WE WON. I am *begging* you to take note of who did this. *Not* UCLA admin—they’re still scuttling around behind closed doors, attempting to appease—but FACULTY AND STAFF, led by AAUP.

Happy Partially Muscled Skeleton Day to all who celebrate. Be sure to let all your screams out and then disappear.

Brilliant, unimpeachably great idea. I'm most excited about the new knights. Those horses are just so totally disgusting, I can't wait to paint them wild chartreuse and ugly oozing purple. I wish I could give every single sculptor on this team a hug.

In our upcoming Technomoral Conversation we will discuss how AI has transformed science for better or worse, what it means for AI to be seen as a scientist & whether AI can truly fulfill its promise for science. 🗓️ Tues 4 Nov 18.00-19.30 GMT 📍 Edinburgh Futures Institute & online 🎟️ edin.ac/3VSUXUt

MONUMENTS, an exhibit featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments paired with work by contemporary Black artists, opens in Los Angeles next week. This is Karon Davis' Descendants (2025), showing her son, Moses, holding a squirming replica Confederate general www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

How did I only just learn that "walrus" was in Old English written the other way around—horshwæl—because it means "horse-whale"?

Last chance to submit your video to the CogSci Mind Challenge! ONLY 2️⃣ DAYS LEFT!

repost this if an editor has ever saved you from yourself

And if you don't win, hey, that's a cool essay you can post, publish, or submit elsewhere. (As far as I can tell, anyway.) If you're an undergrad in linguistics, anthro, cog sci, STS, comms, etc., think about submitting!

Forgot to add 🐦🐦

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

This whole section really.

Yes. And to write or speak well is, usually, to deliver both nuance and clarity. Which is why it's so hard

My theory of Wicked is that Glinda is just as powerful a witch as Elphaba—it's just that her magic is exclusively social. The dance scene portrays her casting Mass Suggestion or a nice version of Otto's. Ditto the scenes of arrival at Shiz, Popular, etc.

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

I didn't know that collecting comics actually whips Well, reading comics really whips, and collecting them is fun and is how you support artists. Best of all, collect and share instead of collecting for value. Buy the books you think totally rule and lend them generously

Trying to comprehend a draft journal article about "metaqualia." Anyone have any tips for metaapprehension

pre-coffee thoughts with Tilly: when you’re addicted to watching kind German ghost rodents plan an elaborate scheme to steal gaming cubes made from carby food, call that a: nice geist mice rice dice heist vice this has been pre-coffee thoughts with Tilly

How many times, in how many contexts, from how many internal and external researchers, or from how many CEO's are people going to have to receive this message before they believe it: "Hallucinations" are an inherent part of the large language model architecture. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Embrace Frank Frazetta Thought

Highest level of support since Gallup started asking this question a quarter century ago

A thoughtful piece, but I think badly off the mark: LLMs just kind of suck at search. Why acquire this skillset rather than actual research skills with existing tech that's (a) faster, (b) more reliable, (c) involves learning as you go, and (d) isn't opaque?

This is what academic writing can be btw Yeah it's dense and abstract (heh), but the author conveys something complex and nuanced basically just through excellent word choice. I do think the body of the article could use a lot more concreteness (e.g.s, mechanism-talk), but the writing is lovely.

TIL that in Irish you can use the word 'demon' as a negative quantifier and it's called "demonic negation" (McCloskey 2009), e.g. Dheamhan duine a bhuaileann sé. demon person that hits he 'Not one person does he hit.' 🐦🐦🐦

Short-form video is easily the worst media format we've created so far. Too short to say anything, no links to sources, encourages repetition, prioritizing faces over words, demands high impact above all, etc. Every negative trait of Twitter and cable news, mashed together and dialed to 17.

Firefighters, dude. People out in the woods standing between our cities and the face of the apocalypse. And these clowns are like "but were they perhaps born in a different country?"

Some of the best nurglings I've ever seen by reddit user u/czokalapik: www.reddit.com/r/Maggotkino... #warhammer #aos #minipainting #maggotkin #nurgle

Letting Google set the narrative about the environmental costs of "AI" is like letting tobacco companies set the narrative about the effects of second-hand smoke by measuring the health effects of sitting through one neighbor smoking one cigarette.

could ChatGPT have made a book like this? didn't think so

Call for papers! Working on social aspects of #ai communication? #Sociolinguistics with a machine-learning bent? Doing boundary-pushing work in #humancomputerinteraction? Language Sciences wants to hear from you! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... #linguistics #cfp #callforpapers

Scientists! @skypeascientist.bsky.social matches scientists with classrooms, libraries, & more for virtual Q&As! It's easy and fun! We are looking for 750 more volunteers by 8/15 If you're down to chat with 1-5 classrooms this semester, sign up here www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html

An AI tool, like a gaslighting coworker, lies so flagrantly and with such certainty that you begin to question your sanity. This is by design: AI outputs are hallucination all the way down. (New blog post!) www.linkedin.com/pulse/halluc... #ai #hallucination #philosophy #misinformation #truth

Post someone who looks good in a hat

First thing I've ever read that has made me interested in visiting Las Vegas

The manosphere lurks in the cesspool of shallow communities linked by nothing more than shared content preferences as detected by algorithm. A lotta young, kinda dumb, kinda dull influencers run out of content for their audience of rowdy, underinformed teens. And they resort to misogyny & outrage

Hell yeah

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.

Warhammer's creative breadth summed up by my two factions: 1. Adepta Sororitas🤘: fascist nuns, conlang space Latin; orbital drop cathedrals; satirically sharp; aesthetically indulgent. 2. Maggotkin💩: uh oh so gross! Ew, goopy. Haha sneeze attack! (Look for my poetry series, "Nurgle's Gurgles.")

new blog. it's short but it's what's been on my mind lately

Beyond the 60 Minutes payoff & Colbert cancelation, an unprecedented capitulation: as part of merger agreement, new parent company agrees to install an official to "monitor bias" at CBS’s news division. CBS news will essentially be state controlled media. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/b...

Half radical philosophy and half practical advice for the working content writer, this short piece digs into the nature of content—and empanadas. www.linkedin.com/pulse/conten... #writingadvice #contentwriting #content #blogwriting

nowadays nobody wants to answer me these riddles three anymore

"i asked grok" "i asked chatgpt" yeah well i asked carl sagan and he said the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge 🧪

“What place can art have in such a system? How much can people care about Art who will put up with the products of such a system?” -William Morris, ‘Art and the People’

Can’t think of a more Worcester thing a squirrel can do than sprint across the street with a takeout container by in its mouth then trip over it andeat shit once he hits the grass

Fandom is rotten as a concept, man. I understand it helps a lot of people who struggle with socializing to find community, but I think it's pretty clear the end result is the very difficult to reverse enmeshment of individual identity with corporate property.

The same technique looks different in varied contexts and for divergent audiences. I contrast the inverted pyramid in journalism and academia: www.linkedin.com/pulse/invert... #contentwriting #sciencewriting #nonfiction #writingadvice

Who the heck calked it a "pig pen" instead of a porking lot

An AI tool for muddying, flattening and mealy-mouthing the description of objective facts www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/law3... @andrewdeck.bsky.social

I imagined the Chatsubo in 1984. 41 years later I opened its door. Neuromancer is in production.