#University of Virginia

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers develop first voxel building blocks for 3D-printed organs

A research team at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science has developed what it believes could be the template for the first building blocks for human-compatible organs printed on demand. Liheng Cai, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering and chemical engineering, and his Ph.D. student, Jinchang Zhu, have made biomaterials with controlled mechanical properties matching those of various human tissues. "That's a big leap compared to existing bioprinting technologies," Zhu said. They published the results July 13 in Nature Communications.

Read more.

[oeldeservesthenorris]

Taryn Tkachuk and some lesser known athletes in her family 💚

[blastofsports]

Ralph Sampson and Sam Perkins

[transpondster]

I was at a small dinner a few weeks ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Seated next to me was a man who related that his daughter had just gotten married. As the day approached, he had wanted to say some words at the reception, as is fitting for the father of the bride. It can be hard to come up with the right words for such an occasion, and he wanted to make a good showing. He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own. This strikes me as telling, and the intuition that stopped him from deferring to AI is worth bringing to the surface. 

To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense. I am reminded of a passage in Tocqueville where he noticed that America seemed to be on a trajectory that would have it erecting “an immense tutelary power” that wants only what is best for us, and is keen to “save [us] the trouble of living.”

What would it mean, then, to outsource a wedding toast? To use Heidegger’s language, some entity has “leaped in” on my behalf and disburdened me of the task of being human. For Heidegger, this entity is “das Man,” an anonymized other that stands in for me, very much like Kierkegaard’s “the Public.” It is a generalized consciousness—think of it as the geist of large language models.

LLMs are built on enormous data sets—essentially, all language that is machine-scrapable from the Internet. They are tasked with answering the question, “given the previous string of words, what word is most likely to occur next?” They thus represent what the philosopher Talbot Brewer recently referred to as “the statistical center of gravity” of all language (and I am following Brewer’s lead in viewing LLMs through the lens of [Charles] Taylor’s account of language). Or rather, all language that is on the Internet. This includes the great literature of the past, of course. But it includes a whole lot more of the present: marketing-speak, what passes for journalism, the blather produced by all who suffer from PowerPoint brain. But put aside the impoverished quality of the language that these LLMs are being trained on. If we accept that the challenge of articulating life in the first person, as it unfolds, is central to human beings, then to allow an AI to do this on our behalf suggests self-erasure of the human.

In a presentation in Charlottesville in April that is yet unpublished, at University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, Brewer referred to “degenerative AI.” Because the new AIs are language machines, they are “aimed right at our essence.” Brewer is not himself a Christian, but he finds Christian terms apt for thinking about the problem: We are created in the image and likeness of God, who is the Word.

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

The State Attorney’s Office of Cook County, Illinois has dropped criminal charges filed against three Northwestern University faculty and one graduate student who allegedly obstructed law enforcement’s efforts to clear an unlawful demonstration at the Deering Meadow section of campus.

According to a local National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, the office said its decision is based on its “policy not to prosecute peaceful protesters.”

Charges against the four individuals were pursued by the Northwestern University Police Department, which said that they allegedly engaged in “obstructing a police officer during the protests,” a crime for which they could, if convicted, spend a year in jail and pay a $2,500 fine, The Daily Northwestern reported last week. They had already appeared before a judge and were scheduled to do so again in August.

The university had defended the recommendation of its police department and rejected the notion that the individuals acted peaceably, saying in a statement issued earlier this month that it “does not permit activity that disrupts university operations, violates the law, or includes the intimidation or harassment of members of the community.”

Many more protesters have similarly avoided punishment for the actions they took during a burst of pro-Hamas demonstrations at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year, according to a new report by The New York Times. Prosecutors in Travis County, Texas, for example, have dropped over 100 charges of criminal trespassing filed against University of Texas at Austin protesters, the paper said, and 60 other Northwestern University protesters saw their charges dismissed, with prosecutors calling them “constitutionally dubious.” The Times added, however, that some charges will stick, including those filed against someone who bit a police officer, and many students are still awaiting the outcome of disciplinary proceedings.

Per the report, “At the University of Virginia on May 4, as students were preparing for final exams, administrators called in police to break up an encampment. Police officers in riot gear used chemical irritants to get protesters to disperse and eventually arrested 27 people. The local prosecutor dropped the charges facing seven people after he determined there wasn’t enough evidence. He offered the rest an agreement: their charges would be dismissed in August if they didn’t have any outstanding criminal charges at the time.”

Prosecutors in other states have not been as forbearing. According to Fresh Take Florida, prosecutors in Alachua County, Florida charged seven University of Florida students, as well as two non-students, with trespassing and resisting arrest. The defendants have resolved to take their chances at trial, the news service added, noting that all nine have rejected “deferred prosecution,” an agreement that would require them to plead guilty, or no contest, in exchange for the state’s expunging the convictions from their records in the future so long as they abstain from committing more criminal acts.

