It's an outrage and a travesty, and it's happening to a person whose misfortune I read with great satisfaction. I hope that this outrage is prevented - slowly - and that the perpetrators' misfortune is the source of great future satisfaction.
...and the horses they rode in on (which, I suspect, were all nidstangs).
So many poxes. So many houses.
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public. It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
Two quick websites for getting a sense of the geography of income inequality in major US cities: https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps
These show increases in concentration of rich and poor over time, but the levels of concentration vary by city. https://inequality.media.mit.edu/#
This one looks not just at neighborhood median income, but tracks the places that people of varying economic backgrounds visit in several cities to show the geography of daily association.
Hard to say if these patterns persist outside of major metropolitan areas. I imagine that smaller data sets lead to greater uncertainty of results.
GftNC - the analysis of how the humanities and social sciences actually end up subsidizing STEM are not in the review synopsis that I linked, but rather in the book being reviewed, so here's another link that gets at those details some more (esp. in section 2): https://profession.mla.org/the-humanities-as-service-departments-facing-the-budget-logic/
There's a lot more analysis like this in The Great Mistake.
Tony P. - I find it tragic that Newsom has opted to put redistricting up to a vote, but I fully understand and accept the necessity of it, and will vote in support of it when it comes to that. This all could have been avoided had the Roberts Court done the right thing and allowed the Wisconsin gerrymandered districting to be struck down. It's fully on Roberts' shoulders that partisan redistricting is considered to be allowed under the constitution. Likewise, their systematic erosion of voter protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed the GOP to attempt this latest scheme to disenfranchise opposition voters by wasting their votes on non-competitive districts and empowering their own voters in competitive districts.
I'd gladly vote to go back to non-partisan redistricting after the fact if this GOP power grab is unsuccessful. I don't want to disenfranchise Republican voters, but neither am I going to get caught up on principle while the other side cheats to win.
I don't know if it will be enough to break the fall, but taking the high road is conceding the contest, and that cannot happen.
If anyone is looking for a really thought provoking analysis of what has happened to higher education in the US with a focused look at California and the UC system in particular, I'm currently reading Christopher Newfield's book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Rather than try to summarize his points myself, I'll link to a review published by the American Academy of University Professors that has a fairly complete synopsis to give you an idea of where Newfield is coming from: https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/103-4/failure-privatization
Yes, Prop 13 has had a damaging effect on education funding in California, but that was all made much worse when Schwarzenegger instituted austerity measures, and then compounded by both Brown and Newsom continuing the policy of allowing the burden of university funding to be covered by tuition increases rather than public funding increases.
There are some other interesting bits of analysis that come out of his research that fly in the face of the public discussion as well - the biggest to my mind being that the Humanities actually subsidize STEM, rather than the other way around.
Well worth the read.
Michael - My use of clever doesn't necessitate intentional deception, it just makes room for it in the name of getting the job done - which probably means that it maps well onto your usage of "cunning."
I tend to think of "smart" as being driven by knowledge and "clever" as being driven by wits. It's probably something like the Platonic difference between a philosopher and a sophist (even if the sophists are given a bum rap by Platonism). The clever person is less concerned with being right and more concerned with achieving their ends. Smart prefers appeals to logos and forming an stratigic,objective understanding of the situation. Clever prefers appeals to pathos and takes a more tactical and subjective approach.
I take it from the conversation here that my sense of those terms may be idiosyncratic?
The "Regional Car Dealership" thing is, to my way of thinking, less about class and more about a particular attitude towards salesmanship.
In the decade between my sophomore and junior year of college, I did (among other things) customer service work for a credit card, a homebuilder, and an internet start up, and rubbed shoulders with a lot of people in sales. Most of them were entirely indifferent to the merits of the actual product, and they often didn't understand the actual thing being sold. You know the type. It was all about the hustle, and about status and appearances.
