BatesLine blogroll headlines

True history of the two million acres opened for settlement in the April 22, 1889, Land Run. No, the land wasn't stolen. American taxpayers paid millions for it, twice.

An essay from 2012. If you want to understand why the people who call the shots don't get much public criticism, you need to know about the people I call the yacht guests. "They staff the non-profits and the quangos, they run small service-oriented businesses that cater to the yacht owners, they're professionals who have the yacht owners as clients, they work as managers for the yacht owners' businesses. They may not be wealthy, but they're comfortable, and they have access to opportunities and perks that are out of financial reach for the folks who aren't on the yacht. Their main job is not to rock the boat, but from time to time, they're called upon to defend the yacht and its owners against perceived threats."

Introducing Tulsa's Complacent City Council

From 2011: "One of the things that seemed to annoy City Hall bureaucrats about the old council was their habit of raising new issues to be discussed, explored, and acted upon. From the bureaucrats' perspective, this meant more work and their own priorities displaced by the councilors' pet issues.... [The new councilors are] content to be spoon-fed information from the mayor, the department heads, and the members and staffers of authorities, boards, and commissions. The Complacent Councilors won't seek out alternative perspectives, and they'll be inclined to dismiss any alternative points of view that are brought to them by citizens, because those citizens aren't 'experts.' They'll vote the 'right' way every time, and the department heads, authority members, and mayoral assistants won't have to answer any questions that make them uncomfortable."

BatesLine has presented over a dozen stories on the history of Tulsa's Greenwood district, focusing on the overlooked history of the African-American city-within-a-city from its rebuilding following the 1921 massacre, the peak years of the '40s and '50s, and its second destruction by government through "urban renewal" and expressway construction. The linked article provides an overview, my 2009 Ignite Tulsa talk, and links to more detailed articles, photos, films, and resources.

From 2015: "Having purged the cultural institutions and used them to brainwash those members of the public not firmly grounded in the truth, the Left is now purging the general public. You can believe the truth, but you have to behave as if the Left's delusions are true.

"Since the Left is finally being honest about the reality that some ethical viewpoint will control society, conservatives should not be shy about working to recapture the culture for the worldview and values that built a peaceful and prosperous civilization, while working to displace from positions of cultural influence the advocates of destructive doctrines that have led to an explosion of relational breakdown, mental illness, and violence."

10 Things From the 2000s That Are Now Collectible--and Valuable - Mental Floss

iPods, Pokemon Cards, Tamagotchi, old game consoles, DVDs, and VCR tapes are on the list. See also 6 Rare Disney VHS Tapes That Are Worth a Lot of Money Today.

On Violations of LLM Review Policies - ICML Blog

The International Conference of Machine Learning identified 497 papers because 398 reciprocal reviewers used an LLM to write the review when they had promised not to use AI. "At a high level, the LLM detection involved watermarking submission PDFs with hidden LLM instructions, which would subtly influence any review produced via an LLM.... First, we created a dictionary of 170,000 phrases. For each paper, we sampled two phrases randomly from this dictionary. The probability with which a given pair of phrases is picked is thus smaller than one in ten billion. We watermarked the PDF of each paper submitted with instructions, visible only to an LLM, instructing it to include the two selected phrases in the review. (A human reading the PDF would not directly see this watermark.)"

John O'Sullivan on O'Sullivan's First Law on National Review Online

Often miscredited to Robert Conquest, O'Sullivan's First Law says, "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." His reasoning: "I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over -- and the rest follows."

Students Say Holberton School Bootcamp Is Like 'Lord of the Flies' - Business Insider

I'm not shocked by this. Friends tell me that the Holberton grads they've dealt with have generally been eager but ill-prepared. Learning to code -- learning how the syntax of a computer language works, how to use the development tools, how to build a running program -- is important, but it's not the same as learning how to solve problems or how to design and integrate large software systems involving multiple engineers.

FIRST & LEGO Education Partnership Update

FIRST Robotics and LEGO are not renewing their long-time partnership, the FIRST Lego League competition, beyond the 2026-2027 season. This is bizarre and surprising. Here is LEGO's statement on the parting of ways: "LEGO® Education will launch a 2027-2028 season, and we look forward to bringing fun, inspiring and creative STEM learning and the important skills it develops to even more children in the future." The Brick Fan blog notes: "LEGO Education back in January announced that they will be releasing a new Computer Science & AI learning solution while the SPIKE Portfolio will be retired at the end of June."

A Reddit user writes:

"FLL used spike prime as its ecosystem, but Lego discontinued the commercial version years ago, and Lego education announced that they're discontinuing the education edition as well. Mindstorms as a brand has completely ceased to exist, which means FLL no longer has a way to get new control systems.

"The only motorized remote control programming system systems LEGO offers aren't able to run autonomously without an active connection to the brick, which breaks a bunch of FLL rules. They also suck compared to spike prime in terms of teach teaching kids to code and use sensors.

"Essentially, Lego moved on. The only people who were buying these kits were FLL teams, and that clearly just wasn't enough to justify the cost of manufacturing them."

When Country Was King « TK Smith

The ballrooms, dance halls, and honky-tonks of Los Angeles and Orange Counties in the 1940s and the bands that played them.

Panoramic view of Ventura and Reseda boulevards, Tarzana. - Panoramic view of Ventura and Reseda boulevards, Tarzana. (recto) - Photographs - Huntington Digital Library

San Fernando Valley, 1946. The impressive Tarzana Rexall building, Lee's Roundup, a Western Swing dance hall. Here's the view today.

This California Marsh Once Spied on the Soviet Navy - @mareislandfoundation on Tumblr

Skaggs Island, north of San Francisco Bay, was home to a base that intercepted Soviet radio signals from across the Pacific and decrypted them.

How far back in time can you understand English?

A travel blog of a trip to the English village of Wulfleet becomes a linguistic time machine, illustrating changes in the alphabet, spelling, and vocabulary from AD 2000 back to AD 1000, before the Norman Conquest.

"But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger's voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler. By the middle of his post, he's writing in what might as well be a foreign language. But it's not a foreign language. It's all English."

RELATED: The history of the letter yogh.

A Christian philosopher's path to truth | WORLD

Douglas Groothuis writes: "Of the myriad books that have shaped my worldview, these four live in me. I have read them repeatedly and have taught them to university students over many years." The God Who Is There, by Francis Schaeffer; Pensées, by Blaise Pascal; The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis; Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman.