Thomas A. Carlson

With all the AI spyware built into Windows 11 and AI's inability to prevent spewing protected information if prompted, some university lawyers should really investigate whether teachers using Windows 11 violates FERPA.

Three years and half a trillion dollars later we still have a dumb AI yet some in academia believe it’s a “research” tool. Imagine the millions of ways the money could have been used to actually serve humanity. AI is nothing meaningful but a stage in the adventures of capitalism.

Big news for Persian Studies and Digital Humanities!

Why we can’t allow Trump to ban that other f-word | Will Bunch The column the Trump regime wants to ban: America has to call out surging fascism in order to defeat it.

This is what freedom of speech sounds like. Also, please consider subscribing to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
www.inquirer.com/opinion/trum...

Mielich's copy of the Six Kings painting from Qusayr Amra. Six figures standing next to each other, against a light blue background, wearing colourful Byzantine garb. Four of the six faces are still partly visible. The copy already records a damaged state.

More recent photograph of the Six Kings painting. None of the figures' faces is recognisable anymore.

Copy of an Umayyad wall painting (early 8th c.) from Qusayr Amra, depicting six kings with bilingual Greek and Arabic inscriptions. The copy was made by the Austrian painter Leopold Mielich who was also responsible for the massivly damaged state it's now in.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintin...

Torn and crinkled brown-ish parchment manuscript with about 30 lines of Judaeo-Arabic text, set on a light blue grid background. The uploader has highlighted portions with red boxes and transliterated with inserted Arabic text, reading الله and واجهاد نفسه في حب خالقه

Here's an 11th-century Jewish manuscript that refers to God as Allah and wishes for the reader to have "jihad of his soul in love for his Creator"

Building a career on punching down is antithetical to becoming and being an effective educator.

... And then there's the eponym of the Turkish shadow-play form, Karagöz, who is sometimes said to have been a man who worked on the construction site of a 14th-century mosque and was 'kambur,' or hunched, giving rise to a hunchbacked stock figure in those plays as well...

... But there are others. The titular figure of the 13th-century Arabic shadow play, Ṭayf al-Khayāl, is said to be hunched (aḥdab), and hail from Mosul, which was sometimes called the Hunchbacked City (al-Ḥadbā'), because the minaret of one of its central mosques is a little tilty...

So, one thing I learned today is that theater loves a hunchback.

Take Pulcinella, of the commedia dell'arte genre. He's said to have antecedents from the Atellan farces, which had characters like Maccus, also hunchbacked. Plautus likely took the nickname Maccius from him...

Is this the old minaret before ISIS demolished it in 2017? I haven't seen pictures of the recent reconstruction to see if they rebuilt it at the same angle...

With all those bottles in the background, I thought that was the office of one of the three of them... =-)

News coverage of the Trump administration's proposed "compact" with universities has been, so far, shockingly bad.

I hate to pick on NPR reporter Elissa Nadworny, who's usually a solid reporter, but almost every important thing I heard her say this morning about the proposed "compact" was false.

paintings of warrior saints from the church of Faras, Lower Nubia

11th-13th century.
-Sudan National Museum (previously)
#randomxt

It's like the Stanford Prison experiment is going on again, except it's the whole country.

Volume 55 Issue 3 | Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies | Duke University Press

In sincerity I did log on for a reason. A new issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is out, edited by colleague/friend Marcel Elias. It's about how to do postcolonial medieval studies bigger and better. You'll like it. (I'm in there). Go read.
read.dukeupress.edu/jmems/issue/...

Really? It seems to me that all the RS departments I've talked to want to ask what my definition of religion is, and I always want to borrow a definition from another context: "I know it when I see it" (Jacobellis v. Ohio 1964)...

I think of the category of religion as ad hoc useful for identifying interesting comparanda, but not as analytically useful per se. Perhaps that's why I've never been hired by a Religious Studies department... =-)

Aha. I am skeptical (and not only for Asad's reasons) of claims of global cultural homology; I would explain the parallels between Arabic and Latin concepts of religio/din due to cognate developments of shared heritage. 1/2

What do you mean by a "universal religious experience"? Asking for clarity, not snark.

No, thank you both for writing such a good and useful book!

It's always delightful when colleagues tell me they picked up a book that I recommended. I was just told that a coworker picked up _The AI Con_ by @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social and is enjoying it! Highly recommended book!

We need a bigger national spotlight on this building raid, fam. Agents dropped from helicopters onto the roof. Citizens and non-citizens alike were dragged from their homes in the night. People who weren't kidnapped during the raid had their belongings seized after the fact. This is madness.

As someone whose institution uses Canvas, I recommend using it for as little as possible. It will encourage you to let it take over your life, but you can just use it to share PDFs with students.

Here’s a comprehensive list of appropriate responses upon hearing that a man murdered worshippers at a synagogue:

1- this is fucked up, fuck that guy, fuck antisemitism, solidarity with the victims

2- see above

When I’m accused of “technopessimism“ I counter that I’m not “pessimistic about technology“; I am opposed to the economic, political, and social project of upward wealth transfer that “AI” is being leveraged to bring about. If that phrasing is useful to others, then go ahead and use it.

It's even more fun when they name-check you in the sermon to support their erroneous definition (without having asked previously, ofc). "This means X, as Thomas can tell you." Ask me how I know...

A famous and well-respected lawyer makes an argument for the importance of understanding American history (among other things):

Every good programmer I know has been saying this to me for months; meanwhile every not-great programmer I know has been trying to outsource their work to ai, causing more issues/delays than they if did it themselves.

A lot of these tools only seem good to people who are not great at their jobs.