A little marginalia.
Dragonlet, Book of Hours, Paris c.1410.
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
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
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 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-...
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...
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
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
One more time, syntax matters. I do hope the snake had a good time, though.
I reckon it would be a good move for cinemas in the US to be showing the original Downfall film now. Magnificent film with huge relevance for today
“When it draws near to witching time of night.”
(Robert Blair)
🎨 Charles Livingston Bull
#owlishmonday
New blog post "Achievements 2025" userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-pres...
I really understand very little about the current version of reality.
Same story over and over. These larpers - Kirkegard, Pesta et al - pumping out the same effluence with their strategy - exposed by @harryshukman.bsky.social + @hopenothate.org.uk - to normalise and spread scientific racism. They KNOW it's bullshit too.
Read this:
www.theguardian.com/world/2024/o...
