cool, I signed up for the ultramarathon version of this event 20 years ago. Almost halfway there!!
04.03.2026 10:04
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cool, I signed up for the ultramarathon version of this event 20 years ago. Almost halfway there!!
yeah. I bit the bullet yesterday and installed Ollama to start exploring open-source, ethically trained LLMs that you run on your laptop. We need to hurry the day that an LLM is just a tool like a hammer or a calculator that you borrow from your mate instead of leasing from a millitary contractor.
[opens fridge]
[condiments, sauerkraut, four bags of shredded cheddar, two large jars of experimental homemade nonalcoholic whisky]
[aloud] Our fridge is weird. I will eat leftovers.
[opens freezer]
[drawer overflowing with crochet nudibranchs]
Maybe "cache-misére" is emerging as the next LLM telltale alongside the em dash?
gallery coming soon—I'll tag you. @emmatyldesley.bsky.social and I ran a zine workshop for ocean scientists last week in the shadows of #OSM26 and folks made some weird and wonderful stuff!
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
this is such good news. If anything happened to BHL it would change the course of waterwayscollective.org zine-making.
nice!
If you want to explore variants, 1) with the wee triangles that become the 8 small points, try squashing them open before folding them—the points become twice as wide & this frees the points that you folded into the very centre. 2) flip the whole thing over, fold 8 corners to centre…
the AI companies should be taking on medieval necromancers as "soft skills" consultants.
This showed up in my feed adjacent to the news that Meta is going to introduce versions of your feed that continue without you after you're dead. Same conjuration tradition.
So no split ticketing then
I have an anytime open return from Haymarket but it says Transpennine, can I use it to become Presbyterian?
quote continues: "There is no reason we can’t create hundreds of quirky models that mostly know about birds... maybe [such models] are merely ragamuffins, pulling together loose threads, creaky at the edges".
(I'm working through why I love e.g. bsky.app/profile/i-fi... while hating 95% of "AI".)
There's an unrealised world of weird LLM variants, and then there's the form that big corps locked LLMs into within 5 min of creation. Katy Gero, LARB: "Artists of all stripes are allowed to play with technology. That’s our role: play with the world, test its limits, poke at the holes and problems."
Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching
in Scotland, these folks are a great starting point: cultureforclimate.scot
There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.”
Philip K. Dick
btw you don't need to be registered for #OSM26, or an ocean scientist of any description, to come to these #artsci ( #sciart?) events. You can also be the other sort of person, or a herring in a mobile tank, etc etc.
Not 1 but 2 evening #sciart events (w drinks) during #OSM26 in #Glasgow!
* zine-making in the pub, Mon 23 Feb (link below)
* opening for Constraint Made Visible (Transmission Gallery, 24 Feb)—collabs among local mathematicians, artists, crafters, and ocean modellers
Pls help spread the word!
How much temperate rainforest could there be in the UK and Ireland, and where? Despite campaigns calling for restoration in both countries, these questions have been difficult to answer. In our new paper we assess the evidence base 🌏🧪🌐🌳🌲 1/9
a hundred thousand idling diesel cars. Energy requirement of a quarter million homes. For *one* data centre.
aprs.scot/press-releas...
Can we replace the word "hyperscale", which sounds like slick sci fi but is hiding horrors? "earthcrusher-scale"? "demon-summoning-scale"?
Ooh I like this one:
Five classes I took at university
* The End is Near! (actual title: apocalyptic traditions)
* Chaos and Dynamical Systems
* Introduction to Buddhist Art History
* Quantum Mechanics
* History of Jazz
sort of eclectic but sort of all on a theme, in retrospect.
I hope so too--possibly at an exhibition at a gallery in town that might come together last-minute, and possibly at the Waterways Collective poster by @emmatyldesley.bsky.social in the Mutual Currents session on Thur. Will update this thread!
This makes me want to be a biochemist, or be Björk, or believe in gods, or I'm not sure. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn8A...
Ocean zine making in the pub during #OSM26!
Please join waterwayscollective.org and the @mastscot.bsky.social Energyscapes Working Group for an evening of #zines and collage in a cosy #Glasgow pub, following day 1 of the 2026 Ocean Sciences Meeting. Sign-up link below, spread the word!
LivingMaps is hosting an online panel discussion with waterwayscollective.org on 3 Feb, where we will share some of the scientific visualisations, zines, and performance materials that have grown out of our #art-science field trips following #Scottish #salmon #rivers. Tickets below. Should be fun!
Painting of a school of lesser sandeels, by Björn Johansson.
🧪🦤🌐
Why are North Sea sandeels getting smaller? New study finds prey community shifts, not warming, likely drive size declines. A growth model shows how prey, temperature, turbidity, and early-life timing interact under climate change.
bit.ly/meps15010
@neilbanas.bsky.social
@sbohvm.gla.ac.uk
I searched for "engaged buddhism nuns" and this article ends with a list of books written by women in Thich Nhat Tanh's tradition: plumvillage.org/articles/fem...
(not meant as #notallmonastics or anything, just suggesting books (that I haven't read))
Acrylic painting of a black silhouette of a bear with one large human eye in a meadow of wildflowers. The sun is encircled by a rainbow.
Sharing another new painting included in my solo exhibition at LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans. In Our Veins is on view now through February 21st as well as online at lemieuxgalleries.com.
"Void"
Acrylic on canvas
12" x 12"
#art #painting #surrealism #nature #wildlife #contemporaryart
Also "coincidentally", on the plane I started reading Jeff Noon + Steve Beard's _Gogmagog_, centered on a watery journey through the miles-long ghost of a dragon. You never really appreciate your leviathans until they're gone.