Garbage in, garbage out – coping with a Procrustean world

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, conformity, artificial intelligence, infinite extrapolation

In 1961 Kurt Vonnegut published "Harrison Bergeron", a sly, ironic projection of the social trend toward conformity that had blighted the prior decade, particularly in Europe. If you've never read it, get the PDF from Google Docs and read it right now. It's just five pages. Then come back and continue.

Kurt Vonnegut wasn't the first. One of the better stories to incorporate enforcement of "equality" was published in March 1954: "The Ambassador" by Sam Merwin, Jr. It appeared in IF: Worlds of Science Fiction, and is reprinted in The 31st Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack. In the Megapack volume, it is 58 pages in length, and treats two issues in equal measure: enforced conformity and excessive reliance on computers to make societal decisions.

To be brief, in "The Ambassador" a newly appointed ambassador from Mars to United Earth causes a ruckus by complaining of useless trade goods being sent to Mars, with little recourse for sending them back. It's reminiscent of the trade wars in the 1700's that prompted the New World colonies to pull away from Britain…consciously so, as some musings attributed to said ambassador reveal. On a United Earth all significant decisions are made by a computer (the term artificial intelligence is not used, and indeed, would have been unintelligible to a 1950's readership; headlines of the time were just getting cranked up with "electronic brain" hype). Science fiction writers of the time used the suffix "-ac" for such global computers. Isaac Asimov published "The Last Question" in 1956, which included first Multivac, and finally Galactic AC. Nobody in the 1950's dreamed that computers powerful enough to forecast weather would one day fit in a half-dozen pizza-box sized trays in a rack about half a meter square. Merwin has Sylac, followed by Elsac, and finally the ultimate, Giac. I don't know what the prefixes mean, but Giac is supposed to be infallible. It is also enormous.

Sorry to be a spoiler: the climax of the story revolves around the reliability of the input provided to the computer. GIGO: Garbage In → Garbage Out. The present conniptions around the "hallucinations" of GPT3 and now GPT4 illustrate the problem equally well. Giac doesn't get destroyed—world peace depends on it—but a newer synergy of its use is begun.

The secondary climax of the story turns out to be not so easy to resolve: nearly everyone being expected (that is, required) to wear gaudy eyeglasses and disfiguring clothing so that nobody is seen as "superior". THAT situation isn't solved in this story, just as "Harrison Bergeron" has a go-nowhere ending (which is exactly what Vonnegut wanted!).

I built a career on designing and building computer software that relied on humans to do what humans do better than computers, and handed the things humans do badly (calculations, primarily) over to the computer. The synergy works well. I see the proper use of artificial intelligence as a co-operative endeavor between machine powers and human abilities. See Asimov's story "The Feeling of Power" for his take on the dumbing-down of those who use hand calculators but were never taught arithmetic. If all I need is an "engineering quality" answer of 3 significant digits, I can usually get it quicker with my old K&E slide rule. Not many folks alive today have even seen a slide rule (two-digit math I can do in my head). Even with those skills, I like Microsoft Excel for wholesale computations.

But conformity! It's actually xenophobia expressed as a cultural virtue. It will take another ten to 100 generations to drive it out of the human psyche, if it is possible at all. The best we can do is to look carefully at the cultural norms around us, conform where we don't want to make waves, and march to our own drummer otherwise. Maybe one would have fewer friends thus, but they'd be better friends.

While I am at it, Sam Merwin is one of the more imaginative writers of his generation. I'm glad I got the Megapack. I've read several of such volumes, and decided to not review them since they're two generations out of date. But a story like "The Ambassador" is timeless.

Confront the alien within to be ready for the alien without

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, SETI, speculative musings

Did you ever play the Birthday Game? If you have a gathering of 23 or more people, ask them, "What are the chances that at least two people here have the same birthday?" You'll get all kinds of responses, and perhaps someone who knows this already will say, "Better than half." If you're comfortable with analytical math, this website shows how the probability with 23 people is just over 50.7%. This article from Scientific American is a bit more accessible.

More generally, if you have a large number of possibilities (N) and a much larger population to sample from—for example, millions of balls numbered 1 to 10,000—, how many items must you select (S) from the large population to have a 50% or greater chance of having two of them that are the same? If you select 90 balls from the example, is there a better-than-half chance that two of them have the same number? It turns out that the crucial factor is the square root of the number of possibilities divided by about 1.2. That is:

S > (√N)/1.2

For the example, where N = 10,000, S is at least 83, and is probably 84. I said above "about 1.2" because the divisor ranges up to 1.25 as N increases into the millions or more.

