The eldest shares her mom and grandmothers' interest.
The eldest shares her mom and grandmothers' interest.
Spring is sprung
There is a particular bus driver on Route 24 of Capital Area Transportation Authority that (density and time permitting) will Intentionally wait until embarkees sit down before driving onward. And it’s little stuff like that which makes me feel good about living in a Midwest town.
Philip Cohen, reflecting on the intersection of the perverse incentives of ‘publish or perish’ + low consequence editorial accountability + generative AI:
I assume you are appalled at the idea of journals publishing such fabricated results. However, there are a lot of people who would draw a different lesson from this example: Why spend an hour getting this real data, doing some recodes, running the model, and sharing the data and code — when ChatGPT already “knows” the answer? They see the small errors in the table above, and compare the time it took to produce them, and conclude that the ChatGPT approach is much more efficient and almost as good. This is productivity!
To the extent I pay attention to Home and Garden trends I always got the impression the platonic ideal for lawn maintenance was a golf course fairway.
Meanwhile I’m out here weedmaxxing
World Press Photo’s 2026 photo of the year, Separated By ICE:
Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚
On the growing challenges early modern education reformers claimed (and overpromised) the humanities could address:
The humanities came to stand in for the contradictions and tensions that, as we have traced in this chapter, characterized nineteenth-century liberal education or allgemeine Bildung: tensions between method, research, and ways of knowing on the one hand and ethos, teaching, and questions of how to live on the other. The scholars who helped establish “the humanities” as a distinct institutional domain within the modern university and identified themselves with it gradually claimed (and sometimes gained) a monopoly over these questions and concerns, especially as other scholars (natural and physical scientists in particular) began to regard such questions as outside their own domains (witness Pinker). Yet the academics who did so much to make the humanities possible within universities also inherited all of the contradictions and confusions that beset Diesterweg in the 1830s. (p. 79-80).
My first blush thought on this is that focusing on humanities stakeholders overpromising intellectual unity allows for side-stepping the issue of disenchantment (the loss of “magic” as Max Weber might phrase it). In this chapter they do briefly address figures like Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory, but brush them aside pretty quickly.
Is the unifying promise they address really a sign of hubris when the pre-Enlightenment world (particularly in Europe) had a unifying meta-narrative that underpinned intellectual life?
What are we doing? What’s going on?
ghoulish
A thesis for why the pathway to a permanent ceasefire with Iran remains elusive, through the framework of zero-sum logic:
What follows is not necessarily continuous war, but recurrent escalation: blockade followed by countermeasures, interdiction followed by retaliation, each step justified by the last and narrowing the space for restraint. External actors may push for de-escalation, and markets may demand stability, but those pressures cannot override the underlying structure—the struggle over relative power
Our Minds Can’t Sit Still Anymore:
When a user hears silence, they’re reminded for a split second that they’re a person staring at a phone.
In other words, those gaps and spaces when our content isn’t stimulating our brain are precisely where we remember that we’re human beings.
And for this exact same reason, I’d argue that we literally need those moments. They teach us that we’re not just brains on a stick amusing, scrolling, and vegging ourselves to death. Silence—or just the lack of stimulation—reminds us that we’re embodied souls aching for something deeper than dopamine.
📸 : The grid.
Spring Progress 📸 2026.04.08 The maple awakens #SP26.3
I generally believe that the fewer tech devices in a classroom the better (except a raggedy desktop in the corner…preferably next to an old transparency projector, and a TV strapped to a wheeled stand)–but its notable that there is NO GENERATIVE AI in this promo.
Public Domain Review highlighting works that feature Notre Dame today:
Highlights from the many centuries of artworks to feature the Notre-Dame de Paris — which caught fire 5 years ago #onthisday — from its illuminated punctuation of medieval skylines to grainy detailed studies at the birth of photography: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/the-notre-dame-cathedral-in-art-1460-1921
Currently reading: Science, democracy, and the American university : from the Civil War to the Cold War by Andrew Jewett 📚
On the argument that the middle 1800s scientific democrats (a Jewett definition for educational reformers) viewed science as a type of ‘theory-to-practice’ for Christian doctrine:
the first generation of scientific democrats in the universities identified ethics, rather than God’s handiwork in nature, as the point of contact between science and Christianity. They portrayed science as the highest expression of a mode of interpersonal behavior prescribed by God. (p. 34)
Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚
On a central problem identified by German university reformers in the 1830s:
This is what the student experience of “academic freedom” has come to: freedom from all authority, guidance, information. Universities are no longer sacred communities held together through the shared sources of authority and common purpose. They have become modern institutions in which individuals pursue their own purposes, largely unaware of and so uninterested in the desires of others much less those of a community. (p. 70)
A common meme related to current events commentary I see on my various social feeds is to compare the U.S. to Weimar Germany of the 1920s and early 1930s. At least in my realm of U.S. education policy and ideology I think we are more frequently re-litigating the 1820s and 1830s.
Per my last post, the Castlevania 2 ‘Bloody Tears’ theme goes harder than it has a right too.
Somehow was able to get classic video game soundtracks into the 5-year-olds music rotation (its a delicate inception, but worth the respite from the usual playlists) and every time Dire Dire Docks comes on I think of the Northernlion commentary.
Somehow was able to get classic video game soundtracks into the 5-year-olds music rotation (its a delicate inception, but worth the respite from the usual playlists) and every time Dire Dire Docks comes on I think of the Northernlion commentary.
Every couple of years Crowbcat comes out of his cave to remind us of the creative decay wasting away the AAA gaming industry.
There’s something for everyone here:
What the internet was made for: A Chicago music fan secretly recorded over 10,000 live concerts from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Spoon, and has made them all available online.
We’re entering municipal construction season in Michigan and it’s galling that that the municipalities I navigate frequently don’t maintain RSS or Atom feeds of construction project updates. They all rely on vendors for their webpages, how is this not a required baseline technical specification?
Every time @zotero@fosstodon.org releases a significant update I’m once again awed that you can just download this software for free, run it locally on your device, and not lose a single iota of core functionality.
Announcing Zotero 9, with Read Aloud, a Recently Read collection, direct annotation citing, and more
https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-9/
P.S. You should subscribe through email or RSS to @ayjay
The final question and answer set in Ben Sasse’s interview with Ross Douthat is incredibly moving.
