horage

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...