1 pint - 0.474 mL. Even the aliens can't get American-customary-system to metric right. #monsterdon
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bookandswordblog
@bookandswordblog@scholar.social
mastodon 4.7.3S. Manning, MA (Calgary), PhD (Innsbruck)
Blogging https://bookandsword.com/ from 🇨🇦 after travelling suddenly overseas for my health
{lu2}DUB.SAR.TUR u {lu2}TUG2.DU3 Please don't request to follow unless I can see a profile and some posts #noBot
Toots harmlessly disperse after six months
0 Followers
0 Following
45 Posts
Joined April 27, 2018
homepage:
pronouns:
he, him, the blogger, the mad orientalist
languages:
en, de, Latin, fr (un petit peu), it (un poco)
meatspace location:
BC, Canada 🇨🇦
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@researchfairy@scholar.social congratulations on finding 30 (!) jobs that use your skills and training to apply to!
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@vrandecic@mas.to @jgordon@appdot.net I may replace my Wordpress site with a static site generator site (I hand-code my current static site). Comments and Fedi integration are the main obstacle.
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@alexglow@chaos.social the moderns might say serva secretum salvumque although salvus is Late Latin
Classic post: what did the ancient Persians do for us? "There are a shelf full of books like How the Scots Invented the Modern World or surveys of the Islamic Golden Age in Iran, Baghdad, and al-Andalus. ... There is a whole library trying to show that 'Europe' or 'the west' started a triumphant march to world power at ever-earlier dates. But I don’t know of a similar book which looks at the heritage of the ancient world from Gaza to the Indus." https://www.bookandsword.com/2020/12/05/what-did-the-persians-do-for-us/ #histodons
danah boyd writes about how many corporate sites are dominated by parasocial relationships. Rather than doing often violent and tribal things to create a community, most people are following a few paid content creators who broadcast to them. The transition from sociality to parasociality is clearest on YouTube, Patreon, and fansites. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261437487 #socialMedia
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@vrandecic@mas.to @jgordon@appdot.net 1990s and early 2000s: I learn to make simple websites with HTML, CSS, and a few JPEGs
(A series of very bad decisions)
2021: I launch a static website consisting of HTML, CSS, and a few JPEGs
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@Lana likewise, government offices and colleges and machine shops are full of people who could be excellent research academics if they had money and resources. But the first fancy postdoc or Visiting Assistant Professor position gives you the publications and prestige to have a chance at the next and before COVID some people kept jumping from log to log until they got a fancy permanent position. (I looked at the situation and dropped out early).
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@evacide I liked this recent post on "CEO Says a Thing" as a template for journalists https://karlbode.com/ceo-said-a-thing-journalism/
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@ElenLeFoll@fediscience.org the case of FamilySearch removing the word Nego and references to race from 18th-century manuscripts it scanned and summarized was striking too https://bsky.app/profile/caitlindeangelis.bsky.social/post/3mlrieau4h227
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@davidgerard@circumstances.run taps the sign about the risks of investing serious money in authoritarian regimes run by goofballs https://www.bookandsword.com/2025/08/16/regime-risk-in-investing/
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@vrandecic@mas.to @jgordon@appdot.net my static site is not having problems on a few-Euros-a-month plan, but it has limited images with public URLs and no audio or video
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@zvavybir my other server used to be on https://masto.host I think, now its hosted by a small business in Canada
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@CaribenxMarciaX@scholar.social @bogpunk@chitter.xyz one of the first people they invited to join Substack Pro and get special cash bonuses and legal aid was Scott "Richard Lynn and HBDchick were right" Alexander
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@CaribenxMarciaX@scholar.social @JessMahler@indiepocalypse.social Substack also have a thriving antivaxx department called Health Politics. They are happy to shut down blogs that get too spicy, but really concerned about interfering with Nazi or alternative medicine speech. Can't say I might not be tempted by that sweet VC money if my writing had a chance of reaching a large paying online audience.
Just like Google's AI overview, DDG's AI overviews will happily make up a meaning for a phrase you just invented and give 'sources' for this interpretation, because all they ever do is emit plausible output matching their input. I tried "better a porphyry bathtub than a limestone bassoon meaning" #duckDuckGo
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@electricarchaeo@scholar.social most countries went to big universities because of the obvious economies of scale over tiny American-style universities with a few thousand students. Likewise larger class sizes: if you want small classes, students have to pay a lot or teachers have to be paid very little (also a 19th-century thing).
