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Here are quotes from two different individuals.

As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe wide awakening.

Machines will follow a path that mirrors the evolution of humans. Ultimately, however, self-aware, self-improving machines will evolve beyond humans’ ability to control or even understand them.

and

I do believe that the goal of AI is to know more about ourselves, about the world, about how to interact. If God exists (as I do believe), the creation of physical artifacts will never contradict that existence. it will just, actually, make it even more visible. How, I don’t know. But I am not afraid of pursuing the AI goal, because I do believe that knowing more about myself and knowing more about the world can never lead me to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist. I don’t think that I would get to that end. Just the opposite.

Alright. One of these people is famous and is always on PBS or NPR or pick-your-favorite-respectable show. He could be on a segment right after Yo-Yo Ma or Maya Angelou. He’s visionary and interesting.

The other is a scientists who actually programs robots for a living and has nearly a hundred academic papers published on serious AI topics.

One you see quoted all the time – in Wired or the Wall Street Journal. The other you’ve never heard of.

One is a ridiculously rich white guy from New York City. The other is a little-known Portuguese woman.

And I am convinced that one of these people knows what they are talking about and the other is full of hot air.

The quotes are from:

Ray Kurzweil, from The Singularity is Near, 2005

Manuela Veloso, from a panel discussion, 1999

You remember in the 1990s when everyone was talking about “virtual reality” and “cyberspace”? Blah blah blah. All talk. Who was actually doing the work? Programmers like John Carmack who spent six weeks holed up in a hotel room figuring out how to get ray-tracing to run on a 386 when everyone else on earth thought it was impossible. You have him and his quiet ilk to thank for opening the door to much of the 3D technology you see today in movies, games, and simulations. They made real progress while everyone else was yacking on the conference circuit and wooing gullible investors.

That is why I don’t trust the futurists. None of the really smart and productive people I know in IT (or medicine or engineering) believe them. Only the hype-loving people who stood in line in the cold last week to buy an iPad Air seem to hang on their every word. Them and journalists. Maybe there is a really great programmer or engineer out there who actually believes all this Singularity stuff. But I haven’t met him/her yet – not even close. I’m open to be surprised though.

Open up Popular Science and you’ll find someone going on and on about how their new virtual reality nano-robot whatever is going to revolutionize heart surgery. Then you look at the cover and realize the magazine is 20 years old and the robot is nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, some guy you’ve never heard of has made heart surgery more effective by figuring out a better way to grind scalpel blades so they stay sharp longer.

I suggest we focus on what can be done with the tools and resources at hand. Solve problems and take them a bit further. Don’t be tempted by talk of quantum leaps. Remember the limitations of the human body and mind. The greatest know this humility.

 

Alright, here is my attempt at an Advent playlist (not a Christmas one). Most of these are on the somber side of things. Remember, Jesus hasn’t come yet.

• Fantasia on Greensleeves, Ralph Vaughan Williams, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields recording
• The Holly and the Ivy, Loreena McKennitt, from A Midwinter Night’s Dream
• Veni Veni Emmanuel, Loreena McKennitt, from A Midwinter Night’s Dream
• O Come O Come Emmanuel, Chanticleer, Our Heart’s Joy
• Noel Nouvelet, Anuna, from Christmas with Anuna
• It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, The Honey Trees, single
• Creator of the Stars of Night, High Street Hymns, from Love Shall Be Our Token
• People Look East, Al Petteway and Amy White, Winter Tidings
• Advent Suite, John Michael Talbot and Michael Card, Brother to Brother
• Christmas in the Room, Sufjan Stephens, from Silver and Gold Vol VIII
• Christmas Lights, Coldplay, single
• O Come O Come Emmanuel, The Cascade Horns, from Christmas Brass

Notes: Probably any recording of the Vaughan Williams piece will do.

The Advent Suite from Talbot and Card is a real power house. You might need to stop and replay that one a few times.

Sufjan Stephen’s 10-disc Christmas album is absolutely bizarre and not recommended. There are a few gems though. Make sure you listen to the volume 8 version of this song. The other one is terrible.

The Coldplay song is not bad, really.

There are about 30 brass quintet versions of O Come O Come Emmanuel and I’ve heard many of them and performed several. This is, without question, the very best one. And no, it’s not on iTunes so good luck.

