Finally, progress on the mess that is college teaching evaluation! A new framework based on a study on changes at UMass, KU, and CU: teval.net

Following up on yesterday's post about the #Roman shipwreck cargo discovered in Lake Neuchâtel: what a stunning photo of the pottery vessels on the lake bottom! 🤩 📷 octopusfoundation.org/en/project/e...

Settling in for some light reading

Dr Émilie Pagé-Perron @epp.cdli.network is leading the new "Towards Universal Access to Cuneiform Heritage" project! It aims to transform access to cuneiform heritage through innovative digital tools and multilingual outreach, hosted at @ads-update.bsky.social www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/...

Apparently Google has only partially updated its satellite photos of Gaza, so there are currently these weird images where whatever algorithm they use is utterly failing to blend before and after shots

Coming soon to the American Numismatic Society database: provenance records for object lots, with distribution maps of the lot contents and a list of associated objects. It is possible to drill down into entities (eg Edward T. Newell) to gain a big picture view of their collecting/donating history.

Today is publication day for ‘Fairies: A History’ - so I’ve written a special free post over on ‘All Old Strange Things’ to celebrate 📚🧚 open.substack.com/pub/drfranci...

(Helium production is a fairly good example of how geological resources are only looked for/evaluated/tapped after demand is sufficient. We're currently getting closer to demand being sufficient to actually have people focus on helium exploration, but aren't there quite yet.)

It's worth noting that all current helium production is just the gas that's been trapped by the same geologic structural traps that keep hydrocarbons from reaching the surface. There's been some effort at identifying non-hydrocarbon related structural traps that might have significant amounts of He

Absolutely fascinated to see this caveat on the description of the Steam Medieval Sale—as if more justification for our course on history-themed video games was needed! 😉

If you see a news story that winds you up, consider screenshotting it (and post with alt text) and if you have to link to it, use archive.is or similar so you don't feed the rage machine Thank youuuuuuuuu

Arts and letters.

E per un istante ritorna la voglia di vivere a un'altra velocità

We don't have to know to know the inner-workings of Marc Andreessen's mind, because the system that created him is bigger than him and will endure when he's gone. We don't have to understand him, we have to understand what created him. THAT is what we have to destroy. THAT is what we can destroy.

Some people find sharing and tracking individual goals with friends motivating. I built Dogthr.com to do just that. Create a group with friends, set weekly goals and track progress. A goal is anything you can count... words, pomodoros, kilometers run, minutes meditated, the sky's the limit...

Just got proofs for one of the project publications, coming soon in an open access volume from Reichert Verlag (Proceedings of the XVII. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft)

Italian call of Italy recording the final out sending them to the semifinals

I analyzed the Proud Boys donor list. The most common occupation was real estate (realtor, mortgage broker) — the same parasitic class that was over-represented among Jan 6th rioters.

Man, one of the most depressing aspects of modern scholarship is finding a great article and then looking up the scholar to see what else they’ve done and just catching a glimpse of an abbreviated career hopping between visiting positions and publishing great pieces before disappearing from academia

Boredom and the invention of the alphabet, a modest proposal: boredom and the desire for novelty are powerful factors in modern media, but they equally animate not only the history of ancient media but the way modern scholars have told its story. For example what the hell is going on here? ↓

a common misconception; "grass" is actually a back-formation from "grasshopper"

Sicily was an important source of sulfur in the Roman period, and again modernly (perhaps 80% of the world's production at the end of the 19th c.); the deposits were produced during the so-called Messinian Salinity Crisis when the Mediterranean all but dried up about 5.5 million years ago 1/

Two key features of geoscientists’ temporal thinking stand out: "They take a long view of time, and they expect low-frequency, high-impact events. Geoscientists have internalized the vastness of the age of the Earth and the relative brevity of human history." eos.org/features/how...

mutatis mutandis, this is why I create nearly all of my maps with a topographic relief base layer

Back in September, OpenAI released a paper showing that ChatGPT will always make things up. Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. It's how the system fundamentally works. Which means there is no "fix."

For #FindsFriday this gorgeous depiction of the Deskford carnyx by Keith Henderson in Piggott’s Scotland Before History, 1958. Found c.1816 Near Deskford, just south of the Moray coast, it dates to the later 1stC AD, deposited in a bog c.2/3rdC. Now in the National Museum of Scotland. #CarnyxCrazy

rare two-for-joy spotted out the window

Il Cristo greco si è fermato a Empoli

I guess I didn’t wake up thinking I needed to know the names of the 279 named triremes ⛵️in the 4th century BCE Athenian navy, but it appears we all do. link.springer.com/article/10.1... I do like that 3.58% had animal names like Λεοντῆ (lion skin) and Λέαινα (lioness). Greek epigraphy is fun! 🪦

the archaeology of the city of Rome is a nest of vipers. Trying not to let it make me bitter

As ever this is the moderate position.

Giovanna Garzoni, Old Man from Artimino, 1648-51, Watercolor on parchment, 386 x 600 mm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence

Pretty easy to understand that the love of AI is rooted in it’s ability to obscure the agency of those making decisions and whitewash horrific abuses by giving each choice the veneer of cold, machinelike rationality.

learning, via worldcat, that Pisa is exactly equidistant from Rome and Turin

pretty confident that if our own government bombed, say, Philadelphia, we'd just kind forget about it after a couple more Rocky movies

This reminds me of that Frankie Boyle joke about how Americans not only come to your country and kill your people, they also come back twenty years later to make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.

finally rested enough to be tired

In a 1968 submission to UNESCO the UK rep said ‘nah we don’t need heritage regulation because the aristos own the heritage and it’s fine’. Hewison’s 1987 ‘Heritage Industry’ noted nothing had changed in 20 yrs except increasing imperial nostalgia. And now …

We should not have to buy our heritage back from treasure hunters. And our museums should not be in stark, market-driven financial competition with auction houses for our shared past. 🏺

high-fiving past me, who in fact *did* take a photo, back in 2017, of that thing I now need a photo of

The subheadline on this NYT piece is going to turn me into the Joker. Like... this... is exactly what trans people have been saying was going to happen for years.

the purpose of a system is what it does

Admittedly, it is not the most beautiful of vessels. However, by depicting a funerary procession and rituals, the Catarinella Askos is one of the most fascinating painted pots from ancient southern Italy. It was quite fun to write about it. doi.org/10.1017/S104... #Archaeology 🏺

nowhere is safe

write a single paragraph without using "anche se" - challenge level: impossible