Michael Brooks

But you can be wonderful at passing examinations and remain both stupid and philistine. Sit on almost any university committee if you wish to verify this claim. --Alasdair MacIntyre

@CivicChronicle1 Definitely yes. There's no such thing.

Yes or no?

@Art444Star I'm heteroweekly, personally.

The most useless word in the English language.

@johnmcchicken3 Have they found the Monolith yet? My father worked on the Apollo program BTW (and Lunar Orbiter and Lunar Surveyor.) This all brings back childhood memories.

Oh my god it’s beautiful

@SuitablePolitic This reminds me of one of my favorite French Jokes. "How many Frenchman does it take to defend Paris?" "We don't know, it's never been tried."

The Americans can do things that the French need cocaine to even imagine.

@MickKenney @MrDanielBuck Thanks, I didn't know that. And of course, some of the fixes to fixes have been quite a bit worse, like Common Core.

That was in response to Sputnik. You think I’m kidding, but New Math was the education establishment’s response to the mistaken theory that the teaching of math in America was something inferior to that in the Soviet Union. In other words, we tried to fix a system that wasn’t broken, and ended up breaking the original system. And, we’ve been trying to fix the fix ever since.

What have schools of education given us? - Whole language - Discovery math - Ending standardized testing - Ending tracking - Ending gifted programs - Social-emotional learning - Equity grading - White fragility - Microaggressions - Critical pedagogy Not a great record

@LucasWMann Hence the "social sciences." Basically ANY discipline that has the word "science" in its name is not actually a science.

the degree to which, if you're in the humanities in academia, you have to defend the difficulty and merit of what you do at all times, while the word "sciences" is spoken with reverence not matter how fuckin lazy and stupid the work is

I'm not normally a petition person, but consider signing this. I have two friends who are in limbo after their permanent residency applications have been put on hold. They have followed all the immigration laws, love the United States, and fear what might happen to them if they have to go back to Iran. Emergency Petition to Protect Iranian Students, Scholars, and Professionals in the United c.org/Rh4JF65H via @Change

@razibkhan @asymmetricinfo I'm just happy that you've personally destigmatized the word "retarded." If ever we needed such a word, that time is now.

@hjluks You probably already know this book, but I've found it very helpful myself, and helpful to people I've recommended it to. The only limitation, as the title suggests, is that its detailed advice is limited to barbell exercises. amazon.com/Barbell-Prescr…

A patient asked me yesterday why so many orthopedic surgeons seem to be in good shape. I told her... Because we know what happens to the human body when we're not. We see it every day. The loss of muscle that makes a preventable fall catastrophic. The joints that hurt not because of decades of neglect and inactivity. People who struggle to get to the exam table. The person who needed a surgery that could have been prevented. The ones who waited too long to start and are frail at 70. Granted... there are those who had no choice in this... but that's not the majority. You don't need a medical degree to act on this information. You just need to understand that the body you have at 70 will largely be the one you are building today.

@grahamscheper I try to use them as often as possible.

English has an amazing and underutilized system of direction adverbs: hither/thither/whither (to here/there/where) hence/thence/whence (from here/there/where) They were very common in Old English, as hider, þider, hwider, heonan, þanon, and hwanon. Now, they are sadly considered archaic, and mostly really only used as jokes. We have replaced them with just here, there, and where, and use context or “to” to demonstrate the direction.

@cremieuxrecueil If you review scientific papers, this happens all the time. It's like a learned skill, makes writing a paper a lot easier when you don't have to worry about reading your references. I can only imagine what it's like in the humanities.

I saw an Ivy League professor linking an article as a source to debunk someone and the article didn't even say the thing they said it did. utm_source=chatgpt(dot)com

@infantrydort @Schwalm5132 An earlier example, very influential on the American revolution, were Cato's Letters. Still worth a read, BTW.

@Schwalm5132 “History offers a clear example. Our Founding Fathers did not hide behind pseudonyms when it mattered most.” Sure they did. They used them until they didn’t. If they didn’t use them, one could argue there would be no revolution. So I disagree with this statement.

@engineers_feed Never cross the equal sign, or you'll sleep with the fishes.

@mattwridley For some reason, I am more disturbed by the dislocation of the Adriatic than by the expansion of North Africa.

🤔

@theodorebeers Pretty much.

Fred Donner used to say it takes three years to learn Arabic grammar, then you can work with Arabic sources. It takes one day to learn Persian grammar, then you need three years of learning idioms to be able to read anything.

@cremieuxrecueil It has the same effect in my brain as the phrases "let that sink in" and "said the quiet part out loud" that I see here on X all the time.

@cremieuxrecueil Anytime I hear anyone use the word "wellness," I automatically assume that everything else that is being said is BS.

I'm about to get some wellness freak pseudoscience retracted. I just found major evidence of fraud.

@Duddly_Three @C4nn0n_F0dd3r There are primary sources about Phoenicians in North America? Somebody find some Punic inscriptions in Vermont or something?

@C4nn0n_F0dd3r Enough misinformation gets spread on this site alone from people who read like one primary source and have decided to give their enlightened views on the Phoenicians in North America that it's probably for the best that the majority have the experts explain it to them

Academics are so goddamn weird about laymen reading primary sources

@razibkhan They renormed the thing in 1996 and lowered the ceiling quite a bit, so a perfect score nowadays would be much lower on the older exam.