@cdarwin@c.im2025-07-10 17:58:09
Ever-escalating Russian drone attacks and the concern that Ukraine will be split up under a future peace plan
have cast a shadow over a meeting of European leaders to plan for the eventual reconstruction of the country.
The conference is the fourth in this format and is being attended by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Poland’s Donald Tusk.
It comes at a time of unprecedented pressure on the Ukrainian economy as Vladimir Putin wide…
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-09-07 16:14:59
"""
Customarily, the honour of having liberated hysteria from the ancient myths about a displacement of the uterus goes to Le Pois and Willis. Jean Liebaud, translating or rather adapting Marinello’s work for the seventeenth century, still accepted (with a small number of caveats) the idea of a spontaneous movement of the womb. If it moved, it was “to be more at ease; not that this came about through prudence, nor was it a conscious decision or an animal stimulus, but by a natural instinct, to safeguard health and to have the pleasure of something delectable.” The idea that it could change its place and move around the body, bringing convulsions and spasms everywhere it travelled, had been abandoned, for it was now taken to be ‘tightly held in place’ by the cervix, ligaments, vessels and the sheath of the peritoneum; yet in some senses it could change its location. “The womb therefore, even though it is tightly fixed to the parts that we have described and cannot easily change its place, still manages to roam, making strange, petulant movements around the woman’s body. These diverse movements include ascensions and descents, convulsions, wanderings and prolapses. It can wander up to the liver, spleen, diaphragm, stomach, chest, heart, lung, throat and head.” Physicians of the classical age are more or less unanimous in refusing this explanation.
[…] Yet these analyses were not sufficient to break the theme of an essential link between hysteria and the womb. But the link is now conceived in different terms. It is no longer considered to be the trajectory of a real displacement through the body, but rather a sort of mute propagation through the paths of the organism and its functional proximities. It cannot be said that the seat of the malady has become the brain, nor that thanks to Willis a psychological explanation of hysteria was now possible. But the brain does take on the role of a relay that distributes a malady whose origins are visceral, and the womb brings it on just as the other viscera do. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, and Pinel, the uterus and the womb are still present in the pathology of hysteria, but thanks to a privileged diffusion by the humours and nerves, not because of any particular prestige of their nature.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
@seav@en.osm.town2025-09-07 09:28:31
Weather forecast for tonight’s total lunar eclipse: cloudy with a chance of rain 🌕🌧️
#LunarEclipse #TotalLunarEclipse #astronomy
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.org2025-09-01 11:32:02
Today is house meeting day for us at DMI as we find out where the state's budget cuts will land and who will be affected (i.e. made redundant).
Coincidentally, one of our #Ukraine #AntarcticScience centre colleagues has just sent us a draft deliverable report to review.
They apologise for lack of polish (it's actually really good! And very interesting science looking at climate change impacts in Antarctica) and they appended this photo of their apartment block after a visit by a Russian drone last week.
And suddenly, Danish state budget cuts seem much less worse...
And now I am going to find someone to swear at.
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-09-05 13:15:19
"""
In melancholy, the spirits are carried away by an agitation, but a weak agitation that lacks power or violence, a sort of impotent upset that follows neither a particular path nor the aperta opercula [open ways], but traverses the cerebral matter constantly creating new pores. Yet the spirits do not wander far on the new paths they create, and their agitation dies down rapidly, as their strength is quickly spent and motion comes to a halt: ‘non longe perveniunt’ [they do not reach far]. A trouble of this nature, common to all delirium, does not have the power to produce on the surface of the body the violent movements or the cries to be observed in mania and frenzy. Melancholy never attains frenzy; it is a madness always at the limits of its own impotence. That paradox is explained by the secret alterations in the spirits. Ordinarily, they travel with the speed and instantaneous transparency of rays of light, but in melancholy they become weighed down with night, becoming ‘obscure, thick and dark’, and the images of things that they bring before consciousness are ‘in a shadow, or covered with darkness’. As a result they move more slowly, and are more like a dark, chemical vapour than pure light. This chemical vapour is acid in nature, rather than sulphurous or alcoholic, for in acid vapours the particles are mobile and incapable of repose, but their activity is weak and without consequence. When they are distilled, all that remains in the still is a kind of insipid phlegm. Acid vapours, therefore, are taken to have the same properties as melancholy, whereas alcoholic vapours, which are always ready to burst into flames, are more related to frenzy, and sulphurous vapours bring on mania, as they are agitated by continuous, violent movement. If the ‘formal reason and causes’ of melancholy were to be sought, it made sense to look for them in the vapours that rose up from the blood to the head, and which had degenerated into ‘an acetous or sharp distillation’. A cursory glance seems to indicate that a melancholy of spirits and a whole chemistry of humours lies behind Willis’ analyses, but in fact his guiding principle mostly reflects the immediate qualities of the melancholic illness: an impotent disorder, and the shadow that comes over the spirit with an acrid acidity that slowly corrodes the heart and the mind. The chemistry of acids is not an explanation of the symptoms, but a qualitative option: a whole phenomenology of melancholic experience.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-06-27 09:50:48
European Commission says Meta has proposed limited changes to its pay-or-consent ad model, and Meta faces daily fines if it determines they are not sufficient (Reuters)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t
@markhburton@mstdn.social2025-08-29 19:25:05
'Netanyahu says recognition of a Palestinian state would amount to rewarding "Hamas's monstrous terrorism".'
I say recognising the Apartheid State of Israel amounts to rewarding its genocide.
And no that doesn't mean expelling Jewish people who, themselves or their forebears, wrongly settled in historic Palestine. Any more than the end of the South African Apartheid State meant expelling whites.
US to stop Palestinians attending UN meeting in New Y…
@arXiv_astrophGA_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-27 09:37:33
Physical properties of gas departing from circular rotation at 50 pc scales using the PHANGS-MUSE galaxies
Carlos L\'opez-Cob\'a, Lihwai Lin, Irene Cruz Gonz\'alez, Sebasti\'an F. S\'anchez, Hsi-An Pan, J. K. Barrera-Ballesteros, Bau-Ching Hsieh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18517 …
@berlinbuzzwords@floss.social2025-07-24 07:40:03
Last Chance! ⏳ The Haystack EU 2025 Call for Papers closes tonight at midnight CEST!
Don't miss this final opportunity to share your search and AI expertise with a global audience in Berlin this September.
Submit now: https://opensourceconnections.com/haystack-eu-2025-cfp/…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-08-16 04:50:09
Trump emerged today from his summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin without a deal and without much to say.
Trump rarely misses a chance to take advantage of a global stage.
But when he stood next to Putin at the conclusion of their three-hour meeting,
Trump offered few details about what the men had discussed.
Stunningly, for a president who loves a press conference,
he took no questions from the reporters assembled at a military base in Alaska.
In his br…
