Sunny Yellow Chrysanthemum

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A chrysanthemum as bright and bold as the sun!

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The Turquoise Elfcup (Chlorociboria aeruginosa) is a tiny cup fungus famed for its vivid blue-green colour. The species is most often spotted by the characteristic turquoise-green stained wood rather than its fruiting bodies, which appear in summer and autumn. It is highly prized by woodworkers for its beautiful colouration, historically used in decorative inlay work. British Fungi on British Bluefaced Leicester is a limited edition mini collection.

'October in the Catskills' (1880) by Sanford Robinson Gifford (United States, 1823-1880).

Oil on canvas.

Winter Cherry (1752-1766) by Dame Ann Hamilton.

Water and bodycolour over pencil on vellum.

Oak Spring Garden Library.

In the SNL David S. Pumpkins sketch, a couple is on a ride called "100 Floors of Frights," where they see a different scare on each floor, and at one point they complain about many of those floors being lame. And then Kenan Thompson delivers this line of deep philosophical wisdom: "Hey look—it's 100 floors of frights, they not all gonna be winners."

My husband and I use this line all the time to give ourselves grace. For instance, I'm a good cook, but when I make a dinner that doesn't turn out well, I will literally say out loud, "It's 100 floors of frights—they're not all gonna be winners," or just "Look it's 100 floors of frights."

It just means when you do a thing a whole lot, there's bound to be some instances that are bad. You don't have to be good at the thing 100% of the time. You can't be good 100% of the time. Some of the 100 floors are gonna suck. It doesn't negate your skill at creating the rest of the 100 floors.

Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.

But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.

The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.

They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.

My dudes, I cannot emphasize enough that the little girl's emotional attachment to the goat is in fact the least of the issues with this story. The main issue in this story is the fact that a bunch of cops broke multiple laws, including the unlawful entry to the property the goat was being held, the unlawful seizure and destruction of said goat, and the unlawful use of a criminal search warrant in a civil dispute case, just to start with.

The little girl owned the goat. At no point in the proceedings - and indeed at no point in the proceedings in the course of the normal auction-purchase-slaughter of a livestock animal in this program - did the fair own the goat. At no point in the proceedings did the person who successfully bid on the goat actually own it - he had made the winning bid to purchase rights to the meat. He hadn't even done that yet! The goat legally and incontrovertibly belonged to the little girl. The very worst that should have happened in this story is a brief property ownership dispute in a civil court.

The fair CEO decided to unlawfully force the auction of the goat, and, when the girl's mother began to dispute her actions, to make a false claim of theft, with precisely ZERO legal basis, calling the cops on an already emotionally fragile child, and then had the temerity to be angry with the child's mother because the story was making them look bad on social media.

GIRL WINS $300,000

They paid over 4700x the money they would have made if the sale had gone through.

EDIT: I'm wrong. The COUNTY paid $300,000 for their overexuberant sheriffs.

So, I've characterized the use of AI in a classroom setting as a failure of integrity. I did that without really filling in a lot of the details of the hypothetical case. That was intentional. I don't think it's actually relevant whether the assignment is pointless (or whether you, from your definitionally less-expert position, think it's pointless). I work very hard to make good assignments and I know the majority of my colleagues do too, but that's not actually what's at issue.

The reason I can so plainly say that AI use is 'doing the wrong thing' is that the vast majority of the time, by using it you are violating the terms of an obligation that you made. The syllabus for the course is a kind of contract. The instructor promises to teach you everything on that syllabus, in the manner described on that syllabus. And you promise to a) take responsibility for what the syllabus asks of you and b) abide by the terms of the class. By taking that class, you bind yourself to the syllabus terms. This is why we always insist that you read the syllabus, by the way. It's really important that you know what you're agreeing to!

And on my syllabi, and those of most others, one of those terms is that your work must be your own.

Going back on an agreement because you don't feel like fulfilling it is prima facie bad. Lying about it is worse. It doesn't matter if you think your end of the bargain is stupid. By accepting the terms of the class, you have agreed to write your own damn essays and I expect you to do it and I especially expect you not to lie to me about it. If you don't accept the terms, you don't belong in my classroom.

Honouring your obligations is the most basic aspect of integrity. I don't want to live in a world in which politicians and the like think that giving their word means nothing and that they can go back on an agreement at any time. I already live in a world like that and it sucks.

like then you could make an argument for choosing not to learn.

But also if we get to a point where students can outsource vivisection to ChatGPT, we’ve got a whole lot of other, separate, probably more pressing problems than whether you’re faking your schoolwork.