Pantone’s use of AI-generated imagery in the Mocha Mousse launch video highlights just how performative the trend-spotting economy has become. Pantone didn’t need to find real-world examples to justify the coming popularity of their Colour of the Year – they could just use AI to create cozy interiors, cafes, and polished wood finishes bathed in its warm tone. If you can’t find proof of a trend in the wild, why not generate it yourself?

A term like “Tomato Girl” creates a lens for viewing the world, encouraging people to adopt and expand the trend, whether by buying tomato-red dresses or posting Mediterranean-inspired selfies. Many of these modern micro-aesthetics are anchored in a single dominant colour – Tomato Girl is red, Vanilla Girl is white, Blueberry Girl is blue – distilling identity into something as simple as a palette. Unlike earlier personal styles like punk or indie twee, which demanded a point of view and subcultural references, these aesthetics require little more than a willingness to buy the right products in the right colour.

However, a big no for female writers is to insert any form of personal experience into the plot. If they get caught, it could end their career. One player famously noted: ‘It feels like being pushed second-hand goods when you are expecting a virgin.’ In short, what paper hubbies absolutely cannot have is: history with other women.

The ‘sapiosexual type’ is more sophisticated than its predecessors and becoming prevalent with highly educated women. Creating these characters convincingly is no easy task. Otome game companies often hire female writers from top universities with diverse backgrounds, equipped with knowledge from a range of disciplines. ‘He’ should be able to comment on a Shakespearean sonnet or quantum physics in a magisterial way, if prompted.

Iconic games such as Genshin Impact (developed by the Shanghai game company miHoYo, whose slogan is ‘Tech Otakus Save the World’) are featuring more and more charming male characters to appeal to female players, which is seen as a betrayal of its origins. Many male players refuse to play with male characters – going so far as to deliberately drop them dead – and vow to boycott the game until this supposed mistake is rectified. What they don’t grasp is that they need to outspend female and gay players to regain some bargaining power. Petulantly railing against the ‘pink tax’ won’t get them what they want.

Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok.

Now we’re watching Ezra Klein talk on the NYT site as well as listening to him. You have to be better than the rando parroting your articles in a selfie video.

The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible

Thus it makes sense to build your concept in public and test its engagement at every stage. Every powerful brand starts with a single post.

The job as a consumer is to find and support them

Media brands increasingly work like fashion brands: Consumers have to want to wear them. If no one wants to come to your party, you’re doing it wrong.

Locality and specificity are good things and offer ways to preserve meaning in the increasingly contextless internet. You have to remain tied to your own digital geography or the scope of a specific viewpoint. An audience wants to feel like an in-group, like they’re in on the joke, even if that joke is just that the mayor of New York sucks.

Parasocial relationships are the name of the game. When people call for a Joe Rogan of the left, it seems like they don’t realize that one of the reasons he is so powerful is that he is many of his listeners’ best friend. People spend hours and hours a day with him; his show and its extended universe have become an on-demand loneliness killing service. The power (and value) of that relationship is unmatched. Puck is a parasocial publication, that’s why you hear the tentpole writers’ voices in solo podcasts.

No matter if you’re a text-only website, it is now in your best interests to hire camera-ready contributors who will make successful video-podcast clips. The problem is journalists and critics aren’t generally known for their personal aesthetic appeal.

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

But a reaction—whether positive or negative—is exactly what Pizza Hut Taiwan aims for. When it comes to developing new pizzas, their main criteria are clear: “How do we appeal to the Taiwanese tastes and how do we make Italians angry?” Leung says.

Americans are prosperous, but without any deep sense of obligations to others. We are a highly commercial, individualist people, and when we let go of even a thin liberal conception of the public good, we become nasty, petty, small, vindictive and irrational.

In contrast, the US left has long held $15/hr (or $31,000/yr full time) to be the bare minimum and, increasingly, through both legislation and a good labour market, wages are catching up to that.

The reality is that most of Bluesky's userbase doesn't know or care about or understand the degree to which Bluesky is decentralized, except for potentially as a reassurance that "the same thing can't happen here" as happened on X-Twitter. "Decentralization" is not the escape hatch people think it might be in Bluesky, but it's true that "credible exit" may be. However, the credibility of that exit currently predicates on another organization of the same cost and complexity of Bluesky standing in if-or-when Bluesky ends up becoming unsatisfying to its users.

I will (quasi)quote Jonathan Rees again, as I have previously when talking about the nature of language and defining terminology:Language is a continuous reverse engineering effort between all parties involved.(Somewhat humorously, I seem to adjust the phrasing of this quoting-from-memory just slightly every time I quote it.)

ATProto's main design is built upon replicating and indexing the firehose. That is its fundamental design choice and method of operation.I won't go into this too far here other than to say, I'm not sure this is in alignment with what many of its users want. And we're seeing this, increasingly, as users are being upset about finding out that other providers have replicated and indexed their data. This is happening in a variety of ways, from LLM training concerns, to moderation concerns, etc.I won't say too much more on that. I think it's just... this all just gives me the feeling that the "speech vs reach" approach, and the idea of a global public firehose, a "global town square" type approach... it all feels very web 2.0, very "Millennial social media"... for Millenials, by Millenials, trying to capture the idea that society would be better if we all got everyone to talk to each other at once.I think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group off people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.

What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that's even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)

Now let us get onto decentralization. First my definition of decentralization:Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.Now here is Bryan's definition (more accurately Mark Nottingham's definition (more accurately, Paul Baran's definition)) of decentralization:[Decentralization is when] "complete reliance upon a single point is not always required" (citing Baran, 1964)Perhaps Bluesky matches this version of decentralization, but if so, it is because it is an incredibly weak definition of decentralization, at least taken independently. This may well say, taken within the context it is provided, "users of this network may occasionally not rely on a gatekeeper, as a treat".

Finally, speaking of things that one is told that simply don't work anymore, my previous article was so long I was sure nobody would read it.

But Ron also shipped something where many others failed, and those others were actual employees. What’s interesting to me is that Ron managed to pull this all off by exercising a different type of power. Ron: Yeah, managers have budget and headcount to make things happen, and the direction comes from the top down. And in that view of the world I had no power. I had no budget, I had no headcount. Adam: Yeah, it makes me think of this quote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends.

Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire (I made a website about Sailor Saturn from Sailor Moon.).

And I had an idea for it: I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.

However, because of the constant rush and haste imposed by social media in my life, I can’t devote enough time to these resources. Because I am so used to seeing information, quickly taking it in, and moving on to another topic. Because the short content I constantly consume, whether written or visual, has made me accustomed to this. While reading a technically deep book, re-reading the same page feels like a waste of time; every piece of information I have to go over because I couldn’t understand it at once makes me feel inadequate and late because I can’t just scroll past it.

The problem with online advice is that the person writing the blog post is doing so entirely from their own perspective and lifestyle. They have no idea about you, and you have no idea about them. There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you. Moreover, you don’t get a chance to question causality, you just read the advice, consume it, and move on. It takes up space in your mind and on your to-do list, but you don’t get a chance to internalize or filter this topic. You don’t even realize that you should actually do so.