Here Knuth reflects on his early pioneering work in digital publishing and typeface creation:

When I first began to use a computer to produce letter forms, I thought the task would be easy. But actually I had to work on the task for five years before I got anything that satisfied me. And the first book that came out was a great disappointment to me after I saw it in print. I BURNED with disappointment – I actually felt a hot flash when I first saw it. I opened the covers, expecting to be really happy, but “Oh, no!” it was back to the drawing boards; still more work was needed.

When you design something yourself you are overly sensitive to it. You can’t view it dispassionately. If I’m watching a lecture in which my fonts appear in the slides, I can’t concentrate on that lecture; I keep wondering whether I shouldn’t have changed the letter S a little bit. I’m sure all artists go through this trauma. The more subjective a task is, the harder it is for you to know that you have produced anything of quality.

-Donald Knuth, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, p.131

I don’t have much to say about this. The highlighted sections are ridiculously true. Don’t forget.

During a panel discussion about computer science and religion in 1999, Donald Knuth made this comment while complaining about the sensationalized accounts of theoretical physics research that often appears in places like Popular Science or Scientific American:

The extra detail that gets suppressed when quantum physics gets popularized amounts to the fact that, according to quantum mechanics, the universe actually consists of much more data than could ever be observed. [Paul] Dirac states, for example, that:

[Nature’s] fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies.

There is this widely-held belief that when scientists discuss things, they are talking about the REAL world while theologians are just hanging out in a made-up fantasy world. People who love to sport T-shirts emblazoned with the idiotic “Flying Spaghetti Monster” are of this ilk.  Today, nearly every psychologist in business is trying to get the “neuro” prefix worked into his title somehow to emphasize how much what he is studying occurs in solid, actual “nature”, rather than some dubious construction. Mathematicians work in an imaginary world, but they are given a pass since their work ends up being fundamentally useful to natural scientists in the end. There is some popular push-back against physicists that like to talk a lot about “string theory” or “chaos theory”. Even the dimmest person in the room can detect the funny smell of a made-up world behind their conjectures.

But wait! This is all a false dichotomy. It’s not us and them. It’s not the real and the imaginary. The real is indeed very real, and what is going on in our heads is a representation of that – not the reality itself. This is equally true for both philosophers and engineers. We are working inside of a mental picture we have formed. Lots of details have been boiled down so we can contain them. And what gets introduced along the way? Irrelevancies. Garbage. Biases. Mistakes. Misunderstandings. Wildness. You name it – stuff that causes problems because we are working with a sampling of the universe small enough to fit in our heads, not the universe itself.

Everyone is doing this all the time, and doing a good job at it requires some musing. This is why artistic creativity often proves to be a boon to scientists, rather than some kind of saboteur. Boring, unimaginative scientists and theologians are equally bad. Some of our best science has arisen from science fiction. Talking about God well requires a sense of adventure rather than a micrometer. What can keep the cancer researcher picking up her pipette for the 100,000th time? Imagining cancer to be a dark evil worth slaying. What can keep the pastor coming back to comfort his wayward parishioner for the 1000th time? Love, and the belief that the doctrine of the Trinity might actually be a valid “theory of everything”.

Come on all you people now! You’re already dreaming. Dream bigger.

Here, computer scientist Donald Knuth explains his experience digging through biblical commentaries for the first time in the library. Having grown up in church, he was at least familiar with scripture, but hadn’t ever dug into much theology before. His account here rings true to me and is especially of value I think because of his status as a bit of an outsider to the subject but familiar with research writing.

Some of the commentaries I ran across were big disappointments to me. in some cases the authors did a superficial job, nt looking closely into the material as a good scholar would. They ignored the challenging questions that other commentators wrestled with. In other words, they were writing for another audience, not for me.

In several other cases the comments seemed to me very lifeless and dry They reeked of academic gamesmanship. Being a college professor myself, I think it is fairly easy to smell such pretensions from a long way off. Of course, I can’t help but sympathize with people who work in academic departments of theology, because they have to deal with much harder questions than I ever need to face. it must be enormously more difficult to do innovative work in a field that has been in existence for thousands of years than it is to do computer science research today. I supposed the best way to get tenure, as a theologian, is to say the wildest new things while not disagreeing too strongly with the people at your institution who received tenure just before you did. In any academic field, people’s egos are bound to intrude on the work they do, especially when their livelihood is at stake.

