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pabloredux.bsky.social
Paul Harland
@pabloredux.bsky.social
1.1K followers 2.4K following 4.2K posts
Evolution: it's nothing personal. (Sorry if I ask too many questions... Share nicely!)

I'm here because you're here.

http://pabloredux.wordpress.com/

(Profile photo: a faint shadow of me cast across a weathered lichen-marked stone wall by the sea.)
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pabloredux.bsky.social
"That’s what technique must be: the control of the information that flows from a play to its audience, and in particular the ordering of the information. We interfere with that at our peril, don’t we? Actually, no, we don’t." www.shakespearetheatre.org/blog/the-rea...
Pragmatic Theatre by Tom Stoppard - Shakespeare Theatre Company
Pragmatic Theatre Tom Stoppard [The following is based on a speech given at the New York Public Library, subsequently reprinted in The New York Review of Books, Sep. 23, 1999.] There’s a man on the st...
www.shakespearetheatre.org
November 29, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
newyorker.com
The acclaimed writer Tom Stoppard has died, at 88. For the award-winning playwright, “art is a game within a game—the larger game being life itself,” Kenneth Tynan wrote, in 1977.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/197...
Tom Stoppard, Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos
From 1977: For the playwright, art is a game within a game—the larger game being life itself, an absurd mosaic of incidents and accidents.
www.newyorker.com
November 29, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
eduardosuarez.bsky.social
Acaba de fallecer el dramaturgo británico Tom Stoppard, autor de obras como 'Leopoldstadt' o 'Arcadia' y muy comprometido con los disidentes del otro lado del Telón de Acero

Hace 15 años tuve la enorme suerte de conversar con él. Aquí nuestra charla
www.elespanol.com/el-cultural/...
Tom Stoppard
“Por más que la vida se hace difícil, el sueño del idealismo sigue vivo en mí”
www.elespanol.com
November 29, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
acscricket.bsky.social
Playwright and cricket fan Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, wrote a famous speech in praise of the cricket bat in his play The Real Thing (1982), using the skilful creation of a bat as a metaphor for the writing of plays.
#TomStoppard
This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly... What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might... travel... (He picks up the script) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting “Ouch!” with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lord’s. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this (the script) and see how you get on. - Henry’s speech on the cricket bat from Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing)
November 29, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
gregggonsalves.bsky.social
One of my favorite Stoppard monologues. From Arcadia.
From Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard Valentine explains how beautiful calculus is to him, and how excited he is to be on the brink of so many discoveries in physics. VALENTINE. If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape, because every dot will be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predictable unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. it makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about - clouds - daffodils - waterfalls- and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in - these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can't even predict the net drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
November 29, 2025 at 5:40 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
ghostingdani.bsky.social
Oh no!
theguardian.com The Guardian @theguardian.com · 6h
Tom Stoppard, playwright of dazzling wit and playful erudition, dies aged 88
Tom Stoppard, playwright of dazzling wit and playful erudition, dies aged 88
A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...
www.theguardian.com
November 29, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
lillmagill.bsky.social
Is this a sign of common sense creeping in?
defendourjuries.bsky.social Defend Our Juries @defendourjuries.bsky.social · 5h
NO ARRESTS IN EXETER

35 sign-holders with “I oppose genocide - I support Palestine Action” signs were not arrested today in Exeter.

Instead, Devon & Cornwall Police decided to remove the signs from protestors and make a megaphone statement, before simply leaving the scene.
November 29, 2025 at 6:13 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
andydiggle.bsky.social
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is on YouTube.

Gary Oldman and Tim Roth star in Tom Stoppard's big screen adaptation of his own stage play, itself a play on Shakespeare's Hamlet.

#TomStoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 1990
YouTube video by Rolo Tomasi
youtu.be
November 29, 2025 at 6:02 PM
pabloredux.bsky.social
(The ‘afterlives’ of hardware.)
November 29, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social
This blog post by Helen Toner (well-known by some for a stint on the OpenAI board) is *really really* interesting because it is the first thing I've read by someone in Frontier AI that starts to get to grips with sociotechnical concerns open.substack.com/pub/helenton...
Taking Jaggedness Seriously
Why we should expect AI capabilities to keep being extremely uneven, and why that matters
open.substack.com
November 29, 2025 at 6:32 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
viss.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
i hope this email finds you well
November 28, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
john86l.bsky.social
Probably my favourite Michael Caine film* and of course I’ve seen all of them.

*having a different favourite is obviously valid unless it’s Blame It On Rio, Bewitched or similar nonsense.
artandhue.bsky.social Art & Hue @artandhue.bsky.social · 10h
Classic spy film "The Ipcress File" starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer is on BBC Two at 2.45pm this afternoon. artandhue.com/spies
November 29, 2025 at 1:35 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
ailogblog.bsky.social
Large language models are language machines, and we need to think about what they do with language as more than just "mathy math."

Language Machines as Antimeme
www.ailog.blog/p/language-m...
Language Machines as Antimeme
AI Log reviews Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism
www.ailog.blog
November 9, 2025 at 11:34 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
eschwitz.bsky.social
The Awesomeness of Bad Art

I love bad art.

