#OTD 19 September 1991, walkers in the high Ötztal alps on the Italian border, found a body melting out of the ice. It turned out to be the remains of a c.5200 year old man preserved with all his kit. Of course, it was essential to replicate him in Playmobil. 1🧵 #PlaymobilÖtzi #PlaymobilInfestation

#NSFGRFP, just signed, recommend to other u.s. academics (easy to do and can’t hurt, even if it doesn’t help?) #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky 🐦🐦

It depends on whether the soup is in a metal can or one of those ready-to-eat pouches because they don’t have hands and so can’t operate the can opened to get the soup in a microwave-safe bowl first.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪 Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students. I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

Who aligns the aligners? #philsky

Excellent read and pairs well with @ebharrington.bsky.social’s writing on shame as an essential weapon for fighting the broligarchs..

I come home from the dentist and my husband is watching videos where they drill into guitars 😬

Children are going to die because instead of tylenol, some parents will give them aspirin, which can cause death in children with fever. God. More stupid deaths.

I really think all the superhero-saves-the-day stories in American culture (not to mention stories with kings/queens, looking at you Wings of Fire) don't help us at this moment

I also maintain that since Brexit, the standard English of the EU should be Irish English

what do we want? MORE FREGE when do we want it? NOW

One thing that's bumming me out, because I'm very much a "DO SOMETHING DEM," is that Schumer did some of what was being demanded of him. He slowed confirmations to a crawl. Got almost no credit, and when the GOP broke the Senate rules again to go around him this week, there was no public outcry.

"To a supremacist society, most of us are acceptable losses. Charlie Kirk is not. To a supremacist society, guns are allowed to kill most of us, and the pundits can debate later how sad our deaths were. But guns were not supposed to kill Charlie Kirk." www.the-reframe.com/acceptable-l...

Edge cases rock

"Semantically, the two sentences are the same. Yet the shift in syntax subtly, but fundamentally, changes the message being communicated." I know it's not the most important thing here but I'm going to be snarky and wish linguistics were taught in high school.

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.' 🐦🐦🐦

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

Brilliant from Martina Wiltschko medium.com/brain-labs/r...

preparing another TED talk for a new physician sigh

People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.

Ah, the klaxon you just heard is a future @mikeduncan.bsky.social narrative putting all the pieces in place before every revolution/reactions "and then somebody, nobody knows who, fired a shot."

neoliberal modes of management There is of course a certain irony in an institution that did as much as any (and more than most) to forge the intellectual armature of neoliberalism (the home of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys!) to be done in by the very neoliberal logics it had helped to 18/

The hits keep coming. “The departments that won’t be accepting Ph.D. students now include art history, cinema and media studies, classics, comparative literature, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, Germanic studies, linguistics, Middle Eastern studies…”

The 4 most pressing global problems that leverage disinformation. --A transnational organized crime syndicate (mafia state) problem --A monopolistic tech industry problem --A genuine grievance problem --A cowardice problem My thoughts here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/addres...

Anyone know of good hist ling books for non-linguists? Thanks in advance! 🐦🐦

I'd never thought about it quite this way before: The entirety of Old Kingdom Egypt and the First Intermediate Period happened before the ancestor of Greek even arrived in Greece.

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🧵So! Re: the antisemitism I keep talking about! (See:⬇️!) Next post = an exchange I had with a person expressing the literal oldest form of antisemitism—the idea in which all antisemitism is rooted—& though he's a circa-2025 rando, he expressed something old that's still v extant & dangerous. Fun!🎉

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Something that I have been thinking about with attribution of "PhD level intelligence" or "PhD level expertise" to a machine is that it reflects an increasing trend among these AI bros and their sycophants to want the products of highly skilled training without actually doing any of the work.

"The Poverty of the Stimulus, Gen-AI Edition" 🐦🐦

We’d be funding courses at universities to teach students about right-wing disinformation. We’d be running info/public service ads about groups like the Heritage Foundation and PragerU to inoculate people to their billionaire-funded propaganda… Speaking of, if you want to help us:

Got bad news about your grammarian, mate 🐦🐦

When I was writing about the French scientist Marie Le Masson Le Golft, I found other women who became "firsts" in the 1780s. It was a decade when things opened for women & men (like a pre-FrRev Robespierre!) denounced gender prejudice. By 1800 that moment was over, & here we are with more firsts!

“It’s more than a trend. It’s a growing crisis of the press abdicating its responsibility to hold powerful people and institutions accountable” @sulliview.bsky.social margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/american-c...

Every. Single. Story. about women not using AI as much as men portray it as bad for their future career prospects (without a shred of evidence) and a result of women being fearful little ladies rather than looking at AI's output and saying "this sucks, it's not going to help me."

Starting up OnlyLabs, where people can pay to watch researchers who used to have federal funding do Hot Uncensored Cutting Edge science experiments.

Some ways linguists can help support and defend immigrants & refugees in their local communities (free free to add more, these are just things that have come up locally) -consulting on political communication -identifying trolls on icewatch apps through their writing style -interpreting/translation

This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about the Caleb Scholars program. We give students funds to return home to learn from elders as they go to school, and we find undergrads though professional/PhD programs bc I know how hard it was to return home during grad school. www.calebscholars.org

Glasgow's looking for a temp phonetician/sociolinguist: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNZ288/t...

Applications accepted on rolling basis: 4 postdocs, neuroscience of language, Georgetown University (US citizens/permanent residents only) neurolang.georgetown.edu/admission

important: what endearing thing do the screenwriters of the movie of your life have you doing in an early scene when you're by yourself to establish your quirky likeability? i'm listening to Al Green's "Love and Happiness" and singing the backup singers' lines in falsetto while chopping garlic

One of my English teachers years ago told me this little anecdote about writing process that legit changed my life. Writers fall into two primary archetypes. They are equally "good," just different in their processes: 1. Mozarts 2. Beethovens

I can’t even

Join us for OASIS 5 in Edinburgh in December. Abstracts welcome on semantics and semantics-adjacent topics, deadline August 15. Aside from the main session there's a satellite workshop on nominals in non-referential use: oasis.cnrs.fr/meetin...

Come join us at OASIS, Ontology As Structured by the Interfaces with Semantics, in Edinburgh in December. Call deadline: August 15. What do you do when a theory is crazy in one domain and elegant in another? Find out invited speaker Tadeg Quillien's answer here: oasis-5.webflow.io/s...

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Join us at OASIS in Edinburgh! Call deadline: August 15. We are delighted to have Fabienne Martin as one of the invited speakers for OASIS this year. Discover one of her favorite recent "aha" moments in our interview with her: oasis-5.webflow.io/s...