Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Christine Jones

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar.com

incredible photo that's definitely worth at least 1,000 words from Andrew Harnik of Getty

November 6, 2025 at 6:10 PM

Christine Jones

@christabellaroo.bsky.social

Any Dry Cleaning fans in the Netherlands interested in coming with me to see them next April in the Melkweg? www.melkweg.nl/nl/agenda/dr...

Dry Cleaning | Melkweg Amsterdam

Het Zuid-Londense Dry Cleaning vertelt verhalen op hun eigen, fluisterende manier. Met de ijzig kalme delivery van frontvrouw Florence Shaw en de opzwepende gitaar van Tom Dowse groeide de band in no ...

www.melkweg.nl

October 18, 2025 at 7:04 AM

Christine Jones

@christabellaroo.bsky.social

Ideal place for about 50 books. For about a minute give or take?

October 15, 2025 at 9:08 AM

Christine Jones

@christabellaroo.bsky.social

Sometimes the worst days are the best. I delivered a terrible lesson today, then beat myself up, then had wonderful conversations with colleagues and cleared a lot of tension in the process.

October 14, 2025 at 4:06 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

fire

@branfont.bsky.social

#StandTogether

Governor JB Pritzker @govpritzker.illinois.gov · Oct 8

If you come for my people, you come through me.

October 8, 2025 at 8:05 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Greg Jenner

@gregjenner.bsky.social

Farewell to one of the greats
www.nbcnews.com/news/obituar...

Jane Goodall, renowned chimpanzee researcher and animal advocate, dies at 91

"Dr. Goodall's discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world," the Jane Goodall Institute said in a Wedne...

www.nbcnews.com

October 1, 2025 at 6:14 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

SpryOldLorax

@spryoldlorax.bsky.social

Some amazing gay history. Listen up kids.

I'm watching that documentary "Before Stonewall" about gay history
pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast
about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed
psychologists, a police officer, and one "known homosexual". The
"known homosexual" is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis
White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale
Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television
and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there's nothing
wrong with him mentally and he's never been arrested. When asked
whether he'd take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether
his family knows he's gay, he says that they didn't up until tonight, but
he guesses they're going to find out, and he'll probably be fired from
his job as well. So of course the host is like ... why are you doing this
interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says "I think
that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself."

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale's boss did indeed recognize him from
the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into
ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten
a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further.
It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity
agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that,
but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person
who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the
statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson's disclosure had
a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the
U.S.

September 24, 2025 at 11:00 PM

Christine Jones

@christabellaroo.bsky.social

If Disney can cancel presenters for freedom of expression, I'm cancelling my Disney subs. Can't cope with any satire of the Kim Jong Un of the US? - I'm not paying for Disney to fund Maga, especially with all the double speak in the media.

September 23, 2025 at 9:20 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

CHOAM for the holidays

@samthielman.com

[the shooter is unidentified] the left must be purged with the sword

[the shooter is, again, a compulsive masturbator who loved Hitler] I believe it was pascal who said that the heart has reasons that reason may not know

September 12, 2025 at 9:22 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Jess Calarco

@jessicacalarco.com

Ironically, it appears that AI chatbots hallucinate for the same reason that students feel compelled to use them:

They were socialized in a high-stakes testing culture that rewards guessing and maybe getting it right over admitting when there's something you just don't know.

Why Language Models Hallucinate, by Kalai et al.

Like students facing hard exam questions, large language models sometimes guess when
uncertain, producing plausible yet incorrect statements instead of admitting uncertainty. Such
“hallucinations” persist even in state-of-the-art systems and undermine trust. We argue that
language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over
acknowledging uncertainty, and we analyze the statistical causes of hallucinations in the modern
training pipeline. Hallucinations need not be mysterious—they originate simply as errors in binary
classification. If incorrect statements cannot be distinguished from facts, then hallucinations
in pretrained language models will arise through natural statistical pressures. We then argue
that hallucinations persist due to the way most evaluations are graded—language models are
optimized to be good test-takers, and guessing when uncertain improves test performance. This
“epidemic” of penalizing uncertain responses can only be addressed through a socio-technical
mitigation: modifying the scoring of existing benchmarks that are misaligned but dominate
leaderboards, rather than introducing additional hallucination evaluations. This change may
steer the field toward more trustworthy AI systems.

