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earthobservatory_iod_feed
Over millions of years, water has sculpted limestone in northern Vietnam into an extraordinary karst landscape full of towers, cones, caves, and subterranean waterways.
slacktivist_feedlanguagehat_feedMy grandson James, who has the family trait of insatiable curiosity and knows where to turn for inquiries about linguistic matters, asked me why poaching an egg is called “poaching.” The answer is interesting enough I thought I’d share it here. The OED (entry revised 2006) defines it as “To cook (an egg) without the shell in simmering, or over boiling, water; to simmer or steam (an egg) in a poacher” (first citation c1450 “Pocched egges,” earlier than I would have guessed); the etymology:
< Middle French pocher to cook (an egg) without the shell in simmering, or over boiling, water (1393; earlier in Old French as past participial adjective pochié: see poached adj.¹) < poche (see poke n.¹).
Notes
French pocher, in sense 1a, is usually explained as referring to the enclosure of the yolk in the white as in a bag.
The “put yolks in the pockets formed by the whites” derivation is plausible and satisfying, and if you know French (poche ‘pocket’) is easy to remember. And poke ‘bag’ (from Anglo-Norman poke, northern Old French poque, pouque) is a nice doublet. As for the other poach (‘to steal game’), well, it’s complicated; OED (entry revised 2006) says:
Origin uncertain. It is also uncertain whether the material below shows the development of a single word or of two or more, and whether (if a single origin is assumed) the original meaning should be taken to be ‘to shove’, ‘to poke’, ‘to thrust’, ‘to trample’, or ‘to thrust into a bag’. Branch I [‘shove, poke, thrust’] perhaps shows a variant (with palatalized consonant) of poke v.¹, but if so sense I.1b [‘thrust at or poke out (the eyes)’] must be of independent origin, < Middle French, French pocher to poke out (an eye) (1223 in Old French; specific use of pocher poach v.¹, perhaps arising originally from an analogy between the empty eye socket and a bag or pocket); with the early uses at sense I.1a, and perhaps also with branch III [‘take game, etc., unlawfully’], perhaps compare also French pocher poach v.¹ in the sense ‘to put in a bag’, although this sense (although apparently a primary one) is not recorded in French until later (1660, unless implied slightly earlier by the idiom recorded by Cotgrave in quot. 1611 at sense III.8a) and is apparently rare at all times. Perhaps alternatively compare poke v.² [‘put in a bag or pocket’], of which the present word could perhaps show a variant (perhaps compare early forms at pouch n.).
I had just assumed that the ‘steal’ sense was straightforwardly from ‘put in your pocket,’ but the history of words is rarely straightforward.
bruce_schneier_feedDemocracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities.
We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform Politics, Government, and Citizenship. In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how AI is undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased AI can harm constituents of democracies and how elected officials with authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power. But we also give positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics for the better.
Here are four such stories unfolding right now around the world, showing how AI is being used by some to make democracy better, stronger, and more responsive to people.
Last year, then 33-year-old engineer Takahiro Anno was a fringe candidate for governor of Tokyo. Running as an independent candidate, he ended up coming in fifth in a crowded field of 56, largely thanks to the unprecedented use of an authorized AI avatar. That avatar answered 8,600 questions from voters on a 17-day continuous YouTube livestream and garnered the attention of campaign innovators worldwide.
Two months ago, Anno-san was elected to Japan’s upper legislative chamber, again leveraging the power of AI to engage constituents—this time answering more than 20,000 questions. His new party, Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more participatory. The party is leveraging its share of Japan’s public funding for political parties to build the Mirai Assembly app, enabling constituents to express opinions on and ask questions about bills in the legislature, and to organize those expressions using AI. The party promises that its members will direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input.
Brazil is notoriously litigious, with even more lawyers per capita than the US. The courts are chronically overwhelmed with cases and the resultant backlog costs the government billions to process. Estimates are that the Brazilian federal government spends about 1.6% of GDP per year operating the courts and another 2.5% to 3% of GDP issuing court-ordered payments from lawsuits the government has lost.
