Dressing Gown

Pillings Fall 2025 Ready-To-Wear

"Rationalism" is up there with "Objectivism" in terms of "definitionally funny things to call your own belief system".

The post on that reading comprehension study is good (and reminded me of some of my complaints about GPT a couple years ago, although the LLMs have gotten much better since then).

But the thing that really stood out to me is that I feel much this same way about math instruction:

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

One of the big problems I have primarily in Calculus 1 (which is the lowest-level course I've taught) is that students just don't expect math to make sense. There's a bunch of rules to follow, which you have to memorize, and then you look at an expression and use some rule that seems like you could use it.

But that's not how competent mathematicians (and I use that word in the broadest possible sense) interact with mathematics. Mathematical formulas mean things. They have syntax, and semantics, and you can break apart a computation and talk about what individual terms mean and are doing, and what manipulation you're doing and what that corresponds to.

(Sometimes, of course, that's easier than others. Calc 2, in particular, involves a lot of "tricks" where it's hard to explain the logic in the middle of using them. But that's why I'm focusing on Calc 1 here, which is mostly not like that but does have a lot of application-y problems where this semantic understanding is important.)

But if you've never worked through a math problem and felt like everything was meaningful, you don't expect meaning in what you're doing, and you don't expect your own work to make sense. And then, well, it won't, and you'll struggle and get lost in the middle of every problem.

King in motion! No audio, lawnmowers were going in the bg

Chilabothrus angulifer - Cuban boa

Do you accept horrible things that USED to have legs, but have now been rendered in a more vile and slithery form?

I will be honest.

#horrible things with legs is a VERY open, very vibes-based collection.

Show me whatcha got

Astronaut readjusts to life back on Earth

> Don’t give him a baby for a while.

Cleto Capri - Alla finestra (1895)

this is kind of misleading I fear, (sorry for the long post) The final one would be part of the realism movement as it depicts manual labour in an un-glamourised fashion. The second could be baroque or romantic depending on the subject - baroque focused more on strong movement and lighting, romantic focused more on the representation of violence and strong emotions. The first /could/ be from the renaissance period but I'd be surprised. The angle and facial expression feel more romantic and the renaissance "leading lines" would have been defined by the scenery not by the subjects. As the background does not have strong, obvious perspective I'm gonna go with it not being from the renaissance period. An important thing to note is that there are multiple distinct styles/movements during the Renaissance period. The art during the Italian renaissance was defined by its references to the antiquity and by the mathematical approach to perspective. There were two Italian schools of thought when it came to painting. One prioritised use of colour (leaving a soft, almost blurry sensation). These were the modernists who considered that there needed to be more innovation in artwork. The others, the classicists prioritised shapes and references to the antiquity much more than the modernists. Finally the art of the Flemish Renaissance period prioritised symbolism and realism and had a much less mathematical approach to perspective. Flemish paintings of the period had an incredibly high level of detail. Examples of Baroque paintings: (please note that I have not studied this particular movement in depth - go do your own research about this movement too!)

Annibale Carracci, The Lamentation of Christ, c. 1604

Charles Lorrain, The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Calling of Saint Matthew, c. 1599 Note how all of these paintings have religious themes and have a fixation with light and movement. Examples of Romantic paintings:

Theodore de Géricault, the Raft of the Medusa, 1818/1819 (this is the painting that started the romantic movement)

Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapulus, 1627 Note the fixation on violence and strong emotions as well as the more controversial subject matter - romantic paintings were often very badly received at the time. Examples of Renaissance paintings: Italian Renaissance period:

Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509 (note the very strong perspective in the scenery as well as the antiquity-inspired decor and subject)

Titian, The Venus of Urbino, 1538 Flemish Renaissance period:

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Wedding, 1434 (take a moment to zoom around and try and pick up the symbolism... it's one of those works where you can spend hours trying to find all the hidden details the painter put in - also note the slightly wonky perspective)

Hubert and Jan Van Eyck ,The Ghent Altarpiece, completed in 1432 (this is an example of a polyptych, a common format for paintings during the larger Medieval Renaissance periods) Note the heavy concentration of symbolic imagery, the use of atmospheric perspective (which was also used in works during the Italian Renaissance), the more "realistic" representation and a use of more earthy tones Examples of Realistic paintings:

Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-1850

Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 Note the representation of more prosaic subjects and a focus on manual labour.

I know this is going to make me sound pretensions but I have to get it off my chest. I feel an unimaginable rage when someone posts a photo and is like "this picture looks like a renaissance painting lol" when the photo clearly has the lighting, colors and composition of a baroque or romantic painting. There are differences in these styles and those differences are important and labeling every "classical" looking painting as renaissance is annoying and upsetting to me. And anytime I come across one of those posts I have to put down my phone and go take a walk because they make me so mad

Steel and silver axe head, Scandinavian, 11th-12th Century

From the Met Museum

Four months.

He's only been alive for four months and his color is already this bananas-cray-cray.