Passing thought for the morning: slow-blinking at a cat and playing peekaboo with a baby are essentially the same thing. "My eyes were gone, and now they're back! This demonstrates my trustworthiness and/or entertainment value!"

Huh, I had somehow missed the news that, since 2021, Maryland no longer had a state song, which is actually good news, since "Maryland, My Maryland" was the worst set of lyrics ever to be graced with the name. But it ought to have a new one. One that doesn't suck.

Opera goes hard: "In Elena Doria Winell's operatic adaptation, on the other hand, the psychological weight of unrecognized labor takes a toll on the Hen and she, in a final mad scene, murders the other farm animals, chokes on the bread, and dies."

I've told this story before but as a little kid i told everyone i was going to be a garbage truck driver when i grew up. when i became an archaeologist, my parents told me they were proud that i had held onto my childhood dream of collecting other people's rubbish

A hot take thread on LLMs, undercutting the market, and how their strategies are (and are not) like the Uber/Lyft market-invasion plan. The tl;dr: AI is trying to do for creative labor what Uber did for hired drivers, and it's not going to work. Disclaimer: I am not any sort of relevant expert.

ICE is not about immigration. ICE is about normalizing a paramilitary force on peaceful streets. Abolish ICE.

Eurovision is over! Spoiler: once again, fans managed to keep pro-Israel brigading at bay.

Better late than never, my Eurovision first semifinal thoughts.

I'm using OpenAI Whisper to subtitle a video and am pleasantly surprised by the accuracy. I probably shouldn't be, because AFAICT Whisper uses a trained neural-net model like most cool "AI" did from, oh, 2002 through 2019. It's only the injection of LLM that makes modern "AI" horseshit.

BLOOB FOR THE BLOOB GOD!

Listening to the America cover of "I Don't Believe in Miracles", thinking, "Colin Blunstone went harder." It's hard to imagine going less hard than Blunstone, but America pulled it off.

Szép Magyarország, édes hazátok!

(Reposting because image upload failed the first time for some reason) Today I was nearly brained by falling hardware while teaching! OK, I exaggerate. I was a good 10 feet away, but on any given day, I quite reasonably could have been near or under the projector screen as it fell.

So, it looks for all the world like the administration's next move on Iran is "declare victory and run away as fast as possible, leaving the mess for other people to clean up". It's giving credit where it's very much not due, but it looks like that might be the best move under these circumstances?

Having a PhD doesn’t mean you’re always right, but it does mean that you unlock new and more powerful ways to be wrong.

Today's delight: pudding.cool/2026/02/happ...

All you need to know about ballot fraud is that it is, and for several decades has been, vanishingly rare. If you really want to dig deeper, then historical information is that over a century ago, ballot fraud was _rampant_, but almost all technological developments since then have improved matters.

It may be frivolous to do so, but it's been surprisingly effective to view the Iran war through the lens of EU5 mechanics, as encountered by a recklessly ignorant player: * Declare war without even fabricating a casus belli, take a huge stability hit.

Listening to Hobo Blues Band's 2008 _Bolondvadászat_ parallel to the 1984 original, mostly thinking of the remake as an overproduced mess that was an ill-conceived idea, but in spite of it all that bizarre disco-funk arrangement of "Mesél az erdő" is growing on me.

DHS keeps the fuck plane. Lewandowski stays on it and he has to fuck. Markwayne's problem now.

My daddy always told me, "Never bet on anything that can talk." With that dictum in mind, I have a question about the constant string of reports of insider bets winning big on prediction markets: who are they winning _from_? Who are the dumb marks placing bets in pools with known insiders?

The Iranian regime was horrifically unpopular with their people mere months ago, and our response to that is... surprise attacks? I'm not any sort of student of history, but I get the impression nothing juices a government's legitimacy like foreign aggression. We've fucked the revolution so hard.

To triumph in a swordfight, you have to at some point do something your opponent won't expect, but despite its high success rate, the Surprise Blowjob never became a popular fencing technique.

Customer in Aisle 1 (loudly, into cellphone): Yes, I’m here, and I found it, but they have a bunch of different kinds and I don’t know which one to get. Me: Hi, can I help you? Customer: I need some rat poison for my husband. Me: OK, no problem. How big is your husband? (This really happened.)

I wrote a little tool to solve a problem that was bugging me. Little code solutions like this always bring me joy.

So, evidently @jaketapper.bsky.social has kicked off a conversation about exactly what is a "concentration camp". This sort of thing _should_ be basic knowledge, but a lot of people have the same misunderstanding of how the Konzentrationslager system worked which I'll call "the Auschwitz effect".

In incredible news, the European Parliament has voted overwhelmingly for "The Full Recognition Of Trans Women As Women." Even the center-right European People's Party voted for the declaration. It will form a foundation for their position at the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Our latest.

