Short Circuit Jack had it all figured out https://archive.org/details/1921Prattonia/page/61/mode/1up

University of Alberta Library Digital Scholarship Graduate Student Fellowship Program - Call for Applications https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kjqfCgfEEY7_WEcOH6xD7eV8fByXBYHMWQxxWc0Zo0I/edit This will be our third year offering these fellowships - digital scholarship is so broad that it […]

As terrible as all the pollution from reentries is, I have to say that it's REALLY FREAKING COOL that I now know all the right people to ask to find out what exactly reentered when a journalist sends me a reddit video from a random Canadian city. I don't know the answer yet, but I know who to […]

One more: Robert C. Binkley on scholarly communication, 1938: "There are indeed some property tenures vested at different points along these channels of communication. They are like the tolls along the river, some of them necessary to keep the channel open, some of them functionally piratical." […]

It's maple syrup, right? It's gotta be maple syrup Canada 'has what the world wants', Prime Minister Carney says https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/video-canada-has-what-the-world-wants-prime-minister-carney-says/

How American library collection policy looked in 1939: "As Europe falls, state by state, under the control of regimes that deny free inquiry to scholars, America becomes more and more the last place in which free scholarship can live. Hence the importance of avoiding wasteful duplication in […]

'morning

"The fascist cultures, however rugged they may be in some aspects, are delicate in respect to their historical digestions. Only the most carefully prepared history, put together according to prescription, will nourish them." - Robert C. Binkley, "History for a Democracy" (1937)

I've finally wrapped up a post about my grandfather's work in the 1930s on typescript books (lithographed from a typed master, allowing academic publishing to bypass some commercial services and reduce costs, at the expense of less slickness and more homework), tracing parallels with open […]

Thing I still wonder about: why did the medieval western canon law faculties produce tons of mnemonic verse, and the civil law faculties hardly any? #medieval

boy, git stashes can hang around for a long time

This is great: I had read about these Swedish #medievalmanuscripts that were cut up and used to wrap accounts in the 16th century, but hadn't seen one. Here's Matthias of Linköping (confessor to St. Birgitta), Alphabetum disctinctionum: https://www.manuscripta.se/ms/101701 - some pages with […]

Wonderful, wonderful video of the building of a wooden mechanical calculator, with reflections on the process and the history https://youtu.be/E0pJST5mL3A

Margaret Atwood claps back to having The Handmaid’s Tale banned from Alberta schools by the UCP. It’s so good. #ableg #abpoli #abed

"I thought of us in the worded world." #SundaySentence is from Gliff by Ali Smith https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/38351476-3985-4969-b3a1-6a6914f1190d

By this time next year there'll be a remake of Attorney Woo where Woo is AI

"Please do not use Google AI to find out our specials. Please go on our Facebook page or our website," the restaurant wrote in a weary Facebook post. "Google AI is not accurate and is telling people specials that do not exist which is causing angry customers yelling at our employees." […]

Absolutely splendid - a few typos, but given the source, it's great ... until the hallucinated ending: "I belief at least two weeks should be allowed" becomes "it will be best to wait until the report is finished." Plausibility: the bane of AI output. [/end]

Rather amazing OCR from olmocr - source: https://storage.googleapis.com/mnhs-finding-aids-public/library/findaids/00794/pdfa/00794-00189.pdf?page=104 (image 104 in that pdf) - dark scan of handwritten page. output: Nov., 1931 Joint Comm. Survey Activities The report as it now stands, Nov. 17 […]

"The trains in San Francisco's Muni Metro light railway, for example, won't start up in the morning until someone sticks a floppy disk into the computer that loads DOS software on the railway's Automatic Train Control System (ATCS)." […]

Canada finds itself in uncharted territory

A page of Miroslav Bartak, my newly-discovered favorite cartoonist about whom I know nothing except he's Czech born 1938 https://www.irancartoon.com/site/gallery/gallery-of-cartoons-by-miroslav-bartak-from-czech-republic

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security today released a new ICE recruiting poster, under the stilted and sexist tagline "which way, American man?" Why did they use that word language? Because it's a dog whistle, something ordinary humans won't notice but that those […] [Original post on c.im]

We have just watched Oedipus at Colonus and we don't need any more emotions today thanks

Tomorrow's prairie thunderstorm prairie threat is a giant bunny rabbit. Bewaaaaare!