This is pertinent to the question of DNA compatibility between Earth life and any life that may be found on a faraway planet, assuming that the alien life is also DNA-based. 

We can analyze it thus. The DNA codon-to-amino acid coding table has 64 DNA 3-letter codons that select among 20 amino acids, with three of the codons used for a Stop signal to the ribosome. Clearly, many or most of the amino acids are selected by at least two codons. The number ranges up to 6 for Leucine, an amino acid with a specific shape that is apparently "most dissimilar" to the others. Seven other amino acids are selected by 4 codons each.

Here is how the table looks, for most Earth life: 

What might it happen if it were rearranged? We must assume that the translations were arrived at by random processes via natural selection (or by careful design by God).

As it happens, this table is used by all eukaryotic life and nearly all prokaryotes…but not all. An article I read listed 16 minor variations used by certain rare bacterial species. This is evidence that various minor changes to the table don't automatically produce "incompatible" organisms; the 17 known DNA variations all exist on the same Earth. What of larger changes?

Some time ago I calculated that the number of possible rearrangements of this table, keeping the DNA codons in the order shown, but moving the amino acids about freely, is about 10⁷⁰, a number with 70 or 71 digits. If we keep the codons in groups of the same size as those shown, effectively rearranging just 20 grouped items, the number of possibilities is closer to 20!, or 2.43x10¹⁸. That's 2.43 billion billion. A lot.

Now let's play the birthday game with 2.43 billion billion. Its square root is 1.56 billion; divide by 1.25 to get 1.25 billion. Simply put, we would need to collect DNA from DNA-bearing species on more than a billion planets in order to have a 50% chance that some pair of them would have compatible DNA coding tables, and we'd need to sample about 10³⁵ species to have a 50% chance at an exact match. I wonder how many aliens (if there are any) use reproductive machinery that doesn't depend on DNA?

For those who think space aliens in UFO's (UAP's) are kidnapping people for genetic experiments, I suggest it'll be a long time before the aliens find a compatible species to ANY of those that might be "out there." Human-alien hybrids are out of the question.

The above represents my own musings, based partly on prior research, as I read The Alien Perspective: A New View of Humanity and the Cosmos, by David Whitehouse. Mr. Whitehouse doesn't get into any of the stuff above; that's all "me". What he does get into is a longish history of the precursors of SETI, of SETI itself, and of its successors that are ongoing. SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, is (was?) a radio telescope-based search for radio signals emitted by intelligent beings in stellar systems close enough to our Solar system that we can receive the signals and recognize them. More recent programs look for laser signals and possibly gamma-ray signals.

The historical portion of the book is followed by increasingly speculative discussion of what might occur upon First Contact; it's nothing like what Carl Sagan had in mind, almost certainly. To my mind, a gigantic cover-up is most likely, and the author leans in that direction to a lesser extent. Unless, of course, First Contact is more like the early part of Independence Day, globally obvious. In that case we're toast anyway; no teen hacker would be penetrating the security protocols of an alien computer that is running an alien version of Windows 9,127 or (more likely!) Linux 7,704, with help files in an alien language. Let's remember, there are a few dozen human writing systems we have not yet deciphered. What kind of script could encode Dolphin or Elephant or Squid language? Alien will be far less "obvious".

The author seems to waver between the views that aliens will be benevolent or malignant. However, he then considers that we tend to project our own fears and hopes and dreams (and nightmares) upon our anticipation of First Contact and continuing contact. This portion of the book is of real value. It clearly indicates to me that we need to get our own mental house in order, or we'll be so unprepared for First Contact, whenever it may occur, that we'll destroy ourselves before any malignant aliens could do so, and with more finality than any benevolent aliens could restore. You got it, folks: In my view, First Contact will be a portent of Doom, no matter what "they" are like.

That said, I found it hard to read the book. Not philosophically, but because the poor writing kept distracting me. Run-on sentences abound, as do partial sentences. It's almost like the placement of punctuation was frequently chosen at random. Don't authors employ copy editors any more? Maybe that's considered too expensive, but it's a false economy. I know I'd charge a helluva lot to edit text I find so disconcerting. Call me a glutton for punishment; I read the whole book through anyway.

