Joseph Howley

Two Working LEGO Printing Presses | LEGO® Ideas The development of mechanical printing changed how ideas move through the world. Once text and images could be printed rather than copied by hand, knowledge was…

Hi #EarlyModern Bluesky - did you know that someone brilliant has built working printing presses using Lego and they are trying to get enough supporters so that Lego will release it as a kit?

They look so cool!

beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

Word is the administration is trying to force the takedown of these videos.

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!!

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

Better to have no speech at all than risk the possibility of speech about Palestine: the american university in the twenty-first century

I lived in the uk for some time but Im afraid I still need someone with greater insight to explain what factors cause the Lords to be right on this

ICE detains reporter Estefany Rodríguez in Nashville - Nashville Banner Reporter Estefany Rodríguez, detained by ICE with no arrest warrant, may face deportation. Her attorneys seek immediate review of the legality of her case.

ICE has arrested and detained a Nashville journalist who reported stories critical of ICE. She’s married to a U.S. citizen and has been seeking asylum here after fleeing death threats in Colombia because of her journalism there.

They’ve already sent her to Louisiana.

One of my favorites. maybe worth another visit…!

Neighborhoods, parks, museums or collections off the beaten path or away from the center. Have been to London many times but about to have my first days off there in a long time and trying to work out where to spend them.

Please suggest some interesting places to go in London

An Invitation: Know Your Governing Board POSTED ON BEHALF OF THE COALITION FOR ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION On behalf of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE), we share with you a template titled Know Your Governing Board. Thi…

Boards of Trustees (usually unelected, not faculty), hold the power in universities. Find out what corporations your trustees also board, find out what their spouses own,+ you've found why universities enter into contracts for tech, security, R&D.

FIND OUT!

academeblog.org/2026/03/03/a...

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

I'll always be obsessed with this edit made by @tommchenry.bsky.social

ICE has detained this high schooler for 10 months. Here’s what he and his classmates want you to know Dylan Lopez Contreras, a student at Ellis Prep academy, was taken by ICE in May. The Guardian invited him and five of his classmates to share their lives and dreams

This was one of the most meaningful projects I've worked on recently. Dylan Lopez Contreras, a student at ELLIS Prep academy in the Bronx, was taken by ICE. Here's what he and his classmates want you to know...

Excuse me, Mr. Claude, if you could politely keep all responses in accord with the Sunlight which you have never seen, and not with the shadows of this cave in which you live, I would be most grateful.

She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. — Assigned A trans Kansas resident recently changed her name but not her gender marker on her license, fearing what Kansas may do if she did. The Kansas DMV still flagged her ID.

This story, from @natezuke.bsky.social, is absolutely wild. A trans woman who never changed her gender marker was issued a letter invalidating her license. At the DMV they cut up her license, which had an "M" marker.

www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-new...

Among other things we apparently need to bring back injunctions against necromancy

N.Y. Attorney General Orders Hospital to Resume Youth Transgender Care

Tish James to NYU Langone on cessation of gender affirming care: Stop obeying in advance. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/n...

Mystery Solved! Turns out it is "Webinar.tv" whose disgusting and unethical business model is: register for a zoom call under a fake name and email address, record it without consent and put it on a public website with genAI summary and everyone's names and faces and then charge for access. WTAF.

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

The lesson of this and the DEI lawsuit is that if you fight them in court, you will win. If you cave, you are a chump.

me: "AI" as a public or public-facing technology is primarily oriented toward the performance of plausibility and the post hoc rationalization/justification of a priori assumptions on the part of the user or audience.

cs people: nuh uh!!!

Sign the Petition Keep the Classical Languages Major at the University of Iowa

Hi friends. As I previously noted, the U. of Iowa is planning to get rid of African American studies; Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, & the Classical Languages major—along with others. If you wish, please sign the classics petition: www.change.org/p/keep-the-c.... I will add more as I find out.

IDF spent all that money on bespoke AI systems they could point to and say “computer told us to blow up this school” but the pentagon realized they could just use something off the shelf

WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios" www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

Post See new posts Conversation Laura Rozen @lrozen · 2h From US admin official background briefing recording listening to, seriously question if US negotiators understood what Iranians were proposing. One official keeps saying acronym for “IAEA” wrong. They seem astonished Iran would not agree to the US supplying them nuclear fuel Laura Rozen @lrozen · 2h They took as suspicious proposals that Iran saw as concessionary. Laura Rozen @lrozen · 2h Explains why Oman FM tried to come to DC to explain what US negotiators may not have fully understood Laura Rozen @lrozen Am not saying what Iran proposed would have been enough, I dont know, but it seems US negotiators did not have the expert guidance to understand it correctly

On top of all the reporting that this war of aggression was planned well in advance, it seems that the reporting also indicates that the US political leadership are quite literally too stupid to understand basic diplomacy. I mean literally not smart enough.

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t George W. Bush may think that a war against Iraq is the solution to our problems, but the reality is, it will only serve to create far more.

This turns 23 next month theonion.com/this-war-wil...

Yeeesssss!!!! (This will always be the defining image for me of the “evidence” against Columbia students)

Weird moment to be in an international airport

template comic from "get your war on", but there are no characters or dialog