FFC art accusations

Nov. 10th, 2025 08:21 pm
[syndicated profile] grrm_feed

Posted by grrmminion

My name is Raya Golden and I manage the art direction and licensing development here at Fevre River working closely with GRRM as his schedule will allow. But I alone am responsible for approving all the licensed art that accompanies our SOI&F book driven materials.

Recently there have been accusations floating around that the Penguin Random House’s illustrated edition of A Feast For Crows was produced using AI generative art.

To our knowledge and as presented by the artist who completed the work in question there was no such programing used. While he is a digital multimedia artist and relies on digital programing to complete his work, he has expressed unequivocally that no AI was used, and we believe him.

SO The official word from our office is, of course, that we do not willingly work with A.I generative artists in any way shape or form.

THIS MESSAGE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MINIONS OF FEVRE RIVER

Burgess’s Fancy for Language.

Nov. 10th, 2025 07:57 pm
[syndicated profile] languagehat_feed

Posted by languagehat

We’ve discussed Anthony Burgess before (e.g., Burgess’s Slang), but I thought this bilious and detailed passage from the Roger Lewis biography was worth sharing:

Burgess’s idea of order, and his mental make-up, is signified by his fancy for the discipline and formality of grammar and linguistics. Language, in Burgess, creates the content. His information about his ancestors is divulged in terms of how they spoke and sounded, and by the Lancashire hotpot they ate: speaking and swallowing. And of course he can’t mention Manchester speech without having a go at the ‘centralizing linguistic culture’ of London and the south, which ironed out regional dialects – yet where did his own sonic boom come from? Elocution lessons? ‘We provincials have suffered in forcing ourselves to conform,’ he announced in 1987, writing from 44 rue Grimaldi, Monaco. One of Burgess’s biggest inadvertent jokes was to call a book Language Made Plain, because he makes it complicated, in my view. When he talks about substituting ‘an alveolar nasal for a velar one’ or of ‘palatizing his unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring. He can’t have friends or cronies at school – they have to be persons ‘true to the etymology khronios’; even as a hungry baby he was like the vociferously verbose Leonard Sachs, compère of The Good Old Days, the music-hall show broadcast from the City Varieties, Leeds. Instead of crying for more milk, it’s a question of ‘the lactal ducts never refilling fast enough’. With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites, one of her symptoms (a distension of the abdomen), is the Greek askos, a wineskin, and that one of her last acts had been to rebuke a Singapore nurse in fluent Mandarin Chinese, ‘astonishing me with a sleeping knowledge of the language I never knew she had’.

Clamour and confusion are concealed by language, and for Burgess living details become a literary process. He reminds me, therefore, less of any modern (or Modernist) artist, where the many-sidedness of existence is acknowledged and presented in a multitude of experimental ways, than of a late Victorian or Edwardian man of letters – his equivalent in painting being William Powell Frith, whose vast, thronging canvases of Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day or railway-station platforms and booking halls prompted Wilde to enquire innocently whether it was really all done by hand? Such, too, are Burgess’s modes of exaggeration – the bejewelled vocabulary, the polishings of his prose – the effect, though picturesque, is that the books are assembled by clockwork. His love of words is robotic.

