VERY COOL PERSON: It's four-twenty, you know what that means?

ME: Hell yeah! [starts shoving blackbirds into a pie]

update: a new paper analysing the osteohistology of non-crocodylomorph pseudosuchians from triassic south america indicates that the holotype specimen of sillosuchus longicervix was mature or near-mature when it died, opening the possibility that the giant material belongs to a separate taxon

An error message that says “Forbidden” below a “Reply” button

Honestly this should probably happen more often

I'm sure you could pull it off

Bring back the parasol as a fashion statement

(And then in other cases, I think maybe the marketers just haven't realized the potential for novelty in a field because they aren't experts in that field and don't understand where the novelty would lie.)

But I suppose that's at least partially perhaps because the things that tend to fall into the latter category don't tend to be marketed as generic AI, they tend to be marketed as "this is a tool for this purpose."

Like, the latter is the actual use case. But I feel like I can count on one hand how many times I've seen that, whereas I feel utterly bombarded by the former.

Consistently bewildered by how so much AI hype is focused on arguing that AI is ~so good~ at things we already have tools for/ways to do (while frequently actually being worse at those things), rather than putting the focus on things that AI can do that other tools simply altogether cannot.

The Lizard in the River — Riley Black A large tooth indicates that big mosasaurs, over 30 feet in length, swam the same rivers where dinosaurs like T. rex and Triceratops drank.

We used to call mosasaurs "marine reptiles." Then we found out that many of the giant lizards swam through rivers, too.

Last week's article, on a mosasaur that swam where T. rex drank, is up on my blog.

To get articles like this first, sign up for my newsletter. buttondown.com/restingdinoface

If a conference will let me get away with a one sentence bio, I will take it every time.

Opinion: Climate change is class warfare — fight back

www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/anal...

There's something sad about the fact that students are majoring in things they think they "have to" major in, usually based on totally false narratives about what will make them employable. In their *free* electives they're taking things they're *interested in,* and those are what admin is targeting

What these admins will never tell you is that the *courses* in these majors are often full. Students don't *major* in these fields, but they really want to take the classes. They use number of majors as a metric on purpose so they can achieve their cuts.

Hopefully they emailed Glenn, but in case not I've emailed him about it now too.
Did the email say anything beyond the public announcement www.campusmanitoba.ca/announcement... about what is gonna happen with their pressbooks stuff?

Mammothssss

Why do we even bother with endnotes--this is my personal pet peeve as a historian, I need to read the spicy, sassy, whiny footnotes immediately

How did you hear? Was there an announcement or something?

Fragment of ancient Greek papyrus with handwritten text, featuring overlaid captions: "Hidden stories: gravedigger families from 1,800 years ago" and "Using digitised items to find hidden stories in Greek papyri.

Newly digitised Greek papyri from the Bodleian reveal the lives of ancient Egyptian gravediggers, including working as carers and taking part in legal affairs. 📜

[1/7]

These are the questions we’re sorting out on group chats every time a pedestrian or cyclist is struck, and if journalists were doing their job they’d be the ones answering those essential, newsworthy questions. A big source of the problem is we often just get a rewritten police press release.

The hollowing out of public postsecondary education: What do we have to lose? - CCPA Is post-secondary education in Canada a pipeline to train students for jobs or a source of critical perspectives essential to a healthy society?

"It is now time for a federal-provincial strategy on public postsecondary education: essential infrastructure in this nation-building era."

CAUT President Robin Whitaker on the hollowing out of public postsecondary education: www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc...

I hadn't even heard about this, but I guess that explains why we haven't had another one of those metadata meetings

Yeah, same boat.

Back from the museum, it's time for dino sketch dump and merch haul!!
@ydawtheshow.bsky.social is a fantastic YouTube series I've been watching for years. If you love dinos but have some trouble reading papers I highly recommend Steven's videos! His animations are out of this world

Obviously no one goes to the UofM campus after mid-April

In general, (re)orienting education wholly or chiefly to specific perceived market needs is always going to produce disaster once the near term passes. It also eviscerates institutions that might otherwise help people weather change, intellectually and in other ways

Of course our city council would rather just play pretend that it's good than fix anything.

Winnipeg deserves a better transit system than the garbage we have.

Agree with this article, but if we are to do this it needs to be bigger than libraries alone; we must work with disciplinary researchers as well, I think. Many of them are also pretty pissed off with vendors too.

Every penny kept away from massive data focused scholarly publishers who continue working with ICE, among other groups dedicated to harming our communities, is a win.

📚

www.ifla.org/news/the-shr...