Sarah Burke Cahalan

I can’t recommend eating modern books. Those inks are full of petrochemicals. Chewing on rag paper or parchment or a piece of papyrus, maybe? Oak gall ink won’t kill you. Some inks and traditional conservation treatments might have unintended effects…

Chimpanzees can distinguish crystals from ordinary stones, showing a preference for transparent surfaces and regular geometric forms. The study authors suggest this demonstrates a shared preference with quartz-collecting hominins of the Pleistocene! 🧪

www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

the joy of being autistic and the importance of diagnosis

love this piece by Rebecca Hooper

"On the edge of the playground, while everyone else played tag, I was in the rainforest meeting chimps."

betweentwoseas.substack.com/p/the-joy-of...

♥️

Kids can be little mystics!

Lots to discuss but the immediate question is “are you currently eating your Bible?”

“If I eat a piece of the Bible, does my body become holy?” fourth graders are the best.

(People hate microform but it's pretty solid for long-term preservation, too.)

Colorful illustration of numerous hermit crabs engaged in battles and negotiations about shells

Hermit crabs, by Winifred Lubell (1967) from “The Outer Lands” by Dorothy Sperling 🐚 🌱 🌊

"Last month there was a bit of light. Computer scientists unveiled Project Silica. In a Microsoft lab in Cambridge there are blocks of glass, each like a chunky microscope slide. Hold them up, as I did, and they shimmer — imperfections catch the light, like notches in ivory. They have been carved not with flint but lasers. Each stores seven terabytes of data. That’s 10,000 CDs or (roughly) 600 billion mammoth tusks. Each can last 10,000 years, without requiring civilisation (and electricity) to last."

"without requiring civilisation" is pretty bleak, considering everything 🔥

I still like books.

OK I love the sentiment but the original article is basically an ad for Project Silica, a new Microsoft product 🙄 📚 📜

“But, in the end, we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military.”

Read all of extraordinary Cardinal Cupich statement here:

www.archchicago.org/statement/-/...

Sterling, not Sperling!! (Sorry, Dorothy.)

Colorful illustration of numerous hermit crabs engaged in battles and negotiations about shells

Hermit crabs, by Winifred Lubell (1967) from “The Outer Lands” by Dorothy Sperling 🐚 🌱 🌊

A blue whale seen by the New England Aquarium’s aerial survey team over Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument on Feb. 27, 2026. (CREDIT: New England Aquarium

Last week, an aerial survey team spotted endangered blue whales two days in a row in the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument

This is the same area the trump admin is now slashing protections for

“Seeing blue #whales outside of their Canadian feeding grounds is rare," they said

Screenshot of a paragraph from a short essay by Becca Rothfeld, titled 'You Don't Have to Use AI'. Text reads: Of course, it’s long seemed obvious to me (and, I presume, basically everyone I care about or respect ) that the use of AI in most humanistic endeavors is beyond the pale. Even if it were good at writing prose or doing philosophy—and thus far it isn’t —to use AI to write or philosophize would be to render those activities futile. In some of the sciences, some of the time, the point is the outcome—the vaccine, the medicine, the finding, the technology. In the humanities, the point is the process. The point of writing is to make something beautiful or interesting; the point of reading a book or a philosophy paper is, at least in large part, to make contact with another human mind that has strained to make something beautiful or interesting, whether or not the human mind has succeeded or failed. There would be no reason to read a novel that an AI had written, even if AI got to a point where it could write “well,” as perhaps it will if it keeps cannibalizing the greatest fruits of human endeavor with impunity. Writing a book with AI would be like driving a car to a marathon finish line, then claiming the title. Even considering using it to write evinces a complete misunderstanding of the enterprise. I can’t stress it enough: if these claims are not obvious to you, you are not “in my world and not of my flesh,” to paraphrase a remark of Stanley Cavell’s in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy.” I hope you are ashamed of yourself and your dwindling humanity, and I think it should be legally required for people to say when/if they’ve used AI in the process of writing something so that I can avoid it at all costs.

Becca Rothfeld: 'You don't have to use AI'

open.substack.com/pub/afetewor...

Even if it were good at writing prose or doing philosophy—and thus far it isn’t —to use AI to write or philosophize would be to render those activities futile. In some of the sciences, some of the time, the point is the outcome—the vaccine, the medicine, the finding, the technology. In the humanities, the point is the process. The point of writing is to make something beautiful or interesting; the point of reading a book or a philosophy paper is, at least in large part, to make contact with another human mind

Becca Rothfeld remains unmatched. afeteworsethandeath.substack.com/p/you-dont-h...

Big news in Dayton. I just heard a toad!

The face of a guy who spent his honeymoon counting utility poles and making little efficiency diagrams (according to my grandma, anyway) 🙃

Midcentury American grandpa, probably thinking about math

My math grandpa has a Wikipedia page! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selmer_...

That's my grandpas. My grandma came on an orphan ship from Sweden, which is a pretty rugged way to start being American, I think.

Mathematician and dentist... not very good for campaign speeches, I'm afraid!

It shouldn't be a luxury to have a home, to settle and stay somewhere and feel safe.

thinking about my friend's family who were brought from Pakistan to Africa by the British in the 19th c, expelled from Uganda in the 1970s, ended up in Bahrain for work so they could settle and raise a family, and they did, and now bombs took out the hotel where one of their kids got married

That’s it!

Or Kween Anne’s lace :)

Did you come up with something for K? All I can think of without googling is knotweed…

honeybee and hellebore

The London Labour woodblocks By Chris Anderson Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1849-1851) let the street folk tell their own stories. To read them today is to step back in time. It followed on from a series M…

stbridefoundation.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/t...

Black and white print of “Old Sarah,” the well-known hurdy-gurdy player

Me, registering as a poetry vendor with an institutional procurement system