Dave Palfrey

Also "safe (whatever that means)" (whatever that means)

How does the difficulty of doing a jigsaw scale with the number of pieces n? (Presumably it’s superlinear, but less than n squared. n log n?)

Undercover officer deceived women with ‘grotesque and cruel’ lies, spycops inquiry told Carlo Soracchi admits exploiting empathy of woman who had abusive father by claiming his father abused his sister

Undercover officer deceived women with ‘grotesque and cruel’ lies, #spycops inquiry told. Carlo Soracchi lived with Donna McLean for 2 years, asked her to marry him (in real life, we was already married), & told her lies about his father abusing his sister

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

no doubt when the plan is published ministers will go on to inform the public of the fact... and how will they choose to do this? Well, on a site owned and algorithmically tweaked by a white separatist, a man who promulgates misogny, racism and disdain for British democracy

careful not to let them go off tho

gets close at PM 1:17:07 JAN. 23. 2026 [26:07 into YouTube Nathan Cavanaugh Deposition (Part 3)]. NC says grants relating to two Presidentially approved initiatives were seen as non-wasteful; asked if all other grants were seen as wasteful, claims not necessarily but offers no further criteria.

The gum-chewing. The nonchalance.

Oof. I know you'd hoped the Donald might have backed you at Cruft's.

The correspondence of that other Potter, Beatrice later Webb, shows you sometimes had to remain on guard tho. There's a letter from the economist F. Y. Edgeworth to BP which makes clear he regarded her BM Reading Room ticket as something of an invitation to receive his amatory advances.

I was brought up with Protestant incapacity for the visual, but do hear that artists' models can be something else entirely! Thanks for your essay. (Tho I'm recovering from a cold atm, so feel too stupid to tackle it properly. Also I'd ideally somehow get access to the Mehrtens article first...)

The term "language model" as used here means a sort of wiring diagram which describes how human language works. It describes the relationship of different systems, used in language, to each other. Since this relating of systems is basic to the understanding of human language, the construction of a model was one of the first things done by psycholinguists.

This is James J. McCarthy at the Univ of Illinois, instructing the instructors of the deaf in psycholing. advances: "The essential distinction between the mech. communication model and the psycholing. model of lang. function is that the former fails to take into account the 'meaning' of signals"

THE LANGUAGE MODEL Prof. Charles E. Osgood, of the University of Illinois, formulated the theoretical basis for this language model by extending and elaborating the mediation hypothesis. The model includes (1) 3 language processes, (2) 3 levels of organization, and (3) 2 channels of transmission. [followed by figure showing two decoding -> encoding channels, each with similar flow between semantic grammatical & integrative levels: channel 1 'Perceptuo-actor'; & channel 2 'Audio-vocal']

It'd be fascinating to pursue the history of usage of the term "language model". Not the familiar pedigree of LMs qua probabilistically-constrained-token-sequences (ngrams, audio signal processing, embeddings, transformers), but the variety of efforts called 'LMs'. E.g. this from 1957:

They’re saying nobody has ever done a national suicide as beautiful as mine. They say to me, eyes full of tears, “Mr President I’ve never seen a country kill itself as bigly.” And I smiled to myself. Think of that. Killing yourself. I’d do it. Maybe I will do it right now, who’d stop me? I wouldn’t.

bsky.app/profile/01fa...

Hello Bluesky! I am looking for anyone who cares about/writes about/thinks about Rebecca West.

I've been on a 10 year mission to get her a blue plaque in London and am finally allowed to re-apply after it was last turned down.

I'd welcome help building a strong application.

Thank you 💙🙏

Not sure I’d blame the war on a surfeit of sentience

Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds Researchers identify sharp rise to about 0.35C every decade, after excluding natural fluctuations such as El Niño

The Guardian on our new study, which shows that global heating is significantly gathering speed. Our efforts to overcome our fossil fuel addiction should do the same.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

How I Became A Target For Right-Wing Freaks At The Australian Open | Defector Before I went to Melbourne in January to cover the Australian Open for Defector and a couple other publications, I spent some time in New Zealand with my family. We lived there for five years when I w...

Across every sphere of modern life — from politics to culture to sports — it is becoming increasingly impossible to do journalism. The economics don't support it; the oligarchs who control enormous propaganda machines don't want it; and, sadly, a large number of readers want cathartic slop instead.

Home-editing tech presumably drove the ubiquity of quick split-second edits. As with hypno-porn, there's a gesture towards some kind of sublime: trapped in a curated maelstrom of Many, yearn for impossible resolution into One. Hence the force of that final obscene shock: the White House credits.

That is awesome. Thank you very much!

Feels like there are 2 alt-right ways to read these: (1) don't know original context for any of these, but war surge just reassuringly meets my confused libinal urges; (2) knowing some original contexts makes the audacity of putting these together feel like extra war surge. Alt-right detournement.

Travelling Activists, Radical Hospitality and the Intimate History of Socialist Organising in Britain, c.1880–1914* This article considers the political lecture tour, and particularly the travelling socialist caravan tours organised by Clarion socialists at the end of the 19th century, to argue that, for socialist...

I've got a new article out @parlhistjournal.bsky.social 💥 It's about late 19thC socialist caravan tours & the production of everyday forms of cross-cultural connection & provincial internationalisms that were vital for the development of socialist ideas in this period

Thank you for this, look forward to reading! Is it over-extrapolating to see it as corrective to crits of 'lifestyle' activism as simply post-68 pathology? (Thinking a lot about #spycops at the moment, and why the state poisoning of activist intimacies was so personally & politically destructive.)

"you're currently living through one of the largest positive technological revolutions in modern history - solar and batteries replacing fossil fuels - and you're hearing more about chatbots because the people who run our country make money selling oil" --‪@mtsw.bsky.social
bsky.app/profile/70sb...

Yes, this does seem extraordinarily idolatrous. I'm not a believer, but do know that some Christians place great emphasis on substitutional atonement. To my mind, that makes the casual performance of this kind of counter-substitution especially problematic.

Area | RGS Geography Journal | Wiley Online Library This paper develops a historical and political geographical analysis of the UK Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). To date, there has been no geographical study of IRD and through...

“The geographies of the information research department”

Enjoyed this “critical geographical analysis” of British covert operations

And there’s me thinking that geography was just oxbow lakes and erosion!

rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Westminster Meeting House raided by Metropolitan Police again. Statement: “For Quakers, faith and action are inseparable. Peaceful protest, prayer and nonviolent action are integral parts of many Quakers' religious life. Whilst we take the planning of criminal acts very seriously, we believe that this incident is a deliberate targeting of committed young people who want to make our country a more equitable place. This raid is part of a systematic stifling of dissent. That this is the second time in a year that the police have raided our meeting house dramatically illuminates the broader trend in the UK of cracking down on those who disagree with the government. The right to protest is fundamental to our democracy. It's a key part of how people make their voices heard between elections.” – Oliver Robertson, Head of Witness and Worship Quakers in Britain, 5 March 2026

Yesterday evening, for the second time in a year, the Met Police raided Westminster Quaker Meeting House and arrested a number of young nonviolent activists.

STATEMENT: www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

hope to get to the root of the problem with my new surd2vec

No idea why you're being so rude. Blocking.

I didn't see you'd posted that too :) Not esp. sure why that would be a result of twitter breaking my mind, but peace to you x