Meanderings, 15 June 2024
Good morning from Cicada-land! They’re a bit ugly, but harmless, even if annoying. Oddly, the cicadas 30 minutes south of us are buzzing in competition with one another while there is no buzzing up north in our suburb. I don’t know why. Do you?
Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash
A father’s and children’s discovery:
A dad, his two sons and their cousin were on a hike in the Badlands of North Dakota in 2022 when they found what looked like a dinosaur leg sticking out of a rock.
Sam Fisher, his sons, Jessin and Liam, then 10 and 7, and their cousin Kaiden Madsen, who was 9, had been amateur fossil hunters for years and knew that the area — the Hell Creek Formation — was rich with them, having yielded some of the most famous Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons in the world.
They did not know, however, that they were making a significant scientific discovery.
“My dad hollered for Jessin and Kaiden to come, and they came running up,” Liam said during a news conference Tuesday in Denver. “Dad asked, ‘What is this?’ And Jessin said, ‘That’s a dinosaur!’”
They posed for a picture with the bones, and Fisher sent the image to paleontologist and Denver Museum of Nature & Science curator Dr. Tyler Lyson, who had been a high school classmate of his.
Now, the museum has unveiled what it calls “Teen Rex,” a rare juvenile T. rex skeleton, one of only a handful in existence. The public will be able to see it get extracted from the rock at an exhibition opening on June 21.
Why else would a book as high-minded as the Codex Gigas (Latin for Giant Book) contain a full-page glamour portrait of the devil garbed in an ermine loincloth and cherry red claws?
Perhaps it’s the 13th-century equivalent of “sex sells.” What better way to keep your book out of the remainder bin of history than to include an eye-catching glimpse of the Prince of Darkness? Hedge your bets by positioning a splendid vision of the Heavenly City directly opposite.
Notable illustrations aside, the Codex Gigas holds the distinction of being the largest extant medieval illuminated manuscript in the world.
Weighing in at 165 lbs, this 3‑foot-tall bound whale required the skins of 160 donkeys, at the rate of two pages per donkey. (Ten pages devoted to St. Benedict’s rules for monastic life were literally cut from the manuscript at an unknown date.)
A National Geographic documentary concluded that the sprawling manuscript would’ve required a minimum of 5 years of full-time, single-minded labor. More likely, the work was spread out over 25 to 30 years, with various authors contributing to the different sections. In addition to a complete Bible, the “Devil’s Bible” includes an encyclopedia, medical information, a calendar of saints’ days, Flavius Josephus’ histories The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities and some practical advice on exorcising evil spirits.
The actual lettering does seem to come down to a single scribe with very neat handwriting. Experts at the National Library of Sweden, where the Codex Gigas has come to a rest after centuries of adventures and misadventures, identify it as Carolingian minuscule, a popular and highly legible style of medieval script. Its uniform size would’ve required the scribe to rule each page before forming the letters, after which 100 lines a day would have been a reasonable goal.
You can have a look for yourself on the Library’s website, where the entire work is viewable in digitized form.
AI and grading. Are profs next? This from Alan Jacobs, who opens with Cameron Blevins:
And lo, this from Cameron Blevins (via Jason Heppler):
There is no question that a Custom GPT can “automate the boring” when it comes to grading. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to grade one student essay (leaving comments in the margins, assigning rubric scores, and writing a two-paragraph summary of my feedback). Using a Custom GPT could cut this down to 2-3 minutes per essay (stripping out identifying information, double-checking its output, etc.). With 20 students in a class, that would save me something like 5-6 hours of tedious work. Multiply this across several assignments per semester, and it quickly adds up.
In an ideal world, this kind of tool would free up teachers to spend their time on more meaningful pedagogical work. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Instead, I worry that widespread adoption would only accelerate the devaluing of academic labor. Administrators could easily use it as justification to hire fewer instructors while loading up existing ones with more classes, larger sections, and fewer teaching assistants.
Alan Jacobs commentary: Alas, I must agree. “Now that we’ve automated grading, we can hire fewer instructors and give them more students!” But then (thinks the same administrator) “Why not train bots on all those lectures posted on YouTube, create professorial avatars — maybe allow students to customize their virtual professors to make them the preferred gender and the desired degree of hotness — and dismiss the instructors also? That’ll free up money to hire more administrators.”
That will surely be the deanly response. But there’s another way to think of all this, one I suggested in my post of last year. Think about the sales people who use chatbots to write letters to prospective clients, or prepare reports for their bosses. People instinctively turn to the chatbots when they see a way to escape bullshit jobs, or the bullshitty elements of jobs that have some more human aspects as well. For most students, writing papers is a bullshit job; for most professors, grading papers is a bullshit job. (Graeber, p. 10: “I define a bullshit job as one that the worker considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious — but I also suggest that the worker is correct.”)
What if we all just admitted that and deleted the bullshit? What if we used the advent of chatbots as an opportunity to rethink the purposes of higher education and the means by which we might pursue those purposes?
But I suspect is that what universities will do instead is to keep the bullshit and get rid of the humans.
My mother was diagnosed with memory problems in her 60s, and doctors eventually labeled her challenges as Alzheimer’s Disease. Almost ten years into living with this disability, she is still socially engaged, travels to see family, enjoys entertaining her grandchildren, and enjoys caring for the pets she and my father fill their home with. While the lively and charismatic entrepreneur and professor that she once was has evolved into a sedentary and careful persona, she likes to look at us with her bright eyes and say that she’s “Still Alice,” referencing the novel by Lisa Genova. This phrase reminds us that even though she doesn’t remember much about what has happened already that day or even over the past week, she is still herself and we should take her seriously. This isn’t an essay about the challenges of caregiving or how to treat memory loss. Instead, it is a reflection on how memory impacts our identity. …
Instead, so many of those who write about their own experience or who study memory loss from an academic perspective warn us not to conflate memory loss with personhood and identity. As a Seventh-day Adventist, I have a life-long belief that we are embodied souls, and that our physicality is as much a part of who we are as the more transcendent and esoteric elements of our personhood/spirituality. Believing that my mother is fully herself and still my mother as long as she is here in her flesh became increasingly important to me. My mother is as much the child of God in this moment as she ever was—as a human in a body, she reflects the imago dei.
Of course, it is sad when she forgets who members of her family are, and it is distressing when she is confused. But often this is more about us and our own wishes than it is about her and her own identity. I have been reminded that memory loss can help us live here in the moment. My mother may not remember that I visited her or called her earlier in the day, but in the moment that we are together she is giving and receiving love.
Reading transports us to worlds we would never see, introduces us to people we would never meet, and instills emotions we might never otherwise feel. It also provides an array of health benefits. Here are six scientific reasons you should be picking up more books.
As I read about the use of AI in grading student essays, I thought of your photos of gathering with your students. You developed a reciprocally personal relationship with them. It seems professors know their students better from their writing. AI in this would lessen this depth of relationship in my view.
Paper writing is crucial to articulation, interaction, and expansion. Responding to jaminato1