Look, I get that many substack authors are talking out of their asses. But the number of them who then confess they don't know what they're talking about and ask for people to teach them the basics... What are you doing? Why did you write a whole thing and then ask someone to teach you intro to it?

I should not have to be in the apple store often enough to have the detailed feelings about it that I do. And yet.

Donna says hello from the balcony.

I installed Linux on 3 different computers last night in less time than the apple store can put an OS on a MacBook.

"Are you able to floss twice a day?" Question wording doing a lot of work here.

In awe of my paper-based colleagues who manage to produce on request copies of unpublished manuscripts they read 31 years ago.

Typed "medial sociology" instead of "medical sociology" and now I wonder what a medial sociology would be.

Move over sandwich discourse.

My chancellor is having a laugh with this "Nimble Strategy for Berkeley’s Future." We're the living embodiment of bureaucracy and static documents.

Me: "What fool would actually be persuaded by a politician going to a diner as if he's one of the common people?" Also me: "Mamdani making a video standing on a random rooftop? He's so real and in touch with the city."

Stated preference: move out of the way of a car running a red light. Revealed preference: stand my ground, arms wide, with "what do you think you're doing?" written on my face.

[Picard voice] There. Are. Four. Borroughs.

Mad that my favorite question from the Kinsey sexual histories data (do you think about homosexual things while having sex with your wife?) wasn't reported in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

Sickos yes.

Power outage caused me to think about being a prepper. Lasted about 20 minutes. Went to a bar down the street instead. City boy just isn't made to live without the World Wide Web and global supply chains.

Power's out. Only books I have at home are cook books. Stove is electric. Guess it's time to snuggle my cat.

Perfect cat.

spooky friday activities - hunting for a copy of an unpublished manuscript from 31 years ago.

Scrapping my favorite section of this draft because I read a good article.

"Do you have anything to add?" "No." [talks for several minutes anyway]

Got my first choice teaching assignments for next year and I'm very happy about it.

My zotero failed me, so history of science bsky, help! What's the book about debates over whether snakes have venom or angry spirits? 1600s era debate, I think, with one of the parties in northern Italy?

Whenever I post something about public health that goes viral and turns out to be totally wrong / made up, I just add a little correction 12 skeets down in the thread and leave up the original viral post for clout. This has been a skeet about monkeys.

[Whining voice] reviewerrrrrrs! Come on.

Art

extremely helpful. thanks.

I took a picture of Donna making a silly face, and then she got embarrassed.

Box living up to its name. Donna loves shreding it with her teeth.

In any story about "people used AI to find out how to do something bad," replace AI with "their computer" and you'll see this story is invariably as old as the public Internet.

I ended up on the absolute worst email list. Just amateurs typing up their unfiltered thoughts and firing them off to a crowd. Totally different from this site, where we... Oh.

I say I have an ideal cat. And I do. She's perfect, and I love her. But also. She's staring me in the eye and yeowling while putting claw holes into a t-shirt.

Sitting in a talk that is a history of something I lived through, and the talk is so good. You love to see it.

Doom scrolling on here so hard that someone saw my face and asked "are you okay, honey?"

Donna has decided my glasses are a toy.

These people probably don't even have erdos numbers! Ugh! Signed, Someone who knows his erdos number.

I think it's a problem that we made science cool. "I solved a math problem" should have stayed a dorky activity we get bullied for genuinely liking instead of becoming a status symbol that vacuous people who have no interest in math use flex.

Even in a world of many small providers or everyone hosting their own on prem servers, there will be outages. Maybe more of them. Resilience would need more providers per service.

If this site really had the juice, people would be posting it's good the white house is being rebuilt with free, unionized labor...

I'm willing to make common cause with the scorched earth science reform crowd over this kind of thing.

Smells like my neighbors are roasting 100lbs of garlic and I'm kind of in love.

*zizek voice* there is no such thing as a gentle reminder! <sniff> all reminders are violent

Got excited about a "combating scientific realism" starter pack before @annaclemencia.bsky.social revealed it was actually a "combating scientific racism" pack. Also good. Not the same. Now I need someone to make an antirealist pack.

Did some tinkering with the ASA section membership data and the diversity index is 0.74 for gender and 0.63 for race/ethnicity. That's ... a fair bit of assortativity. (normalized Theil's H; 1 = total segregation, 0 = uniform distribution)

Back in data collection and oof did I just run into some dark shit.

We talk about the big money and now federal interests manipulating the science reform movement, but I don't think we talk enough about the ideological moves that have been going on inside retraction watch for years. It's like FIRE

The extreme intro to econ brain that says "prediction markets" are magic aggregators of information about probability and can't fathom that they are incentives to fraud, manipulation, etc.

It's not AI unless it comes from the Altman era of computers. Otherwise it's just sparkling algorithms.

Chronic pain people laugh-crying at the very notion of this.

I have thoughts for them on this, yes.