When it comes to the national security implications of windmills, the military has of course a long history of rational suspicion and justified aggression.

I hope at least some people in the Department of Defense are squirming and/or angry about being made partially responsible for this horseshit.

Other things found to cause radar interference include the judiciary, Black people, impossible burgers, NPR, immigrants, people who are rude to me in restaurants, being banned from seeing my grandchildren, Black people again, free and fair elections, and people who refuse to follow me on Twitter.

The Writers get a lot of justifiable stick for their crude frauds and villains, but of all the characters on recent seasons of Very Serious People, Thomas Chatterton Williams comes closest to being a truly original comic creation. From pose to prose, every absurd detail is just so well-drawn. Kudos.

Shure there’s a grand auld stretch in the evenings

Time for another Forbidden Course at the University of Austin. Or perhaps an open letter. Or maybe some adjunct at a branch campus needs to be pilloried for giving a bad grade. In any case, Free Speech must be defended.

Nice. flightaware.com/live/flight/...

My favorite slightly weird “No, seriously, trust me” holiday cocktail is the Trinidad Sour: - 1 oz. Angostura bitters [No, seriously, trust me] - 1 oz. Orgeat - ¾ oz. Lemon juice - ½ oz. Rye whiskey - Shake over ice & strain Tastes like Christmas pudding. If your orgeat is v heavy, use a bit less.

Journal article: “the data are available on request” The data:

Another chapter in “How much shit will America eat?” It’s a strange kind of vanity that is at once so gargantuan and relentless but also so cheap, lazy, and stupid.

Now imagining an academic novel set at SUNY Bloomingdale. Perhaps with a B-plot taking place during the fight against the closure of CUNY’s Fairway College.

Update–By “a dean in the department” I meant to say a guy named Dean in the household goods department and by “I was white” he actually said “l was banned on sight”; further, although a real employer located in New York State, there is no SUNY Bloomingdale. Unsold copies of my book will be pulped.

The crudest and most contemptible kinds of wish-fulfillment repeatedly enabled by crooks, opportunists, and sycophants.

Perhaps we will find America got into this mess because woke people and their shibboleths lowered the standards of our shared public and educational life, and how we recover will be a series of events in elite settings where David Brooks will not be asked any questions whose premise he dislikes.

This is. 391rd Street. Transfer for the ①, ℚ , Ϣ, and ₷ trains. The elevator is a hermeneutic circle at the center of the platform. MTA staff are available to converse allusively in Sanskrit. This an. Inaccessible. Station.

Something something forbidden courses something

I had been wondering why the kitchen was such a mess and where the afternoon went.

Just a shocking missed opportunity that this paper (a) develops a Bayesian approach to network community detection, tested on (b) Sampson’s Monastery Data—which is about conflict amongst a group of monks—but (c) is somehow *not* titled “Updating Your Prior”. www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~teh/researc...

<van Fraassen intensifies>

People make videos about allegedly cursed units like km/s/Mpc or whatever, but the real Most Curséd Unit is undeniably just the decibel.

FDA import restrictions—put in place a long time ago now—really put a crimp in the Irish Christmas Care Package by cutting out anything made with pork, mostly on the grounds that in America you can’t sell stuff with that much bread in it and call it a sausage. At least you can still get Taytos.

The people sending these “Last Minute Christmas Gift Ideas” emails have a very different sense of “last minute” from me.

Watched “Wake Up Dead Man” last night. Fun. But, you know, all of those Catholics were Protestants.

Late-period Kevin Ayers, with Bridget St John. Video shot in part near where I used to live in Tucson.

Metaverse Georg

Comin’ over ‘ere. Rowing up the Tagus Estuary in their improvised rafts

Redoing all of next Fall’s assignments so they have to be completed on the mini PDP-11/70.

Let’s try that again without a horrible burst of static, shall we?

There’s a distinctive skill that makes for a satisfying review. It recalls the sort of scene in a martial arts or spy film where the more complacent sort of minor villain attacks but finds midway that he has been smoothly relieved of his preferred weapon and is about to have it turned upon him.

Some experts expressed disagreement about whether the President can fly by flapping his arms very fast

Everyone loves nostalgic eight-bit gaming until they have to play the worst eight-bit game ever devised, i.e. bibtex.

I’m teaching a course on data wrangling with R & the tidyverse for @stathorizons.bsky.social in January. Filled to the brim with ways to do the stuff you have to do before you can run any of your spiffy models and that often breezily gets glossed over even though it’ll take up 90% of your time.

My Data Visualization book sold more copies than this in its first week and is also better-written.

Like many of you, I eagerly await the many future long-form articles in the Times, Atlantic, etc, that will solemnly “reveal” these facts to us, knowingly inform us they were an “open secret” amongst “insiders”, and chin-strokingly reflect on the “challenges” of “grasping” various “contradictions”.

Absolutely. No problem. Let’s just keep it rolling. www.instagram.com/reel/DRd2ldW...

Or there’s also this. I am full of helpful explications. kieranhealy.org/blog/archive...

Look this is all quite straightforward. For political science just add “ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶U̶n̶i̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶S̶t̶a̶t̶e̶s̶ properly identify your estimand”

An official website of the United States Government.

I like when Miss Piggy (as Mrs Cratchit) is primly supervising the roasting of the goose. Peter chirps “It smells so good, mother”, and while checking herself in the mirror Piggy drops a vocal register and says “It *does*, doesn’t it?” with a guttural relish that can only be described as carnal.

Bonus fact: there are two competing skulls of St Thomas Aquinas that argue about image rights and so forth. This could be resolved if we just established which one is the Skull of St Thomas Aquinas When He Was At Fossaniva and which one is the Skull of St Thomas Aquinas When He Was In College.

working up a take about a potentially problematic christmas song i just heard; i think it has a lot of potential to do big numbers in a triple reverse counterintuitive kinda way

Spent much of yesterday and today reading this. It’s really quite good. Amongst many incidental virtues it makes the protagonists of the Theory Wars seem rather small. It also contains some good literary bitchery, e.g. W.B. Yeats: “The trouble with O’Sullivan is that when he isn’t drunk he’s sober.”

Today in small mercies (via r-devel)

This week on What's New in R, we're featuring: ✅ A collection of posit::conf(2025) talks ✅ @kjhealy.co's keynote on trustworthy data visualization ✅ Tutorial by @bastianolea.rbind.io on creating interactive {ggplot2} visualizations Read the issue: buff.ly/E0WE6gb #rstats

“Eight Hundred Years of Giving” is of course the official slogan of Britain in Ireland.

I assume the recent efflorescence of shiny new Urgent Care for Pets places around here—all with distinct branding—is some terrible private equity thing, in addition to somehow being an indictment of the lower-quality, people-based end of the US healthcare system.

We’d rather leave and fly to the moon Than say the right words too soon

Like techbros and reinventing trains / buses / national insurance / fire brigades / etc, except it’s a race to reinvent the idea of Social Death.