Looking forward to going under the knife

I have arthroscopic surgery scheduled for the 26th of September. Hooray! I first went to this doctor in July, and he had hopes that I’d heal up with time — I guess that I was hobbling in on a cane and grimacing with every step told him that he’s going to have to poke holes in me and stitch something up.

Then he thinks I’ll need about two weeks of recovery time, unless they discover something horrible. I’ll try to be optimistic, but optimism isn’t working out so far.

When we got home from the clinic, there was another chrysalis just outside my door. Maybe that’s a promising sign?

It’s going to be hard going back to work in January

I’m relieved to not have any teaching obligations this term. I’ve been doing weekly homework problems/quizzes using the university standard Canvas tool, and I’ve always been pretty liberal with that: if students want to work together on the problems, that’s all to the good. Communicating and helping each other is useful for learning.

But I’m getting all these emails now about a feature that was added. AI. There’s a box on the screen to invoke Google Lens and Homework Helper, so I could be putting all the effort into composing a problem set, and the students could solve it by pushing a button. The university has been putting in something called Honorlock to disable AI access in problem sets, which seems to working inconsistently.

I’m not alone in resenting all these shortcuts that are being placed in our teaching.

It’s a sentiment that pervades listservs, Reddit forums and other places where classroom professionals vent their frustrations. “I’m not some sort of sorcerer, I cannot magically force my students to put the effort in,” complains one Reddit user in the r/professor subreddit. “Not when the crack-cocaine of LLMs is just right next to them on the table.” And for the most part, professors are on their own; most institutions have not established blanket policies about AI use, which means that teachers create and enforce their own. Becca Andrews, a writer who teaches journalism at Western Kentucky State University, had “a wake-up call” when she had to fail a student who used an LLM to write a significant amount of a final project. She’s since reworked classes to include more in-person writing and workshopping, and notes that her students — most of whom have jobs — seem grateful to have that time to complete assignments. Andrews also talks to her students about AI’s drawbacks, like its documented impact on critical-thinking faculties: “I tell them that their brains are still cooking, so it’s doubly important to think of their minds as a muscle and work on developing it.”

Last spring’s bleakest read on the landscape was New York Magazine’s article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” which included a number of deeply unsettling revelations from reporter James D. Walsh — not just about how widespread AI dependence has already become, but about the speed with which it is changing what education means on an empirical level. (One example Walsh cites: a professor who “caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt ‘Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.’”) The piece is bookended with the story of a Columbia student who invented a tool that allowed engineers to cheat on coding interviews, who recorded himself using the tool in interviews with companies, and was subsequently put on academic leave. During that time, he invented another app that makes it easy to cheat on everything. He raised $5.3 million in venture capital.

I’m left wondering, who is asking for these widgets to be installed in our classes? Are there salespeople for software like Canvas who enthusiastically sell these features for cheating to university administrators who think more AI slop benefits learning? Why, if I’m trying to teach genetics, do I have to wrestle around garbage shortcuts imposed on me by the university that short circuit learning?

Several years ago, I was happy to embrace these new tools, and found it freeing to be doings exams and homework online — it meant 4 lecture hours in the semester that weren’t dedicated to proctoring students hunched over exams. No more. When I get back into a class in the Spring, I’m going to be resurrecting blue books.

Oh, and since I was wondering who kept shoveling this counterproductive crap into my classes, I’ve got one answer.

It’s not coincidental that the biggest booster of LLMs as a blanket good is a man who, like many a Silicon Valley wunderkind who preceded him, dropped out of college, invented an app and hopped aboard the venture-capital train. As a leading booster of AI, Sam Altman has been particularly vocal in encouraging students to adopt AI tools and prioritize “the meta ability to learn” over sustained study of any one subject. If that sounds like a line of bull, that’s because it is. And it’s galling that the opinion of someone who dropped out of college — because why would you keep learning when there’s money to be made and businesses to found? — is constantly sought out for comment on what tools students should and shouldn’t be using. Altman has brushed off educators’ concerns about the drawbacks of AI use in academia and has even suggested that the definition of cheating needs to evolve.

Still falling apart

My lower limbs have been making this sabbatical half-year hellish. First, there was an unexpected meniscus tear in my right knee; that pain is still there, a sharp needle in that one joint. Then my left knee started swelling up and protesting every time I bent it; that knee has been a weak point for a half century, and I think being more reliant on that leg made it protest more. Then I had a gout flare-up in the left foot, and those of you who’ve suffered one of those know how agonizing it can be. And now, this morning, I wake up to my right ankle experiencing a sharp grinding pain, like it’s going on strike in sympathy with the other joints. Basically everything below the hips hurts right now. I’m also going stir crazy, trapped in my office.

