My son is a senior in HS, and I got interested in admissions data (sadly enough). The volume of applications to UCLA does not seem viable with any imaginable selection process. Sortition really seems best under those circumstances.

the pan aves --> pandemonium pathway well grooved, though I of course have no idea if allbirds is an id app, a restaurant, or some heretofore-unimagined thing.

If you've read The Third Policeman, I could imagine an amusing riff on the nested boxes with different models, makes, and hues of the cars inside this little car.

He was a good athlete...

It's from that Ted Chiang story about free will. It lights up before you push it. Nobody likes it.

Dougie from beloved tv serial Twin Peaks (3rd series) could read the Hawking radiation from his void orb to play the slots, or so I've been told.

Mildly curious if the base rate literature has any conjectures that doctors are selected somehow for being bad at it.

It does raise a question: are there novels that maintain the canons of probability but for a single Waffle-Haus teleport?

There's an analysis of the claude code leak going around that seems almost certainly written by one of claude's models. Short sentences getting shorter at the end of a paragraph, in a kind of reddit-cadence, that's the essence of online.

Need a reliable heuristic for spelling "Gigerenzer"---can't even come close most of the time.

Joseph Bertrand - Wikipedia

Shouldn't Parade magazine and Marilyn vos Savant have paid royalties to the descendants of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...?

Long-serving faculty senator here: yes they certainly will, but not as much over zoom, oddly.

Fisher's lady who tasted tea, Dr. Muriel Bristol, was an algologist, which is not in fact a student of sadism, unless you consider sustained attention to algae, their properties & doings, necessarily painful.

Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840s. Lamartine is said to be the first to have given expression to the malady. It plays a role in a little story about the famous comic Deburau. A distinguished Paris neurologist was consulted one day by a patient whom he had not seen before. The patient complained of the typical illness of the times-—weariness with life, deep depressions, boredom. "There's nothing wrong with you," said the doctor after a thorough examination. "Just try to relax-find something to entertain you. Go see Deburau some evening, and life will look different to you. "Ah, dear sir," answered the patient, "I am Deburau." [D3a,4]

Randomly reading Walter Benjamin’s lumber-room of notes for his never-finished “Arcades” project and,

I've long thought about writing a paper arguing that nothing called a fallacy is one in literary scholarship. Characters are people (to the extent we understand them). The author's intention is complete and final (more or less). How it makes you feel is data (?)

I want to check in with the "nothing ever happens" folks to see what's really going on.

I remember them. I was active from pretty much the earliest days of academic blogging (Invisible Adjunct comment threads) and got reprimanded by Luker on several occasions for impertinent remarks.

I'm sure there are people who hear the story about Thales and the olive presses and think: you must be very smart indeed to make a lot of money.

Various philosophies

Various philosophies

I'm looking forward to reading your book, as I'm very interested in the topic. Do you happen to write anything about the idea of a 'causal loop' in ecology, as a difficulty of narrating it? Perhaps a niche interest of mine...

reminds me a bit of coming home late, turning on the tv, and immediately concluding that my roommates were filming an ersatz Headbangers' Ball in a bedroom and displaying it, through a cable I hunted for but could not find, on said tv.

I wouldn't mind a browser plug-in to convert paleontological species names in wiki pages to literal English equivalents: it would be easier to understand "beasthead" or "ugly dog teeth in cheek" or "lizard ass"---at least at first.

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

I see that I dutifully transcribed the name of the theologian Bultman as "Buttman" in several archival notes, shrugging it off as a Wilhelm Fucks-type situation, one imagines.

Simon Newcomb, often mocked for denying the possibility of flying machines in 1903, wrote to Peirce in 1892 to note that it was pure nonsense to claim that one infinity was greater or less than another (www.jstor.org/stable/985195, p. 425)

Empson is one of the greats. Start with his completely sane and sober book on Milton, particularly if you're sympathetic to predestination, etc.

In an interview with one Steven Bannon, a certain figure in the news refers to Gell-Mann coining 'quark' from an "old poem" in the 1990s, which led to high-energy physics being defunded by the government.

I remember one conversation with Theodor Adorno when, after I'd said what I'd done that morning (checking out some books from the library, going to the laundromat, etc.), and asked "What about you," I was slightly chilled when he answered: "I have been meditating on erotic and musicological problems."

While in California, Ian Watt asks Theodor Adorno how his day went

I like the sound of it, could imagine a haughty magus type saying it to Cugel in response to an impertinence.