Mads

I keep catching strays from "technology is neutral" people, so let's set things straight.

1) Technology is not neutral, especially the subset of technology called "algorithms"
2) The form-factor that makes a technology into a tool is not neutral
3) How tools are productized is not neutral

[rant]

The cover of a book featuring a spider in the middle of a spider web, surrounded by snakes. The top reads: THERE'S DEATH IN THE POT and is accompanied by a skull.

"There is Death in the Pot" — front cover for an early 19th-century book on culinary poisoning.

Social Scout Find your accounts across hundreds of platforms to clean up your online presence

Final comment is a reminder that this exists, which attempts to track down your internet footprint so you can manage it. It also does NSFW sites optionally for adult performers

It’s buggy and there’s false positives; going to try to improve it soon. There’s also an issue with Russian clone sites.

5 questions for Danielle Citron

Read this interview with a personal hero, Professor @daniellecitron.bsky.social: "we have essentially presumed that data collection is a good...We have long ignored this important inclination that collection itself is endangering our privacy and civil liberties" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

My photo shows a small Roman flask made of translucent cobalt blue glass in the form of a mouse, viewed in profile with head to the left. The neck of the flask (on the right) is funnel-shaped and slightly up-turned to look like a tail. The body of the vessel is rounded and has four tooled trails for feet. A separate blob of glass forms the head with eyes, ears, and a pointed nose. The flask surface is decorated with distinctive trails of glass which have been flattened and notched, using a technique known as ‘snake thread’. Dimensions 6.3 x 5.1 x 14.6 cm.

Something lovely for the weekend! A 1,800 year-old Roman glass flask shaped like a little mouse 🐭 💙

The Met 📷 by me www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

#Archaeology

💯💯💯

Many ancient homes all over the world had no private kitchens/food prep spaces, period! Especially if you were poor!

This is why the discovery of a largely-intact "fast food" shopfront in Pompeii was such a huge deal, a few years ago. These places rarely survive the passage of time.

In Renaissance Italy (my specialty) many small apartments had a fireplace for heat but no oven or food prep space. One could buy bread, a chunk of meat, and “sauce” to take home and roast the meat on a spit, very like buying a microwave meal today. For complex things (stews, veggies, pies) takeout.

Authoritarians love "Gen AI" because it
- Sounds confident even when factually wrong
- Broadly conforms to & reproduces their biases, off the shelf
- Lets them create bespoke realities (text, audio, moving & still image) which agree w/ their biases
- Degrades trust in knowledge/evidence/expertise…

I see grocery/takeout shaming discourse going around again, so this is your periodic historian reminder that cooking from scratch daily while working has never been sustainable, and for millennia everyone either relied on takeout & restaurants or ate in huge households w/ big dorm-like group dining.

Background paintings from Castle in the Sky (1986), dir. Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli

Pieces painted by Nizo Yamamoto, Toshiro Nozaki and Mutsuo Koseki

Oh, this is a good topic!

There is an element of 'consent' to pitched battles, but it's not the old myth of generals agreeing to have a battle before tea time.

And to the question - a better Roman general would presumably have refused battle at a place like Cannae.

But let's talk about it. 1/

An antlion larva and their pit traps and paths in sand.

Were you a curious kid? Maybe you spent some time looking at antlion pit traps? They're also called "doodle bugs" because they leave meandering paths in the sandy soils they call home.

The 'antlion' is actually the larval form of a type of lacewing, often confused for dragonflies.

Tweet from Sonny that says “don’t watch a 3 hour YouTube vid about colour theory just pick from this photo I’m not joking,” with the picture of Jim Henson and the muppets

This is a technique I’ve used for years because of this one tweet from @sonnyross.bsky.social. Thank you Sonny for changing my life

The book cover was designed by Talia Abramson at Penguin but they let me have a bit of a say over the colours. And I said boy do I have an idea….

a red ink imprint of a seal from the Ming dynasty. the caption below reads: "Stroking the sword while lamenting the social realities" (抚剑伤世路), engraved by Shen Qianqiu. Ming Dynasty (Fig. 14)

you may have seen this seal and the memedom around it. @arrdem.com wanted to make a big art print of it, so we wanted to find a higher resolution of this image. since this is a seal, we first looked up which seal collection it can be found in

it turns out 撫劒傷世路 "caressing your blade and lamenting the state of it all" is from an earlier, Tang-dynasty poem:

zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E8%...