[xtruss]

Graffiti Limbo

A University of Virginia Professor Enlisted Students To Document The Messages—Profane, Hopeful, Despairing—Left On Library Carrels By Previous Generations.

— By April White | March 21, 2025 | Daily.Jstor.Org

Student graffiti art and messages inscribed on carrel walls in the new stacks, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, prior to the renovation of the building, 2020–2023. via JSTOR

The words were etched in four languages, scratched into the edge of the pale wood by at least a dozen different hands, perhaps over the course of decades. When researchers translated and contextualized the overlapping text—faded in some spots, deliberately scratched out in others—they discovered messages of pride and dismissal, hope and despair, deep musings and passing thoughts shared in poetic verse, lyrics, symbols, and now-indecipherable allusions. If the slender board had been 2,000 years old, the find might have been a Rosetta Stone, celebrated as the key to unlocking the stories of long-disappeared cultures. But in the stacks of the Alderman Library on the campus of the University of Virginia, the pencil and ink on the carrel shelf looked like nothing more than meaningless graffiti to almost everyone—except Professor Lise Dobrin and her students.

Title of Latvian song “Skaista Ir Jaunība,” by singer Ilmārs Dzenis, enclosed in a square. Country name Ecuador with class year, enclosed in rectangle; below this, part of a line from the Ecuadorian national anthem, translating to “thousands arise.” The word “HOPE.” Enclosed in a rectangle, and in cursive writing, line from song “Shut Up I Am Dreaming Of Places Where Lovers Have Wings,” by Sunset Rubdown. On bottom, unattributed line from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence;” response to this line of poetry calling it lame. Courtesy University of Virginia.

In the spring of 2019, the budding anthropologists of Dobrin’s Literacy and Orality course began to document the graffiti that had collected on the 176 study carrels in the nine-story Alderman Library “New Stacks” since the building’s construction in 1967. The idle doodles and stray observations inked onto the peg boards, painted concrete, and stained wood furniture were destroyed when the building was demolished in the summer of 2020 to make way for a new library. But those messages live on in a collection of nearly 2,500 student photographs shared by the University of Virginia via JSTOR, with a caveat: graffiti isn’t always polite and can be downright racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. (The students took seriously anthropologists’ responsibility to capture the world as it is, not as they wished it would be; personally identifiable information is edited out.)

Student graffiti art and messages inscribed on carrel walls in the new stacks, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, prior to the renovation of the building, 2020–2023. Courtesy University of Virginia.

Though the undertaking might seem absurd even to some who decorated the New Stacks, the students were contributing to a serious field of research dating back to the mid-1800s, when the word “graffiti”—derived from the Italian word for “something scratched”—was coined by archeologists to describe the markings found on ancient structures. Perhaps the best studied of these are the buildings of Pompeii where, researchers have concluded, graffiti was considered a respected form of writing. More than 11,000 wall inscriptions have been documented in the excavated portions of the city, many inside its grandest homes.

“You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.” – Albert Einstein. Courtesy University of Virginia.

Social and cultural historian Rebecca R. Benefiel, who studied the words and pictures scrawled in Pompeii’s House of Maius Castricius, writes that graffiti is “a dialogue” and that those conversations—between different authors, between their text and their images, and between the messages and their location—are a “window” into aspects of the past that we might otherwise overlook. The students of UVA found the same, writing in a blog post, that the graffiti in the library carrels “reveals conversations playing out in slow motion between otherwise isolated crammers. It voices the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary college students striving to leave their mark on a large and sometimes impersonal institution.”

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn. burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”—Jack Kerouac, On the Road. Courtesy University of Virginia.

“Grades are nothing but ink on paper,” one person printed on the north wall of carrel 1M-1. “True,” added another in a loopy cursive. (Someone else in that same cubicle was worried about something even more menacing than GPA, repeatedly tracing over the words “THIS IS HAUNTED” on the upper shelf.) Advice for the academically anxious students could be found in the next carrel: “REMEMBER 2 STUDY YOUR PASSION” “I’m tired of thinking,” retorted a writer in carrel 4-10, quoting poet Li-Young Lee, “I long to taste the word with a kiss.”

“So many people enter and leave your life…you have to keep the door open so they can come in. But it also means you have to let them go”—Jonathan Safran Foer. Courtesy University of Virginia. Click on the image to explore the collection.

The words of countless other writers and thinkers, among them Albert Einstein, Jack Kerouac, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Zelda Fitzgerald, adorn the walls and shelves, as does what the student researchers believe to be an original verse: “each laugh a flower by my grave / each grin a battering ram at my door / though the walls under siege are mine to save / I think I’d be happier being yours.”

