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Let the wind blow back your hair

Worked in the home office this morning and early afternoon. Then we drove to the train station, where I saw this sign.

The people putting that sign together, and installing that art on the train platform, must have done all of that during off hours. What doesn’t feel right to me is the woman who watched videos on her phone at full volume for the better part of an hour.

Fortunately her stop was before ours, and we had blissful silence for 17 seconds. At the same stop, a woman got on the train, mid-phone conversation, speakerphone, full blast. It’s a common complaint of modern life: the loss of social graces, and headphones. I’ve nothing new to offer the conversation, and this isn’t playing through a loud speaker, so no one could hear it anyway.

We had dinner at The Alderman, the pre-theater dinner special, a four-course meal and you pick the two in the middle. I had a brightly tart, almost citrus salad with a lot of arugula. And then this half chicken which was drenched in grilled lemon juice.

It was all quite tasty. And now I want it again.

Then we went to the nearby Radio City Music Hall.

This was my first trip there. And it occurs to me that they should probably offer tours. Probably a half-hour walkthrough would be a decent draw. I’d think you could see and learn a few interesting things.

It turns out that they offer daily 60-minute tours! I hope it includes the chance to sing a little song or dance a jig on the stage.

Here’s the iconic sign, as you walk across the intersection. Yes, I will stop traffic in New York City for a photograph of neon. Fortunately, the people there are all very nice and understanding and accommodating.

Playing there tonight, Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls. We saw them late last summer, and they were close enough, so we caught them again. Etheridge opened the show. She’s 64 and less dramatic (her word) but she still commands a stage, still has all of her power and can command absolute control of a venue. I had the first six or seven records on a variety of cassettes and CDs, but moved on somewhere along the way.

When we saw her last year, she did a dynamite cover of Joan Armatrading on the piano. And maybe, she had not been successful, Etheridge would have been the best cover singer you’ve never heard of. She does a killer Billy Joel cover and here, she’s mixing one of her own songs with a bit of her idol, Bruce Springsteen for a “The Letting Go – Thunder Road” medley.

And it hit.

Really fun show, wonderful venue. Took the subway to the train and the train to the car and then the drive home. Late night, long day tomorrow. And I’ll put up something from the Indigo Girls then.

photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
Sep 25

No one knows what is at the bottom

I did a thing in class last semester where I opened every lecture with a slide titled Today in AI Fails. I’d leave the screengrab on the screen and just watch the room read them. I’d keep it there until the giggles and titters started. I thought of it as playing the long game of making a point. I figured, last night, that maybe I should do that again theis term, starting today.

And after I saw this story this morning, I realized I’ll probably be doing this for as long as I teach.

Declan would never have found out his therapist was using ChatGPT had it not been for a technical mishap. The connection was patchy during one of their online sessions, so Declan suggested they turn off their video feeds. Instead, his therapist began inadvertently sharing his screen.

“Suddenly, I was watching him use ChatGPT,” says Declan, 31, who lives in Los Angeles. “He was taking what I was saying and putting it into ChatGPT, and then summarizing or cherry-picking answers.”

Declan was so shocked he didn’t say anything, and for the rest of the session he was privy to a real-time stream of ChatGPT analysis rippling across his therapist’s screen. The session became even more surreal when Declan began echoing ChatGPT in his own responses, preempting his therapist.

“I became the best patient ever,” he says, “because ChatGPT would be like, ‘Well, do you consider that your way of thinking might be a little too black and white?’ And I would be like, ‘Huh, you know, I think my way of thinking might be too black and white,’ and [my therapist would] be like, ‘Exactly.’ I’m sure it was his dream session.”

Among the questions racing through Declan’s mind was, “Is this legal?” When Declan raised the incident with his therapist at the next session—”It was super awkward, like a weird breakup”—the therapist cried. He explained he had felt they’d hit a wall and had begun looking for answers elsewhere. “I was still charged for that session,” Declan says, laughing.

