Singer Neil Diamond started his career as Neil Coal. He changed his name when the pressure got to him.

On the one hand, it's been a bit of a rough week. On the other, my karaoke rendition of Randy Newman's 'Political Science' has never got a bigger reaction than it did on Tuesday.

Highlight of the CAN-FIN game today was my partner (philosopher but not hockey guy) coming out of his office as I was watching the game to ask why he kept hearing stuff about 'Brandom Hegel'

Obviously I never want Team USA to win a hockey game ever, but it would be pretty funny if the gold medal game was at a time that was maximally inconvenient for literally all of the relevant fans

How am I supposed to just have a normal day after that hockey game. I could feel the years coming off my lifespan.

This is just what it's like living next to the CMU Philosophy department

Have we considered putting sanctions on Russian exports of figure skaters.

'Describe the process of making bobbin lace'

It makes sense that so much of the focus is on Malinin (largest difference between expectation and result + US bias on this and every website) but I cannot overstate the degree to which almost everyone was fucking terrible today

To be fair, this is what we get for putting the men’s free skate on Friday the 13th. #MilanoCortina2026

I've been watching figure skating for a long time, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a bloodbath like that.

I never understood why everyone hated 'Beautiful Things' until watching the Olympics on CBC, where it's in fully half of the ads

I know why this is the case but it is still remarkable to see people complaining about Bad Bunny (who is American) not being American enough for the super bowl when I didn't hear a word about The Weeknd. Or Rhianna. Or Shakira. Or Coldplay. They've had the Rolling Stones up there.

Yeah, see, there's a reason that most tournaments do a 'best of 7' for their finals. You're basically guaranteed at least one good game that way.

Ok, I'll admit that I haven't had time to follow the sport this year until now, but I'm not sure anything could have prepared me for how fucking goofy Ilia Malinin's long program is.

The name 'C.D. Broad' really was wasted on the philosopher. Should have been saved for a 90s music store with a great riot girl selection

Daily Affirmations: - You are very wise - You speak truly - It must be as you say - That is surely correct, Socrates

You know, the narrator in 'I've been everywhere' never actually specifies whether he's seen a road with as much dust and sand as the Winnemucca road he's currently on. He names many other roads he's been to, but doesn't make any ruling on their comparative dustiness or sandiness.

If the standard model ever develops a need for another pair of quarks they should call them based and cringe

You: you're just making up a guy to be mad at Me: it's called writing a philosophical dialogue. Look it up, Simplicio

Winter is a great time to get some sewing done, but it comes with a caveat, and that caveat is what happens when you make a beautiful new white dress shirt - perfect for job interviews - put it on for the first time, and then immediately baptize it with the unmistakeable, indelible tinge of Dayquil

I've been sick continuously for about a month now. At first I thought that the reason was that I've had to do a bunch of non-optional travel while sick and that was delaying my recovery. But that's not true. It's because I've been too busy to watch Star Trek. You gotta watch Star Trek.

Maybe we can distract him by insisting that an EGOT is way cooler than a Nobel prize anyway. Let him go bother the Grammy committee

'Describe the process of making bobbin lace'

Just don’t think my government should be creating largely exclusive content for this guy. Put another way, if your constituents had to buy Ernst Zündel’s zine to read your latest policy position, that’d be a policy position in itself. And “but his circulation numbers are high” isn’t a good defence.

One of the big questions I keep writing a little bit about and then backing away from is 'what happens if a privately-funded space project announces that they have discovered alien life or detected an alien signal? How could we possibly believe them?'

Everyone going to the APA today, have fun, and be very grateful to me personally for choosing not to give you the flu.

"New artists won't be able to find an audience anymore because everyone's listening to AI" New artists can't find an audience right now because everyone's listening to Fleetwood Mac. New music has never accounted for as small a proportion of what people listen to. Why would that change?

What happens if you do SAT-based faculty hiring and a candidate was educated in one of the dozens of countries that don't administer the SAT? I know the real answer is 'we don't hire foreigners', but I like the idea of a bunch of 30-somethings having to sit a teenager test to be hired to a TT job.

I love the hockey World Juniors for a lot of reasons, but possibly the main one is that the sponsors are so much worse. Nobody looks cool with 'Chipotle' plastered across their forehead.

To the department that sent out their 'thanks but no thanks' job application responses early this morning: at this point I just have to admire the commitment to the role of the heel. Nobody's in the office today. You had to fucking schedule that one.

Maybe this is unique to my players, but the most surprising part of being a GM to me has been the degree to which I've had to be able to come up with an astonishing array of meals, cocktails, and unusual beers completely on the spot. They really want the full menu every time.

I admire the ambition, but it's hardly a beginner-friendly distro. I think he'd be better off starting with Ubuntu or something.

Counterpoint: Leonard Nimoy's "Spock Thoughts" vs. John Pertwee's "I Am the Doctor"

I guess I should do a promo with a bit more information: if you want to hear me talk about alien contact, prime numbers, a Doritos commercial from 2008, and what any of that has to do with the Vienna Circle, this is your opportunity to do that!

Hey look who it is!

Update: turns out that when you manually back up all your files in anticipation of Doing the Thing you learn that your files needed a good clean a long time ago. Why is the entire Final Fantasy IX soundtrack in the folder for the philosophy of math course I took in 2018

Part of me really wants to try switching to Linux right now, knowing full well that I will get very Into It almost immediately, part of me thinks I should save it as a good, safe option for a midlife crisis down the line.

I hate how discussions of Alberta pipelines frame the debate as Alberta economics vs. BC environmentalism, as if there's nothing economic about BC's desire to not have oil spills in it.

One of my favorite historical facts is that I could have a conversation with a Roman in late antiquity using the idioms 'lingua franca' and 'it's all Greek to me', and he would completely understand both idioms but assign them opposite meanings

I love saying 'greetings'. So precise. So specific. No need for me to pick a suitably greetings-ish phrase and for you to interpret it as a greeting. No ambiguity. Just getting my intention right out there. I'm greeting you. You're being greeted. That's what's happening right now. Greetings.

This is why I never engage with any media that gets described as 'a love letter to [genre x]'. Why would I want to read genre x's love letters? Why would I want to read any love letter that isn't addressed to me?

Discourse surrounding “AI” these days often feels like a guy showing you his shovel and you say, “that’s a nice shovel” and he says “I am going to perform surgery on my mother with this shovel” and you say “Oh God please don’t that is not what a shovel is for.”

Guy whose favourite sports teams are the Rangers, Golden Knights, Magic, Warriors, and Wizards: hey, so this sports game is fun, but I have this other game at home I like better if you want to go play that

"It's for the good of the students" It would be good for the students to live in a society that had institutions that were not at the beck and call of their government.

Probably my most unpopular academic opinion is that you're not in a position to make the case against plagiarism to your students (or anyone else) if you don't even bother to check the license on the images you put in your slide decks, let alone credit them correctly.

In light of the Vancouver PWHL team choosing 'The Goldeneyes' as their name, here's a list of James Bond Film titles, ranked by how good they would be as a hockey team name, worst to best. 🧵

You'd think that MLB teams would design variant Halloween jerseys to get around this problem. Very difficult party to theme, this one.

Writing a protest song for the No Kings protests, call that royalty free music