horage

Credit where credit is due on this one.  This is based on a dream a friend had a few years ago about someone being arrested for living too far up the road.  More recently, I spent too much time considering how this could conceivably happen.  I say "conceivably" because the way my thoughts went, it isn't actually possible.  Unfortunately it's now occurred to me that there are circumstances in which it really could happen.  For instance, in Apartheid South Africa it's possible that people of a certain ethnicity could be arrested for living in the "wrong" area and in some places this amounts to "living too far up the road", but that isn't really how things worked there because people wouldn't've been able to move into such an area in the first place.  Nonetheless, such a situation is, unfortunately, possible. After some cogitation, I realised there is a pre-existing fictional setting into which this would fit quite well:  the sitcom ...

  I could be talking about the Mandela Effect at this point.  In fact, in one way I am talking about it but it would have to be carefully defined.  The Mandela Effect is, for the purposes of this post, the situation where a number of people have memories inconsistent with those of another large number of people.  This is the most diplomatic way of putting things.  The fact that it's a number of people means that an individual having different memories doesn't count.  Because of this large number, it would have to be generally the kind of thing which has been publically experienced, such as the death of a famous person or pop song lyrics, or a scene in a Hollywood blockbuster. I have described a number of my memories which are different from other people's.  In my case, some of these are backed up by others and it's possible to list them, but they're not usually the memories which popularly appear as Mandela Effects(MEs).  Consequently, my interact...

William Penn was born in 1644 in Tower Hill, London.  He's a significant person on both sides of the pond for a number of reasons, one of which came up recently in the news.  Trudi Warner stood outside the Old Bailey recently holding a placard saying: She was tried for contempt of court.  Her concern was, and I don't want to go into detail regarding the actual subject of the case, that the jury at the case in question was not aware that rather than ruling on the basis of evidence that an offence was or was not committed, they cannot legally be coerced to rule against their conscience.  This was established as a legal principle in 1670.  Now I am neither a lawyer nor used to writing about the law, so I may get this mixed up and confused, but this post is partly about the law and partly about Quakers, so you should probably look all this up or consult a lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction if you need to rely on it. Anyway, in 1667 William Penn and William Meade we...

To many Westerners, the Arabic script just looks like a series of squiggles.  Perhaps very beautiful squiggles, but squiggles nonetheless.  I could disquisit at this point on Islamic calligraphy, but I won't.  I will, however, say a little bit.  Arabic script is potentially very beautiful, as are the Arabesques associated with them in architecture and other art.  Two very significant mainstream styles of calligraphy used in everyday writing include Nastaʿlīq, used for Urdu, and Naskh, used for Arabic itself.  Kufic is another style, whose subtype Square Kufic is very distinctively, well, square: I'm not entirely ignorant of Arabic script but I'm really not good at it.  I'm about at the level of a reception-class child with reading and writing, although I do write it more neatly.  Arabic is a good script for writing Arabic, and I imagine also Hebrew, because it clearly separates vowels and consonants and often omits the former.  There's a...

  I was rather surprised to find yesterday that if I asked a text to image AI to produce detailed labelled diagrams of brainwashing helmets, it actually did so.  This particular image is not ideal because it actually became more garbled on being enhanced by krea.ai .  As it was, feeding the text into ChatGPT led to it being able to read it as a number of clear English captions, some of which can be made out in this image.  It also noted duplicates. Now, what it actually identified was surprisingly convincing, and this is where it goes a bit meta because considering it's on the subject of brainwashing, that's exactly what you'd expect it to do!  It's also what a lot of people seem to fear from AI, or what we call AI as it isn't clear that that's actually AI.  That, however, is a subject for another time. Seven modules were identified.  Well, more in fact, but some are duplicates and one doesn't have much going for it, which is something like "Mid-Face M...