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neonvincent) wrote2025-11-25 01:58 pm
oursin) wrote2025-11-25 05:56 pmWe perceive that there does not appear to be any gender-confusion, or relationships with military helmets, connected with this particular tortoise, or maybe no-one noticed: Gramma the Galápagos tortoise, oldest resident of San Diego Zoo, dies at about 141. Not quite old enough to have met that there Charles Darwin, then.
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Reversal of Fates: Access Through Photographs can be a Counterbalance
Ongoing digitization and cataloging work not only serves the interests of scholars and manuscript communities—it also creates crucial, publicly-accessible provenance records that provide an increasingly robust bulwark against manuscript theft and trafficking.
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Thousands of rare American recordings — some 100 years old — go online for all to enjoy:
“A lot of that music from that era, the record companies did not keep backups. They were all destroyed, almost all. And it’s all up to the record collectors. They’re the ones who kind of saved the music from that era,”
....
Superior to a random recording uploaded to YouTube with no accompanying information, the database includes things like where the song was recorded and when, as well as lists of musicians and composers who worked on the songs.
I think I may have mentioned at some time the phenomenon of the 'monkey walk': Before Tinder, there was the Monkey Parade… . Though some recent works read for review incline me to think that one reason for the decline not mentioned in that piece was the rise of the coffee-bar - indoors in the warm with a juke-box, and the site of massive 50s moral panic around The Young.
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Statue to 'remarkable' woman who escaped slavery:
A statue to a "remarkable and brave" woman who fled slavery and torture in the US has been unveiled in the fishing town in northern England where she found freedom.
Mary Ann Macham spent weeks hiding in woods in Virginia before stowing away on a ship, eventually arriving in North Shields in the early 1830s.
She was taken in by a Quaker family, married a local man and remained in the town until she died aged 91.
marthawells) wrote2025-11-25 10:55 amjames_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-25 10:32 amjames_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-25 09:03 am
canyonwalker) wrote2025-11-25 05:25 amrionaleonhart) wrote2025-11-25 11:26 amicon_uk) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
scans_daily2025-11-25 10:57 amletzan) wrote2025-11-25 05:29 amHigh-level stats for week of 2025-11-11 - 2025-11-17
A few callouts this week:
sonia) wrote2025-11-24 09:38 pmmrissa posted about her contributions to The Vertigo Project, a generous handful of poems and stories (and journal prompts, and more).sonia) wrote2025-11-23 09:36 pmThere is a real rot at the core of many of our institutions – and certainly at the core of those powerful players operating within and adjacent to them. "Artificial intelligence" emerges from this rot. It cannot be a bulwark against it.
Every time a translator takes a book and puts it in their own words, they are interpreting the material slightly differently. What we found was that ChatGPT Plus couldn’t do that. It could regurgitate or transcribe, but it couldn’t achieve the nuance to count as its own interpretation of a study.
I think that’s because ChatGPT Plus isn’t in society — it doesn’t interact with the world. It’s predictive, but it’s not distilling or conceptualizing what matters most to a human audience, or the value that we place in narratives that are ingrained in our society. [...]
Now, after this experiment, we’re very against using it. After a year of data, we know it can’t meet our standards. If we ever did plan to use it, we’d have to implement super rigorous fact-checking, because we don’t want to lose reporters’ trust.
Creating a pattern requires considering the entire work; each step has to fit with and work with all the others. Blindly selecting the next step without that consideration will, more often than not, fail. This is especially true since AI can’t “test” the pattern after writing it, which is a big part of what humans do. [...]
However, the best and simplest advice is to buy from patternmakers that you trust. If you know someone who is a human making high-quality patterns, turn to them first. Rewarding known human creators rather than chasing the cheapest pattern is the best way to avoid buying AI slop.
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wordsmithdaily_feed) wrote2025-11-25 12:01 amdialecticdreamer) wrote2025-11-24 11:59 pm
brithistorian) wrote2025-11-24 10:03 pmPresented without comment, except that I have always loved Jim Henson and I agree with this quote 100%:
"When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for my having been there." - Jim Henson
brithistorian) wrote2025-11-24 08:19 pmAbout a month ago, NMIXX came out with their latest sing, "Blue Valentine."
I loved it — I've listened to it so many times! One part of it really confused me, though: From the start of the prechorus (at 0:40) until the beginning of the chorus (at 0:56), the tempo suddenly drops, then has an accelerando until the chorus begins. But I was really confused, though, because the line "You'll always be my blue valentine" in the chorus took the same amount of the time as when the same line was sung at the beginning of the song, but it felt faster. Fortunately, when React to the K (a YouTube channel that feature classical and jazz music students reacting to K-pop songs) did their video reacting to this song, they had an entire section where Liam (a classical percussionist) explains what's happening rhythmically during the prechorus — it took him almost 2 minutes to explain what happened in that 16 seconds of the song, but to me, it was worth it — I'd listened to that part of the song over and over so many times trying to figure out what was happening there, so it was great to finally understand.
mastermahan) wrote in scans_daily2025-11-24 02:32 pm
canyonwalker) wrote2025-11-24 01:11 pmjames_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-24 01:59 pm
