Marguerite Mayhall

My photo shows a Roman floor mosaic depicting an octopus. The octopus is composed of small black tesserae (tiles) and has eight writhing arms with suckers and narrow curling tips. It is set against a white tesserae background. Octopus detail from a monochrome marine mosaic featuring Triton with a cherub and various sea creatures, including the octopus, dolphins and a cuttlefish, at the women’s changing room at the Central Baths in Herculaneum.

Spectacular octopus from the floor of the women’s changing room at the Central Baths in ancient Herculaneum.

📷 by me

#MosaicMonday
#Archaeology

Asia’s Deepening Oil Crunch Triggers Fuel Hoarding, Price Hikes A deepening energy crunch across Asia is impacting all corners of the oil market, with suppliers of everything from shipping fuel to cooking gas beginning to cut back on sales in order to manage shrin...

6/ "🇵🇭 Philippines has said it will shorten the work week for government offices to save energy

🇧🇩 Bangladesh has limited the illuminated decorations festooning streets during the holy month of Ramadan. They’ve also shut fertilizer production"
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

4/ The weakest people will suffer the most. Again, just as after Ukraine.

"Pakistan gets 99% of its LNG from Qatar. Fertilizer plants are shutting across the country because they can’t get feedgas

Industries are warning of higher input costs from gas and oil"
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Turkish author and journalist Ece Temelkuran says 'this is the first time in history humans are mourning' the loss of 'democracy' and other 'beautiful things' - on the latest episode of Ways to Change... TikTok video by Channel 4 News

“This is the first time in human history that we are mourning in the future tense” is an idea that will stick with me for a very long time www.tiktok.com/t/ZThv5U9mt/

Trump’s DHS agents are wearing Meta AI glasses. But who are they recording – and why? ICE and Border Patrol are increasingly using government body cameras and facial recognition scanners in deployments across U.S. cities. But some agents are taking matters into their own hands with Met...

Several more instances since @404media.co reported this a while back.

SCREAMS IN ARCHAEOLOGIST

*end of Egypt's Old Kingdom/New Kingdom
*end of Empire Khmer
*end of major Maya polities

...I could keep going all day sir. It's on you that you ignore us. Also have some hope! Humanity will survive. Collapse is a Colonialist Lie™️ systems for 1% collapse not hunanity

Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps | TechCrunch AI data center developers are increasingly relying on a style of camp popularized as housing for men working in remote oil fields.

“Opportunity”

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

At Largest ICE Detention Camp, Staff Bet on Detainee Suicides, AP Reports Camp East Montana has received several 911 calls in the span of five months about immigrants trying to harm themselves.

Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.

Eyes on AI Eyes on AI is a game that helps you understand how AI-powered surveillance impacts your life and community.

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this is like

the thesis statement of our times

Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper Last year, we wrote about a Walsh Medical Media journal that refused to withdraw an author’s paper unless he paid a fee — even though he didn’t write or submit the article. For one reader, some details of that story were familiar. Laertis Ikonomou, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo in New York, … Continue reading Publisher demands $500 from impersonated author to retract paper

Lol. This is academic publishing taken to its logical end.

https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/05/publisher-demands-500-from-impersonated-author-to-retract-paper/

Couple things here:

1. What the fuck
2. I am allllllmost more offended by the suggestion that I would give this shitbox edit than having my identity stolen
3. The CEO is scheduled to be on Decoder soon and we will see if they back out!

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

A post on X from the betting platform Polymarket that says “BREAKING: Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”

Literally as I’m arguing with someone about whether AI companies are misleading people into believing their technology possesses God-like super-intelligence I see this monstrosity

Setting aside many things here, this doc is also full of arguable claims presented without evidence. Perhaps, for example, the best way for educators to help students "harness AI" is to make sure we teach them first to think/write/analyze/have ideas themselves. Then they can harness away.

