We started a conversation yesterday on the use of urine by medieval Western European physicians to determine health. I thought today we'd go into exactly how the urine was an indicator of health.Examining sediment in the urine was one case, which was described yesterday in a paragraph from Giles Corbeil's (fl.1200) poem De urinis. Later elaborations on this suggest the urine would settle into layers of different colors. A large layer on top could indicate a problem with the head. Som sediments…
Cassie Pritchard, on Twitter:I get why so many liberals are fundamentally disdainful of democracy these days—it’s because liberalism is exhausted. It’s out of answers. Liberalism won, it delivered the world it promised, and people still aren’t content. They’re not satisfied. So the people must be wrong. We are unfathomably richer than our ancestors. Output per capita in America today is on the order of 900 times greater than before the invention of agriculture, about ~225 times higher than in 1…
Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report found that over 83% of Chinese respondents see AI products as more beneficial than harmful. In the United States, the number is 39%.Geoffrey Hinton’s warnings about the existential threat of AI have rarely sparked serious conversation in China, not in the public, not in the industry. AI stays in the register of job threat, efficiency gains, and opportunity. People package the fear of AI to sell courses to anxious white-collar workers. Company owners pour…
At August, any task imposed upon me was never upto the mark. Our founder always blasted me to bits. 'Divith, this is incomplete.' 'Divith, 10/10 isn't enough, 12/10 is what we need.' But most often, it always resulted in one feedback: you need to build clarity of thought. This always, always, always baffled me. Clarity of thought? What on earth does that mean? Think clearer, first principles, this jargon circulates around twt like no tomorrow. And for a non-tech individual, these terms imply -…
The concept of "third places," introduced by Ray Oldenburg, highlights social spaces outside home and work, crucial for community connection. Unfortunately, American urban planning has systematically eliminated these places, leading to rising loneliness. Solutions include creating walkable, mixed-use environments that prioritize free access to genuine public spaces, fostering social interaction and belonging.
The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out:In Episode 11, I chat with flaMEd, the author of flamedfury.com about, among other things, web communities around games and television shows, sharing music interests with a personal website, community in the indie web, and more.I hope you enjoy the episode!Wonders of Web Weaving also has an RSS feed you can use to follow along from wherever you get your podcasts. flaMEd flamedfury.com The eleventh episode of Wonders of Web Weaving is out…
While going thru Pinterest to gather references (poor choice, I know), I saw a picture of four women with the title "Manok." Thought it was Filipino (manok means chicken in Filipino), it turns out to be a South Korean one. Love the focus on older Asian queers!!!
From a post my friend T shared on Facebook, I learned about Mine Okubo's work, specifically Citizen 13660. May we continue to remember art as a reminder of each other's humanity.
Guest Post by: David Tonaszuck A reflection on the Gospel of Matthew 13:24-30 Dear Friends in Christ, There was once a boy, not much older than fourteen, who wandered the dusty back roads near a small farming town at the turn of the century. He was an orphan, left to fend for himself in a … Continue reading Rest for the Weary: Trusting Jesus to Lighten Our Burdens The post From Weeds to Wheat: The Transforming Mercy of God first appeared on The Simple Catholic. The post From Weeds to Wheat: The…
For ages, psychological addictions have led to both mental illness and social maladies. Gambling, binge eating/food addiction, compulsive body modification and tattoos, risk/thrillseeking, pornography, and chemical dependencies... the list goes on and on.To varying degrees we can – and should – take collective social responsibility to limit the harm these addictions cause to individuals, those around them, and society large.Much ballyhoo has been made about the social and personal ills of…
Spotted in the San Francisco neighborhood Glen Park (or maybe Sunnyside?) during a walk on Saturday, July 18, 2026. More of this sort of public art / gesture / physical graffiti / intervention, please.
A lot of our current mess can be understood through the long transition from #modernism to #postmodernism. Not as an academic debate, but as a lived reality. Modernity believed in progress. It believed that society could be understood, improved, and consciously shaped. Science, democracy, planning, industry, public institutions, trade unions, education, and infrastructure were all part of this story. The future was something people could build together. Of course, this vision was never as…
(2026/07/20 19:54) You can't measure something's quality by its commercial success, people know shit about fuck, the only thing you can measure is its mediocrity, because that's what "people" represent.
