Higher education at its best is teaching students how to think, how to feel, how to tell the truth, how to observe the difference between fact and fiction. And then take those skills and apply them wherever their career leads.
Nicholas Urie1
Category: et cetera
Spring has sprung
By which I mean, grades are turned in for the Spring 2026 semester. Now I have to turn to the work I was putting off because of teaching. 🥸
The tyranny of evil men
TL;DR: Hegseth has been saying this shit for years, and he never gave much thought to what it meant.
Continue reading “The tyranny of evil men”Qs about the queues
With Bluesky’s announcement that they’ve taken another round of money from venture capital, there’s speculation about how enshittification will set in and destroy the platform.
Continue reading “Qs about the queues”The inevitable next level
In bombing Iran, the US has been using AI to pick targets. This is a playbook that was deployed first by Israel in the early attacks on Gaza. As I commented last year, “Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza has shown that they are willing to bomb and murder indiscriminately, outstripping even their hyped AI’s alleged ability to identify targets.”
As Israeli forces have attacked Beirut, they’ve ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. There can be no pretense that technology is providing them with pinpoint targeting information.
Continue reading “The inevitable next level”No war, no ICE
Here’s a thing I wrote to my senators:
It’s important to resist the unprovoked war with Iran, especially on the heels of the unprovoked incursion into Venezuela. Reckless and indiscriminate overthrow of governments is just a recipe for chaos.
It’s also important to resist funding ICE. I mention this in the same e-mail because I’ve seen rhetoric online trying to use our foreign wars as an excuse to fund domestic security. Murder and oppression abroad cannot be an excuse for murder and oppression of our own citizens, however. The archipelago of detainment camps that ICE is attempting to build, the extradition of people that courts have ordered should not be extradited, and untrained officers given financial incentives to sweep in as many people as possible… All these things show that ICE must not be given money to grow.
Vaccinated yesterday
I’m feeling a bit achy today, in part because I got my covid and flu shots yesterday. It’s weird that this rudimentary bit of public health is also deeply political.
To paraphrase Voltaire
Set aside the fact that Charlie Kirk was a vile bigot.2 Set aside the question of what motivated his killer.3
It is a performative contradiction to claim simultaneously that his legacy is one of free speech and open debate but that anybody who says bad things about him should be fired from their job. Such vehement rhetoric is incoherent on its face.
A true champion of free speech might wholly disapprove of what someone says, but would defend in their death the right to say it.
Four!
A correction to an earlier post, confirming my suspicion from the post before: A recent collaboration, when published, will reduce my Erdős Number to 4.
This required running the query on a different database, one which included more of computer science connections.
Five degrees of separation
In a footnote to the previous post, I suggested that a recent collaboration would lower my Erdős Number to 5.
On the basis of having checked a long time ago, I knew that my Erdős Number was at most 6 on account of having coauthored with Craig Callender.
Since then, however, Craig has also collaborated with more people. So his Erdős Number went down to 4 years ago, meaning that mine was already 5 or less. The new paper just means that there are multiple paths by which I’m entitled to an Erdős Number of 5.4