Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Anyway, if anyone out there is thinking about developing pollen allergies, I guess my advice is to have a pretty careful think about it before you make the leap. Might not be as fun as you’ve been told.

Basically it seems like if there’s a window open I cough. This creates some difficulties because I like fresh air and dislike running the AC.

This seems to be the year I got allergies, and, wonderfully, the symptoms are somewhat like those caused by infection with SARS-CoV-2, the well-known novel coronavirus.

Cover of a high school Earth science textbook–ass picture. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110572308644962989

It’s called the Agreeing With Charlie Method and it has the potential to streamline many aspects of our society.

Reflecting once again on how much more pleasant and illuminating online discourse would be if people simply put aside their self-regard and took the time – before commenting on anything – to sit down and learn to see everything exactly as I do.

Donne’s “Batter my heart” but about the numpy broadcasting rules.

Like you know the friend who’s always complaining about a certain kind of bad social interaction? And sometimes (not always) it becomes clear that they are just bad at that kind of interaction? I feel like 15% of the internet by volume is that.

If someone keeps finding themselves in the kind of circumstance where where they have to say a certain kind of thing – different circumstances and the same thing over and over again – consider that they may possibly be the ones putting themselves in that circumstance because they like saying the thing.

When I say “consider” here I really mean just consider. Don’t assume bad faith. Very much don’t discount people who are stuck in systemic traps. But some people, on some topics, sometimes….

Collaborating on some diffusion model experiments with the cat.

Back from vacation and attending to important chores such as averaging big stacks of images from webcams to see if they look neat.

Online reviews of this aftershave: Pleasant, middle-of-the-road, not too strong.

My review of this aftershave: The smoke alarm is going off, the cat is hissing at the ceiling, the windows are permanently etched, the new milk in the fridge curdled, I’m crying out my ears, I’m getting a call from the county bomb squad,

Mostly I think we learn by paying attention, reflecting, making loose connections, and being in the shared world, and in other ways, but not by saying “X is Y!”

I don’t know. Too-good metaphors have their place. Sometimes they launch us with enough force to escape. And we think partly by jumping to conclusions. “Whose hearts have left their bodies here in England / And lie pavilioned in the fields of France.”

I am grateful for popular science writing that can keep some epistemic humility about its work: that can balance astonishing news carrying weird implications against the reminder that sometimes the truth doesn’t make sense even if we do have it.

Things we aren’t – forests or LLMs or planets or abacuses or moths or whatever – aren’t us in domino masks. It is not the case that everything other than the human soul is only present in creation in order to provide metaphors to humans for their souls. I also suspect that Italian is not just English with a really strong Italian accent and bees are not a model for a perfect human society. Different things are actually different.

A wrinkle in the “forests are internets” thing is that (I suspect) a lot of people promulgating it are trying to do forests a favor by putting them in these terms. In practice, this may often be true. But it seems worth watching closely. These things get away from us.

But metaphors are always not good enough or too good. There’s never the one that takes you exactly as far as it’s accurate and leaves you hydrated, sunscreened, and pointed in the right direction.