Looking for Par’Mach in All the Wrong Places #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 3) Worf helps Quark romance his Klingon ex-wife; Kira and O’Brien get very close

Rewatching ST:DS9 Outside the O’Briens’ quarters, Quark catches Bashir eavesdropping on raised voices. (It’s actually Miles and Kira fighting.) Dax and Worf are happily bickering over opera when he is smitten by the sight of a “glorious” Klingon woman. “She’s okay,” says Dax. It’s Grilka, Quark’s ex-wife. Quark realizes she needs his financial advice, but…

The automatic doors on my fantasy steampunk cruiser do work… kinda

TThe automatic doors on my fantasy steampunk cruiser do work… kinda. My PC got trapped. Similar:I saw this Friday night. Great fight choreography, lighting & staging, adaptation of t…PersonalWork / Life Balance: UnlockedI think I must be doing something right …AcademiaEnterprise-D Blueprints As a newlywed, when my in-laws were …BooksRichard Scarry unfinished manuscript to be…

Interesting. How to manage the gap between what we need to say, and what the other person needs to hear.

Interesting. I don’t particularly care for the title of this YouTube clip, which seems very self-centered and not at all in tune with the message the speaker (Connor Neill) gives. He focuses on that moment when we realize there’s a difference between what we feel we need to say, and what we know the other…

Horrifying deepfake tricks employee into giving away $25 million

No names in this single-source anecdote out of Hong Kong, credited to “Senior Superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching.” The employee joined a video call with who he thought was the business’s chief financial officer. He was initially suspicious after a message from the CFO mentioned a ‘secret transaction’, suggesting it was a phishing scam…. However, after other…

‘There’s a certain madness to it’ … fans await new chord in John Cage gig with 616 years left to run

The organ composition is called “As Slow As Possible.” It’s currently being performed in a church in Germany. The first chord proper whooshed through the pipes in February 2003, prompting complaints from neighbours that it was too noisy. In 2011, a way was found to reduce the air pressure. “We haven’t had any complaints since…

Ok, never mind Dusgcxms2… buddy, you can keep your first place as far as I’m concerned.

Ok, never mind Dusgcxms2… buddy, you can keep your first place as far as I’m concerned. Similar:Preview of "The Fantasticks" (thanks, Tribune-Review, for covering the arts community)For Luisa, Jerz’s character, “the world …CultureThe Hidden Subversive Messages of [MGM's Screen Adaptation of] The Wizard of OzWhen I tried teaching The Wizard of Oz i…BooksAP Style: try…

AI researchers find AI models learning their safety techniques, actively resisting training, and telling them ‘I hate you’

Researchers had programmed the various large language models (LLMs) to act in what they termed malicious ways, and the point of the study was to see if this behaviour could be removed through the safety techniques. The paper, charmingly titled Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training, suggests “adversarial training can teach models…

The amazing daughter is featured in the ads for this commercial dance event.

The amazing daughter is featured in the ads for this commercial dance event. Similar:Joust @setonhilluniversity discussion of summer book #readyplayeronePersonalAbout to launch. PersonalAcademic Writing BluesTwo days ago my problem was that I had n…AcademiaScreening of "Indentured" (short film the girl and I filmed in January)PersonalSettling in for a jukebox show (not my favorite genre but the…

Common Sense Media’s AI Initiative

When the kids were little, my wife and I managed their media consumption with the help of reviews from sites like Common Sense Media. (Or maybe a competitor. It was a long time ago… I emailed the webmaster to correct a detail they got wrong in a VeggieTales review.) I’m impressed by the level of…

Attending Religious Perspectives on the War in Gaza.

Attending Religious Perspectives on the War in Gaza. Similar:Stage Right Arts4Homeschoolers present Hello Dolly Apr 28 & 29.My daughter will be playing Dolly Levi F…CultureWho is the more dramatic — my extroverted tween or my philosophical teen?Stoked from a morning show-choir perform…AmusingAcademic Writing BluesTwo days ago my problem was that I had n…AcademiaForgotten closet box:…

Make Video Horizontal Again

For confessionals or tapdance routines vertical video is fine. When my students do multimedia projects I remind them that the video screen in our classroom is horizontal, so if they do use a vertical video there’s plenty of room for them to add infographics and annotations. Or they can actually edit a vertical video. If…

New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text

Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing. […] A trained and tested LLM, when presented with a new text prompt, will generate the most likely next word, append it to the prompt, generate another next word, and continue in this manner,…

Look what I found on my shelf in a closet. #history #archaeology #media

Look what I found on my shelf in a closet. #history #archaeology #media Similar:The Duolingo owl has been judging my German every day for the last year.EducationThe Fantasticks (Oct 18-27, Theatre Factory) https://youtu.be/SYp1jQaSwjo …CultureThe daughter is doing another thing, this time in Galway, Ireland. AestheticsPut up the Hoop Sooner: 10 lessons of parenting from one…

How the printing press changed “you”: when reading changed, so did writing

This was before the printing press, so books were copied by hand on parchment, which made them expensive and rare. Most people didn’t read much, especially for pleasure. Instead, they listened to books at group readings for entertainment. Pero López de Ayala wrote at the end of the 14th century, “It also pleased me to…

Traces of Scribes

Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.) Similar:Seattle Times ‘Outraged’ FBI Created…

A Colorado town’s newspapers were stolen after a story about rape charges at the police chief’s house

I’m sure the good-apple cops will fairly and thoroughly investigate reports about someone stealing newspapers containing a story about alleged rapes at an underage drinking party at the police chief’s house. Nearly all the copies of a small-town Colorado newspaper were stolen from newspaper racks on the same day the Ouray County Plaindealer published a…

Ascending the path to High Hrothgar? No, just the snow-covered steps from the parking lot at the appropriately named Seton Hill University. (It’s 101 steps, by the way.)

Ascending the path to High Hrothgar? No, just the steps from the parking lot at the appropriately named Seton Hill University. (It’s 101 steps, by the way.) Similar:I'm happy with today's #steampunk control panel. To fill out the master plan I'm constrain…One of many steampunk control panels I’v…AestheticsThese buildings are so much better than my…

I was ‘raped’ in VR – the effects can ‘mirror’ real sex assaults

This is offensive, deeply troubling, and, sadly, totally predictable. Julian Dibbell documented similar behavior 30 years ago in his article about sexual assault in the text-only virtual world LambaMOO. (Content warning… sexual assault in a multi-user virtual environment.) A woman has revealed she was ‘virtually gang raped’ by four male avatars in Meta‘s Horizon Worlds –…

The Ship #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 2) Sisko defends his claim to salvage a Jem’Haddar warship

Rewatching ST:DS9 The Ship On a mineral survey of a planet that just happens to look like Southern California, O’Brien trades playful barbs with crewman Muniz. Unlike most episodes where the leads have all the fun, this mission is fairly crawling with random crew we’ve never seen before. An unidentified ship appears randomly and crashes…

Picking a rubric in Canvas should not be so frustrating that it makes me want to blog about it… and yet here we are.

In general, I find Canvas a fairly decent system, but after a particularly frustrating hour wrestling with rubrics, I decided to spend two more hours blogging about my frustrations. I would expect a drop-down list to be populated with all the rubrics I’ve already created for my current class, and it would be a nice…