M. Willis Monroe

I hadn't seen this mentioned yet, but I garden for all of those reasons and also to reduce my reliance on fossil fuel shipped fruits and veggies. It's so nice to eat a fresh cherry tomato from my backyard rather than something that came from halfway across the planet.

I am quick at playing board games; I have nine skills; I forget runes slowly; the book is a preoccupation with me and also craftsmanship. I am able to glide on skis; I shoot and I row so that it makes a difference; I am able to understand both: harp-playing and poems. — Earl Rognvald of Orkney, trans. Judith Jesch.

Weirdly enough I was telling my first-years about "warrior ethos" last week.

Here's the skill set of a Top Viking, as set out by a dude who'd have gone through anyone using the phrase "warrior ethos" like a well-aimed axe.

800 Years of English Handwriting - Google Arts & Culture Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.

This exhibit from the Derbyshire Record Office hosted on Google Arts and Culture is really cool! Beautiful images of handwriting throughout the last 800 years. Relevant because I just finished teaching lectures on cuneiform and its change over time...

artsandculture.google.com/story/800-ye...

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Charlie Kirk and those who have canonized him.

archive.ph/2025.09.16-2...

We've got a new poll up on the DRH focused on ritual, we're always recruiting more scholars to create entries (and we've got honoraria available!).

I treat as an opportunity to practice accountability, and like you I've never seen in abused. Students generally ask for a few days extra and end up handing in better work often before I've even started grading the things that came in on time.

This has been my policy for a while, I tell the students that the due dates on the syllabus are determined by me, but each of them has their own course/work schedules and that they should identify the crunch times in their semester and propose realistic times that they can hand in their best work.

Wow, not good!

The absolute encouragement and boosterism to do whatever it is you ask is just crazy... seems so dangerous. Not only does it tell you to go for it, it rationalizes it, and predicts future payoff. I mean why wouldn't you?! It's stops short of calling you a coward...

These threads are a pretty amazing example, by Will, of how dangerous LLMs are when consulted for advice, information, etc... (basically anything). Lots of "yes and"ing and pushing the user to extremes choices.

We just finished watching season 2 of Andor (loved it) and this was a fun and insightful read:

We may never know everything about the past, but we do know how to say in Akkadian 'Speak out, revolt' (tisiʾā tuqumta)!

That's thanks to one of the earliest Flood myths, Atra-hasis, composed nearly four thousand years ago.

You should download this while you can, Andrew is an excellent scholar and has a unique way of distilling quite complex historical narratives into compelling and edifying prose.

I've rented a dirt cheap VPS from DigitalOcean for ages and have run various CMS type things on it... wordpress, hugo, now I've settled on @11ty.dev, having the server has been handy for running other experiments/websites when the mood strikes.

Oh I'm sure the actual categorization is pretty far off... but I give them credit for putting the data out there... I'd be fascinated what this looks like for ChatGPT™ since that seems to be the one students are most familiar with... but I doubt we'll ever see that.

I just want to highlight this figure, it is so shocking... Students use AI to create not learn. They're not scaffolding their learning, they're not working their way up a pyramid of skills... they're just having the AI write their assignments.

A graph showing what types of tasks were asked by each discipline, Education tops the charts with 40.6% of questions being used for direct output creation.

As further evidence of future crisis check out this graph (also from the whitepaper), the discipline where direct output creation was most common: "Education". What will that do to our education system in 3-4 years when these graduates are teachers?!

I give the authors a lot of credit for putting this all out there, they dance a little bit around the issue of "cheating" but I think this whitepaper gives a lot of important data that shows how students are using AI right now is contrary to learning (full stop).

"An inverted pyramid, after all, can topple over." Questions asked of Claude when assigned to Bloom's taxonomy, students are using AI to create answers and submit work rather than understand hard problems. 39.8% of all questions were used for "Creating" the highest level, the taxonomy is supposed to show a pyramid structure standing firm, this is the opposite.

There's a lot in there, but this figure is the standout. Students use AI to create work, not to understand tricky problems or figure out how to apply concepts. They're just using AI as a shortcut not a tool. Quoting the authors of the white paper: "An inverted pyramid, after all, can topple over."

They divide the questions in a four part (2-axis) categorization... direct vs collaborative and problem solving vs output creation, this useful because it gets at the issue of whether AI is a tool to understand problems or just solve them and move on... you can probably see where this is going.

Breakdown of questions asked of Claude and their assigned "subjects" compared to percentages of undergrad majors. CS really stands out here.

Caveat this is all anonymized data which they tried to assign to various disciplines in higher-ed, but it probably tracks pretty well... they start off looking at the proportion of subjects using AI compared to percentage of undergrads enrolled in those degrees: not surprisingly CS stands out

Anthropic Education Report: How University Students Use Claude AI systems are no longer just specialized research tools: they’re everyday academic companions. As AIs integrate more deeply into educational environments, we need to consider important questions abou...

If you're concerned about AI use in higher education check out this whitepaper from the AI company Anthropic www.anthropic.com/news/anthrop... about how students use their product (Claude™) there's some really fascinating and worrying stuff in here—kudos to the authors for putting it all out there..

Congratulations!

My other analogy about AI involves an "ice wizard", mixed winter-sports practicing on the same ice-rink, a rival team, and a hypothetical easy to remember name of a student athlete... I'll try that one on my students first.

As instructors we have to remember that our students are being offered AI at every turn, just like the vending machines are pushing sugary sodas, and chips in the halls... how do we counter this easy to digest, high caloric form of sustenance, that literally makes your body want more?

Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot ChatGPT "power users," or those who use it the most, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.

I've been thinking about an analogy of AI LLMs as junk food: readily available, easy and fast, and rewiring our brains to want more. And how time and money is spent by health organizations trying to get people to eat their vegetables! This article seems to confirm that: futurism.com/the-byte/cha...

Hunger and Pingree, Astral Sciences in Mesopotamia (1999)
Boiy, Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (2004)
would be the two for me...

Congrats!

My parents were just visiting from the states and said a normal (not-free range) carton of a dozen eggs was around 8-9 US dollars. That's in New England. For comparison, a dozen eggs (free-range, renewable energy, local to the wider region) is 8 CAD dollars right now where we live.

Tebrikler, iyi yolculuklar!