geniuses
Wow. Such incredible creativity and craft skills!
Absolutely.
#BookSky
My friend
who studies viruses
says we are in
an epidemiological crisis.
My friend
who studies computers
says we are in
an epistemological crisis.
So I asked
my friend
who studies history
which it is
and after a moment
she said: yes.
*
Week 317…
librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2026/04/10/p...
Excellent and empoweringe educacioun will nevir be "efficient" yn the waye that a businesse doth stryve to be "efficient." It ys the heighte of knavery to use one standarde to measure everye human activitye. Businesses are ther to make profits. Educacioun ys ther to make the future.
all these universities kept axing medieval history departments as if they thought tyrants beefing with the Pope was going to stop being relevant
One hopes images like this, when paired with the knowledge that everything we burn ends up in that tiny slice of gasses, would help contextualize why we need to move away from energy sources we set on fire.
One hopes. Climate communicators should make some hay of this.
Don't taco Tuesday this shit. Millions of people spent the day wondering if they would get vaporized, and no one in our government stood up to him. Nothing cutesy about it.
An LLM is nothing like a sewing machine, and only a dickhead who devalues textiles could even come up with that.
Every single garment is handmade, from the cutting up. We have been attempting to automate for literally a century. It’s not happening. Circular knits are about the pinnacle.
Here's a great engine of early modern society, in culture, in trade, in religion and in politics.
A goose quill pen
c. 1590 - c. 1596
(Rijksmuseum)
History is not a settled field. We remain in discussion, debate, and research on every event in the past and are likely to forever remain uncommitted to one singular “true” version of the past.
I’ll get back to that research some day - after the current PhD!
Not a lot. It’s a satin weave structure and I think the weft threads aren’t tightly twisted, so that contributes to the smooth finish. The fabric is pressed between hot rollers, but whether there is an additional glaze I’m not sure.
People are taking unusual measures
to the thwart the scourge of AI
You're researching calimanco? I'm fascinated by it. Did my Honours back in 2001 in 18th century British worsted textiles. A bucket list item is to spin and weave calimanco for a late 18th c dress.
No one is trying to tell you that you are not allowed to feel nostalgic for what Harry Potter may have once meant to you as a kid; they are literally just asking you to not fund their destruction.
because I will always be the "I have a skilled trades/labour background, not an education" person, I will tell you that a big part of becoming skilled in anything is trying, failing, and being willing to try again despite how much it hurt. That's key labour, and without it, it's all an illusion
Our favourite Welsh Viking is having a lovely rant about all the ways Vikings are portrayed wrongly in film, tv and games.
Black biker-gang outfits, lack of colour, filth everywhere, it all comes up!
Enjoy:
youtu.be/SiQnkLflvHc?...
Mason: Dad, there's no real magic in the world, right? Dad: What do you mean? Mason: You know, like elves and stuff. People just made that up. Dad: Oh, I don't know. I mean, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like a whale? Yoy know what I mean? What if I told you a story about how underneath the ocean, there was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean, you'd think that was pretty magical, right?
Saw someone say the world is a boring place because there are no elves or dragons, so I'm legally obliged to share this:
I am forever grateful that Terry Pratchett was with us as long as he was and it was not even close to enough
his work made me a better person, and I do not think I'm alone in that
GNU Terry Pratchett, we are so much poorer without you
'If generative AI is shaped by power, politics and principle, then education cannot treat it as neutral infrastructure. It is not simply a tool that reflects human bias. It is a technology aligned to particular visions of the future.' 3/3
This trio of books by Pam Inder reveal the hidden worlds of the British workers behind the garments:
🧵 Busks, Basques and Brush-Braid
🎀 Feathers, Frills and Fancy Goods - new in hardback
🪡 Shirts, Shifts and Sheets of Fine Linen - now in paperback!
📚 bit.ly/3NkwO8D
