@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)
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-04 20:14:31
Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizza2025-06-07 15:53:54
Anarchism and Linux share key similarities in decentralization. Anarchism puts power back into the hands of the people through democratic, decentralized communities and bottom-up unions that organize collectively without hierarchy. Similarly, Linux operates as a decentralized system where no single entity controls the whole; instead, development and decision-making happen through collaborative, distributed contributions from a global community.
They also align in the principle of mutua…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-08-07 19:10:57
Mzia Amaghlobeli, a prominent independent journalist in the country of Georgia, was sentenced to two years in prison for slapping a police officer at a protest (Francesca Ebel/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08…
@arXiv_csCR_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-07 09:47:04
4-Swap: Achieving Grief-Free and Bribery-Safe Atomic Swaps Using Four Transactions
Kirti Singh (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, Hyderabad, India), Vinay J. Ribeiro (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India), Susmita Mandal (Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, Hyderabad, India)
@arXiv_csCV_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-05 10:27:51
Plot'n Polish: Zero-shot Story Visualization and Disentangled Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Kiymet Akdemir, Jing Shi, Kushal Kafle, Brian Price, Pinar Yanardag
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04446
@cdarwin@c.im2025-07-03 18:26:50
The first group of immigrants has arrived at a new concentration camp deep in the Florida Everglades that officials have cynically dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz”
The facility, at an abandoned airport, will have an initial capacity of about 3,000 detainees, DeSantis said.
The center was built in eight days and features more than 200 security cameras,
28,000-plus feet of barbed wire and 400 security personnel
@arXiv_csCL_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-07 10:23:04
StyliTruth : Unlocking Stylized yet Truthful LLM Generation via Disentangled Steering
Chenglei Shen, Zhongxiang Sun, Teng Shi, Xiao Zhang, Jun Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04530
@arXiv_qfinST_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-07 08:41:44
Universal Patterns in the Blockchain: Analysis of EOAs and Smart Contracts in ERC20 Token Networks
Kundan Mukhia, SR Luwang, Md. Nurujjaman, Tanujit Chakraborty, Suman Saha, Chittaranjan Hens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04671
@arXiv_csNI_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-05 08:38:00
Improving performance of content-centric networks via decentralized coded caching for multi-level popularity and access
Azadeh Sadat Miraftab, Ahmadreza Montazerolghaem, Behrad Mahboobi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01298
