Out walking with Scully at lunch today and the London plane trees are all starting to produce new spring leaves. And wisteria is blooming all over the place. And jasmine.
My wife and I both hate jasmine. We can’t stand the smell of the flowers. But as far as I can tell this doesn’t seem to be a very common thing. I don’t recall ever meeting anyone else, except my mother, who also hated the smell of jasmine. Whenever I tell people this, everyone looks at me like I’m crazy and declares that they love the smell of jasmine.
Anyway, we walked all the way to Cammeray to have lunch at Maggio’s Italian Bakery. I didn’t want to overload on sweets today, so I had two slices of the pizza, a mushroom and a capricciosa. And this afternoon I made a quiche for dinner, so my wife and I could eat our slices separately because I had classes online from 5-8pm.
At Cammeray they’re demolishing a couple of shops next to Maggio’s Cafe (which is a couple of doors down from Maggio’s Bakery, run by the same people). It looks like they might be keeping the old Victorian era front facade on the street and redoing the entire rest of the building behind it.
Oh, and I thought of a cool idea for a future ethics/critical thinking class. I’ll get the kids to do a Turing Test on me, but I won’t tell them if I’m answering as me, or copying their questions into ChatGPT and pasting the results. I’ll prime it first by telling it about the exercise and that it needs to impersonate a human response as best it can. I tried this today and it worked… moderately well, but not great. And then I’ll see if the kids can work out if I’m being human or an “AI”. It should be fairly easy with the right sort of questions. The exercise will be for them to think of the right questions to ask.
New content today: