@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)
@davidaugust@mastodon.online2025-10-02 16:16:34
"My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don't get it, I can't do it."
—Morgan Freeman
#acting #coaching #inspiration
@rasterweb@mastodon.social2025-10-04 19:45:15
I don't know if REACH GREEN is really going to plant 10,000 trees but I'm going to ride my bike anyway this month so I'll just log my miles...
https://www.reachgreen.org/
@arXiv_mathDG_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-10-01 09:48:18
Concavity of spacetimes
Tobias Beran, Darius Er\"os, Shin-ichi Ohta, Felix Rott
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26196 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.26196
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social2025-08-17 14:21:10
Read all about Chatcontrol and why we should resist it. This sentence is extremely scary.... "Specifically, this AI will have to be built by WhatsApp/Meta so they can monitor us on behalf of the EU" 😱
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/chatcontrol-in-brief/
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-08-16 08:12:07
Yeah, I knew some lovely people who worked at Twitter too. And did you know they once had unfettered API access and anyone could create their own client? Some of us loved that so much we built things that helped legitimise them as an open platform. And then one day they just switched that off.
Legitimacy is gold to venture-capital-funded startups. They need people with it to convince everyday folks that this latest iteration of the same old rug pull is different. Until they’ve grown s…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-09-25 09:51:34
In any case, day 2: Ursula K Le Guin.
As I've said elsewhere, part of her science fiction thesis is that "human" can encompass much more than what we mere Terrans think of it as, and that moral standing extends broadly throughout the universe. This is the antithesis of Tokens fantasy, wherein "race" is real and determines moral standing. For Le Guin, it's barely okay to intervene in complex alien politics unless you carefully ensure you're not causing systemic harms; for Tolkien, it's okay to ambush and murder orc children, because they are by nature evil.
Add to her excellent politics Le Guin's masterful worldbuilding and unparalleled range of plots, and you have the one author I loved as a decidedly liberal and naïve teen and love even more now that I'm an adult. She's an absolute legend and deserves a very high place on any list of women authors (or list of authors, period.).
For a short story, try "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" which you can read here: https://www.utilitarianism.com/nu/omelas.pdf
For fantasy "A Wizard of Earthsea" (also has a nice graphic novel adaptation), or for science fiction, "The Left Hand of Darkness" or if you want a more anarchist flavor, "The Dispossessed."
I'll close this with an amazing quote from her:
"""
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
"""
@geant@mstdn.social2025-10-16 12:06:46
The first step on the road to #TNC26 starts today… with the opening of the Call for Proposals!
Next year, our community will gather in Helsinki 🇫🇮 under the theme Digital Sisu—inspired by the Finnish word “sisu,” which embodies inner strength, tenacity, and determination in the face of adversity.
💡 If you have a story to share, or a vision that can shape the conversation—we want to hear f…
@arXiv_csET_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-20 08:01:00
Quantum-Inspired Artificial Bee Colony for Latency-Aware Task Offloading in IoV
Mamta Kumari, Mayukh Sarkar, Rohit Kumar Nonia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13637 https://
@x_tof@verkehrswende.social2025-08-17 16:10:14