The answer to Declan’s question might be, probably not, as an entire secondary market is emerging around the platform’s security.

I may be using that particular story in a few weeks as an AI and human fail. As in, do you want to pay for this? Do you want to pay a professional for this? Then why would you use it yourself? Because that is a thing that is happening, too. And to sometimes horrible outcomes, we should add.

The whole point, as the program told Dr. Josh Pasek last month, is to keep you in the conversation, and nothing more. “My training prioritizes flowing, engaging dialogue …”

If you want to understand why it can’t seem to self correct on how many Bs are in blueberry, and why that is so dangerous:

[image or embed]

— Josh Pasek (@joshpasek.com) August 7, 2025 at 10:47 PM

ChatGPT wants to be the partner that never lets you hang up the phone. At some point, people are going to have to ask why that is.

Today’s AI fail feature included the same question asked of Google’s Gemini, by the same person, four times in rapid succession. Each answer was different. The question was “Has a DIII footbal team ever beaten an FCS football team?” The first answer was, it is rare. The second was it has never happened. The third answer was that it is not possible. The final answer was DIII teams don’t play football.

This came as a surprise, in one of my classes today, where four of the students are DIII football players.

The building (not pictured, above) that is both adjacent to, and adjoins, ours at work is a miracle of modern architecture. From the front, there is no beginning and no end. And the separation is one ground-floor sidewalk, basically a breezeway through the thises and thats that make up the mixed public-private use. Our parking deck, one of the best on campus apparently, is just behind it. And as I arrive in the midday, today I found myself parking on the fourth floor. As I took the steps down, I had several opportunities, then, to see this dumpster in the back of the adjacent, adjoined building.

I have to think there’s a story or two in here. Those giant monitors must be dead — and if they weren’t, they surely are now. Give no thought to recycling them, unless that happens later. But what’s up with that enormous dog crate? And the equally large cabinet or drawer or whatever that box was on the right side.

Coat and tie prohibit me from closer inspection, but I am curious.

I told my criticism class that this was the week I would lecture, and this was the week that they would discover why the class would work better as a seminar. So today I began to prove the point, laying out the basics of what media criticism is, a tiny bit of how we do it, and watching the students eyes for a good 50 minutes, testing their very patience and attention.

I don’t blame them, but socially, or culturally, we’ve got a problem with attention spans. Maybe we should ask ChatGPT to solve the problem for us.

Sorry, what was I saying?

In my org comm class the students did the beginning part of some group work that will pop up intermittently throughout the semester. They’re all creating football franchises, through which some parts of the class will see lectures lessons come to life. Some of them will take this more seriously than others. But they’ll hopefully all have fun, which is a real challenge in an org comm class. It’s not always the most vibrant material. Especially if they’re stuck with me.

I sat down for a chicken finger dinner after that, catching up on the day’s news, because I will always be behind on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I headed for home just in time to enjoy a nice little sunset, catching a few decent shots over the open fields here and there as I went.

And now I must turn to grading the things that were turned in last night, so I don’t have to do them tomorrow. Because, tomorrow, I must get ready for Thursday. And I will also have a great tomorrow.

Hope you do, too!

memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
8
Sep 25

Week two, what it do?

We are now starting week two of the term and in another week or so, he said foolishly, everything will settle and click into place.

Also, the first things to grade are filtering in this evening.

The good news is that every day this week is more or less scheduled. Reading today, class tomorrow, grading tomorrow and Wednesday, class on Thursday, meetings on Friday. Maybe the better news is that the work of preparing for the week is all done. So it’s just a matter of seeing it through! Seeing the whole week through.

Here’s a weekend neighborhood sunset. I was coming back from picking up takeout.

We had Indian. I enjoyed the lamb vindaloo. Quite tasty. Not as plentiful as it was, before shrinkflation hit. Previously, this would have been dinner and lunch. Now it’s dinner, and about one extra bite — which means just a little more dinner.

