Mark D. Does

working at life, love, parenthood, science, engineering, chess, hockey, running ... Researching MRI at Vanderbilt ... working at that too! Opinions are my own.

[Luai Ahmed @JustLuai]

In honor of Pride month, here’s a list of countries in the Middle East that recognize same sex marriage:

1. Israel

[Jason Gregor @JasonGregor]

The NHL has had two different playoff formats in the salary cap era.
Which one is better?
Does one create better matchups and series?
Yes, one is better based on the results.
A look at both formats, as well as a trade and more.
https://t.co/5LVVNrEUfV

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Fascism on the right. Communism on the left. Ancient antisemitic conspiracies seemingly everywhere. Tariffs. War in Europe. Gilded Age corruption. So many bad ideas re-emerging all at once.

Why? https://t.co/pwzZJWBe5J

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

The next time this admin lectures our European allies for falling short of our shared free speech values, I’d like them to explain this crap. https://t.co/y7iCPfsW7f

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

If you have a bug zapper up, it's time to take that shit down.

A landmark University of Delaware study (Frick and Tallamy, 1996) counted nearly 14,000 insects killed by residential bug zappers over a single summer.

Mosquitoes were 31 of them. A mere 0.22%.

The other 99.78% were moths, beetles, midges, fireflies, and the night-shift pollinators your yard depends on.

Mosquitoes don't navigate by light. They find you by your carbon dioxide, body heat, and skin chemistry. Your bug zapper is invisible to them and lethal to almost everything else.

Harvard Medical School's Zika page specifically warns against bug zappers because they may increase mosquito populations by killing the predators that eat them.

What actually works: eliminate standing water within 100 feet of where you spend time outside.

Bug zappers are 1970s technology built on a 1970s misunderstanding of mosquitoes. It's time to take it down.

[Vanderbilt University Chancellor @VU_Chancellor]

“Once universities enter the game of politics, we dilute our purpose and play a different game.”

In his latest op-ed, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier reflects on why commencement should remain a celebration of students, achievement and shared purpose.
https://t.co/GpDyK2STB1

[David French @DavidAFrench]

This is wildly false, and it breeds a dangerous level of ignorance and wishful thinking in the American public. We'd have to make some hard choices (including making some very tough trade-offs) to come close to balancing the budget. Saying anything else is irresponsible.

[Neetu Arnold @neetu_arnold]

University of California STEM professors want standardized tests back due to severe math deficiencies among students:

“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle school mathematics”

“The current admissions metric, based primarily on GPA & essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation & AI assisted application essays”

[Mark D. Does @MarkDoes]

@jtwill_76 Thanks for your posts today.

[Nick Davidov @Nick_Davidov]

The biggest bullshit move by DHS in its history. So everyone on a O1 or H1B visa would have to stop working legally in the US, go back to their country and wait for years of backlog? This includes top scientists in our universities, founders of billion dollar companies (at least 3 just in our portfolio would be affected by the way). And if we look at individual countries it becomes even more bs. Indians would have to wait decades. Russians don’t have anywhere to go (there is no US embassy in Russia, hello?).

This is the worst imaginable way to disrupt important work for the country and pretend you’re fighting some loophole.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

She Was 37. Broke. Dying. And She Made 30 Million People Laugh Every Week. Erma Bombeck didn’t have an office. She had a typewriter on a wood plank in her bedroom. She didn’t have time. She had three kids and a disease that was killing her.

Ohio. 1965.
Erma was 37, a mom in Centerville, Ohio. Laundry never ended. Kids destroyed the house daily. Dishes reappeared like magic. Everyone said motherhood was “sacred.” “The highest calling.”

Erma thought it was also messy. Loud. And funny as heck.

So she walked into a tiny local paper and asked to write the truth. Not the perfect mom version. The real one. They said, “We’ll pay you three dollars per column.”

She said yes.

She went home, put a typewriter on a plank between two cinder blocks, and got to work. No desk. No fancy setup. Just her and the chaos.

She wrote about the septic tank exploding during dinner. About trying to get three kids to school without losing her mind. About “the beautiful absurdity of a life spent making other people's lunches”.

Three weeks after a bigger paper found her, she went national. Soon, “At Wit's End” ran in 900 newspapers. “Thirty million readers. Twice a week. Every week.”

Erma became the most-read humor writer in America.

Why? Because she said what no one else would. “She told the truth about motherhood when polite society insisted it must remain perfect.” She joked about selling her kids. Told moms to “lock the bathroom door and hide from their families for five minutes of peace.”

Thirty million women read it and thought: “Oh my God. Someone finally said it.”

Phil Donahue was her neighbor. He said, “Motherhood was sacred. Mothers were put on pedestals. Then Erma wrote, 'I'm going to sell my kids.' She punctured that pretense and was suddenly speaking for millions.”

But here’s the part nobody knew: Erma was dying the whole time.

At 20, doctors told her she had polycystic kidney disease. Incurable. They said she’d never have kids. She adopted a daughter. Then somehow had two sons.

For decades, she did dialysis and came home to write. “She made America laugh while quietly fighting to stay alive.” She never complained. Never asked for pity. “She just kept writing.”