September 8, 2025 at 10:41 AM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Beatrice Murch

@murchstudio.com

This is atrocious on SO MANY LEVELS. Using the US Army against a US State is illegal, immoral and heinous - again. Completely apart from this, my father was one of five artists who won an Oscar for this film. I cannot even fathom this perversion of art - again. Apocalypse Now was an ANTI-WAR film!

Steven Beschloss @stevenbeschloss.bsky.social · Sep 6

A war against Chicago? An absolute disgrace from a traitor to America.

September 6, 2025 at 6:55 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Kevin

@kevinlikesmaps.bsky.social

Eventually we'll catch up to Ukrainians in the dark humor game. Good step forward!

T. Greg Doucette @gregdoucette.bsky.social · Sep 6

September 6, 2025 at 7:54 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Alasdair Swanson

@alasdairswanson.bsky.social

This looks disturbingly like David Tennant is playing Peter Capaldi

Stephen Gallagher @stephengallagher.co.uk · Sep 2

That Blackpool wig shop seems to be doing good business

David Tennant and Toby Jones in The Hack

September 2, 2025 at 8:46 AM

Reposted by Christine Jones

💀Skulls and Sheets👻

@skullsandsheets.bsky.social

Pets at Home, Im really not sure we should be giving cats access to a ouija board.

September 2, 2025 at 9:27 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Alison Fisk

@alisonfisk.bsky.social

Happy weekend!

Here’s a 3,500 year-old Minoan clay flask decorated with a spectacular wide-eyed octopus! 🐙😍

From Palaikastro, a Bronze Age settlement site on the island of Crete.

Heraklion Archaeological Museum. 📷 by me

#Archaeology

My photo shows the front of a warm-yellow coloured Minoan clay flask, hand painted in black with a frontally depicted octopus. The flask is 27 cm in height (about 10.5 inches). There’s a spout at the top with a small handle at either side. The octopus is swimming diagonally with writhing tentacles covering the whole surface of the flask. It stares out at the viewer with wide, almost cartoon-like eyes. Each of the eight writhing arms are lined with suckers. Between the tentacles are motifs representing the seabed, such as sea urchins, tritons and small rocks with seaweed. Minoan decoration depicting sea motifs is known by scholars as the ‘Marine Style’. The flask was excavated in 1903 at a Bronze Age settlement site at Palaikastro. The Palaikastro excavations, carried out between 1902 and 1906, were run by R. Bosanquet and R.M. Dawkins from the British School of Athens. The flask is dated c. 1500-1450 BC, the Late Minoan IB ceramic period. On display at Heraklion Archaeological Museum. NB it is currently out on loan.

August 23, 2025 at 12:40 PM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Greg Jenner

@gregjenner.bsky.social

We’ve long known Samuel Pepys was a sleazebag, but Guy de la Bedoyere’s new edition of his journal reveals it was way worse than that — he was a relentless sexual predator www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

The Confessions of Samuel Pepys by Guy de la Bédoyère review – journal of a predator

Newly decoded extracts expose the celebrated 17th-century diarist and naval administrator as a rapacious abuser

www.theguardian.com

August 12, 2025 at 9:45 AM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Oliver Darkshire

@deathbybadger.bsky.social

a university is not for generating profit, it provides cultural enrichment via weird little gremlin people who love visigoths or haikus, and very occasionally a scientist who figures out faster than light travel

August 12, 2025 at 9:54 AM

Reposted by Christine Jones

Acyn

@acyn.bsky.social

Karl: The transformation has been gradual and unmistakable.

By February, some golden urns on the mantle.

April, gold adornments appear on the walls.

By July, it's gold everywhere.

Just this week more scaffolding popped up, even more new gold trim appeared.

August 10, 2025 at 3:45 PM

Christine Jones

@christabellaroo.bsky.social

Ely, again. From whens the boys were spawned. My third Pride event this year too! I spent an unprecedented amount of dosh on locally made pretty things from the stalls there.

August 9, 2025 at 10:06 PM

Christine Jones

@christabellaroo.bsky.social

Almost 3 wks at Dad's place in Newbury. A working holiday - installed a washer dryer, fixed doorbell, cut his hair, cooking etc but in the meantime, bike rides, stargazing, cider in the 'spoons, walking around Greenham Common and a day trip to the British Library with dear friend Charlotte.