Who the goddess of love is we well know (in Greek, aphrodiastikos means ‘lecherous’, aphrodiazein, ‘to copulate’). The god of language was Hermes (or ‘the rogue god Mercury’ as Burgess calls him), often represented in Classical statuary as a priapus. In many parts of Greece (Peloponnese, Argos, Megalopolis, Kyllene), he and Aphrodite were worshipped together. They certainly commingle in Burgess, who even talks of taking his dictionaries, like mistresses, to bed. Homage to Qwert Yuiop contains several dozen fervid pieces on dictionaries and sundry encyclopaedia: a veritable seraglio. Burgess always kept on his desk the OED, the American Heritage Dictionary, a 1926 Webster, plus works on slang, etymology, quotation, euphemism, anecdotes and Yiddish, the effect of which touched his every sentence. A Malayan Trilogy is full of South-East Asian tongues. The Doctor Is Sick is about a phonetics expert and the language of the criminal underworld. Abba Abba makes John Keats a pioneering philologist. Honey for the Bears plays games with Cyrillic script, as Paul Hussey becomes Pavel Ivanovitch Gussey. (The flyleaf of Burgess’s copy of Waldemar Schapiro’s Russian Gem Dictionary [1959] is inscribed ‘Ivan Vilson’ in perfect Cyrillic.) And the neologisms in A Clockwork Orange derive from the cockney dialect upon a Russian base. Baboochka is ‘old woman’, droog is ‘friend’, pretty polly is ‘money’. To write the novelisation and script for Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, Burgess went back to Greek and Hebrew editions of the Gospel, discovering a Bible rife with puns. The famous phrase about humped beasts and needles’ eyes is a confusion of kamilon (rope) with kamelon (camel). On the cross, Jesus did not call out Eli, eli, lama Sabacthani, but Elie, elie … ‘This is the vocative of helios in its demotic unaspirated form. He was calling on the sun.’ In Amos, Chapter 8, verse ii, Burgess glosses ‘a basket of summer fruit becomes a portent of Israel’s end’ by informing us that in the original ‘basket’ is qais and ‘the end’ is qes. A play on words, in other words. Harlot to Chaucer meant ‘maid-servant’, knave once meant ‘young man’ (the German knabe), apricot comes from Arabic al-precoq which comes from Latin’s praecox, or early fruit. Such snaps, crackles and pops of information were put to use in Quest for Fire, a film about Stone Age man, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, in 1981. It was based on the novel La Guerre du Feu, written by J. H. Rosny-Aîné in 1909 and first published in 1911. Burgess devised a prehistoric creole, or a new language patched out of existing ones (crioulo is Portuguese for ‘a slave born in the master’s household’), by ransacking his grammars. To make a word, he says, ‘begin with a lip sound, continue with a back vowel, end with another lip sound’. In the film, dondr-dondr (a Chinese duplication from the Greek for tree) means ‘a forest’; a stag is tirdondr (German for deer, Tir, with the antlered branches). Juggling, somehow, Japanese and Russian, muuv emerges as the word for ‘breast’.

Could he conceivably have been taking the piss? Who did Burgess think he was being? James Murray? Murray, ‘a godfearing teetotal non-smoking philoprogenitive bizarrely polymath dominie’, was the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary – a great project which, by scientifically classifying the exfoliations of language, the evolution and pedigree of words, is related to Victorian biology and the work of Charles Darwin. Murray learned new lingos by translating the Bible (for instance, a Chinese Book of Genesis); and he was intrigued by dialects, those remnants of ancient tongues (Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh) which in his day were still spoken in remote regions, surviving like Romantic ruins. And the second wordsmith Burgess wrote articles on is George Borrow, a lackadaisical genius, in contrast to Murray, who was so formal he wore his doctoral cap even at family meals. Yet for all his sloppy manner (he was a supertramp happier living with gypsies than with gentry), Borrow knew hundreds of languages, attending the Great Exhibition of 1851 to be seen ‘yapping away in Armenian and Turkish and Manchu’. Burgess himself, having spoken Anglo-Saxon with Borges and read Don Quixote in Catalan, by 1989 was ready to learn Japanese (‘it takes me a week to learn one phrase. That can’t be right’). He wanted to be able to startle the Sons of Nippon, whom he kept running across in London or New York hotels, with the inscrutable information that ringo wa ume yori yasui desu: apples are cheaper than plums. He was also brushing up his Hebrew and encouraging Liana to learn Arabic. ‘Soon,’ he announced, ‘we’ll be able to read the Koran in the original to see if Salman Rushdie is mentioned by name. On the whole, though, I suspect the Koran’ll be a bore in any language.’