Since at least 2019, the Brazilian government has aggressively adopted AI to automate procedures throughout its judiciary. AI is not making judicial decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research, transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are significant; Brazil’s federal supreme court backlog, for example, dropped in 2025 to its lowest levels in 33 years.
While it seems clear that the courts are realizing efficiency benefits from leveraging AI, there is a postscript to the courts’ AI implementation project over the past five-plus years: the litigators are using these tools, too. Lawyers are using AI assistance to file cases in Brazilian courts at an unprecedented rate, with new cases growing by nearly 40% in volume over the past five years.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing for Brazilian litigators to regain the upper hand in this arms race. It has been argued that litigation, particularly against the government, is a vital form of civic participation, essential to the self-governance function of democracy. Other democracies’ court systems should study and learn from Brazil’s experience and seek to use technology to maximize the bandwidth and liquidity of the courts to process litigation.
Now, we move to Europe and innovations in informing voters. Since 2002, the German Federal Agency for Civic Education has operated a non-partisan voting guide called Wahl-o-Mat. Officials convene an editorial team of 24 young voters (under 26 and selected for diversity) with experts from science and education to develop a slate of 80 questions. The questions are put to all registered German political parties. The responses are narrowed down to 38 key topics and then published online in a quiz format that voters can use to identify the party whose platform they most identify with.
In the past two years, outside groups have been innovating alternatives to the official Wahl-o-Mat guide that leverage AI. First came Wahlweise, a product of the German AI company AIUI. Second, students at the Technical University of Munich deployed an interactive AI system called Wahl.chat. This tool was used by more than 150,000 people within the first four months. In both cases, instead of having to read static webpages about the positions of various political parties, citizens can engage in an interactive conversation with an AI system to more easily get the same information contextualized to their individual interests and questions.
However, German researchers studying the reliability of such AI tools ahead of the 2025 German federal election raised significant concerns about bias and “hallucinations”—AI tools making up false information. Acknowledging the potential of the technology to increase voter informedness and party transparency, the researchers recommended adopting scientific evaluations comparable to those used in the Agency for Civic Education’s official tool to improve and institutionalize the technology.
Finally, the US—in particular, California, home to CalMatters, a non-profit, nonpartisan news organization. Since 2023, its Digital Democracy project has been collecting every public utterance of California elected officials—every floor speech, comment made in committee and social media post, along with their voting records, legislation, and campaign contributions—and making all that information available in a free online platform.
CalMatters this year launched a new feature that takes this kind of civic watchdog function a big step further. Its AI Tip Sheets feature uses AI to search through all of this data, looking for anomalies, such as a change in voting position tied to a large campaign contribution. These anomalies appear on a webpage that journalists can access to give them story ideas and a source of data and analysis to drive further reporting.
This is not AI replacing human journalists; it is a civic watchdog organization using technology to feed evidence-based insights to human reporters. And it’s no coincidence that this innovation arose from a new kind of media institution—a non-profit news agency. As the watchdog function of the fourth estate continues to be degraded by the decline of newspapers’ business models, this kind of technological support is a valuable contribution to help a reduced number of human journalists retain something of the scope of action and impact our democracy relies on them for.
These are just four of many stories from around the globe of AI helping to make democracy stronger. The common thread is that the technology is distributing rather than concentrating power. In all four cases, it is being used to assist people performing their democratic tasks—politics in Japan, litigation in Brazil, voting in Germany and watchdog journalism in California—rather than replacing them.
In none of these cases is the AI doing something that humans can’t perfectly competently do. But in all of these cases, we don’t have enough available humans to do the jobs on their own. A sufficiently trustworthy AI can fill in gaps: amplify the power of civil servants and citizens, improve efficiency, and facilitate engagement between government and the public.
One of the barriers towards realizing this vision more broadly is the AI market itself. The core technologies are largely being created and marketed by US tech giants. We don’t know the details of their development: on what material they were trained, what guardrails are designed to shape their behavior, what biases and values are encoded into their systems. And, even worse, we don’t get a say in the choices associated with those details or how they should change over time. In many cases, it’s an unacceptable risk to use these for-profit, proprietary AI systems in democratic contexts.
