Will of Tyre retweeted
Home Owners, series Chinese portraits in rural areas of central China’s Henan Province, 1990-2000.
📸by Jiang Jian.
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Will of Tyre retweeted
Google Books is becoming a desert. Its regress is real: the knowledge we were assured was both safely stored and freely available, which led libraries and schools to get rid of their books, has retreated into the shadows. The internet of 2026 knows less than the internet of 2010.
Why is Google Books removing access to out-of-copyright books that it once hosted as open access? There is a good chance that the mass-deaccession policy of libraries, on the ground that "it's available for free online", will be one of the most stupid acts of modern curatorship.
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Will of Tyre retweeted
none of yall can hold a candle to 13th century university scholars
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Will of Tyre retweeted
Wish we knew what their Greek name was.
Sipping my coffee ☕️ and thinking about these marvellous Minoan cups!
They look so modern it’s incredible to think they were made by Bronze Age potters some 3,800 years ago!
Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. 📷 by me
#Archaeology
ALT My photo collage shows five cylindrical Minoan cups each with a single handle and a slightly flaring rim. Each cup has a black slip background decorated with a different geometric polychrome motif painted in white, red and orange colours. This type of Minoan pottery is known as Kamares Ware, after the Kamares Cave in central Crete where this kind of pottery was first found. Kamares Ware vessels were luxury items produced by palace workshops mainly at Phaistos and Knossos. These five cups were excavated at Phaistos and are dated 1800-1700 BC.
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Will of Tyre retweeted
John Tukey the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) inventor, who coined both "bit" and "software" died exactly 26 years ago today.
The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), one of the most important algorithms in signal processing and data analysis, was introduced by Tukey & Cooley in 1965.
In 1805, Gauss - studying the orbits of asteroids Pallas and Juno - came up with a method to interpolate their trajectories from discrete samples. What he came up with was mathematically very close to the modern FFT but Gauss never published that work, and didn’t analyze its computational complexity. It predated even Fourier’s 1822 work on heat diffusion - but without the framing or generalization that Cooley & Tukey would bring 160 years later.
In 1965, Cooley & Tukey published their now-famous algorithm that reduced the cost of computing a Discrete Fourier Transform from 𝑂(𝑛²) to 𝑂(𝑛 log𝑛). This leap made real-time signal processing and digital media compression feasible.
From radio telescopes to JPEGs, from audio codecs to quantum mechanics - the FFT is everywhere. It’s one of the most important (and elegant) algorithms of the 20th century - rooted in the genius of Gauss, but brought to life in the computer age.
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My daughter wanted to practice writing "princess" 公主 in Chinese with me and Claude produced this video for us to study Jing Xiaopeng's calligraphy.
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Chinese numbers 1–10 in hard-pen calligraphy 一二三四五六七八九十 — each character at half speed, then full speed. Music: "Vaporwave" by Dizzy Crow (CC0)
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Some background on the video: the hand you're watching belongs to 荆霄鹏 (Jing Xiaopeng, b. 1976), one of China's best-selling copybook authors — 400+ published practice books, and calligraphy teacher at Tsinghua's Academy of Arts & Design.
He's writing 硬笔楷书 — "hard-pen regular script." Same discipline as brush calligraphy, but done with an ordinary gel or fountain pen, the way schoolchildren across China still learn to write today.
The style has a 1,400-year pedigree. Jing is a direct disciple (入室弟子) of 田英章 (Tian Yingzhang), the most famous living master of the "Ou school" (欧体). That school traces back to 欧阳询 (Ouyang Xun, 557–641 CE), calligraphy authority at the early Tang court and one of the Four Great Masters of regular script. His inscription 《九成宫醴泉铭》, carved in 632 CE when he was 75, has been THE model text for students of this style ever since.
Ou style is famous for 险劲 — "perilous rigor": tall, razor-precise structures that look daring but lock together perfectly. Tian Yingzhang inherited that strictness; his student Jing softens it slightly — reviewers call his hand 秀气, graceful.
