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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 2d

A perfect table of contents.

1 Happiness 1
2 Death 61
3 The Remainder of Life 106

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 9d

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 11d

Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · 11d

James Scott.

The historiography of class struggle, one might add, has been systematically distorted in a state-centered direction. Everyday resistance does not throw up the manifestos, demonstrations, or pitched battles that normally compel attention. It makes no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political and economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any movement that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the ship-wreck (for example, a fiscal crisis) itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible. It is seldom that the perpetrators seek to call attention to themselves. Their safety lies in anonymity. It is also extremely rare that officials of the state wish to publicize the insubordination. To do so would be openly to confess that their policy is unpopular and, above all, to expose the tenuousness of their authority in the countryside. Thus, the nature of the acts themselves and the self-interested muteness of the antagonists conspire to create a complicitous silence that is reflected in the historical record. In this context, the events that claim most attention are typically those to which the state and ruling classes accord most space in their archives. Thus, for example, a small and futile rebellion claims an attention that is often all out of proportion to its impact on class relations while unheralded acts of flight, sabotage, and theft that may be of greater long-run significance are rarely noticed.

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Reposted by Brad Weslake

Dr Liam Sims @liamsims.bsky.social · 12d

A stunningly beautiful initial depicting a dying man in bed with his soul being taken up by an angel. From a copy of Aristotle’s De Anima, likely copied at Oxford c. 1260. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social since 1715, MS Ee.2.31.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Apr 4

We stand in solidarity with the penguins.

A crowd of penguins captioned BREAKING: MASSIVE ANTI-AMERICAN PROTESTS IN HEARD AND MCDONALD ISLANDS.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Feb 1

Christopher Walken.

Did you go back and study “Severance” before filming season 2?

I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I’ve seen “Severance” on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me. I don’t have a cellphone. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered.

Does it make you feel a bit alien in a world where everyone is attached to their phones?

Not really. I’ve never had a watch either. But if I need the time, I just ask somebody. Likewise, once in a while when I need to use a phone, I just ask if I can borrow one.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Jan 31

Excellent guesses—Darwin it was.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Jan 31

150 years ago you could get random observations of your baby published in Mind. Indisputably the most famous person to ever publish there—guess who!

No. 7. JULY, 1877.
MIND
A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.
I.-A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN INFANT.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Jan 3

From Eric Huntington, “Buddhist Cosmology” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022. doi.org/10.1093/acre...

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Jan 3

Unless your multiverse has endless hells lurking in the triangular gaps between worlds, I don't buy it.

Surrounding the great, circular ocean is a ring of mountains known as Cakravāla (also Cakravāḍa), which forms the external boundary of the world. The disk-shaped earth that supports all these oceans, continents, and mountains floats atop decreasingly substantial layers of fundamental elements (earth, water, sometimes fire, and wind) that ultimately float in the void of space. Most traditions acknowledge a multiplicity of such single world-systems (loka-dhātu), often abutting one another horizontally and sometimes also layered vertically. Groups of thousands, millions, and billions of such worlds play important roles in metaphors for vastness and innumerability. When described in such collections, each world typically has the same basic geographical features, including its own Sumeru, four major continents, great ocean, and so on, making this a generic model for all worlds in Buddhist cosmology. In other cases, however, alternative worlds are described with quite different landscapes to emphasize specific contrasts with this world (see the section “Mahāyāna and East Asia”).

Within each single world-system that follows the generic pattern, there are also numerous heavens and hells above and below the relatively flat surface of the world. While the heavens generally rise directly above Sumeru, the hells may descend—depending on the tradition—centrally below Sumeru, peripherally below southern Jambudvīpa, broadly filling all of the elemental layers below the entire cosmos, or even externally in the deltoid interstices between adjacent discoid worlds. Based on these layers above and below the surface of the earth, many cosmological systems also propose vertical divisions of space, most commonly distinguishing the more-or-less geographical realm of the earth, hells, and lower heavens (kāma-dhātu, realm of desire) from more ethereal realms of form (rūpa-dhātu) and formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu) above.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 30

I'm friends with one of the provosts who oversees IT and I could barely resist emailing him to ask how his night is going.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 30

An NYU student really levelled up on this tonight, managing to find an unsecured email list that goes to all faculty and everyone in IT. In the five minutes it took me to auto-filter the list to trash, five professors had already unwittingly replied to 10,000+ people... no doubt it's ongoing.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 29

Counterpoint—this is the ideal nap, now you are ready to go dance all night.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 29

Many more examples (with high-resolution images) in Gillian Riley, “Eat Your Words! Seventeenth-Century Edible Letterforms” in Gastronomica, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 2001, pp. 45-59. doi.org/10.1525/gfc....

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 28

Regret calibration.

A menu box allowing you to “Undo send” at timescales of 0, 5, 10 or 20 seconds.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 23

This post has a link to an associated WeChat announcement on their official channel.

Che-boo!-rashka @leshij.bsky.social · Jul 1

Niche topic, but jiazazhi, one of the few large storefronts on the Chinese mainland still selling a wide variety of art books and zines, just got closed for rectification. Based on the tone, seems like it's permanent. Not shocking, but still depressing

假杂志图书馆整修公告

勿走空

mp.weixin.qq.com

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 23

Another is Feng Li (冯立), Good Night.

Feng Li ╱ Good Night

In 2017, when we made photobook White Night for Feng Li for the first time, he brought plenty of photographs to our studio. We were immediately shocked by his color photos. As a result, the black-and-...

jiazazhistore.com

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 23

Some of the most beautiful books I have purchased since moving to China are published by Jiazazhi. One favourite is Chen Zhe (陈哲), Bees & The Bearable (蜜蜂 & 可承受的).

Bees & The Bearable — Chen Zhe 陈哲

Bees & The Bearable蜜蜂 & 可承受的 Presented as a layered notebook weaving in and out of images and texts, Bees & The Bearable restores Chen Zhe’s...

zheis.com

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 23

Very sad to learn today that Yanyou—the founder of Jiazazhi, the Chinese photo book publisher and bookstore—was arrested in June and is still being held. There is a small note about it in this AP story. #china

As China cracks down on bookstores at home, Chinese-language booksellers are flourishing overseas | The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Yu Miao smiles as he stands among the 10,000 books crowded on rows of bamboo shelves in his newly reopened bookstore. It’s in

www.ap.org

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 23

To solve problems like this:

Paul Frambot | Morpho
@PaulFrambot

Last week, 6 out of 30 candidates interviewed by our recruiter were likely North Korean hackers using deepfakes to disguise their accents and facial expressions.

Now implementing stricter hiring protocols eg. thorough background checks, in-person meetings, ... Any suggestions?

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 22

You think your life should get better, I think you should suffer and die, we agree that something must change.

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 22

Scandalous that “Confucius for Trump?“ was addressed before “Funeral strippers?”

Abstract

Could the Chinese philosopher Confucius have supported Donald Trump?

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 21

For an overview, see: news.mit.edu/2024/mit-stu...

MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style

An MIT study on “legalese” suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked to write l...

news.mit.edu

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Brad Weslake @bweslake.org · Dec 21

The magic spell hypothesis: just as magic spells are written distinctively to make them appear special, so legal language is made complex in order to signal a special kind of authority. See: doi.org/10.1073/pnas...

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