Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/08/2026Fine long tradition of payment by dairy product academic.oup.com/book/2756/ch...academic.oup.comTracing the Late Viking Age and Medieval Butter Economy: The View from Quoygrew, OrkneyAbstract. Easily preserved and high in energy, butter was a reliable foodstuff during the medieval period for northerners vulnerable to short growing seaso 020
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 16/06/2026The sewage treatment plant near Melbourne, Australia is one of the best birding sites in the country. Orange bellied parrots! 070
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 12/06/2026"Hey chatgpt, what would be the impacts on American democracy and society of: - mandatory voting - tripling the size of the house of reps - non-partisan redistricting - increasing the number of states to 60 with roughly equal population" 010
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 19/04/2026www.reddit.com/r/agedlikewi...reddit.comFrom the agedlikewine community on Reddit: This 1987 Far Side comic by Gary Larson aged like wine...Explore this post and more from the agedlikewine community 020
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 02/04/2026fatmouse.orgfatmouse.orgTHE DOMAIN OF THE FATMOUSE - UNOFFICIAL MIRROR 010
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 03/11/2025A movie you’ve seen more than 7 times with a gif.media.tenor.coma man is sitting at a table with a plate of food on itALT: a man is sitting at a table with a plate of food on it 020
Reposted by Ian PollockPitt Rivers Museum @pittriversmuseum.bsky.social · 18/09/2025The Clothworkers Textile Project have been looking at two 'Pua Kumbu' textiles from Sarawak. Collected a century apart in 1908 & 2019, they were made using a combination of ikat dyeing and backstrap loom weaving, a technique unique in its use of fibres and dyes endemic to the jungles of Borneo. 0398
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/09/2025I'm writing a study of a social/economic system that makes a better future by storing wealth in relationships. Soon I'll start a new job leading human-centered research to make aged care in Australia safer and better. 020
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 01/09/2025Oh wow... when it spreads to Ruteng and Waingapu we'll know we've really got something 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 31/08/2025Looks like NTT has been spared DPRD fires so far...? 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 26/08/2025"Hey you know that bit in the Name of the Rose where he talks about how great lists are?!" 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 03/08/2025Start your sunday with thisyoutube.comHigh-pitched voice theory - Neanderthal - BBC scienceYouTube video by BBC Studios 011
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 29/07/2025I just came within a hair's breadth of telling my actual son to "measure once cut twice" @dungeonsanddads.bsky.social 020
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 28/07/2025Hello, I'm an anthropologist in a film. I am grossly appropriative and condescendingly academic, and I have a moral relativism the audience finds disgusting. The heroes will see my support for my community as both foolish and traitorous. 050
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 27/07/2025I once saw a sign like this at ANU, something like, "Do not remove the stack of paper below this sign: it is blocking an air vent with a possum inside." 1130
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025What will you take from the last three days that you didn't have before? What has surprised or struck you? What do you want to keep thinking about? #AusSTS25 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Anyone who was part of the conference, it'd be great to see your thoughts in the replies ⬇️ #AusSTS25 110
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025To really really close, @carinatruyts.bsky.social leads a reflection on the conference: I heard I saw I felt I made #AusSTS25 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025(There's some old French intellectual history and theory in here that I'm sure plenty of people in this room are familiar with, but I'm not) 010
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025We cannot control ghosts. We can only let them get on with their work. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Some theorists want to pathologize noise. Others see it as a valuable hauntology: noise as specter, interference, a disturbing tone, disorienting. A hauntology disturbs an ontology, overthrows a hegemony. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Closing us out, it's @wombatscholar.bsky.social (University of Sydney), with "noise as an attention ecology, or hauntology" #AusSTS25 210
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Public health can benefit from taking multiple ways of knowing on board: health humanities, ecological science. Help to attune to the noise, to the extending set of relations between drugs, bodies, waters, politics, inequalities, ecologies. #AusSTS25 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025The potential for drug harm is a transferable concept. Can we attribute addiction and withdrawal to fish? Hyper-aggressive meth-gators? Coke-eels? #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Tons of research have established that harm from drug use is socially mediated. Wastewater testing, with the social elements removed, can be a proxy for use, but not for harm. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Testing wastewater promises a non-invasive, accurate, real-time stream of evidence about drug use, about which other kinds of evidence are noisy. In the water, the signal is meant to be clean: drug use, separated from bodies and social practices. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025In wastewater epidemiology, we can see how human activities, like drug use, entangle much more than human worlds. It's ecological, an environmental problem. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025The value and risks posed by feces are now on everybody's minds. #AusSTS25 www.wiley.com/en-ae/Specta...wiley.comSpectacles of Waste<p>The modern bathroom is an ingenious compilation of locked doors, smooth porcelain, 4-ply tissue and antibacterial hand soap, but despite this miracle of indoor plumbing, we still can’t bear t... 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Checking wastewater for evidence of drug use -- both medical and recreational/illegal -- is now widespread around the world. It's a technoscientific solution that aims to clean up the mess and eliminate noise. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Up next, Kari Lancaster (University of Bath) with "Shitty signals: wastewater epidemiology, addicted fish, and an ecological wrong-turn." Some wild entanglements here. #AusSTS25 120
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Now everyone can be a quantified selfer, but the use of this data is moribund. It still takes real medical expertise to make any sense of the data. Meanwhile it's being financialized by the insurance industry, and turned to biopower by RFK Jr. and MAHA. It's the opposite of emancipatory. #AusSTS25 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025From a niche, to the world. In 2014, Apple launched the Health app; in 2015, the Apple Watch. Now self-measurement is a data practice to which there seems to be no alternative. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Ok then: so the recent "quantified self" movement: a NoCal, tech-savvy group of people measuring everything about themselves, learning from their own data and doing self-experiments, "decoding" themselves in a way they felt the medical establishment couldn't or wouldn't. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Foucault's intervention is to say, "you're both wrong:" neither patient nor illness is sending a message. The body is noise, and the doctor attends to that noise, seeking elements of a message. No single approach will "informatize" all that noise. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025The essay was part of a public debate at the time about how patients should be diagnosed, around patient-centered or illness-centered approaches. Is a "message" from a patient the signal? Or is it noise, corrupting the true signal sent by illness? Can you take patients at their word? #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Now it's Christopher O’Neill (Deakin University), as part of the closing plenary panel, which starts from Foucault's 1966 essay, "message or noise?" #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025The system depends on every actor's willingness to share data -- when data sharing creates vulnerabilities. #AusSTS25 000
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Real traceability is enabled as more and more participants contribute their own data. It's not easy to convince everyone to take part. What's the added value for farmers/harvesters/processors etc? How to overcome infrastructure barriers in places like the highlands of Ethiopia? #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025(I found the mere presence of attachments a sign of robustness, enough that I didn't feel the need to open any of them. Their presence alone was reassuring. My mistake.) #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Traceability pages are littered with attachments, which farmers are required to upload and link to the blockchain. You can imagine how farmers react to this requirement! #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Are these signals real? I followed a QR code to a set of blank pages. Was it a technical glitch, an oversight? In any case it shaped my experience of tracing and trust. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Bar codes and QR codes are key tools to help "follow the thing," allowing consumers to access traceability information -- to a point. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025The coffee aisle at the supermarket is overflowing with brands, telling all kinds of stories and making all kinds of claims. The shelf is the point of contact between product, information, and consumer. #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Finally we have "Filtering Sustainability Signals: Navigating Noise in the Coffee Industry," by Kestity Pringgoharjono (UTS) #AusSTS25 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Sam Altman's statement, "we now have magic intelligence in the cloud," also evokes deadly drones patrolling the sky. #AusSTS25 010
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025Yes, an artist can write about something hardcore like war! #AusSTS25 link.springer.com/article/10.1...link.springer.comLight-speed, contemporary war, and Australia’s national defence strategic review - Digital WarIn our hyperconnected contemporary world, military and civilian digital and cyber technologies rely upon uncontested and uncongested access to frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). This r... 100
Ian Pollock @ianfpollock.bsky.social · 11/07/2025The EMS environment is described as a "battlespace," even though all kinds of non-military activities happen there. #AusSTS25 100