To address that, we have long advocated for the development of “public AI”: models and AI systems that are developed under democratic control and deployed for public benefit, not sold by corporations to benefit their shareholders. The movement for this is growing worldwide.
Switzerland has recently released the world’s most powerful and fully realized public AI model. It’s called Apertus, and it was developed jointly by the Swiss government and the university ETH Zurich. The government has made it entirely open source—open data, open code, open weights—and free for anyone to use. No illegally acquired copyrighted works were used in its training. It doesn’t exploit poorly paid human laborers from the global south. Its performance is about where the large corporate giants were a year ago, which is more than good enough for many applications. And it demonstrates that it’s not necessary to spend trillions of dollars creating these models. Apertus takes a huge step forward to realizing the vision of an alternative to big tech—controlled corporate AI.
AI technology is not without its costs and risks, and we are not here to minimize them. But the technology has significant benefits as well.
AI is inherently power-enhancing, and it can magnify what the humans behind it want to do. It can enhance authoritarianism as easily as it can enhance democracy. It’s up to us to steer the technology in that better direction. If more citizen watchdogs and litigators use AI to amplify their power to oversee government and hold it accountable, if more political parties and election administrators use it to engage meaningfully with and inform voters and if more governments provide democratic alternatives to big tech’s AI offerings, society will be better off.
This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.
astronomypicofday_feed
What created this unusual space sculpture?
earthobservatory_iod_feed
Hurricane Melissa left the island nation’s forests brown and battered, but they won’t stay that way for long.
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nancylebovslacktivist_feedlanguagehat_feedWhile not one of my core concerns, typography has long been an interest of mine (LH: 2003, 2010, 2017), and I couldn’t resist Ugonna-Ora Owoh’s Meet the Nigerian graphic designers bringing African expression to typography:
Contrary to what might be known, type design has always had a quiet but steady presence in Nigeria’s visual culture. Long before digital fonts and design software, lettering thrived on the country’s streets: hand-painted shop signs, market boards, danfo buses, and film posters all carried unique typographic expressions that reflected regional dialects and everyday aesthetics. These vernacular letterforms, often created by self-taught sign painters, formed the foundation of a distinctly Nigerian typographic identity, one rooted in improvisation, and storytelling. But they weren’t widely appreciated or respected, so gradually, these vernacular letterforms began to find themselves amidst imported Western forms which slowly blurred their identity.
However, the good news is a growing number of Nigerian designers are returning to the craft, building on both digital innovation and traditional sensibilities. These type designers are experimenting with indigenous scripts to craft fonts inspired by street typography, and they are even redefining what Nigerian type can look like. And the beautiful thing is, this is finding its way into global design conversations.
I really like the examples and I hope the designers continue their work and thrive. (Via MeFi.)
bruce_schneier_feedThe International Association of Cryptologic Research—the academic cryptography association that’s been putting conferences like Crypto (back when “crypto” meant “cryptography”) and Eurocrypt since the 1980s—had to nullify an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key.
For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.
Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.
The group will redo the election, but this time setting a 2-of-3 threshold scheme for decrypting the results, instead of requiring all three
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poetryearthobservatory_iod_feed
Satellites are helping land managers track ecological shifts as reserves reconnect and landscapes return to a more natural state.
slacktivist_feedlanguagehat_feedLH fave Ben Yagoda has posted an expanded version of a piece he published last week in the Forward, and it provides a convincing answer to a frequently asked question. He starts with a joke his mother liked to tell, the one about the kid whose mother calls him “bubele” so constantly that when she asked him what he learned on his first day in school, he says “I learned my name was Irving.” He continues:
Years ago, I reviewed Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, which begins with an epigraph from a William Wordsworth poem, “London 1802”: “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” I opened the review by quoting the line and saying it was “not, as you might expect, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow.”
