Feeling very salty today about irresponsible electric "bicycle" riders (throttle-controlled electric mopeds) ruining things for e-bike riders more generally.

If you are ever in a position to get reimbursed for travel, then FYI driving your own car but not keeping receipts and just charging the "mileage rate" is by far the best deal. Feels like a grift.

Remember, if our solution to homelessness doesn’t start with more housing, we don’t really want to solve homelessness. #UrbanTruth

My contribution to the "this is meaningless, but what else can we do" sweepstakes today is that I had to create a linguistics assignment and made it about Farsi.

FYI if you’re talking about the #Artemis II mission and you want to get the spaceflight terminology right, the mission is “crewed,” not “manned.” (NASA made the terminology change official decades ago, so this isn’t new, but a lot of folks just aren’t aware.)

The first cuneiform text found after George Smith's decipherment of the Epic of Gilgamesh's Flood Tablet in 1872 was a literary text called šarru ana dīni lā iqūl, or 'The King Does Not Regard the Law'. 'The King Does Not Regard the Law' concerns rulers who act out in a state's self-interest:

Wisconsin votes today. Get out there and do your duty. I did the thing. Voter 68.

Hey if you need something to do over this long weekend, have a go at my PhD student Anna-Merete’s survey. It’s sentences to rate, you just need to have any English variety as your first language, and it’ll take you 10–15 minutes. #linguistics docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Microsoft, to its billions of customers: You must use this product to be hired or promoted. It is the future. We are spending billions per day, choking the rest of the economy. You cannot avoid it. You cannot uninstall it. It is risky. Do not rely on it for anything important. It is a toy.

Happy Tartan Day! In recognition of this day, I encourage you to look up what possibly-weird tartans have been registered for jurisdictions or institutions you are associated with.

WIRED is doing more hiring! Come be a staff editor and work across our newsroom and with our international editions. Great, dynamic gig, moving quickly so don’t hold off on applying:

Someone asked for an app to point your camera at a color and find matches. Cool. Here. BUT ALSO: I'm colorblind and never thought to make this for myself! Save colors ("new paint," "mom's fave"), get colorblind-friendly complements, simulate what you see vs. what others see. Legit using this daily.

two of the hardest things ever written are "face god and walk backwards into hell" and "you cannot kill me in a way that matters" one of them came from a tumblr shitpost and the other one came from a dril tweet about hollering at zoo animals the internet truly is a magical place

i love how this illustrates the relative distance and apparent size of the moon! so often, the moon is portrayed as being much closer and would be _huge_ in the night sky it gives a false popular understanding of how far it is, love to see that get countered here 🌕

This Minneapolis rent fund is helping a group of immigrant neighbors who will be evicted within 14 days if they don’t get to goal! 😱 Can we help get them there? I can vouch for this fund and these neighbors, and I would love for them to be able to sleep tonight! Please share and give if you can! 💛

I have been knitting a top, and convinced since early on that it was going to be WAY too big. I kept knitting because I figured worst case I could gift it. Today it was finally long enough to try on usefully, and wouldn't you know, basically exactly my size. Trust the process!

Hot off the press...I talked to @vox.com 's "Explain It To Me" podcast about accents and identity! megaphone.link/VMP7502393904

NYT quoting AOC when she says “um”: This dumb girl can’t talk NYT quoting Trump after sticking a fork up his nose into his brain and rambling about sharpie pens: Doth thine lion howl with instincts known not learned by man, or sound his sonorous roar as prophecy to gaze back upon history itself?

HEY Y’ALL are you super mad about people being kidnapped and/or renditioned by the federal government, want to do something about it, but aren’t a lawyer? See below!

okay, a happy holidays video, we see those all the time *ten seconds in* "a british warlord named coroticus" you have my attention sir

I'll be talking slang on WBGH's Curiosity Desk today at 1:30pm EDT/10:30am PDT this morning! Listen (and call in) here! www.wgbh.org/shows/the-cu...

