Rachel

Helen, we interacted very little but I was always so inspired by your insatiable love of learning and you’ve been such an example. I hope you’re surrounded by loved ones.

Having a LLM or another person writing your papers feels like a victory but it is just your own defeat, you felled by your own contempt for your future and anyone who believes in you.

Fun new milestone ahead: eating solids!

Impulse-purchased two sea buckthorn plants today 😅 guess I gotta figure out how to garden

I’ve said this elsewhere, but truly, discovering a new way to love another human being is such a joy

My baby is six (6!) months old today and I can’t even express how happy I am she’s in our lives. She’s so curious about the world and such fun company these days

The Canadian federal election: the only time the country pays any attention to New Brunswick 😌 and if the province goes blue, we’ll receive more vitriol than the much more populous provinces going blue 😌

From NYT article about the increasing use of AI in the classroom: “Writing is one of the most challenging tasks for students, which is why it is so tempting for some to ask A.I. to do it for them. In turn, A.I. can be useful for teachers who would like to assign more writing, but are limited in their time to grade it.”

Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create

Sorry to hear about Random!!! He was such a beautiful boy

Solidarity!! Mine only sleeps while being held, with some small success being set down by me (while wearing a Merlin’s magic sleep suit) earlier in the night to sleep up to an hour at a time. But by morning, it’s hopeless even though it’s still nighttime for her

People who co-sleep with their babies are very defensive (because it’s less safe), which sometimes tips into righteousness when they advise every parent with a bad sleeper to do it. My baby, however, simply refuses to do it and sleeps EVEN WORSE if I try 😌

My photo shows detail from a Roman fresco (wall painting) in a corridor at Villa A, the luxurious so-called ‘Villa Poppaea’ at Oplontis (modern day Torre Annunziata) in the Bay of Naples, Italy. The fresco depicts a small light brown standing on a small pinky-brown wooden shelf, against a vibrant red background panel. The bird is shown in profile, facing left, with plummage painted in various shades of light brown and grey to beautifully depict detail of its feathers. The bird is lowering its head with beak open, about to peck into a fig on the shelf in front. There are two further figs painted behind the bird which have already been pecked into. The figs are painted light brown. The figs which have already been pecked into have cream flesh and red seeds.

This little bird survived a volcanic eruption!

Buried by volcanic ash from Vesuvius in AD 79, this Roman fresco of a little bird pecking at fruit re-emerged looking as delightful as it did some 2,000 years ago!

Villa Poppaea, Oplontis, Italy
📷 by me 2023

#Archaeology

When paying debit/credit, you pay to the cent. When paying cash, rounding happens. I don’t think it changed the general trend towards cashless payments, especially because businesses pay transaction fees if you use cards rather than cash. Losing 2 cents on a cash transaction is worth the tradeoff.

Fwiw, Canada did this over a decade ago. It’s fine. We just round up or down to the nearest 5 cents. I was a cashier when the change happened and it was really seamless.

Can’t believe it’s impossible to find an archived link of the latest Andrea Long Chu hit piece when I’ve got an extra clingy baby and nothing but time on my hands today 😤

Ran a two-hour seminar on Hume today with my daughter strapped to me 💪

It’s my favourite thing to teach, second only to fighting with students over the claim in the Gorgias that everyone acts for the sake of the good

Teaching Hume to my students this week, aka being my most annoying philosopher self as I pummel them with arguments for two hours to show how hard Hume is to knock down

Truly incredible how little argumentation is in Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”

Why do this? So students don’t think Aristotle just assumes a claim we might want to reject as unsupported. It makes us engage with him more intelligently.

He then gives reasons (albeit ones we might not like) to think humans have functions. It’s a good exercise because it helps us see how easy it is to read into the text what isn’t there but nearly is.

I do this annoying exercise when I teach the Nicomachean Ethics where I ask students to reconstruct the function argument for me. Almost always, students begin with “humans have functions”. But it actually begins: IF humans have functions, then it’s reasonable their good is there

LSAT questions are going around Twitter and are a great demonstration of what historians of philosophy train students to do when reading a text. It’s actually very important to differentiate between what’s actually implied by the text and what seems right but isn’t quite.

🚨🚨 She now appears to have sorted out identity in objects because she realized the object in her hand is the same as the object she was looking at

It’s been very fun to observe as a philosopher!

So much is fun about watching a baby discover the world. This past week, mine has discovered that her hands can open and close and that her fingers can move and she’s now exploring things with them all the time 😭

A student last night told me he can really tell that I spend my time reading Socratic dialogues because of how I was pushing them all in discussion 😌

The difference between reliably getting 3 hours of sleep a night and reliably getting 4.5-6.5 hours of broken sleep is vast

Finally graduating from the “this is dangerous” sleep deprivation of a newborn into “I dream about sleep all day but I can function” sleep deprivation of an infant

Once again bad at being here, but: first week of post-baby teaching (on the Timaeus and also business ethics) in the books