Michael Erard

@michaelerard.bsky.social

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Count the blessings, honor the hungers.

Coming in February 2025: Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words (MIT Press). Preorders: bit.ly/4dIfTFc

www.michaelerard.com

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Michael Erard

Very excited to share that my paper on gender-inclusive language and how it is perceived by multilinguals has just been accepted! 🌈 „In Deutschland wird es weniger diskutiert“: Sprachideologien über geschlechtergerechte Sprache aus der Sicht von L2-Sprechenden des Deutschen 🌈

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Michael Erard

This classic SF author is about to become a mute words casualty so just taking a moment to remember the good times

The last words news today: Shannon Doherty and the local dad killed at the Pennsylvania Trump rally

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Michael Erard

*Detecting LLM Delvish by looking for "excess style words" (sometimes known as "fluff"). #Delvish #meticulous #comprehensive #intricacies #etcetcetc arxiv.org/pdf/2406.070...

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Michael Erard

I have changed my mind about the world. David Ignatow

A PhD position in listening to chickens. Seriously. www.academictransfer.com/en/343752/ph...

PhD project: sound monitoring in laying hen houseswww.academictransfer.com In the poultry sector, it is striking how large the variation in performance is between poultry farms using the same genetics. This means that a lot of energy, effort and resources are lost in underpe...

There it is. Vance proposing what Trump, for whatever reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t.

ugh I somehow forgot that babyfaced bitch is also the current figurehead of the English Only movement I have actual work to do, I don't have time to fact check his stupid English Language Unity Act, but someone should cause just the first 2 pages are full of howlers for anyone who took LING101

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Michael Erard

Today we lost an ally. May he rest in peace.

A moment of silence for a hero. apnews.com/article/buxt...

Tuskegee syphilis study whistleblower Peter Buxtun has died at age 86apnews.com The whistleblower who exposed the Tuskegee syphilis study that left hundreds of Black men untreated has died at age 86.

A Japanese translation of Babel No More was published in February, I *just* got this image of the cover. It joins translations into French, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and Mandarin (simplified and traditional). Too bad they didn't ask me for my Chinese name. (Yes, I have one.)

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Michael Erard

I will never forget the interview, shortly after Ozy Media Inc. was formed, where Carlos Watson said he named it after the poem, because "the lesson you take from [Ozymandias] is that you have to dream big." So that's why liberal arts education is important.

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Michael Erard

This is a fun conversation with collection & preservation experts at the Library of Congress 🧪 Q: If the building was burning, what would you run out with? NADAL: I would do nothing. www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

How Does the World’s Largest Library Decide What Becomes History?www.scientificamerican.com From ancient clay tablets to TV shows to video games, the U.S. Library of Congress preserves far more than just books

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Michael Erard

This seems like a grim natural experiment to show that access to mental health services isn't going to neutralize access to guns when it comes to controlling violence

Jesus, both of Thomas Matthew Crooks' parents are licensed professional counselors. "The AR-15 rifle Crooks used was one of more than a dozen registered to and legally purchased by his father, with whom he often went to the shooting range, officials said." www.wsj.com/us-news/myst...

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Michael Erard

As soon as we learned that Crooks was a registered Republican it was clear that the assassination attempt was going to be a two-day story.

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Michael Erard

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump does not erase the crimes that Trump himself has committed against American democracy, or the crimes he would commit if given the chance, and no one is obligated to pretend otherwise www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Nothing About the Attempted Assassination Redeems Trumpwww.theatlantic.com This crime does not erase what the former president has done, or what he has promised to do.

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Michael Erard

Biden went to University of Delaware and Harris went to Howard. Personally, I prefer people who have seen the inside of a state university or an HBCU and they don’t pretend to hate other people with their educations.

A great illustration of how class is just vibes is that only one major party ticket is entirely Ivy League alumni and it’s the one that yells about the elites selling you out

others.to

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Michael Erard

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance argues against need for rape and incest exceptions in abortion laws www.washingtonpost.com/politics/van...

Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance argues against need for rape and incest exceptions in abortion lawswww.washingtonpost.com The author and venture capitalist running for the GOP Senate nomination said in a local interview that unborn babies should be allowed to live even if the circumstances are “somehow inconvenient.”

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Michael Erard

This is a busy week for us so I can’t say anything about timeline, but we are going to prioritize notification filtering. Work has already started

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Michael Erard

Two months ago Greg Abbott pardoned a murderer who texted a friend "I might go to Dallas to shoot looters" then drove into a BLM protest in Austin and killed a protester. The universal response from conservatives to the pardon was "Yeah! Woo-hoo!" Now they say liberals should turn down the rhetoric

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Michael Erard

New York Times Editorial Board: "Mr. Trump’s political agenda cannot and must not be opposed by violence. It cannot and must not be pursued through violence." Ok but to be clear Trump's political agenda *is* violence. We get that right? I dont want us to miss that www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/o...

Opinion | The Attack on Donald Trump Is Antithetical to Americawww.nytimes.com Political violence is antithetical to our democracy.

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Michael Erard

Spread this far and wide!

Reopening my Serwer hymnal

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Michael Erard

This is how you do it.

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Michael Erard

Hardly a novel insight, but I am so beyond exhausted and enraged by this idiot sucking up every atom of oxygen, commanding every photon of light, turning our attention from the countless more productive and enlightening and beautiful things that do and could exist.

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Michael Erard

Reply to

Kate Starbird

We are all currently participating in a massive “collective sensemaking” process, attempting to gather and interpret evidence to give meaning to this terrible event. For an explanation, see: www.cip.uw.edu/2023/12/06/r...

Facts, frames, and (mis)interpretations: Understanding rumors as collective sensemakingwww.cip.uw.edu The communicative solution to pervasive misinformation is not better facts, but better frames.

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Michael Erard

every liberal's goal is to become a corporation. freed of responsibility. freed of the flesh every conservative's goal is to become a state, for the same reasons we have bodies. we cannot escape them. they pretend they do not. they pretend that they can

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Michael Erard

Reply to

Roxane Gay

Progressive values and Democrats are not responsible for this violence. There is no both sides here. Violent rhetoric is the bread and butter of modern extreme conservatism. And lax gun laws put a semiautomatic rifle in the hands of a gunman.

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Michael Erard

If you don't want political violence and intimidation to be normalized, you should avoid encouraging it, or supporting political movements that encourage it.

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Michael Erard

COVID is rocking me so all I'll say is that what USers have historically called democracy has long coexisted with tons of explicitly political violence, and that what we call democracy today coexists with absurd amounts of violence that simply isn't called political

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Michael Erard

The majority of people flatly do not understand — and would be honestly shocked by! — how little money most publicly known writers make

“Walt Disney died from cancer in 1966. On his deathbed, Walt reportedly scribbled several things on a pad. His last words were ‘Kurt Russell.’” (Notable because 1) written last words aren’t noted as often as spoken ones and 2) Kurt Russell?) wbsm.com/springfield-...

Massachusetts-Born Actor's Name Was the Last Thing Walt Disney Saidwbsm.com One of the greatest mysteries of all time – well, at least in the entertainment world – is why Walt Disney's last words were what they were.

How we name our paintbrushes today cc @fritinancy.bsky.social

Putting together things for Monday. I'm so excited to get these brushes into other people's hands! I love making brushes for myself but they really surprise me when other people play with them. but also look at all these strokes :)