Apropos of nothing, remembering that one highly regarded fantasy work of the 70s was "the saga of the guy whose first act in fantasyland is to rape a teenager, and then spends three books punctuating bouts of self-pity by occasionally being sad he's a rapist." Man, I do not miss "the good old days".

The College of Arts and Sciences gave mugs away to us with Sharpies to complete them at some event a few years back. I still have mine. Maybe there's a reason I don't get invited to A&S social functions anymore.

Every day Mamdani comes out and is like "hey guys, I turned off the orphan-crushing machine. Literally just had to flip a switch. Took less than 5 minutes." After decades of dem leadership pissing and moaning and fundraising about how complex an issue it is and how difficult the process is etc

Our memorial candle for Alex was still burning this morning, despite snow and wind. There are always lights in the darkness, and eventually dawn.

Fuck, I take an hour off to listen to music and the feds execute another citizen. Terrible shit needs to stop happening (and those responsible need to be prosecuted).

I only recently learned that the Moody Blues' "Days of Future Passed" had to be basically remixed from the ground up in 1978, because the 1967 masters had deteriorated. But in 2017 the original mix was rediscovered, remastered, and rereleased.

Today I learned that there is Ea-Naṣir/Nanni slashfic, Newton/Leibniz slashfic, and Bertrand Russell/T.S. Eli... oh, wait, that last one is the real world, nevermind.

The US granted visas to Jews but only allowed 30,000 in from Germany a year. You had to wait for your number to come up. Meet Robert Smallbones. An unassuming British diplomat who 'hacked' this system so effectively (saving 48 THOUSAND Jews) the UK government kept his scheme secret for decades /1 🧵

My belief that Battlestar Galactica (original series) episodes' quality is inversely proportional to their amount of Boxey and Muffit content is borne out pretty well by episode 14 ("Fire in Space"), although most of the egregious things wrong with it aren't actually Boxey and Muffit's fault.

A bit of macabre from Frog and Toad Bot. I'm sure in the story tihs is taken from Toad is doing something pleasant and wholesome with that rope, but in isolation the line is kinda dark.

I have been rendered completely helpless by illness at the worst possible time. Missed my talk at #jmm2026, likely also going to miss a Mathemalchemy reunion and the knitting circle.

Today I learned there's a kitchen appliance called a "jerky gun". It's nothing extraordinary — basically a caulking tool you fill with meat — but it would be hard to find a more masculine-coded name for an appliance than "jerky gun", unless there's a kitchen tool called a "steak truck" or something.

My wife, this morning: "We should all speak Finnish. Then everyone would be able to use a comfortable pronoun." Me: "Yes, but then we'd all have to learn the partitive case. That might be even more frustrating than butting heads with gender-policing assholes."

I just got an XTEINK X4. It's a ridiculous device, not actually a good e-reader as such things are evaluated, but after installing the CrossPoint third-party firmware, it's much better than it has any right to be, with quick refresh and crisp text. Having no backlight is a bummer, but it's so cute.

Someone much more clever than I am pointed out that Frosty the Snowman could be considered a golem, so I ran with that.

My understanding of what the fuck is going on with NVIDIA, as a mathematician who is not an economist: starting in late 2023, courtesy of their chips being effective for running LLMs,they saw insane, >100% revenue growth. This, from a kitchen-table perspective, _looks_ like a really good thing.

Mervyn Peake's _Titus Alone_ needs a film adaptation in which Titus's recurring nemeses are played by Daft Punk. (Admittedly, any film adaptation of _Titus Alone_ would be a challenge, because the novel is a mess. Intriguing, visceral, and difficult, but first and foremost a mess.)

Well, it's a little clearer now why billionaires are so invested in technology that produces better written emails.

Yeah, let's hear it for Middle-Aged Cardamom!

It's looking like Teen Vogue's excellent political coverage is coming to an end, alas. I'll miss having hard-hitting political coverage among the horoscopes, celebrity fluff, and sex tips. (At least we still have _Wired_. And _People_ seemed to be getting in on the action recently, too.)

I had never seen USA partisan politics given this particular gendered take, but it conforms awfully well with how the electorate seems to react to various parties' actions (see also: Murc's Law).

I posted this on Facebook over a year ago, but @thatandromeda.bsky.social is reminding me they're a thing, so sharing with a new audience. my name is Wil, and wile yu slepe i find the frute yu hoped to kepe. wats in the fridge to fill my tum? so swete and cold I ete the plum.

I feel like Bertrand Russell would have something to say about this. If Triscuits can possess all possible natural flavors, we should be able to give a Triscuit every flavor that is not, in itself, "Triscuit-flavored". Does that Triscuit taste like itself, or not?