Yellow also became associated with Jews, and as European Christians enforced clothing regulations on Jewish communities, yellow was often (though not always) included. By the early modern period, yellow fell out of favour, perceived as gaudy and unpopular.

Yellow initially benefited from its resemblance to gold, which bolstered its reputation. Many medieval heraldic symbols incorporated yellow, and possessing blonde hair was considered highly fashionable. However, in the Later Middle Ages, yellow began to acquire negative associations, including envy and heresy. Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, was increasingly depicted wearing yellow clothing.

The first significant shift in the ‘blue revolution’ was the use of blue to represent the clothing of the Virgin Mary. The scene of Mary mourning Jesus’ crucifixion was popular in the Middle Ages, and once artists began depicting her cloak in vibrant blue, it quickly became the standard. Additionally, artists, especially those working in stained glass, overcame technical limitations in creating blues, allowing the colour to be used in various mediums and clothing.

Michel Pastoureau’s book on blue begins by highlighting the neglect this colour faced among the ancient Greeks and Romans, who rarely wrote about it or used it. He even explores the intriguing question of whether ancient peoples could perceive blue at all! This neglect persisted through the early Middle Ages until the twelfth century. “Then suddenly,” writes Pastoureau, “in just a few decades, everything changes – blue is ‘discovered’ and attains a prominent place in painting, heraldry, and clothing.”

Green is widely associated with Islam, but this association only developed in the twelfth century. The Quran mentions green eight times, always positively, as a colour representing vegetation, spring, and paradise. The Prophet Muhammad favoured green garments, including a green turban. While green was linked to Muhammad’s descendants, different colours were associated with the ruling Islamic dynasties: white for the Umayyads, black for the Abbasids, and red for the Almohads.

Arthurian romances, one of the most popular forms of literature in the High Middle Ages, frequently employed colour symbolism, particularly in the depiction of knights. Pastoureau notes that these narratives used colours to convey deeper meanings and character traits. He writes: The color code was recurrent and meaningful. A black knight was almost a character of primary importance (Tristan, Lancelot, Gawain) who wanted to hide his identity; he was generally motivated by good intentions and prepared to demonstrate his valor, especially by jousting or tournament. A red knight, on the other hand, was often hostile to the hero; this was a perfidious or evil knight, sometimes the devil’s envoy or a mysterious being from the Other World. Less prominent, a white knight was generally viewed as good; this was an older figure, a friend of protector or the hero, to who he gave wise council. Conversely, a green knight was a young knight, recently dubbed, whose audacious or insolent behavior was going to cause great disorder; he could be good or bad. Finally, yellow or gold knights were rare and blue knights nonexistent.

Michel Pastoureau writes that “the true medieval opposite for white was not so much black as red.” This can be seen in the way Europeans adapted chess. When the game was adopted in Europe, the pieces and chessboard were painted in white and red, contrasting with the black and red sets common in India and the Middle East. It was only towards the end of the Middle Ages that the white versus black dichotomy became more favoured. A key factor in this shift was the advent of printing, where black ink was used on white paper, reinforcing the perception of these colours as natural opposites.

Green occupied a central position, symbolically balanced between the extremes of white and black. It was also regarded as a soothing colour. Scribes often kept emeralds and other green objects nearby to rest their eyes. The poet Baudri de Bourgueil even suggested writing on green tablets instead of white or black ones for this reason.

We stored this probability matrix for each location a phone collected from. Using these, if we collected readings while moving in a straight line, we could tell you how far away the WiFi was. If you turned a corner, we could also add direction, so you could find it in 2D space. If you climbed some stairs, we’d show you altitude as well. The technology was the most interesting project I’d ever worked on. But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people.

Men’s gender attitudes are a predictor of whether they own cryptocurrency and meme stocks, Fairleigh Dickinson University professor Dan Cassino found. Young men who said they value masculinity highly but feel they aren’t traditionally masculine enough have the highest levels of ownership.

How the Occult Gave Birth to Science

Many of the women are surprised by their goals. If you asked them to state their ambitions a few years ago, they would have been entirely focused on advancing their careers. They wanted to make partner at their firm, join the C-suite, expand their business, double their salary, get the corner office. The fact that their new goals have almost nothing to do with the big, prestigious, high-paying jobs that have brought them such extraordinary success isn't just a testament to the power of Byars' program. It also says something about the moment we're in today, after a yearslong national reckoning with the role of work in our lives. It's not that these women hate their current jobs, or that they don't care about the quality of the work they do. It's that their previous dreams of climbing the corporate ladder now strike them as laughably tiny.

Byars asks us to come up with our own 10x goal. Think about it, she says. What do you want in 10 years? Then think about it again: Is that what you really want, or is that just what society wants you to want? What if you forget about whether it's socially acceptable, or even doable? What if you could have anything — anything — in the world?

Byars begins by explaining the concept of 10x. She describes it as a "quantum leap" that gets you results "beyond our wildest expectations." That's what differentiates it from 2x, which is only a "linear step," doing more or less what you did before. It's all a bit murky, but for the purposes of the weekend, I understand 10x to represent something really, really big that you really, really want, but that feels utterly impossible to achieve.

Over the course of the weekend, I ask everyone I meet to explain the secret to the change they've undergone through CWU and Optimum. Many of them tell me they have shifted their mindset. But if you're a woman with four kids and a senior-level corporate job, is there really any amount of mindset shifting you can do to avoid burnout? "At home it's a grind," the communication manager admits. But now, she says, whether it's a kid's temper tantrum or a crisis at work, the chaos doesn't get to her the way it once did. Her burnout is gone.

It's the kind of reframing that happens all the time in therapy. But this is different, because these women are also getting validation from their peers.

The issue with high-achieving women, Byars says, is they focus on meeting only two of those needs — security (money) and esteem — while neglecting the rest. As Byars sees it, unmet needs are what lead to unhappiness. Her solution is to figure out which needs you're neglecting entirely, along with which needs you're not meeting effectively. Then her program helps you devise and implement better strategies to consistently meet all your needs.

To find out, Byars founded The Goodlife Institute in 2017. The program's framework is founded on what she calls "our seven universal needs": autonomy, security, health, leisure, purpose, connection, and esteem. "These seven needs are how human beings have biologically and psychologically evolved in order to survive and thrive," she says in the first of the Week One videos I received for Corporate Women Unleashed. "All seven of them have to be met in order for you to experience optimal well-being."

Byars says there's a better way. It's possible, she promises, to achieve personal fulfillment at the same time as professional success. You don't have to choose.

I squirm in my seat. No man would be caught dead saying this stuff, I think. But the women in the room all look stone-cold serious.

His socialism seems based on the moral improvability of humanity, a notion that not even the Nazis could shake from him. He writes in 1934, from prison in Herford, “Man is not bad—circumstances have made him bad. If circumstances changed, he would slowly, within a few generations, become good again.”