Gather some friends and create some bad music. Cruise in a car covered with graffiti doodles. Hand a five-year-old crayons and free time and see what weirdness emerges.

Something worth celebrating happens. Although the art is "bad" in one sense -- 1/
I can swim like a grasfl dolphin can you? by my daughter Kate at age six
May 16, 2025 at 5:08 PM
pabloredux.bsky.social
I'd say "The différance engine: large language models and poststructuralism" by @davidgunkel.bsky.social offers a valid reading of LLMs (or similar generative token-based models, as opposed to "AI" generally, whatever that is) and problematises sloppy metaphors. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
November 28, 2025 at 11:14 AM
pabloredux.bsky.social
“This is a long-term project,” said one person who is, at least for now, involved in it. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
‘We had six MPs and four factions’: inside Your Party’s toxic power struggles
Some say Jeremy Corbyn is too non-committal for project to work, while others blame Zarah Sultana’s combative nature
www.theguardian.com
November 28, 2025 at 9:59 AM
pabloredux.bsky.social
Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre - from his Foreword to the Second Edition (translated by John Moore).
"Everyday life, in a sense residual, defined by 'what is left over' after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis, must be defined as a totality."
November 27, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
nhervieu.bsky.social
Ce schéma méritait d'être traduit en français.

(Car la mécanique infernale décrite colle aussi avec les politiques publiques menées en France depuis tant d'années)
Schéma créé par Jonathan Portes (@jdportes.bsky.social) Un rectangle bleu "Politique migratoire plus stricte" avec une flèche sur la droite vers un rectangle rose "Coupes dans les services publics" et une flèche vers le bas vers un rectangle vert "Plus d'immigration irrégulière. Et un rectangle jaune "Soutien en faveur des populistes" vers lequel point les flèches des rectangles vert et rose. Et qui a une flèche qui renvoie le rectangle bleu initial.
November 27, 2025 at 12:16 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
conciselyn.bsky.social
This made me think of the many splendid posts of @mooseallain.bsky.social.
October 24, 2025 at 11:33 AM
Reposted by Paul Harland
joncooper-us.bsky.social
Fired. Investigated. Silenced. Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Donald Trump — from federal workers and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. It’s the most comprehensive accounting yet of his campaign of payback.
Trump’s campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting
A Reuters investigation documents at least 470 acts of retribution under Trump’s leadership.
reut.rs
November 27, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
knowledgecrisis.bsky.social
📌 Save the Date!
Can we Asses Consciousness in AI Systems? A talk with Tobias Schlicht.
Wed 03.12.25 | Online at 16:00

📩 Email us at [email protected] for the zoom link!
Find out more at our events page: buff.ly/6OAsYji

#philsky #PhilEvent #knowledgecrisis #AIAndConsciousness
November 26, 2025 at 2:50 PM
pabloredux.bsky.social
And as featured in a The West Wing episode (sort of).
johngoldin.com John Goldin @johngoldin.com · 2d
As a comfortably well off retiree, this post is an eye opener. What kind of income does it take to ba full participant in society. And how bad the turbulence is if you’re near the boundary. www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-... @charlesgaba.com
Part 1: My Life Is a Lie
How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America
www.yesigiveafig.com
November 27, 2025 at 1:07 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
mandalee.bsky.social
I respect anyone who goes down a rabbit hole this hard 🫡
moudhy.bsky.social Moudhy Al-Rashid (she/her) @moudhy.bsky.social · 3d
I guess I now have to do a thread on shoes in ancient Mesopotamia in response to this (which happens to be from one of my favourite accounts).

I’m not an archaeologist, nor do I really know anything about shoes, but let’s go on this journey together.
dieworkwear.bsky.social derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 3d
can't believe this ancient mesopotamia shoe wearing ass said people need to dress up at the airport
November 26, 2025 at 8:23 PM
Reposted by Paul Harland
johnthejack.bsky.social
Letters in Times today
Text: Farage’s ‘banter’ Sir, It is baffling that Nigel Farage should complain that the complaints being made against him are political in nature (“Farage’s accuser rejects banter claim”, Nov 26). Of course they are. The people now speaking out made a judgment that for as long as Farage remained a marginal figure, the abuse they suffered in the past was a personal matter. Now that he apparently is close to gaining significant political power, they have decided to put their experiences in the public, and political, domain. This seems to me entirely logical and gives us all information on which to make our own (political) decision. Sarah Mulholland Goldsithney, Cornwall Text: Sir, Sixty-five years ago I was a boarder at Clifton College, where I attended Polacks House, which was the only boarding house for Jewish students at any public school in Britain. I was obliged to study German, which I hated, not least because I was the only Jewish boy in the class. On the last lesson of term I deliberately arrived late, and as I walked into class a boy whose name and appearance I remember perfectly shouted “Ach, the Jew boy, why are you so late?” This incident has stayed with me for life, mainly for the shame I felt at not having the courage to confront this bully and his sniggering mates. We should not imagine for one moment that boyhood recollections are not reliable and painful. They are. Richard Cyzer London W1
November 27, 2025 at 11:41 AM