Thanasis Kinias

It's becoming increasingly clear to me that Reflect Orbital's fucking stupid giant mirror satellite, with absolutely NOTHING useful to offer, which will cause countless safety issues, ecological disasters, and destroy the night sky, is going to launch.

A bunch of astronomers and I have sent out […]

I want a laptop setting that’s “I’m sitting in the damn sun, so crank that screen up to burn-my-eyes-out bright and battery life be damned”

Gotta say I’m disappointed with @frameworkcomputer and I hope that they reconsider their recent decisions.

I’d been using ThinkPads for 20+ years until switching to Framework for my latest laptop two years ago, and I’ve been an evangelist for them ever since.

Jack Posobiec is criticizing Weimar Republic Germany the right way.

--Ezra Klein

photo of a long table with displays of Asian books and prints; in the foreground is an old scroll with vertical Chinese text

The world is terrible, but this morning I’m bringing a class to look at cool stuff—late Edo & Meiji-era prints, nineteenth-century Japanese books (plus an early 19th c. Chinese Gospel of Matthew), and in pride of place, a 13th c. printed Buddhist scroll from Japan

Official photo of Hugh Thompson, Jr. In olive drab fatigues in front of an American flag.

We need more Hugh Thompsons and Ron Ridenhours in the world.

You know what I love?

When I get done grading an assignment and then I discover that Canvas has inexplicably just not saved the grades or comments for a third of the class.

Over the weekend, I wrote to the nearly 200 members of c18.masto.host who joined us in 2022-2024 and then stopped logging in over a year ago. I've gotten several emails back saying that after committing to Bluesky, social media as a whole came to feel like a bad idea. It is my hope that keeping […]

Hey friends! I’m looking for a good article-length reading on sawm (fasting) in Islam to use with undergrads. What I’m looking for is a scholarly work on the practice from a religious studies/cultural studies perspective—but all the scholarship I can find is stuff like “health effects of fasting […]

image of early modern book page with text: Licenſed Rog. L’ſtrange. April 15. 1675.

I just noticed how Roger L’Estrange’s name is printed here (“L’ſtrange”) and for some reason it really amuses me.

(This is from Hannah Wooley’s _The Accomplish’d Lady’s Delight_, 2d ed., London, 1677)

#BookHistory #histodons

Trying to figure out what “Бурдье Пьер” could possibly mean in Russian before realizing that it’s just Pierre Bourdieu’s name.

Why is everything ProQuest does the literal worst?

#academia

TFW you realize that you never locally saved the chapters you scanned to assign as readings for one of your classes at a previous job after putting them on Canvas, so now they only exist in Canvas courses you no longer have access to.

screenshot showing a generic “person” icon next to a drop-down menu with the text “Hi, User”

I feel so loved

Brushing the chalk dust off my trousers after class and remembering the elderly professor I had as an undergrad who used to use the blackboard very extensively—and, because of where he would rest his right hand when he was standing and thinking, would often wind up with a chalk-dust hand print […]

for years now I’ve kept teaching-related files in paths like ~/docs/$INSTITUTION/$SEMESTER/$COURSE, which can be a lot to type, so I created a symlink in my home directory pointing to the semester to save on typing

but of course the old path is so ingrained in my habits that I find myself […]

And it's a little sad. Because it's not like there aren't a few dozen exciting use cases for LLMs and image generation engines.

For example speech to text. Using an LLM to clean up dictation, which tends to be horrible, is pretty effective. What LLMs do well is find the most obvious answer […]

OMG our campus IT has so colossally borked something that all of our on-line services (Canvas, student information, classroom database, etc.) all now redirect to their service status page—which helpfull reports that all systems are up!

What an embarassment.

ADL website. No results were found.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/01/anti-defamation-league-removes-extremism-research

2 fluffy light coloured dogs running next to each other across a grassy meadow, ringed by poplar trees. They are green or different shades of yellow in distinct clumps. The sky above is blue.

One thing I really love about the woods at this time of year is the colours give away which trees are actually the same tree: aspen poplars like these send up shoots, so many trunks are actually the same tree, even if they're separated by a large distance […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

RIP Jane Goodall <https://apnews.com/article/jane-goodall-obit-78698397851bc7634717206f7eba07b2>

Something like half the SMS messages I receive are scammers. And of the rest, probably 80+% of them are from delivery apps or appointment reminders. Well under 10% of my incoming SMS messages are communication with real people I know.

*sigh*

Suvarth Mahadevan talking about Habitable-zone Planet Finder instrument on Hobby-Eberly Telescope (which incidentally has a bullet hole in the mirror, because... Texas)

This is optimized for cool M stars - smaller planets around small stars produce larger radial velocity signatures. M stars are […]

OK, seeking a tech recommendation: I need new Bluetooth headphones. The criteria are:
– in-ear rather than over-the ear (for use in hot/sweaty conditions)
– sweat-resistant (see above)
– earpieces physically connected to each other (not separate earbuds)
– direct USB-C charging (nothing […]

Welp, that’s three buses in a row to no-show. App shows bus 2 min away, 1 min away, 0 min away—then it vanishes and next bus is 30 min away.

So that’s a $30 cab fare instead, I guess.

Why do you suck so much, Austin?

I love relying on a public transit system where buses sometimes just... don’t show up. Like at all.

Especially convenient when it’s the shuttle to the train station which simply—and without explanation—just no-shows. Two cycles in a row.

I’m curious what folks are seeing at other big US universities, but I’ve been noticing a *lot* more military uniforms on campus this semester. ROTC cadets seem to be in uniform way more than is usual (though for some reason I seem to be seeing a lot more Navy and Air Force in uniform than Army?).

A little blue stuffed Mastodon toy being held up by one hand in front of the Federation Street sign.

It’s dangerous to go alone #Plushtodon

I’m just catching up after class, but it appears that the gist of Hegseth’s speech to the assembled U.S. military leadership was “no girls and no fat guys”?

Do I have that right?