Yingyi Ma, a Chinese-born sociologist at Syracuse University, who has conducted extensive surveys of students from the mainland, has observed that the longer the Chinese stay in the U.S. the less they report working harder than their American peers. Like any good Chinese math problem, this distinctly American form of regression toward the mean can be quantified. In Ma’s book “Ambitious and Anxious,” she reports on her survey results: “Specifically, one additional year of time in the United States can reduce the odds of putting in more effort than American peers by 14 percent.”

But colleges also collaborate with a thriving “enrollment management” industry that bases financial-aid offers not on students’ need, but on how much an algorithm suggests they and their parents will be willing to pay. This can have perverse effects. As the higher-education expert Kevin Carey wrote for Slate in 2022, “parents of means who themselves have finished college are often sophisticated consumers of higher education and are able to drive a hard bargain, whereas lower-income, less-educated parents feel an enormous obligation to help their children move farther up the socioeconomic ladder and blindly trust that colleges have their best financial interests at heart.” Accordingly, many colleges offer more money to wealthier admitted students than they do to poorer ones.

One of those two was Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on poverty, and who in recent years has publicly questioned the way his discipline looks at the world. Deaton argues that when it comes to pricing, economists are too focused on maximizing efficiency, without taking fairness into account. In a world of scarce resources, perhaps rationing by time is fairer than rationing by price. We all have different amounts of money, after all, whereas time is evenly distributed. Then there’s the way economists decide what’s good. The mainstream economist thinks that the best policy is the one that maximizes total economic surplus, no matter who gets it. If that benefits some people (companies) at the expense of others (consumers), the government can compensate the latter group through transfer payments. “A lot of free marketers say you can tax the gainers and give it to the losers,” Deaton says. “But somehow, miraculously, that never seems to happen.”

Until 1983, when Pope John Paul II attempted to modernise the process, a Cause could not even be opened until the candidate had been dead for 50 years. (He reduced the waiting period to five years, halved the number of miracles required, and did away with the office of the “devil’s advocate”, established in 1587, whose role was to raise objections to every case.)

British engineer John Hoyte led an expedition that tried to reenact aspects of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps during the Second Punic War in 218 BCE. The group took the female Asian elephant Jumbo, provided by a zoo in Turin, from France over the Col du Mont Cenis into Italy.

If there’s a bit of downtime or some teething problems, or a hug of death or two, is that preferable to adopting the centralised providers like GitHub and Cloudflare as the “default”, or giving newbies the idea that there’s no way to publish good content without an overkill auto-scaling setup?

Because this is primarily for money, no doubt it will be abused to hell. First-party browsers probably wouldn't do anything with this information for the fear of legitimizing scammers' fake profiles.

What’s easy for you might not be easy for others. There’s always a trade-off. Simplicity is a luxury. It’s really hard. And it’s never “just”. We should try to understand what makes it hard. And make it easier.

People with FNSS are living proof that we don’t need 7-9 hours of sleep to be healthy. We already don’t get enough sleep. 34% of Americans are chronically sleep deprived [11]. What if they could keep sleeping less, but with no consequences? That’s possible with advanced sleep engineering. Here’s what else would be possible: falling asleep and waking at will, sleeping 4 hours but feeling like you slept 8 hours, always in perfect mental and physical condition. Considering the huge upside of engineering sleep, an unreasonably small number of experiments have studied FNSS.

The jacket is trimmed with bands of black cord openwork forming lobes with black silk twill folded into ½" wide box-pleats in the centre of them and jet beads; on the lower edge of the jacket, 1" above the hem, this trimming has more openwork with jet along its top and is 2¾" wide.

This is a garden of RSS feeds from a variety of sources. It’s updated every couple of days. Each feed is represented by its own shrub.

양의 해에 태어난 사람들을 위한 모임입니다. Club for people born in the year of the sheep.

Particularly terrible linesI note the following lines that seemed to me especially devoid of meaning or inept

I don’t think that there isany question that the real Whitman poem is incomparably the better poem. Going out on a bitof a limb, I think that that is close to being an objective truth; one could formulate reasonable,measurable, psychological and linguistic criteria under which the real poem is hands down moresophisticated, richer, thought-provoking, deeper, etc. But a preferance for the cheery, shallowAI poem may be perfectly reasonable.

I therefore agree with Porter and Machery’s conjecture that the subjects certainly had a mis-impression of what AI-generated output was like, and probably a mis-impression of what humanpoetry is like. If they were shown five examples of each at the start of the experiment, it ishard to imagine that they would not score very high. On the other hand, given the extremeobviousness of the distinguishing features, I am not sure that there would be much point incarrying out that experiment.

All in all, the AI poemsseem like imitations that might have been produced by a supremely untalented poet who hadnever read any of the poems he was tasked with imitating, but had read a one-sentence summaryof what they were like.

Considering that ChatGPT was specifically instructed to write poems “in the style” of thespecified poets, it is striking that the style of its output poems bears no resemblance to thecharacteristic style of its targets. The examples I’ve quoted above are typical. The one exceptionis Shakespeare; ChatGPT’s imitations of Shakespeare are all Shakesperian sonnets in form.

Stir fried banana blossoms (炒芭蕉花). Middle. Banana blossom’s an ingredient eaten widely throughout the tropical Southeast Asia, and Hainan is no exception.

Layered rice cake (簸箕炊/水籺). Bottom right. This plain layered rice cake is popular throughout the region, with different names and different toppings. It’s made by steaming white rice batter in layers using a bamboo tray or metal sheet.

Smoked jerky (牛肉干). Middle. The Yao people traditionally would preserve meat via smoking, an approach much more common to Hunanese than Cantonese cooking.

Three Cup Duck (三杯鸭). Right. “Three cup’ is a flavor profile originating in Hakka cuisine, which classically braising with one cup each of rice wine, soy sauce, and toasted sesame oil. Three

Faban, rice cupcake (发粄). Bottom right. Pictured is a fluffy rice cupcake called faban (发粄), colored with red yeast rice.

Teochew Lushui (潮州卤水). Top left. Teochew Lushui (master stock) has a unique spice mix - including additions like lemongrass and galangal.

Dim Sum (早茶). Top middle. This particular dish is Siu Mai (烧麦), a pork and shrimp dumpling.

Char Siu Rice Bowl (叉烧饭). Bottom middle. Cantonese roast meats are iconic - from Siu Yuk Pork Belly, to Roast Goose, to Roast Duck. This is Char Siu BBQ pork, served with egg in a rice bowl and topped with seasoned soy sauce.

As migrants, they were often confined to land that was less productive agriculturally, and the sweet potato formed the foundation of the traditional Hakka diet.

With that said, Teochew and Cantonese have obviously had more than a little bit of contact over the centuries. Besides being not all that far apart, both cities were famed for their (rival) merchant classes. Both groups helped build the twin economic engines of Hong Kong (a bit more Cantonese than Teochew) and Shenzhen (a bit more Teochew than Cantonese). This is why Hong Kong fishballs are generally the Teochew style, and why you can find Teochew-style Cheong Fun variants on the streets of Chaozhou and Shenzhen.

