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.
Instant translation is fine for functional and transactional language, but it hits its limits pretty quickly as language complexity increases and becomes problematic for understanding as soon as there is an intertextual element at work. I see this a lot with my international students when they are working their way through English texts with the help of translation software. They miss a lot of the features that the authors are using to communicate - parallelisms, homophones, puns, etc.
To be fair, a lot of my native language domestic students miss those things too, but the international students have the reading skills to catch those elements in their own languages, and would notice those things if they were actually working with the original text.
One thing I can add that speaks to lj's first point. Language-wise I've studied Spanish, French, Swedish, and Ancient Greek. I can muddle through in Spanish, and would probably be able to attain fluency in any of the first three in a few months with immersion. Greek, however, never sticks particularly well, and the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty. It's one more unfamiliar element (deciphering) that takes up processing power that would otherwise be used for linguistic sense-making.
In case anyone is interested in the subject (and in lieu of fraught AI summaries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca
It's entirely possible that English will become the lingua franca for international communications, but if it does, I'd expect, like Hartmut, that it continues to shed irregular constructions and colloquialisms and that native dialects will be treated as quaint variants with charming local color. I also predict that both Americans and Brits will complain bitterly that ELF is "not proper English" when that happens, and resent any standard that treats ELF as the paradigm.
Here's hoping. And here's also hoping that they don't find a way to just destroy any evidence that does exist....
At this point you have to assume that there are many people who have seen the evidence - some in the Biden administration, and some, possibly Patel and Bongino, in the Trump administration.
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it. Given all that we have seen from Trump in the past, the only way to protect yourself is to have leverage. If she were to get rid of it, she would have no leverage.
I think Trump simply believed that if he said that the evidence was not conclusive, his followers would rally around that. I think he's genuinely surprised that there are MAGA fanatics that are not following their cues.
The problem that he has, I think, is that there are two major MAGA factions (with some overlap - it's a continuum). There's the P2025 crowd that are in it for the Christian Nationalism and there's the QAnon crowd that are deeply invested in the "elite pedophile ring" narrative. The QAnon faction, and the people in the middle of the mix that are committed to both are all going to balk at Trump's avowals and assume that someone in the mix is a Deep State plant. My bet is that they land on Bondi for that, which would be fine for Trump so long as she doesn't keep an insurance copy to leak if he comes after her.
My other bet is that they are eventually going to land on the narrative that the Biden administration tampered with the evidence in some way that made it unreliable, and they will use that narrative everywhere that does not involve oaths and the risk of perjury charges.
But it's not going to simply go away, and it will take time and constant massaging to make the new narrative take hold.
I know that the mainstream Dem attitude is that all this conspiracy crap is bad and should not be encouraged, but this is a real fault line that could be a wedge issue. I'd et the infighting rage, and work to poke holes in the Trump cover story that there is nothing to be seen. All that is required is to remain skeptcally agnostic and ask questions. They'll do the rest themselves.
Used to work for a homebuilder in the Denver Metro. They were all about how much more a square foot of home was worth than a square foot of property. They'd buy a parcel of land and then figure out just how many homes they could tile onto it that were in the center of the bell curve for size and trendy features. They would pare down the lot sizes until they had the maximum number of (unnecessarily large) houses they could fit into the space.
FWIW, that's also the way of it in Southern California. The development philosophy is the same, but the climate and the demographics make for differences in home design.
But both places are run by the same real estate mafia.
Meanwhile, in "stuff that pisses off nous": https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.
But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
These fucking people...
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
Well, I'm up to just under 1500 miles on the electric mountain bike. No problems with it so far (Trek Fuel EXe), and just about to change tires for the first time. Had it in the bike shop once so far to get the suspension serviced - not an inexpensive prospect, but far less expensive than replacing a shock or a fork.
Just did my favorite ride again this week - 18 miles with a bit over 2000 feet of climbing. Went in the morning as soon as the trails open and passed a Great Horned Owl sitting beside the trail and staring at me.
Just ordered a 529 Garage shield to put on my bike to protect it from theft. Have it registered at project529.com in case it goes missing.
Been doing a bit of research for gravel/ bikepacking bikes or a dropbar MTB that I might want to pick up if we are forced to retire and move someplace more flat. If there is anything good to be said for getting a full suspension emtb, it's that once you shell out for that, the price of a fancy modern gravel bike seems completely reasonable and the mechanicals seem dead simple.
Thinking of getting some bike mechanic training for retirement. Might volunteer at a community bike shop.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Giving Away the Store”
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.
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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.
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Instant translation is fine for functional and transactional language, but it hits its limits pretty quickly as language complexity increases and becomes problematic for understanding as soon as there is an intertextual element at work. I see this a lot with my international students when they are working their way through English texts with the help of translation software. They miss a lot of the features that the authors are using to communicate - parallelisms, homophones, puns, etc.
To be fair, a lot of my native language domestic students miss those things too, but the international students have the reading skills to catch those elements in their own languages, and would notice those things if they were actually working with the original text.
One thing I can add that speaks to lj's first point. Language-wise I've studied Spanish, French, Swedish, and Ancient Greek. I can muddle through in Spanish, and would probably be able to attain fluency in any of the first three in a few months with immersion. Greek, however, never sticks particularly well, and the alphabet contributes somewhat to that difficulty. It's one more unfamiliar element (deciphering) that takes up processing power that would otherwise be used for linguistic sense-making.
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In case anyone is interested in the subject (and in lieu of fraught AI summaries):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_a_lingua_franca
It's entirely possible that English will become the lingua franca for international communications, but if it does, I'd expect, like Hartmut, that it continues to shed irregular constructions and colloquialisms and that native dialects will be treated as quaint variants with charming local color. I also predict that both Americans and Brits will complain bitterly that ELF is "not proper English" when that happens, and resent any standard that treats ELF as the paradigm.
On “Your Schadenfreude monitoring open thread”
Here's hoping. And here's also hoping that they don't find a way to just destroy any evidence that does exist....
At this point you have to assume that there are many people who have seen the evidence - some in the Biden administration, and some, possibly Patel and Bongino, in the Trump administration.
The evidence could go missing, but to the people who have built influencer careers out of Epstein conspiracies, that would likely just fuel the fires of speculation.
And if I were Bondi, I'd be sure to stash the evidence somewhere that Trump couldn't get to it, rather than destroying it. Given all that we have seen from Trump in the past, the only way to protect yourself is to have leverage. If she were to get rid of it, she would have no leverage.
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I think Trump simply believed that if he said that the evidence was not conclusive, his followers would rally around that. I think he's genuinely surprised that there are MAGA fanatics that are not following their cues.
The problem that he has, I think, is that there are two major MAGA factions (with some overlap - it's a continuum). There's the P2025 crowd that are in it for the Christian Nationalism and there's the QAnon crowd that are deeply invested in the "elite pedophile ring" narrative. The QAnon faction, and the people in the middle of the mix that are committed to both are all going to balk at Trump's avowals and assume that someone in the mix is a Deep State plant. My bet is that they land on Bondi for that, which would be fine for Trump so long as she doesn't keep an insurance copy to leak if he comes after her.
My other bet is that they are eventually going to land on the narrative that the Biden administration tampered with the evidence in some way that made it unreliable, and they will use that narrative everywhere that does not involve oaths and the risk of perjury charges.
But it's not going to simply go away, and it will take time and constant massaging to make the new narrative take hold.
I know that the mainstream Dem attitude is that all this conspiracy crap is bad and should not be encouraged, but this is a real fault line that could be a wedge issue. I'd et the infighting rage, and work to poke holes in the Trump cover story that there is nothing to be seen. All that is required is to remain skeptcally agnostic and ask questions. They'll do the rest themselves.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
Used to work for a homebuilder in the Denver Metro. They were all about how much more a square foot of home was worth than a square foot of property. They'd buy a parcel of land and then figure out just how many homes they could tile onto it that were in the center of the bell curve for size and trendy features. They would pare down the lot sizes until they had the maximum number of (unnecessarily large) houses they could fit into the space.
FWIW, that's also the way of it in Southern California. The development philosophy is the same, but the climate and the demographics make for differences in home design.
But both places are run by the same real estate mafia.
On “Plus ça change…”
Meanwhile, in "stuff that pisses off nous":
https://www.propublica.org/article/newtok-alaska-climate-relocation
Federal auditors have warned for years that climate relocation projects need a lead agency to coordinate assistance and reduce the burden on local communities. The Biden administration tried to address those concerns by creating an interagency task force led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Interior Department. The task force’s report in December also called for more coordination and guidance across the federal government as well as long-term funding for relocations.
But the Trump administration has removed the group’s report from FEMA’s website and, as part of its withdrawal of climate funding, frozen millions in federal aid that was supposed to pay for housing construction in Mertarvik this summer. The administration did not respond to a request for comment.
These fucking people...
I can't wait for the ocean to swallow Mar-A-Lago like a bad case of reflux.
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Well, I'm up to just under 1500 miles on the electric mountain bike. No problems with it so far (Trek Fuel EXe), and just about to change tires for the first time. Had it in the bike shop once so far to get the suspension serviced - not an inexpensive prospect, but far less expensive than replacing a shock or a fork.
Just did my favorite ride again this week - 18 miles with a bit over 2000 feet of climbing. Went in the morning as soon as the trails open and passed a Great Horned Owl sitting beside the trail and staring at me.
Just ordered a 529 Garage shield to put on my bike to protect it from theft. Have it registered at project529.com in case it goes missing.
Been doing a bit of research for gravel/ bikepacking bikes or a dropbar MTB that I might want to pick up if we are forced to retire and move someplace more flat. If there is anything good to be said for getting a full suspension emtb, it's that once you shell out for that, the price of a fancy modern gravel bike seems completely reasonable and the mechanicals seem dead simple.
Thinking of getting some bike mechanic training for retirement. Might volunteer at a community bike shop.
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