Happy Alphabetical Order in the European Middle Ages Day! A day to celebrate the development of the use of alphabetical order in manuscript information systems in the later middle ages. https://pbinkley.github.io/alphabetical-order/

In Japan, August is ghost season so I plan to share lots of ghostly Japanese art. This print by Katsushika Hokusai (1831) is titled 'The Ghost of Kohada Koheiji' and is from the series 'One Hundred Ghost Stories.' #JapaneseArt #ukiyoe #ghosts

Any Woldemar Neufeld fans out there? (Canadian Mennonite mid-20th century artist) - he studied in Cleveland in the 1930s, and among my grandparents' papers are some postcards from a series of his prints, which I really like. That includes this one, otherwise I'd buy it […]

A little essay to unpack a 91-year-old marital tiff in my family, in which I argue that the husband was right but, more importantly, wrong, with help from Coleridge and the Tao. https://www.wallandbinkley.com/fhblog/2025/07_30_coleridge-at-the-binkley-ranch.html

I had the opportunity to use the word "traduced" today but I didn't take it. Alas! When will it come again?

I'm trying to help my cousin with some GIS data from a California county government site, but when I try to visit the url she sent I get blocked by Cloudflare's security. I didn't do nothing! Same result whether I use our home ISP or my phone's telcom (I'll try from a university network […]

I'm sorting out some syncing problems in Zotero, which got me looking at the 8-character folder names it uses in its storage. It allows letters and digits, so it's got a 36-character alphabet, or 36^8 possible ids. (I didn't check whether it avoids O and 0 or anything though). Wondering what […]

“Minimum Wage Machine” “The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. For as long as they turn the crank, the user is paid in pennies as time passes. For example, if minimum wage is $7.25/hour (the current US Federal rate), then the worker is […] [Original post on sfba.social]

I've seen a #iiif example that takes a scroll that has been scanned in sections (like this https://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/manifest/f7906de8-1c83-44f8-8e01-a6501f90fcf1.json ), rotates the "page" images, and lets you pan left and right along the length of the scroll, as if you had it […]

"Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump #cdc Website, Are Hosting It in Europe." https://www.404media.co/archivists-recreate-pre-trump-cdc-website-are-hosting-it-in-europe/ "A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was […]

And it still failed. “Amsterdam followed every piece of advice in the Responsible AI playbook. It debiased its system when early tests showed ethnic bias and brought on academics and consultants to shape its approach, ultimately choosing an explainable algorithm over more opaque alternatives […]

My mom had a cat she called The Pedant because of his deliberate way of doing things, as if he were always saying to himself "this is how cats do it". AI slop makes me think of him sometimes (the difference being that he was a living breathing cat with an endearing way of encountering the world […]

OK, Ollama and Magistral and I are getting along better. I've made a model file with PARAMETER num_ctx 16384 PARAMETER num_predict 16384 to give it more memory for input and output, and I've put a lot of background knowledge for the task in the system prompt. And I've remembered to invoke the […]

Things LLMs and I have trouble with: 1) I say "write this thing", they hear "give me a structured approach to help me draft this thing". 2) I say "read this data and tell me about it", they hear "hallucinate a bunch more data more or less like this".

There was an LLM Who was an LL gem And did things you'd think were impossible When it was right it was very very right And when it was wrong it was plausible

A good example of the kind of AI project I like: the AI is used in a one-time process to populate a traditional reference tool or data set https://www.archipanion.com/en/blog/ai-cataloguing-registry-finding-aid-palatinate/

I really want to read Zelenskyy's memoirs some day

Had a tech bro email me to tell me that my writing is so terrible, that he can’t even use it to train his AI without significant cleanup, and I really do have to wonder, do these idiots really think that is an insult? #ai #aihype

So, olmocr is producing json with '00' instead of '0', like '{"number":00}', and python won't parse it. I feel like we could all respect each other's time a little better than that.

The microfiche scanner at @internetarchive is doing "Canadian International Trade Tribunal / Report on Plans and Priorities" - timely! https://www.youtube.com/live/aPg2V5RVh7U

There's steady distant thunder out there, and the Environment Canada online map with its new lightning layer shows a really active storm, but it's between Edson and Whitecourt, 200km away - can that be what we hear? https://weather.gc.ca/?layers=,radar,lightning&zoom=8¢er=53.57571371,-113.35335797

The view from Sweden, via Canada https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-democracy-report-1.7486317

CTV News: Alberta survey shows most not in favour of provincial library book standards https://www.ctvnews.ca/edmonton/article/survey-shows-most-albertans-dont-want-province-setting-standards-for-school-library-books-province-going-ahead/

I've been trying to get olmocr working on my MacBook, since the OCR results from the online demo are great. Jonathan Soma's post https://jonathansoma.com/words/olmocr-on-macos-with-lm-studio.html was recommended by Simon Willison but I couldn't make it work. This code from kmarxican does the […]