So the lineage in this clip: Ouyang Xun (Tang dynasty) → Tian Yingzhang → Jing Xiaopeng → the numbers 一 through 十, written with a ballpoint pen.
I'm cutting these follow-along reels (½ speed, then normal, then a freeze on the finished character) for each lesson of the DeFrancis Chinese reader as I learn to write.
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Will of Tyre retweeted
I made a huge mistake thinking that manual technical jobs such as electician, appliance technician etc. wd be spared by AI.
Had pbs w/: HVAC, security system, outdoor lighting, pool programming etc. & was forced to solved them w/AI because technicians are slow at showing up.
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Will of Tyre retweeted
In this excellent new book on the Cambridge Five, Senior shows that the Soviets thought they were double agents for years.
The NKVD simply could not believe that these known leftists and communists had such easy access to top secret information, that they could so easily pass it to the Soviets, that their spy craft be so clumsy without getting caught, and that their the British had no spies in the USSR. It had to be an elaborate ruse of disinformation—but, it wasn’t.
🤦🏻♂️
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i'm gonna redo this in france which is suffering an egg shortage (bretagne produces 33% of the eggs!)
About a decade ago, many people in Chinese stopped believing that chickens marketed as "free-range" were legit, because some unscrupulous suppliers tried to pass off bad chicken as premium, leading to small disease outbreaks.
In 2017, a Chinese company called GoGoChicken began sticking ankle bracelets onto all of their newly-hatched chickens to track their locations (via GPS), daily steps, the local air quality, and more. These data were logged onto the blockchain (for no apparent reason other than "credibility.")
When these chickens were slaughtered and packaged, the company included a little QR code on the label. Consumers could scan this label and see details about that particular chicken; where it was raised, what it ate, number of daily steps, and when it was slaughtered. These chickens were profitable, selling for up to $43 each. The technology expanded to more than 400 farms, but the company eventually went out of business for reasons that are unclear to me.
(The company also pitched an idea to allow people to buy their chicken four-to-six months before slaughter, so they could follow its life and remotely watch the animal as it grew up. Strange.)
Yes, this is literally a plot from the first episode of the TV show, Portlandia. But it is also a real story, well documented in the book "Blockchain Chicken Farm" by Xiaowei Wang, which is itself a collection of strange stories about technology adoption in rural parts of China. Recommend.
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have to see this
Looks like an interesting new Taiwanese film, I think it's on Netflix right now
@NetflixAsia
' "A Foggy Tale" (大濛, 2025) is a poignant Taiwanese historical tragicomedy set during the dark early years of the White Terror era in 1950s Taiwan. The story follows A-Yueh, a brave 15-year-old country girl from Chiayi, who travels alone to Taipei to retrieve the remains of her executed older brother after he is shot by the government for alleged anti-authoritarian activities. Armed with almost no money, she forms an unlikely, protective bond with Chao Kung-tao, a rough-around-the-edges, foul-mouthed local rickshaw driver who helps her navigate a dangerous, heavily policed society built on fear, silence, and corruption.'
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Will of Tyre retweeted
Khodarkovsky (not to be confused with the exiled oligarch) is probably the single best contemporary historian on the historical dynamics between Russia & the steppe nomads and highland Caucasians
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Will of Tyre retweeted
David Butterfield tells us everything that is known about the life of Lucretius. The Fowler Lecture 2026.
Set aside an hour to listen, learn, and enjoy!
piped.video/watch?v=BZ4TICzK…
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Will of Tyre retweeted
If you want to learn more about the Holy Roman Empire
Read Heart of Europe by Peter H Wilson
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Will of Tyre retweeted
Interesting, yesterday MIT started posting select lectures from course on Dynastic China, Fall 2024 (selected lectures) with @TristanGBrown I think four lectures are posted, hopefully in the future all of them! Link below:
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