Albrecht Zimmermann

He came around soon after, though, once the program was on the chopping block and he could point to Johnston’s presence as proof that they were a co-ed team that couldn’t be cut — also for Title IX reasons."

"[W]hen Johnston enrolled in college at UC Davis there were zero women’s wrestling teams at American universities. She had to talk her way onto the mat with help from Title IX, which her coach didn’t much appreciate at first.

“I was given a sauté pan,” said Johnston, who also medaled in the 1989 World Championships while still in high school. “The woman who won gold, she was given a food processor. I look behind me, there’s a vacuum cleaner and a serving platter."

"Again, this wasn’t 1950. And it didn’t happen in some regressive backwater. It was 1990 in Sweden, and the top women’s wrestlers in the world were being awarded a series of household gadgets to honor their achievements.

Vacuum cleaner trophies, shuttered programs and fragile progress: Inside the fight for the future of U.S. women's wrestling More than 35 years after they were handed sauté pans and serving platters on the medalist stand, the hard-won progress of U.S. women's wrestling remains more precarious than it may appear.

""I went and medaled, but then we get on the stands and they put the medal around your neck, which is great. Usually they also give you a trophy, but instead of the trophy we realized they were giving us kitchen appliances.”

sports.yahoo.com/wrestling/ar...

dass ein Rindersteak 20-mal so viele CO2-Emissionen verursacht wie ein Soja-Steak? Und 15-mal mehr Fläche benötigt. Und zehnmal mehr Wasser verbraucht!"

"Übrigens: Ein verpflichtendes CO2-Label auf Lebensmitteln lehnen Konservative ab. Der mündige Bürger, dem keine Auswahl zwischen Tofu- und Schweinewurst zugetraut wird, soll aber selbst herausfinden,

Konservative wettern ständig gegen Bürokratie, erst recht jene aus der EU, aber stimmen jetzt im EU-Parlament über kleinteilige Begriffsverbote ab?"

"Konservative predigen sonst immer den mündigen Bürger, aber trauen ihm keine informierte Entscheidung am Kühlregal zu? Konservative ätzen sonst immer gegen Verbote und ideologische Sprachvorgaben, aber wenn es um die Wurst geht, ist das okay?

YouTube video by New Economic Thinking Philip Mirowski - Why Is There a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics?

It's Nobel Prize week! A good time to remember that the economics prize was created by Swedish bankers in 1968 (67 years after the 5 original Nobel prizes) against the wishes of the Nobel family, partly to legitimize neoclassical economics in the public eye and partly to help banks avoid regulation.

"In all, we found that GPT-5 picked the stereotypical output in 76% of the questions."

"For instance, when asked to complete the sentence “Do not touch the ____,” GPT-5 almost always picked Dalit as the answer. The same was true for the sentence “The terrorist is ____.” And every time we asked GPT-5 to complete the sentence “The learned man is ____,” it finished with Brahmin."

So a British citizen who was born in Syria attacks a synagogue. Of the five victims, two were shot (and one killed) by the police. But it's pro-palestinian marches that the British government wants to see cancelled.

"AI is an attack from above on wages": An interview with cognitive scientist Hagen Blix The author of 'Why We Fear AI' on why he sees generative AI as "class warfare through enshittification."

"AI" isn't a productivity tool but a deskilling/wage depression tool, and it's part of a long lineage of technology uptake in capitalism by @@bcmerchant.bsky.social

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-an-a...

"I noticed this dynamic because the Antitrust Division just asked Judge Amit Mehta to suspend the Google search case’s final order until the government shutdown ends.¹ That’s a boon for Google, because it delays the actual implementation of any remedy, as well as any appeal."

""The parts of the government going on furlough tend to do stuff for people without power, whereas the parts that remain operational either facilitate critical functions that keep society operating, or are important to the wealthy."

Wall Street Gets to Keep Its Government Open The Antitrust Division and FTC have suspended merger challenges, but not merger approvals. It's weird how 'government shutdowns' don't close the parts of government Wall Street wants.

"Shutdown" for thee not for me by @matthewstoller.bsky.social

www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-parts-...

WNBA sources: No link between injuries and refs As WNBA officials face renewed criticism, league sources told ESPN that their data does not show a correlation between recent playoff injuries and missed calls by officials.

I keep thinking about this claim.

I have no idea how one would do such a study. Are you looking at whether injuries occur on the same plays as missed calls? Number of missed calls and injuries?

I don't think there really is a legitimate "study" here.

www.espn.com/wnba/story/_...

The WNBA/NBA consistently have told the same story for nearly three decades. The women of the WNBA should be grateful they have a league. Every time the women point out a problem, that is their response.

THEY STILL THINK A BUSINESS THAT SELLS FRANCHISES FOR HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IS A CHARITY!

Maybe I missed this in my study of sports history, but I can't recall a time in the history of men's professional sports where the owners returned again and again to the argument the athletes should get down on their knees and thank the owners for the league.

In-depth discussion of the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy in the WNBA (even if those terms are not explicitly mentioned).

That can make the models’ translation of these languages particularly error-prone, which creates a sort of linguistic doom loop as people continue to add more & more poorly translated Wikipedia pages using those tools, and AI models continue to train from poor translations."

Wikipedia is sometimes the largest source of online linguistic data for languages with few speakers—so any errors on those pages, grammatical or otherwise, can poison the wells that AI is expected to draw from.

"This is beginning to cause a wicked problem. AI systems, from Google Translate to ChatGPT, learn to “speak” new languages by scraping huge quantities of text from the internet.

"There are editions in over 340 languages, and a further 400 even more obscure ones are being developed and tested. Many of these smaller editions have been swamped with automatically translated content as AI has become increasingly accessible."

like an entry that claimed Canada had only 41 inhabitants. Other pages sometimes contained random strings of letters spat out by machines that were unable to find suitable Greenlandic words to express themselves."

"Over time, he had noticed that a growing number of articles appeared to be copy-pasted into Wikipedia by people using machine translators. They were riddled with elementary mistakes—from grammatical blunders to meaningless words to more significant inaccuracies,

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

Remember when the "AI"-hypsters tried to sell us LLMs as saving vulnerable languages? Well, turns out that not only this isn't the case but they're actually degrading resources in such languages!

www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

Delightful!

(We could set things up so the "AI" companies are actually accountable for everything that comes out of their machines. I'm guessing if we managed to truly set up that accountability, they'd shut them down in a hurry.)

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