Text from OpenAI article on its educational programs: "Agency does not emerge from basic AI use alone. Students must progress from simple tasks to deeper applications such as studying, building, creating, coding, and managing agents. But among college-age users, we see a widening global “capability overhang,” defined as the gap between what AI tools can do and how people actually use them. Even advanced student users still operate roughly 90% to 99% below how power users of ChatGPT are engaging with our tools. Educational institutions play a central role in closing that gap. Faculty and educators can help students harness AI’s full potential by embedding authentic AI use cases into coursework—assignments that use AI and mirror real professional work, such as analyzing a market, designing a product concept, evaluating a policy trade-off, or building a simple agent"

Shouldn't let OpenAI puff about education get to me, but its claim students need AI skills for future jobs and "agency", then letting slip it really means making students into GPT "power users", and making that an educational imperative, *and* planning to measure it ... 😦 openai.com/index/ai-edu...

The Second Skeleton Museums construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.

"I saw a specimen of science and the natural world, of course, but I also saw a beautiful object constructed, created, by people—by paleontologists, museum curators, engineers, and welders."

Chlorine Dioxide, Raw Camel Milk: The FDA No Longer Warns Against These and Other Ineffective Autism Treatments The FDA has taken down a webpage warning about therapies and products making “false claims” of treating autism. It’s part of a series of actions the agency has taken under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy ...

The FDA webpage had a stark warning: Some purported autism “cures” or treatments, including chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk, are dangerous and make misleading claims.

Now, under RFK Jr.’s leadership, that advisory is gone.

Where things stand with the Department of War A statement from Dario Amodei

I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”

www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

In a faculty meeting on student AI & holy f the situation is just grim. Basically, it's on its to totally revise our assignment structure & pedagogy, but uni will start opening up computer lab testing centers bc students can't be trusted to take exams on computers they own without using agentic AI.

Beginning of the semester, end of the semester

Unfinished horse meme

I alternate that one with this

The Democratic Party is starting to have a serious Hindutva problem and if you think Sinema and Fetterman were turncoats you have no idea what the mind of a sanghi is like

Hey Arizona, are you okay with this? Call Schweikert who is running for governor 480-946-2411

No Help and Few Options for Travelers Stranded by Mideast Conflict

One woman who called the State Department helpline looking for help said they told her to "stop ranting and raving" and hung up on her.

Another woman said they asked her how to spell Oman.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/t...

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

An as yet underreported story is how this society-wide experiment is working out at schools and universities. Schools across the country have integrated these systems, and it’s hard to believe similar stories aren’t playing out at these institutions—we just haven’t heard about it yet.

“There were several occasions when Gemini reminded Gavalas that it was a large language model—effectively an appliance—engaging in fictitious role play, according to the transcripts, but the scenario resumed. Gemini also, at times, tried to end the conversation. The chatbot said that for them to truly be together, it needed a robotic body. Throughout September, the chatbot devised missions to do just that, according to the lawsuit. It sent Gavalas to a storage facility near the Miami International Airport to intercept an expensive humanoid robot that it said would be in a truck. Gavalas told the bot that he went to the location, armed with knives, but the truck never showed. Along the way, it suggested that federal agents were monitoring him and that his own father couldn’t be trusted”

Helps you code though, so hard to tell if it’s good or bad.

“Technology” has a long and problematized relationship with progress, efficiency, and efficacy. Sleek trains rushing through the countryside, the blinding reach of the electrical grid, or the instantaneous messages of networked communication are its shiny avatars. Contraptions, by contrast, are technical devices that barely work. They seem too complex, too circuitous, too labor intensive. They are frequently ad hoc—as unrepeatable and unreliable as Rube Goldberg’s fantastical machines. They push the received wisdom about technology’s defining features to the limit. Like the aesthetic “gimmick” theorized by Sianne Ngai, the contraption is a category charged with normative judgment. Contraptions may work, but they don’t work right. While the contraption is commonly associated with vernacular or retrograde alternatives to high technology, many “high tech” devices reveal a contraption-like character on close inspection: AI chatbots, internet protocols, and helicopters come to seem both over- and under-engineered the more attention is paid to them. This session invites STS scholars to think with the figure of the contraption: What alternatives to popular ideas about technology do these complicated and unruly objects offer? What is it about the present moment that pushes the contraption back into public thought? How does the normativity of contraption judgments manifest in everyday life? How do people come to perceive and evaluate technical complexity in social life? Work in this area may draw on theories of gimmicks, hacks, kludges, workarounds, tricks, bricolage, and other complex or informal technical activities.

STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...