The humor in both cases, such as it was, rested on “Irving” and “Milton” being stereotypical American Jewish names. The stereotype is accurate. It is easy to think of examples (Irving Berlin, Irving “Swifty” Lazar; Milton Berle, Milton Friedman), and there’s also data to back it up. In a 2016 MIT study, researchers ingeniously culled data from Jewish U.S. soldiers in World War II (median birth date: 1917) and found that Irving was the single most common given name; Milton was 13th. Those scholars, and others, have briefly commented on the popularity of those two names and some others that made the top-thirty list for Jewish G.I.s: Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour.
But the comments have missed an important point about the phenomenon, which I call “My name is Irving” (MNII). It even slipped by the late Harvard sociologist Stanley (emphasis added) Lieberson, who wrote frequently and perceptively about the factors that go into parents’ naming decisions. In his 2000 book A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Lieberson mentioned his own first name, plus Irving and Seymour, and described them as attractive to Jewish parents because they were “names that [were]… popular with fellow Americans.”
That isn’t really true. As the MIT study says, MNII names “stand out as favored by the Jewish immigrants but not by the general population.” According to Social Security Records, Irving was the 106th most popular name for all boys born in 1917, Milton the 75th; Stanley did a bit better at number 34. The others listed above are similarly low in the general count, especially Murray (241) and Seymour (242).
Someone else who has written widely in the field, Warren Blatt, called “Irving, Morris, Sidney, Sheldon, etc. … Anglo-Saxon names that were popular 100 years ago.”
That moves the discussion in the right direction but is misleading, because the word “popular” implies that they were traditional first names. In fact, Irving, Milton, Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour are venerable upper-crust British surnames. Only two of them are even mentioned in The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1947), Sidney and Stanley; the book notes that the latter’s “use as a christian name is apparently a recent development, originally due to the popularity of the explorer Henry Stanley (1841-1904).” […]
The last-name-to-first-name trend—which I’m not aware of having previously been discussed—hit quickly. Among the ten most common boys’ names for native-born members of Yiddish-speaking American households (that is, kids) in the 1910 census, there’s only one of the MNII type (Morris, at number seven). The others, in order, are Samuel, Louis, Harry, Jacob, Abraham, Isadore, Max, Benjamin, and Joseph.
What caused MNII to hit so soon after that? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it was not trivial. As Lieberson and a coauthor once observed, looking at first-name choices offers “a rare opportunity to study tastes in an exceptionally rigorous way.” I imagine the trend originated with some culture-loving Jews, who had been in the new country for a decade or more, who may have read Paradise Lost or seen Sir Henry Irving or one of his many thespian relatives on the stage, and thought such a distinguished name would cast a shimmering reflection on their sons. (And remember that they had a hall pass to use range freely in their choices because of the custom of giving kids a Hebrew or Yiddish names as well). Peers agreed, and soon the trend was viral.
MNII dissipated as quickly as hit, in some ways a victim of its own success. That is, it’s not necessarily attractive to give your kid a stereotypical name. There aren’t handy charts for later Jewish names along the lines of the World War II survey, but Social Security data for the whole country shows the MNII names peaking in popularity in the late teens and early ‘20s, then cratering.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, there were a lot of Normans, Henrys, Daniels, Jerrys, Howards, and Philips; and the popular ‘50s Jewish boys’ listed by Warren Blatt names rings true for my mischpoche: Alan, Andrew, Barry, Bruce, Eric, Jay, Marc, Michael, Peter, Richard, Robert, Roger, Scott, Steven, and Stuart. After that it was, and has been, back to the future, what with the flood of Noahs, Seths, Joshes, Sams, Bens, Isaacs, Abes, Maxes, and Jakes.
Isn’t that interesting? Click through for links and more details (as well as updating footnotes, like one on “why Irving, in particular, might have been so popular”).
And speaking of given names, my wife and I watched Ken Burns’ splendid new PBS series on the American Revolution, and among the very large cast of characters was one Albigence Waldo (1750-1794), a surgeon and diarist who wrote about the winter encampment at Valley Forge. I looked up that striking name and discovered the Joseph Bucklin Society page on Waldo, which explains that his sister Abigail married David Bucklin, who served in the Revolutionary Army:
Waldo’s personal sacrifice and the goodness and effectiveness of his efforts for the soldiers (which included Bucklins at Valley Forge) resulted in David Bucklin naming a son “Albigence”.
