Uh oh. It happened again.
Another slide down cogdog rabbit holes of associative trails that cannot be created by any statistical means. It started with a podcast I did not even listen to (until later), one that I saw Wes Fryer post in Mastodon.
Wes may have hear his ma talk about The Far Side– I lived joyfully in that wild universe in the 1980s-1990s, in actually paper newspapers and printed books, and lives on full of that persona on the web https://www.thefarside.com/. My draw into his view of the world, especially that of the natural world and scientists was the path I was on as a grad student in Geology.
The instant associative trail jump was (now I am guessing) in 1988 when I got to go for my first time to a big academic conference in San Francisco, the fall meeting for American Geophysical Union – I recall doing a poster for my research on satellite imagery and mapping volcanic units of the Bishop Tuff, the tuff stuff of my thesis (still on the project list to extract from old files and put on the web).
What I remember most is being gaga about the City. I had never been to anything like it, and the weekend spare day I remember walking like 20 miles of it, from Knob Hill to the Crookedest Street in the World to Haight Ashbury to and across the Golden Gate Bridge.
But I also remember going to a museum (and my memory as you will see mixed them up) where I saw an exhibit of The Far Side of Science by Gary Larson, hundreds of poster size prints of his science related photos. The one that I always remember is the real reason why dinosaurs went extinct.
Here is the fuzzy part. For some reason I associated and wrongly connected that exibit with the visit I did that day to the Exploratorium in tis location before it moved to Pier 15, I remember the big dome. To try and rebuild my paths I did some google searches on gary larson far side exhibit exploratorium 1980s and look how I can just rely on Google’s AI Summary:
So in some ways I was wrong (as it turns out I was wrong about the Explortorium) but Google’s AI insistence on its correctness is suspect, yes it pulls the reference to the exhibit being at the American Natural History Museum (New York).
But I was there in San Francisco at that exhibit, and some museum. So what Alan does that GenAI does not seem to do is some lateral thinking. Hmm other science museums in San Francisco? No, it just pokes, and then discovering it does not know, ti pass the test it just wildly guesses.
I might be wrong but I know how to dog. And an image search landed by on this flickr photo “photo – “The Far Side of Science”, CA Academy of Sciences, SF” by Jassy-50 that let’s me know it was at the Academy of Sciences Museum in Golden Gate Park. The photo, which looks like a polaroid of likely the flickr account owner, is not shared under an open license, but from the caption we get info:
In fact, the exceptional popularity of Larson’s work among scientists led to the creation of this show. The directors of the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco realized that there were so many “Far Side” cartoons taped to office and laboratory doors in the building that walking down the hall was like strolling through an exhibition of the strip — so they decided to organize one. The exhibit broke attendance records in SF and has traveled to many other natural history and science museums since.
Scan of a Polaroid photo. From 1986.
Photo caption https://www.flickr.com/photos/jassy-50/46351272014/
Not only is the Great and All Powerful AI not able to find this information, but it even adds much more to the story– that the museum decided to create this exhibit, the original one, from noticing how many Far Side cartoons taped to doors in the hallway.
Nor has The nth Coming of AI come across the information on the exhibit when it was at the Smithsonian in 1987 which also clearly states “This exhibition is organized by the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco.”
So now I knew to search for the exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences… easy, right?
So… “the exact dates are not specified in the provided results” who, oh mighty Google, provided said results?
Cough.
Look in the mirror?
Lest you think I was relying on these AI summaries, they were merely my object of derision that I ignore. But a scant few results below is the link to Gary Larson’s own words in the bio on the Far Side web site, with a headline that sings his voice “Gary Larson: Once a Cartoonist, Forever a Wingless Insect“
In 1985, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco premiered a collection of four hundred of Larson’s originals in The Far Side of Science exhibit, which later traveled to science venues across North America, including the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History. In 1988, Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent science writer and a member of the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology, dubbed Larson “the national humorist of natural history” in his foreword to The Far Side Gallery 3.
https://www.thefarside.com/about/34/gary-larsons-bio
There, right there, in the web that Google indexes itself, is the answer, yet it’s own Generative AI that they are planning to make front and center, and perhaps chuck all the results below.
Nothing GenAI does not Google an sniff out from all the link it scoops can match my lived experiences, even if not fully accurate. I was there in San Francisco at some museum and I saw with my own eyes the Gary Larson exhibit. I flip all the GenAI stuff my middle paw bird for not only being wrong but not even knowing what is right, wrong, or real.
And for that, I remixed two favorite Far Sides that were at that exhibit to reflect the Very Wrong Side of GenAI– one of which I do own the coffee much version, but truly and in legal print I admit breaking the rules of copyright. I will hovel at the feet of forgiveness for only making satire and being 100% in love with the true, outside the reach of generative crappery, creativity of Gary Larson.
In the spirit of only using GenAI to mock it, if you want to read what’s on the dinosaur’s devices, check the transcript.
Tick, tick, tick… It’s dino time for this crap.
Podcast Postscript
Oh, to circle back, thanks Wes for the Stuff You Should Know podcast episode tribute to The Far Side. Its fun, two people who were fans of the comic and the books, probably like me in having known it as students.
The thing I do understand is the amount of ads. I listened to this while driving, following the link Wes shared. The very frist audio was all about Emma Watson (I guess that’s a famous person), and made me wonder if I had gotten the right episode. There were two more promo ads for other podcasts, until the Stuff You Should Know actually started.
And, there were at least two breaks where they played the same three ads.
The podcast is two people talking conversation style, how heavy a lift is the production costs to call for the damn ads? I do not get this, but now I am bleeding into the other post on my head.
Luckily there is plenty of Far Sides served up, in fact every day you can get a Daily Dose, like parental advice dispensed when leaving the insect home.
Featured Image: Far Side Style flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) modified to replace the birthmark in the original return with the OpenAI logo. Totally questionable as a licensed version to share. You are on your own here.
