It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch. A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out […]

I want a laptop setting that’s “I’m sitting in the damn sun, so crank that screen up to burn-my-eyes-out bright and battery life be damned”

Gotta say I’m disappointed with @frameworkcomputer and I hope that they reconsider their recent decisions. I’d been using ThinkPads for 20+ years until switching to Framework for my latest laptop two years ago, and I’ve been an evangelist for them ever since.

Jack Posobiec is criticizing Weimar Republic Germany the right way. --Ezra Klein

The world is terrible, but this morning I’m bringing a class to look at cool stuff—late Edo & Meiji-era prints, nineteenth-century Japanese books (plus an early 19th c. Chinese Gospel of Matthew), and in pride of place, a 13th c. printed Buddhist scroll from Japan

We need more Hugh Thompsons and Ron Ridenhours in the world.

You know what I love? When I get done grading an assignment and then I discover that Canvas has inexplicably just not saved the grades or comments for a third of the class.

Over the weekend, I wrote to the nearly 200 members of c18.masto.host who joined us in 2022-2024 and then stopped logging in over a year ago. I've gotten several emails back saying that after committing to Bluesky, social media as a whole came to feel like a bad idea. It is my hope that keeping […]

Hey friends! I’m looking for a good article-length reading on sawm (fasting) in Islam to use with undergrads. What I’m looking for is a scholarly work on the practice from a religious studies/cultural studies perspective—but all the scholarship I can find is stuff like “health effects of fasting […]

I just noticed how Roger L’Estrange’s name is printed here (“L’ſtrange”) and for some reason it really amuses me. (This is from Hannah Wooley’s _The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight_, 2d ed., London, 1677) #bookhistory #histodons

Trying to figure out what “Бурдье Пьер” could possibly mean in Russian before realizing that it’s just Pierre Bourdieu’s name.

Why is everything ProQuest does the literal worst? #academia

TFW you realize that you never locally saved the chapters you scanned to assign as readings for one of your classes at a previous job after putting them on Canvas, so now they only exist in Canvas courses you no longer have access to.

I feel so loved

Brushing the chalk dust off my trousers after class and remembering the elderly professor I had as an undergrad who used to use the blackboard very extensively—and, because of where he would rest his right hand when he was standing and thinking, would often wind up with a chalk-dust hand print […]

for years now I’ve kept teaching-related files in paths like ~/docs/$INSTITUTION/$SEMESTER/$COURSE, which can be a lot to type, so I created a symlink in my home directory pointing to the semester to save on typing but of course the old path is so ingrained in my habits that I find myself […]

And it's a little sad. Because it's not like there aren't a few dozen exciting use cases for LLMs and image generation engines. For example speech to text. Using an LLM to clean up dictation, which tends to be horrible, is pretty effective. What LLMs do well is find the most obvious answer […]

OMG our campus IT has so colossally borked something that all of our on-line services (Canvas, student information, classroom database, etc.) all now redirect to their service status page—which helpfull reports that all systems are up! What an embarassment.

One thing I really love about the woods at this time of year is the colours give away which trees are actually the same tree: aspen poplars like these send up shoots, so many trunks are actually the same tree, even if they're separated by a large distance […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

RIP Jane Goodall <https://apnews.com/article/jane-goodall-obit-78698397851bc7634717206f7eba07b2>

Something like half the SMS messages I receive are scammers. And of the rest, probably 80+% of them are from delivery apps or appointment reminders. Well under 10% of my incoming SMS messages are communication with real people I know. *sigh*

Suvarth Mahadevan talking about Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument on Hobby-Eberly Telescope (which incidentally has a bullet hole in the mirror, because... Texas) This is optimized for cool M stars - smaller planets around small stars produce larger radial velocity signatures. M stars are […]

OK, seeking a tech recommendation: I need new Bluetooth headphones. The criteria are: – in-ear rather than over-the ear (for use in hot/sweaty conditions) – sweat-resistant (see above) – earpieces physically connected to each other (not separate earbuds) – direct USB-C charging (nothing […]

I love relying on a public transit system where buses sometimes just... don’t show up. Like at all. Especially convenient when it’s the shuttle to the train station which simply—and without explanation—just no-shows. Two cycles in a row.

I’m curious what folks are seeing at other big US universities, but I’ve been noticing a *lot* more military uniforms on campus this semester. ROTC cadets seem to be in uniform way more than is usual (though for some reason I seem to be seeing a lot more Navy and Air Force in uniform than Army?).

