In the last week, Donald Trump has insisted that there are no more stores left in war-ravaged Portland, asserted that Joe Biden was president during the January 6th insurrection, hosted conspiracy theorists for an "Antifa" summit, and said he'd consider pardoning his good friend the sex trafficker.

Hard to find a more obvious example of the journalism adage “If someone says it’s raining outside and someone else says it isn’t, your job is not to quote them both, your job is to go outside.”

The other day a student asked me about the prevalence of insider trading in prediction markets. I now have an answer.

I miss REAL journalists

You heard it straight from Kennedy himself: Gold Standard Science is actually just data fabrication.

And they say nothing is made in America anymore!

June 11: GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn introduces a bill to defund NPR and PBS because of their "left-wing propaganda" and "radical leftist gender ideology." October 7: The news industry's main trade group gives Blackburn its "Support Journalism Champion Award." Just shameless.

BNA is delayed because of Trump.

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious" I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge. We know exactly how LLMs work.

I'm willing to support anyone, maybe even a Republican, going up against Senator Marsha Blackburn in the election for Governor of Tennessee. I mean... how bad can the second ranked Republican be? Meet John Rose, the second ranked Republican running for Tennessee Governor.

"Hey Dr. Church. I have a quick question." [Person asks me complex question that requires I interact with their laptop or give detailed explanation.]

I'm really good at puzzle solving and I collect trinkets, yet I don't know why. I think I'm a raven.

I demonstrated just how easy it was to take over a database from a textbox on a website with poor security in my Principles of Information Security class. I was dropping cross-site scripting attacks and SQL injection attacks (all on my own server) to show the importance of input validation.

The water main at my house broke. Good grief. I already wasn't feeling great.

I'm still doing my little French lessons while the world crumbles around me. With French, I can doomscroll in two languages. 🙃

☕🎉 9/19/2025: CoSTEM Coffee @ CSIT, Maynard Building! The perfect Friday morning to relax, connect, and enjoy good company. 🥯✨ #APSUComputerScience

I shouldn't quit social media because my colleagues are losing their jobs. That's obeying in advance. I should have the courage to stand alongside my colleagues, even when times are tough.

I think I'll just quit social media all together.

Today's Google Doodle on the quadratic equation is cool and all, but it links to an AI description of quadratic equation. Where did you steal that content from, Google?

I'm sitting here in a Wendy's and using the wifi to upgrade my Debian Linux. Last week I was partying hard at DragonCon. These are the days.

For the record, I hate Illinois Nazis.

Boo. Pets should live forever. Bye Peaches. You were a good dog.

Thank you, @effinbirds.com, for solving the problem of correct change with AI.

Dropbox is discontinuing the Dropbox Passwords service. Boo. I liked that service just because it came with Dropbox Pro.

New Pandemic board game challenge just dropped: win the game without the CDC in Atlanta. CDC director is out after less than a month in the job www.npr.org/2025/08/28/n...

I'm still playing the Steam game Turing Complete, if only to climb the leaderboard. I cracked the Top 200 worldwide.

I finished DMing the DnD 5e campaign Strixhaven last night. It was a joy and I hope my players had as much fun as I did.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm autistic, then I look at my shelf with my slide rule collection, my Mega Blocks Star Trek Enterprise, and my LEGO Saturn V rocket.

Watched the first episode of Butterfly on Amazon Prime. I can't get past the fact the script calls latitude and longitude "GPS coordinates" instead of the correct term "GCS coordinates."

For years, Computer Science was driven by finding ways to perfectly (or near perfectly) solve specific problems. Now, we solve problems poorly by stuffing them into a magic clanker box and hope for the best. When we need to know how the clanker box came up with a solution, it clanks.

Saw Fantastic Four last night. There's a scene where Reed Richards says, "This equation proves that multiple universes exist!" I'm pretty sure he wrote the Drake equation on the chalkboard. If this is true, it would mark the second major Hollywood movie of the summer to feature the Drake equation.

My rank on the game Turing Complete is 870 in the entire world. Not bad at all. I think I'm ready to teach a class on advanced circuitry.

My six-year-old nephew isn't old enough to work a video game controller but still loves Minecraft. I asked him what he wanted to build. He said, "The Burj Khalifa!" Dream big, buddy.

We went to a restaurant called "Fast & French" in Charleston, SC. All of their shirts had cute sayings in French. I had to get one.

This was my final CPU build in the game Turing Complete. I'm pretty proud of it and I learned a ton in playing this game.

SET YOUR DVRs! My “Confronting Hate” investigation continues with the Tennessee man trying to convince young Christian men to hate - in the name of God!

I was at Theater 99 in Charleston to see an improve show. Thank you, Stephen and Evie Colbert, for your commitment to the arts. I realize that today is a tough day. I love your show. The improve show was great. Cost just $5. Loved it.

Elio is a weird movie. It's a movie for little kids. Kid themes. Colorful characters. Saturday morning vibes. It's also got multiple references to Episode 12 of Cosmos with Carl Sagan, including multiple voice overs from Sagan and one character wearing a t-shirt with the Drake Equation.

Wrote about the absolute craziness of Missouri AG suggesting that any AI that suggests anything negative about Donald Trump is committing "consumer fraud"—especially given his own stance in Missouri v. Biden that no gov't official should ever even be allowed to *talk* to a tech company.

It's 2:30 in the morning and I just finished my CPU architecture that supports one byte instructions with three one-byte arguments. Send help.

Our university's titan arum (and my livestream) were mentioned on today's NPR national news segment. That's wonderful! dcs-spotify.megaphone.fm/NPR122743408...

My University's Titan Arum flower is currently in bloom. You can watch the live feed here. (I personally set up the live feed.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gY3...

I was told that I can't run any more coding camps for little kids with the advertising that some camps are "girls preferred" for fear of DEI backlash. My "girls preferred" camps often ran with more girls than boys and created space for girls to learn coding in a boy-dominant area. Boooo.

UPenn just communicated to every young trans person in the country that they are not safe on that campus. I hope every young person who was considering UPenn for college understands that and applies elsewhere. Your trans friends are not safe on that campus.

I wasted this morning fighting with Claude to get it to write a Python script that will download the most recent frame of a YouTube live video. I don't think this is possible. I just found some software that will grab a screenshot every few seconds and set the YouTube video to full screen.

RAYQUAZA CANNOT QUELL THIS STORM. I CAN. DONATE $8 SO I CAN TELL GROUDON AND KYOGRE TO KNOCK IT OFF.

APSU has another Titan Arum flower, this time named Athena. I set up a live web camera to watch the flower bloom. I got the camera working at lunchtime today and it was shown on the 10pm airing of #NC5 tonight. www.youtube.com/live/5gY35i9...

Will someone please appreciate this full 8-bit AND logic gate I built in Turing Complete? After I put together all these color-coded wires, I realize it was completely unnecessary and I'm going to throw it all away and do better.

For the last four weeks, I've been teaching in my summer coding camps, where we teach Minecraft programming, Roblox programming, Godot programming, Scratch programming, and HTML+CSS. It's work, but it's a lot of fun.

A parent of a camper in our computer science summer camps called our office to ask why we had "vaccines recommended" on our website. Our student worker said it was for things like "flu and covid." Except covid is no longer recommended for kids and the parent chewed the student worker out.