One of the memories that stuck with me from that time was the day that the sales manager at the startup put up a banner in the sales area that read "The world is run by C students" as a way to motivate his salespeople.
There's a lot to unpack in that, between the sort of anti-elitism at the core, and the idea that C-student is a sort of identity to embrace. They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
This is what I was thinking about when I saw "Regional Car Dealership."
There's a strong strain of punitive Jantelagen on the right these days: You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
They feel small and overlooked and they fear that everyone else thinks that they are simple and stupid. And they have become fear-biters over it.
Ironic that they are so dismissive of the micro-agressions thing, since they have their own version of it going on all the time.
The only alternative, though, is to limit oneself to commonplaces and small talk, and not voice any opinion on any matter of taste.
I've become largely silent where my siblings and their families are concerned. Too many landmines lying about.
But what got me was the subhead: "It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond to the request." Do you morons not know? It's not a request. It's an order! Not that the Trump administration recognizes the distinction.
If the search bar here is any indication, I have twice mentioned politics and feud in Medieval Iceland in relation to discussions here. Once was in response to regime cleavage and the corruption of the Supreme Court, the second was in response to CharlesWT discussing libertarian capitalism as a governmental philosophy.
Here's number three, and to quote the Violent Femmes "Third verse/Same as the first."
Checks and balances only work if the people in charge actually care to follow the law. You see this all the time in Icelandic saga, when a goði [a political leader in a district] had enough sway over the local politics it was nearly impossible for anyone who was not allied with that goði to get satisfaction within the law, usually leading to extra-judicial solutions (bloodfeud) being pursued.
Basically, you had to join a party to get enough power and influence as a collective to sway the local courts, and you had to have enough wealth and land to even be entitled to legal status in court. Tenant farmers were stuck with whatever their goði or their landlord decided, or else either leave and find a better landlord or take matters into your own hands and risk becoming an outlaw. (Jesse Byock's Feud in the Icelandic Saga is fascinating reading. I pulled most of this info from his chapter on "Feudeme of Advocacy." If you have no advocate, you are exposed to the whims of those with entrenched power.)
This administration is definitely in the place where they think that no one exists with enough compulsive power to make them follow the law. It doesn't matter to them if something is an order. They are going to force a confrontation and dare the opposing party to try to force compliance.
Someone needs to find a way to enforce consequences or else we are in a de facto tyranny.
It seems like the lit there is suggesting that sexual selection *might* have a role in development of language, but given that the evidence shows that more intelligent mothers have lower infant mortality rates, it could be that it's actually natural selection having an effect that looks like it could be sexual selection - that is, it's not the selection of mates that is the mechanism for the trend, but rather the survival of the offspring that is the driving mechanism. I'd guess it could be kind of hard to tell if it is mate/mate communication or parent/child communication that is the dominant factor. Seems like a bit of a black box and a set of assumptions.
The BLS has been struggling a lot as of late, most all of it caused by staffing shortages. They've stopped collecting inflation data in a number of places as well and are imputing (modeling) a lot of the data for those measures. This from June, but getting more play at the WSJ in the last few weeks: https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424367/inflation-data-cpi-government-job-shortages
The vandalism of the federal government continues apace. It's not being shrunk and drowned, it's being given the Khashoggi treatment and leaving one bag at a time.
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
So...a professional MIDIator?
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
In my freshman year music tutorial at St. John's College (Santa Fé) we did a lab where we tuned two strings in unison and then changed the speaking length of one of them, listening for the places where they sounded consonant or dissonant and calculating the ratios where those things occurred. Then change the speaking lengths of both and tuned to unison again and repeat the process. Fun lab.
We ended up getting into a discussion about what, exactly, consonance and dissonance sound like, because a few people were taking consonance as meaning "pleasing to my aesthetic taste" and they had a taste for clashing waveforms. Once we all agreed with the literal sense of the words - together-sounding and apart-sounding - the conversation moved on smoothly.
