The Weekly Wrap: February 23, 2025

My library has a chat tool embedded on our website to make it easier for people to get help. It's staffed by our team of real life, reference librarians. But, oftentimes, we are mistaken for bots.

I get that. It seems that AI is in everything. Usually these moments provide a bit of levity in my day. I'm thinking of that time someone signed off with, "Thank you helpful library bot."

On Friday, we got a series of chats from high school students in Halifax. Despite my conversational tone, tailored answers, and reassurances that I was indeed a human being, one student refused to believe I was a real person. Apparently, I type too fast? I was also accused of giving canned responses.

In order to prove my humanity, this student asked me share my LinkedIn page. Honestly, that was a brilliant thing to ask for. It's a public page and my chat avatar image happens to be the same image as my LinkedIn profile.

I'm going to steal that idea as an example when I teach about AI and evaluating sources.

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• The power of peat. [WaPo - gift link]
• The meaning of blue to the Black community. [The Atlantic - gift link]
• I will be using more paper maps after reading this. [The Analog Family]
• Geography is fascinating. [Brilliant Maps]
• I added so many things to my adulting to do list about reading this health checklist. [WaPo - gift link]
• Some members of Congress want to revoke DC's ability to govern itself. This is what might happen. [The 51st - *note: I am a DC resident and am vehemently against this move]

• The rise of the antivax movement. [Throughline]
• The science and taste of alcohol-free booze. [Gastropod]
• Watching the government funding pipeline. [Planet Money]
• What it feels like to be fired by DOGE. [The Daily]
• An interesting consideration on the start of compulsory elementary education. [Good on Paper]

• I haven't watched Speed from start to finish in years. It was a delightful thing to rewatch this week. I had completely forgotten how this one both started and finished. I pretty much only remembered the stuff on the bus. Also, this is full of old tech alerts but it holds up as a thriller. [Hulu]

• I did not feel like cooking this week so we relied on quick and easy dishes. I made shrimp tacos with corn salsa. The recipe was more of an inspiration than anything else. I used canned, fire roasted corn and skipped the avocado in lieu of a swipe from a mashed avocado single packet. I also made a crema out of sour cream and the juice of a lime. Peeling the shrimp was the hardest part of this one. [My Evernote]
• For Christmas, we make beef wellington. We always end up buying a larger than necessary beef tenderloin. Once we cut what we need for the wellington, we slice individual steaks off the leftovers and toss them in the freezer. This week, we defrosted two steaks, sous vided them, seared them off with salt and pepper, sliced them, and served them over a bag of sesame Asian salad. Easy peasy. [Dole]