Sweet little PBS documentary on Raleigh hometown legends The Connells, still making music after all these years. I still have a mixtape from '94 with Slackjawed and '74-'75 anchoring the whole damn thing.

Despite Silicon Valley's claims that it has developed without any assistance from Uncle Sugar, the regions ties to the military are more than a century old... www.wsj.com/politics/nat...

Close reading the work of well-known anthropologist of science and envying their freedom to casually mis-cite, not cite, and basically just do whatever the hell they want...

Dorian Gray, 2026 edition...or "Why is this a NYT feature?"

Critical Epstein Studies with a focus on infrastructure, network theory, and materiality

1964…

I guess we can look forward to receiving these emails for the rest of our careers...

Prepping a talk about Joe Weizenbaum; this pops up...

Huh...the New Yorker writer who wrote the bootlicking profile of Anthropic *AND* who writes about "technology & books" doesn't mention the massive lawsuit against Anthropic for stealing authors' work.

The singularity might get here…what are the odds??

Meeting all expectations

Help me do the job for the people of Colorado. Chip in $15 today. secure.actblue.com/donate/lauba...

Truth from the DKM's...looking forward to hearing this live in Denver next month. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k_O...

Today in (Galtonian) eugenics... -gift link- www.wsj.com/lifestyle/re...

Bad bunny...

Excerpt from “If I Was White”, a work on the display at exhibition at the National Gallery of Art of indigenous Australian contemporary artworks

On "wishful worries" and other myths of technology (“When someone says ‘algorithm,’ start searching for the people.”) @dcbrock.bsky.social's 2019 essay is worth a re-read lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-...

Huh...Epstein confidant Dan Ariely is known for his TED talk "Our Buggy Moral Code"

A glee club with a business school attached to it...

The persistent belief that "Tech" is a non-human thing and covering it that way, rather than understanding it as fully human-made and suffused throughout our lives.

[Super Bowl writers room] "So what do we call the pro-fascism team?" [a young Frank Miller exhales his cigarette smoke] "The Patriots."

Sunset…

Colorado represents.... "If a person is, for example, wearing a mask and not showing ID but attempting to detain someone," the Fort Collins police chief said, "call 911, and we will be there very fast."

There's a simple way for Sen. Britt to feel less guilty "as a Christian and a mother" www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/u...

For about a decade, I stoped teaching my "Histories of Nuclear War" class as it didn't seem as relevant...I put it back into rotation last year. My students will definitely be reading this: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/u...

We just dropped the trailer to OVERBURDEN. Looking forward to getting this film out in the world. A huge thanks to the entire team involved, spanning four continents. overburdenfilm.com #biodiversity #mining #ConvivialConservation #envhist #liberia

Had very interesting conversation recently with senior (Jewish) scholar about the Epstein files and the prevalence of Jewish men in them, the failure of ethics, and the price of assimilation.

Fascism as incompetence... www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

Here's the in-house medievalist talking about her new project on medieval bees, gardens, and agriculture... #medieval #bees #gardens #environmentalhistory magazine.libarts.colostate.edu/article/hist...

There are few public trash cans in Japanese cities. At the same time, there also very few pigeons & other critters that like what's in the trash cans. I'll take well-designed, plentiful & clean public toilets + collective responsibility for trash over lotsa bins any day. www.wsj.com/lifestyle/tr...

Ride for Alex; Fort Collins, CO

"Mr. Lutnick planned the Caribbean excursion along with his wife, Allison...they would be arriving on a 188-foot yacht called “Excellence.”...A day later, an assistant to Mr. Epstein forwarded Mr. Lutnick a message from Mr. Epstein: “Nice seeing you,” it said." www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

Fort Collins represents... www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2...

"Born to Black farmers in rural Virginia, Dr. West lived through remarkable societal and technological transformations — from segregation to the civil rights movement, from calculators to supercomputers, and from paper maps to Google Maps." Remarkable! www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/s...

Today in "materiality" www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3KL...

40 years ago...Jan. 1986 - I was a freshman engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh when I learned about the Challenger explosion. I've since used the accident in a variety of teaching situations.

I gave a book talk at Stanford a few days ago; a student reporter grokked it: stanforddaily.com/2026/01/25/r...

“The good ideas are coming from China,” LeCun said. “But Silicon Valley also has a superiority complex, so it can’t imagine that good ideas can come from other places.” Gift link www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/t...

"The coal mascot—named “Coalie”—appears to be a new character designed to represent the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSMRE), a bureau in the U.S. Department of the Interior. "

Any statement from the NRA? Didn't think so.

Crazy to be wishing that Colorado's Front Range would get as much snow as Arkansas is projected to receive

Thoughtful dialogue here with @anneapplebaum.bsky.social ...but surprised to not see a reference to Lysenkoism; I think that's perhaps the best analogy for understanding what's happening with respect to science. www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/202...

A blind, idiot god... #GoldenCalf

If LLMs and "A.I. products" represent a deity, then it is blind idiot god. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/s...

Science is the production of reliable knowledge about the natural world...A.I. slop is degrading that reliability Via @rossandersen.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/science/2026...

Here's the recording of my conversation with Patrick McCray (@patrickmccray.bsky.social) about his new book from MIT Press, README, at the Computer History Museum. Audio podcast to follow. youtu.be/reeVfmw4sbI

Last evening, I talked about my new book *README* at the Computer History Museum. One of the chapters in it is about Don Knuth's classic TeXBook. I was surprised and a little terrified to look out to the crowd and see Prof. Knuth sitting in the first row...we talked afterwards & he was quite nice.

"Now Boarding the Freedom Plane"...The plane, organized by the National Archives, will take rare 18th-century documents around the country in a tour loosely inspired by the Bicentennial’s Freedom Train. Someone tell Nicolas Cage!

In lieu of the US's Arecibo dish, which collapsed catastrophically in 2020, researchers are now using China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to revisit those radio sources for 15 minutes each. iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...