Christine Jones

Shudder.

#StandTogether

I'll try it on my laptop.

Jane Goodall, renowned chimpanzee researcher and animal advocate, dies at 91 "Dr. Goodall's discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world," the Jane Goodall Institute said in a Wedne...

Farewell to one of the greats
www.nbcnews.com/news/obituar...

Unfortunately not. Maybe a location restriction? I tried typing in paulsemel.com too, i got a link here in the post but it wouldn't open both from the app and in chrome.

The link doesn't work, can you post the link to the interview again please?

I'm watching that documentary "Before Stonewall" about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting. The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one "known homosexual". The "known homosexual" is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson. So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there's nothing wrong with him mentally and he's never been arrested. When asked whether he'd take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he's gay, he says that they didn't up until tonight, but he guesses they're going to find out, and he'll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like ... why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says "I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself." 1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium. Despite the pseudonym, Dale's boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary. Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson's disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

Some amazing gay history. Listen up kids.

If Disney can cancel presenters for freedom of expression, I'm cancelling my Disney subs. Can't cope with any satire of the Kim Jong Un of the US? - I'm not paying for Disney to fund Maga, especially with all the double speak in the media.

He ain't stupid - multiple vaccines cost more and more people getting sick is profit for a few people who are paying for his power. He is awful and soulless , but sadly not as stupid as he makes out - that's just his way of appealing to the lower sections of the IQ spectrum.

Lauren Lavern used to have a regular feature on her morning show on 6music for this sort of happening called House music. Does your washing machine sound like the opening bars to the Pulp's song, Misfits? etc. Very fun.

David Tennant does an incredible Peter Capaldi.

What if he tasked himself (together the internet) with making Kirk a martyr? Maga is all about polarisation and fear as the most powerful motivator. The Bible is obviously a great manual if you want to get biblical.

[the shooter is unidentified] the left must be purged with the sword

[the shooter is, again, a compulsive masturbator who loved Hitler] I believe it was pascal who said that the heart has reasons that reason may not know

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al. Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such “hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This “epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

This is atrocious on SO MANY LEVELS. Using the US Army against a US State is illegal, immoral and heinous - again. Completely apart from this, my father was one of five artists who won an Oscar for this film. I cannot even fathom this perversion of art - again. Apocalypse Now was an ANTI-WAR film!

Eventually we'll catch up to Ukrainians in the dark humor game. Good step forward!

This looks disturbingly like David Tennant is playing Peter Capaldi

Pets at Home, Im really not sure we should be giving cats access to a ouija board.

My photo shows the front of a warm-yellow coloured Minoan clay flask, hand painted in black with a frontally depicted octopus. The flask is 27 cm in height (about 10.5 inches). There’s a spout at the top with a small handle at either side. The octopus is swimming diagonally with writhing tentacles covering the whole surface of the flask. It stares out at the viewer with wide, almost cartoon-like eyes. Each of the eight writhing arms are lined with suckers. Between the tentacles are motifs representing the seabed, such as sea urchins, tritons and small rocks with seaweed. Minoan decoration depicting sea motifs is known by scholars as the ‘Marine Style’. The flask was excavated in 1903 at a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro. The Palaikastro excavations, carried out between 1902 and 1906, were run by R. Bosanquet and R.M. Dawkins from the British School of Athens. The flask is dated c. 1500-1450 BC, the Late Minoan IB ceramic period. On display at Heraklion Archaeological Museum. NB it is currently out on loan.

Happy weekend!

Here’s a 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a spectacular wide-eyed octopus! 🐙😍

From Palaikastro, a Bronze Age settlement site on the island of Crete.

Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 📷 by me

#Archaeology

My 18yo son could be a contender, not that I think he needs killing, more his hatred of AI. You'll have to wait for him to finish uni first though.

The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bédoyère review – journal of a predator Newly decoded extracts expose the celebrated 17th-century diarist and naval administrator as a rapacious abuser

We’ve long known Samuel Pepys was a sleazebag, but Guy de la Bedoyere’s new edition of his journal reveals it was way worse than that — he was a relentless sexual predator www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

a university is not for generating profit, it provides cultural enrichment via weird little gremlin people who love visigoths or haikus, and very occasionally a scientist who figures out faster than light travel

Karl: The transformation has been gradual and unmistakable.

By February, some golden urns on the mantle.

April, gold adornments appear on the walls.

By July, it's gold everywhere.

Just this week more scaffolding popped up, even more new gold trim appeared.

Ely, again. From whens the boys were spawned. My third Pride event this year too! I spent an unprecedented amount of dosh on locally made pretty things from the stalls there.

I was there last week too! Fantastic exhibition. Lots of inspiration for the pub quiz I'm making for my local international women's club.

Almost 3 wks at Dad's place in Newbury. A working holiday - installed a washer dryer, fixed doorbell, cut his hair, cooking etc but in the meantime, bike rides, stargazing, cider in the 'spoons, walking around Greenham Common and a day trip to the British Library with dear friend Charlotte.

Tumblr normal-horoscopes Everyone shut up and look at this carving of a whale from the 1200-600 CE Chumash culture The whale looks delightfully round and seems to be smiling.

We have always made delightful little guys.

Love moments like this. Public Enemy meets Mavis Staples ❤️