Poor Burgess! Yes, a lot of his theories were loony (or at least groundless), but he deserved better than to have a biographer who so smugly plumed himself on his ignorance (“I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring”). He was admirably besotted with language, and it’s fun to learn about the books on his desk; I myself have a prized copy of Waldemar Schapiro’s Collins Gem Dictionary, the first book of Russian instruction I ever bought (having been frustrated by the impenetrably Russian entries in a multilingual book).

Schapiro himself, incidentally, is a mystery; I was unable to find out anything about his life for his LibraryThing page, not even his birth or death years. (He should not be confused with this guy, who was murdered in 1933.)

Birdfeeding

Nov. 10th, 2025 01:40 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is partly cloudy and cold.  It snowed a bit more last night, leaving white patches sprinkled over the yard.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 11/10/25 -- I finished assembling the lantern terrarium with the air plants.  \o/  It looks pretty good.  I had to put it on the table with two other terrariums, though, because today is too cloudy to see where the light falls in the planter window.

Also I need to bring in the ceramic pots from outside, which I should have done earlier.

EDIT 11/10/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

I've seen a large mixed flock of sparrows and house finches mobbing the fly-through feeder.

Most of the mulberry leaves dropped all at once, and this year they're a muddy shade of yellowish-brown instead of the normal bright gold.




.
 

Bundle of Holding: Outgunned

Nov. 10th, 2025 02:15 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


This Outgunned Bundle presents Two Little Mice's Outgunned, the tabletop roleplaying game of cinematic action by Riccardo "Rico" Sirignano and Simone Formicola, with art by Daniela Giubellini.

Bundle of Holding: Outgunned

Book Poll

Nov. 10th, 2025 10:36 am
rachelmanija: (Books: old)
[personal profile] rachelmanija
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 56


Which of these books would you most like to see reviewed?

View Answers

Red Rising, by Pierce Brown. SF dystopia much beloved by many dudes.
7 (12.5%)

Lone Women, by Victor LaValle. Fantastic cross-genre western/historical/horror/fantasy.
16 (28.6%)

The Lout of Count's Family, by Yu Ryeo-Han. Korean isekai novel.
8 (14.3%)

The Haar, by David Sodergren. Cozy/gory/sweet horror about an old Scottish woman and a sea monster.
15 (26.8%)

The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow. Very unusual Arthurian AU time-travel fantasy.
22 (39.3%)

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, by Stephen Graham Jones. Fantastic historical horror about a Blackfeet vampire.
12 (21.4%)

Best of all Worlds, by Kenneth Oppel. Another absolutely terrible children's survival book, what the hell.
7 (12.5%)

The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker. Coming of age at the end of the world; Ray Bradbury vibes but girl-centric.
8 (14.3%)

Surviving the Extremes, by Kenneth Kamler. A doctor for people in extreme climates/situations analyzes their effects on the body.
16 (28.6%)

When the Angels Left the Old Country, by Sacha Lamb. A Jewish demon and angel leave the old country; excellent voice, very Jewish.
26 (46.4%)

An Immense World, by Ed Yong. Outstanding nonfiction about how animals sense the world.
19 (33.9%)

Combat Surgeon: On Iwo Jima with the 27th Marines, by James Vedder. What it says on the box.
6 (10.7%)

Slewfoot, by Brom. Illustrated historical dark fantasy set in early American colonization.
2 (3.6%)

Animals, by Geoff Ryman. Animal zombie horror, at once deeply sad and utterly bonkers.
9 (16.1%)



Anyone read any of these?

Suzi's big scary adventure

Nov. 10th, 2025 09:00 am
agoodwinsmith: (Default)
[personal profile] agoodwinsmith
 My little Suzi cat went missing last 05 July 2024, and I was too ashamed to talk about it because, yes, I had let her outside.

