A University of Idaho Connection in Idaho Falls

This week I've really enjoyed reading Connie B. Otteson's "Unsung Heroes and Settlers of Bonneville County, Idaho," a local history book published in 2005.

It was a lucky find at a local thrift store, where I've found a good number of local history books. Now around here, we don't have a lot of history at least for whitey, going back if we're lucky only about 150 years.

Today's reading started out with a familiar story of the city's Village Improvement Society (which still exists, I found out) and a drive to import hardwood trees from back east and plant them all over town, notably on the numbered streets and in a park that would come to be known as Kate Curley Park, after one of the VIS' prominent boosters who was really tired of dragging the hems of her dresses in mud and horse doots.

While the VIS imported the trees from Iowa and Illinois, they wanted to find a more local expert to help them arrange and plant things, particularly in the park.

They found Charles Huston Shattuck, late of the University of Idaho's College of Forestry, where he was dean, and where he'd laid the groundwork for the tree cover and landscaping at that campus, including the Shattuck Arboretum, which of course bears his name.

I went to the university of Idaho and spent some time wandering through the arboretum, as it was between my first residence hall (the building in the lower right corner of the photo above) and the campus. It was crisscrossed with trails. Honestly, I thought it was just a bit of forest that the campus had preserved, it looked so natural. Come to find out it was just a weedy patch of bare ground before Shattuck started his work on it.

As much as I don't want to live on the numbered streets in Idaho Falls, I do love that the VIS had the foresight to bring in hardwoods and take the effort to plant trees in what was otherwise a sandy, wind-blown desert. And I'm glad they found an expert who produced the prettiest university campus in the state to help with the effort.

We came close when I was a kid at living in a house kitty-corner to Kate Curley Park, but it never came to fruition. I don't know why. But it's certainly a pretty neighborhood.

FOOD

One of our weenie dogs might be just a tad motivated by food.

Greener Pastries

It pays to self-edit fast in our family group chat, because if you don't, they'll jump on ya.

To be honest, I'm not sure what greener pastries might be either. Maybe something for St. Patrick's Day?

Aw Shucks, Part 2

So I found "The Will Rogers Book" at a local thrift store and figured I'd give him a whirl. He's a name kind of on the edge of my realm of knowledge and I knew he was lauded as the cowboy philosopher.

As I read the mini biography in the book, I initially scoffed at the claim that he was a major movie star. Then it hit me -- major in the silent era, with much of his filming happening in the 1920s and 30s.

The more I read his story and his writing, the more it hit me: He'd fit right in the social media age. His quips are short enough for Twitter, his personality homey enough to feed the Boomers on Facebook and his slick embrace of the new and unusual enough to make the crypto bros look at him for maybe a few seconds. He might have even minted his own LassoCoin.

He even died relatively young, crashing with pilot Wiley Post in the newfangled airplane shortly after they landed in a lagoon near Barrow, Alaska, when they got lost in a storm and stopped to ask directions.

Or maybe not. That's most likely me looking at his cornball through a modern lens.

And he is a bit cornball, echoing some of the crackerbarrel philosophy anyone who read Sinclair Lewis' books would be familiar with. He might be a star today, but certainly with the older folk, though some of them might call him woke.

So the book was okay, if definitely sounding a hundred years old.

Aw, Shucks . . .

I'll bet if I posted this on social media, I'd get some attention from certain folks:

We might be the wealthiest nation that ever existed, we might dominate the world in lots of things and because we are richer than all our neighbors or that anybody else, that dont necessarily mean that we are happier or really better off. The difference between our rich and poor grows greater every year. Our distribution of wealth is getting more uneven all the time. We are always reading "How many men paid over a million dollar income tax," but we never read about "how many there are that are not eating regular."

I'm certain I'd be told by some that I'm some sort of commie or libtard or whatever other junk epithets fly around today.

Except this was said by Will Rogers, likely sometime in the 1920s when he was at the apex of his fame. And shucks and by golly how much his home-spun common sense wisdom we need today, except of course for this commie crapola.

Because he'd be chased off social media these days. Maybe he was scorned back then; I think our ability to scorn people whose thoughts and attitudes that differ from ours aren't any different now than they were a hundred years ago, except that every stupid opinion is amplified online.

Anyway, have fun cherry-picking. That's all we're good at these days.

Eight-Legged Elephants

I got a peek today of what adult Sunday School might be like come September when our teaching time is cut to 25 minutes -- and it came because I substituted in Primary.

Twenty-five minutes is not a lot of time to teach one of our Come Follow Me lessons. I knew that going in, but figured this audience -- a bunch of nine-year-olds -- deserved a good lesson without any fluff.

We discussed the major points of the lesson: God allowing Israel to have a king to maybe convince them through poor kingmanship that God was the better leader; our callings being from God; and God looking not on the outward appearance, but on the heart, in that twenty-five minutes.

The spirit was strong in that room, and I know the kids felt it. They participated. They asked questions and made meaningful comments. They got a buzz from the object lesson of optical illusions as a fill-in for God looking on the heart and couldn't believe this elephant had eight legs.

They paid attention, even the kid I'd pegged as being the one most likely to be distracted.