I am myself guilty of writing with an excess of typographic emphasis, but I here to share that it definitely detracts from your message to use bold, italics, and TWO different text colours in a single 2-3 page document.

People keep reacting to my extensive knowledge of fancy office chairs as though they don't also sit in a desk chair for 6-8 hours a day, when they do. Though on reflection, before I got neck-and-shoulder pain from bad ergonomics I also figured a chair was basically a chair.

Anderson Cooper: “So it's more expensive to have a chronically homeless person living on the streets than it is to actually subsidize an apartment for them?” Answer: “Yes, we’re paying more as taxpayers to walk past that person on the street and do nothing.” #HousingFirst #UrbanTruth

I would like to propose a syntax puzzles registry, for those nagging data sets we don't have analyses for, and others can claim them. Adorable syntax puzzle, free to a good home style of thing.

Important potato technology.

I regret to report that I continue to believe, against all past evidence, that finding The Perfect Bag will miraculously improve every part of my life.

Save me from citation styles that still want an actual honest-to-god place of publication. It is 2026. The relevant location is the INTERNET.

The great thing about knitting as a craft, for me, is that the ratio of prep time to doing-the-thing time is fairly reasonable, compared to, say, sewing or painting minis.

Dear body: what, I ask, could I possibly be allergic to in a bacon and chicken salad sandwich? I am (very mildly) allergic to many things! But not usually bacon, chicken, lettuce, or mayo.

"Surely someone has published an autosegmental analysis of Old Elglis strong verbs," I said. "How hard could it be?" Answer: no they haven't, and it turns out very.

book - beech (from bēċ with palatalisation caused by the same lost _i_ of the ending) if there had been no regularisation, which to my mind is even better...

The deeply unfair thing about social anxiety is that sometimes avoiding things for social anxiety reasons just gets you into yet MORE anxiety-inducing situations.

I propose to make universal the old policy of the Blackfriars conference at the American Shakespeare Center: If you do not end your paper on time, you will be forced to exit, pursued by a bear. Literally, a bear will come take your paper from you.

TIL that in Old English the goose/geese tooth/teeth foot/feet alternation for plural nouns also applied to "book", so singular boc became plural bec! I am charmed. Bring back beek!

…That "Generative AI" does not tell you the truth, that it doesn't give you facts, & that when its outputs conform to factual reality, it's by fucking happenstance. These systems are not all-in-1 answer production machines, they are collections of stats & regularities spat out via fucking dice rolls

It’s not like study after study has shown this for decades, there, Anderson

A new university in Nunavut is set to advance Arctic education when it opens in 2030. We tell you why Inuit teachings will be the cornerstone of its campus, tonight on APTN National News. Watch live: youtube.com/aptnnews

Great thread. Note that Vancouver only has like 10 blocks of urban elevated highway, and yet managed to target its historically black neighbourhood for demolition with laser precision.

well i for one couldn’t be more excited for the possibilities of AI. finally a technology that answers the age old question ‘what if clippy was wormtongue’

This is an outstanding resource and very clear rundown on a) why Substack is bad because people apparently still need to be spoonfed in 2026 and b) the MYRIAD options to use instead

An Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) card game created by an Indigenous designer right here in #Winnipeg. Currently $4,110 pledged of $7,000 goal.

Ring is first and foremost a scheme to charge Amazon customers to deter crime that costs Amazon (not the customers themselves) billions annually in refunds, returns, double shipping, and customer service overhead.

I watched the whole thing because it's astonishing

After six+ months I have finally accepted that I am not cut out for a two phone lifestyle. Just totally incapable of keeping both charged and functioning.

To all the non-academics who don't understand the point of academic freedom and don't care to learn about it, let me give you a factor you might care about: Tenure is the biggest reason you get my services at a steep discount over my private sector value.

I think the names given to this approach to syntax peaked circa 1975 with “Revised Extended Standard Theory”.

I guess the old standby "transformational syntax" is still there, isn't it? Are there any transformational theories other than GB/Minimalism?