On Wednesday my parish church held a beautiful Choral Evensong service, featuring guest preacher Rowan Williams! You may watch the stream here, starting with two preludes played wonderfully by our organist and choirmaster Eugene Lavery.
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica:
When the professors realized how widespread this was, they contacted the 100-ish students who seemed to be cheating. “We reached out to them with a warning, and asked them, ‘Please explain what you just did,'” said Fagen-Ulmschneider in an Instagram video discussing the situation.
Apologies came back from the students, first in a trickle, then in a flood. The professors were initially moved by this acceptance of responsibility and contrition… until they realized that 80 percent of the apologies were almost identically worded and appeared to be generated by AI.
So on October 17, during class, Flanagan and Fagen-Ulmschneider took their class to task, displaying a mash-up image of the apologies, each bearing the same “sincerely apologize” phrase. No disciplinary action was taken against the students, and the whole situation was treated rather lightly — but the warning was real. Stop doing this. Flanagan said that she hoped it would be a “life lesson” for the students.
Seems to me the most likely “life lesson” would be that there are no bad consequences for cheating with AI.
(By the way, Nate, a staff writers for Ars, is yet another of my former students doing cool stuff in the world.)
John Stuart Mill, from The Subjection of Women:
So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old.
Re-upping my 2023 essay on Murray:
My thesis can be simply stated: There is today no more important writer for North American Christians to read than Albert Murray — a man who, as far as I know, had no religious belief whatsoever. But he held as his guiding principle an idea that Christians today cannot flourish without adopting: “the blues idiom” — otherwise known as life in the briar patch.
Slightly concerned about the competence of my Uber driver.
Another wonderful Szymborska poem: “Consolation.”
Exodus 35:
The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD, every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all manner of work, which the LORD had commanded to be made by the hand of Moses. And Moses said unto the children of Israel, See, the Lord hath called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah; and he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship; and to devise curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in the cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning work. And he hath put in his heart that he may teach, both he, and Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen, and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that devise cunning work.
I wrote a few years ago about the men and women of cunning. One of the writings I’m most proud of.
This video of Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez, and a sitting-in drummer (in Copenhagen I think, 1966) is astonishing. Absolutely riveting from beginning to end.