Today I learned that it depends on the translation of Johann David Wyss' "Swiss Family Robinson" whether the phrase "Fritz amused himself with his monkey" appears.
Project Gutenberg has the non-monkey-amused version, but the physical copy I have and the Wikipedia version have Fritz adequately monkey-amused.
You know which version I prefer.
Posted on a friend's Facebook feed, an homage to the humorous talents of one Michael Palin.
And Palin's Eric Olthwaite is a character who'll always be close to my heart, because Dad loved to chuckle at him and his shovel. And it is a clever story, about the most dull human being ever in existence. That speaks to me on a spiritual level.
Going to brag on my youngest son for a moment.
Before Christmas, I saw this LEGO set at Walmart and mentioned to the kids it would make a great gift for their father. The price tag, however, was not friendly. So Christmas passed, and no weenie whistle, nor this particular LEGO set
Time went on, of course.
Then he came home from Walmart the other night and said he saw this on their discount shelf at a price that couldn't be beat. He presented it to me as a belated birthday gift.
Somehow, maybe, we raised our kids right.
This is where I started today. We got a justifiable nastygram from the postman, asking us to clear some snow away from the mailbox so he or she can get to it without leaving their vehicle.
And as this is snow the city has plowed off the streets, it wasn't easy. I had to use an axe to chop everything up so I could scoop it out of the way.
Midway this is how things looked from the porch. We have a lot of snow.
And the end product:
Apparently it was enough. The mailman came as Isaac was coming home. They exchanged pleasantries, and he delivered our mail.
I also got the front sidewalks cleaned viz:
Well, almost clean. I should go out and fix that little swoop on the streetside, but I've got a good case of the noodle arms right now.
Tomorrow, I get the roof rake out and clean the garage roof off. Good news is I won't have to shovel all of that twice.
They ask us to keep the sidewalks clean "for the children," and to be fair, we do get a good amount of foot traffic from the elementary school and random walkers and joggers. But based on where all the little footyprints are in the snow, I know most of the little kids won't be walking where I've cleared. Here's a facsimile, with the red lines indicating where normal people (dog walkers, adults, serial killers, etc.) and the blue line showing where the kids have walked and will walk.
Because of blowing snow and closed roads, work buses didn't run this morning.
But I work from home, so that doesn't matter.
The announcement sent out about the closure said some "town" facilities were also closed due to the cold.
But I work from home, so that doesn't matter.
Now buses are running, and people should be at work in various locations by, say, noon or so.
But I work from home, so that doesn't matter.
But nobody knows who is at work, who isn't at work, and when exactly they might be there. This really impacts document reviews and such, which is what I do for a living.
So it really does matter, even though I work from home.
It all worked out, though. I got a lot of stuff done this morning, including document-review-related stuff, despite the confusion.
This is the appropriate amount of bootlicking, yes?
It's been sick for quite a while, if I'm honest. A few years back, it got a few Windows updates stuck in its craw As far as I could tell, some updates made it through, but it kept going back to these other updates like old friends, always asking, but never succeeding in getting them done.
I did what any other run-of-the-mill slob would do in such situations: I would occasionally and half-heartedly try to fix things, going to the Internet to see what could be done to make things better. I tried several things, from the idiot (trying and trying again to get the updates to install, neglecting to remember that doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is a sign of insanity. I also tried recovery points, reinstalling Windows completely, etc. But nothing worked.
So now my computer's in the hands of a friend who has promised to try his best. I hope he can figure out what's going on, because I'd like my computer back. It's taken me a week to finally get this post done via my laptop, because I had to sort through all of my kids' Google accounts in order to get signed in.
I did manage to get everything saved on my desktop to an external hard drive, in case the nuclear option has to be taken. Hoping to her from him soon.
I don't pretend to know how hard it is to be a CEO, and to have to announce layoffs.
But as a former journalist and tech writer, I recognize boilerplate when I see it.
Inc. Magazine screamed this headline Jan. 19:
However, here are the words Inc. praised so loudly:
I got an unexpected text today, and after a little prompting, decided how to reply:
They gave up after this. Pretty sure someone in North Carolina either decided to give up on the scme attempt, or figured out they'd texted the wrong number.
Seymour Skinner is the minor Simpsons character who is always giving.
And yes, maybe with two posts in a row about ChatGPT, I'm adding in a small way to the THRRPTTTTing of the Internet on the subject. But lordy there are a *lot* of people really enamored with this thing, even when they don't quite know what it is.
I watched a few days ago a three-minute long YouTube video by some ChatGPT acolyte showing us how to "install the app" on our desktop computers.
I mean, it was a three-minute convoluted video showing how to make a desktop link to the website; that's all it was. BUT IT'S CHATGPT and thus AMAZING and even if we DON'T KNOW how or why to actually use it, we HAVE to get on the BANDWAGON RIGHT NOW.
I've tried joining a few ChatGPT-related Facebook groups, and each time it's proved to be a grave mistake, as the ChatGPT-ing of everything is worse than the Bernie-in-Mittening that The Oatmeal illustrates above.
