LAST UPDATE June 2, 2025

Culling around the internet

DNA

Recent study of ancient DNA "upended the world of archaeology and challenged long-held historical assumptions" – Brown EDU

"There seems to be a narrative today that our countries and economies are more interconnected than they used to be," van Dommelen said. "But we have evidence that the ancient Mediterranean was a big, interconnected web of people and ideas. It wasn’t just Greeks and Romans — it was a lot more diverse and a lot more complicated."

DEFINING THE CENTURY

"Functional illiteracy"

Story at Hilarius Book Binder

Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either. I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read...."

Finding stories of a deep and strong illiteracy, not just in language but in basic math skills, is easily found online and in social media. Stories that students are, well, not students, but beings housed temporarily during the day then sent away at the end, are recounted by people claiming to be classroom teachers. How much of what is claimed is true, or only the experiences of certain areas, or exaggerations, is a question worth asking. But anecdotal stories are evidence of something important about the state of education.

COOKERY

Cooking "real" Greek food in Australia

Story at Sydney Morning Herald

Preparing the meat for the gyros is a three-day process. The chicken is brined for one day, then marinated in a mix of garlic, paprika and bukovo – a dried northern Macedonian chilli – before hitting the spit where it’s cooked over the coals. “Not a lot of people cook on a horizontal rotisserie. They use an electric or gas burner, but you just can’t beat the aroma and flavour that comes from cooking on charcoal,” Cassimatis says."

Sitting at the Taverna and smelling the long, thin, flat charcoal cooking pits is like experiencing an air-based food through your pores.

DEFINING THE CENTURY

"...the planet as a whole, is suffering from a self-imposed epidemic of loneliness that is transforming “our personalities, our ideologies, even our relationship to reality . "

"The Anti-Social Century" – Skai [In Greek, use Google Translater to put into English]

Mental health experts say that no generation of Americans has spent as much time alone (intentionally or unintentionally) as today. The main symptom of this rise in antisocial behavior is that one in four Americans eats alone every day or almost every day of the week, a 53 percent increase since 2003..."

It isn't an irony, but there's certainly something funny about a significant portion of the populace of the world carrying around mini-copies of the Monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey, 1968. The irony is that the Monolith makes each carrier a movie star with a mini-movie-making studio in the palm of their hand.

MUSIC

Khatia Buniatishvili – khatiabuniatishvili

THE INTERNET

Shadow Banning – UK The Times

The owner of The Spectator has warned about the threat of tech giants such as Meta, X and YouTube “shadow banning” content and called for them to publish their algorithms. Paul Marshall, who also owns the UnHerd opinion website and a stake in GB News, said that he first became aware of the issue, in which the platforms suppress the number of people shown a particular piece of content, during Covid-19. He made the claim, along with a swipe at the TV ratings agency Barb, as part of a call for greater transparency from powerful organisations...."

Shadow banning, in one sense, is the act of doing something impactful and significant while remaining hidden, thereby avoiding the opprobrium that would normally follow. And then what if shadow-banning is used to remove the opprobrium? Powerful enough, a shadow-banning mechanism would be like those little air scrubbers on Apollo 13.

ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE

Well, now, who could have seen this coming?

"People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies" – MSN Rolling Stone

Article has anecdotal stories of people getting so deeply involved in using AI that it has convinced them they are on the verge (or have actually accomplished finding) the "secrets of the universe" and now find they are a unique "anomoly" (the article's word) which has made for a belief that, for example, "he's special and he can save the world."

OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about ChatGPT apparently provoking religious or prophetic fervor in select users...."

IDEOLOGY

"Why SYRIZA wanted the queues for medicines" – Liberal [In Greek, use Google Translater to put into English] – "Why hadn't the SYRIZA government provided a solution to the issue of supplying cancer patients with medicines and left them to suffer, in a chillingly sadistic manner, in the queues at EOPYY pharmacies? Why didn't SYRIZA provide a solution to something that the Mitsotakis government took less than a month to do? But, for ideological reasons..."

The article describes that reducing the individual experience to a particle of the whole, "...waiting in line for long hours convinces individuals that they are helpless victims."

The question comes up, though, what if the lines and waiting are from other factors, such as ineptitude of organization? Inability to think outside of old USSR templates? And is the creation of "helpless victims" really a rational goal for a political organization that is itself a reaction to the status of "helpless victims"?

Gonda Van Steen examines the productions of classical tragedies staged by political prisoners of the Greek Civil War (late 1940s to 1950s). She first explains the historical and political context in which these productions originated, the selections made by the prisoners, and the practical conditions under which the performances were mounted, devoting attention, too, to the prison authorities' acts of censorship. Her main focus, however, is on the interpretation that the political detainees gave to their productions and the rationale behind specific readings. The book includes the text of an adaptation of Antigone , in the original Greek and in English translation, written by Aris Alexandrou, one of the prisoners..."

Publisher – Oxford University Press
Publication date – February 15, 2011
Print length – 370 pages

PUBLIC DOMAIN

20,000 historic newsreels online

Hearst Metrotone Newsreels from 1929 to 1967 - newsreels.net "High Resolution"

A Magazine rack at Kroger, March 11, 2025. Click image to enlarge "monster mom" "married to a monster" plus Psychology Today.

SUPERHEROES

Are Superhero Movies Dying?

Once a colossus that stalked across theatre screens and earned billions upon billions of dollars in box office, the American superhero movie has now reached a point where years of failed big-budget offerings and being pecked at by maligning critics who call them "junk," or even "not movies at all" (so has said Martin Scorsese*) the genre is now running into a hard wall of growing indifference.

Read the rest of Are Superhero Movies Dying?

Time to go to Disney World? Goofy 4 Mickey