bavarians really never accepted the rule of emperor-palatine and elector karl theodor in the 1700s so he unsuccessfully tried to sell bavaria to austria. in ancient greece, cheese based prophecy was called tyromancy. curry was introduced to japan via the british navy in the 19th century.

Burning Man! Element of Fire, 1566, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo of Milan. His day is today.

BREAKING: Eleventh Circuit, on a 2-1 vote, upholds injunction blocking Florida from enforcing its 2022 Stop WOKE Act in the university context. The majority opinion is from Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Young Frankenstein was the funniest thing he could possibly do

PIZZA GUY: Lemme read that back. I take the third right, second left, fifth left, second right, fourth left. Don't touch the seventh stone after the statue with the trident. Square door if there's a breeze from the east, round door otherwise MINOTAUR: No, no

Totally unexpected but the author of this article has now read my book and written a positive review on it.

you think the median voter is badly informed and incoherent? they are like socrates compared to the median nonvoter. the median nonvoter believes glonzo is an ethnic group and we should exterminate them

Astrology is astrology for men

To whom it may concern.

Mariska doing a matinee and a 7 pm performance of her one-woman Broadway show and then watching the greatest comeback in Finals history actually looks like the Jordan flu game

Patient: I think I'd rather have a baby than a root canal. Dentist: Please make up your mind so I can adjust the chair.

In 2023, about 12% of papers showed signs of LLM influence. By 2025, an estimated 57%. Importantly, this 57% involves a great deal of heterogenity; ranging from scholars who don't use AI, but recycle text from other AI-influenced articles, to articles mostly generated by AI.

How is this the coolest two people have ever been?

Died (alas!) on this day in 1594, in Venice, the great Jacopo Robusti, commonly known as Tintoretto. Here, by himself, in 1587.

Karoo Ashevak, Inuk, Nunavummiuq (1940-1974), Shaman, 1972, whalebone, stone, and ivory, 38.1 x 25.4 x 17.8 cm, private collection

Happy birthday #physicist Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), who came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror)! 🧪🐡👩🏻‍🔬 #histsci In my print on the left I show Wu in her lab & a schematic diagram of

Remember, Horace was talking about *placing* the reader *into* the middle of things. If you're talking about something that begins in the middle of things—no motion, just state—you want a dative, not an accusative, construction: the film begins in mediis rebus. Impress your friends!

Frontwards causation

I had a paper on Hume on Miracles accepted by the _History of Philosophy Quarterly". It's got more history in it than most history of philosophy papers do. I try to make sense of an argument of Hume's by reading it in the sectarian context of the time. philpapers.org/rec/JACHOT-3

Me, reading a history book: "It appears we did not learn from history. Maybe in the next chapter we will learn from history."

A depiction of a Seljuk man, possibly used as a chess piece (12/13th century, Persia)

"Among the picks that a majority of adults described as either very or somewhat cool were science (87%), outer space (83%), reading books (81%), tea (65%), math (59%), sourdough bread (59%), country music (56%) and avocados (51%)." 😭 WE JUST WANT TO READ & LEARN SCIENCE & EAT AVOCADOS!

After news of Klaus Fuchs' arrest for espionage in February 1950, one of his fellow scientists, Edward M. Corson, wired him a message saying that he did not believe the charges. Fuchs wired back: "THE EVIDENCE WILL CHANGE YOUR MIND."

If you've ever thought to yourself, "I wish there were a theorist of ecological communism who also made great wallpaper," then I have an article just for you. doi.org/10.1177/1474...

Omg the auto captions for my lecture #medievalsky

Not the step-in wolf, but the wolf who stepped up

Stagflation www.economist.com/britain/2026...

I think about this comic all the time.

You never really forget how to misquote sayings. It’s like buying a bicycle.

I'm very slowly working through Grothendieck's Récoltes et Semailles (Reaping and Sewing), and one thing that makes it fascinating is he sounds precisely like a mathematical crank ("I could see the patterns people refused to talk about!") and yet he was the genuine article.

The conservative justices on the Supreme Court arguing that you can separate race and partisanship got me thinking about these maps. starkeycomics.com/2021/06/11/h...

ISAAC NEWTON: i have just discovered gravity EVERYONE ELSE: hey how come i can't float around anymore

Oxpeckers! On an impala!

At the Friday morning orchestra concert I just sat next to a guy who waited out a *forty-six-minute* piece of music in order to raucously boo it at the end. Incredible degree of commitment to being a hater

I'm brave enough to admit that I would, in fact, buy this the day it goes on sale or see it opening night. Yes, I would.

Mount Redoubt erupting on April 21, 1990, photo taken by J. Warren, USGS. It was the last of 23 major explosive events between December 1989 and April 1990 ...

No because that’s not what Crixk argued. That was, as he later put it, “Watson’s dogma” (DNA-RNA-protein) www.asimov.press/p/crick

Here's the open access official version: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

...the Marquis de Sade is "Sade", Alexis de Tocqueville is "Tocqueville". Fine, fine, I hear you say. But what about de Gaulle? Isn't he always de Gaulle? Yes he is. Because his "de" is Flemish. Different language, different rules.

'Pontificate' in the sense of speaking pompously and dogmatically is a twentieth century expression with an anti-Catholic etymology: speaking like the Pope

Bald eagles aren't endangered any more. They're a species of "least concern." I wrote this as a reply, but it works better as generic good news

A map of cognitive science and an encyclopedia to go with it

Texas A&M has suffered a great loss: the resignation of Dr. Martin Peterson. First Plato, now Dr. Peterson! Out the Door at TAMU....

TIL despite the opening sentence of “Reasons and Persons”, Derek Parfit did in fact *not* own a cat.

Gizmodo says 'poems' but I think it's lines. The press release says 'verses' because there aren't any spaces in ancient Greek, and the meter is how you figure out where the line breaks are

"Eating the retributive version of skittles" is a good line

Shows that there's even a lower bottom to the Crazification Factor than the 27% previously reported. I guess that's a bit of a plus. kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/10/lunc...