They’re still doing it
Crop circle, Wiltshire, 15th May, 2025. The barley crop was young and green, so by the time they took this picture, it was five days later and it had sprung back a lot. It was undoubtedly a lot crisper when new.
Most interesting report at the link. The farmer will let you go look if you kick £10 into his GoFundMe.
We heard a lecture once about crop circles. I didn’t expect to find it interesting, but I did. The man explained that it couldn’t possibly be done the way the authorities say it was. The men who claimed to have created at least some of them, when pressed, couldn’t actually reproduce the effect at all.
If I recall (it was a long time ago), he wasn’t claiming an extraterrestrial origin, he was just saying the government was blowing smoke up our butts to make us stop talking about it.
May 27, 2025 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 5
The roses are exploding
This one is named Gertrude Jekyll, in honor of a very famous English gardener who died in 1932. She created or collaborated on over 400 gardens in the UK. Most famously, she worked with famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and together they invented cottagecore.
Her brother was friends with RL Stevenson, so she was probably that Jekyll, too.
She didn’t develop this rose; is was named for her by the rose specialist David Austin (who, I have just discovered, died in 2018). He specialized in breeding old-fashioned roses.
Yes, yes…of course it needs to be in color.
May 26, 2025 — 6:23 pm
Comments: 10
I’m not sure what to say…
I really, really want to know what a public toilet looked like in 1540. Via this Twitter account.
Have a good weekend!
May 23, 2025 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 8
This might be okay…
I started training my replacement today. I think she’s going to be okay. She’s no weasel, but I think she can do the job.
She really liked my chicken lamp. This is a good sign.
The plan is, she’ll do all the boring office stuff and I’ll swan around doing interesting history stuff.
The downside? Once she’s trained, I have to do the interesting history stuff for free.
May 22, 2025 — 6:06 pm
Comments: 3
Stay away from the brown acid
I needed to find out the earliest printed reference to a certain building in the town, for work. Naturally, I asked Grok. It gave me an absolutely perfect quote from a well-known early local history book. Alas, it was a complete hallucination.
I know this because I have a digital version of the book and had already searched it for all the right keywords.
I told Uncle B and he said, “you should tell Grok it’s lying.” So I did. It apologized and gave me a genuine quote – one that I had already found for myself – that wasn’t so helpful.
It lied to please me.
Computer scientists really do call it hallucination when AI pulls information out of its butt. It’s not only a problem, it’s an increasing problem as the models get more complex.
Recent studies and reports indicate that AI hallucinations are becoming more prevalent, especially in advanced reasoning models. OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models, which are designed to reason step-by-step, have been found to hallucinate at rates between 30% and 79% of the time. Similarly, other reasoning models from companies like DeepSeek and IBM have also shown higher hallucination rates compared to their earlier versions.
Why, yes, I did get that answer from AI (Leo, the one built into Brave, in this instance).
This is why lawyers who use AI keep getting into trouble – AI fabricates cases. According to this tweet, the Chicago Sun-Times published a Summer reading list that was obviously AI – eight of the books on the list don’t exist.
It’s all well and good with these examples, but what happens when it’s analyzing x-rays?
May 21, 2025 — 4:02 pm
Comments: 5
Fatcat on the loose
Our cat has been AWOL for about twenty hours. Not really a big deal, except our cat is a big fat pudding and rarely strays far from his bowl. He vanishes maybe twice a year, and then he’ll saunter past the kitchen window like nothin’ at all.
Man, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have kids.
Prompt was “an editorial cartoon of a very fat black and white domestic cat with his back against a tree as though he’s hiding from someone, in the style of Thomas Nast”. Not terrible. There were several amusing variants.
———
Update: he’s home. Little bastard.
May 20, 2025 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 5
This ugly little church
…has got a complete scale model of the Sistine Chapel ceiling inside.
It was painted by a parishioner in the Eighties. I would love to know his working methods. Looking at this drone footage, it’s not a terrible copy.
Who am I to judge? My hometown had a big pink and yellow cement replica of The Parthenon. It was a favorite stoner spot, back in the day.
May 19, 2025 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 4
What the…?
I got this in the post today. Correct address, correct name. I don’t have an account with NatWest Bank.
It’s weird. There’s no account number on it (and, naturally, no contact information). If it’s a scam, I can’t figure out what it would be. I predict a long interval of hold button music in my future.
Sigh. Have a good weekend!
May 16, 2025 — 5:53 pm
Comments: 11
She late
I was walking on the narrow lane to my office and there was a delivery truck up ahead blocking traffic, slowly delivering construction supplies to a house on the corner with a lift. What do you call those lift things on the back of a truck?
After a few minutes, one of the cars stuck behind the truck began to honk. I turned to a guy looking on and said, “that’s not going to help.” And he said, “look who’s in the car.”
Yep. The bride. The church was just around the corner – she’d’ve been better off getting out and walking.
Image by our sinister robot friend, MidJourney. Such a simple illustration took twelve tries. My favorite was the one that looked like a roll of toilet paper exploding in the back of a limousine. I consistently get ten shitty takes and eventually one brilliant one (not that this is brilliant, but at least it follows the brief).
It’s got a ways to go before it takes over the world.
May 15, 2025 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 3
Today’s theme is: white
Today, Uncle B had his heart set on a white agapanthus, so we drove up and down the county until we found one. What it is to wed a gardener.
Everything was white. I’ve never seen such a profusion of mayflowers. The hedges were dazzling. Mayflower could be any of the hundreds of shrubs or trees in the Crataegus family: hawthorn, quickthorn, thornapple, may-tree, whitethorn, mayflower. We have several.
Then there was Queen Anne’s lace and English daisies.
And the sheep! Leave us not forget the lambs, which were born at the beginning of April and are rowdy teenagers now, in sheep terms.
It was stunning.
May is the blessedest month. Good thing it’s my birthday month.
May 14, 2025 — 5:36 pm
Comments: 3