Here's one that will pull together two of the recent discussions here: metal, and math.
Tool - Lateralus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JG63IuaWs
Tool was playing with the Fibonacci Sequence all through the song. The opening riff after the acoustic intro is measures of 9, 8, and 7 for the 16th step in the sequence (987). The lyrics also play with steps in the sequence:
Black [1]
Then [1]
White are [2]
All I See [3]
In My Infancy [5]
Red and yellow then came to be [8]
Reaching out to me [5]
Lets me see [3]
As below so above and beyond, I imagine [13]
Drawn beyond the lines of reason [8]
Push the envelope, [5]
Watch it bend [3]
Etc.
Not everything is done in sequence in the song, but there's enough to geek out over, and the rest is thematically related to the search for patterns and exploration.
And the outro lyrics: "Spiral out, keep going."
Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.
I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.
Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking. https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
It's not onerous, no, but it is a factor on at least two levels in my experience.
First off, it can create some noise when particular letters look similar to letters in the other language that are not phonetically equivalent, and that usually triggers a bit of recursion in the reading process. It's not a lot of load on the system, but it is processing power that is not being used to make sense of the meaning. Writing English using the Greek alphabet barely affects reading comprehension when deciphering the message when one is fluent in English. Combine a lack of fluency with the need to decipher and the effects compound.
Second of all, it messes with the pattern recognition that one relies upon when skimming a text. When I'm reading Swedish or Spanish, I can skim the text fairly easily and a lot of the language has enough root-equivalency to make those reading skills transfer. That sort of whole-word pattern recognition doesn't fire the same way when I am faced with another alphabet.
All of these things mess with your language in the same way that when a student is asked to write about an unfamiliar topic with its own technical vocabulary, they often end up writing language that has a greater number of grammar and spelling errors than when they are writing about familiar topics. The familiar has a much simplified processing economy.
And again, with functional and transactional language, these difficulties are much less pronounced than when dealing with more complex and nuanced subjects.
At least that is my experience, and it seems to match with my observations of how my non-native student writers interact with texts. Actual linguists would likely have a lot to say about the places where I'm wallpapering over some complex topics, or missing the boat entirely.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Schadenfreude Express”
It's an outrage and a travesty, and it's happening to a person whose misfortune I read with great satisfaction. I hope that this outrage is prevented - slowly - and that the perpetrators' misfortune is the source of great future satisfaction.
...and the horses they rode in on (which, I suspect, were all nidstangs).
So many poxes. So many houses.
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
"
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
On “Giving Away the Store”
Michael - Given the title of the linked piece -- "The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic" -- the author never got to the point I was expecting. What I was looking for was a reconciliation of two facts. On the one side, the author's table showing that A&H generated large amounts of tuition revenue at little expense. On the other, the administration's assertion that A&H departments had relatively few students in their degree programs. He put the conclusion right there in the title, but apparently couldn't bring himself to say it.
I think that what you are noting here is a product of the venue. It's published on the MLA site, so the readers (mostly language and literature faculty) are already oriented towards that conclusion and mostly reading for the findings. Newfield unpacks more of his conclusions when writing for the general public.
It seems to me that A&H faculty should (a) have recognized that they were turning into service departments and (b) have been proactive on the question of how to be better service departments (while retaining their historical roles). The goal ought to be that when someone proposes A&H cuts, the non-A&H faculty scream.
Was more true a decade ago than today. Generative AI is convincing a segment of non-A&H faculty that a lot of the service that A&H provide for them can be handled by tech rather than teachers, because they have been using Gen AI to make their own work more readable. The same is true of coding and calculation. The high-ROI STEM fields use AI to parse the code they write to crunch their data, and they use MATLAB to do their calculations...
...relying, of course, on the judgment and understanding they developed while having to learn to write, code, and calculate the old-fashioned way. The high school graduates that come through those service classes are not going to go through that struggle, and therefore not develop that judgment themselves.