During the 19th century, the merchant class in Canton grew in breadth and depth, and the food they ate ended up borrowing quite a bit philosophically from that Guanfu tradition. And what was that tradition all about? Well, outside of simply showing off (the food of the elite forever rhymes), that cuisine particularly loved the playful manipulation of form.

If you ask ten Cantonese chefs what the ‘essence’ of Cantonese cuisine is, practically to the man they’ll reply ‘keeping the original flavor’.

The principal forces of incarnation are expression of will, and submission of will, whichis love. These forces constitute destiny and fate: “The first or active is Destiny the secondor enforced is Fate. The First is Will, the second Love”

However, as the founding Faculty, Will contains within it that which differenti-ates the incarnation from all others. In the Card File, Yeats records: “The Ego [Will] is thatparticularised element which distinguishes individual from individual” and it is “The ide-osincracy”

The two principal energies are “natural desire” (the Will’s relation to the Mask) and “naturalperception” (the relation of Creative Mind to Body of Fate). These energies are the Opposi-tions. The Discords are the relations that exist between one set of opposites (Will and Mask)and the other (Creative Mind and Body of Fate), and consist of “an enforced understandingof…unlikeness.” In “Relations,” Yeats clarifies:Those between Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate are oppositions, orcontrasts.Those between Will and Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate discords.

Destiny is here the utmost rangepossible to the Will if left in freedom, and its other name is beauty, whereas Fate is theutmost range of the mind when left in its freedom and its other name is truth”

The 28 mansions of the moon have traditionally referred to the moon’s passage through the zodiac (takingan average of 27.3 days) rather than the moon’s phases (which go through their cycle in an average of 29.5days), but the Yeatses’ division is symbolic and has no direct relation to the heavens or astrology.

n both religious and secular usage, there is not usually a distinction between spirit and soul, but in eso-teric usage “spirit” (Greek: pneuma, Latin: spiritus) is usually taken as higher, often solar and immortal,while “soul” (Greek: psyche, Latin: anima) is lower, often lunar and mortal (and each of these can often beanatomized further). Yeats uses the terms relatively indiscriminately when writing for a general audiencebut, within A Vision, Spirit is applied to the primary, immortal Principle of the being, while “soul” is morevaguely applied to the selfhood that survives the body, especially in “The Soul in Judgment,” and effectivelymeans the Principles as a whole.

t will be concrete in expression, establish itself by immediate experi-ence, seek no general agreement, make little of God or any exterior unity, andit will call that good which a man can contemplate himself as doing always andno other doing at all.

A religiousdispensation lasts for some 2,000 years and is either primary or antithetical. It in turn givesrise to a corresponding civilization, which starts (its Phase 1) at the dispensation’s mid-point (Phase 15) and also lasts for some 2,000 years. At the mid-point of this civilization,its Phase 15, the religious dispensation of the opposite Tincture arises (starting at its Phase1) and so on in syncopated succession. Specifically, the primary Christian religion arose atthe height of the antithetical classical civilization, and the primary culture of Christendomarose around 1000 CE. This culture reaches its high point around 2000 CE when therewill be the origin of the next antithetical religion, which Yeats looks forward to in poemssuch as “The Second Coming” and “The Gyres.”

The system presented in A Vision deals almost exclusively with human life and withthe human condition, both at the individual level and in more general historical terms,where the cycle of the two Tinctures is expressed in broadly similar stages. Yeats dividesthe historical cycle into twelve gyres rather than twenty-eight phases, placing two stepsbetween each of the cardinal points. The nomenclature of the phases is retained, however,since the broader steps effectively subsume several phases and Yeats understandably doesnot wish to multiply labels.

unless the full archetype has been expressed in time and space and its twelvecycles are fi nished, the being is then drawn back to birth and multitude.

Whether directed towards the antithetical licentiousness of sensuous self-absorptionor the primary holiness of connection with supernatural reality, incarnate life is for thegathering of experience; a symbolic “day and night constitute an incarnation and the dis-carnate period which follows…the incarnation, symbolised by the moon at night”

Yet as the more complete archetype, the Daimon also embodies opposi-tion to the human, being a perpetual opposite, embodying all of the archetype that is notbeing expressed in the incarnation in question: it is primary if the human is antitheticaland antithetical if the human is primary, male if female and female if male, pursuing andengineering the soul’s crises.

He felt that he expressed the primary badly in comparison withthe antithetical: trying to sing the approach of a time “where all shall [be] as particularand concrete as human intensity permits,” the coming antithetical world-cycle, he noticesthat he has “almost understood [his] intention” to express these multitudinous forces inpoetry. However: “Again and again with remorse, a sense of defeat, I have failed when Iwould write of God, written coldly and conventionally”

Intrinsically, however, human life is antithetical and what we call afterlife primary,so each incarnation at birth starts on its antithetical search for individuation and physicalexperience, while at death it starts its primary search to understand and reintegrate

Overarching all is thedistinction between the two Tinctures: the antithetical being should strive during its lifefor greater individuation, against the spiritual collective, “the struggle of a destiny againstall other destinies” to bring the soul and spirit into deeper contact with emotional experi-ence, while the primary being should strive to unify itself with the collective, in “a trans-formation of the character defined in the horoscope into timeless & spaceless existence”to bring the soul and spirit to intellectual understanding (

The acts and nature of a Spirit during any one life are a section or abstrac-tion of reality & are unhappy because incomplete. They are a gyre or part of agyre, whereas reality is a sphere.

This reflection into time & space is only complete at certain moments ofbirth, or passivity, which recur many times in each destiny. At these momentsthe destiny receives its character until the next such moment from all otherSpirits or from the whole external universe. The horoscope is a set of geometricalrelations between the Spirit’s reflection and the principal masses in the universeand defi nes that character.

The stream of souls or community of spirits (the two terms are equivalent in thisgeneral context) 17 is a vital element of Yeats’s conception of the cosmos, and is not limitedto those who are or have been human, and includes beings “that have never lived in mortalbodies”

Although ultimate reality may be non-dual, human monotheism is no truerthan human polytheism, nor are human conceptions of unity any more valid than humanconceptions of multiplicity, since they are both expressions of the antinomy. For Yeats thecosmos can be expressed in human thought equally well and equally imperfectly as eithera single godhead or a community of spirits, and he himself prefers the latter: “I think thattwo conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as a single being,alternate in our emotion and in history, and must always remain something that humanreason, because subject always to one or the other, cannot reconcile” (Pages from a DiaryWritten in 1930, Ex 305). What monotheists conceive of as “God’s abstract or separatethoughts” are for Yeats “spaceless, timeless beings that behold and determine each other”

A primary dispensation looking beyond itselftowards transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace itsmeans and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent [for immanent] power, is ex-pressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical” (AVB 263). The attribution offeminine to the solar and masculine to the lunar is an unexpected twist, and the associatedmixing of attributes has consequences that are important since sexual imagery and polar-ity underlie many of Yeats’s ideas and the ways that he uses them in his poetry and plays.

Yeats views the Tinctures as including or taking part in almost every polarity ofthe cosmos by means of extended correspondences, in the perennial manner of occultthought. Many of these correspondences are relatively traditional and once he had statedthat the primary Tincture was solar and objective, while the antithetical was lunar and sub-jective, Yeats would be aware that his esoterically trained “schoolmates” would automati-cally make a series of further attributions by correspondence.