It's gonna work, folks. Because God is in charge.

My Parents Raised A Complainer, Not A Quitter

Summer.

I remember summers being fun. Well, there was work, of course. Dad was a bricklayer, and as teenagers it was expected we'd go to work with him.

Some mornings were easier than others. I recall, with some guilt, feigning sleep one morning in the bedroom I had at the back of the garage until I heard Dad's truck roar to life and disappear. Then my day began. Nothing was said when he got home, but I knew I'd done wrong. So days like that were rare.

I'm beginning to have days like that now. Just like Dad, I get the Sunday Scaries and don't want to go to work tomorrow.

But . . . 

I'm the only line of defense between our family and poverty. I don't say that in any way to complain; it's just how things are at the moment. Michelle has been offered a salaried job with a local nonprofit for about $40,000 a year, which isn't much compared to our needs, but it certainly would help us make a dent in things. I don't know as yet what decision she's made on the job, but will support her whichever direction she decides to go.

I have at least ten years until I can retire. I keep checking our retirement accounts to see how they're doing, and they're growing slow but steady, which is what you want to see in such accounts. Still, part of me wishes they were growing faster so I could retire faster, but I'm going to have to stick things out.

I often think the cure is time off work. But though I take a day off here and there -- not all that many of those -- it doesn't help. I feel like I need a good block of time, minimum two weeks, to get a reset. I'll get a little bit of a break for about seven weeks starting in August when the online teaching gig takes a breather. and while that's welcome it often doesn't feel like enough.

Yes, I did just whinge about this. It's a constant theme in my life.

More AI Stupidity

I promise. I thought this was the stupidest AI screw-up I was going to see this week.

Well, AI went and topped itself. Behold:

The irony of their statement at the bottom: "Sometimes the most interesting facts are the ones nobody ever thinks to check" leads me - slightly - to believe this has been posted in an ironic way, but there's so much of this folderol around I can't even tell anymore. Again, part of the cognitive overload we're all dealing with as AI spreads further.

It is true Missouri has eight letters in its name. It is also true that Missouri borders eight states. But you know there are people out there -- even US citizens -- who are going to think it borders Mississippi, or that Arkansas, Kentucky, Illinois, and Iowa look like that. Or that any of these states look like that. I *think* they got the shape of Missouri right, but other than that . . . 

A Non-Tom Holt Tom Holt Novel

Something unexpected tonight: I finished reading a Tom Holt book that didn't read like many of the other Tom Holt books I've read.

While there was a love story - seems common to his stories, even if the lovers are numpties - there was none of the following:

1. An uncannily capable hero.

2. An uncannily capable hero who should have been a fish out of water but who instead adapted remarkably well to the circumstances.

3, A television reporter keen on getting the big story but generally there to flit around like a ninny.

4. Any mention of Dounreay Nuclear Power Station.

Those elements are as common as the letter E in all the other Tom Holt books I've read, but were absent in The Portable Door. Which made the story that much more enjoyable.

Paul and Sophie are the numpty loser central characters, hired by an old, mysterious firm to do what appears to be useless busywork that would make the Terrible Trivium from The Phantom Tollbooth blush.

As they stumble through organizing spreadsheets and scrying photos for bauxite deposits, they soon learn the secrets of the firm they work for and their putative powers that will probably remain putative.

The story's a slow burn; the eponymous portable door doesn't make an appearance until halfway through the book, and doesn't get used until there are only about a hundred pages left. True to form, it's used numptily.

The climax of the story spools out quickly, which was fantastic for a Tom Holt novel.

The copy I had, early on, had the naughty words crossed out, but as I kept reading the censoring disappeared, probably a sign that a former owner gave up on the story. I could do without the words myself, but I liked the story (I'm kind of a numpty myself).

Cognitive Overload

A note to my students today:

In the early days of the Internet - I'm old enough to remember life before Internet - New York University professor Clay Shirky wrote a few forward-thinking books about the good he saw the Internet creating. One of the books, "Cognitive Surplus," focused on people and institutions saw using their free time and intellect to create useful tools on the Internet.

He's now Vice Provost for AI and Technology in Education at NYU and might be thinking of writing a follow-up to his book, called "Cognitive Overload."

I have no idea if he's got such a book in the offing. But when I read "Your AI Use is Breaking My Brain," by Justin Koebler at the 404 media website, I felt the pain Koebler expressed in decrying the cognitive overload he's feeling in trying to sort artificial intelligence from human intelligence on the Internet.

Koebler - an Internet-based journalist - penned this as the closing of the linked article, and I think it's apt to my experience as of late on the Internet:

"What’s driving me crazy, then, is not the idea that AI exists or that people are using AI. It’s that I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write."

You'll have to surrender your email address to the website if you want to read the article, but it's otherwise free (since your email is the price you pay).

I bring this up not because I'm seeing a lot of AI use in class, but because I thought it was interesting. I'm feeling the fatigue Koebler expresses in trying to sort fact from fiction on the Internet, something that has been increasingly taxing over the last few decades, not just because of the advent of AI.

For any of you writing on AI use for your bibliography and final assignment, I'd highly consider using this article as one of your sources.