Piers Kelly

Ugh, sorry this is grotesque from start to finish

Archduke Franz Ferdinand has entered the chat

I suspect that changes in the entropic signal are to do with the information load swinging towards the graphic mode and away from orality etc – yet the complexity of the overall content is probably quite stable

All this suggests that, like message sticks, both Uruk V objects and Aurignacian objects may have been much more information-dense than they appear from a statistical analysis, especially when you factor in multimodality and the 'infrastructure' of communication...

...in the case of message sticks, certain 'simple' objects with low information in terms of entropy can be involved in communications that have very high information content. This is because not all info is encoded in marks but in shape, timber species, orality, kinship identities and institutions

Still digesting this paper! Information entropy is an excellent and necessary measure for this sort of thing, but I want to investigate how the authors coded 3D objects with diagrammatic and iconic features, into to linear sequences. And...

First up in the 2026 UWA Archaology Seminar Series: Meet the Archaeologists, featuring a range of fictional archaeologists from Indiana Jones to Lara Croft and Bandit Heeler

University of Western Australia's archeologists are smokin', especially Dr Bandit Heeler

This makes so much sense now

CaMP Down Under Enter your name, email and institution to sign up

Judy Kroo (UniMelb) and Matt Tomlinson (ANU) are starting a #linganth reading group, modelling it on CaMP anthroplogy but for Oz time zones.

It's called CaMP Down Under and will be zoomed on the last Friday every month at 10:30AM AEST.
Sign up here: forms.gle/MqGx7HrVPqC9...

I love a SMALL country show. There is a critical threshold when a country show goes from being great to being sprawling, expensive and chaotic !

'Some Account of My Intercourse with Madame Blavatsky' (1885)

This is going to be hot

​The circular dance of bureaucracy everywhere:

​UNI ADMIN: In order to proceed you MUST provide us with your unique project code!

ME: What is my unique project code?

UNI ADMIN: KellyX34

ME: Alright, "KellyX34"

UNI ADMIN: Thank you for informing us!

Title page of Darwin's book: "The formation of vegetable mould through the actions of worms, with observations on their habits"

Today I learned that Charles Darwin wrote a 348 page book on 'The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms with Observations on their Habits'.

There is also a bunch of mature theory on whether a sign system is writing or not that goes well beyond merely eyeballing it

But I see something else in that lone figure carrying two shopping bags: a man who is perhaps heading home to prepare dinner

The banality of good

...read this from Gal Beckerman

www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/0...

I once game a live presentation, after which somebody in the audience advised me to engage with the work of Piers Kelly

Screenshot of an email from the Executive Dean including the words "A short time ago a brown snake fell from a colleague's bookshelves and slithered around their office [LG7] on the Lower Ground floor of the Arts Building, E11 [...] I recommend vacating E11 if you can, and working from some other location"

Totally normal seasonal notice from my rural Australian university

Personal statement on reviewing and being reviewed My policy on reviewing Topics I can review I am always happy to review relevant papers in the field of Philippine studies, Australian studies, linguistic anthropology and writing system research. T…

I ignore most of them altogether (I emphatically agree with
what ‪@scarymrolmecman.bsky.social‬ said), and for the remainder I simply send them my pre-prepared personal policy: bravenewwords.info/personal-sta...

What the hell is this creature? Cross between a dingo and a drop bear?

(Reminiscences of Australia, 1846)

This is next-level masks-off insanity. I really hope you’re doing ok! Love and solidarity to trans folks in the US and everywhere

The Dreaming, in translation I’ve recently read four pieces of writing that together tell an interesting story: David Uniapon’s Legendary tales of the Australian Aborigines [1924-1925] (2001), W. E. H. Stanner&#821…

Four different approaches to The Dreaming, an Aboriginal narrative complex guiding belief and action. bravenewwords.info/2025/09/14/d...

one of the biggest arguments against AI dependence is that the strongest proponents of its use have become visibly *dumber* in the last few years.

Wait, what? Don't all the studies point to *boomers* being more likely to fall for misinformation?

I'm all for civic education but it seems the kids are alright

(Even Stanner's ahistorical fallacy is kinda defensible. He confuses a shared value of social equilibrium, or 'abidingness', with actual historical stasis. The Native Title era has a been a good corrective to that view.)

It's also a nice counter-point to essentialising discourses of incommensurability when it comes to Aboriginal communities.
These representations are weirdly appealing to activists, per Spivak, but all too often they end up reproducing exoticising colonial stereotypes in the guise of 'truthtelling'.

He is genuinely awed by the Dreaming, and expresses this awe with humility and poetic subtlety.

He certainly understood his assumed reader in his deliberate use of Western metaphors and idioms to clarify an otherwise head-spinning concept. Namely, the 'everywhen' (Tjukurrpa, Alcheringa etc).

If you set aside the structuralist fallacy that Australian Aboriginal societies are somehow ahistorical, it remains an excellent example of cultural translation.

I've just read W. E. H. Stanner's 1953 essay 'The Dreaming' for the first time.

I'm surprised by how well it holds up after 72 years.🧵

Most humanist critique of #genAI falls into the ideological trap of treating machine learning systems as less perfect quasi-human subjects, by claiming that human «creativity» or «intelligence» will always surpass machinic ones. That’s not the point, the comparison is flawed from the beginning
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Jordan Peterson on lasagne