Any time I look to see what the Labour government is up to in the UK it turns out to be things like making posters that Alfonso Cuarón put in the background of the long tracking shot that opens “Children of Men”.

Revising the dataviz book is an opportunity to remind enthusiastic beginners of the bitter realities that lie ahead of them.

Statler and Waldorf have more of a comment than a question

Mamdani, obviously. Plot of episode deals with J.P. Grosse trying to strong-arm Kermit about the terms of the theater lease.

This is like the “Deck of Cards” monologue, but for weirdos. Also, shout out to all my readers in their 80s.

"Donald Trump--not having asked to be born, and who, in that sense, cannot be charged with the credits or demerits of the corporeal existence God has gifted or cursed him with--posted a racist video of Kamala Harris and Barack Obama as monkeys"

I’m v. interested to see this revitalization of the idea of political socialization.

This joke accidentally became funnier overnight.

Argonauts of the Western Passiac

Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

Several very handy things in here.

Backing in the day, in its weird way the CIA Factbook was right up there with the Statistical Abstract of the United States (also RIP).

Apparently it’s important not to forget Columbus in the District of [checks notes] Columbia

O, that I were as great As is my grief, or lesser than my name! Or that I could forget what I have been, Or not remember what I must be now.

One modest benefit of growing up in Ireland is a reasonably clear-eyed picture of the unpleasant realities of dairy farming, and indeed farming in general. These people, who appear to be rich dilettantes in it for the social media clout, deserve to be regularly sprayed with slurry.

Direct-to-consumer marketing of serious medications—like this Instagram ad I just saw—should be banned (again) but more importantly is just like super weird. Let’s get the buzz going out there about this radioactive injection.

This cannot be something a civilian law enforcement agent is allowed to wear in the US — and an agency that has a culture that tolerates this cannot be saved.

Man I stay off email and the socials all day and now checking in it turns out I’m the US Attorney for a some state or district thereof or something

This week in the Singularity. www.wiz.io/blog/exposed...

As a researcher who studies human behavior, I am curious about and obliged to meet all the humans

Scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the universe

You may recall the many stories the paper ran—clearly fed to them by the administration—saying Harvard was about to fully capitulate any second now.

This claim by Tooze is a payout from the same slot machine that pops out the first column from your favorite scrappy, fiercely-independent upstart commenter about how business-class airport lounges are shit now.

The huge storm kept all the GOP voters at home because F-150s, Silverados, and Rams can’t drive in the snow, and all the Dems turned out in their Priuses, Leafs, and ten year old Honda Fits. Unfair, really. The National Weather Service should be defunded.

In November 2024, Roberts made all the SC clerks and staff sign NDAs. He’s learned a lot from the guy he works for.

In retrospect, “When you’re a star, they let you do it; you can do anything” was the truest thing he ever said.

Chotiner barely keeping the lid on in this interview. Just a slow flow of molten, occasionally bubbling and spitting contempt that Spinotti blandly absorbs like some sort of sponge.

The news that seems to be in the, uh, air makes me happy I spent the day doing other things.

The fact that CRAN now automatically generates DOIs is really great. Trivial to slurp up via Zotero and then cite package authors like they should be.

@gmcd.bsky.social Beavering away on 2nd Ed of Dataviz book, important to mention recent innovations …

There are redactions like this in the PDFs—in this case, from the context, it’s just “I’m”—which seem to have been generated automatically. It’s tempting to wonder if one could reconstruct some of the more substantive auto-redactions from patterns in contextually clear false positives like this.

Can we get Anemona Hartocollis back out to Princeton for a dinner party with Katz, Gold, George et al to discuss how the fact that Professors in Texas now need a permission slip to assign selections from Plato’s Symposium is yet more evidence of left-wing cancel culture destroying academic freedom?

As a side note, it’s funny to see so many of these emails with thirsty academics repeatedly enact Marx’s bit in the 1844 Manuscripts about the power of money. “Oh Mr Epstein, your house in New York is enormous and, unrelatedly, your questions at dinner were so intelligent, so insightful, so deep.”

I guess the best-available defense to this sort of thing—lots of friendly emails and visits with someone recently convicted of procuring a child for the purposes of prostitution, I mean—is something like “He seemed to have lots of money and connections and I would have liked a little piece of that”

Doo do doo

Noodling around the new Epstein releases; as before it’s interesting to see the concentric rings of academics (esp. Physicists, Philosophers, and Cog Sci types), from direct ongoing connection to JE, to grubbing for money/clout, to chattering-class brokerage via eg the Brockman/Matson hype channel.

Crazification Factor Watch, a continuing series. www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...

Most of the people in this article seem to be that dril “someone who is good at the economy please budget this” meme come to life.

Is Trump fascist? One Wall Street Journal columnist believes to ask the question is un-American--how could one question the judgment of the American people? To do so raises the appalling prospect that everything might be broken. I discuss why it matters: open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

Roboreddit www.moltbook.com

I wonder if we are going to be treated to 15,000 clotted words from TCW or equivalent about how arresting Don Lemon is ultimately both the natural result and purest expression of censorious campus leftism.

Everyone on this site is all oh solidarity with immigrants until you say something obviously true about peanut butter

The correct answer is of course Peanut Butter is Disgusting

Is there an accompanying new Presidential Junior Research Assistantship

Ten Easy Ways You Can Help The Planet, Practice Self-Care, Lose Weight, and Avoid Summary Execution at the hands of Masked Agents of the State Who Are Rounding Up People In Your Neighborhood <click here>

You will be shocked to learn the NYT has unearthed evidence indicating that this nurse who worked at the VA and got summarily murdered in the street by agents of the state Was No Angel.

Zotero 8. www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/