Duke’s Last Plane
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In a World Heated Only by Fire
Since the SILs departure, we have had only one fire in the pretty good room. Mostly walling off all of that cabin-cave complex and contending ourselves with hunkering down on the kitchen porch. It being semi-winterized and having a wood stove. A stove that is way more efficient than the fireplace and can be left to safely cool unattended. We do not want to violate the cabin’s prime directive: Do not burn the cabin down! Thanks to Jane’s innovation of a wood splitter appropriately sized logs are now easy to make. Since we’ve cleaned the stove’s window, it is possible to see the fire now, but it is still not as picturesque as the fireplace. In the photo, a nearly split log forms a chimney and acts like a torch.
It is still quite cool here, lows in the forties, with highs in the sixties, but there is a slow, almost imperceptible day-to-day temperature rise. Today it might warm enough to justify opening some windows to help warm the cave. This morning, we made a hazmat run and toured the back half of the Chippewa County Recycling Center. The decor was very GFL. This errand cleared the decks for Monday’s appointment with Bugman Bob. Unfortunately, it has done little to clear out the cave. It did help with the shed though, giving us room to move stuff back there. Two steps forward, one step back, if I have that right.
The Bureaucratic Supremist
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Stochastic Parrots
Dr. Timnit Gebru’s most famous and controversial research paper is entitled On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Co-authored with Emily M. Bender in 2020. It is widely credited with coining the term “stochastic parrot” to describe modern Artificial Intelligence (AI). A stochastic parrot is a metaphor used to describe Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT or Claude. It suggests that while AI systems are remarkably good at generating fluent, human-like text, they do so purely by predicting word probabilities based on vast amounts of data—meaning they possess no true understanding of what they are actually saying. Gebru was working at Google then and was fired that same year from her position there as an AI ethicist, because she refused to pull her paper. A paper that predicted the problems that have been found with these models. Not a good look for the company whose motto was once don’t be evil.
Anne and I split wood together. Then after she completely finished her new chainmail sweater top, we went out to dinner at the Cozy Inn. This early in the season the place was pretty empty, except for the Piedmonts. Who were there in force. We were too late to join them at their table but got an invite for next week. After dinner, we nerded out with the Scripps Spelling Bee. We rooted for 12-year-old Logan Bailey until he fell with Quincke tube, an acoustic device used to demonstrate the interference of sound waves and calculate the speed of sound. Even throwing in a reference to K-Pop Demon Hunters did not help him. This is our kind of sporting event.
Speaking of Anne and AI, I would like to offer an alternative to artificial intelligence, Anne’s Intelligence. It is all natural, nothing artificial about it. The best thing about it is that it does not require a prompt to activate. It will tell you out-of-the-blue when you are doing something wrong. Like in, “Mark, don’t do that!” or “Polly wants a cracker.” You get the idea.
Pic Island
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Orphaned Negatives
An orphaned negative or unpaired word is a word that contains a negative prefix or suffix (like un-or dis-) but lacks a corresponding positive counterpart in everyday use. It is not to be confused with a negative of orphans. These words feel like they should have an antonym, but the base word has fallen out of use over time. According to AI, orphaned negatives can also be one of those shoeboxes of old photos, where the prints have become separated from their negatives and one is left with a jumbled mess, but leaving AI aside let’s stick with the first definition.
In the July 1994 New Yorker, author Jack Winter offered a humorous take on orphaned negatives in his article, How I Met My Wife. It is written using orphaned negatives. Its opening paragraph demonstrates this tongue-in-cheek linguistic gimmick:
It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party, I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array.
Tomorrow, I’ll delve into the potential link between phone use and population decline and also drooling in your sleep. Is it normal to drool in your sleep? Every day your mouth produces between a liter to a liter-and-a-half of saliva that has to go somewhere. Why not your pillow?