Kieran Healy

Public Key

npub1q0eq22qfsw6znze5n9mzzfd58xrwv0rq46lup8hz8ancau5zkmxse5ej23

NIP-05 Address

kjhealy@mastodon-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsq8us99qyc8dpf3v6fja3pyk6rnphx83s2a07qnm3r7euw72ptdngpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dse0ydkf

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

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npub1q0eq22qfsw6znze5n9mzzfd58xrwv0rq46lup8hz8ancau5zkmxse5ej23

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Last Notes

2026-03-04 03:37:49 UTC

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/168/816/337/303/929/original/9ac3fe99eb5a8428.jpeg

2026-01-26 14:55:00 UTC

On the whole, what the world needs more of is teeny-tiny suspension bridges that shake when you walk across them and thus are known as the Shakey Bridge.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/961/973/721/342/713/original/a8bdf1408e5789e2.jpeg

2026-01-20 00:23:22 UTC

A casual reference to “cakes and ale” by a better-read person led to me learning about a particularly filthy bit of Shakespeare, viz “By my life, this is my lady's hand. These be her very c's, her u's, and t's, and thus makes she her great Ps”. Outrageous that this stuff is taught to high-schoolers.

2025-12-11 23:43:50 UTC

Everyone loves nostalgic eight-bit gaming until they have to play the worst eight-bit game ever devised, i.e. bibtex.

2025-10-20 17:42:24 UTC

Always worth taking sentences that use “the Cloud” or “the Internet” and try replacing those phrases with “A shed in Virginia” to see how they hold up. “Our service is fully based in a shed in Virginia”; “All my files are in a shed in Virginia”; “A shed in Virginia was designed to survive a nuclear war”, etc.

2025-10-13 20:20:12 UTC

A couple of parking signs for anyone who wants to print them out for this coming Saturday. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/10/13/parking-signs/

2025-08-23 17:36:01 UTC

The most compact, informative, and useful introduction to the Philosophy and Sociology of Science remains Kovar (2001), “Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass”.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/079/286/121/440/427/original/6018d02a1e9be872.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/079/286/413/470/826/original/1364592667b35a54.png

2025-08-19 15:28:01 UTC

Semester starts next week; people starting to show up around the place.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/056/133/867/374/029/original/ffcf378a7f4d7b4f.png

2025-08-08 00:25:57 UTC

I had the Blueberry talk with GPT5. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/08/07/blueberry-hill/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/990/300/789/577/168/original/2841a37da76bf117.jpeg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/990/301/117/176/866/original/cbecb6d1d01cd209.jpeg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/990/301/405/522/433/original/ee3ecc14f1851dca.jpeg

2025-07-27 18:52:27 UTC

RIP Tom Lehrer, one of the all-time great satirists. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/music/tom-lehrer-dead.html

2025-07-12 21:49:38 UTC

I see it’s time once again to break this out of storage.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/842/466/702/106/113/original/b23a094df9f9e4dc.jpeg

2025-07-08 13:22:49 UTC

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@nprofile…z7vu Your profile pic on here does kinda look like a guy who’d have weed for breakfast, in fairness.

2025-06-28 20:41:10 UTC

I became a U.S. citizen this past Friday. I wrote a thing about it.
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/06/28/american/

2025-06-26 12:14:29 UTC

The Occam/Chekhov/Chesterton Razor/Gun/Fence matrix. Summer’s off to a productive start.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/749/608/123/519/699/original/8a1e712320fd86df.jpeg

2025-06-09 22:29:34 UTC

"We call this one ‘The Color Czar's Frozen Corpse’”
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/655/767/423/626/194/original/afb6b1669adeb254.png

2025-06-09 18:21:04 UTC

A parallel universe of computing UI where hardware and most software developed very much as in our own, but windows, a pointer, and menus were not invented until 2025

2025-06-09 18:00:13 UTC

Like a toddler determined so help me God to eat that tide pod, OS designers are permanently hell-bent on making the menu bar invisible.

2025-06-09 13:03:09 UTC

The LAPD Tactical Donut shot works quite well as a cover for all kinds of classics, tbh
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/653/539/445/091/528/original/a04a053c8030419d.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/653/539/832/073/341/original/d4fb7862b2c15e41.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/653/540/216/315/396/original/d1cb2c0c70641399.png

2025-06-09 01:35:17 UTC

Here, I made a helpful graph to assist with current “Very large numbers of Americans live in big cities, that’s one of the main reasons why they are big, you see, it’s just, like, science man”, discourse, with real Census data and everything.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/650/835/409/355/858/original/02713114e5a283bf.jpeg

2025-06-07 20:22:15 UTC

RIP Bill Atkinson. “-2000 lines of code”
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

2025-06-02 14:28:55 UTC

Blaise Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Pedro Pascal
https://mastodontti.fi/@pahoittelemme/114530233028183925
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/614/241/248/638/954/original/ad4336a4a1c01322.png

2025-05-26 21:58:47 UTC

One narrative aim of The Last of Us games, especially Part II, is to viscerally convince the kill-happy portion of its gamer audience that living as a broken person in a blighted, desperate world would be a horrible, soul-destroying experience and in no way fun or satisfying. Less clear this works as good weekly TV.

