We watched some local news last night, and I ended up transcribing some of the weatherman’s patter:
“Grab them shades on the way out the door. Precip cast? Fuggedaboudit! I mean, we still need a tall drink of water. I just ain’t happening tonight nor tomorrow.”[The suspect is a white male, late fifties or early sixties, tall, wearing a toupee, glasses, tight-fitting sport jacket, and sneakers.]
At Inside Higher Ed, Jacob Riyeff writes about generative AI and its effect on teacher-student relationships. What breaks his heart, he says, are the ways in which AI makes it difficult for him to trust his students:
I assume students don’t think about their unattributed use of chat bots as affecting a personal relationship. But those of us who actually still believe in the edifying power of higher education can’t see the relationship between instructors and students as one of instrumental exchange — products (assignments filled out) for payments (grades). Or as one of mechanical input and output. In the classroom, in office hours, and in conferences, there is (can be) a genuine mutual sharing between persons if we strive for it, if we foster dialogue and sharing of perspectives in our common scrutinizing of reality and pursuit of truth. And the making and assessing of assignments is (can be) an extension of that relationship’s mutual sharing. But to engage in that scrutiny and that pursuit in common, the relationship between instructor and student requires integrity — that is, both parties need to be honest in their communications with one another.Exactly. Passing off someone else’s (or, now, something else’s) work as one’s own violates the trust between teacher and student.
Student: Why can’t I just use a chat bot to write this essay?Related reading
Me: Because I don’t care about what OpenAI’s products can do. I care about what you’re thinking.
[70 East 102nd Street, Manhatttan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click the second image for a much larger view and some choice details.]
The vagaries of the archives: that first photograph, an outtake, misidentifies the lot number. I’m not sure how I found my way to the second photograph. I just traipsed the streets.
What’s that stand of apples doing there? Or are they tomatoes? Or plums? Did the photographer put the stand there for fun? Perhaps at the grocer’s request? I would like to know if the stand appears in a photograph from the opposite side of the street, but photographs from this street are few.
Golden Bantam is a variety of corn. I can find no evidence that it was ever a name for an apple (or tomato, or plum). The mystery deepens.
I chose these photographs for the fruit, but when I checked Google Maps, I realized that I know this location, at Park Avenue and 102nd Street, from a movie and from life.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, turned out to be far easier than I thought it would be. Lots of fine clues and unexpected answers, and two fairly ridiculous answers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My clue-and-answer pairs of note:
1-D, four letters, “Intriguing development.” The wording carries a lot of weight.
5-D, six letters, “Swing shifts?” Nicely done.
18-A, ten letters, “What Hemingway got for his WWll reporting.” Something to know that I did not know.
14-A, fourteen letters, “It has its ups and downs.” ROLLERCOASTER comes up, or down, short.
24-A, six letters, “Quick glances.” Easier to see than I expected.
28-D, four letters, “May day nickname.” It’s not a nickname for a day in May. The intersection of 28-D and 40-A is for me the low point of the puzzle.
36-A, fifteen letters, “Synthesizer’s hard rock.” See? Unexpected.
37-D, eight letters, “‘Smells Like a Man, Man’ sloganeer.” Or at least a man of a certain age?
38-D, eight letters, “Somewhat sticky.” I don’t think there’s any redeeming this word.
40-A, five letters, “Sort of gray.” Okay, it’s a word, but still. A change of one letter would make 28-D and 40-A better players in this puzzle.
45-A, six letters, “Where Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress.” Yes, I read lots of seventeenth-century prose in grad school.
50-D, four letters, “Makeup, e.g.” Clever.
My favorite in this puzzle, because it’s just so strange: 55-A, ten letters, “Trouble spots on radar.”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
“The comedic actor, musician and artist who gained widespread attention in the 1970s in shows such as Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Fernwood 2-Night ”: The New York Times has an obituary. The Fernwood episode with Tom Waits is not to be missed.
[The correct styling: Fernwood 2 Night.]
I just discovered that Orange Crate Art was added to ooh.directory earlier this month. OCA is one of 2,299 blogs listed on the site, and one of 358 blogs categorized as personal. Here’s the listing.
Orange Crate Art: it’s personal!
One ooh.directory blog I’ve added to my RSS: The Public Domain Review. Another: Separated by a Common Language, about British and American English.
Did you know that “naming sauces by colo(u)r seems to be a monocultural thing”?
From the latest installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American:
This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.And:
It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has. It is similar to what Trump did to Biden during a debate in 2020. In that case, though, the lack of muting on the mics left Biden simply saying: “Will you shut up, man?” a comment that resonated with the audience. Giving Biden the enforced space to answer by killing the mic of the person not speaking tonight actually made the technique more effective.
About the effect of tonight’s events, former Republican operative Stuart Stevens warned: “Don’t day trade politics. It’s a sucker’s game. A guy from Queens out on bail bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, said in public he didn’t have sex with a porn star, defended tax cuts for billionaires, defended Jan. 6th. and called America the worst country in the world. That guy isn’t going to win this race.”I hope he’s right.
I am given to understand that many people watching the presidential debate tonight will be looking for a game changer. If I trust the commercials that appear on my television, nearly everything these days is a game changer. “Game changer!” I think it’s time to constrain the use of this term:
game changer /ˈgām-ˌchān-jər/ noun[Pronunciation borrowed from Merriam-Webster.]
: one who abandons one board game for another in an arbitrary, capricious manner
Example sentence: Kyle invited us over for a game of Clue, but then he wanted to play Uno, and now he wants Trouble. What a game changer!
At the Public Domain Review, Hunter Dukes writes about “American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century”:
More than a century before Noam Chomsky popularized the idea of a universal grammar, linguists in the United States began diagramming sentences in an attempt to visualize the complex structure — of seemingly divine origins — at their mother tongue’s core.Dukes provides many examples of these efforts (with links to the books they’re drawn from). Here is a fairly tame diagram of a syntax tree, from Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge’s A Comprehensive English Grammar (1890):
[Click for a larger tree, which you must imagine as standing upright.]In response to a comment from Matthew Schmeer that describes inventive assignments to keep students from turning in AI-generated writing, I came up with a phrase that I’d like to share: “off the bot,” after “off the grid.”
I am thinking and writing off the bot. Off the bot!
Related reading
All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)
