Dr Helen McGilp

Seren, this world does not deserve you. Thank you for speaking-up.

Seren is a young person who lives in a really vulnerable household.

Everyone should listen to her story.

💙💜💗 #educationANDlives

Image is a snip from Flann O'Brien's letters, reading: "It is a pity you did not like my beautiful book. As a genius, I do not expect to be readily understood but you may be surprised to know that my book is a definite milestone in literature, completely revolutionises the English novel and puts the shallow pedestrian English writers in their place. Of course I know you are prejudiced against me on account of the IRA bombings."

Today, academics, ask yourself:

Am I bringing enough of a Flann O'Brien energy to my R&R work?

Detail of a print of 1799 showing a man sitting at a desk, and a shouting man standing in front of him with an arm raised. The man shouts: Footnotes, FFS". Source: http://diglib.hab.de?grafik=graph-a1-243

He Wrote a Course Syllabus. Is It Still His? After an AI expert finished teaching a course at the University of California at Los Angeles, he was alarmed to discover that a version of his syllabus was still being used.

Interesting question
www.chronicle.com/article/he-w...

bsky.app/profile/toon...

Text: The Pandemic Isn’t Over Just Because You’re Over It. Image at bottom in purple is wastewater levels of SARS-CoV-2 in the US since 2020, with more infections since Biden took office than when Trump was in office.

Things are disastrous, but we’re hoping that learning together, celebrating public knowledge + the gloriously noncompliant, can be ✨✊❤️‍🩹🌱. We’re hosting our first zoom info session this Friday at noon ET; sign-up @ the bottom of the page:

Screenshot of the available information (from Stuart Semple), which reads: Well it's a bit weird - you’d expect it was that l'd spent 10 years of my life making a blue paint as good as his. But no - they admit my formula is different. Their problem is me using the word KLEIN on the packaging. They asked the judge to seize all the paint and destroy it. Luckily the judge said no. They also complained about me painting my hand blue as Yves did that too. They won that argument. Seems they now have ownership of artists painting their hands blue.

Screenshot of the Wall Street Journal video made on the paint development - which can be accessed via the link in post.

A strange case between The Yves Klein Estate and Stuart Semple. For two self-styled ‘provocateurs’ of paint, the infringement outlined seems fairly mundane and petty. For info: gofund.me/41ee201c

What this student had come to say was that she had descended more deeply into her own mind, into her own conceptual powers, while in dialogue with an intelligence toward which she felt no social obligation. No need to accommodate, and no pressure to please. It was a discovery—for her, for me—with widening implications for all of us. “And it was so patient,” she said. “I was asking it about the history of attention, but five minutes in I realized: I don’t think anyone has ever paid such pure attention to me and my thinking and my questions . . . ever. It’s made me rethink all my interactions with people.”

Tons of thoughts about this essay, but parts like this, beyond eliciting thoughts of ELIZA, are striking because of the report that the most profound experience of attention this person has ever achieved is from a bot.

Co-constructed realities through Google AI search and response.

Glasgow & Photography, part I (1839-1844) Working on the early development of Buchanan Street and identifying its close relationship with early commercial photography in Glasgow at Kemp’s warehouse used by photographer John Urie and notici…

Watch the birdie...

A fascinating deep dive into Glasgow's early pioneering photographers. While some names, and work, are familiar to me, there plenty new rabbit holes to explore.

Top hat doffed to the author, the mysterious 'Cicerone'.
merchantcityglasgow.wordpress.com/2025/04/06/g...

screen shot of auction page: photo of 17th-century manuscript Item title 1623 100's of French words in brown ink (400+ Year Old) Untranslated Document!

Oddest eBay description of the day

Hundreds--count 'em!

Handwritten recipes for dyes used in William Morris’s fabric designs, from the Merton Abbey Dye Book (1882-91)

amazing how the cyber attack on the British Library still means that all recently published work (and that's a definition that stretches back several years) is completely unavailable to researchers, since they only acquired ebooks and that system is still down

This disc records everything you say — to make you a better person Limitless hopes its AI wearable device will be used as a life coach and productivity tool by millions

“Every morning, Dan Siroker wakes to a flurry of judgment. Not from his spouse. Not from his mother, but from a coin-sized AI listening device on his collar that records every utterance, argument and backhanded compliment.” 🥴

Alt text

George Orwell wrote his epic novel 1984 on the Scottish island of Jura. 'The Ministry of Truth' seems to have been fully embraced; where black is white and where free-speech means censorship.

bylines.scot/podcast/orwe...

The speed of the liberal collapse in the US is harrowing.

Yes indeed - we cannot fix a broken system by making it worse.

You see Abraham Gorlaeus or his brother David, both being born around mid sixteenth-century, in Haarlem. The man in the engraving is sitting at his desk in the year 1580.

You see Abraham Gorlaeus or his brother David, both being born around mid sixteenth-century, in Haarlem. The man in the engraving is sitting at his desk in the year 1580. Highlighted are details of the image that the thread explains.

The story of communication with paper artifacts includes a big chapter on storing, dear #skystorians. A thread or those enjoying #paperhistory and #bookhistory alike.

You see Abraham Gorlaeus (or his brother David), both being born around mid sixteenth-century, sitting at a desk in #Haarlem.

1/7

Me, a very light skinned Black woman in black wire glasses and big hair holding up a black poster that says "THERE IS NOTHING MORE EPHEMERAL THAN A WEBSITE" in gold ink

Now more than ever

Read the whole thread. Most of my research would be airbrushed out of all funding and publication in USA right now. NB good luck doing epidemiology research without the word 'bias'. #academicsky #episky

An image showing a text excerpt ‘Key topics page of State Department's Office of Global Change’ indicating large removed sections on the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic and the diversity of the Head Start teaching staff. This is shown as crossed-out text.

These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration (Gift Article) Federal agencies have issued guidance to employees on hundreds of terms to limit or avoid using. An analysis of government websites shows many of the same words being removed.

Narrowing discourse—‘purging’ and redacting language.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Currently reading The Ordinal Society, and one of the key takeaways is that in the current tech landscape, individuals are only valuable to the extent that they are consistently producing data and making themselves legible to systems, and that framework certainly helps to explain schemes like this.

Number crunching: BP’s change of strategy on renewables 

From the new Private Eye, out now.

Photo of the book cover for Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe.

Photo of the first page of chapter 7, titled "Remaking Sixteenth-Century Botanical Woodblocks: Embodied Artisanal Knowledge in Early Modern Woodcutting."

Received my copy two weeks ago but only able to open the parcel now! Exciting book edited by @sarahabendall.bsky.social and @serenadyer.bsky.social.

More info: www.aup.nl/en/book/9789...

Get 20% off with discount code “AUP20”, valid until 31 March 2025.

You see 5 symbols used by Hernando Colón in his library catalogue. The images of this thread are from J.M. Pérez Fernández / E. Wilson-Lee: Hernando Colón's New World of Books" (2021).

If you ever thought that searching a library catalogue is complicated, be reminded: this is how a book (in manuscript or print) in octavo with five pages or more and less than ten was categorized in a sixteenth-century European collection (from Hernando Colón).

A 🧵 for #earlymodern #bookhistory

Opinion | Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives. Had they merely read the summary, my students would have seen many of the same words, but they’d have lacked the feeling part.

On the invisible losses of summaries - www.nytimes.com/2025/02/16/o...