2025-05-25 22:56:36 UTC

Justice is served. https://www.wgbh.org/news/education-news/2025-05-25/in-extremely-rare-move-harvard-revokes-tenure-and-cuts-ties-with-star-business-professor

2025-05-24 22:12:06 UTC

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Also the Triumph of the Frog shot.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/565/101/801/082/863/original/1dad63d496c516f5.png

2025-05-24 22:06:48 UTC

Solid wide shot of Kermit’s commencement speech at UMD.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/565/080/958/122/676/original/b85e7a738c8de0bc.png

2025-05-20 18:52:00 UTC

My friends love it when I use a robot pretending to be me to communicate with them. https://mastodon.social/@harrymccracken/114541332465455666

2025-05-20 15:49:42 UTC

The long-sought pinnacle, the very apex, of a well-rounded education, the platonic ideal of the life of the mind, is to become a full-time fact-checker and nonsense-detector for devices that extrude plausible-sounding slop for the benefit of people who are trying to get away with something.

2025-05-20 15:32:43 UTC

AI Slop “content” package (an advertising vehicle) appears in the Chicago Sun Times and Philadelphia Inquirer and elsewhere. Summer Reading list includes mostly real authors with mostly confabulated titles. Recipes include quotes from an imaginary food anthropologist at Cornell. Also an imaginary nutritionist and her imaginary book. https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/540/881/427/421/127/original/fef25b2781976bcb.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/540/881/721/108/960/original/7c50f83398b87011.png

2025-05-14 12:44:39 UTC

They conkered them, obviously; Jesus Christ do I have to do everything around here
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/506/247/400/652/008/original/e96d99d478d9da29.jpeg

2025-05-08 02:45:29 UTC

Viable Post-LLM Pedagogical Strategy:
– In-person, active learning only
– One-on-one instruction
– Examination via practical tasks
– No lectures, just enigmatic remarks
– Classes offered only in Swamp
– Breaks for intensive physical exercise
– Hit obstreperous droid with walking stick

2025-05-07 17:55:15 UTC

In Pope Safety Engineering, Time in Conclave, or TIC, is an inverse of MTBP (Mean Time Between Popes) the standard measure of Papal Infallibility. Continuous-time models are the expected value of a PDF (Pope Density Function). Simplified models may add a Mitre parameter, λ, to express a constant pope failure rate.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/467/832/583/567/687/original/68eb12e2aebb0837.jpeg

2025-05-04 16:05:36 UTC

Nice example for your Time Series Are Tricksy files. When “Compared to the same time last year” leads you astray because the same (calendar) date is not the same (social) time.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/30/world/us-travel-decline.html
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/450/414/459/481/779/original/36f5efbbdf8ad6ff.jpeg

2025-05-02 11:12:49 UTC

Nature reports that the NSF has stopped funding awardees entirely, “until further notice”. This administration is determined to destroy the country’s scientific research infrastructure by choking off funding and taking a wrecking ball to the merit review system.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

2025-04-20 19:58:28 UTC

Happy Easter from Britain and Ireland’s most tortured 19th century hip-hop artist. (Quite seriously. That is what sprung rhythm is. Try it.)
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/372/057/819/982/502/original/d493be8e3b769500.jpeg

2025-04-20 17:39:31 UTC

I know it’s in no way an original observation but, now that I’m piloting him around the eternal city, I have to say that Dr Henry Jones really has a very strong claim to being the single greatest danger to archaeological sites of all descriptions and sizes that the world has ever known.

2025-04-13 01:37:47 UTC

“Hi it’s Elon. Can we be friends? Will you be my friend? I’ll give you a cybertruck I promise.”
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/technology/2025/04/12/silicon-valley-crosswalk-buttons-apparently-hacked-to-imitate-musk-zuckerberg-voices/

2025-04-01 17:09:01 UTC

@nprofile…md38 @nprofile…t230 The traditional 1970s Irish immersion is a large hot water tank found in the “hot press”, or airing cupboard, in the bathroom. It is distinct from but fed by the attic cold- or rat-water tank. Flipping a switch located next to the tank turned on the element inside the tank. Some hours later, there would be hot water. As children we were all taught that running the immersion cost a fortune, and that forgetting to turn it off risked a catastrophic house-destroying explosion.

