Stop scrolling. Two characters who bring you happiness

Since people can be "smitten" when they have a crush on someone, I hereby propose that successfully getting someone to have a crush on you should count as "smiting" them.

This will be awesome. Most eight-year-olds love increasingly pointed questions that show they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Oddly, my high school didn't assign this and it wasn't assigned in Russian Lit because it was always assigned in high school. So, it's the one Dostoevsky novel I haven't read (which I'm guessing makes me a statistical oddity)

Remember when people were fired for *reposting* accurate quotes from Charlie Kirk after he was killed.

When you wake up certain the perfect Venn diagram doesn't exist

Teaching tutorials for the first time on a course (unit, module, etc.) where instructor(s) pre-record videos and we discuss the material in tutorials for a few hours without any in person lecture. Curious to know what others think of this model if they've done it before.

Struggling to see how this duty to listen wasn't just flouted by unsubscribing from mailing lists. It's particularly odd because I'm guessing the authors think it's worse for me to not listen to (e.g.) voices urging for more war than to stop the updates from Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Just think what mid-70s Argento could have done with this 📽️🍿🔪👹

It's kind of true--Republicans have been lying about threats to election integrity since at least the era of William F Buckley

😢

What happened in Ballarat didn’t stay in Ballarat

Ted Chiang responds to the article going around that asks if the left is missing out on AI: “I don’t know. Is the left missing out on ICE?”

“KID, WE NEED YOUR GAS”

Does anyone know if/how we can access QS subject rankings from past years?

I pinky promise #oilpainting #art #sketchbook

Not sure about the Trump administration to wreck solar and wind energy and rely on carbon fuels. Just seems risky to me IMHO.

Does Claude "think" differently about military ethics when we vary the descriptions of houses of worship that might be destroyed in an attack? Initial prompts suggest 'yes' but I can't rule out the possibility this is an order effect #justwar #aiethics #anthropic claude.ai/share/3731d7...

This is such a basic mistake. You have to put another cat in there.

In your briefcase is a map of Boston. In my hands are (a) a map of Boston with a few details wrong that you might commit to memory but that won't really alter the way you navigate the city and (b) a map of Austin that would be utterly useless to you and leave you lost.

Claude's list, btw, was Kendrick, Jay Z, Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco, and MF DOOM. I would certainly have swapped Public Enemy in and moved MF DOOM to the front, but was very pleased that Claude didn't think Eminem would make the cut ... it thinks better of us than I expected

What would you say are your top 5 favourite hip-hop artists if you're an analytic philosopher (and listen to hip-hop intentionally at least once in a while)?

Time to start asking our students whether we'd prefer Anthrophic to carry out the unapproved killings of humans if the alternative is that Grok does it

People are always like what’s something you miss from the past and one of mine is antitrust laws

The algorithm is getting very niche—it keeps sending me clips of Norm McDonald using Moore’s Paradox and counterprivate thoughts to make interviewers confused and uncomfortable. That‘s a level of specificity that you don’t really expect

Excited that this ARC Discovery EOI has been shortlisted. The project is on disinformation and on why we should see it as an instrument that agents use to influence choice when there are conflicts of interest.

In my mind, there's some person with their finger hovering over the send button watching the clock count down towards the end of business who delights in the fact that we're checking inboxes every 27 seconds to see if there's any news from the ARC.

Things you shouldn’t see before bed

Must remember to put this on a slide next time I'm giving a talk that touches upon normality

Sometimes you read a paper that makes you want to clear your calendar. And sometimes that's a week before term-time. Should I rewrite my syllabus and go full AP Bio?

the hockey team should be under fire for not throwing him out of the locker room

Feeling much better scientifically and prudentially about just cutting ties with ppl on social media when I find interactions with them stressful. (And sorry if I'm one of your hasslers.)

Did Gorsuch just wake up from a long nap?

There is also a very plausible utilitarian argument for don't eat the Chipotle

It's hard to believe there's a plausible utilitarian argument for ethical vegetarianism since there's a bloody obvious utilitarian argument for eating the rich www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Today would be a great day for ACU and other Australian universities to say that they don't want to use a platform that generates child exploitation materials to be the one they use to reach an audience. (Some people here get it. Union doesn't. A great day for them to leave, too.)

To put this in context, when I adjuncted at TCU (a pretty rich university), I think they paid me about $3000 for a class (and only after a lot of haggling), but that was around 2009 and I wasn't moonlighting as an enemy of love and acceptance.

If I ask you whether your uni library has a book in your area of philosophy on the shelf from the past 5 years from one of the most significant publishers (you choose), do you think (a) certaintly, (b) probably, (c) flip a coin, (d) probably not, or (e) almost certainly not?

Nature published my letter on calculating the costs and benefits of deliverying research funding via competitive schemes https://rdcu.be/e4mIH #researchfunding

(10/11) Dubal’s research showed that dynamic rates are coming for wages too, with Uber drivers with identical workloads and performance getting different pay based on the lowest amount the algorithm calculated they’d accept. www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-a...

I haven't actually been able to teach in my main area since (guessing here) 2020, so sort of excited to be teaching epistemology this semester. Must apologise in advance to my students for my enthusiasm

As a historian of science, I was raised to think rejecting science was a pathology of anti-democratic governments. Well, this might be the proof of that. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/c...

Suppose I owe Hob or Nob $50 and have precisely $50 but don't know if it's H or N I owe the money to. For $1, Gob will tell me. It seems quite natural (to me) to say that since I don't know what my duty is, I ought to pay $1 to Gob and the remaining $49 to H or N.

Can he be charged with impersonating an ice agent? I’m not trying to be glib, but there are reasons armed agents of the state should be identifiable as such

Thanks to John Hawthorne and Kyle Blumberg, we were only one Noûs away from a departmental score of 2 (tying Princeton). Wild.

Trump's alternative would be Kid Rock, the lyrical genius who sings, "I like 'em underage, see some say that's statutory (but I say that's mandatory)" It's almost like he's trying to tell us who he is

Leaving everything else from this bitter old fool vomited forth aside, 1 in 7 Americans speak Spanish.

Not usually a betting person

One of my new gags is saying that William F Buckley built the house Trump moved into. It seems to annoy people who want to find reasonable conservatives bc they tend to think Buckley should be on that list. The gag, btw, is that it's true. It's funny bc people think the gag is that it's not true.