She started as an indoor cat, and she strenuously objected to that state of affairs.  I think I may have documented some of our exchanges of opinion, and ultimately she won.  She was an outdoor kitty for two years or more and then went out at 4:00 pm on 05 July 2024 and never came back.

Oddly, I knew that it was most likely that she had been consumed by the local coyote pack because they had been active in our area during that time.  However, secretly I had a small-flame conviction that she was not dead.

On 07 August 2025, I got notice that Suzi had been found in downtown Salmon Arm (about 4 miles from here).  She has been back home since 12 August 2025 and it perfectly happy to be an indoor kitty.  *whew*

I have no evidence, but I believe Suzi was trapped and dropped in Salmon Arm.  I'm just grateful that she wasn't dropped in the woods.

Snow Season!

Nov. 10th, 2025 10:30 am
lydamorehouse: (science)
[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 Here in St. Paul, we woke up to a light dusting of snow. 

I reported my CoCoRaHS amount of melted snow (barely 0.01 of an inch), but I have fully forgotten how to report the actual snowfall. So today at lunch time, my plan is to watch the snow webinar that is posted on the CoCoRaHS main site. 

I also need to take some time to do some personal science, by which I mean that I need to schedule my mamogram and a physical so that I can get some prescriptions renewed. Wow, okay, I just popped off to do that on the other screen and I could get a mamogram today (though late in the evening, which is not great for me), but my doc can't see me until January. So much for the so-called convenience of non-socialized medicine. I always hear from my UK friends, "Oh, well, at least you can get in to see someone right away." I would not say that a two month out appointment to get prescriptions that need renewing this month is actually at all convenient, myself. 

I'm sure I have more to report, but I need to go make gravy to have with our lunch (which are leftover pasties from dinner last night. Yum!)

Monday At The Movies.....

Nov. 10th, 2025 09:40 am
disneydream06: (Disney Movies)
[personal profile] disneydream06
This Week's Movie Quote...

R.: He's always looking at the good side of people.
M.: Yeah, but while he's looking at their good side, their bad side is gonna finish him.

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3


Which Movie Does This Quote Come From?

View Answers

Hot Lead and Cold Feet
1 (33.3%)

The Private Eyes
0 (0.0%)

The Shakiest Gun in the West
1 (33.3%)

I Don't Have A Clue...
1 (33.3%)




Last Week's Movie Quote...

Thea: Laws can be wrong, and laws can be cruel, and the people who live only by the law are both wrong and cruel.

It comes from the 1945 movie, "Isle of the Dead".
It starred Boris Karloff.



Those Who Knew or Guessed Correctly...
[personal profile] meathiel
[profile] sidhe_uaine42
[personal profile] thoughtsbykat
[personal profile] pigshitpoet
[profile] hoobird
[profile] davesmusictank
[personal profile] gwendraith
[personal profile] thewayne DW

Songs From The Movies.....

Nov. 10th, 2025 09:15 am
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[personal profile] disneydream06
Today's song comes from the hit movie, "Funny Girl".
"Don't Rain On My Parade"...

Grading

Nov. 10th, 2025 02:17 pm
[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Mark Liberman

Frazz for 11/06/2025:

And for 11/07/2025:

The "difficulty" of organic chemistry courses is connected to their role as gatekeepers for admission to medical school. Such courses don't just teach relevant background information, they also calibrate students' ability (and willingness) to deal with certain kinds of methods and pressures.

This function applies in an even purer form to calculus courses, which are also required by med schools, though they lack any significant applicability to doctors' future educational or practical experience. As I wrote back in 2009,

The role of college calculus seems to me rather like the role of Latin and Greek in 19th-century education: it's almost entirely useless to most of the students who are forced to learn it, and its main function is as a social and intellectual gatekeeper, passing through just those students who are willing and able to learn to perform a prescribed set of complex and meaningless rituals.

