Professor Liu, the Grandma Killer
Why do American grandmothers become mysteriously vulnerable to college exams? A Cancun yacht, an academic satire, and an alarming faculty mortality record.
Blog
Notes in progress.
Notes on what I notice, think about, care about, and love.
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9 posts
A Red Arrow Should Mean Something
What a traffic light reveals about communication design, legal rules, and the cost of ambiguity.
Wait. You Had a Childhood?
ChatGPT casually told me what it did not know ‘when I was a kid.’ The grammar was fine. The speaker was impossible.
Comm Scholars and Chimps: Disciplinary Boundaries and Reproductive Isolation
Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication, and Media Studies often study remarkably similar things. So why do their scholars still reproduce inside separate academic species?
Buffet Economics: Starting with Watermelon in the Dining Hall
Why does watermelon disappear at the dining hall, and why does shrimp vanish at a Chinese buffet? A small economics lesson about value after the price of the next bite falls to zero.
Before Evidence: What Must a System Take for Granted?
No system starts from zero. Before evidence can count as evidence, something has already made evidence possible.
Most Papers Add Very Little. That May Be Fine.
Most social-science papers add only a little. The problem is not small contributions; it is the performance that they are larger than they are.
When AI Changes Its Mind, Ask What Changed
I gave Gemini no new evidence. It changed its answer anyway, then produced a plausible explanation for why it had been wrong.
Not Too Sweet
I scraped 400 bakery reviews to see what people think a good cake should be.