In memory of the events of the Revolutionary War, the David Bucklin family line deliberately continued to carry the name of “Albigence” for eight generations (two hundred years!), either as a first name or a middle name of a Bucklin boy.
Aside from them, however, I can find no one with that very odd name; it seems like it must, like the adjective Albigensian, be derived from the French city of Albi, but why? All theories are welcome.
solarbirdGreater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0.7 – 23 November 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.7.
This release contains two major corrections to the 2 Line Bike Connector Map, as well as notice of a December 1-5 closure of the EastRail Trail in Renton near the Seahawks Training Centre.
Here’s the complete changes list:
All permalinks continue to work.
If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.
Enjoy biking!
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
astronomypicofday_feed
Seen to the left of Saturn's banded planetary disk, small icy moons
musesfool
languagehat_feedJoel is still posting excerpts from Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (see this LH post), and in RLS First Tries Writing Fiction I was struck by this tidbit:
The term “short story” seems to have been used for the first time in 1884 by the American critic Brander Matthews, to describe a distinct kind of condensed and focused narrative, as opposed to a tale that merely happens to be short.
Naturally, I wanted to find out more. Sure enough, Wikipedia says:
In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first American professor of dramatic literature, published The Philosophy of the Short-Story. During that same year, Matthews was the first one to name the emerging genre “short story”.
Which is referenced to the Britannica article “Brander Matthews | American writer,” but that doesn’t mention either the book or his alleged invention of the term. So I turned to the OED, whose entry was revised just this year:
A prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting, and (in later use) frequently conceived as a means of exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader; (with the) this as a literary genre. Cf. novella n., novelette n. 1.
The proliferation of literary magazines and periodicals in the first half of the 19th cent. afforded more opportunities for self-contained, relatively short works of fiction to be published. In the Anglophone literary tradition, the artistic possibilities of this form of writing were explored and discussed by a number of writers in the mid 19th cent. (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe), leading to its recognition as a distinct genre by the late 19th cent. Cf. Compounds C.1, Compounds C.2 for a reflection of these developments.1822 The author of these ‘Lights and Shadows’..has published a volume of short stories, chiefly of a rural kind.
Scots Magazine July 59/21843 If I were writing a novel, this would be thought a great fault, but as it is only a short story, perhaps I shall be forgiven.
Ladies’ Cabinet August 1151877 His various books have been eminently readable, in the highest sense of the adjective, and some of his short stories have been almost without a flaw in their glittering beauty.
Independent 17 May 9/21896 The novelist who works on a large scale..is seldom master of the art of the short story.
Publishers’ Circular 25 April 447/31923 Mr H. G. Wells’s definition of the short story as a fiction that can be read in a quarter of an hour.
J. M. Murry, Pencillings 82
[…]
You will notice there’s no mention of Brander Matthews, and I’m guessing his role has been exaggerated. But the question of how to tell a mere “prose work of fiction, typically able to be read in a single sitting” from the putatively more advanced version “exploring a single incident or sequence and evoking a particular emotional response in the reader” is a nice one, and I’m not sure how one could be sure which one the citations from 1822 to 1877 were using. For that matter, I’m not sure whether I myself could tell one from the other. But then I’m not a professor or a literary critic, just a humble blogger.
astronomypicofday_feed
Now outbound after its perihelion or closest approach to the Sun
bruce_schneier_feedI did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called “Squid.”
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
languagehat_feedIt’s taken me over a month — twice as long as it should have — to finish Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник, literally “Letter-Writing Manual” but translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark. It’s the most recent of his four novels, all of which I’ve now read (LH: 1, 2, 3), and much as it pains me to say it, I hope he doesn’t write any more of them. He’s probably come to the same conclusion, since it’s been fifteen years since this came out; the fact is that he’s a good writer but a bad novelist, and he’s surely clever enough to have realized it.
