every time someone talks about Discord I'm like "Which cord?"

Rewatching Tim Burton's Pee Wee's Big Adventure as a film noir fan is super rewarding because it's 100% Burton's take on a Hitchcock thriller: music, angles, and all that playing up of the dissonance between a sunny happy day and one person's internal terror; beginning, middle, and end.

Little Darlings

This Amelia Earhart thing feels like someone steering him away from giving Charles Lindbergh a posthumous Presidential Medal for Excellence in Antisemitism.

Not that I'm some huge defender, but complaints about daylight savings usually amount to "Wahh, none of my virtual worlds have social context, historical accidents, or interactions of humans over centuries of time and technology on a physical planet, why does reality have to?"

"No, he's the *acting* deputy undersecretary of the Department of Labor but also a vice chair of the Treasury, we don't really know why he is also the one whose job is to fire people at the FDA"

Seven Habits of Highly Successful People: Decline Edition

Such embarrassingly credulous coverage. How is "But what about Trump's feelings?" an actual beat for reporting? www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

I'm getting emails from prospective PhDs to join my lab, that used an LLM to read my research, align themselves in it, and propose research projects within my agenda. And I'm too impressed to stay as annoyed as I require.

Fun result. And I didn't know this history about Brownian motion.

So weak and embarrassing.

Woah true story. Doing science actually feels like this.

As I start my grad coding class, I always love sharing the outputs of a demo using a Google Translate API to produce back-translations of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" from every language. Starting at 'A': The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak --- afrikaans ...

The US is trying to out-Russia Russia with it's increasing attacks on educators and the professional classes. But there's no out-Russia'ing Russia.

AI nerds; HELP pls: I need to talk to someone who has become a proficient programmer entirely in the age of vibe coding, from 0MPH to 55. Not just able to produce output that run, but evaluate & criticize, able to think in code, break up problems, and write their own snippets as necessary.

Funnest insight from my recent work on transitions to community governance, and from parallel insights from fav podcast (🙏 @lisa-gill.bsky.social): You do in fact sometimes have to shove being free down people's throats. It's ironic sure, but it's not contradictory or even bad per se.

Profs and other educators: I'd be curious to hear the most "too much information" excuses you've gotten. Less "grandma died" and more "my IBS" I've seen a lot, but not all After a 12yrs of being treated like kids, it's such a project to get college students to respect their own right to privacy

Glad to see this policy at my kid's school, both for * naming life's difficulties. Some days being a good teacher is leaving a kid alone for a day * reminding people to respect their own privacy. I often remind undergrads to just say “I need an extension” and not tell me about their endometriosis

American parenting: I told my child that calling Daddy "Mr. Stupid" is disrespectful. Now I'm "Dr. Stupid".

Not sure how this got under the radar: The German far-right extremist party AfD was invited to the White House. Back home they are the primary heir of Nazi ethnonationalism and right-wing populism. White House downplays their enthusiasm (a "surprise visit" to the White House?) but message is clear

The stock market is if someone reworked the entire global economy to depend on your fantasy football picks. It's exactly that stupid.

UN commission on Israel reveals evidence for "genocidal intent" in Gaza. This is the highest bar for a genocide accusation, one rarely crossed.

On the “real estate bonanza” in Gaza: Israel “paid a lot of money for this war, so we need to divide how we make a percentage on the land marketing later in Gaza.” — Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich www.justsecurity.org/120991/early...

I've always thought it was kind of a joke when Americans, especially conservatives, tout traditional family values. 1. Americans are freakishly individualistic: the least family-focused population on Earth and in human history (see doi.org/10.1017/S014...)

Just like there are auditory and visual perceptual illusions, there are time perception illusions as well www.nature.com/articles/421...

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Technology can’t fix any real social problem until society fixes technology’s real problem: ownership by shareholders instead of stakeholders.

On the AI/EA/SF tech beat: I'm all about the US's worship of young people's ideas and innovations, but actually knowing the kiddies and seeing how clueless they can be one does start to question the wisdom of putting the baton of national moral leadership in the hands of 20yo CA software engineers.

100% of violent extremists have received formal education for at least part of their lives. Case closed. Universal access to education is destroying our nation. I say we should neglect it and underpay and disrespect our public school teachers. It's the only way to fix this country.

“the professors have to go away” The Targeting of professional classes is straight out of the centuries old authoritarian playbook

Live by the bad take, die by the bad take.

Pretty advanced. I’ve never made it past number 2.

For those who are still only feeling the Trump admin indirectly, it's been hitting the global community of academia hard. Just in 2025: * I've had two (!!!) prospective hires postpone interviews because of bombings (ripples from T's ME policy) ...

A democracy requires an informed public to work. But guess how much news is on the news. Fox News broadcasts just 1 hour of news every day. Just before midnight. The other 23 hours of the day are opinion/editorial. They popularized opinion content in the early 2000's, and all others followed.

“”” While on the journey making my vision a reality, I was told by many to pick a lane. To those I say: Dreams don’t have lanes. Sincerely, Burley Proprietor, Burley’s Berkeley Bait and Tackle and Art Gallery and General Multi-Ethnic Cuisine “””

I don’t know how explicit this is, but there’s def a thing in cog sci where the position of a philosopher isn’t to rigorously reason through problems, but, more politically, to creating new camps by spouting extreme untenable views that inspire scientists to get creative and find great new things.

Was decline a choice for that woman?

My son and I accidentally made a hemispheric neglect clock. ❤️❤️❤️ (On right is the clock you’ll sometimes draw after a lateraled stroke in an attention/visual area)

Be a good American. Report your subversive neighbors.

Rep. Fine (R): "Numbers always tend to benefit the left" Hell of an admission

Crypto has all kinds of designations beyond "bull markets" and "bear markets" for describing the financial weather. With signals these days from the Trump admin that anything goes, you'll hear giddy talk about "crime season."

I often fall asleep on my keyboard to wake up to an email response of "That's no problemssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss" Awk bc it's just a few keys off from getting my zzz's

Upside is a rabies epidemic will take some of the bite out of the measles epidemic.

Republicans in the US are trying to reclaim the "Thoughts and Prayers" platitude for mass killings at schools. They shouldn't bother: when it comes to bringing weak messaging to unwinnable issues, there's no beating Democrats. thehill.com/homenews/sta...

The way that housing co-ops work in Switzerland may seem foreign to many. But the central idea is simple: What if homeownership had no profit motive and no capital gains? Advocates say their model could reshape how the world thinks about affordable housing. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/r...

"If you're not trying to get punched, are you really living?"

This man has a dorm-room-philosophy-argument level understanding of our health system