@dtgeek

"virtue signaling" is what people without morality call morality

they're telling on themselves

Atoms are binary. They are either intended to be hydrogen or helium. We can't just scrap this worldview just because of a handful of exceptions.

Q: Why don't American use the metric system ?

A: Because they have a foot fetish.

#dadjokes

Q: Why don't American use the metric system ?

A: Because they have a foot fetish.

#dadjokes

TIL about Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a Roman charioteer who raced for 24 years, earned over 35 million sesterces, making him the highest-paid athlete of all time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Appuleius_Diocles
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1hu9d14/til_about_gaius_appuleius_diocles_a_roman/

Outraged by the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, a wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover climbing the ranks of right-wing militias.

He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell family or friends. The one person he told was a ProPublica reporter.

https://propub.li/4gF50W0

#News #Militia #Jan6 #Insurrection #Trump #USPolitics #Journalism

"New Year, new me", I said, emerging from the goo.

It's okay if you failed today. You can try again tomorrow.

„A CAPTCHA that lets you play DOOM® to prove you're human (for educational and entertainment purposes)“
https://doom-captcha.vercel.app/

This morning I was wondering where the sun was, but then it dawned on me.

#DadJoke #DadJokes

TIL about the "longest recorded calendar year in human history." In 46 BC, Julius Caesar declared a transitional year lasting 445 days. Also known as the "year of confusion," it marked the transition from a lunar calendar to a solar calendar for the Roman Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46_BC
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1hs5b8b/til_about_the_longest_recorded_calendar_year_in/

finally reasonable CAPTCHA

https://doom-captcha.vercel.app/

The only way to stop a bad guy with an exploding cybertruck is a good guy with another exploding cybertruck

Welcome to the public domain, THE SKELETON DANCE (1929). 🎞️ 🎶👻 Walt Disney Studios' first Silly Symphony cartoon is a wordless masterpiece of synchronized animation & music featuring dancing skeletons in a graveyard.

Learn more about the creative works from 1929 & sound recordings from 1924 that have moved into the public domain in the US in 2025: https://blog.archive.org/2025/01/01/welcome-to-the-public-domain-in-2025/

A camp for HIV positive kids in Northern Minnesota is closing and going up for sale.

The reason? Anti-retroviral HIV drugs work. There are now not enough HIV-positive kids to need the camp.

Some good news to start your 2025

🥺 🥳

https://www.startribune.com/closure-of-northern-minnesota-camp-is-the-greatest-story-heres-why/601199362

#HIV

The era of ChatGPT is kind of horrifying for me as an instructor of mathematics... Not because I am worried students will use it to cheat (I don't care! All the worse for them!), but rather because many students may try to use it to *learn*.

For example, imagine that I give a proof in lecture and it is just a bit too breezy for a student (or, similarly, they find such a proof in a textbook). They don't understand it, so they ask ChatGPT to reproduce it for them, and they ask followup questions to the LLM as they go.

I experimented with this today, on a basic result in elementary number theory, and the results were disastrous... ChatGPT sent me on five different wild goose-chases with subtle and plausible-sounding intermediate claims that were just false. Every time I responded with "Hmm, but I don't think it is true that [XXX]", the LLM responded with something like "You are right to point out this error, thank you. It is indeed not true that [XXX], but nonetheless the overall proof strategy remains valid, because we can [...further gish-gallop containing subtle and plausible-sounding claims that happen to be false]."

I know enough to be able to pinpoint these false claims relatively quickly, but my students will probably not. They'll instead see them as valid steps that they can perform in their own proofs.

TIL about the Lavon Affair, a Mossad covert operation in Egypt where agents planted bombs in places frequented by American and British citizens, intending to frame Muslims and strain Egypt’s relations with Western powers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
#til #todayilearned
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1hq25q3/til_about_the_lavon_affair_a_mossad_covert/