When the young emperor Caligula had recovered from a seemingly near-death paralyzing illness (status epilepticus ?) he summoned a man who was among those who had publicly offered their own lives to the gods to spare the young (then very popular) emperor.

The fellow assumed he would be honored and rewarded for his gesture.  Instead, Caligula was angry that this fellow had not ended his life.  It was as if he did not really want his emperor to live and even risked divine wrath upon the emperor himself for breaching his bargain with the gods.   An assisted suicide ensued.  And it became clear to all that Caligula was indeed [redacted] crazy.

Anybody who goes through life with an open mind and heart will encounter moments that are saturated with meaning, but whose meaning cannot be put into words. These moments are precious to us.  When they occur, it is as though, on the winding, ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter.  There are many who dismiss this world as an unscientific fiction.  I am not alone in thinking it real and important. – Sir Roger Scruton

When C.S. Lewis was a little boy, his brother Warnie showed him a miniature garden he had constructed in a “biscuit tin”. Something about that miniature world grabbed Lewis’ imagination and created in him what he later called “joy”, though one gets the impression from Lewis’ elaboration on the idea of “joy” that in some sense he meant “longing”. As an adult convert to Christianity, Lewis harkened back to that miniature garden as something that over time became a kind of a lodestar for him, because the beauty it represented planted a seed that was eventually instrumental in undermining his determined atheism.

John Etchemendy and Fei-Fei Li are the codirectors of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), founded in 2019 to “advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.” In this interview,  they delve into the origins of the technology, its promise, and its potential threats. They also discuss what AI should be used for, where it should not be deployed, and why we as a society should—cautiously—embrace it.

I notice that most males will forgive a pretty dumb plot in a movie if the action scenes are compelling. Likewise, many females are obsessed with bad Hallmark movies (particularly during Christmas time) because such movies appeal to feminine feelings even when the movie is utterly dull.

There are similar patterns of bias when it comes to science fiction. The genre is notoriously divisive as it tends to minimize character development to instead focus on how science effect society. This is especially the case with harder science fiction. In fact, science fiction fans often complain that mainstream critics just don’t appreciate science fiction.

Jim Geraghty posted in The Corner at National Review Online. Mostly, he is laying out the lame excuses for Biden to dodge the debate. I agree with how those are just excuses. However, I don’t understand a couple of bits.

He quotes David Frum who :

I live on a golf course in Hilton Head, in a wealthy gated community.  So I’m surrounded by lots of extremely intelligent people who worked extremely hard at something for an extremely long time, so they could make enough money to retire when they’re 60 and play golf on private golf courses for the rest of their lives.  Many have something else in common, as well:  They tend to have adult children who are very intelligent like their parents, with lots of potential, but they tend to be underachievers.  Which tends to bother their hard-working parents.

I was at a community party this weekend, sitting there drinking bourbon (surprise!), minding my own business, when this topic of conversation came up.  The mothers sitting at our table started complaining about their kids, who all seemed to lack drive and focus.  One said that her daughter didn’t like her job, so she quit.  She didn’t have anything else lined up – she just quit.  So now she’s living at home at the age of 26, with her extremely expensive elite college diploma on the wall, eating their food and watching their TV.  Mom and Dad are frustrated.  The other Moms all had similar stories, each sounding more outlandish than the first to my blissfully sheltered ears.

The Moms all agreed that they had sheltered their kids too much, and left them unprepared for the difficulties of real life.  One of the Moms pointed at me and said something like, “His kids are doing great.  His wife told me how hard he worked those girls, and now they know how to work.”  I responded that I didn’t think that was right.  She asked what I meant.

My 90-year-old mom had another fall on Sunday afternoon. She has had A-fib and heart failure for more than a decade, and her cardiologist struggles to control that without causing her dizziness and low blood pressure. Which results in falls. After enjoying a warm spring afternoon on the patio, she lost her footing on the porch steps and fell backward onto the car and hit her head. Fortunately, she had her cordless phone with her, so she called me to come over and help her up. Her neck hurt badly, so I helped her gently into the car and took her to the ER. And there fear of lawsuits started driving medical decisions.