Fortunately, enough people are left who really love what they do and who aren’t just acting out some supposed strategy for success. I did run across a number of commentaries that I thought were not only excellent but also truly great. They combined superb scholarship with a genuine love for the subject that came through in the writing.

-from Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

You see that part at the end: “People that combine great scholarship with genuine love for the subject”. People that are untainted by money and the stress of deadlines and the politics of the academy. Who does that sound like who is writing this “truly great” stuff? I’ll tell you who. AMATEURS. That’s right. Hobby bloggers and even some self-published enthusiasts are writing some of the best dang stuff out there – concerning all subjects. Oh, but we need professionals to do the best stuff. Nonsense. They have a bunch of other problems they have to deal with that often prevent them from working through really good (or new) ideas. Amateurs might have the true love and creativity, but without the hurdles that come with an attached career. This difference is now it’s easier to discover or become(!) one of these people than ever before.

Ah, can you tell I dug up an old hard drive and found a bunch of projects I did 10+ years ago back at the university? This one was for a friend of mine who played bass clarinet. This solo part has been adapted to keep the lines within a nice range, occasionally taking certain phrases down an octave. Double stops have also been either removed or replaced with arpeggios. If I recall, she didn’t get the opportunity to actually play this with an orchestra. It’s a good piece though and should actually sound pretty nice on a B.C. provided they could get enough volume out of it.

Download

This fall I directed a small string group that ended up consisting of 6 kids aged about 8-11. They were all in at least Suzuki book 2, but a couple could barely read and a couple others were fairly advanced. No published music I could easily find bridged the gap, so I arranged something practical on my own this evening. As I have greatly benefited from people offering free ensemble music online in the past I figured I would post this for anyone else to use or adapt if they wish, even though it isn’t particularly good! The files are PDFs in letter format.

Download the score

Download the parts

Everyone gets the melody at least once during the three variations. The tremolo at the beginning is meant to provide a somewhat mysterious feel. The small interludes given to the first violin are supposed to have a middle-eastern flavor and be taken out of time and possibly embellished upon. The 2nd cello part is meant to be the easiest although there are a couple of brief finger extensions.

A snippet from the Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy:

Dirty dish archeology

Six ceramic mugs and a whisk
All brown with cocoa after the first snow
Freezing fingers curled ’round the afternoon

Bowls and peeled back plastic wrap
Reveal three different depleted leftovers
All ground-beef based, like the budget

The recycle bin full of empties
Milk jugs to be precise – two in two days
Growing bones long and strong

Two coffee cups infuse energy in the morning
Two wine glasses wind down
Both hard to resist, their narrow mouths resist scrubbing

Eight plastic divided plates
Four from lunch, four from dinner
Full and growing, tucked in their beds

Artifacts of love

 

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of Celtic Daily Prayer, a great book of daily prayers and readings published by the Northumbia Community. When my copy arrived in the mail (purchased used on Amazon), I removed the dust jacket and discovered the outside had been attacked with a Sharpie. The inside too had some warnings in place.

Apparently the previous owner felt it necessary to warn future owners of the danger of abandoning scripture in favor of, well, preselected scripture and liturgical prayers. They also are apparently not too keen on the NRSV, which apparently was devised by the sons of Cain, or perhaps a “serpent Jew”.

I share this just because I think it’s kind of funny and because as a book lover, it’s fun to find hidden treasures left by previous owners.

This made me think though – what a relatively recent idea to warn people not to fall back on liturgical prayers. My children just studied Gutenberg in their history lessons. Before his time, nearly 1500 years after the time of Christ, very few people on earth had access to a bible for use in personal devotions. What did they fall back on? Liturgical prayers and scraps of the best memorized passages – exactly the sort of thing you find in a prayer book like this. Oh such a step backward to return to their unenlightened ways! I’m not so convinced. It sounds too much like the “dark ages” myth all over again. Recently, I have been encouraged by using a prayer book for daily devotions rather than raw scripture reading, which is very hit and miss. Of course I still study the bible – for all kinds of things, but it’s been helpful to be shown another way to pray and meditate. The constraint is a comfort.