This morning I got a couple of videos of one of the hawks perched on the side of the nest fiddling with something in it. We can’t tell what’s happening with it, but I don’t think anything has hatched, if any eggs are in there.
We’re hoping the chicks hatch so we can see them before the foliage gets too dense on the trees.
Early this morning, we saw the Red-tailed hawks trade places in the nest. This gives the mate a chance to grab a bite to eat while the other incubates the eggs we hope are in there.
Little birds tend to chase the hawks away from their territories. Even though the hawks are 3 times bigger than the little ones, they meekly oblige by moving away.
Today is Earth Day and Sena is out in the garden working. She’s doing it not just because it’s Earth Day. She’s doing it because she cares a lot about the garden and not just that. She’s often way out in the outlot beyond our back yard.
We got a message in our mailbox from Forever Green in Coralville. Of course, it’s an ad about a sale to buy stuff at their store on Earth Day through Arbor Day (April 22-25). The great part of their message is:
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Sena cares a whole awful lot. Happy Earth Day!
How about them Hawks! I’m not talking about the Iowa Hawkeye football team. Today, I got another video of the Red-tailed hawk pair in their nest that might make you seasick. It’s windy. Sena tried to get a video but often gives me the camera.
According the internet they mate around March or April and lay 2-4 eggs which hatch in 4-5 weeks.
They poke around in the nest as if maybe they’re turning eggs (we think). Tree leaves are starting to bud out so visibility will unfortunately diminish.
I read this article today about how more and more students are using ChatGPT or some kind of AI to write term papers. The title gives you a clue what the author’s opinion of it: “AI Chatbots could be making you stupider.”
For about the last 3 years I’ve been writing about how AI is not the greatest thing, in fact both Sena and I say it should be “dislodged.” It won’t be, so we need to keep our brains limber. Hey, we exercise our bodies. There are ways to exercise our brains and some of them can be fun.
For example, we regularly play cribbage and there are variations of the game that make scoring more challenging.
Sena regularly says that 6 card cribbage as typically played in tournaments sponsored by the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) is too easy those who participate in them. I think that might be an overstatement, but there’s no doubt a lot of variants make you think harder about scoring, what cards to throw to the crib, and how to think your way through the pegging phase.
Take 9 card cribbage for example—please! I almost hate this game because the hand and crib scores are often too hard to count. You have to resort to using a computer scorer that, so far, you can find in only one place and it’s the Reddit site where you also can find the rules of the game. It’s not hard to play because you follow the basic rules of 6 card cribbage. It’s just mind-bendingly difficult to score most of the time.
You can check out our YouTube video of 9 card cribbage for the Cribbage Wars game if you like, which took hours (no, days) to put together because of the scoring complexity.
I still can’t get over the fact that Sena got a 29-hand playing 6 card cribbage on Cribbage Wars a while back and we never even recognized it until days later. The context of playing 6 card cribbage on a Cribbage Wars game board somehow made us oblivious to seeing the 29-hand right in front of us. Most people never see it because the odds of getting it are 1 in 216,580.
I realize playing cribbage isn’t the same as writing term papers, but it’s still good for your brain. Some think people are still better than AI at playing cribbage.
There is a computer player called Brutal on a computer version of cribbage called Cribbage Pro. I got a 28-hand playing Brutal once. Google Gemini calls this an AI player and says, while Brutal uses algorithms and statistics, it can falter when facing the psychological tactics used by humans.
Google Gemini summary and a video of a Cribbage Pro game using ChatGPT:
While AI is capable of playing, it often focuses on statistical optimization rather than the psychological aspects of the game used by human players.”
We saw not only the Red-tail Hawks today, but a bald eagle to boot. The hawks were making eyes at each other and the eagle was making colonic bombardments. They were getting soaked.
It’s hard to regard the bald eagle as a majestic bird when its head feathers are flattened down like it’s been styling with Brylcreem—and it lets fly with intestinal ammo. Anyway, we’re doubling down on bird videos today.
We got this sudden string of thunderstorms come up this afternoon in eastern Iowa and it blew pretty hard briefly for a short while. We got barely pea-sized hail. It buffeted the Red-tail Hawk around so much I couldn’t really tell which end of it was up. And then it quickly calmed down. If you don’t like the weather in Iowa-just wait a bit.
This is a follow up video of the Red-tailed hawks nesting in the outlet beyond our back yard. This time it seems to be fixing up the nest. We can’t tell whether they have eggs in it or not. It was pretty windy today, so the view is even more challenging.
Sena found a Red-tailed hawk on a nest in the outlot beyond our back yard. At first, I thought it was too early for that sort of thing. Sure enough, today we went for a walk and both saw it.
This has been a common theme for us. Over 20 years ago she saw a coyote in the back yard of another house in a different neighborhood. I didn’t really believe it—until our next-door neighbor asked us if we’d seen that “coyote” out in the back yard. We never got a chance to get a picture of it.
And then there was the time she saw (actually heard it before she saw it) a pileated woodpecker in the backyard of another house we lived in about 12 years ago. I doubted it then, too. But she got a picture to prove it. It just goes to show you—I never learn.
I got a nudge yesterday reminding me I could choose to opt-in to a free Artificial Intelligence (AI) helper to essentially allow it to assist me in doing certain tasks. There’s a YouTube presentation about it featuring a nice guy named Jamie (see below).
While the suggestion sounds like it wouldn’t necessarily automatically allow AI to do the actual creating of a blog post, I’m suspicious that it might move in that direction. The term for this new thing is “Vibe Coding.” It’s not clear what that means. A commenter on the YouTube has a cheeky remark about the term.
I found a website that clarifies the term to some extent. The general idea is that you tell in plain, non-technical language to AI what you want to do when you want to do something with your website that would normally require you to know something about coding. Then, AI does all the coding. It all sounds great until you get down to toward the bottom of the page. Then you hear about the limitations of this approach:
“While it has many benefits, relying entirely on AI to create software is not without risks.
There’s a YouTube presentation by a polite guy named Jamie (who I think is a real person) which drew some comments. One of them is my favorite which is just a long string of words like “terrible” and so on, which are obviously adjectives expressing how bad an idea Vibe Posting is. Jamie replies with a question: “Is your comment about the use of AI within WordPress?”
Well, yeah. Sena still says that AI “should be dislodged!”
I remember reading about the WordPress AI assistant a while back and there was a long disclaimer saying that if a blogger used it, WordPress would not be liable for any legal trouble you might incur by doing so.
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