It’s dangerous to go alone #plushtodon

I’m just catching up after class, but it appears that the gist of Hegseth’s speech to the assembled U.S. military leadership was “no girls and no fat guys”? Do I have that right?

Wifi has been down for about two months now at the station where I get the train downtown. Or, to put it more precisely: Wifi is up, but the WLAN is disconnected from the Internet. The incompetence is staggering.

Thinking about how when you live in a multiethnic city you inevitably wind up learning at least a smattering of other languages—but also, you wind up with weirdly specific phrases like “La última parada de este train es Downtown” and “¡Cuidado! Piso mojado”

Talking about sexual violence perpetrated by settlers against Aboriginal Australian women in class this afternoon, and—God, I hate this stuff. My body is all knotted up with tension as I’m finishing notes and pulling quotes from historical newspaper articles. But it’s malpractice for a […]

Does anybody know a properly academic/scholarly term for “cult of the STEM-bro”? I’m trying to come up with something to use in a course description to describe stuff like the celebration of the competent white male engineer or the superiority of hard facts over feelings that we see in mid-20C […]

#til that the name of the town of Xanten in the Rhineland is supposed to derive from ‘ad Sanctum’, in reference to the shrine of St Victor there. I’d long wondered how a German town wound up with such an odd name—but I have to admit to having some skepticism still.

There was a window of time starting about 2005 and ending about 2025 when it was easy for an average person to create and distribute a genuine image or video, but difficult for an average person to create a fake image or video that stood up to scrutiny. That was the window of time that citizen […]

Again, TCW is broadcasting from a social media platform where he is *literally surrounded by open nazis* and he is complaining, without cease, about the rudeness of random leftie commenters on some other site. It. Is. Insane. We've all gone fucking insane.

Reasonably sure Mastodon peeps like libraries and might like a peek at this wowzer I stepped into today. #dascdmx

For the first time since spring, it actually cooled down below room temperature at night—I woke up this morning to find that it was 18°C/64°F outside. There’s finally hope that the summer heat will come to an end...

I think we should treat people who get scammed and come out and talk about it like heroes. And this is important: no matter how "obvious" the scam might seem in retrospect or from the outside of the community it prey'd on. The more I look at scams the more I think this is major factor in how […]

Alert chime and vibration goes off on my phone, which is just out of arm’s reach. I check e-mail, SMS, WhatsApp, Mastodon via Web interfaces on my laptop: nothing that should have popped a notification. Wearily go get my phone and look to see what it is: nothing. There is no notification […]

What @notalawyer.bsky.social said.

Btw "everything is a distraction from Epstein" internet people & "everything is a distraction from health care policy" official Democratic accounts, eventually the overrepresented-on-Bluesky people who care most about collapse of the constitutional order & ethnic cleansing will lose our minds.

Kind of a funny thing about the language of education: you can get vocational “training” at a two-year college. And it’s not that unusual for academics to talk about their “training” in a particular Ph.D. program. But we tend not to use the language of “training” to talk about undergraduate […]

At the end of a frankly kinda rough week, it’s such a good feeling to have a few conversations with students who are excited about their projects. It’s why we do what we do, and it makes it all worthwhile.

Our Astronomy Student Association sells donuts as a fundraiser on Friday mornings, and I sometimes get one from them in semeters when I teach in the morning on that side of campus. Just seeing them there makes me happy. My life took a turn where I wound up a historian rather than an astronomer […]

No, Discord, I do not want a “Perplexity Award.”

Do I have any Dutch-speaking friends who could tell me what ‘bijzonderheden’ might mean in the early modern book title ‘Bijzonderheden over Japan’ which is apparently an album of illustrations? It’s literally something like ‘Exceptional Cases of Japan’ or something along those lines, right?

Thinking again about yesterday’s EO in the States declaring that trespass and property damage associated with protests will be prosecuted as terrorism, along with the UK’s decision that holding a sign can constitute terrorism. And some of us were saying 20+ years ago that the whole concept of […]

There’s a big Lorne Michaels/Saturday Night Live exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center, which now holds Michaels’s papers, and hearing people talk about how “everybody” loves SNL has me wondering how much it’s really a purely North American thing. I’ve never thought that SNL really translated […]

Hey U.S.-based #histodons: My old position at Western Colorado University has been posted <https://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=179251801>. This is an absolutely fantastic place to work if you love teaching—great colleagues, amazing students, breathtakingly beautiful […]