Two things are helping me keep my perspective.

First, years ago I was funded by a cancer training grant, which required me to attend weekly classes on cancer. Many of these were great and useful to me, when they were taught by molecular biologists, but every once in a while they’d bring in a cancer surgeon, which was a very different experience. Most memorable was the guy who had a patient with bone cancer in his lower limbs that spread up into his pelvis. To keep him alive, and to generate the most horrific series of slides I’ve ever seen, they cut him in half at the waist, threw out his legs and pelvis, and tied him off with a knot, where the tag end of his colon and a couple of ureters were left dangling, dripping into a plastic bag.

The happy part of the story is that he lived long enough afterwards to escort his daughter down the aisle at her wedding, which is all he wanted. Also, I’m left with some terrible images that tell me it could always be worse.

They still look a little creepy to me

Second, I’ve always been kind of an anti-foot-fetishist. I’m a hand man. Feet have always seemed like ugly, malformed hands, so I’m most comfortable keeping them tucked away in a pair of shoes. My recent problems mean I’ve been shoeless most of the summer, and when I am getting up to shuffle around, my attention is often focused on my feet. I have started to seriously appreciate my toes. Really, they’ve evolved to spread out the load at the ends of my feet, and I see them doing an important job that has always been obscured by footwear. Then I notice that they also conform to the substrate — we didn’t evolve to walk on flat floors, but on more rugged ground, and there they spread out so that all five toes are in contact. Sometimes, when I’m trying to get from the bedroom to the bathroom, I look down and have to admire the job my toes are doing.

So I’m getting by. I have an appointment with my orthopedist tomorrow, and hope he can fix one or two of my problems.

Health advice — consider the source

You want to know where all these “health” cranks will take you?

If you have a rash…pee on it…
If you have a cut or scar….pee on it.
Want clearer skin….pee on it
Want to feel better….drink your pee
Fasting….drink your pee….
Eye problems?…..take a glass dropper snd pee in it. Every night before bed drip it in your eyes. And in the morning when you wake! Watch your eye strain vanish! Wanna go a step further? How about programming it! Write on a label “Heal eyes/Clear vision”
Notice how in desperate situations when we are stuck in a desert or on a boat we drink our urine and it keeps us alive!! If it was some toxic poison it would kill us! Instead it gives life to go on!! Wake up…. Your urine is the most potent remedy to all your issues and you ignore it. Drink it.

Please don’t do any of that…except that I guess it’s OK to write whatever you want on a label. It just won’t do anything.

If you’re stranded on a desert island, drinking urine won’t keep you alive — it will make your situation worse.

The most common reason for drinking urine in movies and pop media is to stave off dehydration. If someone is lost at sea or deep in the desert, they are sometimes depicted as drinking their own urine to preserve moisture. This is highly unlikely to actually help.

The average adult’s urine contains a significant amount of salt, which gets much more concentrated if you become dehydrated. Dehydrated individuals can quickly reach excessive levels of sodium in their urine.

Consuming more sodium is linked to increasing your thirst. Higher levels of sodium in your body quickly lead to feeling thirstier. By drinking urine, which contains a high concentration of sodium, you can quickly develop a negative feedback loop in which you feel thirstier despite drinking liquids.

Sweating can increase the risks associated with drinking urine. Typically, sweating releases water and salts from your body. When you’re also losing salt in your urine, your electrolyte levels stay balanced. However, when you’re re-consuming the salts from your urine, you are concentrating salts inside your body and making your thirst worse. The field manual for the US Army explicitly recommends avoiding drinking urine as a form of hydration, even in emergency situations.

I think the US Army Field Manual is evidence-based, unlike anything Damien Michaels Extreme says. I predict that Damien Michaels Extreme stinks.

Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him

People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own words to show that he deserved being dragged.

He was killed on camera. No one’s family deserves to have to witness that. It’s unthinkably cruel that people would then go on the internet and use their platform to say about an innocent man that “l don’t care that he’s dead.” “He’s not a hero.” “He’s a scumbag.” “He shouldn’t be celebrated.”
I’m talking about George Floyd. You thought | was talking about Charlie Kirk? No, those are actual quotes BY Charlie Kirk about George Floyd. Outrageous that anyone would say that of the dead, right?

It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should have been done before he was killed, because what should have been assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff journalists shied away from while he was living and building a movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late.

When asked about mass shootings he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said “some gun deaths” are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

On that front, I’m fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

Now is the time to talk about the evil being done by Trump and Steven Miller and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and RFK jr (I’m beginning to see some open detestation of that foul creature) and all the billionaires backing the current political moment. I’m done with Kirk. He’s dead, good.

A great response from a Christian minister:

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