Memory

Hi, everyone. Thanksgiving break is over and it ended with a most curious dream.

In this dream, I met an old friend, a girl I haven't seen for several years. We were in a classroom talking, and some teacher who looked like Condoleezza Rice came over to listen to us. I started shouting at the teacher, "Get out of here! You don't have permission to intrude on our privacy!" The girl blushed and was happy that I'd do something so forcefully on her behalf.

When I woke up I thought about this for a bit, and I realized that this particular girl and I had not actually lived a life of privacy together, of shared secrets. I wrote letters to her that I never sent (every time I think this now, I hear a Sean Watkins song called "Letters Never Sent"), chronicled our meetings and moments in Masoretic detail, and credited her with attitudes and feelings that were, at their best, holy. My half of our relationship was, to put it mildly, ungrounded, and the secrets were not shared; I was the one with the secret.

My memory of her is suffused with this attitude, enough that sometimes I cannot separate the living person from the marble statuette. The things I remember clearly are shared moments, when we disagreed or moved around together. They are surprisingly brief, and they make me think I never knew her. The memories I made up by myself are literary, not in a positive sense. They are beautiful at times, heartbreaking to remember. Fiction. I remember our last disagreements. Reality.

I try to remind myself of this as I troll around the internet, looking at the footprints she's made, pictures and things she's written, where she is. I could email her this second, for good or for evil. But I have been unsure about what it would mean to me. I've had other dreams, that I'd tell her I was proud of her, proud of what she's become. But frankly, that is all made-up stuff again, my relationship to dead artifacts.

I also try to remind myself that I have my own secrets now, sequestered in the four walls of my home with my wife and my son. I know how much must go unspoken in any conversation with her. Like Levin at the end of Anna Karenina says, "... there will still be a wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife..." and how much more so, with this lady who is practically a stranger to me.

It has a strange hold, memory. She has never given me any sign she knows I exist, not since we talked years and years ago. She doesn't look for my pictures or articles. I don't know if she even remembers me.

Yet I want to write; yet I wonder. And I feel a little bit strange trying to explain this all to Sarah. But I will, and it will be another secret just between us.

Thanksgiving blessing

Happy is a yuppie word
Nothing in the world can save us now
It's empty as an argument
We're running down a life we won't cash out

Jon Foreman of Switchfoot wrote this song after a Bob Dylan quotation "from a 1991 Rolling Stone interview. Dylan was asked, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, if he was happy. Dylan replied, 'Those are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's blessed or unblessed.'"

If you want to put things this way, happiness and unhappiness are a matter of your instinctual reaction to your circumstances. When we long for happiness, we long to control our circumstances to the point that all our desires are endlessly satisfied, and we ride on a wave of pleasures to our eventual death. But it's good while it lasts.

I should have said, rather, to our eventual unhappiness, because the kind of control necessary here is impossible. This is one of the things the machines couldn't understand in The Matrix: "Some thought we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world..." It's in a CS Lewis book too (Pilgrim's Regress) that advising people to the pursuit of happiness is like advising someone to enjoy unbroken good fortune.

Blessedness is not about luck. It rejects the power fantasy of the yuppie world. This is the first way that blessedness is about weakness. Here are some other ones.

[3] Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
[4] Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
[5] Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
[6] Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
[7] Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
[8] Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
[9] Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called sons of God.
[10] Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessedness is not a question of circumstances. It is an orientation toward the world, an allegiance to a point of view. That point of view is to understand the world as overflowing with meaning, rain or shine. It is to understand the seasons of living.

For Christians, blessing lies beyond the horizon of this world. Still, they find blessings everywhere. But that's a story for another day.

May your lives and your families be blessed this Thanksgiving.

Banner news I keep forgetting

It's the pre-holiday homework stress. But last week I got my first business cards ever. I am now the Product Manager for a piece of Proprietary Software at My Company. I'll scan a card sometime. I think I might be leaving my job soon though, so they did that just in the nick of time. It only took three years from my first days on the job.

And last week they mailed me my Bachelor of Arts diploma. So, crappy grades and all, I officially made it to the next level. I am a Linguistics journeyman, to go with my journeyman Computer Science 5k1772. I have mixed feelings about my linguistics education, but I guess it is still serving me.

I stayed up late and I'm tired, but I still have more work to do. Thirty minutes asleep might help.

NPR story on Jose Padilla

One of the most famous detainees in the war on terror, Jose Padilla, was finally charged with a crime. Padilla is an American citizen arrested in the United States, who was labeled an enemy combatant and denied habeas corpus rights and access to counsel for three years. His case has been working its way through the courts for quite a while. Now I suppose the constitutional problems his case raises for war-on-terror detention powers won't be heard by the Supreme Court. Google and the Washington Post think, lo and behold, I might be right.

Originally the government said he was plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb. Now they are charging him with fundraising for NGOs suspected of funding terrorist organizations. With the three year head start, you would think that the government would be farther ahead by now.

I heard something on NPR about this as I came home. I've been unable to locate the report to link to it.

The report ended with this line: "Padilla faces life in prison if convicted."

Take a moment to let the irony sink in.

Nickel Creek tour

Supergroup Nickel Creek is coming to a town near you. I really can't say enough good for them. If you poke around on CMT.com you can listen to their newest album for free from beginning to end. Guitarist Sean Watkins has a new solo album out. It is in stores in March 2006 but he wanted everyone to hear it, so it is pay-to-download mp3s.

