Sandstone Violin

I was noticing today how I still get ~1-2% of my editing work in .doc, not .docx, format, even nearly 20 years after the .docx format was released.

Kinda interesting re: technology obsolescence cycles, maybe especially for technologies that generally fly below our conscious radar screen

Introducing the 4th grader to some (recorded) late night talk shows:

"Is Stephen Colbert a bear? A cold bear?"

This meso loop of #Melissa from CIRA is absolutely stunning at it makes its closes in on landfall in southwestern Jamaica.

rammb-data.cira.colostate.edu/tc_realtime/...

#hurricanemelissa

Ooh, another nice linguistic coinage tonight from the middle schooler — "more sneakily" is "sneakilier".

Trump says federal agents 'will not surge San Francisco' In a Truth Social post, the president said calls with San Francisco’s mayor and some tech titans convinced him to wait, for now.

Glad to see no "surge" this weekend, but also disgusted by the framing, on multiple levels.

www.berkeleyside.org/2025/10/23/t...

Sometimes stating the question answers the question.

Philosophical conversation with the 7 y/o today — why, indeed, ARE farts funny?

"They're just smelly things that have noises and come from your butt! And why are butts funny, bro? All they are is like an oval with a crack in it that shoots out poop [pause] that's kinda funny."

Interesting innovation in phrasal verb usage from the 9 y/o: "this make sures that..."

I've heard similar things from the 11 y/o too but have forgotten to jot them down.

Interesting Gen Alpha linguistic usage from the middle-schooler today. Apparently "AFK" can apply to being absorbed in work for a couple hours—even if that work is *at a laptop*, literally *at a keyboard*.

Very interesting interactive map of indigenous territories, treaties, and languages:
native-land.ca. The choices of what to include in Asia, Africa, and Europe are quite interesting. I wonder if future versions will have more Siberian representation (e.g., Tungusic?)

YouTube video by Sokak Köpekleri - Topic Drakula'nın Daveti

I started learning Turkish many years ago with high-minded ideas about using it in my research.

15+ years later, I'm rocking out to this fun ditty about partying with Dracula, hooking up with Frankenstein's wife, and becoming a vampire.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOGD...

Psychology is ok A response to Adam Mastroianni

Good response: smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/psychology...

By far the best part of watching Oakland A's games now is listening to the back-and-forth between the announcers, esp. how Dallas Braden tries to politely conceal what seems to be genuine dislike and WTF responses toward Chris Caray's random comments.

Feel like one political party kidnapping an opponent should be bigger news

I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies

Thoroughly enjoyed
@mastroianni.bsky.social's post on the woeful state of academic psychology, esp. the critique of "pick a noun and study it" (I often edit research along those lines, in nursing). Not sure I share the optimism re: boredom's effects, though.

tinyurl.com/5akw8b3h

Watching Jurassic Park with the 9 y/o, and I had never noticed before the thread of "whether to have kids" discourse, or remembered that the cool, black-leather chaos theory guy apparently has 3 kids and is a big fan of both kids and divorce 😂.

This online presentation of the Genji poems is one of the coolest things I've seen in quite some time! Not just that the "poems are online", but so much thought and care has clearly gone into the presentation and interface. genjipoems.org

Today's work-related reminder that someone's always having a worse day (and of the importance of flared devices) — apparently there's at least one documented case of a heart attack resulting from the stress induced by a self-inserted glass bottle getting stuck in the rectum.

Annunciation by Lauren Groff — Z Space Word for Word and Z Space present: ANNUNCIATION BY LAUREN GROFF Directed by Joel Mullennix June 18 through July 13 in Z Below Award winning author, Lauren Groff, brings us a tale of a young w...

Never imagined a word-for-word theatrical adaptation of a short story could be so good. I was stunned by Word for Word's adaptation of "Annunciation" www.zspace.org/annunciation.

One vividly played character in particular was a delightful reminder of someone from my past, too.

Our first target microbe for Mars, and how we chose it 🏗️ Goal: push the limits of science AND be practically useful

Plans for bacterial-driven biomanufacturing on Mars!

Super cool. Back when I was a 30-year-old career-changing premed (before those plans fell through too), I low-key fell in love with microbiology, and this reminds me of why.

pioneerlabs.substack.com/p/our-first-...

A little bit of Goethe today, reflecting on how our entire built landscape is a sort of fossilization of human stories and passion. #poetry

How to Know When the Frog Has Boiled Autocracy in America won’t unfold the way you expect.

www.persuasion.community/p/how-to-kno...

"Competitive authoritarianism" is a great phrase. Also an excellent point re: people's assumptions about transition states — there's never going to be a day where we wake up to the announcement, "NOW HEAR THIS, IT'S AUTHORITARIANISM TIME," and waiting for such an announcement is a fool's errand.

A first in a paper I've edited: "Statistical analyses were conducted using ChatGPT 4o." 🤔🤔🤔🤔

Mamdani & the impact of his campaign/election remind me a lot of Obama, maybe not least because I lived in Chicago (and was in my early 20s) when Obama became prominent. Multiple parallels come to mind, and I'm surprised I haven't seen more people note the similarity.

YouTube video by Дореволюціонный совѣтчикъ - Topic Анархист

The Kino adaptation is amazing, but I think I'm even more delighted by their adaptation of Гражданская оборона's "колхозный панк" ("collective-farm punk"), which I adored back 20 years ago when I was young.

YouTube video by Дореволюцiонный Совѣтчикъ Дореволюцiонный Совѣтчикъ - Метаморфозъ

This group doing 19th-century adaptations of major Russian rock songs is the most delightful thing I've found in ages:

"Городъ в огне как при Бонапартѣ..."

"Метаморфозъ, алчемъ метаморфозъ..."

Absolute genius.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTfH...

Excellent thread about a fascinating paper. 🙏 to @philipcball.bsky.social for the post! The overwhelming mechanistic complexity of regulation should be better-known, especially when it comes to bio-futurist discourse.

The collision between "creation mindset" and "production mindset" was a difficult part of my transition from academia to industry (non-tech), and I've seen it be hard for others too.

Recently, I've had one foot in both academic & pro-AI Bay Area circles. V. little mutual understanding or curiosity.

Documenting my entry into the World Championship of Parallel Parking here.

(Don't worry, I did move forward to avoid being a complete jabroni).