Over the years, I've asked many clinicians and clinical researchers whether they've ever needed (or wanted) to apply in their work what they learned in their college calculus course(s) — and so far, the number of "yes" responses is zero. This is not to say that math is irrelevant in these disciplines, whose practitioners need a better grounding in statistics and linear algebra than they generally get. But expertise in integrating various types of equations is not the help that they need. (See "When 90% is 32%", "(Mis-) Interpreting medical tests", etc.)

Stepping back a bit, grading has at least three goals:

  1. Establishing how well someone knows something;
  2. Motivating people to learn something;
  3. Providing a basis for choosing some people over others.

If the goal is (1), then the best outcome is one where everyone gets the highest possible score.

If the goal is (2), then the best outcome is probably the same, where every participant is fully motivated, although it also works when there are some slackers who get lower grades or fail completely.

It's only for goal (3) that a broad distribution of results is what we want. In my own teaching, it's goals (1) and (2) that I've had in mind, so that I'm fine with results like this:

That distribution is suboptimal for goal (3), a fact that doesn't bother me at all. I'd be happier, in fact, if everyone in the class got an A — like Caulfield in the strips at the top of the post, I'm inclined to see lower grades as my failure to teach, not the students' failure to learn.

And this brings us to the recent fuss about grade inflation, starting with "Harvard College's Grading System Is 'Failing,' Report on Grade Inflation Says", The Harvard Crimson 10/27/2025, with broad media commentary.

If students are getting A or A+ without actually knowing the material, that's worth worrying about. Whether that's what's going on isn't clear to me, however.

It's interesting in this context to read Bertrand Russell's 1924 essay "Freedom or Authority in Education". Russell allows a role for authority, e.g.

It is obvious that most children, if they were left to themselves, would not learn to read or write, and would grow up less adapted than they might be to the circumstances of their lives. There must be educational institutions, and children must be to some extent under authority.

But nowhere in the essay does he mention grading, or the role of grades in choosing among students for subsequent opportunities. It's not clear whether this reflects the culture of the times, or his own attitudes and experiences.

In closing, I should also mention my own experience with organic chemistry in college, many years ago. The pre-meds in the course were so concerned about their rankings that they sabotaged each other's lab experiments, and razored out the crucial pages in the reference works on reserve in the library. This cancelled for me what might have been a career in molecular biology: "Do I want to spend more time in the company of these assholes? Hell, no."

Which was probably an over-reaction. But still…

 

larryhammer: a wisp of colored smoke, label: "softly and suddenly vanished away" (disappeared)
[personal profile] larryhammer
For Poetry Monday, a more famous desert poem also from Crane’s first collection:

In the desert,” Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”


Crane was a little too early to be a Modernist (as a prose writer, he was part of the pre-modern Realist and Naturalist movements, not that I can tell the difference between those), but he was a strong proximate influence on especially the Imagists.

---L.

Subject quote from How to Save a Life, The Fray.

Clarke Award Finalists 2021

Nov. 10th, 2025 09:15 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2021: Conservationists are aghast that influenza B/Yamagata lineage may face extinction, the selection of Alan Turing’s image for new £50 notes raises the question of whether other state torture victims will be so honoured, and the Johnson government proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that herd immunity does exist… but only to shame, and only amongst Tories.

Poll #33821 Clarke Award Finalists 2021
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9


Which 2021 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
0 (0.0%)

Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
6 (66.7%)

Edge of Heaven by Rachael Kelly
0 (0.0%)

The Infinite by Patience Agbabi
0 (0.0%)

The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
5 (55.6%)

Vagabonds (translation of by Hao Jingfang
2 (22.2%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2021 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes
Edge of Heaven by Rachael Kelly
The Infinite by Patience Agbabi
The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
Vagabonds (translation of by Hao Jingfang

(I thought I posted this last Monday...)