How long is the Universal Keyboard?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, frequency, vibration

Once in a while I encounter a book with a wholly fresh idea, an unexpected view of a subject. Such a book is What the Ear Hears (and Doesn't): Inside the Extraordinary Everyday World of Frequency, by composer and musician Richard Mainwaring.

Frequency is related to everything physical. In the 1970's I worked on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), and sometimes I would arrive early and read in the campus library. I was on the top floor, the tenth, one day, when the building began to shake. The elevator shafts began a regular Click-Click, a little longer than a second apart. Alarmed, I found a phone and called campus security. They said, "Oh, Dr. Richter is on the roof shaking the building with his earthquake machine." The machine was a strong variable-speed motor turning an off-center weight. I learned that the building is full of strain and motion sensors, and Dr. Richter (of the Richter Scale) did such experiments from time to time, to learn the resonant frequencies of the structure and how it responded to various frequencies.

Something less planned but no less alarming happened in South Korea when a tall building began to shake, rather badly. This building is much taller than the CalTech library. The "culprit" was not an earthquake, but a Tae Bo class of 23 people, stomping and taking lunges in unison, on the twelfth floor. Their workout was on the resonant frequency of the building. Mainwaring tells us that building engineers installed equipment to dampen and counter resonance in the future, making the building safe for fitness classes in the future.

For the frequency of anything to persist, it must stimulate a resonant system. For example, a tuning fork, when struck on something like the edge of your hand, oscillates at a characteristic frequency, such as the "standard A" at 440 Hz that is used to tune up an orchestra or any modern musical instrument. If you consider a tuning fork's reaction in detail, it is stimulated by the strike with a wide range of frequencies, but those that it cannot resonate with vanish quickly, leaving the frequency it is calibrated to.

In order to make all the frequencies he writes about relevant to readers of the book, the author attaches them to popular musical compositions, saying things like, "…the Techno Mart tower of Seoul gets vertically excited whenever it hears the opening G of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (eleven octaves lower though…)". To unpack this: That "G" is 196 Hz (Hz, or Hertz, designates cycles per second, using lots fewer letters). Eleven octaves is the 11th power of two, or 2,048; 196/1,024 = 0.19 Hz, or a period of 5.2 seconds.

Early in the book the Infinite Keyboard is introduced, starting with the standard piano keyboard. A piano can play 88 notes, and at 12 notes per chromatic octave, that comes to seven-and-a-third octaves. The highest note on a piano is C8, with a frequency of 4,186 Hz, and the lowest C on the keyboard is C1, with a frequency of 32.7 Hz. These have a ratio of 128:1 because each octave, from C to C, encompasses a doubling of frequency, or a halving if counting downwards. The lower 1/3 of an octave ends on a low A (A0), with a frequency of 27.5 Hz. This is just a little above the lowest tone that most people are able to hear, 20 Hz, a "note" midway between F#0 (19.44 Hz) and G0 (20.6 Hz).

However, people in their teens and younger can hear many sounds higher than C8; the limit is about 20,000 Hz (AKA 20 kHz), which is a D# more than four octaves above C8. How long would a keyboard need to be to play that note? Each octave has a width of 165 mm (6.5 inches). That D# would then be 2.25x165 = 371 mm or about 14.6 inches further. At that point, it gets hard to reach both ends! This ignores the different widths of the white and black keys on the keyboard. The author does the math in the background so the reader doesn't have to.

Once that is set up, a survey of (almost) the entire realm of frequency begins with the author's pick for the lowest note in the universe, a slow oscillation of a galaxy-sized plasma jet with a period of 18.5 million years. He reports the frequency as 0.000000000000002 Hz. I dickered around with the figures and refined that a little: 0.0000000000000017 Hz. This is a B, 57 octaves, plus one note, below middle C. How far is that on the Infinite Keyboard? 9.4 meters, or almost 31 feet to the left. This shows the power of the logarithmic transformation between frequency and music notation.

At this point, let us touch on scientific notation. Very large and very near-zero quantities are cumbersome when written out. Thus, that low tone is better represented as 1.7E-15 Hz. "E-15" means "ten to the minus 15th power", which puts 14 zeroes in front of the "1", locating it in the 15th decimal place. More familiar numbers such as a million, or 1.0E+6 or one-billionth, or 1.0E-9, ought to make this comprehensible.

So this keyboard is getting long. It won't fit in your living room any more. Fast-forward to near the end of the book. The very low note was discovered by a space telescope called Chandra using gamma rays. These are some of the highest frequencies in the universe. X-rays and gamma rays are not usually reported in terms of frequency, but energy per photon. Photons of light have enough energy to stimulate the dyes in our cone cells, but not enough to do damage. Visible light photon energies range from 1.77 eV to 3.1 eV, while UVC, the ultraviolet rays that cause skin damage, have energies in the 4-5 eV range. The unit eV is "electron-volt"; 1 eV is the energy of an electron accelerated by a one-volt difference between two electrodes.

The X-rays that are used by your dentist or bone doctor have energies in the range 10,000 to 100,000 eV. They are called "penetrating radiation" because they'll easily go through flesh but not through bones or teeth. Gamma rays are much more energetic, in the millions to billions of eV. The most energetic gamma ray detected had an energy of 1.4 peta-eV, or 1.4 quadrillion eV. That's 1.4E+15 eV…about a million billion times as energetic as visible light. What frequency might that be? There is a proportionality constant that cranks out the frequency as 3.4E+29 Hz. On the Infinite Keyboard, that's a C# just over 90 octaves above middle C, at a distance of nearly 14.9 meters, or 48'-9". Put this together with the distance below middle C of the low-low note, and we find we need a total keyboard length of 24¼ meters, or just over 79½ feet. Hm! Eighty feet. That's all we need of an "infinite" keyboard to encompass all the frequencies ever detected.

That got me thinking: How long would the keyboard need to be to encompass all possible frequencies that "fit" in our universe? I would call it a Universal Keyboard!

• The lowest possible note is one that began at the Big Bang and has just completed one cycle, with a period of 13.8 billion years, or 4.35E+17 seconds. It is a "note" between E and F, 66.6 octaves to the left of middle C.
• The highest possible note is one with a period equal to the Planck time, or a frequency of 2.95E+42 Hz. It lies between C and C#, just over 133 octaves to the right of middle C.

The sum of these octave ranges is 199.7, and thus the full length of the Universal Keyboard is 32.95 meters or 108 feet. Building lots in my neighborhood are 100 feet wide. This keyboard would have to be placed on a diagonal to fit in the lot, and you'd need a big, big house with a basement rumpus room at least 75 x 80 feet in size, or more to have room to play the highest and lowest notes.

But beware: as you approach the highest notes, there is danger. Actually playing the top note would force a new Big Bang, and create a new universe. Your basement room would not survive, nor would the rest of known creation.

I've gone far beyond the author's scope. There's plenty to do with "only" 80 feet of keyboard: all of known science. I haven't touched on most things he gets into. I'll leave that up to you. I didn't recognize nearly any of the musical pieces the author uses to anchor our understanding of this note or that note, but that's OK. You might…read this book! Great fun.

Can American Christians be aroused?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, persecution, christian testimony, history

Will it come to this? A law proposed in California two years go would require the persecution of Christians who own businesses if they do not promote the "rainbow agenda" of wokeness. Fortunately, it was not enacted. Don't think that Invertors* will not try again.

You, reading this, may be someone who considers "Woke" to be some cool trend, the "thing to be". The leaders and promoters of Wokeness have a very different idea: Control of the masses, for whom they have enormous contempt. Wokeness is extortion, it is evil, and it is the latest weapon of totalitarians in the United States and throughout the West, to subjugate everyone to their control.

Persecution of Christians and Jews simmered along at a low level for about a hundred years in America. It is now exploding. The arson of church buildings is one glaring symptom of this disease.

Christian writer Eric Metaxas recently published Letter to the American Church, in which he likens the modern trends to those existing in Germany in 1932, and the lassitude of American Christians and Christian leaders with the inaction of the German pastors 90 years ago. Mr. Metaxas wrote a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the prophet to German Christians, who was martyred by the Nazis. His exposition is based on what he learned while researching that book.

The author wastes no time getting to his point: "The German Church of the 1930s was silent in the face of evil; but can there be any question whether the American Church of our own time is guilty of the same silence?" I will proceed mainly by annotating certain quotes from the book.

