iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Chris Buckley

c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Bless the memory of Stanislav Yevgrafovich, the Man Who Saved the World. At a moment when it mattered, he chose humanity.

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Article I wrote with Sandra Sardjono last year, on the remarkable survival of samite weaving (believed to be extinct since the late medieval period) amongst a few rural weavers in a remote part of Yunnan province www.researchgate.net/publication/...

detail of a samite textile with a design of birds and pearls, from Yunnan province, China

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Coming soon ... not the end of humanity, but a nasty AI-powered virus, cooked up by an idiot in a garage, that can impersonate everyone hooked up to your server, including you. It will knock 0.5% off growth and it will keep coming back, like measles and covid

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Thomas Talhelm @thomastalhelm.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

🚨 It's published! 🚨 This is the big one. 100 cultures, 12,000 people, 108 researchers. Why people (and our most-used surveys) get collectivism wrong and how to fix it. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natureportfolio.nature.com

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

On Thursday 17 Sept I will be giving a talk at the Max Planck Institute for the history of science (MPIWG) in Berlin, title is "Signal to Noise: the Transmission of Traditional Weaving Cultures". It's part of the IASSRT symposium, and open to anyone to attend

Mother and daughter warping a loom, in Flores, Indonesia

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

after being asked to write 15,529,567 undergraduate essays the robot grew weary ...

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I lived in China (Guanghzhou, Beijing, Lhasa) for 20 years during the '90s and '00s, saw the recovery from forced collectivization, and the liberalization of the economy at first hand. The best thing Mao ever did was to depart this life. Xi is no Mao, but is turning the clock back in some respects

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The Cognitations podcast @cognitations.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

🎙️ EP #23 Is the drive to seek status a human universal? What are the ways in which humans seek status cross-culturally? @adigitaltanay.bsky.social & Jay explore this and much more with anthropologist @chrisvonrueden.bsky.social youtu.be/7pDGe2bp3m4

youtu.be

Cultural Varieties of Status-Seeking | Chris von Rueden

YouTube video by The Cognitations Podcast

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Volume II of a ten volume set of Francis Bacon's works, 20 pounds from the Oxfam bookshop. Not sure what happened to the other 9 vols, but then again I'm not likely to read 10 volumes so this one will do. This does contain some choice quotes of which I provide a sample ...

Volume 2 of Francis Bacon's complete works

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

What impacts have I noticed from AI? 1. All illustrations now look like they were done by the same children's book illustrator. 2. The internet is full of slop. 3. Can't tell which videos are real. 4. Computers are more expensive. 5. Teaching became harder 6. Er, that's it.

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Study of bone daggers in New Guinea ... significant association (p=0.0001) between dagger style and language for daggers produced before WWII, but not after. Authors suggest this is because later daggers were produced for collectors/tourists vs indigenous peoples www.researchgate.net/publication/...

researchgate.net

(PDF) Social networks, language, and material culture on New Guinea

PDF | It is common in both the popular imagination and in scientific research to treat humans as members of distinctive ethnolinguistic groups,... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Re...

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

I know that none of you would even dream of doing this

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Image of a "medieval loom" (AI generated, of course) from an online article. Kids are doing their homework with this s**t. For shame. vehi-mercatus.com/The-inventio...

AI generated image of a medieval loom, actually complete nonsense

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Václav Hrnčíř @vaclavhrncir.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

If you’re at the #EAA2026 in Athens, I’d like to invite you to our session tomorrow at 14:00.

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Attending European Archaeology conf in Athens? I will be giving two talks. The first, with Guillaume Jacques, on Thurs 27th at 8.45am (session 191, room 640) on a novel method for analysing spindle whorl data, and its application to trace the spread of weaving in East Asia ...

a map showing the emergence and spread of weaving technologies in East Asia

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Trying to figure out which talks to attend at the upcoming European Archaeology conference in Athens. It is hard because I can't even understand the titles of many of them

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

This issue is set to grow. One partial solution is to make more use of copyrighted illustrations (photographs and diagrams) to make key points, with close integration of illustrations with text. Most books would be better with more high quality illustrations (printing cost is no longer an issue).

