Announcing the 3E College Football Preseason Awards:
They should go back to ten-team conferences.
UTEP +41.5 vs Oklahoma: UTEP is cool
East Care of Lina vs Alabama -28.5: Pirates are cool
Kent St. vs South Care of Lina -35.5: no
Baylor vs Auburn -7.5: I Believe
Texas St. +29.5 vs Texas: This would be a neat upset
Missouri St. vs TAMMY -40.5: TAMMY
Clemson +10 vs LSU: I think Lane whining so much about a backup tight end or whatever coming from the NFL suggests issues with the roster. I can't decide if it's funnier if Old Mist loses a ton of games or if LSU loses a ton of games.
ULM vs Mississippi St. -28.6: Lamo
FAU +26.5 vs Florida: This would be a neat upset
Louisville +7 vs Old Mist: Of the second rank teams I hate, I think Old Mist going something like 4-8 would be the funniest. The real goal: a combined 17 losses between them.
The salad is for our fish.
UTEP +41.5 that is a lot of points. also i initially typed 41.3 and its funny to imagine a bettor having internal turmoil over whether to take a team at +41.5 or if +41.3 is a better deal.
Alabama -28.5 kalen deboer looks likes if you over-inflated brett venables. Or perhaps Venables is sun-dried Kalen Deboer.
Kent St +35.5 "lightning strike and thunder quake, they do not make the green grass make" don't know what this means. I think it was something I said about how the sound and fury of a storm doesn't make the grass grow.
Auburn -7.5 Ed made a eagle lego and told me war eagle. It later came out that my mom told him to do that. I do not care. War Damn. It's damning as a sport and society that if you say "the rape school," you have to further clarify yourself.
Texas -29.5 who the fuck is this quarterback
Mizzou St +40.5 ok missouri thinks they're a state now
Clemson +10 The personality cult of Lane Kiffin is amazing and I love him. What game were we talking about here?
Mississippi St -28.5 Croom was a good guy but how can you not put a hat on straight
Florida -26.5 McElwain has a little something for em this year
Louisville +7 I'm taking a city over a whiskey I invented every time.
tough year
UTEP vs Oklahoma -41.5
East Care of Lina vs Alabama -28.5
Kent St. vs South Care of Lina -35.5
Baylor vs Auburn -7.5
Texas St. vs Texas - 29.5
Missouri St. vs TAMMY -40.5
Clemson vs LSU -10
ULM vs Mississippi St. -28.6
FAU vs Florida -26.5
Louisville vs Old Mist -7
Picks whenever.
1. "Somebody told you once that Internet sites are sometimes inaccurate. You hope it’s not true. How could you figure out which are the inaccurate ones using BRUTE STRENGTH?"
2. "Instead of writers and intellectuals coming up with ideas that filter into the culture, they are totally dominated by the conditions of discourse of social media."
3. "I'll just have to keep going. I can't disappoint it. I'd be letting the suit down."
4. "Or maybe they’re just performing some Gnawa devotional trance music."
1. Halupedia: "Every article here is fabricated by a language model. Biographies, dates, footnotes, and quotations are invented. Nothing on this site is true. Do not cite Halupedia, do not quote it, and do not believe it."
2. Smush: "It's pretty simple: make words, get points."
3. Date the Globe: "Every day the archive releases a genuine historical map with the dates blacked out. Read the names on it — empires, colonies, countries that no longer exist — and pin down the year of publication in six guesses."
Maybe it’s no big deal! After all, most people don’t like reading and don’t do it voluntarily as adults. Most jobs don’t require in-depth reading, and the availability of good-enough LLM tools promises to reduce the number of those that do. In that context, do we really “need” to spend valuable pedagogical time and energy attempting to give everyone the baseline skills to follow extended narratives and arguments and potentially to develop their own? Arguably we don’t. We can do without that, as a society, or at least with much less of that—because presumably we need at least some core of people who can still read and write and understand on their own, if only to check that the AI is properly calibrated.
But the smaller the circle is, the less the arts of reading and writing will be pushed forward, and the greater the chance of eventually breaking the chain. And in the meantime, millions of people who would have had the chance to develop the difficult but rewarding skills that have been foundational for—indeed, all but synonymous with—intellectual achievement for millenia… won’t. Many, perhaps even most, would have chosen not to develop or even use those skills in any serious way, but at least they would have been free to make that sad choice. In the scenario that seems to be approaching, they’re not even being given the chance. And this is happening without anyone deliberating or voting or even directly deciding that we as a society don’t want mass literacy.
En passant: After the war, John Cade was made director of the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital and moved his family into a house of the asylum grounds. The two hundred patients there included many manic-depressives and John became preoccupied by the “absolute failure” of psychotherapy to cure them. “Psychopathological explanations seemed to me to be singularly unconvincing,” he reflected, “and completely useless when it came to treatment or prevention of attacks.” He wanted to know the “essential nature” of the disease, and like many naturalists and herbalists and folk healers before him, he knew that the malady must come from some imbalance in the harmony of the body, in excesses or deficits or toxins.
In 1969: Forty-nine countries had approved the use of lithium, but the United States was not among them. Many years later, Cade himself would write that his cure was “made by an unknown psychiatrist, working alone in a small chronic hospital with no research training, primitive techniques, and negligible equipment.” Who could expect the Americans to care? In many official histories, American skepticism has been attributed to the lithia craze, to wariness around the substance in the decades after lithium had left so many Americans dead. But those with experience in natural remedies know the truth: the trouble was money. Lithium is found in water, in rocks, in soil, in the sea. It cannot be placed under patent. It has no commercial value. Even today, it can be made by pharmacists in-house, without the trade secrets of pharmaceutical conglomerates, without the true incentives of modern medicine.
While some female Norse soldiers had been found before, she was the first high-status female warrior ever identified. Or was she? The second it was suggested Bj 581 was a woman, every conclusion drawn about her when she was thought to be a man was questioned.
Maybe the grave goods were heirlooms or an homage to her family, and not about her. Maybe there had been another, male body in the tomb, and it had been removed while hers and the horses’ were left undisturbed. Maybe the 19th-century excavation had mislabeled samples. Maybe while chromosomally female, the individual had been intersex or had lived as a transgender man. Anything rather than imagine a woman may have led armies.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
None of the story is real: not the blogger, not the town. But the language is real, or at least realistic. I constructed the passages myself, working from what we know about how English was written in each period.
[...]
And verely this name dyd me ſore affright, for who was this Maiſter wherof he ſpake? And what maner of man was he, that his very name ſholde be ſpoken wyth ſuche reuerence and drede. I wolde haue fledde but he purſued me and by myn avys he was the ſwifter, for he caught me full ſoone.
How far back in time can you understand English? | Image by Paul Lehr