The dynamic essences are the primary and the antithetical Tinctures: the primarynamed because it comes first and “brings us back to the mass where we begin” (AVB 72),the antithetical “because it is achieved and defended by continual conflict with its oppo-site”

The mostfundamental antinomy is that which embodies the dualism itself, the One and the Many,and the most important manifestation of these two poles is that of God and humanity,while within individual human consciousness the polarity is also that of the objective andthe subjective. Yet Yeats is less concerned with the poles themselves than with the forcespulling in either direction—towards the One and towards the Many: the unifying and thedispersing, the centripetal and the centrifugal, the homogenizing and the differentiating,the objectifying and the subjectifying.

Thesystem that he proposes is not a dualism because the ultimate reality is one, represented inthe Sphere; however all manifestations of the system that human consciousness can appre-hend are dualistic because of this “fall,” and a form of duality or multiplicity is essential toconsciousness, because “things that are of one kind are unconscious”

Though both husband and wife worked on all stages, as the system was collated,adapted and reformulated, it became more his than theirs. 7 Yet it remained independentin a way that he was not accustomed to, and he did not usually feel at liberty to change theterminology without approval from George’s communicators,

Generallyspeaking this volume aims to show that A Vision, including most of the geometry and con-ceptual philosophy, is far more internally consistent than is usually surmised. Yet GeorgeRussell (AE) recognized this in A Vision A’s very first review: “For all its bewildering com-plexity the metaphysical structure he rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with theprecision of Chinese puzzle-boxes into each other. It coheres together, its parts are relatedlogically to each other, but does it relate so well to life?”

ncreasingly, also, therewere others who were more in sympathy with that whole “side summed up in the Vi-sion” and addressed such interests directly, including Birgit Bjersby, Hazard Adams, HelenVendler, H. R. Bachchan, T. R. Whitaker, Northrop Frye, Shankar Mokashi-Punekar,Kathleen Raine, Harold Bloom, and A. Norman Jeffares, even if some of them disagreedwith Yeats’s particular approach

The first stage, which prevailed until the sixties, was characterized largely by incom-prehension of the work itself and disdain for Yeats’s occult interests more generally, mostfamously summarized in Auden’s comment “how embarrassing,” and his observation that“though there is scarcely a lyric written to-day in which the influence of his style andrhythm is not detectable, one whole side of Yeats, the side summed up in the Vision, hasleft virtually no trace.” 1 Th e comment may have had some justice with regard to creativeinfluence but says nothing of intrinsic worth.2

Two such expenditures — Social Security and Medicare — are directed towards the care of the elderly. In prior times, however, almost all of that work was done by women at home. Now we no longer value homemakers, and paying for that work takes up 34% of the federal budget.

Philosopher Elizabeth Jackson and I recently carried out a study, not yet published, involving more than 300 participants. We gave them brief summaries of several scenarios where it was unclear whether an individual had committed a crime. The evidence was ambiguous, but we asked participants whether they could choose to believe the individual was innocent “just like that,” without having to gather evidence or think critically. Many people in the study said that they could do exactly this.

People can, of course, choose to read certain sources, spend time with certain groups, or reflect on a certain matter – all of which influence their beliefs. But all of these choices involve evidence of some kind. We often choose which evidence to expose ourselves to, but the evidence itself seems to be in the driver’s seat in causing beliefs.

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There was no clear cutoff for low, medium, or high need, making it functionally useless. The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, ‘This patient is too sick, I need to focus on them alone,’ because the numbers didn’t help us make that case anymore. They didn’t tell us if a patient was low, medium, or high need. They just gave patients a seemingly random score that nobody understood, on a scale of one to infinity. We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need.

Bobrycki, by contrast, describes what looks like a catastrophe but labors not to characterize it as such. One day there were hot baths in Britain; the next there weren’t. The thinning of the population which attended what he does not call the Dark Ages, we are assured, “did not make for a better or worse society.” Yes, it did. Prosperous and library-bound Roman civilization—however lamed by cruelty, public executions, slavery—was clearly a better place to be than one where all those evils persisted, along with some new ones, and none of the good things did.

This is the video that got nuked from TikTok

As well as actual girdle relics, medieval women could rely on manuscript birth girdles: parchment rolls that mimicked the relics and served the same purpose. These manuscripts, like the girdles they imitated, would be wrapped around the pregnant woman’s womb either in the weeks leading up to the delivery or during labour itself.

PlantStudio is a surprisingly deep botany simulator for creating and arranging 3D models of herbaceous plants based on how real plants grow, change, fruit, and flower, over their life cycles.

English: Oil on canvas. 48 x 66cm. Armagh County Museum

Because knowledge can vanish as people pass on, each generation sees it as their responsibility to perpetuate their culture by adding to the tribe’s communal wisdom and passing on ancestral teachings to children and grandchildren.

“They told me they don’t have a word for poverty,” she said. “The closest thing that they had as an explanation for poverty was ‘to be without family.’”

For many First Nations, therefore, self-actualization is not achieved; it is drawn out of an inherently sacred being who is imbued with a spark of divinity. Education, prayer, rituals, ceremonies, individual experiences, and vision quests can help invite the expression of this sacred self into the world.

Maslow appeared to ask, “how do we become self-actualized?”. Many First Nation communities, though they would not have used the same word, might be more likely to believe that we arrive on the planet self-actualized. Ryan Heavy Head explained the difference through the analogy of earning a college degree. In Western culture, you earn a degree after paying tuition, attending classes, and proving sufficient mastery of your area of study. In Blackfoot culture, “it’s like you’re credentialed at the start. You’re treated with dignity for that reason, but you spend your life living up to that.”

He was curious how the Blackfoot might deal with lawbreakers without the strategy of dominance that he’d seen in his own culture. He found that “when someone was deviant, [the Siksika] didn’t peg them as deviant. A person who was deviant could redeem themselves in society’s eyes if they left that behavior behind” (Blood & Heavy Head, 2007, video 7 out of 15, minutes 15:44–16:08).

To most Blackfoot members, wealth was not important in terms of accumulating property and possessions: giving it away was what brought one the true status of prestige and security in the tribe.

Deeply curious about the reason for the stark difference between Blackfoot culture and his own culture, Maslow sought out positive deviants, or unusually successful individuals. He started with the wealthiest members of the Blackfoot tribe. He discovered that “for the Blackfoot, wealth was not measured by money and property but by generosity. The wealthiest man in their eyes is one who has almost nothing because he has given it all away” (Coon, 2006). Maslow witnessed a Blackfoot “Giveaway” ceremony in his first week at Siksika. During the Giveaway, members of the tribe arranged their tipis in a circle and publicly piled up all they had collected over the last year. Those with the most possessions told stories of how they amassed them and then gave every last one away to those in greater need (Blood & Heavy Head, 2007, (video 7 out of 15, minutes 13:00–14:00).

the teacher is the Subject of the learning pro cess, while the pupils are mere objects.

