Bohemian Rhapsody

The East and West mixed choir sang this, as arranged by Philip Lawson. I can see why they left out the part about Why the "poor boy from a poor family" was in such trouble -- singing about random murders is maybe not what you want impressionable youth doing -- but it changes the tone quite a bit. This way the singer seems almost justified in his complaints.

Libraries

Thanks to Anecdotal Evidence, a description of our living room: To Read. So many books, so little time...

Formation

Evangelical colleges have not been on my radar--never really were, since I wasn't planning to study liberal arts. The link explains why they're in trouble: partly demographic change, partly cultural changes (can I get a good job?), and partly heads in the sand.

What's the purpose of them? Liberal arts education and Christian formation, apparently--seminaries seem to be the place to go for specifically church-related credentials like MDiv (*) and MRE.

If the evangelical college is like a secular college but with Christian focus and an effort at formation, then how can this be accomplished more flexibly and cheaply?

Online study is popular, though zoom is an inferior substitute for in-person discussion. One obvious problem is supplying the "Christian formation" part. If the college partners with the home churches, perhaps the local church could implement formation plans. Of course you might ask: "Aren't the churches supposed to be doing that for everybody?"

Well, yes. But I notice that the church doesn't keep close tabs on who "attends chapel," and doing that might cause problems. Unless, of course, the person volunteers for closer supervision and regular meetings with his spiritual advisor.

Even with that voluntary aspect there's still the risk of developing a two-tier church with "ordinary" and "more holy" groups. Which would be very very bad.

There's interest in programs for spiritual formation. Naturally, they will only be as effective as you let the Holy Spirit be. And there's a lot of fuzziness in definitions. I just looked up one (EFCA) program that read like a course description instead of a relationship.

I clearly have quite a bit of reading-up to do. And I should collar one of the pastors and ask some questions.

(*) Master of Divinity -- among all the weird names for a degree, this stands out.

Wisdom of teenagers

Fledgling robins fly about the garden, hoping to still be fed. Or something. Two stood on the far side of one of the garden fence panels, giving the mulched garden the side-eye. Then one tried to hop in as though the chickenwire wasn't there.

Then it tried again. And again. And its nestmate tried too. Three times. Finally both wandered off. As far as I can tell, they didn't try to fly in that day. Not that there was much to dig for in the wood-chips.

Honeyberry

aka haskap, grows nicely here. We've had some in the front yard for several years now. I've only eaten about 3 or 4 of the berries, though.

The way that you know that the berries are ripe is to look at the bush. If the robins are busily eating all the berries, they're ripe.

FWIW, we also planted strawberries in a 4x4 raised bed. They never produced much, so we yanked them out and planted flowers and fennel (don't do that) and whatnot. However we missed a few runners, and the strawberries spread, escaping the baleful shade of the coneflowers and forming a perimeter about the central garden, that actually produces strawberries. We usually get a few (mice get more), which is fine for a no-maintenance/no-expectation plant.

It took about 25 years for the grapevine to start producing significant quantities, and by then all the kids were grown, but grandkids learned how to harvest them anyway. We squeeze a lot of plants in a tiny city lot. You can't feed a crowd off them, but that wasn't the point.

Doxology

I've sung it thousands of times, but had never heard about Thomas Ken before. Maybe he would have liked it that way.

All Praise to Thee My God This Night has as the last verse: "Praise God, from whom all blessings flow" -- the famous doxology.

Ken sounds like he would have been a good man to know.

Wikipedia claims that he wound up crossways with Gilbert Burnet, of whom I had also never heard before, and of whom it was said "Indeed it was not easy to wound Burnet's feelings. His self-complacency, his animal spirits, and his want of tact, were such that, though he frequently gave offence, he never took it." I think I've known a few like that.

Negotiations

I commented back in March that the IRCG in Iran was probably going to be in the final state in Iran unless we were willing to go all out with boots on the ground (or the big bombs, I suppose).

I didn't think about what shape agreements would take. The Strait open goes without saying. The question is what about the uranium?

I don't see the IRCG being willing to publicly give it up. Supposing a faction had the power to do so, offering to would be an invitation for another faction to denounce and attack them, grabbing their territory and control of the uranium.

So face-saving would be built into the agreement. They'd agree to something lesser that in practice (and in secret) amounts to giving it up.

Except for weaseling. They would fake the records ("A GBU-57 ate my homework") and offer up half the uranium.

We'd have to rely a lot on intel, and by this time I'm not sure how many useful assets remain.

And, of course, nobody will explain what's really going on, leaving lots of room for nasty politicking.

Waiting Room

A short story on Substack

Smile

I'm not immersed in music lore, and didn't recall having heard of the never-quite-converged "SMiLE" Beach Boys album. I gather that at least some of the peices existed in multiple versions, and the group hadn't decided on what to pick.

I was curious. It exists on Youtube.

It feels sloppy, and I can easily believe they didn't yet know where they were going. Good Vibrations ends the set--the contrast seems stark. They experimented with all kinds of instrumentation and musical ideas, but it didn't seem confident and ready to me.

Sometimes you need to respect an author's privacy about "unfinished works." There's likely a reason the thing wasn't finished.

Quiet

Where can we go for quiet?

A walk in the woods sometimes qualifies, but it isn't always convenient, especially in winter.

I use quiet for prayer and writing and just being silent sometimes. (Walking is lousy for writing.) Other people live here as well as I, and they listen to music or podcasts or talk on the phone (or sometimes want to talk to me, which is fine, but not quiet).

When I need silence, I find that headphones and instrumental music to overcome other people's music/noise is almost as good. Half the time. If I need to be doing something rather than resting the mind, it isn't good enough. (Do I need to say that any music at all is bad when trying to write poetry?)

When you have little kids, silence is more of a late-night thing, and you're tired and sleepy then.

Early in the morning? Perhaps. There are tradeoffs.

Banquets

I find banquets frustrating. The level of ambient noise from distant conversation makes conversing with anybody but the person next to you difficult, and almost everybody is quite some distance away. You catch a fragment of a conversation that sounds interesting, but too far away to join in.

Can you work out a seating arrangement for a banquet in Heaven?

If we weren't limited to 4 dimensions... How about a "Hilbert table" with as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest?

Bookstore Angel

See Anecdotal Evidence today.

Who matters

Chesterton's The Donkey is a fun short poem.

And we're that donkey too, aren't we? Not who we are, but Who we bring with us matters.

Obedience

Obedience teaches. Some things you may have words for, but don't undestand what they mean until you've lived them. I understood the demographic preference for monogamy over polygamy (and I certainly didn't have anybody else in mind), but after years of marriage I'm starting to understand what "one flesh" means and why more wives would be less.

Kids are in no position to decide what's best. "Just learn your times-tables; you'll understand later." We didn't go the "unschooling" route--we knew better than the kids what would be useful in understanding the world. Once they had obeyed and learned the background they could dig into what they pleased.

Sometimes we learn from bad choices, but I know a few adults who double-down on willfulness.

Automated Synthesis

The phrase Artificial Intelligence isn't appropriate. Slapping the word "intelligence" into the name doesn't make it real, and the result is misleading. This morning one of the men in our prayer gathering complained that the CEO, and a number of the new hires, were putting undue faith in the computer's analysis, and ignoring experience.

Since what the systems do is a more like a probabilistic synthesis of existing material, "Synthesis" seems like a better word than "Intelligence." That term emphasizes the aspect of compilation of existing material, instead of the implied "thinking about" that isn't actually happening.

In place of the term "AI", I propose that we use "AS": Automated Synthesis. Given the systems' notorious propensity for hallucination, one might call it "SS" -- Stochastic Synthesis -- but I gather some systems are getting better.

Maybe with a more accurate label people will be less tempted to put inappropriate trust in the systems, and recognize and use them for what they are. Rectification of names?

Ghost melody

Can you make out the original tune by subtracting notes from a background?

Can you make out any kind of melodic movement at all?

In trying to answer that question I hit two obstacles: I couldn’t hit the notes I needed to reliably, and I already knew what to expect.

To deal with the competence problem I used MuseScore software to compose and play back for me, and as for the bias due to expectation—I can’t solve that for myself unless/until I script something to take a random tune and generate the silhouette tune automatically, but I can solve it for you by obfuscating the title of the tune.

I chose to use as a “background” the collection of all the notes used in a tune. For each note in the original tune I played this background without that original note. I thought of it as like a ghost in the background noise.

Does that ghost, that absence, make something melodic?

Youtube video of Gjvaxyr (I am still learning ffmpeg. Please forgive the video quality. The audio was assembled with Audacity.)

Those who have some musical background will predict that the result will be dissonant, and so it is.

I think I can sort-of hear something, that is vaguely like the original—sometimes.

Later I’ll look into removing chords rather than single notes, though I expect it will still be dissonant.

I wonder under what conditions would the ghost tune not be dissonant. A base song with notes only from a chord, yes--others?