Here’s a road I rode on this evening’s bike ride. The road just goes up and up.

Or just up. But not even that. It’s flat here, and after that curve you pretty quickly get to the overpass and that’s the big geographical feature. I probably couldn’t climb a real hill anymore if I tried. (I did the one climb in Switzerland this summer, the tot de splitsing, a hot, slow, grinding mess. One mile, 500 feet, danger at every pedal stroke. The danger being, Can I stay upright at this low a speed? So maybe I can still do one hill. Not sure I could do two…)

Phoebe doesn’t not have much faith in my climbing abilities, either. She’d rather put her head on the underside of a foot than see me struggle up a proper hill.

And Poseidon, well, he’s a fan of going to higher up places.

There are a few things in my home office that I don’t want him on, which of course demand his immediate and perpetual attention. We have the same disputes three or six times a day. But, this weekend, I had that big bin on the floor, and the basket full of towels and sheets, and I think I’ve found a way to keep him off the bookshelves.

So the cats, you can see, are doing great. But only if they get their required amount of pets this week. We’ll see.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
5
Sep 25

Saw an aerodrome, was transported

After a day of reading and prepping and typing away at my keyboard, I went for a little early evening bike ride. The wind was up, my legs were down and it was slow, but that’s OK. We got vaccinated last night and so I blame the quality of the ride on the conspiracy theories floating through my system.

There was a new-to-me road I wanted to see so I pedaled my happy little self toward the winery, but turned right before I got there, marveling at how I was easily doing 18 and 19 miles an hour up this hill on Wednesday, but doing considerably less than that today. I turned right and then left, and went down this road.

This looks flat when you’re on it and in this photograph.

But it is actually a little downhill. It bends off to the right at the tree line and then toward a creek bed. But the wind comes from that direction, usually, and it is actually a difficult down hill some days. Some days I have to shift to an easier gear to get down the hill. Some days coming from the other direction, up the hill, is easier than going down the thing.

In fact, today going down it felt unusually strong and I was doing about 17, but with minimal effort. And with no legs and post Covid vaccine (which we got last night) I felt a bit sapped and didn’t want to put any effort in. Later, as I reversed this route exactly, I came up the hill almost twice as fast.

That road alters reality, is what I’m saying.

I enjoyed some nice time under the trees elsewhere along the route.

And then I finally worked my way over to the new-to-me road. There used to be a little airport here. It was originally named after the town, but then it got a new name in 2021, when a private company bought it and dubbed it the Spitfire Aerodrome.

That’s just a great word. A great combination of words. It’s evocative of times far enough away that we mistakenly romanticize them. No one says the aerodrome without thinking of dirigibles or dashing pilots with silk scarves and leather jackets or barrage balloons or search lights piercing the sky and … they closed the joint in 2023, to make way for yet more warehouses no one needs.

I rode there it just to see what was at the end of that road. How often can I see an aerodrome? What’s there is a fence, through which you can still see two or three buildings, which look to be in still-good shape. The runway seems to be intact, as far as small municipal runways go. This is the view on the way back out.

I got back just in time to clean up for dinner, and fill the evening with tales about how the new microchips ow floating in my system have made me even slower.

cycling / football / links / photo / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
4
Sep 25

From here to there, to space and back

Here’s a photo I shot in the backyard tonight. The bright one, low and just between the tree crowns, is Jupiter. The second largest thing in our solar system, itself larger than what our puny little brains can contemplate — and pretty small itself, in the larger scheme of things — is just hanging right there. It’s bright enough to be captured by a cell phone camera, even as a little smear of light.

You know that big red spot on Jupiter? That’s a storm. It’s been raging away, a single storm, for at least almost 200 years.
This is the view when Voyager approached in 1979.

That was just two years after Voyager 1 launched. And now, 46 years later, the probe is the thing we’ve cast farthest into the night. Voyager 1 began the summer 15.5 billion miles from home. Scientists predict it will be one light day from Earth in November of next year. If distance is success, it is more successful than anything that we’ll launch in our lifetimes.

Sometime, in the next 10 years, for any one of a variety of reasons, we’ll lose contact and control of Voyager 1 forever.

Which is a lot to think about, when you’re just standing out back. What is far away? And what is farther than that?

I wrote something on Tuesday and we published it on Tuesday and I haven’t mentioned it here at all. Shame on me. This was a quick look at what ChatGPT thought of the first weekend of college football.

It immediately tried to tell me that Ohio State and The Most Definitely Back Longhorns are archrivals. I don’t expect a distributor of ones and zeros to know this, but five games played across 20 years does not an arch rivalry make.

Incidentally, Google’s Gemini got that right. The preceding is a sentence seldom uttered or typed.

ChatGPT goes on, trying to summarize a key point from random games. I didn’t ask for specifics, so it is guessing that I’d care about Michigan’s big day rushing against New Mexico. Justice Haynes tallied 159 rushing yards and three scores against the Lobos, a team that was 126th in rushing defense last year. It presumes I also had a peculiar interest on Nebraska’s Dylan Raiola. It tells me he threw two TD passes against UTEP. But…the Cornhuskers played Cincinnati, not UTEP. (UTEP fell to Utah State.) Dylan Raiola is a QB at Lincoln, and he did throw two TDs, though. ChatGPT mentions Purdue’s 31-0 “statement win.” That was a 31-0 trouncing of Ball State. If that’s a statement in West Lafayette this year, the Boilermakers are in for another horribly long season.

The point I’d like to make here is that I randomly picked three of the bullets ChatGPT offered me. One is wrong on the face of it; another is lacking any of the nuance your football hating relative could have brought to the conversation. Also, I spent three minutes Googling all of that to check its work.

Go ahead and subscribe to that newsletter. I’ve got an idea for another piece for next week.

Today on campus I had my second classes. Criticism and org comm — most of the students came back and some new ones came in. In criticism, we did our first high altitude pass of what media criticism is about, and started to speculate on why it is important. In org comm, we announced our fantasy football teams. We’re going to play football as part of our larger classroom experience. In groups of three or four they’ll all run a franchise and apply the things we learn across the semester. Some of these people are very eager to do this, which is great.

I gave both classes my second off-topic lecture. I do this three times a term. The first day, Tuesday, I talked about my hope of helping students discover the joy of learning. I do that by talking about a former student who is doing some really incredible things out in the world, simply because she wanted to take on new things.

Today, we talked about being safe around cyclists. We have a vested interest in this, of course. I told them about Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, which was just a year ago last week. They know of it, being that they were local boys and Johnny was a big time hockey hero and Matthew was, to a different degree. But they don’t know the details. So I share a little of that, and then point out that in a few weeks my lovely bride and I will celebrate the third anniversary of her horrible accident after a tangle with a pickup truck. Three ribs, shoulder blade, destroyed collarbone, muscular damage and a concussion. It took her more than a year to get back to her normal quality of life.

I used to give this lecture, I told them, a bit differently. I used to tell students that I won’t say what color bike I ride, or what color my helmet is, because I want you to be safe around all the cyclists you might meet. And remember, I’d say to them, one of them might be me. And I have your grade in the palm of my hand.

I would do this with my very dry sense of humor, putting my right index finger in my left hand for syllabic emphasis. In the palm. Of my hand. At the end of one semester a young woman said to me that I got into her head with that, and it made her nervous every time she saw a cyclist. That wasn’t my goal, so now I explain the whole joke.

And now I’ll hope they give cyclists and others more room when they pass.

Next week I’ll start a class by saying “Who here drives a …” whatever car gets too close to be between now and then. I’ll drive this point home all term. I’m changing attitudes a few dozen people at a time. I wonder if they’d be willing to listen to me go on and on about Voyager 1.