This week, we commemorate the work of Harold Innis, who was born on 5 November 1895 and died on 8 November 1952. 1/

Read this & immediately thought of @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social “There are silences that can be heard, even from the dead & the severely oppressed…Sensitive & faithful historians can learn much of what has been lost, and much therefore that can be continued.” —James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Psychology’s emphasis on personal responsibility, resilience, and self-help frequently aligns more closely with conservative ideals than with progressive ones.” Preordered!!!

With all due respect to wet dogs, there’s nothing friendlier than a man who just ate a tin of sardines 🙊

Really hope students understand why this is not a matter of not polluting, not using slave labour — say there could be AI models that are more or less not doing that, even though it's impossible — but of actually the whole of human self-expression at stake, so pointless to come to class otherwise.

It’s how she rolls 😜

This is a good visualization of when people say that AI saves them time.

The fungi are magnificent rn

The artistry of sand isopods

“The human race is a strange mixture of the divine and the diabolic, both equally real, making both good and evil inevitable. Complete despair is no more rational than blind optimism.” On keeping a wide horizon - Bertrand Russell (1979) mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljourn...

Tonight in amazing music: I'm a long-time fan of Norwegian jazz trumpeter Nils Peter Molvær. And I've been pushing everyone I know to listen to the Sweetheart, the best (Scandin)americana band you've never heard. Here they are playing together. It's sublime. h/t @acresofsnow.bsky.social

this is not meant as a hot take or a unique insight but it's remarkable how a lot of scientific discourse is about methods, data, and findings, whereas what really does most of the heavy lifting happens to be the assumptions

@themerl.bsky.social Absolute units

It's no secret that mainstream media is struggling, even dying out. I talked to longtime journalist & media observer @jeffjarvis.bsky.social about what comes next. I hope you'll give it a listen 🎧: open.spotify.com/episode/2ias...

"Do most Americans want to sew tiny little skirts a thousand times a day?" Using products whose production is so onerous we’d rather other countries do that labor for us…dunno something feels morally off there…

On Synthetic Philosophy and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations in Aristotle and Tainter open.substack.com/pub/digressi...

“protest reading” ! ♥️ ! ♥️ !

That mountain needs to come to Mohammed

To say a bit more: I think this trilemma points the way to the argumentative theory of reason thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/how-i-lear...

I'll be teaching some students about the Lotka-Volterra food web model tomorrow, and this historical aside feels particularly relevant. Pretty stark that, in 1931, only 1% of Italian professors refused to sign a loyalty oath to the fascists.

Since people keep asking me for the slides from my talk last week in Maastricht on "Why AI Ethics is Unethical" I've now put them up on my website here: www.nolengertz.com/lectures-and...

"Finally, look for every possible way to fight back against the destruction of institutions that have served us well... New nonviolent resistance efforts will emerge in the weeks ahead. Watch for them. Join them." - Adam Hochschild in WaPo today:

Take a deep breath and enjoy positive news from around the world 🌱 🌍 (a thread, 1/3)

“But modern computing … concentrates power into the hands of programmers who mistake social, political, and economic problems for technical ones, often with disastrous results.”

You’d better be more afraid of the eagle than the police @carlbergstrom.com

“Philosophy would render us entirely skeptics, were not nature too strong for it.” — David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding #philosophy #philsky

This self appointed traffic turkey reprimanded me twice this morning @thewaroncars.bsky.social

I’ll take any chuckle this weird technofeudal world can give. Also serves me right for reading about Deleuze

sometimes wish I was much much smarter, or much much stupider. This being smart enough to know you're stupid sucks.

Star Trek did say the 2020s were gonna be a little rough

So what’re we doin’ today?

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

‘Matrilocal societies are also less likely to experience internal conflict… "It disperses groups of related males, stopping groups of related males developing strong loyalties and starting feuds with the related males nearby," she suggests.’

Built an inukshuk

Deleuze & Guattari’s Nomadology makes so much more sense after Theise’s Notes on Complexity and Campagna’s Technic and Magic. But need to finish Anderson’s Private Gov maybe to push back Nomadology’s classifying corporations as war machine (except geospatial-wise)

What fresh douchbaggery is this? 😩

"Did you consider the people who don't like chili? The people who are vegetarians? The people without tastebuds? The people who don't know how to turn on stoves? What about all those folks?"

Kitty Macfarlane’s song Half Wild is about chaos theory, complexity theory and quenched disorder. Class dismissed. youtu.be/Z7eTTnfUU-k?...

When billionaires take control of our most vital platforms for communication, it’s not a win for free speech. It’s a win for oligarchy.

When your dog loves fruit but grapes are bad for her

Whinge warning: I see the value of nurses, medical technicians, phys therapists, surgeons and GPs. But every time I visit a specialist MD, they bring so little to the table that I firmly believe they could be replaced TODAY by a reasonably executed AI.

"A score of 100 means a text can be read by someone aged 10 and a score lower than 30 is very difficult. Humanities scores have fallen from 35 in the 1960s to 18 today, suggesting they're now incomprehensible." #HigherEd #edchat #phdchat #acwri

I fear they know what we’ve done

Acoustic = a stick for prodding a Scottish cow

Frosty morning

Is there any warmer feeling than, while settling down with a book, your dog immediately grabs her favorite chew toy and joins you in quiet comradery?