Whatever the case, the non-A&H faculty have a lot less solidarity with the A&H faculty than they used to, thanks to two decades of austerity budgets, and especially now as their research grants are being stripped away.
It's a bad scene all around. And the biggest casualties in all this are the teaching mission of the universities and the economic futures of the students who are being forced into ever increasing debt and being given a much degraded version of an education thanks to all of this.
Our lecturer's union is fighting against this trend (being wholly dedicated to the educational mission and having the majority of its members teaching in service departments). Our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. But the regents and the professional management class at the university system level are entirely isolated from the teaching mission side of things and think that this level of precarity gives them more flexibility when dealing with state budget austerity. They don't care about the quality of the student education, only that the quality of that education relative to their rival institutions (you know, the US News rankings, and admissions numbers) remain high enough to hold place or move up.
It's quite sad - moreso when you are in the middle of it and care more about the educational mission than about all of the rest.
The only thing that seems to budge the statewide people is when they start to worry about bad publicity damaging the institutional reputation. But that sort of media attention is also hard to come by. It takes a combination of really bad circumstances and massive coordination efforts to get media attention, and it's really hard to keep that attention for more than a blink with so much shit flooding the zone every single day.
"
Two quick websites for getting a sense of the geography of income inequality in major US cities:
https://inequality.stanford.edu/income-segregation-maps
These show increases in concentration of rich and poor over time, but the levels of concentration vary by city.
https://inequality.media.mit.edu/#
This one looks not just at neighborhood median income, but tracks the places that people of varying economic backgrounds visit in several cities to show the geography of daily association.
Hard to say if these patterns persist outside of major metropolitan areas. I imagine that smaller data sets lead to greater uncertainty of results.
"
novakant - No need to correct ME. I've always pronounced it HANnah.
"
GftNC - the analysis of how the humanities and social sciences actually end up subsidizing STEM are not in the review synopsis that I linked, but rather in the book being reviewed, so here's another link that gets at those details some more (esp. in section 2):
https://profession.mla.org/the-humanities-as-service-departments-facing-the-budget-logic/
There's a lot more analysis like this in The Great Mistake.
Tony P. - I find it tragic that Newsom has opted to put redistricting up to a vote, but I fully understand and accept the necessity of it, and will vote in support of it when it comes to that. This all could have been avoided had the Roberts Court done the right thing and allowed the Wisconsin gerrymandered districting to be struck down. It's fully on Roberts' shoulders that partisan redistricting is considered to be allowed under the constitution. Likewise, their systematic erosion of voter protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has allowed the GOP to attempt this latest scheme to disenfranchise opposition voters by wasting their votes on non-competitive districts and empowering their own voters in competitive districts.
I'd gladly vote to go back to non-partisan redistricting after the fact if this GOP power grab is unsuccessful. I don't want to disenfranchise Republican voters, but neither am I going to get caught up on principle while the other side cheats to win.
I don't know if it will be enough to break the fall, but taking the high road is conceding the contest, and that cannot happen.
"
If anyone is looking for a really thought provoking analysis of what has happened to higher education in the US with a focused look at California and the UC system in particular, I'm currently reading Christopher Newfield's book The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Rather than try to summarize his points myself, I'll link to a review published by the American Academy of University Professors that has a fairly complete synopsis to give you an idea of where Newfield is coming from:
https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/103-4/failure-privatization
Yes, Prop 13 has had a damaging effect on education funding in California, but that was all made much worse when Schwarzenegger instituted austerity measures, and then compounded by both Brown and Newsom continuing the policy of allowing the burden of university funding to be covered by tuition increases rather than public funding increases.
There are some other interesting bits of analysis that come out of his research that fly in the face of the public discussion as well - the biggest to my mind being that the Humanities actually subsidize STEM, rather than the other way around.
Well worth the read.
"
TACO - Trump Always Conciliates Oligarchs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/16/russia-jubilant-putin-alaska-summit-trump-ukraine
'Cos flattery gets you everywhere with Orange Chicken.
On “A New Gilded Age”
Michael - My use of clever doesn't necessitate intentional deception, it just makes room for it in the name of getting the job done - which probably means that it maps well onto your usage of "cunning."
"
I tend to think of "smart" as being driven by knowledge and "clever" as being driven by wits. It's probably something like the Platonic difference between a philosopher and a sophist (even if the sophists are given a bum rap by Platonism). The clever person is less concerned with being right and more concerned with achieving their ends. Smart prefers appeals to logos and forming an stratigic,objective understanding of the situation. Clever prefers appeals to pathos and takes a more tactical and subjective approach.
I take it from the conversation here that my sense of those terms may be idiosyncratic?
"
The "Regional Car Dealership" thing is, to my way of thinking, less about class and more about a particular attitude towards salesmanship.
In the decade between my sophomore and junior year of college, I did (among other things) customer service work for a credit card, a homebuilder, and an internet start up, and rubbed shoulders with a lot of people in sales. Most of them were entirely indifferent to the merits of the actual product, and they often didn't understand the actual thing being sold. You know the type. It was all about the hustle, and about status and appearances.
One of the memories that stuck with me from that time was the day that the sales manager at the startup put up a banner in the sales area that read "The world is run by C students" as a way to motivate his salespeople.
There's a lot to unpack in that, between the sort of anti-elitism at the core, and the idea that C-student is a sort of identity to embrace. They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
This is what I was thinking about when I saw "Regional Car Dealership."
"
There's a strong strain of punitive Jantelagen on the right these days:
You're not to think you are anything special.
You're not to think you are as good as we are.
You're not to think you are smarter than we are.
You're not to imagine yourself better than we are.
You're not to think you know more than we do.
You're not to think you are more important than we are.
You're not to think you are good at anything.
You're not to laugh at us.
You're not to think anyone cares about you.
You're not to think you can teach us anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
They feel small and overlooked and they fear that everyone else thinks that they are simple and stupid. And they have become fear-biters over it.
Ironic that they are so dismissive of the micro-agressions thing, since they have their own version of it going on all the time.
The only alternative, though, is to limit oneself to commonplaces and small talk, and not voice any opinion on any matter of taste.
I've become largely silent where my siblings and their families are concerned. Too many landmines lying about.
On “An open thread”
But what got me was the subhead: "It’s unclear how the Justice Department will respond to the request." Do you morons not know? It's not a request. It's an order! Not that the Trump administration recognizes the distinction.
If the search bar here is any indication, I have twice mentioned politics and feud in Medieval Iceland in relation to discussions here. Once was in response to regime cleavage and the corruption of the Supreme Court, the second was in response to CharlesWT discussing libertarian capitalism as a governmental philosophy.
Here's number three, and to quote the Violent Femmes "Third verse/Same as the first."
Checks and balances only work if the people in charge actually care to follow the law. You see this all the time in Icelandic saga, when a goði [a political leader in a district] had enough sway over the local politics it was nearly impossible for anyone who was not allied with that goði to get satisfaction within the law, usually leading to extra-judicial solutions (bloodfeud) being pursued.
Basically, you had to join a party to get enough power and influence as a collective to sway the local courts, and you had to have enough wealth and land to even be entitled to legal status in court. Tenant farmers were stuck with whatever their goði or their landlord decided, or else either leave and find a better landlord or take matters into your own hands and risk becoming an outlaw. (Jesse Byock's Feud in the Icelandic Saga is fascinating reading. I pulled most of this info from his chapter on "Feudeme of Advocacy." If you have no advocate, you are exposed to the whims of those with entrenched power.)
This administration is definitely in the place where they think that no one exists with enough compulsive power to make them follow the law. It doesn't matter to them if something is an order. They are going to force a confrontation and dare the opposing party to try to force compliance.
Someone needs to find a way to enforce consequences or else we are in a de facto tyranny.
"
It seems like the lit there is suggesting that sexual selection *might* have a role in development of language, but given that the evidence shows that more intelligent mothers have lower infant mortality rates, it could be that it's actually natural selection having an effect that looks like it could be sexual selection - that is, it's not the selection of mates that is the mechanism for the trend, but rather the survival of the offspring that is the driving mechanism. I'd guess it could be kind of hard to tell if it is mate/mate communication or parent/child communication that is the dominant factor. Seems like a bit of a black box and a set of assumptions.
"
The BLS has been struggling a lot as of late, most all of it caused by staffing shortages. They've stopped collecting inflation data in a number of places as well and are imputing (modeling) a lot of the data for those measures. This from June, but getting more play at the WSJ in the last few weeks:
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/05/nx-s1-5424367/inflation-data-cpi-government-job-shortages
The vandalism of the federal government continues apace. It's not being shrunk and drowned, it's being given the Khashoggi treatment and leaving one bag at a time.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
I worked with a guy at the Labs whose MS thesis was on numerically simulating the attack transients of woodwind instruments.
So...a professional MIDIator?
"
Music is fundamentally mathematical, and many of the aesthetic qualities we find beautiful or satisfying (in music and many other arts) can be measured and described in mathematical terms.
In my freshman year music tutorial at St. John's College (Santa Fé) we did a lab where we tuned two strings in unison and then changed the speaking length of one of them, listening for the places where they sounded consonant or dissonant and calculating the ratios where those things occurred. Then change the speaking lengths of both and tuned to unison again and repeat the process. Fun lab.
We ended up getting into a discussion about what, exactly, consonance and dissonance sound like, because a few people were taking consonance as meaning "pleasing to my aesthetic taste" and they had a taste for clashing waveforms. Once we all agreed with the literal sense of the words - together-sounding and apart-sounding - the conversation moved on smoothly.
"
Here's one that will pull together two of the recent discussions here: metal, and math.
Tool - Lateralus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7JG63IuaWs
Tool was playing with the Fibonacci Sequence all through the song. The opening riff after the acoustic intro is measures of 9, 8, and 7 for the 16th step in the sequence (987). The lyrics also play with steps in the sequence:
Black [1]
Then [1]
White are [2]
All I See [3]
In My Infancy [5]
Red and yellow then came to be [8]
Reaching out to me [5]
Lets me see [3]
As below so above and beyond, I imagine [13]
Drawn beyond the lines of reason [8]
Push the envelope, [5]
Watch it bend [3]
Etc.
Not everything is done in sequence in the song, but there's enough to geek out over, and the rest is thematically related to the search for patterns and exploration.
And the outro lyrics: "Spiral out, keep going."
"
Metal is a vast country and it is easy to get lost or to only encounter things that clash with your own preferences. I was a marginal metalhead for years before finding a bunch of bands that hit the sweet spot for me.
Learning the geography helps a lot with avoiding the things that annoy you and finding more that delight you.
On “Motes and logs”
What Snarki said.
On “Everyone is a hero in their own story”
I've never been into Metal, but Ozzy was a beautiful, loving soul. RIP.
If you want a taste of Ozzy and Black Sabbath that wanders far afield of their usual heavy metal aesthetic, you should give Spiral Architect a try:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQi7HP9Bjs
Of all the things I value most of all
I look upon my Earth
And feel the warmth
And know that it is good
The album closer from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath starts with an arpeggiated acoustic guitar line that sounds like it comes straight out of a moody, early Genesis song. When the band comes in, it's built around strummed suspended chords that could be classic, early '70s Who, then this gives way to a chorus with a string arrangement - wholly unexpected, and hauntingly beautiful.
Ozzy's voice is not beautiful or versatile, but it is expressive and affective, and he uses it to great effect here.
Worth a listen, and it might make you appreciate Sabbath's musicianship and range a bit more. It's the song I keep coming back to since Ozzy's passing.
I was never a huge fan of Ozzy or Sabbath, but the metal bands I do love would never have been what they are without Sabbath's influence. Their music built a genre every bit as vast and varied as jazz. Their influence is staggering.
"
I mean... Ozzy and Chuck Mangione are dead, why not America too?
On “The law of the letter”
Here's a post from Keith Devlin working through some thoughts about the tension between calculation and mathematical thinking.
https://devlinsangle.blogspot.com/2018/05/calculation-was-price-we-used-to-have.html
For any mathematician alive today, mathematics is a subject that studies formally-defined concepts, with a focus on the establishment of truth (based on accepted axioms), with various forms of calculation (numerical, algebraic, set-theoretic, logical, etc.) being tools developed and used in the pursuit of those goals. That’s the only kind of mathematics we have known.
Except, that is, when we were at school. By and large, the 19th Century revolution in mathematics did not permeate the world’s school systems, which remained firmly in the “mathematics is about calculation” mindset. The one attempt to bring the school system into the modern age (in the US, the UK, and a few other countries), was the 1960s “New Math”. Though well-intentioned, its rollout was disastrous, in large part because very few teachers understood what it was about – and hence could not teach it well. The confusion caused to parents (other than mathematician parents) was nicely encapsulated by the satirical songwriter and singer Tom Lehrer (who taught mathematics at Harvard, and did understand New Math), in his hilarious, and pointedly accurate, song New Math.
As a result of the initial chaos, the initiative was quickly dropped, and school math remained largely unchanged while real-world uses of mathematics kept steadily changing, leaving the schools increasingly separated from the way people did math in their jobs. Eventually, the separation blew up into a full-fledged divorce. That occurred in the late 1980s. The divorce was finalized on June 23, 1988. That was the date when Steve Wolfram released his mammoth software package Mathematica.[...]
Devlin is really good on matters pedagogical, and always worth the read.
I do tend to think, though, that students will have a very hard time with understanding math (or written communication) if they have not had enough experience with doing the work, and not seen enough examples to get an idea of the possible range of approaches to doing the work, etc.. Early in my teaching I tended not to give enough examples, figuring that teaching the conceptual side would lead students to sort through their own database of examples to see the underlying principles. I've since learned that most students come in having seen and understood too few examples, and having no idea of more than one approach to the tasks they have been called upon to do.
I do a lot more modeling of approaches, and evaluation of those approaches, now that I'm finally starting to figure out this whole teaching thing.
"
I'm puzzled by this. I'm not good at languages, relative to my other skills, but switching alphabets - Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian... is trivial.
It's not onerous, no, but it is a factor on at least two levels in my experience.
First off, it can create some noise when particular letters look similar to letters in the other language that are not phonetically equivalent, and that usually triggers a bit of recursion in the reading process. It's not a lot of load on the system, but it is processing power that is not being used to make sense of the meaning. Writing English using the Greek alphabet barely affects reading comprehension when deciphering the message when one is fluent in English. Combine a lack of fluency with the need to decipher and the effects compound.
Second of all, it messes with the pattern recognition that one relies upon when skimming a text. When I'm reading Swedish or Spanish, I can skim the text fairly easily and a lot of the language has enough root-equivalency to make those reading skills transfer. That sort of whole-word pattern recognition doesn't fire the same way when I am faced with another alphabet.
All of these things mess with your language in the same way that when a student is asked to write about an unfamiliar topic with its own technical vocabulary, they often end up writing language that has a greater number of grammar and spelling errors than when they are writing about familiar topics. The familiar has a much simplified processing economy.
And again, with functional and transactional language, these difficulties are much less pronounced than when dealing with more complex and nuanced subjects.
At least that is my experience, and it seems to match with my observations of how my non-native student writers interact with texts. Actual linguists would likely have a lot to say about the places where I'm wallpapering over some complex topics, or missing the boat entirely.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.