g.j.hilton

For passementerie in British country houses, Annabel Westman, 'Fringe, Frog and Tassel: The Art of the Trimmings-Maker in Interior Decoration', lovely pictures

Unbelievable, just unbelievable. You never let me down. Astonishing.

Thank you!

Right arm detail for context

At the left shoulder, above the white sleeve, a v shaped and tiny hint of a red lining below the black jacket - with a hint of bounced light picking up red along a crease of the shirt sleeve

For me the whole show is about this extravagantly virtuosic glimpse of lining. The bounced light!

Ritratto di Maffeo Barberini - seated, bearded man in ecclesiastical dress (black and white) holds a paper in left hand and points past the viewer with his right (which is rimlit and foreshortened quite brilliantly)

By the side of the chair: apparently a baton of some sort, pierced, with an elaborate tassel

Looking at the expensive Caravaggio bought by the Italian state today (has the face suffered some ill-advised overpainting?)

What's this detail? Is it part of the chair or an accessory?

(Also has anyone ever written a history of tassel making?)

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Some great suggestions on the threads already but to read today, I'm not convinced all the canon have held up brilliantly so I might go with

City Come A-Walkin - John Shirley
Synners - Pat Cadigan
Busted Synapses - Erica L Satifka

The curse of having to write before the stuff wants you to.

Suggest: write silliest possible joke versions to genre prompts / in character: as a movie pitch, record review, limerick, the shopping channel etc

The point a) to mock your tormentor b) give your subconscious permission to surprise you

Wait. I have an idea for something we could do with fifteen of our current ships...

Counterpoint: 'Not poppy, nor mandragora,/ Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,/ Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep/ Which thou owedst yesterday.'

Is the lecture headed into print? That bravura final chapter of Spycraft has very much uh... whetted my appetite for EM poisons.

The floors were tiled, the tiles imported from Seville.

historicengland.org.uk/research/res...

A brick cottage at the end of a hedge-lined driveway. Hard to identify from resolution of the picture if anything Tudor survives.

The only potentially surviving part of the Tudor building is the gatehouse, though this was rebuilt in the C18th.

historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-...

Detail of illustration showing Tudor manor house built around two courtyards.

Thomas Cawarden's (and formerly Anne of Cleves') house, Bletchlingly Place (Bletchlingly, Surrey) from the (earlier) Pendell estate map, 1622.

Uvedale LAMBERT, Blechingley: a parish history; together with some account of the family of De Clare, chiefly in the South of England (Mitchell, 1921) 247.

When I clicked 'reply' I was planning to applaud such a brilliantly chosen example of his genius. But then I remembered Arabian Nights. And Happy House. And Israel. And Christine.

And Fade to Grey and Cruel and Seattle and The Light Pours Out of Me and...

Home Our tea is grown, picked, and delivered to your door which means we can guarantee the quality of our teas. Find them all online today.

If what you're after is superb tea that doesn't put a foot wrong ethically, you truly cannot do better than Williamson.

www.williamsontea.com

The whole range is flawless but the English Breakfast is the very best builders-type cuppa I've ever had. And I say that as a Yorkshireman.

From the AoA contents pages: The horrible Vice of pestiferous Dauncing, vsed in Ailgna. 154 Dancing provokes Wantonness (154); Clipping, Clipping, Kissing, Groping, &c. (155); hurts the Body, and lames the Mind (156). The Bible and the Fathers against Dancing (157-8). Our Forefathers' dancing and ours compard (158-9). The Israelites' dancing: not Men with Women (160-3). Our cheek-by-cheek Dancing is 'beastly to behold' (163). Bible-folk's dancing (163-5). Our filtby Dancing must do hurt (165). Each sex should dance by itself (166). The Fathers, &c., against Dancing (166-9). It sprang from the teats of the Devil's breast (16g).

AoA contents: CHAPTER XXII. Football playing on the sabbath & other Days in England ... ... ... 183-184 It's a bloody and murdering game, not fit for the Sabbath or any other day (184).

Poster for the movie, Trainspottimg: character portrait of Ewan Bremner as Spud

❤️

no war no borders no cops no prisons no to all of this shit

musical cartography works Christopher Castle demonstrates the music potential of patterns in nature, land forms, stellar maps, cellular structures, ancient sites.

Thank you so much for introducing me to this. After a little bit of search, there is also SO MUCH MORE

www.christophercastle.com/music.html

🐔

But also, I'd echo what @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social said: if you don't enjoy lovingly gardening and inspecting your data, maybe this whole thing isn't really for you.

Script output should be deterministic. Hallucinations by definition arent.

tldr: If you want to use an LLM get it to *code a script* to clean the data for you (which doesn't itself call an LLM).

Otherwise, eg for classification tasks perform iterated runs for sanity checks and/or check manually.

Jury still out what I'd trust an LLM with but rule #1 of data cleaning is never do it ad hoc.

Whether human or LLM when cleaning data you should always write a script to do it, because: reproducibility. Careful scrutiny of the script should offer (hopefully substantial) protection against errors.

How did they make the exterior look so much like a circa-2003 Sketchup render?

Oh im so thick, sorry. thank you. EPIC. I

Love this to bits. Do you have a reference for it?

Pan-cake is clearly the philosophical view that cake is inherent in everything.

Contrast: emergentist accounts e.g. Berry, Lawson, Hollywood which propose that cake is a threshold property achieved only in sufficiently complex aggregates of non-cake matter.

Yaaaaaay!

I have shelved all other plans for the rest of the evening. So much more I want to know about all these people and their lives!

AMAZING. Thank you. Can't wait.

Seriously this is such great, great work. I wish I was like even 1/100th this cool.

Great UI; code & data available: exemplary.

Fascinating to track the trajectories of serial offenders over their careers - e.g. Edward Duncombe's migration Westwards... (Fleet Street -> Holborn -> Drury Lane / Oxford Street -> St. Martin’s Lane) or William Ward's slide from West End to the fringes

Im afraid you may have just nailed the origin story for AI.

Every day is a new humbling as you discover whole new subfields you ought to have known about all along. Every day thickens the despair ever of mastering anything at all.

Seriously, I am truly sorry to have posted in haste. As I say, everybody makes mistakes.

I shall trouble you no further. Have a better evening.