Henry Snow

oh God what why

the 20th century really was the age of acronyms. hoping readers of this chapter won't mind being told FTO worked for the MNC AMAX and its subsidiary RST and sided with UNIP rather than the BSA-backed ANC, with complex implications for AMAX's relationship with AMWU and MASA

I feel like western PA ruled from Boston (?) would be a nightmare insurgency situation

Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Can Your Face Predict Your Salary? Using AI Personality Assessments in Hiring A new study from Wharton faculty explores how AI can extract personality traits from facial images — and what that means for your career.

Computer scientists: "So with machine learning we can extract subtle patterns from massive datasets. What shall we do with it?"

Business school professors, every single time: "You know, I think phrenology got a raw deal in the late 1800s."

Chernobyl promo poster, using an awkward, lumpy typeface.

Fonts are in the news, so I'm going to take the opportunity to port over an old thread: what was typography like in the Soviet Union?

Spoiler: they did not just have 1 font everyone had to use. As a matter of fact, there were 39.

One of them, you can see here, used to great effect for "Chernobyl."

But I think there's opportunity as well as risk. Artists and teachers didn't have it great 5 years ago! We can do more than defend past structures like intellectual property and marginal pay; w/ the solidarity of a larger class of workers identifying w/ the same problems we can build something new

This is of course cold comfort given the sheer misery they endured; what happened to artisans in the industrial era was tragic, cruel, and could have been mitigated. We have an even more powerful and democratic state now, and we should use it to minimize harms and maximize benefits.

One cause for optimism with AI job displacement and disruption: new technologies that disempower particular classes of worker often encourage new forms of solidarity. The British artisan class that lost their livelihoods in 1790s-1830s was instrumental in the development of unions and socialism

I did not know that the shortest day of the year is not the earliest sunset until Trevor (aka Plateau Astro) explained how...well, planets and sunsets work. Read more below!

Sunsets only get later from here! 🌇

www.plateauastro.com/index.php/bl...

SKULL OF THOMAS AQUINAS: TAKE A LEFT NOW
PRIEST: No, the GPS says we have to keep going—
SKULL: I KNOW A SHORTCUT
PRIEST: Do you remember the last ti—
SKULL: FOR THOSE WITH FAITH, NO EVIDENCE IS NECESSARY; FOR THOSE WITHOUT IT, NO EVIDENCE WILL SUFFICE

"Listen to Hegel while eating a bagel" will bring more students to the yard than the most charismatic and credible lecturer on the topic (and can also be repeated next semester w Schlegel)

(incidentally the pencil story was Leonard Read first, not Friedman. they're both awful but I believe in good citation practices even among bad people)

the 20th-century right on pencils: isn't it a miracle how capitalism brings us all together across national boundaries to produce this writing implement

the 21st century right on pencils:

this is a new Blackboard feature. looks like a trial basis until June '26, at which point it will be an additional license they're going to try to get our institutions to pay for

AVA - Use AI to revise submission feedback Impact: Instructor Updated Help Topic: Grade Assignments with Flexible Grading and Grade Tests with Flexible Grading Idea Exchange ID: Not applicable The new AI-powered Rewrite option in Flexible Grading helps instructors improve the clarity and tone of their feedback. This tool uses generative AI to reword instructor-authored comments—whether they are rough notes, bullet points, or complete sentences—into more polished and student-friendly language. The Rewrite option supports iterative editing and is designed to help instructors deliver clearer, more impactful feedback with less effort.

If I can't even write my own grading feedback why would I be qualified to grade student writing?

Faculty Members Are Not Cashiers Why the “customer service” lingo in academe is bad for students.

2014 from me: No, students aren't customers. Because you, the student, are much more important than a financial transaction.

www.chronicle.com/article/facu...

interesting, why the disparity

does anyone have suggestions for e-ink devices (tablets?) for writing and reading?

the tyrannical authority of the consumer is incompatible with learning

students cannot be customers and also students. these are mutually exclusive. the customer is always right, and students by definition are not. a teacher needs to be able to challenge students

It’s completely absurd. The Constitution does not allow for-cause removal protection, unless it will affect my stock holdings. Lawless.

thinking about this again bsky.app/profile/henr...

"advances in-"

"what's that? quantum what now? I can't hear you over the sound of another 1m artillery shells"

“We’re locked up in 1000 ft2 cages. There are 32 people in each cage, and 8 cages inside the tent. The lights are like stadium lights; they’re always on, they’re never turned off or even dimmed. It’s very cold, the air conditioning is very strong. There are a lot of mosquitos.”197 Individual previously detained at “Alligator Alcatraz” “We didn’t have access to any sort of media. There are no televisions or newspapers. We didn’t have the ability to practice our religion; there are no bibles. We were locked up in the cages for almost 24 hours a day. We couldn’t have any visits, not even our lawyers or family members.”198 Individual previously detained at “Alligator Alcatraz”

From Amnesty International:

"we hardly slept we worked so hard on this" -thank goodness new tools have freed up time for even more drudgery

what i find especially bizarre about this is how it reproduces that hideous haze everything on netflix has.

The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it's not just inflation—it's a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest.
In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most. A thread 🧵
scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/pub...

thinking for no particular reason about a popular JRPG with a plotline where a declining superpower clone-resurrects its long-dead founder but he Comes Back Wrong and ends up destroying the world

in other words, at risk of analogizing too far, drones, golden dome, and war crimes