Their Utah show on 12/2 is sold out. I'll be there. I am extremely excited. It's been two years since I last saw them live.

The grueling schedule continues with a show in Spokane, WA 12/3 and at the Paramount in Seattle on 12/4. I can't recommend this concert highly enough. The opener, Andrew Bird, is extremely talented as well and we will be there early to see him. He is a one man symphony, playing the guitar, violin, and glockenspiel, whistling and singing, remixing his loops live.

CS Lewis on Intelligent Design and Evolution

Just a quick note since I'm busy with end-of-semester projects. You might think the subject of this post curious, because CS Lewis died the same day as President Kennedy in 1963, but the term "Intelligent Design" wasn't invented until the early 1990s.

Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -- because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. ... A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.

This quotation is from Lewis' modern classic, Mere Christianity, which is a thoughtful exposition and interpretation of a certain core of Christian belief, leaving debates about details on the fringes to the theologians and historians.

Fundamentalist Christians (along with other Christians) accept Jesus Christ's godhood on the basis of the authority of the apostles who wrote about him, or on the essential trustworthiness of their books about Jesus and the action of Holy Spirit in the early church (collected in the New Testament). That's what "for the Bible tells me so" means. But they don't accept Darwinian evolution even though the scientists have been saying it with one voice for decades in peer-reviewed journals. Seriously, disbelieving evolution is like disbelieving global warming: all you have to do is ignore the people who know something about it, and listen to the cranks.

CS Lewis, at least, is not on their side. This is not an isolated quotation in his work. At every conflict Lewis is on the side of a kind of conventional wisdom; not the kind that is constructed out of clouds of jello by our all-spinning mass media, but the kind of wisdom that sensible people have all agreed upon over the years. An Experiment in Criticism thinks about the wisdom of common people in regard to reading books, Mere Christianity considers the main thrust of Christianity as believed by the great mass of Christians down the centuries, The Abolition of Man considers the morality that is common to people of all religions and cultures. The Narnia books are, in the main, stories of ordinary, even weak people thrust into extraordinary situations, who triumph over the rich and powerful of their age by common virtues. I could go on.

I'm not on their side either. As a journeyman scientist, I cringe to think of what the fundamentalists will make of ever-stronger AI, and what they will make of me as a scientist who tries to explain it to them.

I had a conversation with a friend several years ago, before I dreamed of becoming a computer scientist, where I said, in effect, that I didn't know how somebody doing computers could be as good a Christian as someone doing ministry work. Needless to say, he was doing computers at the time, and I was volunteering a lot of my time to a university Christian group. I've since apologized to him, but I understand how easy it is to let "ministry" assume an undeserved primacy in your religion.

There is a reason why religious figures like Robertson and Falwell and Dobson dominate the public religious conversation. It is an undercurrent in Protestantism, that people who have given up their lives to listen to God and do what he wants are more qualified to speak for Christians than people like me. They are the truly sold-out.

I am wishy-washy. I am too secular, which is only a step or two from idolatrous to the minister-pushers. They think I am building silicon sand-castles. They regard the world as the Titanic, and me as a microchip-polisher.

CS Lewis's main job was as a lecturer and writer at Oxford, the chair of Medieval and Renaissance literature. He excelled at his job, writing a permanent volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, on the 16th century (excluding drama).

What I've learned in the years since I talked to my friend is that good work glorifies God. I only wish the Intelligent Design agitators would learn it too.

Tidbits

Tuesday morning, it was cold in Logan. I had parked down the hill from campus near the football stadium, which is a 5 to 10 minute walk. I was bundled up well and put up my hood as I approached the crosswalk to go down the hill. The light turned green, so I started walking through the crosswalk. Maybe eight steps into the street, a black sedan cut in front of me, turning right, from behind me. It was so close that I could have touched it. To prove that fact to the very dangerous person behind the wheel, I started walking forward, and kicked the car in the back right panel before it passed me. I hope they got a dent. Remember, drivers and pedestrians are equal, except that the driver can kill the pedestrian. What am I supposed to do, honk my horn? Several other revenge fantasies played out in my head as I walked to my car, and I stopped for a pedestrian at the first light on my way to work. I have felt smug and superior about the whole incident ever since until now.

I played checkers with the computer (it was for class! really!) and was leading four kings to two kings and a piece when I made a stupid mistake and the computer jumped three in a row. But I shouldn't feel too bad; our last big project in AI class is to make a computer program that can beat us. I think I must have been playing a dumbed down version of the checkers AI, otherwise I wouldn't have even been close.

I made potato soup that tasted like my father's chowder, clams not included. It made me very nostalgic for his kitchen. Was the secret the sour cream (and whole milk and cream)? The scallions? The bacon? My recipe made a gallon (!) of soup. Great for the winter, and for heating the house.

I have loved the end of our grad school seminar because of all the new cooking time. Sarah has been sick and I bet all the leftovers have helped her relax a little. We also had shepherd's pie on Monday, another one from my dad's kitchen.

Oh, and someone really should've told me that after you've uncorked a bottle of wine, it only keeps for a couple of days. I have a bottle in my fridge door of some fruity white that I used for a stir fry about a year ago. The things you miss out on because you're a debate math drama honors nerd in high school. Found out on I Want That!, the show with the misleadingly selfish name, about gee-whiz gizmos etc. for the home. It's going in the trash when I get home.

