Dan O'Hara

@skeuomorphology
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literary history | philosophy of tech | EXTREME METAPHORS: Interviews with JG Ballard http://amazon.co.uk/dp/B007QOXKHI | VITAL SIGNALS http://amazon.co.uk/dp/1914953096/
danohara.co.ukhttp://danohara.co.uk/

UKHSA have BA.3.2 as dominant and over 50% of sequencing as of 3 weeks ago.

If this variant is indeed affecting children more, it may explain why GP rates for respiratory infections are remaining unusually high.

5/5

Some of the Scottish data is missing this week.

The only sign of higher levels is in South Ayrshire, but this is based on extremely low levels of testing.

4/5

The patches of higher positivity remain on Teeside, across Lancashire and Yorkshire, and around London.

The only area where there's a general trend upwards is around London: in Essex and Hertfordshire, Surrey and Sussex.

3/5

The clear exception is Worcestershire.

Looking at the amount of testing being done there, and knowing the numbers of patients in hospital, I think it's safe to say this is nearly all nosocomial now.

2/5

The PCR positivity map is out, national positivity has barely shifted at 2%, and the hotspots aren't shifting either.

Most of these are around or slightly over 10%.

https://jamestindall.info/skeuomorphology/ladb_covid/index.html

1/5

#COVID19 #covid #longCovid #uk

"Torazine was the most extreme magazine that has ever been published in Italy. Born in Rome in 1995 as an offshoot of the local rave scene and fueled by the most rigorous "chemical diet" of the time, for the next seven years it would infest the worst underground nightmares of distorted visions and degenerate accelerationisms, infecting with its "polychrome capsules of pop counterculture" an imagination which, at the turn of the millennium, even risked overflowing into the mainstream.
Covers in which Che Guevara's face overlapped with that of Charles Manson. Great reports on drugs, acid Marxism, unlikely conspiracies, possessed Barbies and deviant sex. Techno-comics drawn at 180 bpm. Articles praising the extinction of the human race that seem to be written by a sect of possessed Satanists. Bizarre cute incursions with perverse aftertaste. An aesthetic both seductive and repulsive, refined and repelling, imbued with the same spoiled colors as a carton of spoiled LSD.
It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Torazine in the history of Italian offline publishing: the last chapter of a saga inaugurated thirty years earlier by newspapers like Mondo Beat and then continued with publications like Re Nudo, Frigidaire and Decoder, with its mockingly necrophilic breath the Roman magazine represents the pyrotechnic conclusion of an era destined to be supplanted by the advent of online. At the same time, precisely because of its apocalyptic nature, Torazine was able to anticipate many of the aesthetics that still crowd the online underworld, from the disturbing hallucinations of weird/dream/traumacore to the most abrasive forms of dark web meme-aesthetics."
https://archive.org/search?query=torazine

And that amounts to far more than just 'poisoning the well' of knowledge.

It's a reshaping of the bloodstream to favour the poison.

Empson's poem, but quickened

If LLMs are going to fulfil the role that conventional media played in amplifying fraudulent science in the pre-AI era, they'll tighten the loop of circular citation that bad-faith actors exploit
What concerns me is that we're extremely poor at combatting that pre-AI genre of bad faith 'research', and scholars who cite such are themselves unwitting victims of fraud
We're not actually short of historical examples of journalists or grifters who imitate the forms of scholarship, publishing fraud that then is promoted in the media, with the untruths finally finding their way into actual scholarship