Thursday, 27 August 2026

Light

 August 27 Word of the Day: Light

 

Rooftops arrayed at daybreak. Windows squared with new. Streets sometime were wetter. Light through garden railings. Faces washed and dry. Cloud very much whiter. Car sills winding up. City immersed in colour. Twinkle of backlane urine. Dogtag shines in fur. Brooch draws a line. Tireless reflections of watchface. Sunlight full against bookspines. Mouse twitches screen glow. Pages open for attention. Afternoon light slow bend. Faces watching the crossings. Flow shimmering under bridges. Light behind each blossom. Hair soft in sun. Home of finding switches. Wineglass curve at rim. Same fine cutlery look. Shafts inside flower vase. Tiny moon standing-lamp off.

 

 

Wednesday, 26 August 2026

Sentience

 August 26 Word of the Day: Sentience

 


In today’s class we learn about sentience structure. Sentience structure is how all the parts of sentience fit together. If you want more advanced and interesting sentience, you first have to understand how sentience structure works. Sentience structure is the order of all the parts of sentience: subject, predicate, objects, phrases, punctuation. They combine, they modify. Emotion comes into play, subjective states are applicable: dejects, predilections, abjects, phases, punctuality. Sentience requires at least a verb and a subject, though some musicologists dispute this. Cosmologists are tight-lipped. The same applies if you stand on your head or go for a long trip somewhere you have never been before. There is present continuous, auxiliaries, exceptions and imperatives. Imperative sentience is sometimes all you need at stressful moments or when in doubt. Stop! a single word completes sentience, at least theoretically. The verb is stop, and no subject is necessary because it’s a command. Life goes on, with or without this imperative to stop. (Some say stop is anathema in sentience.) Sometimes sentience adds objects, which are nouns that also participate in the action. Examples abound, when they can be put into words. Sentience may be direct or indirect. Verbs govern subjects, or vice versa, ditto direct objects and indirect objects, though some of those are completely ungovernable. Indirects may receive directs. Indirect objects come between the verb and direct object, leading to some awkward silences. This is harder to tell in early manuscripts with period punctuation, wingdings, daggers, and romantic outbursts. Aside from knowing the parts of sentience, you also have to follow the rules. In case you forget, here’s a quick list. Capitalize the first letter of the first word in any sentience. End sentience with a full-stop, question or exclamation mark, exclamation point, quote marks, or curlicues for all anyone cares. It’s crucial to understand how clauses work. Sometimes a clause is a complete sentience on its own. It is not always asking about your own well-being. Subordinating conjunctions need to be memorised, while you must be on guard for insubordinate clauses. To recap, there are basically four different types of sentience structure: simple, compound, complex, compound-complex. Your homework is to write a 500-word essay on common insubordinate clauses in everyday life. Tomorrow’s class will look at the relationship between independence and subordination, with special attention to auxiliaries. If you are not feeling top-of-the-morning ask your doctor for the day off.

Tuesday, 25 August 2026

Mania

 August 25 Word of the Day: Mania

 

Comment on Eureka Street this week, in response to the article ‘To build Claude, Anthropic needed to destroy millions of books’: “Scanning books for digital purposes has been a mania of publishers and even librarians for some decades now. This latest manifestation of the mania is directly related to the unquestioned attitude that readers have a right to read the text (any text) in every available format. Claiming though that this wholesale, indiscriminate ripping off of prime text is somehow creating a Borgesian library of all books is a pretense, a front for making money and controlling who gets access to this library of all libraries, while feeding a mindless amanuensis. Be assured, it will not be a free public library. In fact, there is no real interest in libraries at all to judge by the practices now underway: wilful indifference to authorship, physical destruction of the original books, placing silos for manipulative purposes, &c. This becomes even more serious for books pre-ISBN (i.e. 1968), where the only way we can be sure the original is the original is by reading it in a genuine library. Some of the main reasons for rare books libraries are precisely to salvage books from permanent loss, to confirm that an author really said what they said, to authenticate literature and publications against fradulence, to provide the researcher with the genuine article. Scanning itself is a dodgy business, as anyone knows who orders print-on-demand post-Gutenberg rarities. Scans flatten the text, magnify the blots and alter lettering by their very nature. To scan a book and throw away the print original is complete stupidity, a sin against the makers of the words and of collective memory.”

 

Link to the original article: https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/to-build-claude-anthropic-needed-to-destroy-millions-of-books