I think one of the saddest things about being a millennial is remembering a time when technology was advancing in a way that made life better and easier and more exciting instead of actively, intentionally worse

A photo of the gate tower and the gate way integrated in the former Bishop's residence: The lower section features rough stone masonry and a partially preserved archway, while the upper structure has smooth white walls, rectangular windows with yellow trim, and a red-tiled roof. The historic elements are visibly integrated into the facade along a cobblestone street.

Regensburg is definitely worth a visit. The city still features visible remnants of the Roman legionary fortress of Reginum/Castra Regina, notably the Porta Praetoria, its north gate: a part of the gate tower and the gateway are integrated into the former Bishop's residence, which...🧵1/2

📷 me

Penguin Vessel: 1,600-year-old Nazca depiction of a cold-water Humboldt penguin that lives in tropical Peru A rare penguin-shaped pot reveals the Nazca's interest in depicting the wildlife around them.

A good way to start the day:
1600 year-old pot depicting a Humboldt penguin made by Nazca artisans.

Also love that this article's author included the factoid that Humboldt penguins are known for their projectile-pooping.

A handwritten page from a notebook showing herbs for cooling the blood. These include sorrel and endives

Feeling the heat? 🥵

Try these herbal remedies for cooling the blood from our 18th century herbal notebook.

The iPad of late antiquity (this one is even similar in size!): a complete wax tablet found in Byzantine Egypt still wit notes in Coptic on it. Low content permanence but high portability with an infinite undo function!

Met Museum 14.2.4a–d, c. 500-700

And if you’ve seen any major productions, you know the quality. Here are 5 Cdramas set in imperial China, with splendid period sets and costumes, featuring clever, spirited and resourceful female doctors or herbalists, written and produced by the Chinese, which Apothecary Diaries fans might like. 2/

A photo of a person grinding a microphone with a powertool "This is how you make noise."

Here's apple doing a better job integrating cloud native linux than linux distros. Again.

I have cleared the garden of like two square meters of bishop’s weed and somehow the pile is calf high already??? How does it DO that?

I did that a couple of weeks ago and the outcome is a scraggly twisted thing that seems to have a perpetual air of sulk

Researchers cause GitLab AI developer assistant to turn safe code malicious AI assistants can’t be trusted to produce safe code.

you can prompt inject a repository coding bot with a malicious pull request, because of course you can arstechnica.com/security/202...

All those young people studying coding when it turns out the real careers of the future will all be in smuggling.

1/29: First plane crash in 16 years in DC
1/31: Crash in Philly
2/5: Delta flight struck in Seattle
2/6: Flight wrecks in Alaska
2/10: Crash in Scottsdale
2/12: Military jet crashes in San Diego
2/16: Crash in Covington, GA

7 crashes since the WH congratulated itself for “restoring aviation safety”

A message from the Sun (the Hittite king): Tell Amištamri (king of Ugarit): When the man from Ugarit and Šukku met before the Sun in court, Šukku declared as follows: "His boat was smashed by (hitting) the harbor wall," while the man from Ugarit declared as follows: "Šukku smashed my boat on purpose!" The Sun gave the following decision: "The chief of the sailors of Ugarit should make a declaration under oath (about the matter), and then (if the man from Ugarit is shown to be innocent), Šukku must pay him full damages for the boat and the goods that were in the boat."

When someone smashes up your boat and claims you did it

YouTube video by Rachel | Reading Faerie 💻 HOW TO: get your Kindle books to your Kobo: Calibre set up, Kepubs, and NetGalley 📚

posting this for informational purposes only since obviously i do not condone stripping copy protection (DRM) for ebooks from the great and powerful amazon www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcBi...