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Cake day: February 15th, 2024

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  • I’ve never played crokinole, but I made a carrom board (mentioned in the article) years ago and it’s a lot of fun. Mine was not from very good plywood, so it needed extra starch, but while messy, I could get (what the internet said was) an acceptable number of rebounds. We still have it, but its last use was to hold a partially completed Harry Potter jigsaw puzzle whose many dark areas stubbornly outlasted my daughter’s interest in the franchise. Given ol’ Jo’s proclivities, that’s just as well, though there’s still a few wand and such floating around, a few of which I made on my lathe.





  • There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it’s non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I’m still getting to the point where I’m not sure what’s left to do other than sandbox “exploitable” graded work in a controlled environment.



  • Literally the one undeniable success of the post-WW2 order was the lack of a global-scale hot war. Everything else is tainted by smaller scale conflicts and self-interest and economic inequality and picking winners and losers in a callous and awful way. But, you could always say it’s been 60, 70, and then 80 years with no world war 3. We didn’t nuke ourselves. We didn’t devastate our species’ potential to make the world better for more people. I guess on net there was even progress, statistically speaking, though that’s small comfort to those it bypassed and the benefits sure as shit were not distributed equitably.

    That one thing, that lowest of bars – no global shooting war – is now at risk because a handful of men who are stupid or evil or both, surrounded by people orbiting around them on those axes of stupidity and evilness, have decided that too much is not enough.







  • Earlier in the week, news broke that Hegseth had personally created a Signal group chat including his wife, brother and about a dozen other people who he then texted highly sensitive information on active strikes in Yemen… One person said Russian and Chinese spies were no doubt directly targeting susceptible people in Hegseth’s inner circle.

    Even if, as I am sure he very wrongly does, Hegseth believes himself morally beyond reproach and too smart to be tricked, does he honestly think every single person in his circle and in their circles is as well? JFC.


  • I do sometimes think there is a bit of hand-wringing that happens where people glom onto the most visible sign of changing times and blame it for things that probably aren’t as different as the adults think, but by the same token most schools in richer countries have screens everywhere with school-related interconnectivity and even tools that are not unlike social media.

    I see very little downside here, even if it may not result in some magic rebirth of older forms of social interaction. It seems like the major benefit from the French pilot programs was “improved atmosphere,” in which case it’s still better than nothing. Having a period when kids are learning to deal with small-group dynamics is not a bad thing, and neither is taking “dealing with phone bullshit” off the teachers’ plates.