Locomotoring

I thought I would end the San Juan Island travel stories by asking chatGPT to illustrate Roy Franklin’s three-car system of landing on cow pastures at night. Roy would have three cars positioned to show where the “runway” was located — one at the near end with headlights pointing forward up the field, a second crosswise to the landing area with lights pointing across it to mark the midpoint, and the third at the far end with red brake lights showing the end of the landing area.

After making sure that chatGPT understood the landing setup, I asked it to illustrate. Here is what I got:

This wasn’t logically correct, so I asked chatGPT to explain what was wrong with the illustration and it cleverly responded as follows: In Roy Franklin’s system,

• Car 1 (near end) → should be inline with the runway, headlights pointing straight ahead down the strip (toward where the plane will land).
• Car 3 (far end) → also should be inline with the runway, red brake lights facing the oncoming plane (to mark the end).
• Car 2 (midpoint) → should be perpendicular (crosswise) to the runway, headlights pointing across it, creating a visual midpoint marker.
  

So yes, it said with confidence — Cars 1 and 3 ought to be parallel to the plane’s landing direction, while Car 2 is crosswise.

So then – I asked, go ahead partner, give me a correct illustration this time. And, this is what it produced next, wondering aloud what else it could do for me:

And I said, thank you, not today. You clearly need some tea and biscuit after all that thoughtful work.

Did you ever watch Fawlty Towers episode “The Builders” (Season 1, Episode 2). Basil Fawlty decides to have some construction work done at the hotel while his wife Sybil is away. Against her instructions, Basil hires the unreliable and cheap builder O’Reilly instead of the competent builder Sybil prefers. Predictably, everything goes wrong. O’Reilly and his crew botch the job. When asked to fix his mistake, O’Reilly tries to downplay the scale of the mistake, and uses the line: ‘Lick of paint, lick of paint.. half an hour. Give us a biscuit!’.