David Adger

An array of 9 purple discs on a blue background. Figure from Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt.

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

Comic depictions of the first page of research papers in the language sciences, with titles that include the following: Just what the hell is a word anyway? See how this single cognitive process or brain area or neural oscillation or gene explains language! Based on the shapes of these old bones, Homo erectus could sing .... don't @ me. A baby looked at one thing more than the other, now we know the secret to grammar. If you think about it, every language is fundamentally the same, amirite? We taught a load of undergrads a made-up language, lol. On the staggering diversity of the many languages across the world. Remember the thing you said only humans could do, here's a video of a monkey / dolphin / corvid / octopus / honeybee doing it. I trained this AI with 80 billion tweets and it became head-writer for phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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 Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: 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 acceptin…

"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-...

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts Medical device makers have been rushing to add AI to their products. While proponents say the new technology will revolutionize medicine, regulators are receiving a rising number of claims of patient ...

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...

10 January 1993 Caller (w): 'Can you tell me about Clone Zone?' Me: 'yes it's a shop selling everything from lycra shorts + underwear to leather harnesses + nipple clamps. Predominantly gay boys but some women use it. Why, what do you want?' (thinks she's looking to buy a dildo) Caller: Well I've just found an access receipt in my husband's pocket!' ！！：

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

REFORM ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ X.com finds it difficult to believe that Manchester finished above Rome, Madrid & London in the most liveable cities list (Vancouver #1) 09:36 • 02/11/2009

Oops

A red squirrel on the ground. It almost looks like it is in superhero pose with one front paw and one back paw on the ground. The other front and back paws are raised in the air, its head is forward ready to run towards the camera.

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

Photo of Lindsay Lohan with jungle background Below, Entertainment--Lindsay Lohan bitten by snake on holiday in Thailand Above, I don't understand how a snake even begins to organiseva trip like that.

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

A large snowy owl glides across a washed-blue night sky, wings outstretched and head angled downward as if hunting. Far below, a dark, blocky city skyline fades into mist, with scattered points of light suggesting windows and streetlamps. The contrast between the silent, ghost-white bird and the smudged urban haze gives the scene a quiet, watchful mood—night made visible as a single hovering presence.

“When it draws near to witching time of night.”

(Robert Blair)

🎨 Charles Livingston Bull

#owlishmonday

Covers of 20 books published in 2025

New blog post "Achievements 2025" userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-pres...

Sajid Javid: why I wouldn’t let people like my parents into the UK now.

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...

Stop Sex Matters infiltrating the Council of Europe In just one week, the Council of Europe will be voting to ban conversion therapy. This would be an incredibly important step to stop the rollback in the rights of LGBTQ+ people. But Sex Matters is inf...

I've just used Good Law Project's tool to email MPs on the Council of Europe about the conversion therapy ban and Sex Matter’s transphobic threats. goodlaw.social/9f10d1

This is great Andrew - I've been trying to do something at this level for my first year lings students in class, mainly to underpin later discussion of linguistics issues (and ethical ones) and found it quite a challenge, so this is really just so perfect, and very much needed. Thank you!

YouTube video by Andrew Perfors Part 1: How do LLMs work?

I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊

Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.