Benjamin

Illustration of a trio of lemon sharks swimming in a shallow turquoise ocean over white sand. The topmost shark seems to be looking toward the viewer, a pair of remora attached to their side.

lemon sharks

(Swim On 6, 2020) #art #sciart 🎨🦑🦈

Watercolor painting of a Nicobar pigeon showing off its long neck feathers and fancy multicolored iridescent back.

This week I'm using the prompts for #stilltober and painting in watercolor!

Here is a Nicobar pigeon in #watercolor for #stilltober25 prompt "iridescent". Fun fact, this fancy guy is the closest living relative of the dodo.

#artyear #birdart

Windows 98 Plus! - Underwater

Jane Goodall, legendary primatologist, has died at age 91 Jane Goodall, primatologist who transformed our understanding of the lives of apes, has died, according to an announcement from the Jane Goodall Institute.

We should all lead a life as interesting and useful

www.npr.org/2025/10/01/4...

I tell people that the problem is not coming up with ideas, I think of a couple dozen of them a day. The real problem is knowing which of the damn things is any good for writing up. Most of them are junk. I have to let them roll around in my brain a while to find out which is which.

I hear the President has decreed that it is possibly a crime to refer to Americans as "fascists," but "fascism" is a word that has a relatively clear meaning that's worth understanding. Here's how an official publication of the US Army defined "fascism" in 1945.

Frog and Toad craddle warm cups of tea in their hands, as they sit in cozy chairs in front of the fire. From "Shivers" In *Days with Frog and Toad*

The night was cold and dark.

“Listen to the wind howling in the trees,” said Frog. “What a fine time for a ghost story.”

A screenshot of an article published in popular science. It reads: “First known wild 'grue jay' hybrid spotted in Texas. Green and blue jays are crossing paths as temperatures rise.”

I’ve been training my whole life for this moment

trans people just want to be able to live their lives and cis people are like "due to this we need to do mandatory genital inspections to children playing sports". im sorry but the problem is cis people

This seems like a joke they would do with Crabtree in Murdoch Mysteries. He would describe a cell phone without using that term and the other characters would dismiss it as ridiculous.

one of the common threads you will frequently find among devoted adult readers & writers is that as kids the librarian let them get away with reading whatever the fuck they wanted. so much of the scifi and fantasy I fell in love with as a kid was very much Not For Kids, but it made my brain light up

I love the colors on this one! Tried to do a little practice redraw(not even close to the original :D) Thank you @erinhansonartist.bsky.social!
#followeeredraw #art #watercolor #watercolour #tradart

That’s one way to avoid the preface paradox

I know I know it's a well worn point but still. Plenty of people who would self-describe as Christians, for whom that is a very important identity, watch Fox News. I genuinely can think of very few messages as laser-targeted to be anti-Christian as "kill the homeless". Designed in a lab by Satan.

I recognized the furry one but I didn’t know about the video game references or what a groyper was.

Finally! This was the thing I missed most from Twitter.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

I really like the metaphors in the lyrics. They give you such a vivid sense of what the narrator is feeling.

Comic. (1) [Teacher points to world map that highlights the edges of South America’s eastern coastline and Africa’s western coastline.] TEACHER: People had long noticed that South America and Africa had similarly-shaped coastlines. (2) TEACHER: In the 20th century, geologists finally found the explanation. (3) STUDENT: *Plagiaris*— TEACHER: Continental drift. STUDENT: Oh.

Coastline Similarity

xkcd.com/3132/

saw a blue salmon swimming upstream to spawn today

If you talk to queer and trans kids about the internet they will tell you that it’s full of issues and causes issues for people in general, not just young people—and that they probably wouldn’t be here today without it. It’s a lifeline. It’s the only LGBTQ resource and community many of them have.

"How bad slavery was" is worse. Much worse. Much worse than you think, much worse than you're taught, much worse than museums depict. Worse.

It’s such bad reasoning that it sounds more like an exaggerated example to demonstrate a logical fallacy than an actual argument someone would make.

I read this book about the Lavender Scare. When there started being enough openly gay people that the “security risk” justification didn’t really work anymore, they just pivoted to saying “They’re too open about it and it might embarrass the government”

Costco made a massive decision to not carry a thing it has never carried this is awful

Those examples they gave of “acceptable” responses made my skin crawl. How did it even get to that point without someone questioning it?

#18. Digital colored pencil for 2.5”x3.5” print.
#art #fineart #contemporaryart #artist #psychedelicart #digitalart #adultcoloringbook #coloredpencil #drawing #painting #procreate #psychedelic #popart

6 days after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, a Prague paper published these “10 Commandments”:
‘When a Soviet soldier comes to you, YOU:
1. Don’t know
2. Don’t care
3. Don’t tell
4. Don’t have
5. Don’t know how to
6. Don’t give
7. Can’t do
8. Don’t sell
9. Don’t show
10. Do nothing’

I looked it up and the precise wording they used was that it would be considered to fall under “human parts and remains.”

This reminds me of how eBay dealt with someone trying to sell their soul. Either the soul is real or it is not. If it is, it’s considered a human organ and is not allowed. If not, then you’re not selling anything and it falls under scams and is not allowed.