Alex Grafen

Duolingo screenshot translating 星期三 as “week” rather than “Wednesday”

Duolingo screenshot translating 怎么样 as “how is the weather” rather than “How are you?”

Weird, basic errors in Duolingo’s Mandarin course

Ooh, not sure tbh. I’m reading the Foreign Languages Press ed, translated by WJF Jenner. It has a fair few typos but seems otherwise good and I like the format. I’ve heard good things about the Anthony C Yu translation but i think it was a lot pricier

Just started reading it recently and really enjoying! Bit where Monkey basically says “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” but in a pretty cheerful/unfraught way

Journey to the West seems like a good candidate

The image is a Japanese woodblock print titled "Red Mask Cormorant on Rock" by Ohara Koson (1877-1945), a prominent artist of the shin-hanga movement. The artwork features a large, dark-feathered cormorant standing on a rocky outcrop, with its wings partially spread, possibly in the act of drying them or preparing for flight. The bird is rendered with detailed plumage and a distinctive long, pointed yellow beak. Waves break against the rocks it stands upon. In the background there are birds in flight in the distance.

Morning.
🖼️ Cormorant, Ohara Koson.

Revolting Gays are fundraising to keep their website online. It's a great archive of queer life in 1970s south London.

Read more and donate here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/revolting-...

Ghazal Mosadeq of @pamenarpress
has translated Parnia's "The Extinguished Star"

pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-...

Jury Theorems for Peer Review Marcus Arvan, Liam Kofi Bright, and Remco Heesen Abstract: Peer review is often taken to be the main form of quality control on academic research. Usually journals carry this out. However, parts of maths and physics appear to have a parallel, crowd-sourced model of peer review, where articles are posted on the arXiv to be publicly discussed. In this article we argue that crowd-sourced peer review is likely to do better than journal-solicited peer review at sorting articles by quality. Our argument rests on two key claims. First, crowd-sourced peer review will lead on average to more reviewers per article than journal-solicited peer review. Second, due to the wisdom of the crowds, more reviewers will tend to make better judgements than fewer reviewers will. We make the second claim precise by looking at the Condorcet jury theorem as well as two related jury theorems developed specifically to apply to peer review.

Paper is finally up and open access (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...), it's a sequel to an earlier paper where we'd argued that there's not good evidence that pre-publication peer review is a net benefit (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1093/...). So in this one we suggest an alternative.

“In ruse, by the candor and the reist, the pith is in the shell of the make”

Coming by year’s end—

Welcome to the public domain, UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), the surrealist short from Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí that shocked cinema with dream logic, stark imagery & one gruesome eyeball.

More. ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/w...

#PublicDomain #InternetArchive

Winter in Yiddishland — The Workers Circle

www.circle.org/winterinyidd...

This Sunday: Winter in Yiddishland! (online) I'm teaching a beginner's class playing with adjectives and reading a poem about Winter by Communist résistant and poet Dovid Pliskin z"l. Also performing my Yiddish translation of Lionel Bart's Oom Pa Pa in the concert

Plastic Language w/ Nina Mingya Powles 22nd January 2025 Playing Spoken Word, Field Recordings, Folk, Ambient Jazz. Will René presents Plastic Language, a show exploring the spoken word across a variety of genres & recorded media. This volume features speci...

Latest Plastic Language excellent as usual!

Woman behind the till at the petrol station to her colleague mopping the floor: ‘That floor is constant, I can’t keep up with that bloody floor’

The University as a Contested Space | 7 | ‘No Platforming’ controversi In recent years, there has been much attention paid by the media and by politicians to the alleged free speech ‘crisis’ at universities in Britain, with ‘woke’

Just a quick thread of my publications in 2024. As usual, DM me if you can’t access

“The University as a Contested Space: ‘No Platforming’ controversies at British universities, 1968–1990”

www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...

In Super Mario World, letting Yoshi rest on top of a Control Coin block with the coins leading straight up and then pressing a P-Switch will cause Yoshi to become "abducted" by the blocks, ascending off the top of the screen.

Katy falls sick by the walnut trees, by the hazel trees, by the nut-tree grove. Her mother asks her where’s the pain. Not my head, not my heart. My head doesn’t hurt, my heart doesn’t hurt. Mother have my heart cut out, my calling heart, my joy. Have it cut out, pack it up in a case and carry it safe to the shop. When they ask you what you sell, say it’s Katy’s calling heart, her joy.

My working of a Hungarian folk-song (from 'What's in Store').

Jury Theorems for Peer Review | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Vol 0, No ja

More of a turn towards crowd-sourced peer review has been one proposal, from what I understand (www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...) [cc @lastpositivist.bsky.social ]

This is a good an important piece but let's not overlook the bit where retired French railway workers are casually running a Batcave for train nerds

(Another part of the book is quoted in J. H. Prynne’s poem “Aristeas, in Seven Years”, “the skulls are sent on hunting journeys [etc]”)

Source: Rasmussen, The Netsilik Eskimos

“Life there was always animated, there were always people, some working, some looking on. This was also the place where the gossips congregated, for it was from here that all spicy village news was set in circulation.”

Surprised to see “spicy” being used in this way in a text from 1931

A D-shaped slice of translucent orange agate standing vertically. It has concentric bands of darker orange running through it, and the sunlight shining in the background through the window highlights some of the finer banding. From the Natural History Museum, London's collections.

A little piece of mineralised sunshine! Agate is a translucent banded variety of quartz

Its name comes from a river in Sicily that was once called Achates (now called Dirillo). The Greek philosopher/naturalist Theophrastus found agate along this river between the 4th & 3rd centuries BCE #minerals

Audubon Society Argues NLRB Is Unconstitutional More liberal non-profit madness.

"Does the Audubon Society really want to avoid cooperating with its staff union so much that it is willing to run a test case that, if successful, could destroy the labor rights of 100+ million people in the country?" www.nlrbedge.com/p/audubon-so...

Come!Unity Press - Wikipedia

Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come!Un...) after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.

bsky.app/profile/moll...

Gilded Dirt #4: Bermuda △ Sadcore Featuring nearly thirty authors, our next issue takes a slomo plunge into the ocean in search of lost cities, cephalopods and that selkie we made friends with in ’93. The issue features poetry, fictio...

V pleased to have a poem in Gilded Dirt iv (the Bermuda Sadcore issue). Poem features a moving lodge and a cheese sandwich as well as parts of the Mengzi and a Python tutorial.

GitHub - lascellesabercrombie/eighty-flowers: Sample pages from poet Louis Zukofsky's notebooks set in LaTeX Sample pages from poet Louis Zukofsky's notebooks set in LaTeX - lascellesabercrombie/eighty-flowers

The (v messy) source code is at github.com/lascellesabe.... Improvements and additions welcome!

80 Flowers notebooks - Z-Site The following transcriptions draw from two notebooks that Zukofsky used in preparing and writing 80 Flowers: a working notebook, in which Zukofsky gathered notes relevant to the project and developing...

Transcriptions of five sample pages from the notebooks Louis Zukofsky used to write 80 Flowers can now be seen at z-site.net/80-flowers-n...