As Peter M. Senge writes in the introduction to David Bohm’s On Dialogue:Our personal meaning starts to become incoherent when it becomes fixed. The incoherence increases when past meaning is imposed on present situations. As this continues, yesterday’s meaning becomes today’s dogma, often losing much of its original meaningfulness in the process. A much more useful thing to do when my system starts to feel like a dead dogma is to go, “. . . oh? huh? Something feels a little off here?” and then sit with that feeling for five, ten minutes, or however long it needs to unfold.

posts are collected into a digest once a day. posts from yesterday are deleted, forever, every day. posts are a draft and can be edited until the moment that yesterday is deleted and tomorrow becomes today. posts are only visible between people who "add" one another ("mutual follows"). it's become a sort of collaborative daily newspaper written by friends.

But that's the thing: I don't think dansup, Eugene and friends are trying to create a "truly post-Facebook" social media platform; I was wrong for thinking so. It's a lot more obvious to me now that they're reformers. And for what it's worth, I hope they succeed in making something better. Anything better than what we already have. But these days, I'm having a much harder time getting myself excited about social media reform. Ethical anti-design is, as so many people pointed out to me, an oxymoron. It is fundamentally a very contradictory design philosophy. It's uncomfortable to interact with by design. That awkwardness is what lead me to explain Resin as more of an art project than an app I'd reasonably expect anyone to want to use. I mean, its main conceit was that instead of having infinite scroll, you'd have to press and hold a button for a second to load more pictures. Resin never interrogated why posts need to be structured in an apparently infinite gallery for the interface to be intelligible, it just treated the dark patterns as bugs to be patched. And that's what ultimately made Resin a reformist project itself.

There’s spectacle not only in the appearance of a many-liter bottle but also in the logistics of how they are handled before they reach the customer. “Only 750-milliliter bottles, which is the standard size, and magnums can be made on an automated bottling line,” said Andrew Walleck, COO of the online retail platform Wine Access. “Everything bigger than that has to be hand-filled, hand-filtered, and the cork has to be hammered in by hand.” Next comes the hassle of getting a bottle the size of a small child to its destination. “Imagine you’re shipping a grandfather clock,” he said. “That’s the level of pain-in-the-ass-ery.”

Liber Cure Cocorum, Copied and Edited from the Sloan MS. 1986 For lumbardus mustard Take mustarde and let hit drye Anonyn, Sir, wyturlye; Stomper hit in a morter fyne, And fars hit thurghe a clothe of lyne; Do wyne therto and venegur gode, Sturm hom wele togeder for the rode, And make hit thyke inowghe thenne, Whenne thou hit spendes byfore gode menne, And make hit thynne with wyne, I say, With diverse metes thou serve hit may.

On this page, I share my attempt at achieving a beautiful glass effect, along with sample code and assets for anyone who wants to explore this technique themselves.

When we speak of twentieth-century totalitarianism we often due so with a sense of naivety, as if the worst of the past was safely ensconced there, mistaking technological progress with liberty. Now, consider what the Nazis were able to do with flimsy IBM punch cards, and the difference today, the sheer amount of data concerning all of us, saved on servers owned by the very people now enabling authoritarianism. “If literature is to survive,” wrote Birkerts, “it must become dangerous”—it increasingly is. More importantly, if we’re to survive, then we must become literate, again.

Irene Vallelejo in Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World quips that the codex is the rare device that a time traveling classical Roman would recognize, the book included alongside shovels and axes in basically appearing the same over the centuries. What makes the book perfect, and thus not in need of change, isn’t its appearance (they can be both beautiful and ugly), their price (they’re both expensive and cheap), or their sturdiness (some last forever, others not so much), but rather their ability to disconnect. That is the source of the interiority that Birkerts describes, that books are not mired in the cacophony of the internet.

The Kirkus reviewer, for example, imagines a straw-Birkets at various hinge moments in the past, who inveighs against the “ballpoint, the typewriter, the printing press.” What this critique misses are that those were technologies of production, but the internet is also a technology of reception. The frenetic, interconnected, hypertext-permeated universe of digital reading is categorically a different experience. Even more importantly, a physical book on a shelf is a cosmos unto-itself, while that dimension of interiority and introspection—of privacy—is obscured in the virtual domain.

These marshmallows are cooked with champagne, then hand covered with 24 karat edible gold.

and i dont know what the mantis is prayin for but he’s prolly jus thankin the lord that he dont live in a home and he dont have a phone and he dont sit around all angry and bored

Des Signes were commissioned by the Élysée together with the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration to design a commemorative plaque and a visual identity to mark all Algerian-French memorial sites.

That rhymes, at least, with the patterns of generational disdain toward the people born into financial systems that strip away stabilities (affordable education, affordable housing, retirement funds, seasons with weather) their parents could take for granted, if they were white enough and within spitting range of middle class.

nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all.

Decades down the road, I think the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complexities of governing a new layer of global public life, with all the opportunities and dangers it brings, will be obviously laughable. I think it already is.

For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that

And also when previously good products of the social internet are lost, as when it becomes impossible for people to find sustaining work, learn from one another, or organize responses to the rolling crises in which we live.

The last and most most dangerous weakness of the Dark Internet Forest as a frame is that it positions the broad landscape of connection as something that “we” can simply do without—and without which we will indeed feel better and be more productive.

Meanwhile the actually-hip kids, like effortlessly cool Dasha and Anna of the buzzy and transgressive Red Scare podcast,

Maybe this is simply the generational turnover of slang. But it may represent more than that. Gen Z, having tasted the bitter fruit of rationalism, are far less interested in debating or clapping back on Twitter. Even more strikingly, they’re returning to God, and seeking a reenchantment of the world.

I call this posting style “Snot,” which is now so totalizing that it’s hard to imagine what a liberal even is without this voice.

Political conflict, to the modern liberal, is not about struggle for finite resources, insoluble moral differences, or fundamental divergences in our conception of what America ought to be. It’s only a failure of half the country – a bunch of dumb hicks – to know what’s good for them.

The rationalistic millennial lib therefore hopes to deal only in policy, regulation, and governance, not in myths, heroes, or transcendent values. But this leaves him unable to make absolute moral assertions. Authority now flows from science and data – from the status of being correct. The truth, uncertain as it always is, becomes a matter of rhetorical prowess – a game of owning and dunking. In this game, nothing is capital-T True, and opinions need only be validated by The ScienceTM – that is to say the managerial consensus

So the Dems gradually pivoted away from labor concerns toward issues that mattered to the feminized PMC, like education, climate change, and, most importantly, identity politics (Note that these causes don’t require the PMC to relinquish substantial resources or power, they are simply about believing, knowing, feeling, and affirming the right things).

Maybe writing like a sassy teenager is just another expression of this desire to stay young at all costs.

A lot of this boils down to an inability to age with grace.

Remember, Biden is “Joebi Wan Kenobi.”