“I don’t suppose I really know you very well—but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek JUST fits the depression in your shoulder.”— Zelda Fitzgerald. Courtesy University of Virginia. Click on the image to explore the collection.

Graffitists claiming to be from the class of 1927 to the class of 2021 left behind all the things you would expect: declarations of love and of hate, odes to sex, drugs and alcohol, anonymous confessions, and sketches of the WWII-era meme Kilroy (“Mike was here”). And they left behind a lot of things you wouldn’t expect: movie reviews, weather reports, even a pressing question that has vexed physicists and philosophers—“are electrons even real?”

Unattributed opening line from song “White Room,” by Cream. Doodle with declaration that someone was here, modified to be in the present tense. Courtesy University of Virginia. Click on the image to explore the collection.

On the southwest wall of carrel 4-17, in neat penciled letters, the student anthropologists found a plea that could have been directed to them: “Save the Stacks!” And in more than one way, they did. UVA’s new Edgar Shannon Library opened in January 2024 with pristine carrels but Dean of Libraries John Unsworth promised some of the students involved in the graffiti documentation project that he had no plans to prevent the next generations of students from leaving their own marks. “I’d rather have people writing on the walls than in the books,” he said.

[non-conventionnel]

The Controversial Historical Novel:

The Secret Gospel of Jesus AD 0-78 by Anton Sammut

Goodreads

[elenitrack]

Jans Croon (Virginia Cavaliers)

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science developed an AI-powered system that mimics the human sense of smell to detect and track toxic gases in real time. Using advanced artificial neural networks combined with a network of sensors, the system quickly identifies the source of harmful gases like nitrogen dioxide (NO?) that poses severe respiratory health risks. According to the World Health Organization, outdoor air pollution, including NO2, contributes to approximately 4.2 million premature deaths globally each year, primarily due to respiratory conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Their work was recently published in Science Advances.

Read more.

[thehappyspaceman]

The Falsies' upcoming livestreamed performance on WTJU!

It's the one year anniversary of WTJU Rock’s Third Rail music series and The Falsies are thrilled to celebrate it with WTJU! In just two days, this free performance on June 15, 8-9pm EST, will open to an audience at the Belmont Arts Collaborative on 221 Carlton Rd, near Belmont Pizza. You can also listen live on 91.1 FM, stream via www.wtju.net, and video stream on WTJU’s Facebook and YouTube channels.

Video filmed at the Ting Pavilion, footage by Elizabeth Cassell!

TWO DAYS, Y'ALL! Be there if you can!

[blastofsports]

Patrick Ewing and Ralph Sampson

[deadpresidents]

Here's the phone call between Lady Bird Johnson and LBJ from March 7, 1964 where Lady Bird is reviewing President Johnson's performance at a televised press conference, showing a very different side of both Lady Bird and LBJ, as mentioned in my last post.

This is from the LBJ Library's awesome LBJ Tapes website, created in conjunction with the University of Virginia's Miller Center, which specializes in Presidential history. The LBJ Tapes website features an archive of audio and transcripts of LBJ's taped phone calls that you can search or browse through depending on details such as the topic of conversation, date of the phone call, or names of the participants of the calls (which include people like Lady Bird, Martin Luther King Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and scores of other important historical figures).

You can really spend days exploring the LBJ Tapes website, and some of the more fascinating topics like LBJ's calls in the hours and days following JFK's assassination where he's becoming more comfortable in the Presidency and begins asking (and, in some cases, ordering) people to serve on the Warren Commission, or LBJ's behind-the-scenes machinations during the 1968 Presidential campaign, as MLK and then RFK are assassinated, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention spins out of control and Richard Nixon's campaign makes some shady moves with the Vietnamese to help ensure their own victory. On all of these calls, you hear the real Lyndon B. Johnson and they give an eye-opening definition to the "Johnson Treatment".

[tutor-maryam]

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[asteria-photo]

Afternoon has settled long and heavy on my shoulders The winter's light feels different on my skin It doesn't seem to strike as far below the surface, so I have to conclude that shadow won't let it in

Pentax K1000 // Cinestill 400

[dixiedrudge]

Earlier this month, in a small, private ceremony...

The Virginia Flaggers Raise Another Roadside Memorial Battle Flag View Source: Earlier this month, in a small, private ceremony, The Virginia Flaggers raised and dedicated a 20’ x 30’ Confederate Battle Flag on a 80’ pole, on private land adjacent to Hwy 58 in Danville, Virginia. The Virginia Flaggers Danville Hwy 58 Col Powhatan Bolling Whittle Roadside Memorial Battle Flag was dedicated to the…