Walking 200km of the Kiso-ji (back and forth) starting on Thursday; more deets and signup links here: craigmod.com/ridgeline/216/

Doomscrolling used to refer to social media consumption of one emotive post after another. These days, it pretty much describes just reading the news ... 🤦‍♀️

one of the most Turkish food combos there is: tea & sunflower seeds 🌻

the hoods are off

filled the car to the brim with tools and materials (again!) and headed to the "House of Angles (except 90)". three weeks of building cabinets, digging, laying subsurface drainage, skim coating, and panelling will hopefully bring the house up to a livable state. wish me luck

seven-hour data analysis class held, online meeting with students later in the evening... the semester has officially started! #academicsky #edusky

love the replies too :)

as September approaches, i'm itching to teach again. creating a slack group to gather current and former students at one place. and also students from other universities. any tips & tricks to make it more engaging are welcome #academicsky #edusky

took niece & nephew to the pool. left with the worst earworms from a variety of Turkish music genres. so much for guarding my headspace for months

another interesting topic i would love to learn more about. not only for my students, but for myself as well. where to find the time, though ... Genomic Data Science Specialization: www.coursera.org/specializati... #academicsky

need to read/work through this before the next semester starts. students need to know that there are many problems still to be solved "Breaking the Sorting Barrier for Directed Single-Source Shortest Paths" arxiv.org/abs/2504.170... #academicsky #computerscience #eduksy

AI may be useful for many things, but never forget: "At best, such output is accidentally true, but generally citationless, divorced from human reasoning and the web of scholarship that it steals from. At worst, it is confidently wrong. — Guest, van Rooij et al. (2025)"

brilliant! a new PG Fitzsimmons book is out. the author describes this series as 'if Wodehouse wrote locked room mysteries'. a high aim, but i think he achieves it. pity that we can get the ebook only on Amazon, though :( www.amazon.com/Twisted-Herr... #booksky

it's almost #caturday. this week i was lucky and got to play with two kittens. one sweet and one feisty

grateful that niece & nephew have grown out of their baby shark etc. phase and finally want to play games that we like also. even though they have the attention span of a goldfish and can't stand still for long :) #bohnanza #yogawheel

after my fallout with Siddhartha, i am reluctant to return to my old favorites, but Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times did not disappoint. when i first read it at the beginning of my English journey, i probably understood only a third (if that), so i was genuinely worried :) #booksky

the third bridge over the bosphorus near the new airport is almost a decade old, but it still feels unfamiliar and off. maybe because it looks like Sauron's tower?

and today i'm headed to istanbul airport to pick up niece and nephew. wish me energy :)

this week at the House of Angles (except 90) in the village, we assembled a wardrobe and applied skim coat to one bathroom. there is still no electricity so my power tools are quite powerless :) we work until our batteries (ours and the tools') run out and head back to civilisation

experiencing major decision fatigue because of the house in the village (need a name). have a hundred tabs open about a thousand things (100 < 1000, but i don't have the energy to be mathematically precise right now). so many things to fix, build, buy...

12 637 more steps in Vienna and my trip is over. loved having autumn weather in summer

16.395 steps in Vienna

@apocalypseorutopia.com happy birthday 🍰

today's wins for the new house in the village included replacing a bad purchase (Stanley angle grinder) with a good one from the Bosch professional series and returning another bad purchase (glaze-blemished toilet bowls) even though the seller didn't / doesn't consider them as blemished

“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back into a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.” It costs a lot less to house people.

it's a mad mad world

tl;dr - as well as causing cognitive atrophy, "AI" has also led to a crisis of information quality. Simply put, data produced after 2022 has been contaminated with AI slop and can no longer be considered reliable. Why burn books when you can just poison them? www.theregister.com/2025/06/15/a...

looking for second hand bookshops in Vienna to visit when i'm there in july. most of the shops i can locate online seem to be antique shops :( #booksky

love this. we are allowed to prioritize other things than efficiency www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLGQ...

bosphorus of istanbul. the view never gets old

looking at #NoKings footage and posts to cheer myself up. want to play ostrich and ignore the rest of the national and international news

back to basics: the Norby chronicles by Asimov. here an adorable quote from the first book in the series #booksky #scifi

i may be spending a few days in Vienna in June, and while autumn would be my preferred time there, i am not one to complain

obligatory Eid photo. Eid mubarak to all who celebrate

the number and range of injuries and bruises that i manage to inflict on myself suggests that i have the hand-eye coordination and motor skills of a six-year-old, if that #ouch, #aua & #uff

the best part of being a lecturer is meeting former students years later happy and well, and having them smile at you instead of trying to avoid you :) #academicsky #edusky

oh no, a new Dr Roy Casagranda lecture is out, but i don't have time to watch it because of eid preparations, course preparations, grading assignments, cleaning, ... adding to my ever growing watch-later list: www.youtube.com/@DrRoyCasagr...

when the weather is too hot to do anything, there is nothing left but to lie on a cool floor somewhere and read a voluminous book. ideally War and Peace or Walden #booksky #books #walden

look at that face, look at those eyes #streetcats #cats

time flies! i spent the first 800 days on Hindi (baahar.blog/800-days-of-...) and the next 800 on Arabic. all sections finished and gilded. next up Italian and then hopefully Japanese #duolingo

some words are beautiful #word

sleepy bunch and their ever watchful mother #streetcats

students have started submitting AI chatbot prompts as their only reference, such as "hi, you are a software engineer. in the PDF file, there are some assignments for you. solve the first one". how am i supposed to grade that code now? it would be easier if i didn't know 😭 #edusky #academicsky

relaxing(?) sunday activity. i'm determined to go through my mom's fabric stash/hoard this summer. some of the fabrics are so old and have moved so many homes along the way, that it is a miracle moths of several nationalities didn't make a feast of them

i need more people with a can-do mentality in my life

one of the best decisions of my life has been to move a few kms away from istanbul. i LOVE istanbul, but the crowds, traffic, tall buildings everywhere,... not so great. here, these are the views i see when i go out for groceries

two more courses have been accepted for the summer school and I have plenty of time to prepare the content, which is rare #academicsky #edusky

grateful for the leisure time to read a book. michael innes is a late discovery for me. "Appleby's End" was my first (and it might be the best). this one seems to be full of chuckles as well #booksky

it's been a hectic few days with guests, house hunting (for the guests), cooking, baking, chatting, ... i now have a thorough knowledge of my neighbourhood and days' worth of leftovers