Helen, we interacted very little but I was always so inspired by your insatiable love of learning and you’ve been such an example. I hope you’re surrounded by loved ones.

Having a LLM or another person writing your papers feels like a victory but it is just your own defeat, you felled by your own contempt for your future and anyone who believes in you.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but truly, discovering a new way to love another human being is such a joy

Sorry to hear about Random!!! He was such a beautiful boy

Solidarity!! Mine only sleeps while being held, with some small success being set down by me (while wearing a Merlin’s magic sleep suit) earlier in the night to sleep up to an hour at a time. But by morning, it’s hopeless even though it’s still nighttime for her

When paying debit/credit, you pay to the cent. When paying cash, rounding happens. I don’t think it changed the general trend towards cashless payments, especially because businesses pay transaction fees if you use cards rather than cash. Losing 2 cents on a cash transaction is worth the tradeoff.

Fwiw, Canada did this over a decade ago. It’s fine. We just round up or down to the nearest 5 cents. I was a cashier when the change happened and it was really seamless.

It’s my favourite thing to teach, second only to fighting with students over the claim in the Gorgias that everyone acts for the sake of the good

Why do this? So students don’t think Aristotle just assumes a claim we might want to reject as unsupported. It makes us engage with him more intelligently.

He then gives reasons (albeit ones we might not like) to think humans have functions. It’s a good exercise because it helps us see how easy it is to read into the text what isn’t there but nearly is.

I do this annoying exercise when I teach the Nicomachean Ethics where I ask students to reconstruct the function argument for me. Almost always, students begin with “humans have functions”. But it actually begins: IF humans have functions, then it’s reasonable their good is there

🚨🚨 She now appears to have sorted out identity in objects because she realized the object in her hand is the same as the object she was looking at

It’s been very fun to observe as a philosopher!