She grew up poor in Dayton. Dad died when she was nine. At 13, she wrote for her school paper. At 15, she got a job at the Dayton Herald. A professor told her: “You can write.” So she did. For 31 years. Over 4,000 columns. 15 books. Nine bestsellers. 15 million copies sold. Eleven years on Good Morning America.

She wrote survival guides disguised as jokes. Titles like The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?

She beat breast cancer in 1992. Finally told the world about her kidney disease in 1993. Got a transplant on April 3, 1996. Wrote her last column 14 days later. Died five days after that. April 22, 1996. She was 69.

She’s buried in Dayton under a 29,000-pound boulder from Arizona. Big as the laughs she gave us.

Think about it. She started at 37 — when the world says women are done. For three dollars a week. On a plank. While on dialysis. While dying. “And she never stopped being funny.”

Because “humor isn't the opposite of pain. It's how you survive it.”

She once wrote, “Success is outliving your failures.” She did.

Not because she got famous. But because 30 million people picked up a paper and felt less alone. She told them: Motherhood is hard. You’re tired. You’re not failing. You’re human.

“Before Erma, mothers were supposed to be saints. After Erma, they were allowed to be people.”

She was 37 when she started. Dying the whole time. Wrote till five days before she died.

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996). A housewife. A typewriter. Three dollars. Thirty million readers. And the belief that ordinary lives are worth writing about.
“Not despite their ordinariness. Because of it.”......................

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

The Trump slush fund is a clear cut impeachable offense. https://t.co/nUveUBkApa

[Timur Kuran @timurkuran]

Practically every academic will admit privately that well-connected families abuse disability accommodations. Most students getting extra test time are simply gaming the system. US universities lost control because of a coddling ethos and growing fear of litigation. (Clip: WSJ)

[VU Engineering @VUEngineering]

Welcome Ruogu Fang! A leading researcher in brain-inspired AI and neuroimaging, she will join Vanderbilt’s esteemed Department of Biomedical Engineering as the Flowers Family Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Engineering on August 16. Learn more: https://t.co/M51un0pi0v

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

The man bagging your groceries at Smith's in Salt Lake City is 83 years old.

His name is Gary. He was an architect for decades — a man who designed buildings, raised a family, and built a life with his wife Carol.

When Carol got sick — severely sick, with dementia and a brutal neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy — Gary never once considered putting her in a facility. He brought her home. He became her caregiver, her nurse, her constant companion. Every single day.

The bills came anyway. Insurance covered what it covered. The rest — medications, equipment, the relentless cost of keeping someone you love alive and dignified — fell on Gary. When Carol passed in 2021, she took a piece of his heart with her.

She left behind $80,000 in debt.

Utah law says a surviving spouse can be held responsible for medical debts accumulated during a marriage. Gary knew that. Gary paid. He's still paying.

So three, four days a week, a former architect in his eighties puts on his vest, drives to the grocery store, and bags strangers' groceries. He doesn't complain. He doesn't ask for sympathy. He just works — steady hands, quiet dignity, doing what a man does when he loves someone even after she's gone.

A customer noticed him. Asked around. Learned his story.

When someone asked Gary why he didn't just walk away from the debt, he said something that stopped everyone cold:

"She was my wife. It was the least I could do."

The least he could do.

Next time you're in that checkout line, look at the people around you. You have no idea what someone is carrying. You have no idea what kind of love story is standing right in front of you, quietly paying its bills.

[Robert Parham @kn_owled_ge]

Teaching in the age of LLMs:

I failed 4 students, for the first time ever. I also gave more A+'s than ever before.

In previous years, students realized after the first or second HW that they weren't in Kansas anymore and needed to work hard.

No more. Just solve it with LLMs.

But then the midterm arrives, and they can answer 0 of 40 questions. Do they reform their ways? Nah, they just decide to "give up" on class, assuming they'll get a B, or a C, or whatever, because they submitted HW and got decent grades on those. And never before have they encountered a professor who will dare fail them.

The flip side is that the most "agentic" students now have the world's best tutor at their disposal. They deeply understand the material and aced my (intentionally very difficult) exams. As if we live in "The Diamond Age".

Inequality galore.

From my vantage point, "the permanent underclass" appears to be about agency, not assets.

[Mark D. Does @MarkDoes]

@James_West_PhD @DaveWBrowning I switched from iPhone to Pixel when GoogleFi came out. I wanted that plan and Pixel was the best option at the time. I will not go back to an iPhone, even though you can use it with Fi now, but I still love my Mac.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

A flag featuring swastikas and a Star of David flew over NYU during graduation today.

The specific building it was flown over was named after a Jewish donor to the school.

Does no one feel shame anymore?

[kurt.schilling @kurtschilling5]

(1/5) Out today in @Nature! We all know pediatric growth charts for height and weight, but what about the brain's wiring?

Excited to share our new work establishing comprehensive lifespan reference charts for human brain white matter pathways.

https://t.co/xQtsHBpOGR

[James Blunt @JBlunt1018]

If you’re against H-1B and truly believe, in your HEART OF HEARTS, that H-1Bs are paid LESS solely because they are visa dependent, I have a suggestion for Congress:

Require EVERY company hiring ANY employee — even U.S. citizens — to file an LCA WAGE ATTESTATION.

Watch how fast the “CHEAP LABOR” narrative collapses.