Andrew @generalising@mastodon.flooey.org

a new round of #wikidataMPs begins (yes, I forgot the party first time around...)

The perils of fast fashion, c. 1969 (these are both from the same work, a 1960s photographic handbook)

The things you learn: photographic identification cards existed as early as 1861 in some form

dispatches from a century ago: the Scottish football clubs met and agreed that no player needed to be paid more than £200 a year.

(the same issue of the paper had various adverts for domestic cooks at £50 a year, to give you an idea of where that stood)

Alec Douglas-Home, accidental discoverer of Nixon's great secret. It's never the ones you expect.

(Francis Wheen, 'Strange Days Indeed')

Scandalous developments in Rotherham, 1937

This evening's film: Desk Set (1957), a late Hepburn/Tracy comedy set against the looming spectre of computers coming & taking our jobs.

(Taking *her* job, anyway. He is the computer guy. You can guess how it goes.)

I have a preprint out estimating how many scholarly papers are written using chatGPT etc? I estimate upwards of 60k articles (>1% of global output) published in 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.16887

How can we identify this? Simple: there are certain words that LLMs love, and they suddenly start showing up *a lot* last year. Twice as many papers call something "intricate", big rises for "commendable" and "meticulous".

#bibliometrics #scholcomm #chatgpt

I really need to find something better than a flatbed for this, but it's definitely working.

Second 120 film today - spooling a little fiddlier but came out OK. Quality looks excellent for a 70-year-old camera & lens! Going to be a pain to scan, though...

The camera itself is surprisingly well-preserved for something that has "MADE IN GERMANY US-ZONE" on the back. Retail UK price was £10/4/4 for this model, which is pretty close to what I paid on ebay last week.

further #photography experiments: my first roll of medium-format film, on an untested 1950s folding camera, using Ilford XP2, which is not meant to be developed in normal B&W chemistry so I had to make up the times.

Amazingly, there are actually pictures coming out on the film. I mean, let's not assume they're in focus or reasonably exposed, but still.

I sort of see what the gov.uk people are trying to do here, but my goodness, this is a wild prompt to put on the confirmation screen for a form that has nothing to do with organ donations.

Their competitors (the Leicester Chronicle rather than the Leicester Mercury) were a bit more pro. Get the feeling these two reviewers did not often agree.

This evening's delightful discovery is a regional English paper's slightly bemused review of Bob Dylan's 1966 tour.

"I must admit I was surprised at the heavy emphasis Dylan put on this type of music which has by no means become associated with him. But one must give him credit for such a brave display of his amazing versatility."

Good news: the following Monday it had dropped to just 11 patients on the critical list, and also the censor would grudgingly allow romance

Spotted in an Aberdeen paper, 1941: they printed bulletins on individual patients in the city hospitals, using reference numbers? huh.

Caffenol adventures 2.0: so much better! Same recipe but using real vitamin C not effervescent tablets, and adding about half a gram of potassium bromide to slow down the graininess. #photography

my foray into the wonderful world of weasels comes from having had the opportunity to photograph some on Wednesday: I am now absolutely in agreement with "something enormously satisfactory"

a weasel (~200g) was once observed recorded trying to mug a snowy owl (~2kg) for a mouse.

(do snowy owls normally eat weasels? why, yes, they do. did this stop it? no)