When we arrived at the excellent rural ER in Marion, Kansas, the nurses immediately immobilized her neck in the car and put her on a stretcher. I think they already suspected the problem. They called their radiology tech in from her Sunday afternoon, and she did a CT scan. As I later learned, the radiology tech immediately spotted a dangerous, potentially fatal, fracture in the C2 vertebra in her neck and pointed it out to the PA in charge of the ER. I could tell they were more concerned than usual about my mom, but I didn’t know why. Following procedure, the PA e-mailed the scan to some M.D. somewhere to interpret it. An hour later the interpretation came back, “All OK.” At that point the PA told me what was going  on. She made a very polite call to the faraway M.D. and asked if he had seen the fracture. He was appalled at what he had missed and sheepishly corrected the interpretation.

Humanity is really very good at putting the past behind us. “Sure, you saved my life last week. But what have you done for me lately?!”

It is amazing how many blessings a person receives, but forgets. This is sometimes given as the reason “Thanksgiving Offerings” must be eaten within a day, because we forget the things we should be thankful for. I suspect this is a reason that G-d gives people so much suffering: bad events stick better than blessings do. For example, we take good health for granted – until we get sick. Being healthy is like running water: entirely unmemorable, until you don’t have it.

This is the 25-year NPR veteran who wrote a piece on The Free Press about NPR’s monolithic point of view, and its stunning lack of newsroom diversity (something like 86 Democrats/0 Republicans at its HQ) as well as citing specific examples of its failure to cover major news stories fairly over the past fifteen or so years.

I guess they are really mad at him.  The Chief News Executive of NPR stated, in their response, that

I just finished another book written by someone I’m proud to call a friend – Bing West.  He wrote “The Village” about his experiences in Vietnam.  He was in charge of 12 US Marines tasked with protecting a village of 6,000 people from the Viet Cong, and preventing the VC from using the surrounding area to transport supplies and equipment.  His Marines patrolled every night, taking fire nearly every night, for 435 days.  Half of the Marines died.

Bing’s book describes the relationships between his Marines, the local villagers, the Viet Cong, the local law enforcement, and the US military at large.  The 12 Marines did a masterful job building relationships with the locals, figuring out local politics, and introducing sufficient stability and relative safety so the locals could continue to work their farms during the days so they didn’t starve.  Today, “The Village” is required reading in The Marine Corps Officer Candidate School.

Bing returned to the village in 2002 – thirty years after the Marines had left.  He was welcomed as a celebrity.  He found the remains of the fort they had used – just traces of a foundation now.  The floods had mostly filled in the moat he and his friends had dug in the late 1960’s.  When they left the fort in the 1970’s, there was a small stone monument in the ground, with a small bronze plaque, honoring the Marines who had died there.  When he returned in 2002, it was gone.  A local woman told him that someone had beat the bronze into the shape of a trowel and used it for farming.  She regretted that she could not return it to Bing, but the farmer had thrown it away some years ago.

So sue me.  I’ve never really pretended to a deep acquaintance with, nor understanding of, mid twentieth-century American playwrights and screenwriters.  And so we have Days of Wine and Roses, a 1958 teleplay by JP Miller with Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie , which I’ve always gotten spectacularly mixed up with Splendor in the Grass, which began life as a 1961 Hollywood movie starring Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood.  Neither of them has anything to do with Tennessee Williams (although, thematically, perhaps they should have), and maybe this salient fact has exacerbated my confusion over the years.

One thing I’m not at all addled about, though, is the origins of the titles:

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind–William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood

Today at work I completed an hour-long employee harassment training advertised as requiring 30 minutes. Now I’d like to know who to report the harassment of my harassment training to.

I work for a small company with fewer than 50 employees, but we were purchased by an aggregator a couple of years ago (based in another state) and now we’re getting the treatment you expect from a large company. Our little team has some long-timers who have moved around together and reformed after the big company purchasers started imposing Big Stupid. We’re highly specialized and use materials not easily relocated, which makes the breakaway possible. I suspected our small group would not bend to this nonsense — at least we’d take our time about it, since we know each other well and are respectful without needing a periodic struggle session.