Renovation on a bookshop in Guildford, England revealed a stunning medieval chamber, forgotten beneath the ground for some 700 years. Archaeologists have identified it as a Synagogue dating back to the year 1180. The oldest Synagogue remains in the British Isles.
Julian Lage’s new album Scenes from Above is FAB. Maybe his best record yet — adding John Medeski to his trio was a genius move. ♫
Collaboration: cherry farmers and kestrels.
I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur. More and more I’m wondering if the joke’s on us and it actually happened that way. It’s like MacOS, once the crown jewel of computer human interface design, has been vandalized.
I wrote about analog devices as luxury goods.
Listening to Joni Mitchell’s 1974 album Miles of Aisles on the remastered vinyl released by Acoustic Sounds. A wonderful record, and performed by Joni and her band at a level of musicianship that’s pretty much unimaginable today. ♫
Re: my previous post: If I discovered that anyone in my university was changing the grades I had assigned to students, I’d say: “Excellent. You do the grading from now on — I’ll forward all my students’ work to you for evaluation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my teaching.”
It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong.
A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […]
Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did what professors are supposed to do. I raised the matter internally. I tried to work through existing channels. I invoked the language of policy, accreditation, and Title IV compliance. I was told, politely, that the system was working as intended.
Wow.
My friend and colleague Philip Jenkins is pursuing a late Roman Welsh mystery. [UPDATE: after posting that I realized that it sounds like I’m talking about one of the last novels by a detective-story writer named Roman Welsh. But let it stand, just for fun.]
