What Learning Can Learn From Machine Learning Posted on : Jan 21 - 2022

Over the years, this biweekly letter has provided me with the opportunity to fully and fairly document just how much free time college students can have if they try. My college roommates tried really hard. They found time to make prank calls to the campus literary magazine, create enough frost in our fridge to throw snowballs out the window on 90-degree days, leave old pizza in the entryway for the stated purpose of growing penicillin for a roommate who couldn’t afford antibiotics, and organize campus recruiting events for fake investment banks. When these time-wasting activities required a fake identity, the persona of choice was John W. Moussach Jr., an alumnus turned successful Midwestern industrialist. (We don’t hear enough about successful industrialists these days – another downside of digital transformation.)

Last week I looked online for remnants of John W. Moussach Jr. and came upon neither the Wikipedia page my roommates built after graduating nor the Moussach aphorism that somehow made it onto Wikiquote (“We have all heard the Will Rogers quote ‘I never met a man I did not like.’ In my youth, I met a World War I veteran who had met Will Rogers. The veteran told me, ‘I never met a man I did not like until I met Will Rogers’”), but rather an article on something called Study Sive which purports to feature higher education news. The article mentioned John W. Moussach Jr. in the second line, but then devolved into Moussach babble:

It turns out that the Study Sive article, ostensibly written by Cindy G. Fryer, an unusually attractive “social media evangelist and certified beer guru,” and dated January 9, 2022, was actually a 2019 Gap Letter mangled by some bad algorithm that adopted a synonym for every other word – an attempt to avoid detection that can fully and fairly be called Moussachian. View More