Dan Seel

when the AI bubble bursts and we have hundreds of extra GWs of capacity on the grid, power will then be too cheap to meter and the hall–héroult process will be essentially free. i propose spinning up the aluminum industry and providing a weekly ration of aluminum billets to all americans

🚨We analyzed 138 million geocoded property tax records to quantify how municipal boundaries spatially overlap onto economic segregation in every US metro area—creating disparities in localities’ ability to fund public goods. And we made an interactive map of our results! [1/16]

Ken Burns Revolution documentary drinking game where you take a shot every time you recognize the author of a primary source before the narrator tells you.

I feel like if it's Salazar all the dirt from her first senate run will get dragged out again. It'll be less effective this time and she can probably push through it, but still: messy.

“Sooner or later, one has to take sides, if one is to remain human.”

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

worth noting that the $30.2 million deficit the school is facing can be traced to ballooning admin salaries, real estate, and admin benefits, according to the economics department's analysis. the salaries for the actual professors is in line with or *below* the school's revenue growth

I've done a decent amount of historical research on documents turned over in litigation and it never ceases to amaze me how many people are willing to write out "hey would you like to commit a felony with me"

A yellow bridge in front of a city background with three banners reading "POST-GAZETTE STRIKERS WILL WIN".

BREAKING: We won!

Today the 3rd Circuit Court ordered the @post-gazette.com to restore our contract it illegally tore up 5 years ago. That’s our health care, PTO, right to a 40-hr. work week, short-term disability and so much more we’ve struck for 3+ years.

pghguild.com/2025/11/10/p...

"responses of 'about average' and 'not sure' are not shown" - I have a feeling those were the two biggest categories for most of these figures

" Scholar Institution* Please enter the full name of your institution, spelling out where applicable state and campus names, but omitting preceding "The" (e.g., University of State - Campus; or Example University). "

I do really appreciate that the ASA grant application form takes direct aim at Ohio State's weird affectation 🦡🦡🦡

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

SV spent a decade chasing the organic adoption high of smartphones and social media, only to fake it with astroturfed garbage: crypto, NFTs, metaverse, and now AI-Slop. Hard to see them getting real hype ever again.

A stat we don't talk about enough: Newspapers have lost 77% of their jobs over the last 20 year, more than any of the 532 other industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Jevons paradox will always get you in the end.

Students, campus labor unions, and alum organizations have been doing their best to keep the pressure on universities across the country to remain independent and that should be rewarded in any future settlement. Hell, would there even be a resistance to trump in the UC system without labor?

beating my higher ed drum: this includes Higher ed reform which must decentralize power from trustees/admin to faculty, students, staff & alumni governance. Start with collaborationist universities and move outwards from there. Institutions that cave to pressure should face real consequences.

An academic article titled "the beagle dog as an animal model for marijuana smoking studies"

I found this bizarre study yesterday while looking through some Philip Morris documents and I can't stop thinking about it...

Everyone wants to streamline bureaucracy, but maybe we'd get better results by making it *harder* for university admins to chase fads. Imagine the money we'd save with a mandatory cooling-off period before launching a "Center for Blockchain Studies" or dumping millions into the latest edtech toy.

A Post-Literate Society is a Too-Literal Society Directness is a virtue and subtlety is lost

"when people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged but that we can also not ban devices, I want to sigh performatively—how, exactly, am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can’t keep them hooked?" musgrave.substack.com/p/a-post-lit...

Probably best to chase it indefinitely

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads: Abstract A " 'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings. This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one. CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind. Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming ACM Reference Format: Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3759429.3762631 1 A Way of Knowing From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves. I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I? What kind of person? What kind of mind?

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

BJPolS abstract discussing the influence of high inflation on recent elections, voting behavior, and potential impacts on different political parties in the United States.

NEW -

Inflation and Incumbent Support: Experimental Evidence from the 2024 US Presidential Election - https://cup.org/3JaiZYj

"priming Americans to think about inflation reduced support for the incumbent party"

- Selim Erdem Aytaç, @danielmcdowell.bsky.social & David A. Steinberg

#OpenAccess

Figure from blog post: Shows how much 342 new assistant professors had published at the time they began their first jobs. For Assistant Professors and newly promoted Associate Professors, there is an upward trend from early 1990s to late 2010s. The trend is stronger for Associate Professors.

Does a new generation of social scientists have to publish more to achieve less? (from 2019)
blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci... Intuition says "yes", and so says data for sociology.

A pie-chart of federal research funding, using 2023 figures. The funding slices for the NIH (83%) and NSF (17%) are so large that the slices for the NEH and NEA round to 0%.

Again, it is worth keeping in mind when comparing the rate of discoveries that public funding for medicine and the sciences is orders of magnitude larger than for the humanities. We work slow in part because we work on a shoestring.

I wish you had pushed more here, because that's not what either footage or reporting from the ground shows, quite the opposite...

damn. hoping it at least signifies something

ouch, do you have a link?

one of the minor frustrations of the 2020s internet is how many sites now don't respect boolean commands in search, like they'd rather give you a bunch of unrelated content to sift through than turn up only a handful of results

Argentina Gets a Bailout, Brazil Gets the Stick. What Unites Them. The Trump administration’s judgements are rooted in political style, Karthik Sankaran writes in a guest commentary.

I have a piece out today comparing the current ARG bailout to MX 1994 (quite different); ECB behavior in 2010s (closer as it targets voters); current BZ tariffs (ding-ding-ding--it's a market intervention that's also an intervention in domestic politics).
www.barrons.com/articles/arg...