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Adam Smyth Institute
28.7K posts
Adam Smyth Institute
@ASH_Smyth
Reader, writer, boulevardier, and quondam breakfast DJ in the Falkland Islands. Yes, 'seriously'.
Katılım Eylül 2011
4.1K Takip Edilen1.1K Takipçiler
Some people take this sort of thing *quite* seriously... 😬
thecritic.co.uk/his-race-is-ru…
ithaca rising 🇫🇷 🇬🇧@ithacarising
I loved the film back then, and I love it even more today. I still remember staying up way too late on a school night, watching Colin Welland bound up to the stage to collect his Oscar, punch the air, and bellow "The British are coming!" like a gleeful revolutionary. Back in 1981 Chariots of Fire snuck up and stole Best Picture like a quiet outsider winning the 400 metres. It wasn't loud or flashy, it was smart, restrained, and genuinely beautiful at a time when Hollywood was drowning in explosions. It won Best Picture not because the Academy had suddenly developed a taste for Scottish Congregationalist scruple and Cambridge atheism, but because Hugh Hudson's film understood that the true English epic is often small, private, and conducted with a restraint in manners. What still holds it upright, 40 odd years on, is the way it refuses to sentimentalise its own decency. Eric Liddell's faith and Harold Abrahams' driven Jewish ambition are not presented as cuddly quirks, they are serious impediments to the easy life, and the film respects them as such. Vangelis' score still gives you chills and those slow-motion runners on the beach remain a visual shorthand for aspiration that no amount of CGI can render obsolete. Chariots of Fire reminds us that grace under pressure is still the rarest medal of all.
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How to write a children's book:
Step 1: Be famous for something else.
Step 2: Have lunch with a publisher.
Step 3: Talk about your brilliant ideas.
Step 4: Tell them to turn the ideas into a book and publish it. How hard can it be?
Step 5: Remember to thank them for lunch.
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Alas, we are a little short of trains here in the Falkland Islands... But otherwise, I'm in!
Alexandra Wilson@amwilson_opera
Welcome to new followers! I write about opera and cultural history. My latest book is Someone Else's Music: Opera and the British. At a recent event, another speaker said it "reads wonderfully", is "hugely inspiring" and a great book to read on a train! amazon.co.uk/Someone-Elses-…
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**PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT**
Clicking on seemingly perfectly-sensible links will ruin your life.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins@daniel_dsj2110
In your opinion, what is the best intellectual history book written since 2000.
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Sure sex is great but have you ever refrained from making a joke in a meeting and woken up feeling relieved
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RRS Sir David Attenborough is a ship worthy of the great man’s name, writes @ASH_Smyth
thecritic.co.uk/sir-david-atte…
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American operation names are normally just crassly literal. Operation Kill Bad etc. But here, the literalism works.
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In December, 2018, while visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, David Kenny became hypnotized by an epitaph. Near the south door, he gazed up at a marble plaque bearing the epitaph for Jonathan Swift, the redoubtable novelist, poet, satirist, and former Dean of St. Patrick’s who died in 1745, and who was buried beneath the cathedral floor.
The text of the monument was in Latin and stipulated by Swift himself, in his will. Translations vary, but the most enduring was published in 1933, by William Butler Yeats:
SWIFT has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
Kenny had read Swift’s epitaph before, but on that day the lines caught him anew. “I had the strongest sense that there was something going on here that I couldn’t quite understand, and that wasn’t captured by Yeats,” Kenny told Ed Caesar. “The interpretive materials in the cathedral didn’t suggest the possibility of any other reading. The rousing, earnest interpretation taken up by Yeats was clearly the accepted understanding. But, to my ear, it was discordant. . . . Swift had never struck me as boastful. Something felt wrong.”
After seven years of research, Kenny thinks he’s cracked Swift’s true meaning: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/CGC7a4
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@patrick_kidd @robcrilly Is this a running BM 'gag', I wonder? They get a moment, too, in 👇
(V possible that's just the TV version, NB.)
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The war what they played a cameo in. Fascinating nugget in Ben Macintyre’s column today
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Advice to Everyone, quite frankly.
BurlHorniachek@BurlHorniachek
“Advice to the English Department” by Joseph S. Salemi
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🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.
ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.
My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.
I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.
Hedgie🤗
nature.com/articles/d4158…
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This, from Wisden Cricket Monthly, shows why Oxford commas matter.
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Judas Iscariot was paid 30 pieces of silver for turning Jesus Christ in to the Roman authorities. But he made nearly 10 times that amount by placing a Polymarket bet accurately predicting the day of Christ’s death.
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We are excited to be participating in the 2026 #Archive30, and sharing more highlights from our fascinating collections.
Follow our social media posts to see how we respond to the chosen themes over the next month.
Today's theme: #YourArchive
@FMHTrust @FalklandsinUK
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