Excessive use of “like,” uptalk, and vocal fry – these were once considered unprofessional ways of speaking. But in the early 2010s a handful feminist linguists with Tumblr accounts wrote opinion pieces arguing that the way teen girls talk is actually like, totally valid. “Like” isn’t just a crutch, a semantically empty filler word for someone who’s not in command of her ideas, it’s a “lexical hedge.” Talking like a teen girl or catty gay became a way for boring straight white people to reposition themselves as youthful rebels.

They especially enjoy doing the high-low thing where they pair a beefy vocab word like “unreconstructed,” with a snippy teengirl-ism like “creepy,” or a working-class swear like “dipshit” or “shitheel.” This is supposed to say, I’m smart, but I’m also cool.

even if they’re saying it with a wink.

But guys like Carville have long since been swapped out for spreadsheet nerds who were born with a silver lanyard around their neck. People who think that “joy” is a compelling message to families who are eating hot dogs on Wonderbread for dinner because dad’s been feeding an oxy habit since the forklift accident. It’s OK, he probably deserves it – he once told a woman on the street that she should smile more often.

Whenever I am struck by someone’s taste, I love seeing how little influence our current moment has on them. As though this person’s world lives in a vacuum that without them couldn’t exist and it was never done for anyone but themselves.

“Now I’m starting to feel guilty in some weird way about playing a role in a big deal that cost taxpayers money,” Wu said.

Instead of opting out of social media, how can we use it to connect and form relationships with figures or ideas we never before had access to?

Further, unplugging — or the failure to do so — now installs shame. The more we preach “better habits,” and the less we adopt them, the worse off we feel. Starting the day checking email in bed somehow feels even worse when the world is telling we’re a loser for doing so. Judgement compounds our predicament.

This isn’t an all or nothing deal. Unplugging is a false binary.

I suppose these orgs don’t have an issue with cave paintings, which are just another form of social media. Books? Ok. eBooks? Ok. Book reviews? Ok. A book review on a social platform? Someone’s comment on a book review? A number which represents the number of people who agree with that book review?Where exactly would you like to draw the line between kosher and caustic?

But as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level.It's a world-and-life negation. A kind of selfish free-riding, tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load...”

Unplugging is a short-term, unsustainable, selfish and frankly, privileged approach to the downsides of our everyday technological struggles.While billions of “bad” dollars are spent hooking, billions of “good” dollars are spent onboarding more and more and more people around our planet online. Countries, states, townships, schools, hospitals and non-profits are all ensuring that every facet of society is accessible via a smartphone. This includes countries, which have historically been left behind — connection begets prosperity whether we like it or not. As a result, employment, banking, housing, education, dating, healthcare, you name it — the foundations of any functioning society are now only accessible online.

This is visual density. A visually dense software interface puts a lot of stuff on the screen. A visually sparse interface puts less stuff on the screen.

You should not ask, it is wrong to know, what end the gods will have given to me or to you, O Leuconoe, and do not try Babylonian calculations. How much better it is to endure whatever will be, whether Jupiter has allotted more winters or the last, which now weakens the Tyrrhenian Sea against opposing rocks: be wise. Strain your wines, and because of brief life cut short long-term hopes. While we are speaking, envious life will have fled: seize the day, trusting the future as little as possible. Tū nē quaesierīs, scīre nefās, quem mihi, quem tibī fīnem dī dederint, Leuconoē, nec Babylōniōs temptāris numerōs. Ut melius quidquid erit patī, seu plūrīs hiemēs seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, quae nunc oppositīs dēbilitat pūmicibus mare Tyrrhēnum: sapiās, vīna liquēs, et spatiō brevī spem longam resecēs. Dum loquimur, fūgerit invida aetās: carpe diem, quam minimum crēdula posterō.

miseri, quibus   intemptata nites.

The celebrated historian of the novel’s rise, Ian Watt, counted the Faustian bargain, along with the tales of Robinson Crusoe, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, as four great “myths of modern individualism,” in a book of that title published in 1996. Watt’s emphasis falls on the Faustian myth as a religious culture’s way of maintaining theological and social order. He makes the point that Protestantism (and, of course, Christianity generally) had a need to enforce the discipline of delayed gratification. Since “one had to make people believe that pleasure in this world must bring pain in the next,” what better than a popular story that taught the ultimate dangers of sacrificing the eternal afterlife for the fleeting pleasures of this worldly existence?

In my own relatively limited experience lecturing on group tours, I have often been struck by the energy, enthusiasm, and curiosity of those travelers—regardless of their level of prior knowledge or experience—most willing to sacrifice their autonomy, not because (as “authentic traveler” lore would have it) they demand an inordinate degree of comfort, luxury, or safety, but because they would like to see and do as much as possible in a place, in the limited time available.

Central, too, is the notion that the true (and implicitly untethered) self is in some sense purer and morally superior to the self that, say, runs errands, buys groceries, and changes diapers. Travel, in this schema, is a spiritualized act of bravery, of self-assertion against repressive demands, a quest for self-knowledge that can only come through the willful rejection of embeddedness in one’s own home.

Travel qua travel, as an experience of self-transcendence through alienation, is not about the visited place itself but the traveler’s own interior journey: one made possible less by a particular encounter with a city, a church, or a historic site, but simply by the mere fact of being away from home.

Those healed, or who wished to be healed, made their way to Canterbury, the seat of his bishopric and site of his martyrdom, to give thanks or pray for intercession, wearing pilgrims’ badges and carrying bottles containing what was known as St. Thomas’s Water, so called because it was reputed to be mixed with the disintegrated remains of the clothing Thomas was wearing at the time of his death, still stained with his venerated blood.

Jewish people have enjoyed fresh bread at their Friday Sabbath, or Shabbat, meal since antiquity, but, according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, it wasn’t until the 1400s that “Jews in Austria and Southern Germany adopted…an oval, braided loaf, modeled on a popular Teutonic bread.” The stranded bread, with its resemblance to braided hair, was said to ward off a demon-witch named Berchta, or Holle (the similarity between “challah” and “Holle” is coincidental, from what I can tell). Marks is quick to point out that “Although European Jews certainly did not worship or even to a large extent know anything about Berchta or Holle, they [nevertheless] assimilated the attractive bread.”

People associate longer shapes with greater quantity, which is why we find bar charts and other chart types that are based on that principle to be intuitive. In a box plot, however, longer box or whisker segments don’t represent greater quantities. The four segments in a box plot each represent the same quantity, i.e., they each contain the same number of values, regardless of how long or short they are. In fact, shorter segments in box plots actually represent higher densities of values, so there’s a “mismatch” between what our eyes are telling us and the underlying data.

In some texts we see the initial form v and the medial/final form u, as in vniuersi for universi — although "Some Alphabetical Notes" indicates that things weren't terribly vniform in practice. (This is complicated by the fact that u upper-cases to V.)

we see the same final j all over the place in old Latin texts. I see "radij" (for "radii"), "vadij," "monarchij" — but also "radijs," "socijs," "petijt" (for "petiit"), indicating that it's not simply about the j appearing at the end of the word but something a little more like a digraph or ligature, where the last i in a run of two or more is turns into a j.

