After our half-day trip to Calvert Cliffs which resulted in zero fossilized shark teeth found — and one given to us by a compassionate local — we decided that a thing worth doing was a thing worth doing well, and not having any other plans for the Labor Day weekend got the shabbiest, most cost-effective and affordable cabin available, and started combing the beach.

It worked! Nine teeth total, three of which found during a particularly lucky 15-minute stretch, and one of those which was dropped to the ground by a senior member of our party never to be recovered. So it goes… As luck would have it, another compassionate local — plenty of them are to be found wandering the Calvert Cliffs beaches, it turns out — saw us scrambling to find the tiny shark tooth we lost and gave us two from her own collection, which isn’t the same as finding your own, but it will make for a good dinner table reminiscence-slash-putdown of our fumbling senior.

The whole excercise was particularly enlightening to our middle-schooler, who in short order experienced the value of 1) experience, 2) patience, and 3) serendipity. And being the one whose fossil was lost also 4) forgiveness and 5) understanding. Well, one would hope. I’m pretty sure she stills holds a grudge.

“On the morning of 8/6/1945, the Yamaki family and their bonsai survived the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima. 30 years later, bonsai master Masuru Yamaki offered this tree, one of his oldest and most precious, as part of a gift from the people of Japan to the people of the United States”

This weekend we are back at Calvert cliffs, the great fossil buildup.

Boarded then left a broken JetBlue plane, and noticed how… ugly abstract the carpet was while waiting at the gate.

When traveling through Washington National airport, looking up is so much more rewarding than looking down. Not as safe, of course, but beauty comes with risks.

These were supposed to be Notes from a 6-hour trip to Boston, but mechanical issues delayed the inbound flight by 4 of the 6 hours, and since this included the 90 minutes during which I was supposed to talk (for 20 minutes) answer questions (10), and attend a panel (30), the lecture had to be pre-recorded and the questions will have to wait another day. So anyway:

• Despite the delay, I have to give kudos to JetBlue. I am not their frequent traveller — though that is now likely to change — and my status with them is “Group F”, yet they refunded the entire trip without fees and gave additional credit for the inconvenience. The gate staff was on top of reshuffling people with connections to different flights and they handled some heated situations with poise. Granted, I may have been more heated myself had the trip been higher stakes, but had it been higher stakes I would not have had such a tight itinerary. Hurray for risk management.
• The stakes are not high because I was able to pre-record and send out the talk as soon as I realized I would not make it there on time. Now, could things have gone better? Yes: using AirPods to record over the background airport noise led to less than ideal audio, and a few times I had to yell over a person who decided to take a phone call right next to me, but hey, it’s a free airport, I hope we had annoyed each other equally.
• Speaking of sound quality, of course there is a study that shows that poor audio quality leads to distrust (sponsored by Shure, by any chance?). The original article had some 200 of Amazon’s “mechanical Turks” — what a charming way to describe low-wage digital labor — listen to manipulated and clear NPR recordings and grade them by how trustworthy they were. Now, this rhymes so much with the now-debunked study of illegible text leading to better retention due to increased focus that I’ll decide to throw all of it onto the ever-growing pile of things that just don’t matter, and will keep telling myself that my sub-$100 Samson is more than enough, if I just used it more.
• But anyway, it is a good idea in general to pre-record your talks — maybe during a practice session? — and save the best take for cases like this. It will also help you get rid of ticks both verbal and facial which you won’t even notice until you see yourself speak. Nowadays even PowerPoint has built-in recording.
• And if you didn’t come here via the homepage and/or RSS, do have a quick look at the good and the ugly of Washington National airport, DMV’s premiere flight cancelation destination.

Lenore Skenazy, a co-founder of the free-range kid movement Let Grow, writes about the playgrounds of North Virgina:

“Welcome! Play Safe,” reads the sign at a Fairfax County Public School playground in Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. The sign also lists a few simple rules—21 of them, by my count.

⊕ Although, to be fair, the background of my favorite sign ever was green.

The accompanying photo shows the playground sign, versions of which I’ve been seeing so much they’ve become part of DC’s atmospheric noise, like ambulance sirens, or screams of people who may or may not be experiencing homelessness but are definitely experiencing a psychotic episode: crowded white text on a screen-of-death blue background trying to codify common courtesy.

Skenazy’s Let Grow partner Peter Gray had the best comment:

“The only restriction that needs to be added to make them complete is ‘No Playing,'”

And of course, at least one person in the article mentions that these signs are there to “mitigate the liability of the entity responsible for the playground (school, municipality, etc.) in the event they are sued.” This just in case regulatory creep is apparent everywhere, medicine being the prime example, and the expanding size of clinical protocols yet another. Yes, we have Choosing Wisely, but how about Regulating Wisely?

(↬Tyler Cowen)

I’ve recently had to do a simple but tedious literature search: finding the incidence and prevalence of a handful of rare diseases, using only peer-reviewed articles as reference. The perfect job for AI, some would yes. Well, yes for an AI, but apparently not for LLMS.

I am a proponent of using LLMs as tools of the spellcheck sort, but they are still not ready to act as serious research assistants. Bing presented me with gobbledygook that ended with a repeating string of “KJKJKJKJ” or some such — and no, my prompt was not for it to pretend a cat was walking over the keyboard — while Bard gave a beautifully formatted table full of inaccurate numbers and fake references. Correcting it would have taken more time than doing the research myself.

Which is to say: I anticipate a lot of angst when incoming students start passing off unadulterated LLM work as their own in anything that’s not a business writing course.