Porcupine

A woman was running back up the road from her truck, looking concerned at the small animal that was wandering and looking disoriented in the road. It was a young porcupine.

A warm-hearted woman. What could possibly go wrong. 

Traffic

My overall traffic has suddenly gone up 100x, with this last week up 3x, all of my posts from May 2025 visited two hundred times each two days ago, and a similar weirdness for Oct 4-9 targeting other months in the last ten years.

They come from phones in South America and Southern Asia, but except for one American Osteopathy site, the majority come from the vast category of "other."  

Whatever it is, something automated is looking for something here, and I doubt that's good. 

Controlling The Weather

Conclusive Evidence Found of Jew Controlling the Weather - Babylon Bee

Winchester Cathedral

 

New Education Model! Using AI!

 So you know it must work, right? Except Boy, Was I Wrong About Alpha School by Wess Trabelsi at AI ∩ K12.  This is someone who wants the tech revolution in education to work.  He is sympathetic.  

But he has also seen other promising results blow up before, and calls 'em as he sees 'em.

I have long since learned not to be surprised when new educational marvels look like they work, because the news that there is selection bias and results that don't scale is just around the corner. Deception.  Some of it may be salvageable, but it doesn't look likely.

Debates

Scott Alexander at ACX has a new post, challenging Steven Pinker to a debate about AI. Alexander thinks the AI dangers are real - and I don't mean the water and the electricity - while Pinker thinks they are oversold. Alexander points out that Pinker has consistently underestimated how intelligent AI is going to be, so he should just admit he is wrong, wrong, wrong about all of it. There is something about the tone which makes me uncomfortable.  His reasoning is all in a row, though it is his usual obsessive self. (Note, Alexander always faults himself for the length of such posts, as if that were the extent of the problem. To me that is a clue of how he is missing the point.)

Alexander was arguing with Tyler Cowen last year about USAID in much the same tone. I am at a bit of a loss, approving of his general approach in both discussions, yet finding the final product somewhat beside the point. It is fair to hold someone accountable about what they previously wrote, but this somehow has an air of the childish "But you said...but you said...but you SAID..." I quoted GK Chesterton about arguing with a madman, as Alexander has that autistic style I am so familiar with. 

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity*, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. 

But my strongest impression was how much I glimpsed my own reflection in his posts. A few specific topics I have covered in detail (ahem) and at length (ahem) sprang immediately to mind. 

* I remembered this as "charity," which is interesting.  I may like that better, and if I ever get to speak with Gilbert I will mention it. 

Undermentioned

There are people making points I would myself, but doing it better than I would have. Yet I do notice few people want to touch on the possibility that this is what happens when minority and immigrant cultures are trying to compete socially in elite white situations. Perhaps those who already feel entitled are more likely to enter those cultures, less afraid of it.  One of the accused has returned to Dubai, for example. 

"Hidden" Messages

My mother remarried in August 1966, just before I entered 8th grade. We went to the beach with his family sometime that summer, with the girl who was going to become my step-sister, who was getting ready to leave for Colby Junior College.  This song came on my transistor radio and their voices dropped.  "You know what this is really about, right?" said Beth.  My mother murmured, "it sounds like they are talking about having too much to drink last night without saying it." My sister nodded wisely.  They were clearly hoping that I didn't catch this terrible reference. 

That was my first clue that my new sister was some kind of a dingbat.  It was clearly a drug reference, not alcohol.  You could tell that from the garage-band El Cheapo psychedelic sound if nothing else. (Rock autoharp was a little surprising.) Heck, I even made sure my nine-year old brother didn't miss stuff like that.  You wouldn't want to be humiliated in fifth grade of a suburban school for missing a drug reference.  You might never recover your status. It was one more moment of thinking I was just going to be alone in the world until I had a family of my own. Eighteen months later I played "What Condition My Condition Was In" in my own garage band,* and none of the mothers overhearing us had the least bit of objection. Went right over their heads.

Of course, I married a girl who also didn't get the reference, or more exactly, never considered that there might be a naughty reference of any kind. She memorised lyrics without listening to them.  Her sorority sisters explained a few things to her so I didn't have to. But that's another story.

 *We weren't even a garage band.  None of our parents would let us use their garage. We thought we had a garage at Jimmy Labonte's house once, but when we got there his father was doing Pinewood Derby stuff with his younger brothers.