Now that the World Cup is over, we can finally get back into the swing of things at fOOfARAW HQ. While we won't be getting much in terms of new movies this week as everyone cowers from the Goliath of The Odyssey, there are a ton of fun shows, comics, and albums to talk about. 📺 King of the Hill Season 15 — HuluKing of the Hills season 14 was one of, if not my favorite returning show of 2025, so I'm really looking forward to season 15. We actually went back and started from season 1 earlier this…
This is an article I resisted writing for a long time. I didn’t pull the trigger in the mid-2010s, in the glory days of the SF Bay Area rationalist movement. I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real hard in the wake of the early 2025 scandal involving the Zizians, an alleged sex / murder cult that originated from the same community.Part of the reason why I hesitated for so long is that the rationalist movement has…
Originally published on Board Game Geek. Skyway claims to be a city builder in the vein of Sprawlopolis, to which I thought “Impossible! Sprawlopolis uses custom cards that have a grid of four blocks and variable scoring criteria. How can that be done with standard cards?” Ok, I didn’t think that verbatim, but I was skeptical. And I was wrong. City-building games go back to at least SimCity map building concept. Drop in new zones, watch people move in, build them something cool like a stadium,…
I read that the first proper analysis of the Constantinople synaxarion – list of saints, quick details, and their saints’ day – is that in the Acta Sanctorum by H. Delahaye: Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanum e codice Sirmondiano nunc Berolinensi. This is online here. He’s printing a Berlin manuscript, but giving material from other manuscripts. Here’s the entry he gives for May 19th, column 695, line 35, with a ChatGPT output for it: 2. Τῇ αὐτῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἄθλησις τοῦ ἁγίου μάρτυρος…
I recently skimmed through Andros Fenollosa’s post, I joined the IndieWeb, here’s what I learned. Every time I read about the IndieWeb, I’m left with roughly similar thoughts: I don’t want it. I honestly don’t get what’s desirable about it beyond what you get with a blog, RSS, and e-mail. I assume I’m the wrong target audience for it, as I detest social media. In my book, the slower pace and more effortful communication of blogging + e-mail are features, not problems. Bad roads as filters I…
This went viral today, “AI’s solution to 87-year-old riddle takes mathematicians by surprise.” Levent Alpöge at Harvard University wrote on X on 19 July that the Jacobian conjecture – which academics have spent decades trying to prove was true – is actually false, giving a tiny, 216-character counterexample as proof. I will admit I wish I had thought of this (not the conjecture), but just running it into a prompt. This is the math-equivalent of winning the lottery, where the price is worldwide…
“What is medicine for?” is a hard question that is not as widely discussed as it should be. Medicine has a way of thinking that is very much bound up with the concept of disease, even though the idea of disease is a comparatively recently invention. Plus medicine behaves as if diseases are like animals species rather than complicated and changeable constructs. In practice medicine is about treating sick people, using knowledge of disease when it can. Medicine is also about fending off death.…
When you name yourself, I Am, your own I Am arises from the same divine source who spoke to Moses, saying, this is my name forever, I Am that I Am. Your own I Am breathes from the same heart as Christ, who says, I Am the light of the world. I Am the Creator, I Am the Child of God, and I Am your own Spirit, your own breath, one three-part harmony singing I Am, irradiating heaven and earth
[Only time will tell.] Potential good news, everyone! It appears possible that when the sun exhausts its hydrogen fuel and expands into a red giant in about 5 billion years, Earth might not be swallowed up. Using updated models of how aging stars interact with their planets, researchers found that the gravitational forces drawing Earth toward the expanding sun are weaker than older models predicted. That would give the planet more time to drift outward as the dying sun sheds its outer layers…
“We recently received a double-digit number of submissions from authors in the Far East… where we had strong evidence of machine generated content. Nothing made much sense in these papers, the authors, with their yahoo and aol type email addresses, frequently supplied false university affiliations, among other glaring problems. I suspected that these submissions were a test of our detection systems more so than anything else.” That is Udo Schuklenk, professor of philosophy at Queen’s…
Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventeenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts. In the “old days” when I was growing up (the 1960s) we started to hear the term “disposable society”. In part this was due to an inevitable failing of capitalism: the preference to produce cheap, shoddy products…
Kari Lake: former TV news anchor and United States Ambassador to Jamaica Lake Kari: a freshwater lake in Armenia The post Don’t want to get those two confused appeared first on Cultrface.
Sponsored: This article is made possible by the Avila Catholic App, supporting quality and engaging Catholic content. We live in a culture that offers no shortage of relationship advice. Scroll through social media for a few minutes (some days just mere seconds) and you’ll find countless opinions about red flags, compatibility, chemistry, and finding “the … Continue reading What Saint Teresa of Avila Can Teach Us About Discernment in Relationships The post What Saint Teresa of Avila Can Teach…
You don't have friends in your office. That's a bitter pill to swallow. You cannot be friends with someone you're competing against. There's no such thing as healthy competition. Wherever competition exists, one-upmanship follows. You have to withhold information from them. You have to resist the urge to overshare. You cannot, therefore, be completely honest with them. And without honesty, there can never be genuine friendship. Corporations condition you to believe this is your best career…
This week we were lucky to be joined by Carly Adams, who recently graduated from college and spoke on the view of AI from those in their early 20’s: Apple Spotify YouTube
We were all afraid of Mr. Turner. He was the principal at Meadowfield Elementary in Columbia, SC, and, it was rumored, he had a wooden paddle in his office with "holes drilled in it" so he could swing it faster. Even as an eight-year-old, I thought the physics of that sounded off, but I sure didn't want to test it. The most sure-fire way for a teacher to shut down disruptive behavior was to threaten to send the offender to the principal's office."Cultures of domination," writes bell hooks,…
This post is dedicated to the lovely Semiurge. Tattooing in the Barony is not commonly practiced - the art is associated with the nomads from the south, and visible tattoos will mark you as a foreigner. There are a couple of notable exceptions to this; the most common and visible are the mercenary fighter cults. These groups are semi-secret societies within mercenary companies - in the south of the Barony, near to the border, many of them practice something that they call 'enlightened…
