(It’s not just universities.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/computing-college-cs-majors/677792/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaVm8z–QoVaXTzvFuQCez-g&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

«Universities are conservative institutions, steeped in tradition. When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large.

…

An American university is organized like this, into divisions that are sometimes called colleges, and sometimes schools. These typically enjoy a good deal of independence to define their courses of study and requirements as well as research practices for their constituent disciplines. Included in this purview: whether a CS student really needs to learn French.

…

Near the end of our conversation, Isbell mentioned the engineering fallacy, which he summarized like this: Someone asks you to solve a problem, and you solve it without asking if it’s a problem worth solving. I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer’s fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.»

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/elon-musk-racist-tweets-science-video/

«“There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.’”»

https://chi2innovations.com/blog/discover-stats-blog-series/graphs-prove-correlation-not-causation/

Some people have been making granola. I present my sister’s* granola recipe, which in spite of the fact that it’s stellar, I have not made in years.

Granola

Mix in bowl:
3 cups oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup flaxseeds

Heat, not boil:
6 tblsp honey
6 tblsp oil
1 tsp cardomom
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ( sorta) vanilla
Stir honey mixture into oat mixture

Spread on cookie sheet
Bake on middle rack at 325 about 12-15 min
Flip stuff over and bake 12-15 mom
Scrape
Let cool & stir in dried fruit

Goal: golden brown, not dark, although dark is edible ( voice of
experience)

*She got it from somewhere, but, for me, it will always be “my sister’s granola recipe.”

«Vierziger wasn’t wearing body armor; he’d claimed it would interfere with his driving. Now he reached left-handed into one of his tunic’s front bellows pockets and drew out a red-banded grenade that he had no business carrying.
He struck the safety cap off against the side of the building with casual ease. Malaveda had seen troopers trying to arm a grenade that way, proving how macho they were. He’d never seen anybody succeed so perfectly, and with such little concern, as Vierziger did now.»

David Drake, Hammer’s Slammers vol. 3, The Sharp End

How do you put this in a (video) episode of something?

(I keep thinking how this stuff would be so good on Netflix or Amazon.)

Al.com is teh bomb.

«Britt’s problem is an old one in Alabama politics — she couldn’t be genuine and win. So she chose to be fake.

There might be a simple explanation for Britt’s odd delivery Thursday night: Perhaps she couldn’t believe what she was saying either.

And like so many Alabama politicians before her, she left us asking …

Was she ever real?»

https://www.al.com/news/2024/03/whitmire-is-katie-britt-for-real.html

https://www.justsecurity.org/92714/american-autocracy-threat-tracker/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#post-92714-_y4a3s8vnsqyb

Blech. Really unpleasant reading (and I have given up, at least temporarily), but it’s all here, in one concentrated, smoking lump of evil.

https://youtu.be/QKGbguoildA?si=veq-cz8GKCRpFgR-

https://www.businessinsider.com/job-applications-hiring-ai-bots-spam-resume-cover-letter-2024-3

Hmm, is this our future?

«Troves of internal documents and analyses have over the past decade established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating as far back as the 1970s, but forcefully and successfully worked to sow doubt about the climate crisis and stymie action to clamp down on fossil fuel usage. The revelations have inspired litigation against Exxon across the US.»

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

Yes, and they should pay. BUT. For decades (generations, even) the US has resisted increasingly stringent CAFE* standards. As an electorate. This country, on the whole, has continued to buy gas-guzzling vehicles. This is a collective decision. We have known this for generations and not acted on it. Like. Seriously. It’s not like we didn’t know.

(I own one such vehicle myself, a 2022 Subaru Outback. A premium on the vehicle, plus appropriate taxes to raise the price of gas might have affected my car-purchase decision, but if I had still chosen to pay the premium, that would have been my choice.)

*Look it up.

«classic conservative posture of just, like, a person who is doing okay and is kinda selfish and who thinks that progressive idealists might be bad news.»

https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-we-got-here-ce8

“Kinda selfish.” I like that characterization.

«Yet a sense that Trump’s win was somehow an indictment of Obama for not being sufficiently progressive — rather than an indictment of Romney for being too far-right on retirement programs — has hung like a weird fog of misperception over Democrats’ interpretations of Trump-era politics.»

I wonder how much of that “weird fog” traces back to the miasma of social media.

Yglesias is irritating a lot of the time, but that was a good article.

«Associate Justice Anil Singh, however, lifted a ban on Trump’s ability to obtain loans from a New York bank, which could allow him to access the equity in his assets to back the full bond amount.»

Ok, who’s going to loan him money now?

🍿

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/28/politics/donald-trump-appeals-court-new-york/index.html