Hannah Dahlberg🦇Dodd, PhD

Like, sure, the roads are generally wider, but most of downtown has proper grade-separated bike lanes. I haven't even been nearly isekai'd by a distracted driver in a Toyota Alphard yet, a nearly daily occurrence in Nerima.

Now that I've been in Sendai for nearly a month, one of the big things I've noticed is how much more bikeable the city is compared to Tokyo (or at least the parts of it I frequented).

Omg!!

Tokyo’s average annual temperature has increased by about 3.0 °C from ~1876 to ~2019. This includes both global warming and additional warming due to urbanisation and continued loss of green spaces. Meanwhile, Tokyo Met Gov’t is felling hundreds of mature trees in downtown parks for redevelopment.

Four frames comic about two types of Isekai I found and read lately. The first frame shows a young man with a sword. He says: "My name is Josh Itcantbehelped and I used to be a loser before a car crash brought me to a world where I am a god and half the population is made of SLAVE CATGIRLS". The second frame shows him crying and clenching his fist, with many a cat behind him, wearing bikinis. He says "To make it here I guess I have no choice but to own as many catgirls as I can...how tragic...". The third frame shows another character from another type of Isekai. She's a woman with a fluffy dress. She says "My name is Elise Robespierre and after being hit by a truck of terminal cancer I am now in my favorite 900 pages novel. With many a hot man.". The fourth frame shows her giving a board presentation to citizens, with graphs and pictures of plants on it. She says: "Hello citizens. This is my plan to modernize the agricultural system and prevent any further plague by creating medicine [...] taxes which ..." the text becomes unreadable as she keeps talking to her captive audience.

Been trying to read some isekai lately.

If you take the Seibu Ikebukuro, you might have to ride a whole ass HP train (because of the studio tour thing) 😑

There's this same discussion around SSRI use in pregnancy, too. Basically, ongoing symptoms of depression and anxiety are worse for fetal development than any hypothetical mild side effects of SSRI use during pregnancy (depending on the medication). And yet.

Super big kokeshi standing in a park

The massive kokeshi in Nishi Park here in Sendai pleases me every time I see it.

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

Each day you will be confronted with three unmarked doors. Behind door one is getting all your work done. Behind door two is getting enough rest and exercise. Behind door three is a tiger. Good luck.

The boars just want to learn!

BBC News captures Doctor Who himself Sylvester McCoy at the Trump protest seemingly unaware of who they're interviewing.

I feel this needs to be said again but LLMs are not implementing usage-based theories of language unless one interprets the latter in the shallowest, devoid of their most interesting assumptions, way. “Usage” is not just frequency ffs.

A box with its contents listed as "under sink stuff, Legos, bath mats, accordion." The items originated from "everywhere," and they are bound for "the bathroom." It's also marked "fragile."

guess what stage of moving this is

I feel this so hard honestly.

As a person originally from the US South who moved to the Midwest, nothing confuses me more than interacting with Californians.

If you see this, repost with a vampire that's not Dracula

forgot to post the proof

tfw you need to get a cardboard box home (and a bunch of other stuff), but you came by road bike today

When I think about the fact that universities are ALSO supposed to be repositories of knowledge and expertise you can't get elsewhere (and not just job training or even educational enterprises) I immediately go to ancient languages. I don't think ppl realize you can just lose them

Darkness to hyper-visibility: exploring promotional and creator cultures of social media This one-day symposium explores the visibility games at the heart of social media’s promotional and creator cultures. From influencers and everyday users to advertisers and automated algorithms, every...

From Darkness to Hypervisibility! A one day symposium on the promotional and creator cultures of social media at UQ in November. CFP and details here: hass.uq.edu.au/event/sessio... @bradyjay.bsky.social @antmandan.bsky.social

I recall really enjoing Tim Wise’s piece "Forget STEM, We Need MESH” (media literacy, ethics, sociology and history) pre-pandemic and thinking and talking about it often. Link.

medium.com/our-human-fa...

Part of me really wants to go to the Osaka Expo, but given *waves hands* all that, it seems mostly like a nightmare with small children. An experience that's 95% waiting in line in the sun? And crowds? That sounds like immediate and persistent misery.

Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession

I'll admit, I was skeptical when they said Gemini was just like a bunch of PhDs. But I gotta admit they nailed it.

The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it do...

A great read on UChicago, arguing we’re seeing the result of decades of mismanagement: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal.”

People on two wheels are trying to reclaim the streets for human beings from deadly, huge, overpowered four-wheeled metal boxes.

R.I.P. Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), you wolde have lovid "Kyoto" (2020) by Phoebe Bridgers.

another way in which LLMs make me feel like an alien as compared to their many fans: I find their default fawning conversational tone to be intensely, viscerally repulsive and suspicious.

Mmmm, pancakes 😋🥞