Philip Schrodt
@philip-schrodt.bsky.social
Opinionated old goat ~still~ no longer writing code: conflict forecasting, NLP, and ML before it was cool. Now fully retired, building trails, etc. Head is in Virginia, heart is in Kansas. http://philipschrodt.org and http://asecondmouse.org .. more
Opinionated old goat ~still~ no longer writing code: conflict forecasting, NLP, and ML before it was cool. Now fully retired, building trails, etc. Head is in Virginia, heart is in Kansas. http://philipschrodt.org and http://asecondmouse.org
Political science
44%
Sociology
27%
twice the amount of time it would have taken to drive to my Chicago destination. Tho I believe the culprit was TWA, long ago relegated to the Great Holding Pattern in the Sky. Oh, wait, all holding patterns are in the sky...whatever...
Years ago, returning from ISA as I recall, in those old days when ISA could still be accommodated in St. Louis, I was stuck in a constantly changing delay -- "We're gonna leave, honest...as soon as the glue holding the wings on dries...oh, sorry, now it's nap time for the pilots..." for roughly /1
Probably at least 1000 people there at CVille, at the main intersection in the middle of town. And lots of support from people driving by (and the demonstrators let the Teslas, of which there are many in CVille, through without harassment...)
I'd be expecting to see the Emerald City around that bend
Seven observations from the first week of the year of the snake
Background This started off as an extended set of stream of consciousness notes accompanying tea and oatmeal on the morning of 4-Feb-2025, with assorted additions over the next week as the chaos co…
asecondmouse.wordpress.com
The blog revives with an extended set of observations on the chaos of our present time: asecondmouse.wordpress.com/2025/02/11/s...
Well, there goes all statistical research into biased estimators. Compute the sample variance by dividing by N, not N-1, you hopelessly woke losers!
History’s Seven Dumbest Self-Inflicted Political Disasters
As I’m sitting here both feral and furloughed—my major source of funding is under a “do not work” order [1]—it seems time for another blog entry before—out-sourcing myself— I head…
asecondmouse.wordpress.com
I wrote this in October-2013 (!) but it seems, ahem, curiously relevant to events of recent days: asecondmouse.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/h...
Suggesting also that he's probably on some serious stimulants. Seriously.
🏀🌪️🌻🌻 It's Kansas Day!! 🌻🌻🌪️🏀
Just set up a WordPress-based web site for a small specialized local group I'm involved with, using a new Gmail account, and I'm going to be quite curious--natural experiment--to see how quickly it accumulates spam. Had a "like" from some utterly irrelevant source (bot?) within an hour.
Exactly: when I went to West Africa having received every imaginable vaccination, I felt like an immunological superman (particularly during an outbreak of meningitis). Similar feelings about folks skipping classes having had Palestinian students spend a day getting thru checkpoints to get to class.
I've always found in poignant/appropriate that our independent auto repair place provides a well-used Bible in the waiting area.
I would like to be the first to christen the forthcoming battle royal by innumerable interests with often conflicting objectives over the legacy and institutional powers of the ever weaker and declining Donald Trump as "Game of Toads"
Trump and the Vance factions and the desire of the Project 2025 types and a Senate-controlled GOP to minimize drama in order to actually change policies, and the tendrils of this drama get remarkably complex. Remember: fiction must be plausible, reality just needs to happen /end
with the distinct possibility of eliminating the path of dynastic succession. Add to this the unpredictable timing of Trump's likely decline, the fact that any 25th Amend. action will require the cooperation of Trump's own cabinet appointees, the choice of those almost certainly influenced by the /7
ideological succession,and the additional issue—highly dependent on Trump's mental state—on the relative advantages for simply being puppet masters with Trump nominally in charge, or Vance playing his ace card and invoking the 25th Amendment and putting himself and his backers officially in charge/6
were in that situation, it gets complicated, and for the Trump administration, it's going to be really complicated due to multiple centers of power. While Don Jr. and JD are currently aligned, their future interests diverge sharply over the issue of whether to plan a dynastic succession or a semi-/5
future, which is, well, going to be complicated. This predicated on the likelihood that Trump's cognitive decline is very real but also is not yet catastrophic, which means he will have good days and bad days. Having—lucky me—been at not one but two universities during times when their presidents/4
educated rich white people; and the decades long transition to a party dominated by a small elite class who could afford expensive universities and unpaid internship and who had utter contempt for, and zero contact with, anyone outside their rarified social class. So that got us here; now to the /3
primary might have helped, though possibly not that given, second, the weaknesses of the Obama administration in addressing populist issues, specifically bailing out banks and not mortgage holders in the housing meltdown; utterly failing to address the opioid crisis since the Sacklers were well /2
So moving out of my usual lurky posture, some observations. First, this was a populist revolt against the old two-party establishment, more similar to Brexit than a classical ideological shift. As such, there was little Harris could do, though a counter-factual Biden allowing an open Democratic /1
Paraphrasing Mitch Horowitz, evil is not a librarian casting spells before a black candle inside a pentagram; evil is the person in a cubicle surrounded by pictures of children and drawings of rainbows who denies your insurance claim.
The "jaywalk" question is pivotal, and the full question is "Is jaywalking prohibited or mandatory?" Add to list: "How intent are bicyclists at running over pedestrians?" (Amsterdam = 10)
All news is "trump support underestimated in polls"
Being grifters, pretty sure these dudes were also throwing shade for past few months on various plant-based carbon offset projects, saying evidence was overwhelming that stoves were the best option. There are definitely a *lot* of issues with those other projects, but guessing not as bad as billed
They've started showing up in remote areas -- Nelson County -- in central Virginia, taking out trees near small rivers. Thus far they haven't discovered the tasty ornamentals in suburban yards
Doubtlessly attending a summer solstice bacchanalia on a private island somewhere that certainly involves an orgy and may or may not also include a human sacrifice.
It's the rearview mirror effect: the further you drive, the smaller things get. Eleven years out, and the pettiness of most of the academic stuff I was involved with (thankfully, there were a few, if very few, exceptions) both astonishes me and, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn...
You are probably far ahead on this already, but I'd be really curious about the role of UVA, and probably its assorted secret societies that still tag every building on campus with impunity, in both coordinating this and providing justifications acceptable to northern elites.