In the sixteenth century it became the fashion to tail the last i when Roman numerals were used, as in viij, for 8, or xij, for 12. An example from 1547 is as follows: "For j li of ffrangensence, iiijd." [That is, "for 1 pound of frankincense, 4 pence."]

Show activity on this post. The letter j originated as a "swash" (florish) character at the end of Roman numerals, and only later became useful as a separate character. A j was used for the final i, to make it clear the number had ended.

Let's say we have a function and we want to approximate it

When I was a young teenager on tumblr, basically everyone I followed and looked up to adhered to the following archetypes:A woman who just wanted to buy a bra and ended up becoming an expert on Edwardian corsetry (and, by extension, early 20th century sartorial techniques, the labor struggles of the English garment industry, and all kinds of vaguely related topics)Someone who started off posting scans of obscure Japanese fashion magazines and ended up, essentially, becoming an amateur archivist of 1990s fashion editorials that are exclusively preserved on an obscure tumblr or LivejournalI truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.

Research requires understanding

Research begins with a desire to ask and answer questions, thereby contributing to the greater sum of human knowledge and culture.

the interrupter was Eric Weinstein. I knew who Weinstein was because, at the time, I was a masochistic listener of The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE). I had recently discovered that all men are insane and was doing my part to get to the bottom of their intentions and aspirations straight from the source.

n criticizing critique, Felski, much like Van Duyne, points to its essential irony: that the posture of cool impersonality and critical distance is itself a “mood” and a “form of attachment.” But this, after all, is not such an original observation. Even T.S. Eliot well knew that critics are always writing from a particular subject position. His line about poetry as “an escape from personality” is followed by a qualification: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Impersonality can only ever exist in relation to personality; writing comes not from one or another of the two, but from the interaction between them.

The method of reading on display in these books not only risks a vast oversimplification of a writer’s particular literary achievement, but also comes at the expense of interpretive possibility, which lives precisely in the space of difference between a reader and a writer, and between the writer and her text.

I found out that you can find camaraderie in the strangest places and that people, as a whole, are actually trustworthy, social, and cooperative. One thing I really can’t emphasize enough here is that mosh pits are not free-for-alls. On the contrary, there exist all sorts of unspoken rules and etiquette moshers must follow if they wish to participate. For starters, violent acts such as kicking, punching, wrestling, and slapping are strictly prohibited. If you see someone fall over? You stop and pick them up. And if someone looks distressed? You work together, and you get them out. Moshing is not a fight, and it’s not everyone out for themselves. Instead, it’s a collective experience where the ultimate aim is joy, not violence. In this sense, moshing is like a trust-building exercise. Naturally, your nerves assume it won’t work out and that individuals will take liberties. Of course, there’s always that one drunken asshole (as with any group situation). And there’s always the chance (as with any physical activity) that an accident might occur. But time and time again, the hive mind takes over, the losers get kicked out, and social cooperation wins the day.

This is how the hawk addressed the dapple-throated nightingale as he carried her high into the clouds, holding her tightly in his talons. As the nightingale sobbed pitifully, pierced by the hawk's crooked talons, the hawk pronounced these words of power, 'Wretched creature, what are you prattling about? You are in the grip of one who is far stronger than you, and you will go wherever I may lead you, even if you are a singer. You will be my dinner, if that's what I want, or I might decide to let you go.' It is a foolish man who thinks he can oppose people who are more powerful he is: he will be defeated in the contest, suffering both pain and humiliation.

When an eagle seized a sleek and glossy lamb from the flock and carried it off in his talons as a feast for his chicks, the jackdaw decided to do the same thing. Accordingly, he swooped down and clutched at a lamb but his claws got tangled in the wool on the lamb's back and he could not escape. The jackdaw said, 'It serves me right for being such a fool! Why should I, who am only a jackdaw, try to imitate eagles?'

Ut quamvis sublimes sint opibus, tamen humiles metuere debent.

Robust to the inclusion of other features of culture such as individualism and residential mobility in the statistical models, the findings revealed that display rules in heterogeneous cultures favor higher emotion expressivity than in homogeneous cultures

Results revealed that the heterogeneity of the country of the expresser (but not the perceiver) was related to emotion recognition accuracy, such that expressers from historically heterogeneous cultures made displays that were easier to recognize across cultures. This finding supports the idea that a boost in the signal value of emotion in the face and the voice may constitute an adaptation to the pressure of interacting with individuals with whom one shares few expectations about emotions, and no nuanced emotion language. In other words, the intermingling of people from diverse cultural backgrounds over an extended time period appears to be associated with the use of facial and vocal expressions that are relatively unambiguous and easily decoded by unfamiliar others.

There is a conceit in musical theater that when a character becomes too emotional to talk, that’s when they begin to sing, and when they become too emotional still, that is when they dance. This concept applies to blogging as well; when you become too emotional to simply write, you write a screed, and when you become too exasperated to screed, then and only then do you write a hate read.

But science is a social process; the AI folks under­stand this very well. How would AI-generated “raw theory” be channeled into the real world of science and tech­nology? How would you know when your virtual Pauli had a theory worth testing? What if it spat out a million theories, and you had good reason to believe one of them was correct — a real paradigm-buster — but you didn’t know which?

This is what digi­ti­za­tion does, again and again: by removing friction, by collapsing time and space, it under­mines our intu­itions about produc­tion and exchange.

All of this means that ALT tags are not so much descriptions of image contents as they are artifacts of the web’s workings and of creators’ retail ambitions.

The importance of this difference is underscored by the early history of safety efforts in anesthesia. The earliest work conducted in the 1950s (e.g., Beecher) used a traditional epidemiological approach, and got nowhere. (Other early efforts outside of anesthesia similarly foundered.) Progress came only after a fundamental and unremarked shift in the investigative approach, one focusing on the specific circumstances surrounding an accident—the “messy details” that the heavy siege guns of the epidemiological approach averaged out or bounded out. These “messy details,” rather than being treated as an irrelevant nuisance, became instead the focus of investigation for Cooper and colleagues and led to progress on safety.

And the fourth market failure is the exploitation of public goods. So we have the ocean in common, and we don’t want people destroying it for profit. Sidewalks are also a kind of common good. We don’t let restaurants expand onto the sidewalk without some sort of regulation. And all of human attention is kind of a public good. What happened in just a few years is that a few companies, especially Google and Facebook, basically monopolized human attention for billions and billions of people. They took huge amounts of it, and we don’t have it back.

There's no faster way to totally sink my credibility, as a new team member, by making a huge fuss over something that's not a problem, or that the team doesn't see as a problem, or that there's already an effort to fix, or that there's a really simple way to fix that I just didn't see at first. There are always so many problems on a team, so many things that could be better, that I'm only ever going to solve a handful of them. Working on problems in the order I noticed them is rarely the most effective order. So the WTF Notebook gives me a place to park the impulse to fix it now, damn it! until I have more context for deciding what to work on first.

Generally, I'll find out that the things that problems I've noticed are around for one of a few reasons.The team hasn't noticed itThe team has gotten used to itThe problem is relatively new, and the old problem it replaced was much worseThey don't know how to fix the problemThey've tried to fix the problem before and failed