2025-03-25 00:43:37 UTC

CONTROL: You weren’t followed?
SMILEY: No.
CONTROL: You're sure?
SMILEY: Quite sure.
ALLELINE: Always one for the tradecraft, our George.
BLAND (coughing): Can we begin?
CONTROL: Yes, yes.
KERMIT: Hi-ho! Kermit T. Frog here for Sesame Street News.
ALLELINE: George, take a look at this from Source Merlin. Absolute gold dust from start to finish.
SMILEY: Very well. But first, may I—may I ask a question?
CONTROL: Oh for heaven’s sake George what is it this time?
SMILEY: It's just—

2025-03-02 13:21:34 UTC

I assume this is a direct translation from the Māori that the surveyor wrote down thinking it referred to a feature of the landscape.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/093/043/907/831/975/original/f73cf2b0cc70f453.png

2025-02-08 00:17:01 UTC

The NIH indirect cost cap thing will blow a hole the size of Texas in the budgets of research medical schools and life sciences departments across the country. Federal IDC rates are extremely high and it would be wrong to say there’s no room for debate about them. These cuts are gigantic, though. Capping IDCs at 15% is like a 45 percentage point cut.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html

2025-02-07 05:09:25 UTC

I needed something to distract me from the news and it turned out to be something even more miserable. https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2025/02/06/kerning-and-kerning-in-a-widening-gyre/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/960/875/520/336/572/original/c574c39a0f9632c9.jpeg

2025-01-09 22:34:02 UTC

The device that essentially gave us the specific version of the pocket, touch-based, single-app-at-a-time, mobile, ubiquitous, GPS-enhanced computing world we have now was introduced 18 years ago today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o

2023-11-02 02:36:47 UTC

We regret to inform you that due to unforeseen difficulties this evening’s flight of the Owl of Minerva will be provided by the Replacement Connecting Bus of Minerva.

2023-10-13 13:06:07 UTC

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunder/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/227/854/009/120/751/original/7e4c08fb7c75e580.png

2023-09-09 22:01:56 UTC

To build a fully reproducible platform for scientific and statistical computing first you must develop settled agriculture and a record-keeping state with a monopoly on the means of legitimate violence, and eventually a highly elaborated social division of labor capable of escaping the Malthusian Trap.

2023-09-04 11:49:29 UTC

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/006/722/644/122/188/original/53ed54b0e226d2b9.jpeg

2023-09-03 00:53:25 UTC

People seem unable to grasp that when they make a list of things people should and shouldn't do it's Carceral Pedagogy fueled by the will to dominate, whereas when I make a list of things people should and shouldn't do it's Critical Praxis that emanates from a place of love.

2023-08-28 22:33:39 UTC

America is a gun.

2023-08-17 13:21:20 UTC

Me planning to teach computing stuff, imagining exchanges:
— So, the file system is like a filing cabinet with an index …
— What’s a filing cabinet?
— And you have these files in it …
— What's a file?
— OK imagine a bunch of index cards th–
— Wh–
— Sorry, sorry. Uh, you know the wallpaper on your laptop screen?
— Yes
— Imagine that was a real desk.
— OK. Do I have to share it?
— No. You know all the documents you have on it?
— Yeah
— Imagine they were really on the real desk
— OK?
— Now,

2023-08-11 01:35:45 UTC

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@npub15ml…2w4s As it happens I’ve been using BBEdit quite a bit more over the past few years. It can’t do the data analysis stuff I want but it is in every other respect way, way nicer than the likes of Emacs.

2023-08-11 00:20:37 UTC

The marketplace of ideas is when the government chooses which subjects colleges may teach. Academic freedom is when the state decides your subject shouldn't be allowed. The Classical Liberal Arts Tradition is when political appointees get to judge whether something is science.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/868/118/456/629/286/original/bc31950d86030a5e.jpeg

2023-08-10 23:35:31 UTC

@npub15ml…2w4s Re: BBEdit being the imperishable rock while others come and go, the same of course applies to Emacs, alas. (Quote from yours truly in <squints> 2010.)
https://usesthis.com/interviews/kieran.healy/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/867/941/143/276/618/original/94c1afec3f14b34f.png

2023-08-09 15:29:51 UTC

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@npub15ml…2w4s The Empire Strikes Back

2023-08-03 22:22:35 UTC

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@npub15ml…2w4s @npub1el8…4l26 What's especially funny is what a significant chunk of my childhood culture consists of material designed to help children navigate the New York City that Robert Moses was determined to eliminate. Every Irish person my age has the same rudimentary Spanish vocabulary together with basic knowledge of the subway (If you're in a hurry / Take the Express / It will go right by / Your local address)

2023-08-03 22:09:48 UTC

You know what comes next.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/827/967/910/777/566/original/c1a5abcebec19c4c.png

2023-08-03 11:41:26 UTC

Here's the Gino complaint, fwiw. https://archive.ph/o/yxxPx/https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.259933/gov.uscourts.mad.259933.1.0.pdf

2023-07-02 01:38:19 UTC

To address extreme levels of scraping and manipulation I have put the cat in the garage until further notice.

2023-03-15 23:40:58 UTC

A good way to make yourself feel your brain is broken and you no longer know how computers work is to sit down in front of someone else's machine and try to use it. It doesn't have to be running a different operating system. In fact, the closer it is to yours the worse and more confusing it will feel as you get tripped up by any of the dozens of things you feel are just how computers work but which in fact are some preference you set in 2004 (or 1984) and have taken for granted ever since.