All posts by Andrew

Garden

Despite all the land around our house, we haven’t grown many vegetables yet. We’ve planted a few tomato and pepper plants around the edges of other plots, and a few herbs, but nothing like the small farm we had at our old place.

With her characteristic energy, Sarah decided to do something about that this summer. Using recovered cedar and some redwood from our old deck, we built two new raised beds. Sarah came up with the box design and built the first one. Oliver and I then tackled the second, larger one. In addition, Sarah has been extending the existing mulched plantings in the yard to introduce local prairie grasses, milkweed for the monarchs, and native flowers.

Broad view
10×3 and 6×3 raised beds
Expanded garden

Shame of the Nation

I took a screenshot of this image from the New York Times this morning. It’s hardly the worst of President Trump’s offenses, but it crystalized for me how humiliating it is to have such a petty buffoon sitting at the resolute desk.

Gemini Math

As I’ve mentioned before, I play with AI regularly to make sure I understand how it works. Gemini, Google’s LLM, has generally been pretty impressive. It’s not without its hallucinations (and numerous other concerns), but more often right than wrong.

Simple polygon using GeoGebra.

Today, I was working on some exercises for my beginning computer science students. They need to be able to use Cartesian coordinates in their Python programs (using the “turtle” module). Most of them need more practice. I created a simple polygon in GeoGebra so that they can identify the vertices. I needed to create a bunch more.

Then I thought, This is a perfect task for Gemini! I explained what I wanted to Gemini and this is what it came up with:

Yikes! Even if math isn’t your thing, I suspect you’ll be able to see some egregious errors here. It is utter nonsense, wrong in just about every possible way. I’m surprised that it knew which axis to label x and y. (Even then, it added the specious “0” and “e“.)

I think my colleagues in the math department don’t have to worry about being replaced by AI “teachers” quite yet.

Humanizer

It’s hard for me to believe that someone wrote this copy with a straight face. It seems like a mockery of AI β€” a dystopian satire of the robot apocalypse. Humanizer? Really???

Screen shot of an email advertisement received from Grammarly on September 8, 2025.