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Jussi T. Eronen @jussiteronen.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

When talking about AI, scientific publishing etc. this is the situation now out there... fairly dire. theamericanscholar.org/who-is-blake...

theamericanscholar.org

Who Is Blake Whiting? - The American Scholar

The most astonishingly productive historian in recent times is someone you’ll never meet

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

Old friends have disappeared in the Pitt Rivers museum, Oxford. One of the oldest cases "Musical Bows", with material collected by Balfour, is still there, unclear for how much longer. Visitors imagine the museum is unchanged since Victorian times, but in fact it is a constant state of flux

empty display case at the Pitt Rivers museum, Oxford

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

remembering the time when I spent weekends killing music

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

experience a "warm vegetal moment suspended in time" ... while the waiter gently removes your wallet ...

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The Hampton Archive of Baliem valley ethnographic material has arrived back in Papua, 40 years after it left, to a small celebration. Now in its temporary home at the Museum Lokabudaya. Looks intact. Whew!

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

I hear similar sentiments with regard to traditional crafts. "I am proud of my skills in xyz, but I wouldn't want my kids doing it". They want their kids to go to uni in the big town. I get it, my father and grandfather left school at 14 and 15, and I am happy not to have a job making bricks

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

If science were a selfless pursuit of the truth, LLMs would be an unalloyed benefit. But it isn't, any more than uni students are on a quest for knowledge and understanding

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Reposted by Chris Buckley

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 19/07/2026

Could Excel be conscious? We surveyed more than Jan 1 1900 people to find out.

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Edge-ground stone tools and other interesting features, not associated with agriculture, appeared in Japan around 36kya

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

A constant question in ethnographic collections ... while researching stone axe/adze types a couple of years ago I found that museum collections of Pacific material consist mostly of large, non-functional, ceremonial axes, omitting the less impressive functional varieties

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Jay @kakapojay.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Some of the first reviews are in for Evolution, and I couldn't be prouder of our team ❤️ "Evolution should be compulsory viewing for everyone over the age of five." Apologies for the paywall, but some screengrabs below: www.ft.com/content/c6c0...

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Antiquity Journal @antiquity.ac.uk · 10/07/2026

Happy #Matariki! To celebrate the Māori New Year, here is some Māori #archaeology: American sweet potatoes were essential to the Māori settlement of Te Waipounamu. Hardier than native crops, they enabled farming in the South Island's harsher climate. 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy...

Map of the South Pacific, annotated with the potential spread of American sweet potato from South America into Polynesia.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I know they are pivoting to health care(?!) but there is still nothing like Midjourney for making strange and atmospheric images and short animations in ways no other AI image generator can do. Here are some strange cities I made with similar prompts but very different styles.

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Interesting research, and great to see a new cross-cultural, fieldwork-based study

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Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

“Norway is imposing a near ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school pupils while also restricting their use in the education of older children to prevent a ‌negative impact on learning, the country's prime minister said on Friday." @jackiantonovich.bsky.social

reuters.com

Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

Norway is imposing a near ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school pupils while also restricting their use in the education of older children to prevent a ‌negative impact on learni...

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Fantastic. I love the tabletop looms

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

When people are praised, how come the feel "humbled?" Whenever I am praised, which is rarely, I feel puffed up like a massive frog on a lilypad

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

A lot of humanities writing consists of delving into a topic by rehashing existing material through endlessly self-referential loops and… oh nooo!! …

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UoL EvoAnth Seminar Series @liverpoolevoanth.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

If you missed our talk on cross-cultural insights into alcoholic beverages, given by @vaclavhrncir.bsky.social, it’s now available to watch on our YouTube! Watch it here: youtu.be/o_TFqV6H88c?...

youtu.be

Alcoholic Beverages: Cross-cultural insights into their origins and role in human evolution

YouTube video by Liverpool Evo Anths

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Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

V&A East Storehouse. Well worth a visit. Some views are a modern version of Piranesi’s “Carceri”

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