This tour-de-force of American literature and a winner of the National Book Award is a profound, intimate, affecting novel from one of the most esteemed literary minds of the last century and a beloved chronicler of the West.
Joe Allston is a cantankerous, retired literary agent who is, in his own words, “just killing time until time gets around to killing me”. His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, has not been his choice. He has passed through life as a spectator, before retreating to the woods of California in the 1970s with only his wife, Ruth, by his side.
When an unexpected postcard from a long-lost friend arrives, Allston returns to the journals of a trip he has taken years before, a journey to his mother’s birthplace where he once sought a link with his past. Uncovering this history floods Allston with memories, both grotesque and poignant, and finally vindicates him of his past and lays bare that Joe Allston has never been quite spectator enough. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
I had another day off from walking on Saturday with it raining most of the morning and threatening for most of the afternoon. The rest is probably good, I don’t need to keep pushing my walks just take them when I can.
I have updated the maps for my Virtual Walk. The distance these past four weeks was down from what I had been doing. Maybe pick it back up next month or in March when it starts to warm up. HA
Conclusion
AI peer review, as currently implemented by most large language models, does not evaluate science. It evaluates the aesthetics of science: proper formatting, prestigious affiliations, orthodox framing, confident tone. A parody with fish-pun authors and a paper with circular reasoning and fabricated data both received higher scores than sound empirical work—because they looked more like what AI models have learned to recognize as “good science.”
We propose AIQ as a calibration metric for AI scientific discernment. Any system claiming capability for scientific peer review should first demonstrate AIQ > 100 on a standardized test battery—a threshold that five of six tested models failed to meet. Until AI systems can reliably distinguish substance from aesthetics, their use in scientific gatekeeping should be approached with extreme caution.
A random number generator would achieve AIQ ~100. Deepseek scored ~88. The field has work to do. — AIQ: Measuring Artificial Intelligence Scientific Discernment by Vox Day and Claude Athos