When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

harper's letter signatories are all like

Things I Cooked in 2025 1 : chili & cornbread, a standby in our house

confused as to why this is an air new zealand advert but tbh it's pretty dece

I did this again on Thursday, just saying. Not all tech is intermittently broken. eduroam 4eva

"Generative AI is designed to create things that look real; predictive AI identifies what is real. A misunderstanding that generative systems are retrieving things when they are actually creating them has led to grave consequences"

omg this is my absolute favourite new fact to have learned on the hellsite

Here's a piece on our new Marsden project on music in dementia (w/ Lynette Tippett at UoA and @carolynfredericks.bsky.social at Yale) Having known several people with Alzheimer's, all of whom retained their music perception and musical memory, I'm eager to learn more about these puzzling phenomena

Hahaha new favourite example of the "music is for social bonding" hypothesis falling flat

did everybody already know that Yahoo, the pre-Google search engine that began as a list of hyperlinks, is called that because it's an acronym? Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle. Yahoo

8yo has reached the stage of "you HAVE to stop reading or you will be up all night" 🥹

perfection

my family is originally French and Czech, not Hungarian, but close followers of this account will know that mid December each year, I spend the better part of a day making mákos & diós bejgli That day is today, they're going in the oven in about twenty minutes

admittedly the External Auditory Meatus does sound like it was made up (it's not, but it's still depicted in the wrong spot in Carl's AI experiment lol)

huh that's weird, the 'intellectual dark web' folks were so convinced that nuclear power was the way of the future and yet here we are with insanely cheap solar all over the place

did this guy consider the effect of being a d-bag on his job prospects? bc in my experience that does play a teeeeensy role in faculty searches

Another way of putting this is "despite what you may have read about the 'gene for X', there is almost certainly not, in fact, a gene for X"

Trainposting from Montréal again because holy hell the REM is fast. 4 minutes between McGill and l'UdeM!!! And just for fun they left some of the excavated rock walls exposed to remind you that you're 70+ meters underground

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

as a person who cooks a lot I actually wonder the extent to which "kickass meal" is correlated with "more cleanup". i love a one-dish meal but if we're being honest it's pretty hard to come up with low-cleanup meals that are better than high-cleanup ones

I suspect that an impediment to people getting more serious about home cooking is the absurd number of dishes that one must do, always Like to make this toffee I used 3 sheet pans, 3 pots, 3 bowls, a sieve, a thermometer, 2 spatulas, and 2 spoons. Lots of washing up for one dessert! Worth it tho

My sense is that the “male loneliness crisis” is not really about addressing men’s emotional needs but rather the relatively newfound absence of having someone to perform domestic labor for you quietly in the background now that there is a longer gap between your mother and your wife doing it

I've wondered whether parts of MUSICOPHILIA were legit, starting with the guy who's never liked music, gets struck by lightning, and becomes obsessed with classical piano He exists, there are independent sources (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Ci...) but how much is embellished in Sacks's account?

one wonders whether the willingness of these 'doormat moms' to 'publicly blast their adult offspring' might say something about the sort of people they are

Some thoughts on Mozilla's trajectory and Waterfox's stance on AI in the browser 👇 www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-h...

Let the baking begin (toasting nuts for toffee)

this is wild but of course Qualtrics has *never* been intended for scientists. Their primary clients are marketing companies, not us

À good test of your auditory imagery abilities: when looking at this image, can you hear in your head the guy's voice go "Welcome!" and "You've got mail!" ? If you can't imagine the sound of his voice, either you're too young or you might have anauralia (the auditory version of aphantasia)

Technology is only getting Better and yet I can never get my fuckin pocket computer to connect to android auto and all help about this online is either AI slop or a goddamn YouTube video behind ads so I'm just gonna be swerving around grasping for my phone instead of using the car's built in screen

I like when good journalists write about my field because they very quickly capture exactly what's hilarious / infuriating about it (from David Owen's VOLUME CONTROL)

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

🇨🇦🇨🇦 Canada is getting serious about high-speed rail with the first main line to be Ottawa-Montréal If the REM is any guide, this will take a long time at great expense and disruption.....but then will be so massively convenient and useful that nobody will remember Amazing infrastructure project!!

Broke academic: my research articles don't matter at all Woke academic: my new yorker pieces don't matter at all Bespoke academic:

iMessage block people from sending you links

anyone who has driven from Montreal with a last stop at saint-viateur won't judge, as the appropriate way to eat those bagels are behind the wheel, unsliced, dipping directly into a tub of cream cheese, before the bagels cool off

amurica!!!

i believe people when they say linux has gotten better in the last few years. what i'm skeptical of is that linux Guys have improved. i will not use an OS where i'm at high risk of someone calling me stupid for not liking some aspect of the experience. i must be allowed to hate the computer

I reread @kvanaren.bsky.social's excellent NY Mag piece on Bluey (web.archive.org/web/20240415...) and am struck by her description of some (many?) American parents' feeling of inadequacy re: Bluey's parents Is this an American thing? I honestly have not encountered this vibe in NZ at all

Do creationists not go to playgrounds because the clearest readily available evidence that humans are primates is watching a child on the monkey bars

Actually it’s good if the one daily activity that kills other people if you fuck it up is heavily regulated

I think it's good to recognize when your own views change. As a kid I loved dogs, then I grew up, experienced my child becoming terrified of dogs while people were dicks about it, and I no longer do. David Sedaris recounts being bitten by the dog of fentanyl addicts; people sided with the dog

I don't give a shit what uni a student email address is from but I definitely ignore messages that read like chatgpt wrote them

Alright everybody time to dust off that classic science twitter battleaxe, "NEVER submit papers over the holidays" vs "DONT TELL ME WHAT TO DO"

TGV Québec-Toronto | Le premier tronçon à être construit reliera Montréal et Ottawa: ✱ Incroyable.

"A nightmare of salad" - Our friends' 9-year-old inadvertently inventing a new mass noun at the dinner table

Big week for people maintaining the distinction between font and typeface

just now 8yo ordered his own apple juice in a loud enough voice to be heard while also saying please and thank you and without getting scared Other parents of a certain type of child will recognize that this is no small feat

🇨🇦🇨🇦 Just announced: a massive new program from the Canadian govt, separate from the well-known CRCs and CERCs, to recruit foreign scientific talent Canada was already a destination for scientists but whoa. Real impressive for a new govt to back political talking points with serious investment

Reached a new level of peak expat when, observing antisocial behaviour at the gate, I, originally an American, audibly sighed "Americans!"

Me to the one other guy in the airport wearing a mask, every time I fly