If I hear "ChatGPT" and "disrupt" used together in a sentence one more time, I'm going to go bonkers. Because so far the hype is really outpacing everything else. Because I've watched AirBnb "disrupt" the hotel industry to the point people are going back to hotels because the average AirBnb host is adding on so many fees that hotels are far cheaper and much more convenient to use. ChatGPT may well find its place, but right now it's in the IT'S EVERYWHERE phase of Internet gibbering. I'm going to wait for the dust to settle a little bit. then maybe find a group that's a little less breathless about the thing.
NOTE: This is an announcement I just shared with my online English students, just so you know the audience.
I'm sure most of you have heard talk of ChatGPT, which in its own words describes itself thus:
"ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by OpenAI, which is capable of generating human-like text based on the input it is given. The model is trained on a large corpus of text data and can generate responses to questions, summarize long texts, write stories and much more. It is often used in conversational AI applications to simulate a human-like conversation with users."
In other words (and per the Mashable story linked above) it's an online service that we can use to write love letters, help debug computer code and even write essays.
I've played around with it a bit myself, and have used it to write an unsourced informative essay, some rather convincing poems in the style of e.e. cummings, and a rather terrible poems in the style of Edgar Lee Masters. I've also used new services that are popping up to help others detect text written by artificial intelligence.
I'm also aware of a professor locally who has had students write an essay using ChatGPT and then develop strategies to combat detection by services meant to identify "machine-written" language in comparison to "human-written" language.
A few of you have sent me articles about ChatGPT, so I'd be a fool to think the majority of you haven't heard of it -- as it's also been given a fair amount of press lately.
What do I *think* about ChatGPT, and its potential uses, inside and outside the classroom?
I'll be honest, the jury is still out.
The knee-jerk reaction is to say using such services is cheating. And I suppose, in a way, it is. I was able to generate the essay linked above in only about twenty minutes. As I explain in my blog post, it's not perfect. But, by Grabthar's hammer Links to an external site., what a time-savings.
Similar debates about "cheating" cropped up when the calculator was invented, and revived again when graphing calculators entered the scene, making it much easier for morons like me to "do math," even though that's something I avoid doing as much as humanly possible.
Do I want to see machine-generated text pop up in class?
Probably the wrong question.
Have I already seen machine-generated text pop up in class and missed it?
That's a better question.
Understand I'm not lobbing accusations at anyone in this course. I am not running your text through AI-detection websites. Artificially-created writing could actually be an important step forward in many industries, if we learn how to use and master it correctly. I've read enough poorly-written instructions to know that if there's a better way to make better instructions out there, we ought to be taking advantage of the technological developments coming our way.
But let me share this:
In 2016, comedienne Carol Burnett published "In Such Good Company," a memoir of eleven years' involvement in the Carol Burnett Show, a comedy-music variety show that Americans of a certain age are likely familiar with. She records a conversation with Larry Gelbart, a well-known television writer of the same vintage:
Burnett: I don't know, but when I watch a comedy show on TV today, I know exactly what's coming as far as the writing goes. No surprises. No originality. Usually, it's the 'setup' first, and then comes the obvious joke, and then you hear that awful laugh track. It's as if all the shows are alike and repeating themselves.
Gelbart: I think it's because most of the writers today grew up watching television. That was their childhood, so they're writing about life once removed.
Burnett: What do you mean?
Gelbart: They never played stickball in the street.
Calculators are great for getting the correct answer. But the Cs and Ds I got in algebra belie the fact that I can use calculators to get the correct answer almost every time. I remain terrible at math because I never had the discipline to sit down and practice running through equations enough time to really understand what I was doing.
ChatGPT may indeed be great for generating text, text likely good enough as the artificial intelligence learns more to fool us poor English instructors into thinking our students are brilliant (and, based on your change essays, you are that). But such tools, as Gelbart says, represent learning the art of writing "once removed." If we allow ChatGPT to produce words for us without pausing long enough to consider how the words were put together and how we could put the words together on our own, we are writing "once removed." We're not learning a skill. If we don't sit down with a blank page, with our research by our side, with ideas bubbling in our head, waiting to come out onto paper or the screen, we're not playing stickball in the street.
ChatGPT is a tool, and one that should not be dismissed as useless or morally suspect. But at the same time, it should not become a crutch, a substitute for learning.
I shot this video the other morning. I'm not sure we can *survive* another six weeks of this. NOTE: Sotto voce cursing as I was recording the video not included.
I can't wrap my head around this story.
They say this capsule -- about the size of a Tic-Tac -- likely "fell off a truck" as it was being transported.
Was it sitting loose, just rattling around? That seems highly unlikely; it had to have been stored in some kind of container. No one would just lob a bit of radioactive material in the back of a truck and hope it would stay there if it were this small.
Yet none of the stories mention any container, any container recovery, and all have fretted over the possibility the capsule got stuck in a tire tread and toddled off somewhere far from the search area.
Either there's something really missing from the stories being told, or there's something really awry with how Australia handles radioactive material for transport.
I'm glad they found it . . .
Update: Should have gone to the BBC:
