Between watching AI's uniformly detrimental effects on every aspect of higher ed over the last few years, and then watching my kid get fed a steady diet of screentime in kindergarten this year, I'm radicalized on this. 🪕 AI has no place in education 🪕 No screens in K-12

personally i am

The funny flip side of this is that since raw athletic ability doesn't really exist when everyone is 6, any kid who can focus on the object of the game for as much as a minute or two at a time (i.e. not my kid) gets to have a fun couple years of everyone acting like they're a sports genius

I haven’t watched a Giants game in two weeks but I am given to understand that they defeated the opposing squadron this evening

My personal Umbrella is this Sesame Street clip: if I pull it up to send to someone, I have to post it. youtu.be/ws_vnXup7so?...

👀👀👀

Even the most privileged of us are going to be lucky to go into 2029 with our jobs. Our institutions are simply not built to survive this level of malicious destructiveness

I took my kid to the used-sporting-goods store to see about getting some used T-ball gear, and ... I'm radicalized about inflation now

Am I allowed to coin the word “sententiality”? Would it change your answer if the alternative was “sentenceishness”? How about “sentenceosity”?

I'm 10 days or so into the longest hiatus from watching SF Giants games I've taken in years and years, because Buster Posey is running the team like a Trump appointee runs a cabinet department, and with more than a hint of the same motivation

Wrote a poem today

This is 4′33″ for people who don’t have their kids’ current addresses

really he's just going to coffee with friends. excel mistakes everything for a date

Free rhyme for anyone who might be considering writing a poem about putting your kids to bed in the tropical rainforest: “Amazon” and “pajamas on”

So good, it needs an ALT. #CSLewis

Universities: firing faculty, cutting vital benefits, and zeroing out entire budget categories in order to pay for the subscriptions to LLMs that still only exist due to VC largesse. Oh well no way THAT could go horrendously sideways in the foreseeable future

Kid: Daddy, is the sun clean? Me: Is the sun … Kid: Clean. Me: I don’t … I don’t think clean and dirty mean anything on the sun. Kid [no patience for hair-splitting nonsense]: Daddy, just tell me if the sun is clean.

if you’re not a parent, you can’t even imagine how difficult it is to travel on a plane with a toddler: somewhat difficult at times. have you ever done something that was somewhat difficult at times? i didn’t think so

Bat signal for your favorite YouTube videos of full concerts of music by women/NB artists!!

I'd have a couple of questions for him too. First of all, what kind of an argument is a *teacher* who outsources critical job activities to AI making for their continued employment?

The final solution for AI in academia is a scenario where students are submitting AI-generated homework to be graded by AI-generated faculty using AI agents, all of which is being overseen by highly paid administrators who are extracting money from the students in exchange for a degree. The end.

Appreciate Robert’s willingness to call this garbage out, the absolute last thing our field needs to welcome in this uncritical way

[2-year-old in the art museum, looking at a renaissance stained glass window:] What does it say, daddy? Me: It’s in Latin, kiddo, do you understand Latin? 2-y.o. [thinks I said “Do you understand quackin’?”] Quack quack quack!

You have to read Dan’s piece, which isn’t very long and yet which touches on the development of music psychology in the 20th century, eugenics, Spotify, transhumanism, music “aptitude” as a mental illness diagnostic, and more. (It won’t make you feel better about algorithmic music recommendations.)

I have a piece about the dark history of musical preference research in the @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.

Also I find it amazing that "To escalate" came after the invention of the word "escalator" (which was a compound of escalade -climb a ladder- and elevator)

I pulled on a good thread recently when I realised that annoyed was one of those Middle English "a-noun" adjectives like afraid (a-fear-ed), asleep, aboard. From there I went back and realised the relationship to both nuisance and noise, all from the same french route, just Anglicised differently.

The new transparent alt text popover on the @bsky.app iOS app frequently makes the text unreadable (the text is also smaller than it used to be) … I realize screen readers are the most important use case but sometimes I appreciate being able to read alt text with my eyes!

🎶Hexachordal combinatoriality, it's the most remarkable word I've ever seen🎶

None of these are words

I'm stepping in tonight for Rachel Grimes in this concert of music by the 19th-century Kentuckian composer and bandleader Henry Hart—fun music and tons of interesting history. Featuring 1873's number-one hit "Good Sweet Ham" (it's a song about ham)

@wikipedia

(I would obviously play the shit out of a sentence-diagramming video game)

I really loathe the home maintenance situations where the guy tells you it’s going to be insane money just to get minimally functional again but if you don’t spend insane money x 2 for a fuller rebuild then you’re going to be spending insane money x 3 before too long

In the last few days I've talked to a few people who are planning to spend the summer converting a dissertation chapter into an article. In the spirit of a productive writing summer, a few pieces of advice based on my experience writing a bunch of articles and editing two journals.

It will surely* interest you all to know that the minstrel's song in Noel Goes to Hooters 22 is canonically sung to the tune of "Loving You Too Well" by Ralph Stanley & The Clinch Mountain Boys

I'm only now sort of just dimly, haltingly, unwillingly becoming aware that there is such a thing as a "streamer" OTHER than people who stream video games on Twitch, and I am not happy about it

I'm only now sort of just dimly, haltingly, unwillingly becoming aware that there is such a thing as a "streamer" OTHER than people who stream video games on Twitch, and I am not happy about it

The tale of Sonny Rollins’s self-imposed 1959–61 hiatus, taking his horn to the Williamsburg Bridge to shed at all hours of the day and night, is one of the most famous episodes in jazz lore. (“I wasn’t satisfying my own requirements,” he later explained.)

However, I did have to stop reading a different novel yesterday because the author appeared to be under the impression that the chromatic scale is derived directly from upper partials of the overtone series ... and it wasn't even science fiction

updating your committee on your dissertation progress

It should be considered an element of the most basic good internet citizenship to be logged in while browsing Wikipedia and to take 2 seconds to fix little problems when you see them. You can do at least that much for the best and most important website of all time.

In my naive imagination an orchestration class would teach you to think about & combine different timbres, of which a cappella Muppets are as good an assortment as any. I realize there may be pragmatic considerations that prevent it from being so cool & fun but I would have no problem ignoring those

Now HERE’S some lore I was unaware of 😂

As someone who had a kid in 2022, my wife and I often joke that we bet wrong on the moral arc of our country. But this kind of doomerism is loser shit. Basically every parent I know is raising their kids to be part of the solution. It just takes time. Why should we quit, they're the ones that suck.

All muppet 4’33” feat. Kermit and Animal

I'd probably never be asked to teach Orch because I'm not a composer and have never, to be technical about it, orchestrated anything. Still, I feel I could give some thought-provoking assignments. All-Muppet Beethoven Op. 18 no. 4. All-Muppet Dallapiccola Quaderno. All-Muppet Spem in Alium. All-Mupp

If they ever let me teach Orchestration the final project is going to be to compose an all-Muppet a cappella version of Also Sprach Zarathustra

It should be considered an element of the most basic good internet citizenship to be logged in while browsing Wikipedia and to take 2 seconds to fix little problems when you see them. You can do at least that much for the best and most important website of all time.

I occasionally remember this anecdote about Dylan and just start laughing.