Thomas Middlebrook

@FredFredSanders Thanks. No pressure to pay from me! But I know it makes a difference.

@OldTestamentTom Yes, free tier. Very few use cases have made me consider paying, though I expect to be forced into paying when providers collude to choke normal channels (search, editing, etc).

The writing was a weird mix of (a) vague and bland and (b) blunt and overblown. On the vague side, reading it was exactly like reading workmanlike student notes taken from a lecture. The key points were there, but sort of suspended in a haze of "I'm not sure this student got it."

@FredFredSanders Free tier or? The model makes a difference, though I am guessing it wouldn’t change your conclusion.

I learned about ai tools, but I didn't save any time on my lecture task; that I had to start back into from scratch, by myself. And it was good work worth doing. After doing it I knew my stuff even better & was prepped to express it to my fellow humans.

This is outstanding! This is the advantage of going to schools like this. You get sage wisdom from professors who want to help you thrive!

I've got brand new data about American religion that was collected in October of 2025. And, folks... The share of Americans who are non-religious has dropped for the third year in a row. Atheists and agnostics are down to 5% each. Those are 2014 levels.

@ShannonJoyRadio Link?

Everyone knows Trump's 'assassination attempt' was fake as hell at this point right? It's almost embarrassing TBH. New footage from WAPO ---->

@MindofTorres 2021?! What is the variable that might skew that year?

This is what grade inflation looks like. AP exams suddenly became easier. So when your local school, district, or state touts record AP participation and passage rates ... now you know why. Source: fordhaminstitute.org/national/comme…

@MadisonPierce Thank you for sharing.

Oh, and obviously, students/people can be just as disrespectful when using titles. 😅

Last thing: I don't request my title be used in educational settings because I think I "deserve" it. It provides a reminder that, there, I have a different role and delegated authority related to the subject matter (like "your honor" in a courtroom). Here's a few stories...

@weRessential @BrandonLuuMD Reading the study, it seems like the biggest “no so fast” is *how we take notes. Verbatim v selective, verbal v other visual organizations

@BrandonLuuMD Not so fast here. Yes, longhand study was best BUT Conceptually and combined--laptop no study beat longhand no study and even beat laptop study. Would seem for quick bang for the buck, laptop learning could be superior initially, and best followed by longhand studying.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

@davidgaw @BrandonLuuMD Then you aren’t writing, you’re doodling. Writing preserves semantic content.

@BrandonLuuMD Except I can take notes on a laptop that I can read, and I can't do the same by hand.

Huge majorities of Americans favor access to an abortion in the case of rape and serious birth defect. But, for the first time ever, slim majorities also favor access in cases like: The woman can't afford more children. The woman wants no more children. The woman is unmarried.

I just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric. *** The average was 64/100.*** My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85. Context: • This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material. • Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions. • Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay. • I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester. • We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don't have to do something on their own that wasn't covered during the lecture. • Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade). • Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz. *** But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.*** After the midterm, students reported: • They thought they knew concept definitions but couldn't produce them on paper. • They thought they understood the arguments but struggled to connect them or identify points of agreement and disagreement. My view: It might be “cool” or “innovative” to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly "know" the material. Moving forward: We have a second midterm coming up. I don't know how to convey to students that the best way to do better on the exam is to rely on and improve their own reading skills.

An Iranian man left this comment on my YouTube channel. This is without a doubt the single best explanation of the reality facing Iranian people today👇 "As an Iranian, I can tell you the situation is no longer just political—it's existential. We are trapped between two collapsing structures: one internal, one external. On one hand, we face a deeply dysfunctional government, led by the Supreme Leader and the Islamic Republic’s unelected institutions. Decades of economic mismanagement, suppression of dissent, and brutal ideological control have alienated multiple generations. No one believes in reform anymore—because every attempt has either been co-opted or crushed. But here's the paradox: We are also terrified of regime collapse—because we've watched the aftermath of Western intervention in countries like Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan. Each was promised freedom; each descended into chaos, civil war, or foreign occupation. So no, we don't trust the U.S. or Israel. Not because we support our regime—but because we know how imperial powers treat ‘liberated’ nations in the Middle East. Freedom, in their language, often means vacuum, fire, and permanent instability. Right now, many Iranians live with three truths at once: The Islamic Republic is morally and politically bankrupt. The alternatives offered by foreign actors are not liberation—they’re collapse. A bad government is survivable. No government is not. We are not silent because we agree. We are cautious because we’ve learned—too well—what happens when superpowers decide to "help." In a sentence: Iran is a nation held hostage by its own regime, but haunted by the fate of its neighbors. We are stuck in a house we hate, surrounded by fires we fear more."

I’ve never seen someone struggle so much with the separation of powers in real time like our current president.

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet. 1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output. The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice. Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet. And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.” This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one. We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that. The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

@adamwren CS Lewis was the first thing I saw deep faked after AI came out on YouTube. It’s just gotten so bad out there.

Not only did CS Lewis not say or write this, he married at 58 and did not have children.

@cryptodropper3 @SusieBdds A role model for how to non-apologize

@SusieBdds this sent me howling

Never cared about curling until I found out Sweden set up a surveillance operation to catch Canada cheating. Now I’m invested. 🥌👀

@BanjoAtheist No. I recommend reading recent works on how Torah was used in the ancient world. It wasn’t clear to me at first that you were just trying to crucify the divine author. At first I thought it was curiosity Q. But this is a bad faith discussion. ✌️ out

@OldTestamentTom Thomas. Are you saying Deut 22 based a capital crime on a false understanding of anatomy, but it was the best medical science they had at the time”? Is this fair summation of your position?

@OldTestamentTom Hey, Thomas. I’ve been trying to get a handle on Christian Old Testament scholar views on the Virginity test of Deut 22. Can you share your thoughts on this one narrow Q. (I get the overall complexity and cultural background of the legal process there). 1/2

@DriverXag @lukedsimmons In ancient Israel, the priest could start serving at 30, although Numbers also mentions age 25.

@lukedsimmons In 20 years?

“Any advice for me?,” asked the new 23 year-old pastoral resident. “Yes,” I said. “Don’t read The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry for at least 15 years.”

@mattleeanderson In Tune with the World - Pieper

I think I am going to teach a course this fall that is thematically organized around Memory, Reality and Time. What should we read? I'm interested in classic or classic-adjacent texts, poetry, smart fiction, etc. I have a provisional list, but give me your best ideas.

@BanjoAtheist It’s a case law, right? The case is a grave accusation from an upset new husband. How would you determine the truth of his accusation?

@OldTestamentTom 3/3 Tom, you miss the point when you say it’s the best science they had back then. We are NOT judging ancient medical practices. We’re judging the “breathed word” of your “perfect being.” Remember? Deut 22 shows that this being is DEEPLY on the hook. How do you save Him?