Why, you ask, did I plow through all 376 pages if it wasn’t working for me? Two reasons: in the first place, I figured I might as well have read all his novels so I could talk knowledgeably and fairly about them and him, and in the second, I’d already bailed out of several novels and was starting to feel like a slacker, so I called on my inner Stakhanovite and got the job done. (Also, I was curious about how he’d end it.) The basics are soon told: it’s an epistolary novel alternating between letters by Alexandra (“Sashenka” or “Sasha”) and those by Vladimir (“Volodenka” or “Volodya”), who may or may not be writing to each other. They are love letters (often containing clichéd and increasingly embarrassing avowals of over-the-top emotion) but are stuffed with details of daily life and of early memories, both usually grim. If you want more (and aren’t worried about spoilers), there’s Mia Couto at The Modern Novel (cautiously approving), Phoebe Taplin at the Guardian (a rave: “The breathlessness of Maidenhair becomes, in The Light and the Dark, a more measured brilliance”), and Carla Baricz at Words Without Borders (an even more enthusiastic rave). I’ll quote the end of the Baricz review to give you an idea:
Both of Shishkin’s books, like his other works, return obsessively, with tenderness and with great brutality, to the question of whether individual moments of existence add up to more than the sum of minutes we are given to live, and whether and how they may be salvaged through language. Shishkin’s incandescent Russian undertakes this redemptive project, rendering translation a Sisyphean task. One cannot translate Shishkin, in fact; one can only attempt to find an adequate equivalent in the target language. Andrew Bromfield works very hard to do so with The Light and the Dark, and it pays off. In English, his Shishkin becomes, to quote Shakespeare’s Ariel, “something rich and strange.”
The Light and the Dark is a sentimental book, but only because it takes as its subject matter human love, in all of its infinite varieties and with all of its bitter complications—its indefinite hopes, its moments of transcendence and grotesqueness. Which is to say, as Volodya does, that this narrative is a story about death. Death, however, is never the end of the story. In language, we are always in the eternal present, so that, in one of his last missives, Volodya can whisper: “After all, I’m alive, Sasha.” Death belongs to time, and time wavers in this remarkable narrative and finally folds in on itself: “They write from Gaul that in the evening, in the dense rays of the sunset, a fine skin grows on the cobblestones of the street. They write from Jerusalem. [. . .] As the years go by the past does not recede but moves closer.” Of course, language cannot make up for loss: “I want everything alive, here and now. You, your warmth, your voice, your body, your smell,” Volodya cries. But Shishkin holds to the idea that, despite what mortality may take from us, language can nevertheless redeem the ephemeral moment, capturing it and returning us to its present. In letters, he seems to say, we are always the people we were when we wrote them—we are always young, we are always in love, we are always reaching across the dark, like “flies in amber.” The sheer beauty and power of his prose makes us believe that, indeed, as he writes, “it’s going to be the word in the beginning again.”
The thing is that all of that is Literature 101: yes, life is suffering, we’re all going to die, and love and language are important counterweights to the bad stuff. This is what Shishkin has been saying his entire career, and it’s wasted effort, because the only point to writing is to (as my man Ezra said) make it new, and he doesn’t do that, he just retails the same old bromides. His novels are full of little slices of life that should be affecting but aren’t because they’re just narrated flatly rather than seen in their individuality, and because they don’t happen to people but to cardboard characters. See the end of this post for a more extended riff on that subject; I’ll just add that if you value ideas over people you should write essays rather than novels, and Shishkin does that well. Philosopher, stick to thy lasting values and leave messy humanity to people like Dostoevsky!
bruce_schneier_feedIt’s been a month since Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship was published. From what we know, sales are good.
Some of the book’s forty-three chapters are available online: chapters 2, 12, 28, 34, 38, and 41.
We need more reviews—six on Amazon is not enough, and no one has yet posted a viral TikTok review. One review was published in Nature and another on the RSA Conference website, but more would be better. If you’ve read the book, please leave a review somewhere.
My coauthor and I have been doing all sort of book events, both online and in person. This book event, with Danielle Allen at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center, is particularly good. We also have been doing a ton of podcasts, both separately and together. They’re all on the book’s homepage.
There are two live book events in December. If you’re in Boston, come see us at the MIT Museum on 12/1. If you’re in Toronto, you can see me at the Munk School at the University of Toronto on 12/2.