For obsessive coverage of the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation, read firedoglake.

Habeas thou a corpus?

4 days ago, the Senate passed an amendment to an appropriations bill brought by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). The amendment narrowly circumscribes the habeas corpus rights of enemy combatants in America's secret prisons (and not-so-secret prisons like those in Guantanamo Bay). The vote was 49 in favor to 42 against with 9 abstentions.

What is habeas corpus? It is the only individual right in the Constitution itself: the legal right to challenge your detention in the courts. "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it." The exceptions are rebellion and invasion, where obviously there might not be time to convene a court to justify the detention of a soldier while the British are attacking the prison. But the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism is not against a rebellion or an invasion. Discuss.

Why do they always release suspects within 24 hours on Law and Order? Habeas corpus. The government has to justify holding you or give you up. Now, habeas corpus is not the best thing if you are trying to prosecute a case. It makes things more difficult on the Bensons and Stablers and Gorans and Eameses of the world. When it is obvious who is the criminal, we naturally want every tool at our disposal to aid the good guys and hinder the bad guys.

But habeas corpus is the best thing in the world if you can't tell apart the good guys and the bad guys. And it is the best thing in the world for you if you are arrested. Without it, the government doesn't have to release you, even if you are completely innocent. The government doesn't have to explain what they are doing with you, much less justify it. Habeas corpus is the guarantee that a justice system which is predicated upon fairness is in charge of your fate, not a mercurial, sometimes cruel government.

Habeas corpus is also the best thing in the world if you are labeled an enemy combatant. The American President can label anyone an enemy combatant (since the PATRIOT act was passed in 2001) and leave them in the oubliette forever.

Our democracy took a major left turn when we gave the power to suspend habeas corpus to any President at all, much less George W. Bush, who has shown a propensity to defend and exercise any privileges the executive has been afforded by our laws. This power has not sat useless against the day it would be required to Defend Freedom; it has been used over and over again.

If you read about this in the papers, you will find out that even the crippled military tribunal process has found many detainees to be completely innocent. The detainees have remained in prison. Here's an example:

"In late 2003, the Pentagon quietly decided that 15 Chinese Muslims detained at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could be released. Five were people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs. The other 10 were deemed low-risk detainees whose enemy was China's communist government -- not the United States, according to senior U.S. officials.

More than 20 months later, the 15 still languish at Guantanamo Bay, imprisoned and sometimes shackled, with most of their families unaware whether they are even alive."

That quotation from the Washington Post is drawn from a series of posts on Obsidian Wings, 13 in all, addressing Graham's amendment and a counter-amendment by a Senator Bingaman to restore habeas corpus to enemy combatants. They are indexed here. They're recommended reading, of course, and they say all this in much more eloquent and sourced detail than I have.

Clearly this is a miscarriage of justice. But consider carefully that for these men, it is a miscarriage of no return. These men have no way back through the looking glass. Many of them were picked up for having the wrong skin color, or being in the wrong place. Some of them were tortured to the ultimate point of no return.

If you were labeled an enemy combatant, you would live and die at the mercy of your interrogators. Your dossier would languish at the DoJ, and you would languish in an Eastern European prison, location classified. The President would say "We do not torture."

I don't know about you, but that sounds more like the Ministry of Love than the United States of America.

Batman Began

I finally saw Batman Begins, an excellent rendering of the Batman mythos. It is very satisfying, so see it if you haven't. I'd say that I will be shocked if they leave the cast they assembled on the shelf. Sequels are coming! That's what I think anyway. I really liked the way the movie portrayed poor people. A lot was filmed on location in Chicago, I gather, which accords somewhat with some high school memories riding on a bus through the bad parts of town to Wrigley Stadium (I was there for a math contest). I also liked its take on justice and mercy. They picked a great Batman, great director. Not much wasted dialogue either, just really really well done.

Food for the mind as well as the thalamus. Please let there be more.




[Edited 11/16 to delete redundant reference to the portrayal of poor people]

"We do not torture"

http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20051112/1041927.asp

There is a reason why a President of the United States said those words.

Here's another one: "We do not use chemical weapons on civilians".

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/8/125531/161
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/9/164137/436 [some swearing]

And another: "We do not imprison Americans without due process". What happens when you are labeled an enemy combatant?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002588541_padilla28.html

What's next? "We do not engage in human sacrifice"?

What kind of country is President Bush making America?

Needless to say, I agree

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. -- John Keats

This was one of the Slashdot page quotes. I never knew Keats said this, but I am sure glad he did.

No religion means anything until it is real like this.

This last week

Hi all. I have been verrry busy this last week, but a number of notable things have happened.

I acquired a major advisor for my Master's Thesis by a combination of fast-talking, overpowering genius, sheer charisma, and serendipity: Dr. Nick Flann.

You can see from his web page that he is interested in Autonomous Vehicles and Bioinformatics, which, while not repellent to me, are not the focus of my interest. So why him? A passing reference to learning algorithms in my classical AI class, I guess. He has also mentioned interest in the evolution of the brain (Steven Pinker visited our campus recently and Dr. Flann was all over it; I was at work).

Fortunately, he is interested in the Cyc Knowledge Base. This is essentially a computer-understandable, hierarchical database of common-sense knowledge about the world we live in, with associated logic machines, natural language processing, etc. There is an open source version that I am downloading as we speak. This seems like a good fit for my interest in computers becoming creative: see my earlier meandering post. I was extremely lucky to run into him when I did, as I gather that his interest in Cyc is relatively new.

I got the feeling while we were discussing all this that I sounded a bit wild-eyed, talking about creative computers and ruts of abstractions in the brain. But he did say my project sounded cool and real, which is hard to find in an artificial intelligence topic, so I guess I struck gold. I am open to the future of what I can do here, so it should be interesting to see my topic morph over time. I wonder idly if my work will be too closely tied to this particular technology, or if Cyc is the only game in town for my interest. I suppose I will be learning a lot along the way anyhow.

Bonus: next semester I could take a "readings" class that will help me prepare to use this technology. So, much less homework! I guess we will find out pretty fast how much I enjoy the art of research. But I have high hopes.

It snowed in Logan on Friday night. Sarah and I had just finished watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (which I found affecting and well-constructed, except for the somewhat pat resolutions of the interweaving story threads) at midnight, and we stretched and saw the snow outside. It stuck at night and thawed in the morning. But it was quite beautiful for a while there.

On Saturday we went to a great store called Ten Thousand Villages. This is an organization that buys from artisans around the world at living wages, then sells locally. I liked the instruments best, but there were puzzles, clothes, jewelry, sculptures, and one exquisitely carved Chinese box. I couldn't believe how cheap some of it was.

We came home from the store because Alex was tired, but then we found out that our water was cut off. What happened, we pieced together later, was that a person who owned the condo below us (and moved out a while back) had come while we were out and shut off her water. Unfortunately, and bizarrely, our water was connected to hers, so ours was cut off too. For the next six hours, we lived without water. Not as easy as it sounds; I kept saying, "Well, we can have eggs without using water," and "How about tuna fish?", and "Well, I can go without a shower, it's ok," even though I almost never do and it almost never is. There were other problems too. A real estate agent with a key came back and turned on the water at about 10 PM.

Today was a banner day because I made my first recipe by James Beard, the Apostle of American Cooking. It was a braised onion sauce with bowtie pasta. Take half a pound of butter, melt, add 6 medium onions, sliced, and cook till soft and transparent. Add a tablespoon of sugar, simmer for an hour, add 1/4 cup of Madeira (I substituted white wine, so maybe it would taste different), pour over fresh pasta, sprinkle cheese. How do people come up with this stuff? I thought it was great, but Sarah was put off by an excess of onions. So there are lots of leftovers. I can't remember the last time I felt so full.

Back to work! But I am way off my 2-post-per-week average. Maybe this week, maybe next week, I will catch back up.

Yikes, a whole week

I've been busy, as you can probably guess. No new books to report having completed. I started A Tale of Two Cities. I have no clue how I read this in high school. Even now, with ten years of good reading under my belt, I stumble over the rhythm of Dickens' words and the almost excessive extravagance of his words and imagery. Maybe I just bleeped over the words I couldn't pronounce, like Linus reading The Brothers Karamazov. And also, I didn't pay such careful attention to the author's choice of words and how they sound or even what they were saying, when I was 15. Back then, I read like a child, only wanting to know what happens next. Now it is more alive to me. Or, most likely, maybe it is stupid to think you can read Classic English Literature in the commercial breaks for South Park.

I don't watch much South Park because I am too busy. But I caught a great episode, "Christian Rock Hard," a rerun from a couple of years back. The boys are starting a band, but Cartman sucks, so the other guys kick him out, and he bets them $20 that he can get a platinum album doing Christian music before the other guys get a platinum album. Then he takes pop songs and replaces the word "baby" with "Jesus", a testament to the blandness of most Christian music these days. But the love songs Cartman picks are about, ahem, adult situations. I laughed and laughed. Cartman gets his million records sold to the adoring CCM community, but the Christian music execs give him a "myrrh" album instead of a platinum album. Cartman loses the $20 bet that he sold all those records to win (and he spent all the money from his recording contract on an enormous celebration of his winning the bet). He can never go platinum (but he can go "double myrrh", what a great line). In anger, he curses Jesus in public and his audience evaporates.

There is a parable in the Gospels about reserving judgment of others until the Judgment Day exposes all people for what we are, at Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43. Here is a good homily on it. I was thinking about this today because it came up in the sermon (we were visiting Aldersgate Methodist in Brigham City). I will have a profounder thought on this later, I hope. But one of the reasons I like that South Park episode is that Cartman has his Day of Judgment for his hypocritical salesmanship of slop to the naive Christians.

I am creating a backlog of promised postings: Hubris, Gay Marriage, and now the Final Judgment. And I also need to do one on our awesome pumpkins. But that's it for tonight.

Update [11/8]: Yikes. I was rereading this post and noticed a misuse of word that I just hate. I have been somehow infected by this word. It is "testament", as in "a testament to the blandness of most Christian music these days.", meaning "evidence of". Hmmm... I just looked it up on Google, which sent me here, and it turns out "evidence of" is now an accepted usage. But that says to me that the word has deteriorated from "statement of belief; credo" and "will". Another casualty of the mush-mouthed MTV generation, I guess.

Hubris

As Machiavelli says in The Prince,

"Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach."

In other words, try too hard.

That is the story of these first several weeks of my semester. I have finally yielded to the wisdom of my betters and agreed to drop a class. The time pressure has been too much; I barely saw my wife and child last week, much less entertained all my loyal readers ("example of letters of invitations to a musical", I am talking to you). I am readying a long thought on homosexual marriage, having been inspired by some other blog post somewhere.

Today at church I got to explain to a friend, who is teaching the class, why I was dropping. He was cool about it, for which I am grateful.

I have been reading more interesting books. I just finished A Grief Observed by CS Lewis for the first time, and it was quite revealing and sharp; he wrote it after his wife died. But I think I should've known that book-reading is not the only barometer of success.

I'll take suggestions for my first new book. Email me at the address depicted in this picture.

I feel sad that I wasted a great word like hubris on a title to a short post like this one, so I'll write on Hubris, Part II soon.

A large hard drive

Utah State University's remodeled science library opened recently (also replacing the old generic library, I understand). I was interested in reading the artificial intelligence journals about learning. I couldn't find any. I looked up Artificial Intelligence in the catalog and found out it was in this thing called BARN. I looked at the map of the library and noticed this BARN thing on several different floors. Oh, I thought. There's stacks or something. So I tried the first floor, but that corner of the building was under construction, so I figured I couldn't get in.

I wandered around on the second floor where the current journals and newspapers are, but I couldn't find it, so I checked the map again. BARN, this big rectangular thing in the corner of the map, it was there. I wandered around stacks and journals and study rooms until I finally got to a study area where a woman was reading something in a chair. There were these windows to my right, and I expected to see more study rooms. I looked and everything clicked.

"There are shelves, Neo... endless shelves." My first impression was "human beings are no longer born... they are grown," as I stared out at a four-story-tall warehouse of books. I was behind a window in a wall, so I didn't have vertigo. While I watched, a robot almost like a little forklift wheeled out into the distance, then raised the entire belt to a distant shelf, a miniature little cube of shelved, bound journals, lifted it out of its rack, then carried it down to an exit point and slid the shelf off the robot arm, presumably to be processed by a human once it reached the outside. I watched entranced for a moment, realization washing over me. If anyone had been watching, I would have been embarrassed. But I just thought it was extremely cool.

A few other thoughts occurred to me. First, it might be harder to read for my thesis if every article request required robotic assistance. I don't know what the policy is about checking out multiple journals at once, but I might have to check a few out, return, check a few more out. Maybe photocopy a lot. I haven't found out yet how inconvenient this will be. Second, this thing is like a large hard drive. It seeks out data (in blocks of large predefined size), moves an arm to retrieve the block, brings it back into a more accessible area where a librarian can give it to you (call it a cache), and then a bit of that block of data is actually used for real work. There are more metaphors too, like system call and address space and seek time. And you are a CPU in this scenario. Third, and connected, I find it interesting that we have followed a computer-science model pretty closely to work with our ink-and-paper information. Even our analog is becoming digital. To quote The Matrix again, "Whoa."

I didn't read the map very carefully, or I would have known that BARN means "Borrower's Automated Retrieval Network".

It's a pretty cool new library, but I have started to wonder if I will need to take trips to Salt Lake City and the University of Utah to carry out this research of mine. Or maybe I will become the Interlibrary Loan's best customer. I just don't know if there are enough books here.

I get letters

Searches, that is. To this point I don't know if I have succeeded in communicating much on this blog. Maybe indirectly. I get few comments and no emails. But the name of this web site causes a certain class of people to find me. All of the examples are within the last 12 hits on the blog, people searching like this:

"example of letters of invitations to a musical"

Dear Patron of The Arts,
Come see ___[lead actor]___ and ___[lead actress]___ light up the stage at ___[theater]___ in this ___[adjective]___ production!
Sincerely,
Art Purveyor

"sample moving memo letter"

Once more unto the paper jam, dear friends, once more
Or fill the toner up with our Cubiclish dead!

"free letter of explanation"

This letter does not explain this sentence, which means what this phrase says, which is that this sentence does not explain itself, but the rest of the sentence explains the beginning of the sentence, and this is the rest of the sentence.

"examples how to make a letter for a child go out for vacation"

Free subscription to Letters and Papers for the first reader who can parse this search. "child go out"? Or "letter for a child" "go out for vacation"? "go out" "for vacation"? None of the beads on this string make sense to me.

"sample letter explain poor credit rating"
"sample letter escape situation"

Seriously, these ones make me sad and I don't plan to make fun of them.

Victory in the spam war

Attention: we have won the spam war completely, at least in my mailbox. We can't declare total victory until middle-aged men stop clicking the links for C1A7i5, and we all pray they do, but Spam Assassin has obliterated spam for me.

How do I know? I received a spam today. Huh? Am I being paradoxical? Not at all, just read what I received:

Re: Bernardo Hansley Meidictions
[omitted a few headers]
socecivaxaamprvilepr
maleallinabiozagviop
brexis $um $xenacra $traecia
170 30 pi161 90 pi 135 30 pi
llslls lls
get additional info

If I can't even read the advertisement or figure out what it is for, why send me the email? There were no links or pictures. It didn't cost me any brain cells to delete this piece of trash. Maybe Thunderbird is doing some work for that too.

Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons

How Brains Think

Actually, as fascinating as the subject is, I don't totally care. But I am reading How Brains Think, by William H. Calvin, and not just for my neuroscientific education. I have zeroed in on a broad research area for my MS, and it has to do with thinking. So, I am learning evolutionary explanations for how this pile of meat feels conscious and how learning works. It is challenging me, but I don't mind. So Nick, since you lent me this book 5 years ago or so, I hope you are happy to know that I got around to this eventually.

My research topic revolves around learning and thinking. I had been chewing over topics in artificial intelligence, and came up with it walking down the hill after a lecture by the resident network security professor at USU, Dr. Erbacher. Basically, the department is trotting out all the professors to talk about their research. I have been listening carefully to all of them to see if they like to think about what I want to study.

So far the closest to my interests has probably been the lovable, a bit wild-eyed professor Hugo de Garis, who wants to bring about Ray Kurzweil's Singularity and phase out the human race in favor of superintelligent machines. He makes artificial brains by evolving neural networks at hardware speeds, using FPGAs, and then downloads them to PCs that can run the programs. He is making a mine-seeking robot dog for DARPA, but he is mostly just interested in the brains. He gave a spellbinding, wide-ranging lecture on his research and the coming Singularity (when artificial intelligence will be evolving too fast for us to predict the future of the technology or even [horror movie organ interlude] the human race).

My topic was inspired indirectly by Dr. Erbacher though. He visualizes network traffic by changing connection logs and data flow into pictures. This makes it easier to spot patterns and detect network attacks. His lecture was excellent too, but one thing bothered me: his visualizations depend on a human looking at the picture and interpreting it (as far as I understood him). I thought afterwards about whether computers can interpret things, even things they've never seen before. I came around to the idea that computers should be able to create abstractions, but can't.

I think I talked about this earlier, but the trend in the way we interact with computers is toward higher-level abstractions. You used to have to speak 1s and 0s to work with a computer; as time has gone on, we have created ways to summarize a lot of those 1s and 0s when we talk to computers. Among many other things, this trend makes it easier over time to create useful software and information.

Unfortunately, it has up to now been all on people to pull the computers into intelligence. Even learning approaches to artificial intelligence, which have shown some great success, have run into a ceiling, summarized as follows by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig in Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Very powerful logical and statistical techniques have been developed that can cope with quite large problems, often reaching or exceeding human capabilities in the identification of predictive patterns defined on a given vocabulary. On the other hand, machine learning has made very little progress on the important problem of constructing new representations at levels of abstraction higher than the input vocabulary.

In other words, computers are not creative in the sense that they can find patterns in disparate ideas, name them, and reuse them to think about a problem in a simpler manner. If we want computers to have a knowledge base to draw on to solve problems, we have to put it all in by hand.

What would a computer do if it could make up words? Learn like a person, but voraciously, at DSL speeds, by reading the Wikipedia? Reveal hidden mysteries? Talk back?

Anyway, I think that is what I want to do for the next two years. That's why I'm reading How Brains Think: I actually need to know, in order to make a computer create abstractions. Was it safe to unleash me on this problem? God alone knows.

That is, if any of the professors will take me.

streetprophets.com

Note: http://www.streetprophets.com/ is a liberal religious community site that spun off of Daily Kos. I like it quite a bit. I posted the following comment there; it explains a little why I consider myself a Protestant but not an evangelical. I added a few explanatory notes in square brackets.

I have bobbed up and down in my Christian faith over long periods of time. I am a Christian today because I think Jesus died and then lived again, but the beliefs surrounding that belief have been morphing slowly, ever since I became a Christian at age 18.

Once, I considered myself an evangelical because I believed it was truly important to believe certain things about X, Y, and Z; if you didn't, you were in a precarious, possibly deadly position. The evangelicals believed that too, so I fit right in. I tried to define truly important beliefs sharply, to find real traditional orthodoxy. It was a big project for me to learn what all Christians have believed, to come to my own mere Christianity.

I understood the futility of this endeavor a few years ago. I was leading a Bible study and met one of the guys in it by chance one day. I explained to him that I'd spent a lot of time taking apart the engine of Christianity, analyzing it to pieces, and very little time putting the engine back together, slapping it in the car and driving. I realized it was true as I was saying it, so I had a new project: to live out my Christian life with less emphasis on true belief than on integrity, true action.

Down the road, I realized that it was foolishness to set myself up as a judge of the orthodoxy of other beliefs, and thus a judge of other people who believed those things. I could trust God to manage his details, to see truly what I glimpse darkly. I also didn't understand the meaning of the line in Romans, "For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all." [Meaning at least that God's salvation works in mysterious ways, and questions of heaven and hell are too deep for us to know.]

Another realization came when Fred Clark of Slacktivist said, in a post on Left Behind, that evangelicals lack metaphor [not evangelical people necessarily (Hi Dad!), but evangelical ideology]. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it was true. That was probably my decisive break with evangelicalism.

I still consider myself a Protestant Christian, but I don't feel guilty about voting for Democrats. Or thinking subversive thoughts about God, Jesus, and church. Or asking hard questions of my faith. Life has been much better ever since.

Religion and a-religion

Posted this at Daily Kos:

...

One prejudice some secular Democrats could do without is this: religious people must have blind, irrational spots where their religion touches reality, while secular people have thrown off the shackles of the oppressor and stopped drinking the narcotic Kool-aid of the masses, and are such great Vulcan logic machines that if you prick them, they bleed green.

In other words, religious people have failed where freethinkers have succeeded, to find objectivity and a rational way to live in the world. As Maher put it [on Real Time with Bill Maher: "That - people of faith - and when I hear 'people of faith' I think, well those are people who suspend rational judgment for nonsensical ******** that they believe." ... "No - I had a mental block when I was a child when they taught me this nonsense and when I got to be an adult, I got over it." ], he grew up, but I never did. Pardon me if I'm not convinced; let me just point out that the same claim may apply in reverse, equal and opposite: religious people have found a rational way to live in the world while freethinkers have failed.

Without prejudging the outcome of a debate between religion and a-religion, just think about how unhelpful these equal and opposite arguments are in formulating the basic questions about life, the universe, and everything.

It's up to religious people, like me, to counter that prejudice by talking about what real religion looks like (and not sounding like idiots in the process), and to reject our fellow believers' truth-avoiding behavior.

It's up to non-religious people to take seriously the rumors that religious people can think, and to take with a grain of salt the rumors that religious people are so far-gone in their distorted faith that they are willing to ignore evidence that contradicts their faith in order to retain a sense of peace and integrity about their place in the world. I'm not saying you will never run into people with a distorted religion; I live in Utah, after all, where a lot of people grow up believing a religion just because it's what their mother and father believed and they know in their heart that it's true.

But there is a middle ground for religious politics. Here is a mission statement for religion we should all be able to agree is sorely needed and sadly distant from religion in public life in America:

"Religion is patient, religion is kind. Religion does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. Religion is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Religion does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Religion always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

No matter what religious stripe you paint on your sleeve (including transparent, or paintless), "Religion does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth" ought to be the hallmark of religion in politics for the Democrats. The differences between this and the religious politics of the right are obvious.

A short note

I am feeling a little better. I started rereading The Magic of Recluce by L.E. Modesitt. I read it in high school or so and enjoyed it, but I felt like I didn't understand it exactly. This book spawned a series that is still going strong a decade later. I stopped reading it when I got to one that spoiled the surprises for me, Fallen Angels, I think it's called. Hover over the note [SPOILER ALERT] to see why.* On rereading, I am enjoying myself more and the spoiler seems more obvious to me.

It has felt a lot better to be reading some fiction. I got some work done last night too and I felt like I might be able to manage this school business.

It came from beneath the sermon

The last couple of weeks, I have had trouble concentrating during the sermon. Maybe I am missing things that would be really valuable to me, I don't know. But instead of staring silently at the pastor, I decided to write.

Here's clips of things I wrote:

[on emotion and worship]

But emotions are made for the outpouring of our hearts to God and others. They betray our inner life that we keep masked. When we are finally so angry that we can't contain it, we yell or slap the table. When we are so sad, we weep. When we are amused, we laugh.

... When we can't contain it any more, we praise him with our lips and our lungs, we sing him songs. We talk about him without stopping. We betray the life we have kept masked, strip away veneers of dignity and sufficiency, strip away our silence and our rationality...

[on truth and storytelling]

... arguments about true and false rest on truth, not truths. We cannot beat against facts with theories or reason from the general to the specific.

If this is all Hume was saying, it's not much. Scientists don't claim to beat against the facts. Theories are not true. Approximations to the truth have degrees of truth. Stories are truth-telling, but not true.

But who would say there is no knowledge in science or wisdom in stories?

...

[on journalism and narratives]

Beware anyone who tells stories in narrow contexts. They are shielding their interpretation from the facts. There is no such thing as a competing narrative. Stories do not compete: instead they are adequate or inadequate to the facts. When you hear about competing narratives, you are hearing about a large story pared down to selective, narrow facts.

Journalists write articles nowadays that purport to give equal time to competing narratives, or equal criticism to competing parties. They do this by selecting slices of truths in order to maintain the appearance of objectivity. But the truth is that objectivity is faithfulness to the whole story, the large story, all the facts. Objectivity means that truth resides in the facts, not the theory that opposite narratives are equally true, or the theory that opposite parties are equally sinful or deceptive. ...

I can't recommend inattention to everyone, but I know it's not always the worst thing in the world.

And the worst part is

I don't even have time to read. Yes, readers, you know your life is dangling around by your ankles and dragging you into a jagged chasm of despair when you don't have time to read.

I mentioned this to Sarah the other night and she commented to the effect that going days without playing with your son and seeing your wife might also give you a clue about the state of your life.

But it's not exactly true; I have been able to see Sarah and Alex on the weekends at least, and some lazy Thursdays. And it's not exactly true that I can't read. I have several textbooks to read and things to learn. In fact, I am basically drowning in things I need to get up to speed on.

But I am starved for stories, for fiction, for a little escape from the grind. I don't read when I walk around campus, on the bus, on my breaks. So my emotions are getting duller too, I think. And I bring a less lively mind to my problems. I am not being surprised and joyful at the new things I'm learning, even though they're incredibly cool. And I have this permanent headache now, throbbing while I listen to music.

Music is great, but it is a poor substitute for a glimpse of real life beyond this incredibly hard semester. Music just makes me feel asleep these days instead of awake. I am not bringing my humanity to it, I am not singing along.

And I worry that my life may turn into this permanently, a furious struggle to get out of debt and make someone else's dreams come to life, then die.

God, let it not be so; show me something to read.

Long week

I think I've mentioned that I have 12 semester credits of computer science this semester. 6 of them are graduate credits. I am also working about 20 hours per week.

So last week all my juggling crashed. I had a presentation to do (will actually do tomorrow), an assignment I can only accomplish on campus, that used proprietary software that I can't afford, and an assignment that I didn't have the proper tools to do. On my half day, Friday, when I usually have nothing to do after 1:30, I was at school until 8 PM.

We spent the weekend unwinding. I saw a truly excellent football game on Saturday morning (Purdue and Minnesota, with 2 or 3 overtimes and superb rushing on both sides), and Sarah and I got out a little bit together and just relaxed. We watched Prince Caspian and Voyage of The Dawn Treader that evening. It was the first time we could sit and watch TV quietly together in recent memory. Usually I am parenting before 8:00 and working on computers after 8:00.

So I owe people emails and such. I was especially glad to hear from my brother, and I'll be writing to him soon.

This week I am looking forward to an orderly school experience, which will eliminate the need for a violent bloodbath.

Free GMail invites

I just read a Wall Street Journal article that said that Google's GMail internet mail service is not easy to obtain. Here: http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050922.html

I thought everyone had an account who wanted one, but in case you don't, I have 99 free invitations to anyone who wants to get their GMail account now. Why 99 invitations? Because I just sent one to to the author of the article.

I have enjoyed GMail; the time it takes to set up a label (= folder) is trivial. Email filtering into the folders can be automatic if you set it up; I'm sure it's no easier in any other mail service. I have 21 labels at the moment, and almost as many or more email filters. I have enjoyed a spam-lite or -free mailbox every day since I signed up for this thing. All my email gets forwarded to me there now.

So email me for your brand new GMail address today. They're not going anywhere fast.

Fedora Core 4

Oh yeah, after a bit of tugging with SUSE 9.1, I decided to bite the bullet and install Fedora Core 4 (which is Red Hat Linux with a different name). To do this, I needed to download 4 CDs worth of installation material.

Joshua, the guy I was sitting next to in AI class while I downloaded this stuff in the lab, said that was awesome. Or cool. You breathe a sigh of relief when you're the companion of friends like these.

Anyway, it took me a while, and I found out a few interesting details about Firefox on the way (Google "why is firefox so slow" to find out how to make it faster), but basically everything about my Linux setup works now. I like working over there much better than in Windows, but I need to know a few more details to use it effectively. Fortunately, Linux is like Windows without the chastity belt, and I can explore to my heart's content. So the answers will come, I'm sure.

Defining moments in marriage

[Sarah starts to hum "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Grieg's Peer Gynt]

Dan: What are you humming?

[Sarah hums louder]

[Dan joins in, then starts humming too loud and tapping his foot]

Sarah: Dan, stop it.

Dan: Sorry, this song really moves me. [pause] It's about dwarves.

Crappy

I just ran across this crappy sentence in a reading and writing textbook at work:

An article by Penny Oldfather of the University of Georgia explains how a positive classroom culture and teachers who try to attain an empathetic understanding of their unmotivated students’ perceptions can help them accept and become engaged with literacy learning.

Hold, American Cicero! Why art thou wasted on pedagogy? Get thee hence to the public square, that the unwashed rabble mayst marvel all at the depth of thy masterful oratory. Pretend no false humility!

Kids read better when their teachers understand them inside out and teach toward their problems.

Sheesh.

Puzzle Pirates

So there's this online game called Puzzle Pirates. Basically, you do puzzles, and you're a pirate. You're in a big world full of other pirates (people from around the world) doing piratey things. I suggest you download it and start with a doubloon ocean (these basically require cash to get items, but are free to play indefinitely).

This devilishly clever game makes activities like bilging a pirate ship and firing its cannons into games of Dr. Mario and Bejeweled. The better you play, the better the ship performs. As time goes on, you can captain your own ship, join the commodities market, or become president of an island, all involving mastery of puzzles. Beyond that, you can blockade another group, start wars against the other players, play politics. On your break, you can get into fights and drinking games at the inn.

The interesting thing is that every ship is a set of interdependent systems: get hit by a cannon, then the bilge comes faster into the ship, and you can't sail as fast; fix the hole with carpentry and the bilge problem goes away; sail faster and you can navigate better in battle. It's possible to have computer pirates take over some of these systems, but the best ships have real people working in concert. And of course, the higher-level battles and blockades require intense coordination.

It's fascinating that a bunch of people can conjure this kind of game, but really this kind of community, out of thin air. It's also fascinating that the people who excel at this game can do puzzles really well; it's a pre-built social structure for the chronically shy.

Check it out.

That sick feeling

I had a dream last night about that sick feeling. It was kind of post-apocalyptic, kind of spy thriller. I remember talking to some really strange people in very burned-out hovels, that kind of thing.

Anyway, we were stealing this very important purple flower, important like athelas, say, from my parent's house in Seattle, where someone evil had set up a headquarters. By this time I was in control of the dream for some reason, but instead of getting myself out of the house to safety after picking up the flower, I found myself thinking, ok, what's the worst thing that could possibly happen. The kind of thing that gives you that sick feeling when you're watching a movie, and they think they're safe, but slowly, out of the shadows comes the evil killer.

So I controlled the dream so I got captured by this evil person, and I got that sick feeling, no way out and then the dream wouldn't end. I don't remember exactly what happened next, but I know it kept going.

I think there is a lesson in there about storytelling. The last time I remember a book really doing this to me was Misery. Read it.