An assortment of some very adorable hedgehogs from illuminated manuscripts, mostly dating from the 14th and 15th c.
Snails and rabbits get a lot of attention, but personally I love the hedgehog. Especially the ones with stuff on their spines. #medievodons#medieval#medievalart#bestiary
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
@nicholas_saunders Sure:
The essay #Totalitarianism was fisrt published in 1951 as the third volume of "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
In it, Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries. Further, Arendt states that, owing to the insertion of ideology into the apparatus of coercion, "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within". She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the genocide of European Jews, but merely a convenient proxy. That totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only.
Adapted from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism
@cian@cogsci
Just off the top of my head (speculation alert)
"1) assume we have a limited storage capacity so aren't good at raw memorisation"
Maybe everything gets encoded and stored, but we aren't so good at retrieval/recall of specific episodes.
Maybe that poor exact episodic retrieval is a consequence of generalisation at retrieval.
"2) even after learning something, we tend to forget details over time."
Assuming we store new episodic memories over time, the accumulation of new memories might make it harder to retrieve specific old episodes through a generalisation at retrieval mechanism. (Also, even if parts of old episodes were to randomly disappear over time, that wouldn't necessarily stop a generalisation at retrieval mechanism. A good generalisation mechanism should be able to cope with partial records of episodes.)
"Neither of these really apply to ANNs?"
Well, you could include weight decay in an ANN and there is the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting. However, I take the relevance of most current ANNs (feedforward, weight optimising networks) to cognitive concerns with a fairly large pinch of salt.
IMO the theoretical conceptual framework of most current ANNs doesn't make contact with cognitive concerns so you can't really ask these questions of them.
Hey Ya'll! I was thinking of hosting my own Mastodon Instance, but noticed that it's pretty big as in software, I'm looking for something a bit more light. I'm preferably looking for something that runs in docker, as I have that installed on my Linux book, Yes, I am using Linux as if I attempted to use Windows, MacOS I wouldn't have a great time.
Anyways, I was going to choose lemmy, but I think that's also heavy, not sure though!
GoToSocial is designed for small / single user instances. There’s more with similar goals like snac, seppo, pub, ktistec, tapir, shuttlecraft, activities.next, and microblog.pub, but I haven’t really looked into them so I’m not sure on the status of each. There’s a nice list of activitypub software at delightful fediverse apps if you want to look at more options.
What I'm really trying to puzzle out is how these texts compare to older and still widely available Armenian works like Grigor of Narek's Book of Lamentations (Մատեան ողբերգութեան, c. 1000 CE). Initially, I thought the European works would be very different from the #Armenian ones, having been produced in a different cultural context. But I'm finding now that they're more similar than I'd assumed—at least, in the ways that would have been noticeable to the average Armenian reader around 1700. 9/
With the biography done, I'm now writing about Hohannēs's translation of Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. It's been so interesting to read about how popular of a book this has been all over the world over the past 500 years. I've found that it's an anthology, really, the overall title being the incipit of the title of chapter 1: "De imitatione Christi et contemptu omnium vanitatum mundi." A more descriptive title would be "A Manual in Humility for Monastics." 12/?
Although Imitation was written in a totally different context (a European monastery in the 15th century), it's not as different from something like Grigor Narekatsi's Book of Lamentations (Մատեան ողբերգութեան) as I'd thought. They're both very humble and humbling works. They're quite complimentary, and, for that reason, they can't be categorized as simply Apstolic versus Catholic within an Ottoman-Armenian context—which is how I was thinking of them initially. 13/? @bookhistodons
@CoinOfNote@histodons@numismatics I’m going to guess Ukraine or the Soviet Union. Seems like a communist idea to put factories and plows on your coins.
@curmudgeonaf@histodons@numismatics
Definitely the right thinking there! You'd find factories, and plows, all over the world of course, but there are some places much more likely to feature that imagery on their coins.
@dogzilla@paninid I just read "The Pursuit of Happiness" by J. Rosen, which had this fun fact about Jefferson: His great fear was that god is a just god and would require recompense from Jefferson for his hypocritical refusal to give up his lifestyle and the enslaved humans he needed to maintain it.
Thank YOU for letting me know you joined the Knowledge Commons instance as a result of my above report on it. They -- @hello -- might also be glad to know this.
Speaking of your mission of films for social activism, through our family friend in Tokyo, I happened to encounter such a group based in NYC led by a Chinese-American woman, with collaborators in Canada and here in Japan. I reviewed their most recent documentary -- available free at https://hi-lo.tv/Our-Work -- on professional photography of Japan's hostess bars, as explained at https://hcommons.social/@SteveMcCarty/112621109879323004
Being a career academic, it was my first foray into a film review or that kind of content, but it all goes toward my challenge as a Japanologist of explaining this inscrutable culture (for once a stereotype is an understatement!). If you happen to contact Hi Lo TV, please give them my regards.