Or a thug for J.H. Blair

Nov. 10th, 2025 08:47 am
sovay: (Psholtii: in a bad mood)
[personal profile] sovay
Instead of "a group of moderate Democrats [who] agreed to proceed without a guaranteed extension of health care subsidies . . . as Democrats have demanded for almost six weeks," I wish the papers would just print "strikebreakers."
tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
I don't think many Australians fully understand the importance of China to the ongoing economic development of both countries. Many might be aware that China is Australia's biggest trading partner, both in terms of imports and exports. As far back as 2019-2020, according to the ABS, 27% of all imports came from China and 39% of all exports went to China, and this has been increasing every year. Iron ore, coal, and education are notable exports, but following the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA), agricultural produce and pharmaceuticals have also become popular. Imports have mainly consisted of telecommunications equipment and household appliances. Whilst imports themselves are likely to flatten (households can only have so many appliances, a person can only have so many mobile phones and computers), China's dedication to transforming their economy means that "green steel" is on the agenda, produced by hydrogen rather than coal furnaces, and produced here in Australia - but only if we develop the renewable energy to power such facilities. Our economic future is closely tied to China's, and there is really no alternative.

I have emphasised this point in my president's report in the October newsletter of the Australia-China Friendship Society - along with writing reviews of two recent and impressive Chinese films: "Caught by the Tides" (2024) and "Resurrection" (2025). The former I saw in Darwin a few months ago, and it weaves a long-spanning and troubled romantic story with over twenty years of footage, making it part fiction, part historical footage. The latter I saw recently at The Astor as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, and combines several short period films with a time-travelling science fiction thread whilst referencing several other films in content and style. Further, in my role, I have recently had the opportunity to discuss matters with a number of delegations from China.

A little over a week ago, I hosted an arts and culture delegation from the Chaoyang district of Beijing and took them to the National Gallery at Federation Square to give a tour and explanation of the development of Australian art. They are very keen on following up with an exchange programme. Then, a few days ago, representatives of the Jiangsu Friendship Association and I, on behalf of the ACFS, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with great fanfare at the Chinese Museum, as a photo exhibition on Chinese modernisation in Jiangsu was being launched by the Jiangsu Federation of Literary and Art Circles and Creative Victoria. Last night, I enjoyed the company of the Quanzhou Trade Delegation at a wonderful dinner hosted by the Fujian Association of Victoria, and I gave a brief speech on behalf of the ACFS.

It's one thing to be cordial in a transactional business relationship. But, as I said in my speech last night, relations between people are more important than relations in business, and friendship is more important than contracts. Friendship with China means that both parties will engage in respect, understanding, and accepting differences. It means being honest, open, and inviting. The bellicose attitude of some Australians, including Australian politicians, towards China and the Chinese demeans our national character and, really, is quite embarrassing. Fortunately, through its seventy-five-year history, the Australia-China Friendship Society has stood for building relationships, building partnerships, and building friendships. We have our Annual General Meeting at the end of this month, 1-3 pm. Sunday 30 November 2025. Maybe some of you with a similar mind should come along.
[syndicated profile] languagelog_feed

Posted by Victor Mair

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: A young woman did not fart in her husband’s embrace.”

As quoted in Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton, 2025), by Moudhy Al-Rashid.  This is an excellent introduction to how much we can learn about ancient Mesopotamia from the thousands of cuneiform stamped tablets often just tossed away as building fill.

Searching in The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature for the proverb quoted by Al-Rashid, I found it here:

#15-16:  15-16. Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's embrace.

15. nij2 ud-bi-ta la-ba-jal2-la
16. ki-sikil tur ur2 dam-ma-na-ka ce10 nu-ub-dur2-re

Exacting exegesis by Phil Jones, masterful Penn Sumerologist:

  1.   nij2 ud-bi-ta la-ba-jal2-la
    – niĝ ud.bi=TA la.ba.ĝal.a
    -thing days.those=from not.SEPARATIVE.to be.RELATIVIZER
    – A thing that has not existed from those (primordial) days:

    16. ki-sikil tur ur2 dam-ma-na-ka ce10 nu-ub-dur2-re
    – kisikil tur ur dam.an(i).ak=A še nu.b.dur.e
    – maiden young lap spouse.her.of=in fart not.3rd non-sapient singular.to vent.3rd sapient singular
    – a young woman will not be farting in the lap of her husband

    The usual negative verbal prefix is nu-, but in line 15, it is replaced by la- when it precedes -ba-

    Some of the grammatical terminology is idiosyncratically mine and I use . to separate parts of words or phrases and = to separate phrases from case post-positions

The j and the c in the transliterations hark back to the days of using ASCII in typing Sumerian translits: as j does not appear in Sumerian it could be used for a nasalized g (̂g in my normalization) while c was not needed for /k/ or /s/ sounds and could therefore be used for /sh/; š in my normalization.

The use of c for /sh/ was actually a convention dreamed up by researchers into Sumerian literature; in contrast, those studying Sumerian admin texts used sz (as that combination never occurs in Sumerian). The latter tradition has proven more robust, so if you use the ePSD, you use sz when searching for words with /sh/.

Mirabile dictu!

 

Selected readings

He-gassen (Japanese: 屁合戦, lit. 'Fart competitions'), or Hōhi-gassen (放屁合戦, lit. "Fart fight"), are titles given to a Japanese art scroll, created during the Edo period (1603–1868) by an unknown artist or several unknown artists depicting flatulence humor.

He-gassen is a subject occasionally depicted in Japanese art, first attested at the end of the Heian Period (794–1185). Toba Sōjō (1053–1140), in addition to his famous Scrolls of Frolicking Animals, is also mentioned as having painted scrolls on themes such as "Phallic Contest" and "He-gassen".

(Wikipedia — The entire Wikipedia article is fascinating and well documented, including reference to a digitized scroll of a fart contest held by the Waseda University Library, with courtiers and commoners in attendance.

[Thanks to Keith Barkley]

New Attacks Against Secure Enclaves

Nov. 10th, 2025 12:04 pm
[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

Encryption can protect data at rest and data in transit, but does nothing for data in use. What we have are secure enclaves. I’ve written about this before:

Almost all cloud services have to perform some computation on our data. Even the simplest storage provider has code to copy bytes from an internal storage system and deliver them to the user. End-to-end encryption is sufficient in such a narrow context. But often we want our cloud providers to be able to perform computation on our raw data: search, analysis, AI model training or fine-tuning, and more. Without expensive, esoteric techniques, such as secure multiparty computation protocols or homomorphic encryption techniques that can perform calculations on encrypted data, cloud servers require access to the unencrypted data to do anything useful.

Fortunately, the last few years have seen the advent of general-purpose, hardware-enabled secure computation. This is powered by special functionality on processors known as trusted execution environments (TEEs) or secure enclaves. TEEs decouple who runs the chip (a cloud provider, such as Microsoft Azure) from who secures the chip (a processor vendor, such as Intel) and from who controls the data being used in the computation (the customer or user). A TEE can keep the cloud provider from seeing what is being computed. The results of a computation are sent via a secure tunnel out of the enclave or encrypted and stored. A TEE can also generate a signed attestation that it actually ran the code that the customer wanted to run.

Secure enclaves are critical in our modern cloud-based computing architectures. And, of course, they have vulnerabilities:

The most recent attack, released Tuesday, is known as TEE.fail. It defeats the latest TEE protections from all three chipmakers. The low-cost, low-complexity attack works by placing a small piece of hardware between a single physical memory chip and the motherboard slot it plugs into. It also requires the attacker to compromise the operating system kernel. Once this three-minute attack is completed, Confidential Compute, SEV-SNP, and TDX/SDX can no longer be trusted. Unlike the Battering RAM and Wiretap attacks from last month—which worked only against CPUs using DDR4 memory—TEE.fail works against DDR5, allowing them to work against the latest TEEs.

Yes, these attacks require physical access. But that’s exactly the threat model secure enclaves are supposed to secure against.

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