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@realbloginista @chrisstoecker ich meine, üblicherweise sind Manifesti für Menschen, die keine Macht haben - Filippo Marinetti war nicht der Chef von Fiat, als er Futurismus gegrundet hat
Juvenalia, or blast from the past: Some Thoughts on Wealth in Greece and Mesopotamia (2007) https://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat/showthread.php?tid=8973 #economicHistory #economics #histodons #antiquidons #cuneitoot #ancMedToot
I wish journalists did not have to take a vow of forgetting so they remembered that the vow on the glowing orb in 2017 was an informal alliance of Arab powers + Israel + the USA against Iran https://gwynnedyer.com/2017/trump-and-iran/
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Just a reminder that you can follow a hashtag like #shieldMakingWithTheophilius if you just want to see those posts. I am a trend setter so nobody else has jumped on that one yet.
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@wim_v12e @TheBeastOfBaglan and child labour has been basically eliminated in countries with functional labour laws!
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@wim_v12e I will see if I can do that once I have a feel for what the base form of MS's web apps is like. I hope to get office work soon.
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@TheBeastOfBaglan @wim_v12e it can be uninvented as easily as radium pills and asbestos and child labour.
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@stephanieburgis@wandering.shop if you have trouble accessing an academic edition you could ask a reference librarian or subject librarian to check and hope he or she has a bit of spare time
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@stephanieburgis@wandering.shop any scholarly edition of the letters will list every previous edition and especially the editio princeps
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@jessamyn@glammr.us the whole higher ed sector is being demolished in Canada so that includes the admin jobs. Minimum-wage jobs with a lot of free time to read vanished from Canada a while ago too (as did skilled jobs in the same space like movie projectionist).
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@ZekuZelalem this is why I wish Canada still had international news outside the USA and UK. We have connections to the whole world but no willingness to pay for reporters overseas who speak languages other than French and English.
@ElenLeFoll Canadian coin machines have no troubles with Elizabeth II or Charles III coins (although I once saw a roll of loonies with a Chuck-e-Cheezes token inside)
Both genders get to play sacrificial bondees which is progressive for 1980 #monsterdon
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@alexglow@chaos.social does @greyor@goblin.technology have any thoughts?
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@evacide@hachyderm.io It does seem like that marketing opened up legal trouble because it suggests that the advice is from $expertName and people could confuse the slop and the slop peddler's endorsement for the real thing and real endorsement
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@chrysn@chaos.social @alexglow@chaos.social @Legit_Spaghetti@mastodo.neoliber.al I have not dug out the original text but Latin tends to leave out pronouns where they can be understood from context. So I would have to reread the original English in context.
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@lingucat@scholar.social ich nütze Proton (nie Gmail) aber das Unternehmen hat aktuell ein Problem mit Vibe coding. "Nur für kleinigeiten" 🤔
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@wim_v12e say signing up every student and staff member for a paid chatbot subscription.
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@Ivovanwilligen thanks for writing this up and sharing it. The style is peculioar (AI-flavoured) and calling LinkedIn "a European professional network" is peculiar.
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@evacide@hachyderm.io our generation remembers when it took a live human staffer to read some poor customer's private Gmail "for testing"
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@wim_v12e does Glasgow Uni have mandatory AI subscriptions? The uni I am affiliated with recently introduced MS Copilot which begs you to use it
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@patmikemid@sfba.social Its not just clout chasing. Many people today are open that they have careers in culture because they got on Twitter early and networked there. I think that was and is bad ethics and bad tactics but many of them make more money and get more recognition than I do and the conventional ways of making a living in those fields have dried up too.
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@realbloginista @chrisstoecker der Täter von Utøya war doch kein Millitarär und Chef eines Groß-Unternehmens wie Karp
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@wronglang@bayes.club @fabio@manganiello.eu yes, "its disastrous to reward coders for committing more lines of code" came up early in my computer science degree in the 2000s. Its about as well established as "use version control" and "manual memory management is prone to subtle bugs."
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@ZekuZelalem I think a lot of minority communities rely on news from the old country but you need context and exposure to interpret say Indian journalism under Modi or Turkish journalism under Erdogan, just reprinting the story is not enough.