What's amazing is that in the 80+ years since WW2, simply opposing every war, knowing nothing else about it, has shown it will become the correct, accepted position over time. It's the political stance equivalent of investing in the S&P 500: safe, a little boring maybe, but outlasts all others.

I loved that cat

People were always flabbergasted when they found out a math degree but hated arithmetic. There are whole fields of math that don’t use numbers at all, really. Those are the ones I like the most.

Same. That attitude was and is so gross.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: We try to keep fresh fruit around, though it can be challenging out of season, yeah.

CHOTNIER: So the icebox, obviously, would keep things from going bad as quickly.

WCW: Exactly, yes.

C: Is the food communal? Do you just grab whatever's in there?

WCW: Isaac, look.

I shattered my left shoulder by tripping over my own left foot, trying to stumble and then tripping over my own RIGHT foot. Went airborne, landed on my outstretched arm. This happened in a state park, on father’s day. Soooo many people saw it all.

I can see the alt text btw

Almost exactly the same, except it was during a school museum trip. I think of that piece a lot.

Reached one year cancer free. Went to Iceland, accidentally witnessed an erupting volcano. Learned to solder.

This book this was based on is pretty great. Actual murder mystery, not for kids really.

A large realistic acrylic painting of a macro look at an unfurling fern leaf. A large curving spine is dappled brilliant blue through turqoise to dark green, a reflective white teal highlighting the top to mimic light. The same colours are featured in the other spines that curve down from the main stem, each one covered in tiny leaf lobes. Darker shadows in navy greens give contrast, as do the stippling all over the stems to give the impression of fine hairs. The leaf stems on the right are less detailed and make it seem out of focus.

'Unfurl', 2023, acrylics on 20x24-inch canvas.

Part of a small series of macro ostrich fern paintings. #ArtAdventCalendar

Men. Can. Get. Breast cancer.

Remember those times i said we were headed for an epistemic crisis because bad people were gonna use deepfakes to make propaganda & conspiracy theories & destabilize consensus reality-making & how the central paradigm of "generative AI" enables, encourages, & was indeed built on this premise?

Yeah.

I’m so jealous. I almost took a “living Latin” course before the program was shut down. In high school I took Japanese (there was a Japanese company that purchased a factory in our tiny southern town).

Same. I had a friend once comment that he was surprised I was taking a French class, and not something more interesting/obscure. I duly showed him all my research into tutoring for Gaelic and the Cayuga language.

ME TOO

For what it’s worth, I started following you and ultimately subscribed to your fantastic newsletter because of the brouhaha. ❤️

Note: we were *very* far away and left when the wind shifted in our direction. The gas cloud is extremely toxic!

Volcanic eruption viewable from the road. Channels of lava cooling to the left of the active crater.

Second vantage point of the active eruption

First vantage point of the eruption on our way back from the Blue Lagoon.

Tongues of crumbly lava reaching across a destroyed road near the Blue Lagoon.

Without planning on it at all, we caught part of the eruption in the Reykjanes peninsula in Iceland a few days ago. Also saw some of the lava scars from last year. What an otherworldly place.

A tired looking puffin tucking its beak under a wing, but still keeping an eye on the sky.

A puffin family just outside of a cave nest.

A puffin family watching humans watch them.

A moment of reassurance - two of the puffins seemed young and unsure despite having adult coloring.

I met some puffins yesterday! They are much smaller than I expected, though just about as cute as I expected. They all had adult coloring, but many of them seemed to be rather new to adulthood :)

I just have to say, as a historian of the Reconstruction-era Klan, that masked paramilitaries are very bad and masked vigilantes are even worse and there are causal links between the two and none of this is good for democracy.

"I asked ChatGPT" "I asked Grok" ok well I asked Gandalf and he said he has not passed through fire and death to bandy crooked words with a witless worm

To groups like ICE/police this is a feature not a bug.

I get that, I really do. But I grew up in a part of the country where unauthorized paramilitary groups flourished, and I think it’s important to both recognize and fight back against state sponsored violence *as well as* the fact that these groups often aim to infiltrate “official” organizations.

That may be true but there were also guys there wearing patches with white supremacist-associated iconography. And my point about anyone being able to buy badges and patches online still stands - how many of them were actually employed by the agencies they were claiming to represent?

Like literally anyone can buy tactical gear online. Patches too.

At this point if I see a guy in tactical gear of any kind my first thought is white supremacist paramilitary, and “official” patches are so easy to obtain online that it doesn’t matter to me if they’ve got them.

I’ve been watching all the videos out of Minneapolis and LA and at this point I’m wondering if the majority of armed dudes in masks wearing “ICE” gear are even employed by them. Like ICE should be abolished *and also* most of these guys are just claiming to be them in order to terrorize people.

Read my brilliant pal Matthew.

Two LIGO sites are essential for independently validating observed gravitational wave signals. Without the second site, we can't constrain the sky position well enough for electromagnetic follow-up searches of binary neutron star mergers. This would be devastating for the whole field ...