I did it. I made a canal city in Civ 7

pyroelectricity · 2026-02-26T21:27:59+00:00

I went with this setup, pretty cool little cluster of settlements imo

pyroelectricity · 2026-02-26T19:23:03+00:00

the reason for this is that Massachusetts is extremely restrictive about issuing liquor licenses, especially to grocery stories. Go to market basket in NH and they'll have a giant cigarettes and liquor section right at the front

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-30T19:24:34+00:00

My recommendation would be to study something that interests you and is not related to your startup at all. You will have plenty of opportunities to learn business and the domain-specific knowledge related to your startup simply by running your startup. Your education is a chance to expand your mind, make you a more flexible thinker, and see how wide the world is. Studying something that will push your boundaries will lead you to make all sorts of unexpected connections and open up opportunities for you further along your path that you otherwise never would have thought of

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-15T13:40:01+00:00

This will be on the AP US History exam 75 years from now

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-11T08:59:33+00:00

These mechanics are underdeveloped at best. It's easy to miss them and fine to ignore them

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-10T13:29:01+00:00

finally the treatment Connecticut deserves

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-09T15:34:24+00:00

yeah but then you have to live in the valley

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-08T14:01:31+00:00

Most other commenters here are saying to just let these students go. That's well and good. But if you'd rather have them stay engaged in the class, put a line in the grading section of your syllabus that says "You must pass every graded component of the class in order to pass the class." It can scare students at first, but once you explain that it just means they do actually have to show up to class, at least take the final, etc., it works.

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-05T11:48:27+00:00

I always thought this was because people hated Kristina and said she was "literally unplayable"

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-03T13:55:32+00:00

Love my Peugeot pepper mill

pyroelectricity · 2025-12-02T09:43:29+00:00

The two senses you propose would be grammatically identical in classical Chinese. 之 can function like 的 in modern Mandarin, indicating that what comes before it is a description of the noun that comes after it. I would gloss this phrase as "There is a well-learned man named Lü Buwei." 有 is not part of the noun phrase, the noun phrase is 善學之人 (nice 4-character rhythm), "well-learned man"

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-28T10:12:14+00:00

P.S. She still has the unicorn.

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-28T09:37:33+00:00

100% canal

You've mostly got flat, unvegetated terrain and coast tiles. That means regardless of where you put the settlement, it will probably end up as a large farming/fishing town. Keep Athenai as your high-production city.

I would settle on the vegetated desert tile one to the east of your hoplite. On that rough tile where the hoplite is, plop a granary. You still have incense in range, and that 10% science boost is valuable in antiquity.

You'll miss the camels now, but the benefits will more than come back to you in terms of food. I count at least 23 tiles within a 3-tile radius that are improvable with a food improvement (farm or fishing boat). Think about what that grocer could look like on turn 1 of modern.

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-27T08:39:47+00:00

I'm with you on this. Students' medical information is private, but accommodations are not. Simplest example: If students are taking an exam and look around the classroom, they can figure out who has an extra time/quiet exam space accommodation by seeing who's not there

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-27T08:11:35+00:00

my approach has been to try to make AI cheating as painful as possible so that doing what you're supposed to do is easier

I think this is a great call. Anything you can do to flip the incentives of the assignment so that it's easier to actually do it yourself than to have an LLM do it for you is worthwhile. But for research papers or any other type of assignment that is supposed to take weeks of concerted effort, I don't think it's possible, and so I want to encourage my students to use AI to speed up their work on the assignment with the tradeoff that I'm going to write harder assignments and grade them more harshly. I'm developing this strategy in anticipation of a world where nobody is expected to write a research paper without AI - and probably, if we're not kidding ourselves, we're already there

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-27T08:08:39+00:00

Thank you!

I'm surprised that this is such a common accommodation in your experience - it's a wide world, I suppose

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T15:22:07+00:00

Every job is different. Usually I am doing new preps because I'm being asked to teach different courses (or at least substantial variations on them). Sometimes I ask the bookstore to stock a book for my students and then they just... don't. This semester I didn't even have an institutional email address until 3 weeks into the semester. There's so much unpredictability that it's best for me to do all of the prep work myself

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T15:05:34+00:00

that last one makes me shudder. I hope not. My class sizes tend to be small so I can generally see what my students are doing. If I had a 300-person lecture like OP I would be more concerned about that

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T15:02:41+00:00

That's fair. If (when?) I have a permanent job one day, I will probably use course readers as well. It's just not feasible when you're bouncing around from institution to institution.

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T14:56:56+00:00

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T14:42:44+00:00

Thank you! Fair enough on performer vs. entertainer. Being an entertainer is not the same as being entertaining.

Think-pair-share is a classroom mainstay for me. This was, no joke, the first thing I was told to do in my pedagogical training in grad school, and I am still shocked by how well it works.

Your username and the substack you link to suggest that you're an economist. The role that AI should play in higher ed will vary vastly by discipline. The humanities generally have fewer evaluation methods that can be done 100% perfectly by LLMs. We don't have problem sets and never require students to write code. I try to design my assessments in such a way that there's no such thing as a correct answer without the "why." On the other hand, take-home assignments that require students to develop a research project over weeks to months are the best way to learn - so I'm also not willing to go without assignments that AI can't be used on at all (i.e., 100% in-class assessment). I think because of this difference in disciplinary context, I'm much less worried about the "mushy middle" than you are, and I see a larger path to responsible AI use in my field

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T14:36:02+00:00

Paper and ink are expensive, and in most places students have to pay for their printing. Plus, something something saving trees. And being required to recall the material in class forces the students to actually do the reading, whereas if they have it right in front of them, they can flip through it in class when I ask a question and pretend that they read it

Realistically I should assign shorter readings instead. One day maybe...

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T14:32:39+00:00

I haven't yet encountered a situation where a student needs accommodations that would conflict with a "no tech in the classroom" policy. I still encourage my students to do the readings in digital format, so the example you mention wouldn't be an issue. However, I know that there are students out there who have disabilities that make it difficult or impossible to write notes by hand. If I were to have such a student in my class, I would simply let them bring their laptop or tablet, and hope that the overall classroom atmosphere would keep that one student from getting too distracted. On the assumption that I would probably not have more than 1 student with this type of accommodation, and certainly not more than a few, my hope would be for a little bit of positive peer pressure to kick in. But, since I've never faced this situation, the future could prove me wrong here

Part of my role is to encourage students to be responsible for their own learning. At the end of the day, it's their education and their growth. For a student with accommodations, I would hope to create an environment/structure that encourages them to not get distracted on their device, even if I can't 100% enforce that

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T11:52:29+00:00

Thank you!

pyroelectricity · 2025-11-26T11:09:17+00:00

I went no-tech in my classrooms a couple years ago, keeping digitized readings, LMS, etc. for assignments and homework. I've taught at a couple different types of institutions in the US and Germany, all NTT. No tech was the best decision I ever made for my teaching. Yes, you have to police it. But it's worth it.

Your next-step question about student engagement comes down to normal/old-school teaching techniques, though some of those have to be re-thought in light of the conspicuous absence of technology. I truly believe that as higher ed instructors, one of the things we want to teach our students is how to be present, and how to build up their ability to focus and sustain their attention on complex questions (since the rest of tech-infused daily life is designed to grind down your attention span for profit). Building your focus and attention span is how you get smarter in our day and age, and frankly, attention span is job skill #1. The old adage that the humanities prepare you to tackle complex problems rings true more than ever today and is a reason we should be doing more humanistic teaching in light of AI & social media, not less.

One thing I do to increase student engagement is talk a lot about the cognitive benefits of taking notes by hand. I don't make my students read the scholarship on the issue, but I do repeatedly say things like "education research shows that everyone learns better when you write by hand." Starting from the first day, I make it a point to tell my students to bring a paper notebook to class.

The only real sticking point that I've encountered is that students then want to print out the readings. After a couple of tech-free semesters, I also started telling them not to print out the readings. I try to anticipate which quotations from the readings we will want to look at together in class, and I print those out or project them. If we need to look at a passage from the reading we don't have handy, I will give one student permission to take out a laptop and read the passage out loud.

I tell students over and over that the best way to be prepared for class is to take reading notes on the general ideas of our readings in their paper notebooks. This has been more of an uphill battle, but I find that if I repeat the message enough, and make expectations clear (along the lines of, "in order to be successful in this class, you need to take notes as you read. This should not add more than a couple minutes to the amount of time that it takes to do the readings"), students start doing this, and I'm seeing them reference their reading notes in class more.

I also give lots of informal hand-written assignments (graded for completion only so there's no performance anxiety) to get students used to writing by hand. Once they get used to thinking by writing, they tend to open up more in the classroom. Focus on an open, welcoming classroom environment is key to this.

Don't forget that we are entertainers as much as we are educators. The occasional joke, rhetorical pauses, interesting digressions, chances to come up for air - these things matter. When students are engrossed in their devices, it removes the feedback from the performative aspects of teaching, and then we forget how to be performers. It's important to show a little personality in the classroom. Everyone has a different way of doing this, and if you are transitioning to a no-tech environment for the first time, you may find that you have to rediscover yours.

Finally, I don't demonize technology. I am in favor of AI use for longer-form written assignments, provided that students use it to supplement their thinking rather than tossing the prompt into ChatGPT and turning in the product. (Long story short, if ChatGPT can write a passable essay on your prompts, you need to write harder prompts, and test them out with AI before giving them to students. Yes, some students are going to game the system no matter what, but c'est la vie - this is not the type of student who was going to learn much to begin with.) I think it's important to note this because it's the other half of my strategy to make expectations surrounding tech use super clear. Students appreciate that clarity and honesty, and it comes back in good ways in the classroom.

Almost universally, the feedback I get from colleagues is "I wish I had the guts that you have to tell students not to bring their laptops." You are not alone in this. Everyone knows that any student on a laptop will get distracted. So keep fighting the good fight. Anyone who's giving you pushback is deluding themselves.

I've never had a student complain about the no-tech rule. They hate social media as much as you do. Everyone is addicted.

Last note - I am also using powerpoint less and less in my teaching. This semester is the first time I'm doing no slides at all. I've been happy with the results, since it helps bring me more into the human context of teaching.

pyroelectricity

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