Mike Wiser

There is a class action suit that's been filed.

I'm looking forward to eventually there being some sort of ability to look up who they were offering to pretend to be.

You have to do the movements too. The words alone aren't enough!

That is a surprisingly reasonable cost.

Thankfully, some seemingly bizarre sayings have entirely reasonable origins, and learning about them can help.

For example, being under the weather apparently means you are ... not in space? But its origins lay in sailing, and sailors literally going below during some seasickness-inducing weather.

Does the dissonance between the obvious intent of a phrase and what it literally says bother you, or are you neurotypical?

(this post brought to you by several tautologies I encountered in a short span tonight)

I got 0.0036 on my laptop. I'm tempted to try it on a different monitor.

Homeopathic fentanyl.

"eating thin mints from the freezer" in the style of the teenage mutant ninja turtles logo

current status

We do have loans, but they are explicitly short term. They're for if yours is broken and you're waiting for repairs, not an end-run around the requirement to have one.

Anyone have a recommendation for a good screen door? Preferably one of the retractable kind -- ie, with a built-in panel that you can raise or lower to switch between a screen and a pane of glass.

I feel like I'm not understanding you correctly. Is there a way teams win *other* than by runs?

The bus driver said it was strange, it seemed like every American he spoke to hated the guy. I pointed out that fewer of his supporters than his opponents had passports.

I visited London in 2018. A bus driver asked me what I thought of Trump, I said he was a nightmare and that it was deeply upsetting anyone would vote for him. And that was in his less-awful term than his current one.

That's good to know. I've never sent typos to authors, but I've never known what to do with them when I find them.

Now if only I could snag some bonus points on my student evals for fixing their tech problems...

Fair. This term I have 280 in a lecture, and 28 each in 2 labs.

Last term I had 150 in one lecture, 80 in another lecture, and 28 in a lab.

There's only so much tech battling I can handle at those enrollments.

Interestingly, we primarily *want* our students to submit .pdf. Brightspace/Desire2Learn acts as a .pdf viewer.

I have very explicit instructions that I will not accept .KEY or .HEIC files at all.

Quote of the evening without context: I am a font of haphazard knowledge.

Oh, there's that too, but that's easier to deal with. Same with the ones who have no idea where on their computer a file is. But that I can show them, at the end of class or in our student help hours. It's a lot easier to deal with than "your tech is not up to standards"

I have never met anyone who is more adept at tracking every last cent they have than people who live or have lived in poverty

it is a skill developed out of necessity and it never leaves you

Which: great, that spells out what's required.

What happens when a student doesn't, though?

As far as I can tell, that's basically left to their instructors. Which really feels like it should not be my job.

For the curious, here's the university laptop requirement, which specifically spells out that tablets, mobile phones, and netbook computers (and specifically mentions iPads and Chromebooks) do not meet it: tech.msu.edu/about/guidel...

I ended up waiving the multiple choice part of that quiz for them, but told them that's a one-time thing; they need to have a plan in place for if this happens again, whether using a computer in one of the computer labs or borrowing another student's device that doesn't have this issue.

When I asked if they had a laptop, they said that their tablet was a laptop because they had a keyboard for it. But no, that doesn't mean it's actually a laptop, and that browser isn't designed for tablet hardware.

I ran into a related issue on this since this reply. A student whose tablet completely froze during a quiz outside of class time, to the point of not even being able to turn it off. According to them, that's happened several other times as well in courses that use the lockdown browser.

I, um, may have done this yesterday with an author I've been bingeing my way through some collections of short stories.

For example: you can write a quick email to an author saying how much you enjoyed [thing you read recently]

I think the thing that's the greatest gut punch at the moment is that there are a not-insignificant number of people who look at <gestures broadly> and think "Yes, this is good, we should have more of this"

Join the live online course "Evolutionary Macroecology in R: Exploring Biodiversity Patterns at Large Scales" by Transmitting Science. Register here: https://www.transmittingscience.com/courses/ecology/macroecology-in-r-exploring-biodiversity-patterns-at-large-scales/ #course

What I've gleaned is that its "AI" feature purports to have virtual versions of actual known people be the ones to edit your work and provide feedback. The actual people are not notified and have not consented to this.