Salishan linguist Sarah Thomason has updated her site with online publications after twelve years (life as a tenured research academic is WEIRD) https://websites.umich.edu/~thomason/papers/papers.html #linguistics #philology #firstnations

Decided to risk updating to Tahoe 26.2. So far, it's not as bad as the the angry people on Reddit said (nothing catastrophic has happened), but the rounded corners are kind of annoying and liquid glass is a bit ugly. Kind of meh.

Merry Christmas!

Microsoft apparently want to use AI to migrate all their C code to Rust, but they're not going to fix all the new, sluggish Javascript cruft eating GB of RAM. 💀

The problem is that keeping the incumbent in place doesn't really help much if they're useless. If you have someone in charge who isn't capable of managing anything or leading anyone at a time of crisis, not getting rid of them is *worse*.

Chomsky's politics, linguistics and friendships all follow the same pattern: he decides the conclusion first and then works back from there. It doesn't really surprise me that a lifetime of deploying his considerable intellectual behind consistently poor judgement extended to Epstein.

I'm not a huge Times New Roman fan, but on the other hand, Calibri is san-serif. Enough said.

I'm not notably good at investing in stocks and shares, but since Trump is busy hiding all the economic stats and the US economic news is probably getting worse in 2026, I feel like now is the time to move the money in my Vanguard stocks and shares ISA into bond- and cash-like things again.

Oprah Pursues Dr. Phil On Ship Through Arctic https://theonion.com/oprah-pursues-dr-phil-on-ship-through-arctic/

political science

Pretty pleased by this slightly ye olde black and white vowel chart created using TikZ, although I have to admit I did get AI to help and then tweaked it, since AI also can't get TikZ right first time, ... #conlang

i will never apologize for a post

I've been hitting the secondhand bookshops again.

Just look at that picture. I'm pretty sure that one of the most popular cars Ford, an American manufacturer, has ever sold in the UK was the Ka. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

NᴏAᴅHᴏᴄCᴏɴsᴛʀᴀɪɴᴛs: assign a violation for each ad hoc constraint introduced in this paper

Feeds don't seem to work

I don't know what to do with my stocks and shares ISA to be honest. I don't know whether it's better to have US exposure or to not have such exposure, where might do better, why nothing is shifting much so far and if that will change...

The number of closed syllable roots reconstructed for proto-Tibeto-Burman is kind of crazy. The vast majority are closed...

We're up-to-date on Skeleton Crew now, and Mini-me's still enjoying it. It feels like they have a lot to do in the final episode, though.

This is a reasonably good read. We've been thinking about replacing an almost new second hand car we bought a decade ago for about £12k, and I was a bit shocked when I saw how much prices had gone up.

It's heartwarming that they found each other again after a wizard made her forget who he was.

How on earth did Netflix take Ranma, which ran for 160 episodes, and only remake the first 12 of them? Surely a season should have been at least double that.

Every damned weekday evening.

I just heard my 10 year old son say "don't call me Shirley" while talking with a friend. 😂

I didn't see this until recently and... it's just true? As a mathematician by training long long ago, dark everything just smells like a fudge factor to make an inadequate or incomplete model work.

New mac user experience: I think macOS might not be an always up kind of operating system. After a month of using it, a reboot noticeably made it a little bit nippier. New house rule is reboot once a month.

I'm told control of the passage for shipping is also valuable if more of the ice melts for more of the year.

Help, the dressing the nurse put on the finger I cut open with a knife from the toolbox yesterday is making it very awkward to indulge in my need to thoroughly clean my hands before touching books, laptops or expensive items.

Kind of wild how in Goonies, a kids' movie front the 80s: - they make the fat kid do a belly wobble dance - the older boy uses the mirror of his car to look down a girl's shirt - one of the boys claims he has naked pictures of another kid's mum - there are racist stereotypes everywhere...

Not a woman, but one thing I resent the most about the healthcare system is how often the only way to get gatekeepers who spend 1-5 minutes on your problem to take it seriously is to try to manipulate them. The setup rewards those who can lie and punishes the honest with chronic untreated illness.

For all of you youths. This was such a great and very compact PDA. There's a lot to be said for a well designed physical keyboard and clamshell design. It was so much easier to type with.

Mini-me is definitely focusing on swimming as his main sport. He does swimming lessons twice a week now and does water polo at the weekend. The only other thing he does is Taekwondo once a week.

Sadly, very few people are consistent in their moral reasoning if it would mean criticising their friends.

I really don't like how everywhere in the UK stinks of weed nowadays. I am broadly in favour of legalisation because I don't think people's lives should be wrecked for smoking a drug probably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, but it just stinks of stale BO and makes public spaces unpleasant.

We went to an open day for a secondary school near us, since mini-me will be moving up next year, and I'm kind of annoyed by the lack of joined on thinking on prizes.

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #11,168!

If Trump wins, I just hope Vance can behave himself in the cabinet 😬

So does Bluesky have sustainable funding nowadays? Or is there a risk of it vanishing sometime soon?

This book was a bit disappointing, not because it's bad but because I'm probably not the target audience. And it's a shame because it was so cool to acquire a copy for a reasonable price, instead of the £200+ that Amazon wanted.

Ahsoka was good, but the entire first season was clearly half of something. It creates lots of plot threads and closes few. It felt a bit like seeing Fellowship back in 2001... which means that if they don't make season 2, it's going to be very obviously incomplete forever.

Temporarily in Twitter read only mode because I used the wrong metaphor (talking about giving you enough rope to hang yourself in the context of programming languages upsets the algorithm).

Today in "linguists are not kidding when they say that language enables you to understand sentences that have never been said before in the entirety of human history"

I've sometimes been accused of being untidy, but no one can accuse me of lacking a smell based disgust reaction.

It's also a mystery to me how some people live like this. The previous inhabitants kept cats and lived with cat pee soaked carpets.... Even the chipboard underneath the carpet and underlay is covered in stains.

If all else fails, dismantle it with a lump hammer.

Trailmakers really needs a proper PID controller. It would make things so much easier. As it is, mini-me struggles to create self-stabilising flying machines using rockets and thrusters instead of the balloons/blimps.

The garden grapes are starting to look ripe. We have Boskoop Glory, because it does better in cold climates than most.

Just dropping back after a fairly long absence, and it's a bit weird to have a default bs feed that not everyone just thirst trapping each other. Last time I was here, the place was 75%+ skin.

Grandad made a rack for mini-me to hang his old taekwondo belts behind his new desk.

Another day, another insanity on the platform previously known as Twitter.