The author writes to the "American Church." I understand what is behind the terminology, but the theology of most varieties of Christianity is flawed, so I prefer the term American Christians. Biblically speaking, there is no "American Church", nor "German Church", etc. With that in mind…

The tragedy of American Christianity is that nearly all have bought into the pernicious notion that we must not be "political." Indeed, many states have laws that deny the right of preachers to speak on political subjects or to publicly take any political stance. Many Christians piously (sniffingly) pronounce, "We just pray, we don't…" speak out, vote, or whatever. The proper term is Cowards.

We are called by God to stand for His righteousness and against evil. Evil is afoot today. Do we dare? In the Introduction, p10, we read

If anyone would feel that believing God has chosen the American Church for such a vital role somehow smacks of an egotistical nationalism, they have already bought into the Marxist and globalist lie that America is nothing special…

One may think a prophet is proud, and even say, "How do you know what God wants?" A proper prophet is humble, not arrogant, but knows for sure what God has said. Again and again in the books of prophecy in the Bible God tells a prophet, "I will make your forehead flint," to enable the prophet to withstand criticism and opposition. No proud person can withstand determined opposition, only a prophet, one submissive to God's sending, can do so. In Chapter 1, "What is the church", pp14, 18:

Where did we get the idea that we shouldn’t be at the forefront in criticizing the great evil of Communist countries like China that brutally persecute religious minorities in ways that bring to mind the Nazis themselves?

…it is an inescapable and painful fact: if the churches in America are not free to speak on any topic and in any way that they choose—and if they voluntarily go along with this view—then no one in America is truly free, and America herself has effectively ceased to exist.

Not only should we be speaking out against Chinese persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, and not only should we denounce such persecution elsewhere, such as in Burma, we must even the more denounce it in America, or we, or our children, will indeed one day be thrown to the lions. The Woke in particular are enemies of the right to speak freely. Their attitude is that only the Woke have the right to speak at all. This is the most anti-American, and Antichristian, sentiment there is.

God judges evil, and He judges those who are complicit in evil by their silence, as we read in Chapter 6, "The spiral of silence", p60:

God is no respecter of persons, and if we believe we are exempt from His judgments, we will learn the hard way that we are mistaken.

Bonhoeffer wrote, "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act. God will not hold us guiltless." (quoted on p58) Do you prefer to "not get involved"? To serve God is to be involved. To be uninvolved is to be not Christian. That doesn't mean we all have to volunteer at homeless shelters or preach on street corners (but doing those things more than they are now done would be a very good thing). It means that, when you encounter evil, speak up. If you see a group beating another, perhaps you are afraid to kick a few butts and break it up: Then call 911. Several times if necessary. Always mention that weapons are involved; the police will come faster. Is that a lie? A lie to save a life is no sin. The few good Germans who hid Jews in their homes in the 1930s lied to the SS. God will reward them.

Of course we know (most of us) that our good works do not earn us a place in God's kingdom. But "if we have faith that will bring us to Heaven, we will inevitably do good works." This is from Chapter 8, "The church paralyzed", p77. Jesus called His disciples to be "the light of the world." The world was very dark when I was in the Jesus Movement in the 1960's, and darker when I began to meet with a proper local church in 1972. It is much darker now.

We call our God a God of love, and He is. But there is such a thing as tough love, as we read in Chapter 10, "Speaking the truth in love", p92. Some Christians overdo things, pushing others away with their "truth", but

The opposite of this is an equal problem: to show so much "love" that you are misrepresenting the real love of God, and are forsaking God’s truth in the process.

God warned certain prophets that if they neglected to warn the wicked, who then died in their sins, the blood of the wicked ones would be counted against the prophets. Dear silent Christian, does this describe you? Whose blood is on your hands because of your silence? Do you fear to "offend" someone? The teaching of the Cross is offensive, even called a Scandal (1 Corinthians 1:23). Without it, all perish forever.

Later on p77 the author writes of two off-balance attitudes, that of the "fundamentalists" for whom "truth" is everything (even though most "fundamentalist" "truths" are incomplete or misleading!) and of "progressive" Christians who take the facts of the faith so lightly it seems they have no faith. I would add those who speak so much that "God is love" that they forget there is a Hell for those who persist to their grave in denying God.

In Leviticus 11 we read of the clean and unclean animals. Ignoring bugs and even birds for the moment, we see two characteristics of a clean mammal such as a sheep, goat or deer: It has a cloven hoof (also called a "straight foot") and it chews the cud. It must have both characteristics to be clean. The swine is pointed out as being unclean because, though it has a cloven hoof, it does not chew the cud. Camels and rabbits are pointed out for the opposite defect: they chew the cud but have paws rather than cloven hooves.

Proper Bible expositors apply these things in typology to two opposite kinds of Christian practice. We may call one Rule-Followers, and the other Experiencers. A large number of denominations are so much into rule following that they deny any value to experience. They explain away entire chapters that include the word "gift", even distorting scripture to say that such things are no longer with us. An equally large number of denominations are so into gifts and experiences that they mostly ignore righteousness and truth in any area that might require self control. God wants His people to have both a righteous walk according to the truths found in the Bible, and experiences in our human spirit that frequently refresh us with personal contact with God. Such experiences may include ecstatic prayer and "tongue speaking". That's Biblical. The sad fact is that the rule-followers are unhappy (except for a certain self-righteous glee when they see sinful others), while the experiencers are seldom righteous, falling into besetting sins that make the rule-followers gleeful with unholy Schadenfreude.

Let us go on. There is a telling simile near the end of the book, which I will pull forward for this point. The appearance of a genuine prophet among us will often cause many to "clutch their pearls and lift their skirts and express their horror at it." (p135). Prophets are rather "wild". Guess what, so was Jesus. Do you sort of skip past the portions in the Gospels that describe Jesus twisting reeds into a whip, lashing the money-changers in the Temple, and overturning their tables? Is this Jesus too wild for you? John the baptist was wild. He wore a camel-hide cloak and ate locusts and wild honey. Elijah was described as "a hairy man", and probably not only for having a big beard. Real prophets are scary. They are supposed to be. In Chapter 14, "Justifying ourselves", p121:

But the goodness of God is a wild and unpredictable goodness, infinitely far from the pious and “religious” tameness so many of us have mistaken for the real thing.

Very near the beginning of my Christian life I realized something and I began to tell others, "God doesn't want a religion, He wants a relationship." Few accepted such a word. Those that did, I later encountered among the genuine local churches I encountered in 1972. On p.124 the author quotes Bonhoeffer, that perhaps we need a "religionless Christianity". Yes, we do. This was considered heresy in the 1930s, and is still considered heresy today by many. The fact is, there is only one true religion: Judaism. The Christian church was never supposed to become a religion. The Christian faith is not a religion. Religion is practices and rules, a checklist that you can hang on your wall, but you cannot do it. A robot could do it, but you cannot. Faith is a relationship with a divine Person, Jesus Christ. Having this faith has several characteristics:

• You get great fulfillment from reading the Bible, particularly reading aloud.
• You love other believers.
• You find yourself helping others you might have ignored before you knew Christ.
• Whether prayer on any particular day is easy or difficult (it will be both!), you touch the joy of the Spirit when you pray.

There are others, but that is a good beginning. But what do we see on the "Christian landscape" that is American Christianity? Almost 10,000 denominations and other named groups; there are only about 8,000 verses in the entire New Testament! Peter preached of Jesus, "There is salvation in no other, for neither is there another name under heaven given among men in which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12) And Paul wrote, "Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?" (Galatians 3:3). Names glorify the flesh.

Some Christians ask, "Which denomination is the right one?" The answer is, "None of them." A genuine local church is not a denomination. Terms in the New Testament such as "the church in Ephesus" are not names, but descriptions, naming the locality in which the believers live, and nothing more. 

In 1932 Bonhoeffer appealed to the 12,000 pastors of German congregations. The term "pastor" is a misnomer. The Greek word just means "shepherd" or even "caretaker", and doesn't refer to a church leader, but to any believer who is caring for another believer, leading that one to know God better. In a proper church with 100 members, there is not a "pastor" but 100 shepherds. A church does have elders (always multiple, always), and elders teach, but the commission of any teacher, according to Ephesians 4:11-12 is to perfect others, that is to teach them to teach. A younger brother asked once, "How could I become an apostle? I'd like to travel to care for the churches." I answered, "Pick out an apostle and follow him around, such as brother so-and-so," naming a very useful brother we both knew. The genuine apostles I have known were always eager to train and perfect younger ones in apostolic functions.

