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ray-car.bsky.social

@ray-car.bsky.social
191 followers 361 following 308 posts
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Greg Jenner (Historian) @gregjenner.bsky.social · 6h
A cheery reminder you can now watch visualised editions of You’re Dead To Me on YouTube outside the UK (and on BBC iPlayer in the UK) This episode on the history of underwear was one of my all-time faves, with amazing guests @vicmmic.bsky.social & Prof Serena Dyer youtu.be/T5X4LV46ZVA?...
youtu.be
What People Wore BEFORE Underwear Existed | You're Dead To Me
YouTube video by BBC Podcasts
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Earth.com @earthdotcom.bsky.social · 9h
A nearly intact medieval wax notebook found in Germany still bears readable Latin notes, offering a rare glimpse into the daily life of a wealthy 13th- or 14th-century merchant.
earth.com
A 700-year-old notebook was found at the bottom of a medieval latrine, now scientists have figured out how to read it
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Simon @malkydungeon.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
This amazing find inspired me to make this wee illustration, I found it very evocative to imagine the early medieval churchyard at Govan could be a hive of activity and craft workers. Not just stone carving but jewellery as well
an illustration of a woman in early medieval clothing working on a piece of shale jewellery, in the top right corner is an enlarged depiction of the piece she is working on- a lump of shale being worked with a hole in the centre perhaps in the process of making a ring
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God @thegodshow.com · 6h
Bless this woman for DESTROYING this Christian debate bro.
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manewt.bsky.social @manewt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Friend who works at meta: “Do not use the muse agent, it’s like inviting a Vampire inside”
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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 10h
I had to use it recently for an academic thing (don't yell at me, it was part of a grant management system and I had no choice), it was fucking horrid and a total waste of my time and made me hate it even MORE.
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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 10h
I've never done cocaine or meth, and yet, here I am. Good fucking riddance.
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Caroline Lucas @carolinelucas.bsky.social · 12h
So let’s see practical steps to rejoin asap. As global insecurity grows, anything less simply won’t do
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Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 11h
Burnham speech: An astonishing moment of radicalism and commitment iandunt.substack.com/p/burnham-sp...
iandunt.substack.com
Burnham speech: An astonishing moment of radicalism and commitment
It’s easy to be cynical, but it would be false. Something extraordinary is happening here.
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Rebecca Spang @rlspang.bsky.social · 11h
The "exceptionally deadly" 24 hours (my wedding anniversary and Bastille Day; UGH) includes the shooting in Biddeford, Maine. I was so preoccupied by that murder, I missed the story of the Mexican tourist who was chased by ICE, ran into traffic, and was killed. These killers must be held to account.
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Joschka Meier @josserme.bsky.social · 10h
I remember the handwringing in Switzerland after the pandemic started about potential privacy perils & security concerns regarding online/hybrid-teaching & video chat in general. Like not to talk about certain topics on Zoom because that'd be too risky. But GenAI? Wahey, anything goes apparently.
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 14h
I maybe don't mind us giving commands in natural language, but I don't think that an AI should ever be allowed to answer in a voice that emulates a human, because it's *not*, and it doesn't have the depth and the accountability that goes with a human. It's too seductive, and too easily misleading
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 14h
AI should stay away from writing, should never be allowed to take responsibility and should never provide judgements. Used with care, it can be useful for search, data analysis and data organisation. Words matter. Our society will be poorer if we weaken words by letting machines corrupt them. 2/3
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 14h
I find it hard to summarise my opinions on "AI" (a term I really dislike, because it refers to a huge number of technologies that are very different in capability, quality, ambition and design), but I think I'm coming round to something like this: [1/3]
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 12h
🗃️ I have never seen these highlighted before
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Oisín McGann @oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 16h
That, presumably, is the entire point of GDPR?
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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 17h
"Its now becone OK to say Brexit has been an economic disaster. Better late than never" says ex-Cabinet minister Hilary Benn. It brought a lot of poison to politics & to the relationship, but a lot of that has "drained" & closer trade deal is of mutual interest, he says @policyatkings.bsky.social
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Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 21h
Reform want to indoctrinate our children. Freedom of (and from) belief is a human right. humanists.uk/2026/09/10/s...
humanists.uk
Reform UK Braverman promises 'consequences' if pupils don't sing hymns
Reform UK has said schools will face ‘consequences’ if they fail to make pupils regularly sing hymns and the national anthem under a Reform government. The party’s education spokesperson, Suella Brave...
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Paul Blinkhorn @paulblinkhorn.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Very, very, very old beer. Maybe. It was ritual, obvs, because people wouldn't have made it just because getting good and drunk is enormous fun... 😎
arkeonews.net
Europe’s Earliest Beer? 6,500-Year-Old Malt Found at Solnitsata | Arkeonews
Archaeologists at Solnitsata in Bulgaria found 6,500-year-old germinated emmer wheat, evidence that may point to some of Europe’s earliest beer production.
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Dr Julia Grace Patterson @jujuliagrace.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Let’s hope so!! Link to article: www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/202... jujuliagrace.substack.com
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Vanda Wilcox @vandawilcox.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I keep needing to relearn that thing about urgent & unimportant vs non-urgent & very important Have spent nearly hours doing urgent but largely unimportant things and now my brain hurts and I can't write anything even though the book is the most important thing. Ugh.
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Alan Lester @alanlester.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Oh the dilemma this poses for right wing culture warriors! Condemn it as an example of snowflake liberal cancel culture or celebrate it for cancelling the British slavery episode? BBC removes Horrible Histories episode featuring slavery and child labour www.thetimes.com/article/8146...
thetimes.com
BBC removes Horrible Histories episode featuring slavery and child labour
The broadcaster’s decision to remove one episode and edit others to meets its editorial guidelines for children’s programmes has been criticised as ‘insane’
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Anti-Reform @antireform.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"Someone from Reform & their shrill harridan who live as tax free exiles in Dubai have been entertained by the wife of a former minister of state of a country hostile to the UK and he failed to declare it to Parliament he's elected to sit in? You couldn’t make this up" via We loathe Reform UK Ltd
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Butser Ancient Farm @butserancientfarm.co.uk · 28/09/2026
WIN 4 TICKETS TO EQUINOX 2027! 🎉 Want to join us at Equinox next year? We’re giving one lucky winner 4 tickets to Equinox 2027! 🔥 1. Watch our Equinox 2024 highlights video 2. Subscribe to our channel 3. Comment telling us what looks like the best part! Good luck! ✨ youtu.be/Jeb6-3rTHds?...
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Jessica Price @delafina777.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
“It’s not ALL men.” 32,000 men in an Italian Facebook group devoted to drugging your wife and taking nonconsensual explicit photos of her and sharing them. It didn’t get shut down until a woman discovered and exposed it. www.bbc.com/news/article...
bbc.com
Anger in Italy over non-consensual photos of women shared online
The My Wife Facebook group had 32,000 members before it was shut down for violating adult sexual exploitation policies.
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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 28/09/2026
If you want to help free someone from fear and isolation cause by leaving a high-control religion, please donate generously today. You can help change someone's life. humanists.uk/donate/actio...
Change someone's life right now. Donate and help us reach someone in distress.
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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 28/09/2026
For so many people, we are that lifeline. We train the police, NHS staff, and social services to recognise the signs of religious coercive control. We run a helpline. And we bring people together to find community and support, often for the first time outside their religious group.
Your family. Your friends. Your home. The people you have known all your life. Donate today humanists.uk/faithtofaithless2026
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Humanists UK @humanists.uk · 28/09/2026
No one should live in fear for wanting to be free of dogmatic control. No one should lose their children, be shunned by those they love, or find themselves with no home, no support, and no one to turn to. Leaving one of these groups can mean losing everything. humanists.uk/donate/actio...
Leaving a coercive religious community can mean losing everything.
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Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It’s a wrap! Goodbye Sri Lanka - what a wonderful country - with so many rich layers of history. Watch out for Ancient Sri Lanka by Train on @channel4.bsky.social in the New Year!
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Marc Morris @marcmorris.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
#OnThisDay 1066 William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey. I recently discovered this picture, which looks contemporary. Anyone know the source?
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🏺 The #SecretsOfTheIce project is of course only possible thanks to the #ClimateCrisis, but it has revealed extraordinary diversity of ancient projectile tech: arrows made from ground slate, mussel shell, and bindings not just of sinew but also birch bark secretsoftheice.com/news/2026/09...
Photo of a hand holding a finely ground, long slate arrow head still hafted on its shaft tip. Background is a mountain ice and rock patch.Photo of an arrow shaft tip, showing sinew and dark bark wrapped around it. Caption:
"Rear section of an arrow shaft. It has been reinforced with animal sinew and birch bark around the nock. Approximately 3,600 years old. Photo. Frys film, Innlandet County Municipality, Secrets of The Ice."Photo of a partly fragmented arrow tip, against gritty muddy ground.. Caption:
"Arrowhead made from freshwater mussel shell. The arrowhead is fragile and has begun to split. Approximately 3,600 years old. Photo. Frys film, Innlandet County Municipality, Secrets of The Ice."
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
🏺 🗃️ Archaeologists/Historians - please shoot me your favourite examples & sources on ancient named animals, the older the better! Prefer farm animals but others also welcome 🐏 🐂 🐖 🫏... 🐕 #histsky (I already have Bramati 2025, & Alivernini & Bramanti 2023)
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Butser Ancient Farm @butserancientfarm.co.uk · 28/09/2026
We’ve loved reading these letters from the children at Cheriton Primary School, hearing about their favourite parts of Butser and what they discovered while they were here. We’re taking school trip bookings for 2027, dates go quick! More on our website - www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/learning/sch...
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Greg Jenner (Historian) @gregjenner.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This piece by @djbduncan.bsky.social is such delightful writing, like a gift wrapped in many layers of pretty paper (please forgive the tea stains, he didn’t provide those)
A friend and decided to start
a band. We needed a drummer so we tried out a few, but the one we really liked told us that she was also auditioning for a different band. They were pirate-themed.
She played with us a few more times before announcing that she had resolved to commit to the pirates. We put on a compelled valour, but it was to no avail. She never came back.
I was reminded of my antipathy to pirates this month when I saw a new black flag on the horizon: another author called Dennis Duncan. A few years ago I wrote a history book about book indexes. One of the things that happens when you bring out a book is that you are subjected to email spam from the service industry that exists just outside the publishing mainstream and feeds on the struggling and the selt-published. For example, the reader engagement' company, a kind of search engine optimisation for books, which pledges to bring your work the 'sustainable, meaningful visibility' it deserves. I was about to delete one of these messages when I noticed the title of the book they were offering to promote: Gasparilla and the Winds of Fortune. Odd, I thought. Not one of mine. Not even close. But a quick Google search revealed how the mistake must have occurred: Gasparilla is a real book, and its author is called Dennis Duncan. Another click took me to the cover illustration - a young man in tricorn hat and ruffled shirt - and that old sense of wounded outrage started up again. Gasparilla his best work. is a pirate novel.

Putting aside my previous
run-in with usurping pirates, I'm inclined to feel delighted about the whole thing. How funny to have a literary double, especially one whose work is so different - wilder, sexier, odder - from my own. A Mr Hyde to my Dr Jekyll. Perhaps I should lean into it. My editor at the Washington Post - before they scrapped their Books section - was called Nora Krug, a name she shared with a German graphic novelist who lived in New York. After the latter's Heimat won a Natio…
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It's not just that we had two wasted years under Keir Starmer - years in which, with a vast majority and quite a lot of goodwill - he could have turned this country around. On crucial issues, we had two years of spiralling backwards, towards a very dark place. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
theguardian.com
Ed Miliband to acknowledge Labour’s former stance on Palestine fell short
Foreign secretary will tell party’s conference ‘we are not here to accept the status quo but to change it’
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Alistair Coleman @alistaircoleman.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
No she’s not.
TLS: Mary Beard on the Bayeux Tapestry.
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Scottish Greens @scottishgreens.org · 27/09/2026
This march was designed to spread tensions and hatred, and to intimidate the community and families who live there. Scotland should not be providing policing resources for sectarian events like this that are called to inflame tensions.
The National. Questions over Police Scotland officers sent to Orange Order walk. Scottish Greens are seeking clarity over the role of Police Scotland officers and demanding a review of the agreement that enabled their deployment.
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Defend Our Juries @defendourjuries.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
BREAKING: 94 year old Jewish human rights barrister, Margaret Owen arrested under the Terrorism Act outside Andy Burnham’s Labour Party conference. UK taxpayers are funding these arrests while masked men terrorise the streets in coastal towns. Lift The Ban on Palestine Action.
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Paul Bernal @paulbernal.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Personally, I’d rather have healthy kids than mollycoddled millionaires
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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Well ok I saw it and I felt inspired
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Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Just looking up lego models today for no reason
static.klipy.com
Lego Guillatene Beheading
Alt: Lego Guillotine Beheading
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10k com K 🚂 @sratoz.com.br · 27/09/2026
Doggerland. A treasure trove of information lies beneath the dark North Sea waters. The story in the reply to the posting below is RIVETING cc @w0porquinho.bsky.social @claramadrigano.bsky.social
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10k com K 🚂 @sratoz.com.br · 27/09/2026
I just read this whole article and it is AMAZING. Mind-boggling. I have known of Doggerland for a while now, but this text makes it COME TO LIFE. I read it lightning-fast, it is that riveting
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america.is.not.free @antifapatriot.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
😅😅🔥🇨🇦 #Canada #LakeOntario
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B.S.W. Barootes @barootes.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
And yet I was only allowed to access a 1955 B.Litt. thesis, the only lengthy study on Robert Braybrooke, in person and take notes (no photos). I had to sign a register of those who had ever accessed the thesis.
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TheBossRoss 🧶 @thebossross.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
"Meta's Creep Al Glasses" Cartoon: Aadvik Singh (India)
Mark Zuckerberg on a stage in front of an attentive audience presenting his "All new Meta AI glasses". 

He says: "Do women also scream 'PERVERT!' anytime you stare at them? Don't let that stop you. Record them hassle-free & become an active predator today."
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Working Class History @workingclasshistory.com · 27/09/2026
#OtD 27 Sep 1936 1000 uniformed fascist Blackshirts led by Oswald Mosley in Leeds, UK, were confronted by 30,000 anti-fascist locals who attacked them, pelted them with stones, hitting Mosley, and drowned out speeches by singing The Red Flag stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9965...
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Ancestral Enquiries - Tony Smith 🌳 @ancestralenq.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The 800 years of the Mersey ferries service, started by Benedictine Monks, who ran the first ferry service from Birkenhead to Liverpool in 1150 AD. 👇 BBC News - The 800-year history of the Mersey ferries - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
The 800-year history of the Mersey ferries
From monks to Gerry Marsden, we look at the 800-year history of the Mersey ferries.
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Joel Morris @gralefrit.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The whole point of humans as a sociable, tribal species is we should eject people like this, so they starve in the wilderness alone. There are consequences to sociopathic behaviour. Somehow the abstract idea of money has short circuited our basic evolutionary safeguards.
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Bit weird that increasing uptake of Chinese AI models, or indeed China's place in this sector, is not mentioned once here, especially as the FT reported on this aspect of AI geopolitics in July: www.ft.com/content/9c8f... Maybe interrogate big companies' claims as claims not facts?
ft.com
Big companies warn lack of ‘AI openness’ could hit investment in Europe
Multinationals evaluating countries’ approach to AI before making expansion plans, say executives
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