I’m also doing a live AMA on the book on the RSA Conference website on 12/16. Register here.
slacktivist_feedbruce_schneier_feedFrom Anthropic:
In mid-September 2025, we detected suspicious activity that later investigation determined to be a highly sophisticated espionage campaign. The attackers used AI’s “agentic” capabilities to an unprecedented degree—using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyberattacks themselves.
The threat actor—whom we assess with high confidence was a Chinese state-sponsored group—manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly thirty global targets and succeeded in a small number of cases. The operation targeted large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention.
[…]
The attack relied on several features of AI models that did not exist, or were in much more nascent form, just a year ago:
- Intelligence. Models’ general levels of capability have increased to the point that they can follow complex instructions and understand context in ways that make very sophisticated tasks possible. Not only that, but several of their well-developed specific skills—in particular, software coding—lend themselves to being used in cyberattacks.
- Agency. Models can act as agents—that is, they can run in loops where they take autonomous actions, chain together tasks, and make decisions with only minimal, occasional human input.
- Tools. Models have access to a wide array of software tools (often via the open standard Model Context Protocol). They can now search the web, retrieve data, and perform many other actions that were previously the sole domain of human operators. In the case of cyberattacks, the tools might include password crackers, network scanners, and other security-related software.
astronomypicofday_feed
Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka
anais_pf posting in thefridayfive![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
heartovmidnight.slacktivist_feedearthobservatory_iod_feed
Late-season reds and browns swept across the Ozark Highlands in the south-central U.S.
languagehat_feedExploring Ephemera is “The official blog from Ephemera Society”; from the About page:
Founded in 1975 by the designer, photographer and writer Maurice Rickards (1919-1998), the Ephemera Society champions the very special contribution made by ephemera to an understanding of our past. Dedicated to the collection, conservation, study and educational use of ephemera, the society’s fairs, journal, blogs and website provide opportunities for collectors and researchers to share their expertise and enthusiasm. […]
Our Pepys logo pays tribute to the celebrated diarist, Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). Probably the first ‘general ephemerist’, Pepys included in his collection trade cards, board games, labels, ballads and other street literature. The Society’s Pepys medal, for excellence in ephemera studies, has been awarded to 16 recipients.
Just scroll down the main page and you’ll see all sorts of intriguing posts, like “Undies Without Coupons” (“Who would have thought that a wartime parachute could find a second life as nightwear?”); there are more at the MeFi post where I got the link.
And if you don’t care about ephemera, try John R. Gallagher’s The Curious Question of AI-written Lists: Or, LLMs are Genre Machines; it’s full of useful observations, like:
A good way to think about the output of LLMs is not an instance. It’s not actually a concrete piece of writing. The sentences aren’t sentences. This is a fundamental misinterpretation of what LLMs are doing. LLMs, as genre machines, produce the most abstracted patterns of genre signals possible. Then they write out that abstraction as a set of sentences. That abstraction, when you just glance at it, when you just skim it, feels fine. But when you stare at it with intent, when you close read it, you realize there is nothing there but signals that require interpretation.
Thanks, Leslie!
jazzfish posting in poetrybruce_schneier_feedGoogle has filed a complaint in court that details the scam:
In a complaint filed Wednesday, the tech giant accused “a cybercriminal group in China” of selling “phishing for dummies” kits. The kits help unsavvy fraudsters easily “execute a large-scale phishing campaign,” tricking hordes of unsuspecting people into “disclosing sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, or banking information, often by impersonating well-known brands, government agencies, or even people the victim knows.”
These branded “Lighthouse” kits offer two versions of software, depending on whether bad actors want to launch SMS and e-commerce scams. “Members may subscribe to weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent licenses,” Google alleged. Kits include “hundreds of templates for fake websites, domain set-up tools for those fake websites, and other features designed to dupe victims into believing they are entering sensitive information on a legitimate website.”
