Max Edward Perry

"The saints came back. Not the gods nor the dead but the saints: emerging from crowds and forests and broken towns with eyes as soft as milk and hearts like booming cannons. They went among the people and worked miracles. They brought calm to the mad and grief to the unfeeling and so parted the lands as gently as a mother parts her infant’s hair. And wherever they went there followed behind them tides of envy and muttered complaint, for the world still knows what to do with saints and soon busied itself sending them on, to a better place."

i wrote a 100 word short story about saints for my friend's substack which publishes only 100 word short stories veryshort.substack.com/p/return

Hi Marcus,
This is an interesting problem, with some echos of the professionalisation of medical record librarians in the 20th century. Have put my name down, hopeful that I can be of use.

Only a totalitarian would trust that guy’s maths.

… though obviously you’ll have to verify and test each component of it. And also figure out what it’s doing. You might have to do some other stuff like reinvent mathematics for yourself too. After that though..!

I missed the anniversary but nevertheless!

Aaron Seward's hand-painted music video for "The Year I Lived in Richmond" by Advance Base has been out in the world for a whole, big, terrible year.

Thank you Aaron for making beautiful magic.

Watch it here:
youtu.be/-LXwshEQjtg?...

Yeah, it was fun when it meant taking on a pseudo-intellectual critical class drunk on its own importance. It’s less fun when taking that position puts one shoulder to shoulder with marketeers & Netflix execs; facing down anyone considering seriously what it means to make art in contemporary life.

Generation Ready: Building the Foundations for AI-Proficient Education in England’s Schools Generation Ready: Building the Foundations for AI-Proficient Education in England’s Schools

See also: Blair Jr’s dad’s think tank rounding this circle. institute.global/insights/pub...

3, 2, 1: How We Were Drawn Into the Photo Booth A century after the first iteration, these public-private cameras have changed the way we think about photographs

This is a good and thoughtful essay. Photo booths are a strange thing to have persisted... There is something of the absurd in their invention, and thus, double absurd in their persistence. A romantic machine.
artreview.com/how-we-were-...

They just haven’t thought about who those guards may end up being.

This seems absolutely right. Seems to me a total inversion of the “anything goes” of Feyarbend. “Nothing goes without satisfying a guard.”.

I think, perhaps, my tolerance for scripts quoting Sartre as though it’s esoteric text is abnormally high.

Last night, I watched Richard Kelly’s The Box. Afterwards, I went to read critical reviews and all of them seemed utterly stupid and wrong. I can understand a critique of that film as pretentious, but as “confused” or “boring” seems totally wrong.

I watched The Shrouds tonight at the cinema. A strange little film (in a good way). Seems like a real companion to Crimes of the Future.

I expected this to be stupid, but it's worse than I thought. “Technology has a new target in its crosshairs – and that’s us. That’s our labour.” (hmm.. he's not really thought too much about the character of technology has he?) *few sentences later* "D**r, 48, is a technology theorist." (😬)

Likewise. I have a lot of *thoughts* in the vague area of your talk, so it’s probably for the best you whipped away.

I think that’s a kindness (perhaps to both). Metascience seems —to me— to be an articulation/strategic-deployment of a certain totalitarian/positivist science. What’s more, I think there’s a straight line between it and the biology you talked about on Monday.

A deep well. The Alan Moore fan annotation blogs constitute a utopian vision of the World Wide Web IMO.

I have been reading Jerusalem for almost exactly a year (with breaks I hasten to add). The Lucy Lips/Ulysses chapter was a good month worth of reading. A remarkable thing. Look forward to reading The Great When.

That Providence? I loved that series.

Fantastic, thanks Pritesh. I'll keep you informed.

Yeah, seems about right; I'm guessing those are based on self-report from trusts? Don't suppose you can link me to a source for the table? Am quite interested to follow some of these numbers backwards (there was an EPR productivity claim recently that I'm also curious about!).

Could I ask what “the standard” is in this chart? Digital Maturity assessment? Self report on functionality? Determination made from vendor/version?

Giving this another “bump” as the deadline is on Friday. Happy to chat to anyone who wants to know more. I’m, tentatively, very excited for it…

Thanks for sharing Nicola! 🎈

I recommend using “PDFgear” to read PDFs. It is —IMO— excellent; very light touch and has useful annotation tools should you care to use them.

Poster for “a social science of databases” workshop. Date: 17-18th June, Location: University of Edinburgh.

FAO those interested in databases. We/I have an open call for a workshop running in June. More details here:
dare.ed.ac.uk/events/2025/...

Reading the medical record. I. Analysis of physician's ways of reading the medical record Physicians were interviewed about their routines in everyday use of the medical record. From the interviews, we conclude that the medical record is a …

This paper from the esrly 90s had, at least, some engagement with the real process of reading and how to transpose that to screen. This type of consideration seems (to me) to have completely bifurcated to: “data” and “UX”.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I suppose I’m thinking of the ways that PDFs are considered problems to be “decoded” into structured data. As always, I’m thinking about paper medical records; how meaning was often conveyed in where something was written, how heavy the pen stroke was, style and thickness of the page etc. etc.

This is excellent. I’ve been thinking a lot about how database folk talk about “unstructured” and “free text” info (derisively). Stupidly, I have hardly ever thought/talked about layout and typography in these contexts.

Hits on two vital aspects of ML technologies:(i) they do not 'think' about their utterances; any cognition/computation is ambivalent to the images/texts that it renders. (ii) Their danger lies precisely in the outsourcing of critical engagement with the world to a standardised machine of automation.