Life Stuff

This is a given.

If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.

Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.

If it ends in 5 or 0.

If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.

No shortcut. Alas.

Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)

Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.

For example, 294

29 4

4×2=8

29-8=21

21 is divisible by 7

Second example, 1946

194 6

6×2=12

194-12=182

182 is still large, so let do it again

18 2

2×2=4

18-4=14

btw it still exists ˆˆ

here's the written out link:

Open computer settings

Click on Accessibility on the left-hand menu

Scroll down the Accessibility menu and click on the Keyboard Option

Under the "related settings" tab, click "Typing" which should have a description of "spellcheck, autocorrect, text suggestions."

Turn off the AI "correct misspelled words"

and most importantly: turn off Typing Insights.

[ID: a screenshot of the above mentioned Windows 11 settings, showing that Typing Insights is now turned off, with the following description from Microsoft: "Windows is using artificial intelligence to help you type To help you save time and type efficiently, Windows can learn to suggest words, autocorrect spelling mistakes, and interpret swiped typing. Take a look at the insights below to see up-to-the-minute stats on how Windows has learned to improve typing for you. These stats are stored only on this device and Microsoft does not collect the typing insights data." End ID]

"But Mx. November, it says right there Microsoft doesn't collect the typing insights data!"

I mean, yeah, it says that..... for *now.*

It also only specifies that Microsoft themselves don't collect it, and they wouldn't have made this something that I was automatically, secretly opted in for without my knowledge if they didn't have something to be gained by me not knowing it exists!

I only found this because a cat walked on the keyboard and turned on Filter Keys and while trying to figure out why my keyboard was just making chirping noises instead of typing, I happened to click on "typing insights" by accident.

We know vaccines painful, and by comparing horses at rest with horses getting vaccinated, we've been able to determine how they express pain visually. By looking at horses with disorders like colic, broken bones, wounds, and so on, we can determine their facial expressions during more severe pain.

At zookeeper school we were drilled through the pain faces of the most common lab animals and livestock. Nowadays I believe this has become a routine lesson in all animal related fields, but the general public still doesn't know that this is a thing that exists.

Here are all the pain face/grimace scales I've been able to find. Please study them if you interact with any of these animals on a regular basis:

Harvestmen, otherwise known as daddy long-legs (not to be confused with the cellar spiders of family Pholcidae, which are also described as daddy long-legs) bear a striking resemblance to spiders, but they actually belong to a separate order of arachnids known as Opiliones. These strange-looking creatures have eight legs, but only two eyes, and their body segments are largely fused together, giving the body a noticeably rounded, pill-like appearance.

Above: Metagryne bicolumnata, commonly known as the bunny harvestman

There are roughly 6,700 known species of harvestman, but researchers estimate that a total of more than 10,000 species may currently exist. Their physical features vary greatly from one species to the next; some harvestmen have crab-like claws, spikes, thorny legs, elongated bodies, colorful features, or cryptic markings. Most of them are equipped with long, spindly legs, but there are some that have shorter, stockier limbs instead.

Above: Megabunus diadema and two unidentified species from family Sclerosomatidae

Unlike spiders, harvestmen have an omnivorous diet that includes fungi, fruit pulp, seeds, pollen, lichen, algae, and invertebrate prey, and they are capable of consuming solid food, whereas spiders are typically carnivorous and feed only on fluids.

Above: a harvestman from genus Chasenella munching on a mushroom-cap

As this article explains:

Harvestmen consume mushrooms, fruit pulp, seeds, and seed appendages more frequently than spiders probably because they are “solid food feeders," which means they can ingest solid tissues by biting off small pieces. In turn, spiders are “fluid feeders” and feed on vegetable matter most frequently in the form of fluids (e.g. nectar, stigmatic exudate, plant sap, and honey dew) rather than fungal or plant tissues.

Above: genus Marthana

When given a choice between fresh fruit or invertebrate prey, some harvestmen actually prefer the fruit:

Schaus et al. carried out a feeding trial in which the Neotropical harvestman Erginulus clavotibialis was given a choice between fresh pineapple and live invertebrate prey. This harvestman demonstrated a distinct preference for fruit over the invertebrate prey.

Above: Dentobunus quadridentatus

Harvestmen are also much more social than spiders, and the males of some species have been known to engage in paternal care, which is a trait that rarely occurs among arthropods:

Single fatherhood is the rarest form of parental care in nature. Still, males are often the sole caretakers of progeny among a number of species of daddy long-legs, also known as harvestmen. In these species, fathers are exclusively responsible for guarding eggs that females lay on the undersides of leaves; the males remain on the eggs nearly constantly for months.

Above: several harvestman eggs and a young hatchling

When threatened, harvestmen often bob up and down erratically in an effort to confuse their attackers. They also have several other defense mechanisms, including pungent, foul-tasting secretions, the ability to "play dead," and autotomy, which is the ability to discard one or more of their own limbs in order to escape from predators.

Above: the photo at the top shows an unidentified harvestman from family Cosmetidae, while the photo on the bottom shows a species from genus Gnomulus

Harvestmen are completely harmless to humans. Their mouthparts are far too small to penetrate human skin, and contrary to popular belief, they do not have the "world's deadliest venom" -- in fact, they don't produce any venom at all.

Above: genus Obidosus

Sources & More Info:

BioOne: Fungus and Fruit Consumption by Harvestmen and Spiders: the Vegetarian Side of Two Predominantly Predaceous Arachnid Groups

Laboratory of Arthropod Behavior and Evolution: Harvestmen

Argo Biology: Citizen Science Reveals How Devoted Harvestman Dads Evolved Again and Again

NBC: Daddy Long-Legs Paternal Care Pays off in Longer Life, More Sex

PLOS One: Paternal Care Decreases Foraging Activity, but Does Not Impose Survival Costs to Caring Males in a Neotropical Arachnid

Gulo in Nature: Are Daddy Long-Legs Venemous?

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

I've seen ones today including photos, dates of birth, place of birth even!

So many women feel the need to mention their young children in their cover letters and CVs. Some young people slip in that they can't drive, a sort of pre-emptive "but it's okay I have a bus pass". So many people go and shove their mental health issues with anxiety and depression in there.

I remember one girl had clearly been told that she needed to explain any gaps in employment in the cover letter (terrible blanket advice), and so had described how she had developed depression after a traumatic miscarriage and spent a year in a terrible spiral getting worse and worse before getting on a new medication that, and I quote, "seemed to be finally starting to work." There are ways she could have written that information if she was desperately wanting to include it (I cannot stress enough that she should not have included a word of it), but the way it was written was almost literally a description of how she would be a horrendously unreliable employee who could dip out at a moment's notice and would never be seen again, while also demonstrating that she cannot determine appropriate professional communication.

(And for the record, the latter is the actual issue. I have no problems at all hiring employees with mental health issues, and did several times hire people in recovery to help them get back on their feet. Only once did that not work out; all others were amazing, and two became some of our best employees - one is now a manager there, in fact. But if an employee can't be trusted not to over share personal information with customers or colleagues, particularly triggering topics... That's a different issue. She did herself no favours at all there, and nor did whoever told her employers will always need employment gaps explaining in a cover letter).

Another guy once wrote in his cover letter "I want this job because after years of messing about I now have a little girl, so I need to sort my life out for her, and if I can't do it even for her then more fool me." Which, like, I admire the drive and passion. But again. Why are you telling an employer that you're a flight risk. Why are you telling us this.

One 18 year old volunteered, unforced, that he was gay. Just right in the cover letter. That he sent to a future employer.

And then, of course, the thousands that send in CVs and cover letters that are horrendously mis-spelled. Again, as an employer, I care dick-all if you're dyslexic or what have you; but I do care that you didn't think it was important to get someone to proofread a professional document for you before submission. That tells me quite a big thing about the level of professionalism I can expect from you in the role. It wasn't massively relevant for the job I was hiring for (escape room game master), but if we'd had slightly different job duties (e.g. writing official soc med posts), that would be the difference between getting an interview or not.

In the past, any needle-related appointment on my calendar was this big looming kraken of dread. It felt like the end of the world. A black hole that I couldn't envision the future beyond. I'm not kidding or exaggerating when I say some part of me thought of it like the date of my scheduled execution. (It doesn't help that the fainting episode I have immediately after physically feels like I'm dying.) The more logical side understood that this was irrational and I would survive, but that I'd also surely need to spend a week or so mentally preparing myself beforehand, plus a day or two of just moping around afterward to recover from the ordeal. You know. #SelfCare.

I made this enormous multi-day sea monster with a hundred hungry tentacles out of something that is, on its face, a shitty 15 minutes at the most.

And it sucks, right? Because I know why I did that. I had a traumatic early childhood experience—2 years old or so, held down on a cold metal table by strangers with a hundred rubbing-alcohol-scented hands and twisting dark shadows on the wall shouting HOLD STILL while they jabbed me with multiple shots at once as I thrashed and screamed and begged them to stop because for all I knew, they were going to kill me—that gave me a primal, visceral fear of needles and everything around them. And then, as I grew up, family members and friends and medical professionals saw my disproportionate fear and told me to quit being so dramatic about something that doesn't even hurt that bad! (As if I don't know that. As if the problem was ever the pain and not the loss of control, the shattering of trust.)

My kraken of fear was a big deal for me, and when people dismissed and invalidated my feelings by telling me it wasn't, the only natural response for a contrarian like me was to dig my heels in and make it an even bigger deal. That meant I was in control, right? A perfect plan with no flaws whatsoever! Except for the part where it could've gotten me killed.

It didn't, thankfully, and my abdominal pain turned out to be a couple of ovarian cysts that resolved on their own, but the hours I spent writhing on the floor in agony last June because if I go to the emergency room they are going to put needles in me might've done me in had my initial suspicion of appendicitis been correct. Didn't matter. To that deep part of my brain that deals in adrenaline and tiger attacks, the kraken was certain death, and possible death was preferable to that. I could only be taken in once the pain burned through my ability to resist.

Gorging itself on all the ground I gave it, the kraken had grown larger than my capacity to reason, my judgment, even my desire to stay alive for the people I love. But in therapy, I learned the way to shrink it down was to...well, give it less space to take up!

It wasn't comfortable or easy. Often, giving the kraken less space meant getting closer to it myself. But it also meant bringing other stuff with me—a bag with helpful items, like an ice pack (to put on my face as a mammalian dive reflex hack if I go into a freeze response + also for fainting recovery) and a jacket (helps with the irrational fear I have in every doctor's office that someone's gonna sneak up and jab me when I'm not expecting it). I brought a trusted support person in with me, too, and every inch of space he took up was an inch that the kraken couldn't have.

I scheduled the appointment for first thing in the morning on a Saturday instead of ceding the whole day to anxiously awaiting the kraken, and planned a fun movie day with my friends for the afternoon, and suddenly the shadow the kraken cast was so much smaller that I could see the future on the other side of it. The appointment approached, two weeks away, then a week, and when the old familiar doom-dread tried to creep in, I turned it away until the appointed 15 shitty minutes arrived.

Those 15 shitty minutes are 45 minutes away when I order donuts for pickup in an hour and now the kraken is no larger than an errand. I reach the lab. A kind-eyed young woman in scrubs ushers us back. I mention "a little needle anxiety." She asks if there's anything she can do to help me. I smile and assure her I have it under control, just don't be alarmed if I get dizzy. "But I don't think it'll be bad." She agrees.

My partner is sitting in the chair opposite me. I take off the left side of my jacket and stick out my left arm. Tear open the extreme sour candy in my right pocket that I purposely didn't try beforehand and pop it in my mouth like it's a magic elixir of courage. Sour isn't even the right word. A lemon is sour. This just tastes loud. Staring at the sun while a fire alarm goes off. Make a fist for me? Good. Like a poison dart frog nestled on my tongue. Caution tape, high-vis. Spray paint? The space a dime-sized piece of candy can take up! Half the RAM of my awareness for the space of thirty seconds and the other half is making a wish when the needle goes in like Lorde.

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.