1 July 25
Artificial Intelligence
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been learning German for the past three years, initially through Duolingo and more recently through Lingoda. I’ve taken 46 classes — 46 hours of instruction in group sizes of five students or fewer (and, mostly the average class size has been three). The classes are divided up into the categories of Communication, Reading, Grammar, and Speaking. The level of instruction has been high and I’m glad to say I was today awarded a certificate: I’ve progressed through the beginner level of B2. This means I’m technically now an intermediate intermediate.
This morning’s class was talking about AI, which in German is Kunstliche Intelligenz (or KI). I’m normally the oldest student in the class which I don’t mind, especially since it allows my inner curmudgeon out to howl. I’ve been avoiding taking this particular lesson for weeks because I hate what AI is doing to people’s minds, to the planet, to the political economy, and to political life in general. There were two other students today, both in their early thirties (I’d guess). They use Chat GPT every single day both in their work and in their daily lives. There’s no point in fighting this, is there.
30 June 25
Daily Sketch - Nightshade
This is a pen and wash sketch of some sort of shrubby nightshade that is growing on the north side of our backyard.
29 June 25
The "Right" Fountain Pen
I use fountain pens a lot and have done ever since a boy in my class when I was seven gave me one as a present. (He also gave me a copy of Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheep-Dog, which was as much of a vapid tearjerker as Lassie Come Home, at least the film (I never read the book). Hey. We were seven.)
I use the pens pictured here ALL THE TIME. I mean I use the TWSBI Eco for my German lessons (it’s a fine nib and, loaded with Urban Grey, doesn’t show through the paper); I use the gold Pilot Metropolitan for sketching; I use the green Platinum Preppy for my bullet journal, which happens to be green this year. You get the picture. Match the color to the barrel. For some time now I’ve only been using DeAtramentis Document ink, which is a permanent fountain pen ink; this means I could use any one of these pens for pen and wash, though in practice I mostly use brown. But the bottom drawer of the kitchen table has a good collection of these inks, all in different colors.
Since I’m very fond of my Pilot Metropolitans, which are a fantastic pen for the price, I thought I couldn’t go wrong buying a much more expensive Pilot pen (I think it’s the Pilot Custom 74? It’s gone up in price anyway). I hate it. The nib skips and fights me. I’ve cleaned the nib well several times and it still doesn’t want to work properly. This is the red pen second from right, next to the orange Platinum Preppy which at $4.95 is a frikkin’ bargain, superb pen for what you’re paying for it.
I do have… other fountain pens than these. They are empty and in drawers. They might come out to play once in a while but these ones are my staples.
All the pens pictured here were purchased from the inimitable Jet Pens located in San Jose. Best stationery store in the country.
28 June 25
The Jasper Tax
Our neighbor who shares the duplex with us likes to put out peanuts early in the morning for our local scrub jay, whom she’s named Jasper. When she goes off on a trip I have the assignment of placing four peanuts out on the glass table in the front yard. Here is Jasper collecting his first peanut this morning.
27 June 25
A Bookcase by its Cover
One of the most interesting things to do when visiting a friend’s house isn’t to look in their medicine cabinet, a stereotype I’m not sure is founded in reality, but at their bookshelves. We have a lot of books ourselves, which isn’t great in the game of downsizing, but we do refer to a lot of the books on these shelves, often.
The schematic at left shows our nonfiction shelves which reach to the ceiling, and which also include some graphic recording equipment, old sketchbooks and notebooks, and some unwieldy spinning tools. But mostly they are books, mostly reference books. We don’t tend to buy a lot of fiction (except for, lately, comics, usually nonfiction comics though).
I do have a whole section of spinning and knitting books and dvds along with graphic recording books that don’t fit on these shelves which is twitching me up a bit as somewhat untidy…
26 June 25
Daily Sketch - Plum
I’m continuing with portrait format sketches of bits of plants. Here’s an ink and watercolor pencil sketch of a plum on its tree branch in the front yard.
25 June 25
Wordling into Sentences
I’ve been playing Wordle with my sister for a while now. She usually gets the word with one fewer tries than I do. She recently suggested we start playing a game: making sentences of all the words we used in a day’s challenge.
Here are mine from this week:
I will raise a ladle in the glade to the goddess of soup
The grout sprouted raised thrums of fungi
Oddly, there was not enough clout in the phlox to raise a vowel
Raise the quite white to be elite
The hangman was pouty because he had to raise the moldy comfy chair
I find Wordle to be a good thing to do while I’m waiting for the kettle to boil in the morning, not as much of a mental challenge as playing bridge online, but fun nevertheless.
24 June 25
Daily Sketch - Hollyhocks
Our neighbor has a veritable tunnel of hollyhocks by the sidewalk in front of her yard, and I think at one point seeds from those plants dispersed over into our backyard. Here is my sketch of the day of one of the pink hollyhocks in our yard.
23 June 25
Postcrossing
I joined Postcrossing in July 2021. This is a website where you set up a profile and then send, and receive, postcards from all over the world. It’s not direct correspondence, nor the dreaded chain mail — it’s literally getting sent a postcard from a randomly selected sender, and being assigned a random addressee of your own.
It’s not really random, of course, because what you put on your profile does affect who you’ll send cards to. Since I have listed a number of foreign languages spoken or understood, I am assigned more destinations than pure randomness might dictate. Also, Germans are ferocious postcard senders, and an astonishing 624 of the 830 postcards I’ve sent to date have been to Germany. (I am thrilled by this because I always write the card in German for practice. Though the text is somewhat repetitive, I always try to match what I write to the recipient’s interests.)
On my profile I say I’m a birder, and that I’d love to receive postcards of birds from the sender’s country. An amazing thing is that over half of the 828 postcards I’ve received to date have been of birds. I get so many I frequently have to change the wall of them on the fridge, pictured at right with bonus cat. Not all the cards are Eurasian robins or blue tits, as you can see.
Sending postcards through the mail is a) delightfully analog, b) allows me to make connections with people all over the world, c) scratches a bit of a travel itch, d) makes my own mailbox happy almost every day. (I just wish there were more postcards of Davis available to buy; not everyone likes a handmade card.)
22 June 25
Language Learning with tv.garden
A while ago I found the wonderful app Radio Garden. The interface to this application is a globe you can rotate and zoom in on any city or town of interest. Across the globe are thousands of green dots, each a city or town containing a number of streaming radio stations. Click on the green dot, select a radio station, and listen to the stream. It’s a great way to explore the diversity of radio all across the world.
Radio Garden isn’t often ideal for language study; for one thing most of the world’s radio stations are playing music most of the time. Yesterday I remembered that the application now has a spin-off, tv.garden. This has a similar interface with a globe, but instead providing access to streaming radio, the application lets you click on a country and see live TV programs from stations that have a free-to-view internet stream. One shouldn’t expect to find streams of major sporting events this way, but news programs are pretty common. As an example, the listing for Spain is on the right in this view. At the furthest right is the language code: in this example most of the stations are in Spanish, but some are in Catalan, with a scattering of other languages such as Basque. Catalan seems particularly well-served by free TV streams, I think because the Generalitat de Catalunya (the regional government) has invested a lot in making Catalan language resources freely available to its population.
The tv.garden application is built upon an open project to catalog the publicly available internet TV streams around the world. On this page there is a section labeled Grouped by language with a tab that expands to the scores of languages that are available for streaming. In addition to tv.garden, there are dozens of applications for viewing these streams on every platform.