To whom would a modern Bonhoeffer appeal? He would appeal to all serious believers, "Drop your differences. Denominationalism is the Devil's masterpiece. Get together to denounce evil in your midst. Teach your fellow believers to recognize the totalitarian impulse in every ambitious person, and rebuke it. Drive out of your congregation anyone who insists that Woke ideology be accepted or, worse, practiced." He would further say, "Tear down the signboard that has a blasphemous name upon it. Dis-corporate the denominational corporation and re-incorporate if you must, with no distinctive, religious name. Find like-minded believers and groups of believers and fellowship with them. Ignore different practices that are not heretical or idolatrous. God hates division." Let us raise up real churches, not social groups that may or may not teach the Bible. Such churches just might have the spiritual power to drive away Wokeness. At least for a time.

In Revelation 12 we read of a universal woman who bears a male child "who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron." The great dragon waits to devour the child (so it isn't Christ, who was born in a stable). The woman is helped by God to avoid the dragon and flee "to the wilderness" on "great wings as an eagle". Many good Bible teachers in America consider that this "wilderness" is the U.S.A., or North America, which is defended by a great ocean (the wings) on either side. But there is a warning in this passage. The term "wilderness" just might be literal. Will America survive as a thriving, prosperous, free nation all the way until the Lord's return? Will it become a literal wilderness, so wild and unruly that it affords the fleeing "woman" (persecuted Christians) a place to hide?

Let us strive to fulfill in our lives what we find in Psalm 69:6,

Do not let those who wait on You be put to shame because of me,
O Lord Jehovah of hosts;
Do not let those who seek You be humiliated because of me,
O God of Israel.

On one hand, the Woke must be resisted, and in particular, poked fun at. As in Psalm 2, "He who sits in the heavens laughs." On the other, Wokeness is only the latest salvo in Satan's war on Christian faith and expression. Don't expect it to wither away so easily. When the end times are truly here, Wokeness or something like it will seem to prosper and overcome everything. Even then, let us remember what God said to Elijah when he thought he was the only righteous man left in Israel, "I have left Myself 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed unto Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him." 

My words are few, and may have little effect. Please get this book and read it, prayerfully.

_________________________________________________

*Invertors: those who invert the truth, based on Isaiah 5:20,

Woe to those who call evil good,
And good evil;
Who put darkness for light,
And light for darkness;
Who put bitter for sweet,
And sweet for bitter!

These days, such Inversions include saying that men can give birth; or that "gender" is "assigned" at birth, when in reality, the sex of a child is OBSERVED at birth, based on physical characteristics that are determined by biology.

Our emotion-conveying technology

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, writing systems, scripts, philology

The study of writing is not really the study of language; so says Silvia Ferrara in The Great Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts. The book was translated from Italian by Todd Portnowitz. The author leads a collaboration, INSCRIBE, for Invention of SCRIpts and their BEginnings. They use a synergistic stockpile of methods, including deep learning, to tackle the remaining undeciphered scripts of the world.

My next-in-age brother and I, when very young, were enamored by a Table of Alphabets in the family encyclopedia. We have both retained interest in the subject, though he took it much farther than I, becoming a professional calligrapher in several script traditions including Japanese and Egyptian. As a job, that doesn't pay well, so he became a professor of art history. I went the IT direction, and retained the interest as an occasional hobby. I have always been fascinated by the multitude of non-Latin scripts. The endpapers of Gideon Bibles have John 3:16 translated into many languages, primarily in non-Latin scripts such as Sinhalese. Here is a smattering of lovely aperiodic crystals that I extracted from Google Translate:

The source statement is a bit hyped, but it refers to something in the last chapter of Greatest Invention: while lists of "great inventions" based on surveys with many people have "writing" some 30 places down the list (making the book's title rather ironic), several great inventions further up the list would not have been possible without writing. Yet the author has shown that writing really wasn't a necessity for carrying on a civil society, and several cultures came and went without having a writing system. Although it occurs to me that perhaps the lack of record-keeping doomed those that vanished. And not all "writing" can be committed to paper or papyrus (or clay tablets): the Peruvian quipu, or knotted string, recording system seems to be a full-featured "script". It's like a 3-dimensional alphabet.

