He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich

Three links

1. Halupedia: "Every article here is fabricated by a language model. Biographies, dates, footnotes, and quotations are invented. Nothing on this site is true. Do not cite Halupedia, do not quote it, and do not believe it."

2. Smush: "It's pretty simple: make words, get points."

3. Date the Globe: "Every day the archive releases a genuine historical map with the dates blacked out. Read the names on it — empires, colonies, countries that no longer exist — and pin down the year of publication in six guesses."

Hey, Vasquez,

lmao

Oh, now there is no sound, for we all live underground

Too low to dig, I might just touch hell -- hot!

What a great video. Every single song and every single video for Outkast makes me think, "If I looked and sounded like that, I would be the coolest man alive."

Big hands, I know you're the one

In the desert, you can remember your name

I always thought it was, "In the desert, you can't remember your name."

Like a nervous magician waiting in the wings

It's cool they got the fake Counting Crows band in this video.

Losing Skills

 

Maybe it’s no big deal! After all, most people don’t like reading and don’t do it voluntarily as adults. Most jobs don’t require in-depth reading, and the availability of good-enough LLM tools promises to reduce the number of those that do. In that context, do we really “need” to spend valuable pedagogical time and energy attempting to give everyone the baseline skills to follow extended narratives and arguments and potentially to develop their own? Arguably we don’t. We can do without that, as a society, or at least with much less of that—because presumably we need at least some core of people who can still read and write and understand on their own, if only to check that the AI is properly calibrated.

But the smaller the circle is, the less the arts of reading and writing will be pushed forward, and the greater the chance of eventually breaking the chain. And in the meantime, millions of people who would have had the chance to develop the difficult but rewarding skills that have been foundational for—indeed, all but synonymous with—intellectual achievement for millenia… won’t. Many, perhaps even most, would have chosen not to develop or even use those skills in any serious way, but at least they would have been free to make that sad choice. In the scenario that seems to be approaching, they’re not even being given the chance. And this is happening without anyone deliberating or voting or even directly deciding that we as a society don’t want mass literacy. 

Spare Capacity | Drinking Buddies

[Dave Matthews voice] I did it

Probably not my favorite Dave Matthews Band song, but it's definitely the one I reference the most.

I've got two tickets in my pocket, now baby, we're gonna disappear

Lithium

En passant: After the war, John Cade was made director of the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital and moved his family into a house of the asylum grounds. The two hundred patients there included many manic-depressives and John became preoccupied by the “absolute failure” of psychotherapy to cure them. “Psychopathological explanations seemed to me to be singularly unconvincing,” he reflected, “and completely useless when it came to treatment or prevention of attacks.” He wanted to know the “essential nature” of the disease, and like many naturalists and herbalists and folk healers before him, he knew that the malady must come from some imbalance in the harmony of the body, in excesses or deficits or toxins.

In 1969: Forty-nine countries had approved the use of lithium, but the United States was not among them. Many years later, Cade himself would write that his cure was “made by an unknown psychiatrist, working alone in a small chronic hospital with no research training, primitive techniques, and negligible equipment.” Who could expect the Americans to care? In many official histories, American skepticism has been attributed to the lithia craze, to wariness around the substance in the decades after lithium had left so many Americans dead. But those with experience in natural remedies know the truth: the trouble was money. Lithium is found in water, in rocks, in soil, in the sea. It cannot be placed under patent. It has no commercial value. Even today, it can be made by pharmacists in-house, without the trade secrets of pharmaceutical conglomerates, without the true incentives of modern medicine.

Natural Medicine

 

Just like Adam and Eve, said you'd set me free

Top comment: "who is here because of the IG  the Gas Station Reel ?"

But I'm strong, strong enough to carry him

Female Warriors

While some female Norse soldiers had been found before, she was the first high-status female warrior ever identified. Or was she? The second it was suggested Bj 581 was a woman, every conclusion drawn about her when she was thought to be a man was questioned.

Maybe the grave goods were heirlooms or an homage to her family, and not about her. Maybe there had been another, male body in the tomb, and it had been removed while hers and the horses’ were left undisturbed. Maybe the 19th-century excavation had mislabeled samples. Maybe while chromosomally female, the individual had been intersex or had lived as a transgender man. Anything rather than imagine a woman may have led armies.

We've been very wrong about Stone Age women

Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?

Haunting, familiar, yet I can't seem to place it

I will wash the dishes While you go have a beer

I'm going hungry (going hungry)

The Changing English Language

But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.

By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.

But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.

None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.

[...]

And verely this name dyd me ſore affright, for who was this Maiſter wherof he ſpake? And what maner of man was he, that his very name ſholde be ſpoken wyth ſuche reuerence and drede. I wolde haue fledde but he purſued me and by myn avys he was the ſwifter, for he caught me full ſoone.

How far back in time can you understand English? | Image by Paul Lehr