Google’s filing said the scams often begin with a text claiming that a toll fee is overdue or a small fee must be paid to redeliver a package. Other times they appear as ads—sometimes even Google ads, until Google detected and suspended accounts—luring victims by mimicking popular brands. Anyone who clicks will be redirected to a website to input sensitive information; the sites often claim to accept payments from trusted wallets like Google Pay.
astronomypicofday_feed
Sometimes the dark dust of interstellar space has an angular elegance.
earthobservatory_iod_feed
The volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula continues to erupt after centuries of quiescence.
languagehat_feedWe occasionally discuss Biblical cruxes (e.g., Daughter of Greed), and there’s a good one at Poemas del río Wang; the post begins:
I introduced the Jewish epilogue of the post on Saint Martin and his geese with this image, which, with its depiction of a goose-like bird and a signature unmistakably Jewish, proved perfect to illustrate the peculiar story of the Jews who delivered roast geese to the Habsburg emperor on Saint Martin’s Day.
But what exactly is this bird with that enormous egg?
The inscription only reads: זה עוף שקורין אותו בר יוכני zeh ʿof she-qorin oto Bar Yochnei, that is, “This is the bird called Bar Yochnei.”
All that remains is to figure out which bird is called Bar Yochnei.
1. This name appears in the Babylonian Talmud. Tractate Bekhorot 57b amidst tales of wondrous animals and plants, mentions:
“Once an egg of the bird called bar yokhani (=the son of the nest) fell, and the contents of the egg drowned sixty cities and broke three hundred cedar trees.”
The colossal bird also shows up in Bava Batra 73b, in the adventures of Rabbah bar bar Hana whose travels and miraculous encounters would eventually find their way into Sinbad-style tales:
Once we were traveling in a ship and we saw a certain bird that was standing with water up to its ankles [kartzuleih] and its head was in the sky. And we said to ourselves that there is no deep water here, and we wanted to go down to cool ourselves off. And a Divine Voice emerged and said to us: Do not go down here, as the ax of a carpenter fell into it seven years ago and it has still not reached the bottom. […] Rav Ashi said: And that bird is called ziz sadai, as it is written: “I know all the fowls of the mountains; and the ziz sadai is Mine” (Psalms 50:11).
The mere existence of such a bird is miraculous enough—but two of them? That would be an even greater miracle. Later Talmudic commentators—implicitly the medieval Yalkut Shimoni, explicitly the Maharsha (1555–1631) of Poland in his commentary on Bekhorot 57b—identified the two as one and the same.
2. We have thus learned that Bar Yochnei and the ziz sadai are one and the same. But what is the ziz sadai?
The post goes on to cite Psalm 50, Rashi (“who derived ziz from the verb zuz, meaning ‘to move about’”), and other early commentators, saying:
Thus, the three creatures—Behemoth, Leviathan, and the ziz sadai—form a coherent triad. They are three gigantic, wondrous beings, far beyond human dimensions, yet Adonai maintains dominion over them. According to Talmudic commentators, Behemoth is the wonder of the land, Leviathan the wonder of the sea, and Ziz Sadai the wonder of the air, as it is a colossal bird.
As for Leviathan, we have already noted that it originates from ancient Near Eastern creation myths, well known to the Jews living in Babylonian exile, and woven into their own mythology. During the Second Temple period, the strict priestly editors purged these myths from the Torah in its officially compiled form, yet traces remained in poetic or anecdotal texts, such as the Psalms or the Book of Job.
The central theme of these creation narratives is that the god or gods—Elil, or later Marduk, who replaced him—must first subdue chaos and its rebellious rulers, primarily in the waters, but also on land and in the air. […]
All of this is explored in detail by Nini Wazana of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in “Anzu and Ziz: Great Mythical Birds in Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Rabbinic Traditions” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 31 (2009).
That Anzu indeed made it into the psalm, surviving there for three thousand years under the name ziz sadai, is further confirmed by the fact that the word saday—a hapax legomenon appearing only here in the Bible, with an uncertain meaning—derives from Anzu/Imdugud’s original Akkadian epithet šadû, meaning “mountain.” For Mesopotamia, mountains were the threatening unknown, the source of attackers and storms, whose deity was Anzu.
There’s much more at the link, including the usual glorious images.
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