In the translated texts above, only the latter 3 are alphabetic. Mandarin is not purely ideographic as is commonly thought, but is a combination of ideographs and phonic elements. Japanese and Korean are similar, but Japanese has two other writing systems that work together with the "square" Chinese-style characters called kanji ("Chinese writing"). These are hiragana and katakana, which are pure syllabaries. In a syllabary a consonant (or two) combines with a vowel, all represented by a single character (glyph). Hiragana characters are used to add inflections (Chinese has no inflections, but Japanese has plenty) and numerous words that have no kanji; katakana characters are used to phonetically spell out non-Japanese words. That makes Japanese the most complex writing system I know about.

Amharic and Gujarati are syllabaries of a style called abugida; this is explained briefly in the book. Hebrew, while it is called an alphabetic script, is semi-syllabic because although a few vowels are included as glyphs, most vowels are either understood in context or are explicitly indicated by dots and other small diacritics attached to consonants. Note that this Hebrew sample includes no diacritics.

The author's particular obsession is the undeciphered scripts. Some were clearly scripts conveying real languages. Others are more mysterious, such as the Voynich Manuscript; a part of one page is shown here. Philologists are still very divided over whether there is a language behind its unique set of characters, or if it is a hoax. The latter view is supported by the many illustrations that portray plants and animals that are not and never were.

I never figured out what the "nine mysterious scripts" are. The author discusses numerous writing systems, including many scripts that have yet to be deciphered; also many that are known, even though they are now defunct. It will be interesting to learn if the INSCRIBE project cracks any of them. Perhaps "deep learning" will help.

By the way, "deep learning" is actually "shallow but very wide learning". If the human mind is like the Mississippi River, deep and powerful, the best "deep learning" AI systems are like the Wind River of Wyoming: half a mile wide, half an inch deep, and prone to flowing uphill when the wind is right.

"Latin is a dead language,
it's plain enough to see.
First it killed the Romans,
and now it's killing me!"

Speaking of dead languages, my brother and I, ages 11 and 8, tried our hand at Babylonian cuneiform. We carved styluses from chopsticks. We used red clay from a stream and let our scribed-on tablets dry in the sun for a couple of days. Then we tried to fire them by putting them in the oven, set to broil. Apparently they weren't dry enough, because they exploded! Curious boys do curious things. Luckily, the oven wasn't damaged.

Whatever the nine scripts really are, this is definitely a book worth reading.

Some stories actually go somewhere

 kw: story reviews, collections, short stories, poems, sketches

The latter 3/5 of 2023 Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and a ton of others, did only a little to improve my opinion of the volume. I didn't read past the first page of about a third of the 38 remaining pieces. Of those I read, there were only a few more pointless stream-of-consciousness pieces, a smattering of tolerable items, and then there was actually a poem that I liked, in spite of its being "free verse" (which means "not verse"), and three more items that made me react, "I'm glad I read that".

The first of these is "If Your Dreams Don't Scare You" by Joni Tevis, published in the Georgia Review. The theme is hazing in the context of a marching band. I was in a high school marching band for 3 years, and I'm glad there wasn't a hazing tradition at my school. The skills we had to learn, and the sarcastic comments from one of the band directors, were bad enough. About a third of the story reviews hazing mishaps around the country that made national news (or should have)…like deaths.

The second is "Half Spent" by Alice McDermott, from Sewanee Review. The story gradually reveals hidden depths in a widow who'd been thought a "silly goose" (my term, not the author's). Her passing showed she had a much greater connection to her community than her late, somewhat-lamented husband.

The third, which made me weep, is "Too Attached" by Whitney Lee, from The Threepenny Review. A doctor attends a woman with a dying pre-born baby, which finally miscarries. Later the woman tries again, and delivers safely, attended by the same doctor. The doctor muses over being too attached to this couple, that such attachments might cause her to leave the profession. This is a real risk. During her last year my mother was attended by a lovely nurse; she became so attached that, as Mom failed, the nurse had a nervous breakdown and had to turn over the caring duties to another nurse. But she managed to be there when Mom died.

The poem I liked is "Screensaver" by Robert Cording, from The Common. An elegy to a youngster who died, it proves that stream-of-consciousness has a proper use. Very touching.

That's a poor harvest of goodness from 66 pieces. The volume as a whole gets this from me: