BARD figures it out

 kw: analysis, artificial intelligence, experimental linguistics, mathematics, computer science

Continuing my exploration of the capabilities of BARD, I asked it about some computational and mathematical matters, starting with one that was relevant to recent work I have been doing. I'll comment along with each interaction this time.

P07: Two angles are related by the function A = arctan(sec B * tan B). Given A, what is B?

Bard: The given function is not invertible, so there is no unique value of B that corresponds to a given value of A. This is because the tangent function is periodic, with a period of 180°. This means that for any value of A, there are infinitely many values of B that will satisfy the given function.

For example, if A=45∘, then B could be any value in the range (−45∘, 45∘). Or, if A=90°, then B could be any value in the range (−90°, 90°).

In order to find a specific value of B that corresponds to a given value of A, you would need to specify additional information about the problem. For example, you might know that B is an acute angle, or that B is a right angle.

P07: In the above problem, both A and B are in the range 0° to 90°.

Bard: In that case, there are two possible values of B for any given value of A. For example, if A=45°, then the two possible values of B are 45° and 135°. This is because the tangent function is positive in the first and third quadrants, so the two possible values of B are the two angles in the first and third quadrants that have a tangent of 1.

In general, the two possible values of B can be found by solving the equation

[recast by P07]                  tan B = ± tan A / sec B

For example, if A=45°, then this equation becomes

[recast by P07]                  tan B = ±tan 45° / sec B = ±1 / √2

Solving this equation, we find that the two possible values of B are 45° and 135°.

The original statement is correct, though not only for the reason BARD presented. This is an example of a Trapdoor Function. If angle A is known, it is straightforward to calculate angle B. But if only B is known, finding A requires an iteration, such as successive applications of Newton's Approximation.

BARD treated this like a Diophantine problem, and ignored the restriction of B to (0°, 90°). Further, the answer is incorrect. Tan 45° = 1, sec 45° ≈ 1.414, so 1 is being equated to √2.

P07: Are you able to chart a function?

Bard: Yes, I can chart a function. I can use the following steps to chart a function:

1.       Identify the domain and range of the function.

2.       Choose a few values of x and calculate the corresponding values of y.

3.       Plot the points (x,y) on a graph.

4.       Connect the points with a smooth curve.

For example, let's chart the function y=x². The domain of this function is all real numbers, and the range is all non-negative real numbers. We can choose a few values of x, such as x=0,1,2,3, and calculate the corresponding values of y, such as y=0,1,4,9. We can then plot the points (0,0), (1,1), (2,4), (3,9) on a graph and connect them with a smooth curve. The resulting graph is a parabola that opens upwards.

P07: Can you draw the chart?

Bard: I can't draw a chart for you here, but I can give you a description of the chart of y=x².  The chart is a parabola that opens upwards. The vertex of the parabola is at (0,0). The x-axis is the line of symmetry of the parabola. The parabola approaches the x-axis asymptotically as x approaches ±∞.

This is just as I expected; BARD is linguistic in nature, and has no graphical capabilities...yet!

P07: What is the integral of Sqrt(sec(x)*tan(x))?

Bard: 

The line above needed to be a picture.

To solve this, we can use the following steps:

1. Let u = sec x. Then du = sec x tan x dx.
2. Substituting gives us:

Code snippet

∫√sec(x)tan(x)dx = ∫√u du = 2√u + C = 2√sec(x) + C

where C is an arbitrary constant of integration.

Use code with caution. Learn more [link to https://bard.google.com/faq#coding]

There may be hundreds of calculus books that contain this derivation. No "generative text" was needed.

P07: Can a computer store the exact value of an irrational number?

Bard: No, a computer cannot store the exact value of an irrational number. This is because computers store numbers in binary, which is a finite representation of numbers. Irrational numbers are infinite, so they cannot be represented exactly in binary.

For example, the number π is irrational. It is a non-repeating, non-terminating decimal number. This means that there is no finite sequence of digits that can represent π exactly. If we try to store π in binary, we will only be able to store an approximation of it.

The same is true for all other irrational numbers. They cannot be stored exactly in binary, so they can only be approximated.

However, this does not mean that computers cannot use irrational numbers. They can still perform calculations with irrational numbers, as long as they are aware that the numbers are being approximated.

The only quibble I have with this answer is the word "they" in the last sentence. Computers aren't aware of anything. It should read, "…as long as those using the program are aware…"

P07: What is Green’s Theorem?

Bard: Green's theorem is a theorem in vector calculus that relates a line integral around a simple closed curve C to a double integral over the plane region D bounded by C. It is the two-dimensional special case of Stokes' theorem.

In mathematical terms, Green's theorem states that

Code snippet

∫CF⋅ds=∬D(curl F)⋅k dA

Use code with caution. Learn more [link to https://bard.google.com/faq#coding]

where

•         F is a vector field defined on a two-dimensional domain D
•         C is a simple closed curve in D
•         ds is the line element along C
•         dA is the area element in D
•         curl F is the curl of F, which is a vector field that measures the circulation of F around a point
•         k is the unit vector in the z-direction 

Green's theorem can be used to solve a variety of problems in physics, engineering, and mathematics. For example, it can be used to 

•         Calculate the flow of a fluid through a region
•          Determine the area of a plane figure
•          Find the centroid of a plane figure
•          Solve boundary value problems

 Green's theorem is a powerful tool that can be used to simplify and solve a wide variety of problems in vector calculus.

BARD then referred to the Wikipedia article on Green’s Theorem, and suggested three Google searches on the topic. I then asked about one term used in the description.

P07: What is the curl of a function?

Bard: In vector calculus, the curl is a vector operator that describes the infinitesimal circulation of a vector field in three-dimensional Euclidean space. The curl at a point in the field is represented by a vector whose length and direction denote the magnitude and axis of the maximum circulation. The curl of a field is formally defined as the circulation density at each point of the field.

In other words, the curl of a vector field is a vector that measures the rotation of the field around a point. The curl is zero at points where the field does not rotate, and it is nonzero at points where the field does rotate. The direction of the curl vector indicates the direction of the axis of rotation, and the magnitude of the curl vector indicates the magnitude of the rotation.

The curl of a vector field can be calculated using the cross product. The cross product is a mathematical operation that takes two vectors and produces a third vector that is perpendicular to both of the original vectors. The direction of the cross product vector is determined by the right-hand rule.

The curl of a vector field can also be calculated using the curl operator. The curl operator is a mathematical symbol that represents the curl of a vector field. The curl operator is written as a counterclockwise cross product, and it is applied to the vector field.

The curl of a vector field has many applications in physics and engineering. For example, the curl of the velocity field of a fluid is used to calculate the vorticity of the fluid. The vorticity of a fluid is a measure of the rotation of the fluid. The curl of the electric field is used to calculate the magnetic field. The magnetic field is a vector field that describes the direction and magnitude of the magnetic force.

The curl is a powerful tool for analyzing the behavior of vector fields. It can be used to calculate the rotation of a vector field, the vorticity of a fluid, and the magnetic field. The curl is an important tool in physics, engineering, and other fields.

BARD referenced a Wikipedia article on the subject. In an alternate draft BARD added:

The curl of a vector field F is denoted by ∇ × F. In three dimensions, the curl can be computed using the following formula:

Where F1, F2, and F3 are the components of function F.

Not being a vector calculus expert, I had to ask for the definition of the inverted delta.

The symbol ∇ is called the nabla symbol. It is a triangular symbol resembling an inverted Greek delta: \nabla or ∇. The name comes, by reason of the symbol's shape, from the Hellenistic Greek word νάβλα for a Phoenician harp, and was suggested by the encyclopedist William Robertson Smith to Peter Guthrie Tait in correspondence.

In mathematics, the nabla symbol is used to represent the gradient operator in calculus. The gradient is a vector that points in the direction of the greatest rate of change of a function, and its magnitude is equal to the magnitude of the rate of change.

The nabla symbol can also be used to represent other vector operators, such as the divergence and the curl. The divergence is a vector operator that measures the outward flux of a vector field from a surface, and the curl is a vector operator that measures the circulation of a vector field around a point.

The nabla symbol is a powerful tool that can be used to represent a variety of vector operators in mathematics. It is an important symbol in vector calculus and has many applications in physics, engineering, and other fields.

Sources:

1. brainly.in/question/12687051 
2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabla_symbol 
3. mathoverflow.net/questions/289607/mathematical-objects-whose-name-is-a-single-letter  

BARD did what I would have done, look these things up in Wikipedia and math sources such as those it listed following its response. Green's Theorem was the bugaboo of a Senior-level course in Physics I took many, many years ago.

Here we see BARD doing less linguistic generation and more copying of sources.

Bard versus BARD

 kw: analysis, artificial intelligence, experimental linguistics

I was invited by Google to use BARD, their version of ChatGPT. I decided to do various experiments, not to "trip it up", as some have done, but to learn its range. In the terminology of generative language models, faulty results are called "hallucinations". The process used by BARD and its kin to produce responses is a kind of stream-of-consciousness musing based on probabilities, so in my view, it's all hallucinatory anyway! And when it's wrong, it's just wrong.

I first tested BARD against The Bard with three prompts. I will comment after the transcript of the three results.

P07: Write a short summary, up to 300 words, of The Tempest by Shakespeare.

Bard: The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, probably written in 1610–1611, and thought to be one of the last plays that he wrote alone. After the first scene, which takes place on a ship at sea during a tempest, the rest of the story is set on a remote island, where Prospero, a complex and contradictory character, lives with his daughter Miranda, and his two servants: Caliban, a savage monster figure, and Ariel, an airy spirit. The play contains music and songs that evoke the spirit of enchantment on the island. It explores many themes, including magic, betrayal, revenge, and family.

Prospero is the rightful Duke of Milan, but he was usurped by his brother Antonio and his allies, the King of Naples and Sebastian. Prospero and his infant daughter Miranda were set adrift at sea, but they survived and landed on the island. Prospero used his magic to create the storm that shipwrecked his enemies on the island. He then uses his magic to control the events on the island, manipulating his enemies and testing their characters.

Prospero's main goal is to get revenge on his enemies, but he also wants to teach them a lesson about the consequences of their actions. He eventually forgives them and returns them to their rightful places in society. The play ends with Prospero giving up his magic and returning to Milan with Miranda and Ferdinand.

The Tempest is a complex and fascinating play that explores many themes. It is a story of magic, betrayal, revenge, and redemption. It is also a story about the power of love and the importance of forgiveness.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest

P07: Write a short soliloquy in iambic pentameter on the subject of triumph over loss.

Bard: I have lost all that I held dear,
My loved ones taken from me so soon.
I have fallen to my knees in despair,
And begged for the pain to just end soon.
 

But then I remembered something I had heard,
A saying that gave me new strength and resolve.
It said that even in the darkest of hours,

There is always hope, if we just believe.
 
So I picked myself up off the ground,
And wiped away my tears.
I knew that I had to keep going,
For the sake of those I had lost.
 
I would not let their deaths be in vain,
I would live my life to the fullest,
And make them proud.
 
I would triumph over loss,
And find joy in the world again.

[This one had two other Drafts]

 2) Soliloquy

I have lost so much, I have lost it all.

My dreams, my hopes, my loves, they all have fled.
I am left here with nothing, not even a shred
Of what I once had, of what I once held dear.
 
But I will not give up. I will not despair.
I will find a way to triumph over this loss.
I will find a way to rebuild my life, to start anew.
I will find a way to be happy again.
 
I know it will not be easy. It will take time and effort.
But I am strong. I am resilient. I will not give in.
I will triumph over this loss. I will find my way back to happiness.
 
I know that I am not alone. There are others who have lost as much as I have.
And they have found a way to move on. They have found a way to be happy again.
So I will not give up. I will find my way back to happiness.
 
I will triumph over this loss.

 

3) 

I have lost so much in this life,
I have loved and lost, and loved again.
I have cried and laughed, and felt the pain
Of heartbreak and the joy of gain.
 
But through it all, I have learned to triumph.
I have learned to rise above my pain,
To find the strength to go on,
Even when all seems lost.
 
I have learned that loss is a part of life,
But it does not have to define me.
I can choose to let it destroy me,
Or I can choose to use it as fuel to grow.
 
I choose to grow.
I choose to triumph over loss.
I choose to live my life to the fullest,
Even in the face of pain.

P07: Please write a sonnet in Shakespearean style that names Alice

Bard:

Oh, Alice, thou art fair and true and kind,
A gentle soul with beauty to beguile,
A heart that's pure and free from all guile,
A face that's bright with love and smiles divine.
 
Thy eyes are like the stars that shine at night,
Thy hair is like the raven's wing so black,
Thy lips are like the rosebud's tender pink,
Thy cheeks are like the peach's downy cheek.
 
Thy voice is like the songbird's in the dell,
Thy touch is like the zephyr's on my brow,
Thy presence like the summer's balmy spell,
Thy smile like sunshine on a winter's day.
 
Oh, Alice, thou art all that's good and fair,
A gift from heaven to bless my life here.

My evaluation:

The first paragraph of the summary of "The Tempest" is lifted directly from the Wikipedia article referenced at the end. The rest is a pretty good summary of the plot of the play. It doesn't mention the Masque, or play-within-a-play, found in the last Act.

The soliloquy is presented in three versions. Frequently BARD has produced three drafts and then has presented the one it "thinks" is most likely to fulfill the prompt. None of the three drafts comes even close to Iambic Pentameter in more than a handful of lines. All three are much closer to "free verse" (which I don't consider to be verse at all). The second stanza of the second draft can be most easily reworked into IP:

But I will not give up, will not despair.
I'll find a way to triumph o'er this loss;
Rebuild my life; a way to start anew.
And find a way to happiness regain.

The sonnet's rhyme scheme is messed up. It should be ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Instead it is ABBA CDEF GHGI JJ. Rhyming "kind" with "divine" is OK; Shakespeare did worse. Also, switching the 3rd and 4th lines of the first stanza would fix the rhymes, and the 3rd line needs a syllable somewhere to match the meter, perhaps adding a short adjective before "guile". The other two quatrains are irredeemable. Were I grading this for a middle school student, it would get a "B".

There you have it. BARD is fun. BARD is growing. It will be interesting to rerun these prompts in another year or two. I ran other experiments, to be reported soon.

A slight improvement

 kw: book reviews, short stories, mainstream fiction

In spite of repeated disappointment I still, on occasion, will read a "best of" volume of short stories that are not (primarily) science fiction. The most recent is The Best All-American Short Stories, edited by Andrew Sean Greer. It represents a series I have not encountered before, so I can't be sure what I see in it is characteristic of any trend in mainstream fiction as a whole. I am optimistic that the small uptick in the quality of ideas in this volume is a positive sign.

Firstly, in a volume of 20 stories, while there were only two stories I marked with ++, and five others I gave just +, there were "only" five I marked "gn", meaning "goes nowhere", and only two that I stopped reading almost immediately because they were going into territory I don't wish to visit. One story had a Voodoo basis, and while I finished reading it, I don't think I should have. Eight stories that I did finish reading, I didn't like or felt were at best so-so. I recent years, there are a number of volumes I haven't reviewed at all because, after four or five "unfinishable" stories in a row, I discarded them; and there were a few that consisted of more than 50% "gn" stories (skillful writing that is worthless, in other words).

I will comment on what I actually liked.

• 
  "The Beyoǧlu Municipality Waste Management Orchestra" by Kenan Orhan: The genre is magical reality in a totalitarian setting in an exaggerated Istanbul. I generally don't care for fantasy, but this is very well done, and portrays a stark view of people trying to be themselves in spite of pervasive oppression. The "detention facility", rapidly growing to engulf the city, in which, finally, the guards are incarcerating one another, is a fitting symbol of the goal of the totalitarian impulse.
• "The Sins of Others" by Héctor Tobar takes the trend of shifting blame to an extreme. The protagonist is a "designated replacement" for an entitled person who has committed a crime, and serves time in his place. Need I mention that the "replacement" is a minority? This and the prior story got my ++. The next 5 were +.
• "A Ravishing Sun" by Leslie Blanco: The outward story is recovering from trauma. The story being told is what happens inside. Ordinarily I disdain stream of consciousness. Here, it is the right tool for the job, handled very well.
• "Detective Dog" by Gish Jen: In the face of CCP's pervasive surveillance a woman manages to tell family truths to a teen. It's hard to say more than that without giving too much away.
• "The Meeting" by Alix Ohlin: Company acquisition/merger. The story dwells on the tension between the dramatically different styles of the founder and the purchaser. It ends in disaster, but not what you might expect.
• "The Ghost Birds" by Karen Russell is set soon after the extinction of the last birds. Some people can see bird ghosts (second sight isn't mentioned) carrying out their seasonal migrations.
• "Mr. Ashok's Monument" by Sanjena Sathian: Mr. Ashok doesn't obtain a monument, but becomes one. More magical reality, with a message in metaphor.

Seven out of 20 isn't too bad a record for a modern collection of mainstream fiction.

Science is what humans do

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, history of science

In his book Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science, author James Poskett sets out to demonstrate that "The Enlightenment" and the Europe-centered history of how modern science developed is a myth. He succeeds in part, but only in part.

The caricature of scientific development that my generation learned in grade school goes something like this: The old Greeks mainly thought and argued and argued and thought, and then wrote down their conclusions. The writings of the most famous ones, such as Aristotle, became dogma that was considered The Truth for a couple of thousand years. We heard about long arguments regarding the number of teeth horses might have, but that nobody bothered to open a horse's mouth to count the teeth. Greek culture fell into decline, until their writings were discovered by Arabs and translated into Arabic. Finally, with the decline of Islamic culture, these translations, and some Greek language original documents that were preserved, were rediscovered in Europe, as a new, more experimental culture used them to jump-start a scientific revolution based on observation and experimentation. And voilà, the modern age came about. Of course, that's over-simplified; Horizons goes a long way towards leveling the playing field.

It is no surprise to learn that, when the Spanish entered South America, they found that the people had sophisticated knowledge of the natural history of the plants and animals. It makes sense that any thriving culture has to know at least which creatures in the forests around are safe, or dangerous, and perhaps medicinal. In the early chapters of Horizons we read that the Incas and Aztecs passed on much of their knowledge to Spanish doctors and priests, and that various documents produced by both the Spaniards and Indigenous people were sent back to Europe. Similar scenarios ensued wherever Europeans came into contact with Indigenous peoples.

By the 17th Century "natural philosophers" (the old term for scientists), and priests and doctors with natural history interest or training, accompanied voyages of trading in goods or slaves or armies. It makes sense; then as now, nobody seems to be willing to pay for science to be done for its own sake, but businessmen and military leaders will pay a lot for science to be done for the sake of commerce or conquest. There have been visionary national leaders all over the Earth who have sponsored or supported science, at least in part for the sake of science, but there has always been an element—often the dominating element—of commercial and/or military interest.

In later chapters, the early sciences of India and China are discussed. Science in these regions also developed independently, but once the Age of Sail began, cross-pollination between these cultures and those of Europe accelerated scientific development in all regions. The cross-pollination between the sciences of the New World and the Old was less robust, but it was still critical to both agricultural and medicinal sciences to develop on both sides of the Atlantic.

We read that Newton used enormous amounts of others' findings worldwide to develop his science, which culminated in his Principia Mathematica; and later that Einstein obtained inspiration "from everywhere". Perhaps you've read of a fascinating quantum "object" called a Bose-Einstein Condensate, in which a collection of atoms are induced to cohere into a single quantum state. Who was Bose?

If you know any particle physics, perhaps you know that in the Standard Model, the "matter" particles such as the electron are called "fermions" and the "force" or "field" particles such as the photon are called "bosons". Fermions are named for Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, and bosons are named for Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. Other than a few physicists and physics geeks like myself, nobody in the West even knows that roughly half of quantum physics is based on the work of scientists in (or from) India. Just by the way, both Bose and Einstein were fine musicians. Nearly all scientists have some kind of musical affinity; it goes with the mathematical mind.

It seems as though Mr. Poskett aims to denigrate European contributions to scientific development in favor of a more global view. Does he overdo it? I think so, a little. I believe it is worthwhile to bring all the global scientific contributions into a more equal footing. But it is a mistake to push back too hard on the Europeans. European exploration, including the conquests and all, was the catalyst that brought together roughly a dozen robust scientific traditions, setting up a cross-pollinating explosion of experimentation and research.

A book this dense is not a page-turner. One doesn't read it as a novel; it rewards more measured perusal. The author packs a great many facts into its 400+ pages. I did have to push aside the polemical character of some of the writing. It is still very worthwhile reading.

Global arson

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, speculative fiction

The third section of Terraform: Watch | Worlds | Burn, edited by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans, contains 17 stories, nearly all in the darkest of moods.

One, "Mammoth Steps" by Andrew Dana Hudson (a play on mammoth steppes) has a hint of hope. The tundra is being restored by restored woolly mammoths, tended by cold-resistant mahouts. The oldest mammoth, and presumably the one with the largest proportion of elephant genes, decides to travel south. It's like an adopted child looking for a birth mother.

The stories range from evocative to puzzling; an example of the latter is "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried" by Debbie Urbanski. The author's sense of time hops around, seemingly at random, beginning with the supposed last resort, "human extinction". Some of the items are imaginary (one hopes), such as "bomb auto plants"; others may be possible in the future, such as "biodegradable bullets"; and others are aspirational/unlikely, such as "Coca-Cola removes polar bears [from advertising]".

Bruce Sterling shows up with "Brain Dump", a tale of hacking on another level, told with insufficient punctuation, in a patois that's intended to sound like a Ukrainian learning English.

Does "Dream Job" by Seamus Sullivan, about outsourcing sleep, describe the ultimate outsourcing? I no longer recall who wrote, "Why should we live? Our computers will do that for us."

I suppose the stories were intended to be depressing. They generally are. Most are also extrapolation beyond absurdity. Take a clue, folks: depression is not motivation.

Worlds of warning

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, speculative fiction

Continuing my review of the trilogy Terraform: Watch | Worlds | Burn, edited by Brian Merchant and Claire Evans, the section Worlds contains 18 stories, including one graphic story with minimal words ("Reach" by Mattie Lubchansky). All, very broadly speaking, present a "world of warning". 

Rather than world-building of the sort employed by Jerry Pournelle and Jerry Niven in the Ringworld series, or Isaac Asimov in the Robot/Foundation series, these stories present nearly one-dimensional worlds (with mostly 2D characters) as a fait accompli in which we get to imagine ourselves. Of course, the point is to induce repugnance because the aim of the series is to motivate people to avert the societal and technological trends that might lead to these extremes.

"Drones to Ploughshares" by Sara Gailey, for example, has a mid-level autonomous drone as the PoV character, tasked with finding and eradicating deviations from the corporately-mandated norms of agricultural practice. It is an Echo model, and from the designations of other drones and robots, has greater autonomy and greater powers, and apparently greater "intelligence", than models Alpha through Delta, but less so than a Foxtrot model. The designations are from the phonetic alphabet used by military radio operators; Ham radio operators use it also (In the 1950's the list began with Able, Baker and Charlie). This story, unlike most in the volume, is hopeful. The illustration is loosely based on my recall of the story, without the ag background. 

It has long been a trope of science fiction, also of polemic fiction (these stories are both), to single out a "what if" and drive it into the ground. 

Robots feature in most of the stories. They represent our existential fears of AI takeover, exacerbated by recent over-hyped developments being called AI, including the DALL-E software I used to make these illustrations*. Even more fears are evoked by stories like "Plantation | Springtime", which seems to be loosely based on the Borg of Star Trek fame, except prisoners are those being altered.

The stories are well written and enjoyable to read, while also evoking uncomfortable responses. That makes them particularly effective, though I am not sure how motivational they will be.

*To me, DALL-E and other "AI Art" engines are, at best "hired painters" for people like me who can't draw. Just as photography didn't eliminate artists but actually increased their market reach, so will generative-software artwork.

Observing objectives

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies, speculative fiction

Terraform publishes speculative fiction with a strong environmental/social activist emphasis. The editors, Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans, have published a trilogy composed of stories from the site as an omnibus volume: Terraform: Watch|Worlds|Burn. I decided to review the sections separately.

Watch is about observation…sort of. Extrapolation! What science fiction authors do best. Each of the 16 stories takes a societal trend to the extreme. The trouble with "linear" extrapolation is misunderstanding "linear".

All the formulas and charts shown here represent formulas or solutions to linear differential equations (LDEs). These are actually rather mild. Some LDEs produce functions that look like white noise. But in the realm of mathematics, much of nature is described by LDEs, which frequently "go all over the place", while our understanding of the world around us is typically based on fitting a straight line to a (temporarily) smooth curve, such as the line AB in the outlined area.

Many, perhaps most, science fiction stories explore the consequences of straight-line extrapolation of one or a few societal trends. Some of the better stories incorporate a Black Swan that breaks the trend (the turning point in the combined history of the I, Robot and Foundation series by Isaac Asimov does this masterfully). Nonetheless, such exploration is useful and entertaining. A few examples:

"Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company" by Kevon Nguyen takes the Amazon and Google paradigms, combines them to a global enterprise, Googlezon, and imagines the consequences of being excluded from it. (The image is mostly a Dall-E outpaint. Guess how much of it is a genuine Amazon warehouse.)

"Moved" by Chloe Cole takes the concept of the sex doll about halfway to the extreme ("Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey takes it from a different angle, and in my opinion does it better, adjusting for cultural norms of a 1938 milieu). The full extreme would have the doll sentient and intentional, and no doubt full of surprises both pleasant and terrifying.

"The End of Big Data" by James Bridle presents a final revolt against "the cloud"; the protagonist is a soldier in orbit, tasked with finding and destroying the remaining data centers that were used to bully the populace for so long.

The background of "Blue Monday" is corporatization of all those funny cat and cute puppy videos, and the niche markets opened by creating clickbait. This image approximates the protagonist's view during working hours. It made me wonder, how many YouTube animal videos are produced en masse in studios?

Production values are high for Watch, and I presume for the sections to come. As I've mentioned before, I am an idea guy, and the ideas arrive in firehose succession in this anthology. I don't mind that many of the authors are probably ultra-left-leaning. The writing is great fun.

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: