Thinking in Target Foreign Languages,

As my retirement date nears, I am looking for new ways to approach various interests and how to make progress in them.  One of these interests is foreign language learning.  One thing I have been hesitant over the past years is thinking in the target languages.  We all think in our own "best" languages, even sub-vocalizing in the process.  That doesn't mean that I instantly conjure up grammatically complete sentences in my mind with any level of sophistication regarding word choices.  But I do think in English, although more in a stream-of-consciousness mode.  The same can be true with languages I am learning, but I need to be intentional about thinking in them since the tendency is always to slip back into English.  I saw a YouTube video on this very subject...click HERE for a link to it.  Another thing about learning foreign languages has to do with the pervasive use of computers and the Internet in this regard.  In earlier years I would read texts and various materials in the foreign language, look up the meanings of new words and record my progress with pen and paper within a notebook. Now some of these language learning sites like LingQ and Anki will track my own vocabulary-building progress as well as providing convenient definitions and sentence examples...that's great! But ultimately, when it comes to reviewing what I've learned...or forgotten that I've learned...I think I need to return to my old tried-and-true comfortable method of writing down my progress on paper because engaging in it this way helps more to reinforce my learning.  Now to set up my system... 

On Developing a Second Brain in Foreign Language Learning

As Steve Kaufmann, a Canadian polyglot who fell in love with language learning early on during his ongoing 77-year existence on this planet, has reiterated that achieving a meaningful level of understanding in a foreign language requires a dedicated amount of listening and...hopefully...reading time whereby one's neural pathways are redrawn to develop what is essentially a "second brain" in that language. I am probably studying too many languages at the same time with Chinese, Russian and Spanish currently on my plate, but that's a lot fewer than the number I had been pursuing. Progress is difficult to measure or report since it isn't easily quantified: sure, I can count the words I've learned, but actually comprehending the spoken language in real time is a completely different matter. I would be better served in this regard were I to habituate myself to deeper, concentrated listening and reading with available translation...Kaufmann's LingQ website can be a help with this, and until recent difficult events arose demanding my attention, had been using ChatGPT to generate practice sentences in my target languages on different levels of proficiency.  Yet I'm a little too tentative with computer apps and maneuvering through the digital quagmire that others seem to effortlessly glide through. But if I can intentionally learn to better use productive apps and functions, then this can be a great help.  In any event, I do enjoy studying these three languages, and I guess that's the most important thing... 

Shortcomings in Digital Technology Skills Impair My Computer Use

I have had a Google Chromebook for the past few months...still a long way off from figuring out this supposedly simple device.  For example, I had just typed out several sentences introducing a completely different subject for today's blog article entry, but somehow the way I rested my hands on the keyboard caused the whole thing to erase...and without any means of undoing it!  I've also had issues with the word processing here and certain keyboard functions I'd normally consider standard, such as the absent "Capitals" key normally available anywhere else. Yet overall I'm pretty satisfied with it, since after all I'm a big user of Google applications, including this blog, YouTube, Google Search and Google Maps: they seem to be well integrated.  It's also true that I lag behind many others in my knowledge of how to maneuver around the computer...not an advisable shortcoming in this age of heavy dependency on digital information and the Internet.  I think my problems are probably more due to needing to improve my digital IQ than with the computer hardware or software.  Then again, something inside me says to not get too involved in it all and stay as long as possible on this side of reality.  That might explain why I feel a strange sense of relief whenever I sign out and shut off the computer.  And at least I managed to get this article out before inexplicably erasing it...  

Just Finished Reading Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat

Scary Smart, long title Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World is a 2021 book by Mo Gawdat, a former Google X business executive at that AI-development section of Google with a background in engineering.  When I think of artificial intelligence combined with the word "scary", I recall movies like The Terminator, The Matrix and the old 1970 TV movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, all depicting a future nightmare scenario where super-intelligent computers have concluded that humanity at best is inferior and extraneous...and at worse an evil affliction on the planet that must be controlled or eradicated.  I believe that these stories greatly contribute to the public's increasing concerns about the meteoric rise of this technology in today's real world, and about what direction it will take in the near future, good or bad.  In our dog-eat-dog cutthroat competitive capitalist business environment, the clear message is that you'd better jump into AI as quickly and deeply as possible, else you will be left in the dust and perish.  Gawdat recognizes all this, and hence I felt while I was reading his book that he and I had at least a good deal of common ground in spite of our highly divergent personal and academic backgrounds.  He considers humanity's investment in artificial intelligence too far gone to reverse.  It is here to stay and, with the recent development of quantum computing, increasing its power and development more than exponentially, its intelligence will soon far, far exceed that of humans.  Gawdat believes the world will be irreversibly transformed in the next thirty years or so, so much that he posits a word picture projected ahead that far: he and the reader are out in some isolated natural scenario camping...are we rejoicing at the great new world AI has created for us or are we desperately in retreat, hiding from it?  His thesis in Scary Smart is that now is the time that people can affect the future benevolent (or malevolent) nature of artificial intelligence by instilling in it a more positive representation of what humanity is instead of the more negative, hypercompetitive, bellicose and cruel image we've engendered of ourselves over our history and how we have been using AI so far.  Gawdat is pushing a new creed of happiness, politeness, grace and generosity in dealing with artificial intelligence, which learns with every single interaction.  Even though he feels that we're destined for some future difficult times with artificial intelligence, which he likens to a sentient life force, a change in our attitudes toward ourselves where mutual happiness is the higher aim can steer it away from the nightmare science fiction scenario featured in old movies and toward the fulfillment of the many hopes for us that it brings.  I sympathize with Mo Gawdat's views but given my own experience with human nature over the course of my 67-year existence on Earth, I tend to think that his suggestions are probably just as impractical as reversing AI.  Still, I liked and recommend his book: check it out and get back to me..

Does AI Pose a Future Threat to Us?

In a 1950s futuristic series of novels and short stories, science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote that robots were specifically designed with the imprinted program to never intentionally harm humans or to passively allow such harm to befall them.  In spite of this, in his version of our future, society became suspicious of them and eventually banned them from fear of being dominated by what we now would call artificial intelligence, or AI.  In subsequent decades, though, as computer systems...as opposed to individual units called robots...were more quickly and highly developed in the real world, science fiction turned its attention to supercomputers and the imagined threats they might pose to humanity.  In particular, with regard to my own television viewing experiences as a kid, the original Star Trek series episode The Ultimate Computer, in which a sophisticated computer imprinted with a human personality is installed and independently steers the Enterprise into war, was an early exposure to real fears developing about digital technology running amuck.  Then there was the 1970 TV movie Colossus: The Forbin Project...based on a 1966 novel by D.F. Jones...in which an American supercomputer, designed to defend the country and prevent nuclear war, itself takes over the world and uses the arsenals to establish its power.  Several other movies would ensue, to me the most notables being The Terminator and The Matrix, presenting nightmare scenarios as human beings fight for their very right to exist in the face of uncontrolled AI dominating the planet.  Returning to reality in 2023, it seems to me that only within the last few months have we seen an exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the internet connects it all together.  Major software and internet corporations like Google and Facebook liberally use AI to run their algorithms...I believe one of these erroneously booted a recent compliant post of mine off the latter as no real person would have made such a decision.  I recently checked out YouTube and there are a number of folks raising the alarm about AI being out of control, with a bleak future ahead for us all.  I just checked out a book on my library's Libby app by one of those voices, Mo Gawdat...I'll share some of my insights after I've read it.  Is all this negativity about artificial intelligence like the unfounded public fears expressed in Asimov's earlier novels, or do we have a much more ominous future in store that reflects scenarios like Colossus, Terminator or Matrix?  I don't know yet...maybe I never will...but my gut feeling tells me that the answer lies somewhere in the middle...

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I'm finally moving on to a new year, 1993, and a new book in the excellent anthology series edited by the late Gardner Dozois, this volume titled The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection. For Gardner's series I have been purchasing each successive volume from Amazon for my Kindle account...I read everything straight off my phone. Back in 1993 computers were just beginning to take off with the Internet...we were still doing the floppy disk thing, saving stuff to them that we will never access again after they became obsolete...and what about all those old CD-ROMs? But for now, let's return to our vantage point in the present and check out the first stories in the book...

PAPA by Ian MacLeod

Told by an extremely old man in the not-so-distant future, this story paints the picture of a society where robots do all the menial things as well as provide medical care, and people's bodies increasingly transform into cyborgs with mechanical constructs replacing human tissue.  In spite of these pronounced differences, we see here some familiar family dynamics has "Papa" struggles to relate to his carefree and somewhat irresponsible two grown visiting grandchildren while his son always seems to be tucked away in his city office job, too busy to interact with him.  And then there is Papa's love, his wife Hannah who passed away some seventy years earlier.  A tender, bittersweet story tying the present to what might come...

SACRED COW by Bruce Sterling

Why are Indians (Hindis, Tamils, etc.) in this tale a world power and Britain and the U.S. fallen societies?  The answer is eventually provided in this brief tale of an Indian filmmaker who is making a series of cheap films in England for mass distribution.  It's a combination of the author capitalizing on an ongoing important news story at the time of writing with the reputation of India's huge movie industry, largely unrecognized by the rest of the world...

DANCING ON AIR by Nancy Kress

Never having taken an interest in ballet, either as a dancer (that would be a laugh) or a spectator, this novella, set like the previous two in the near future, exposes the extremely fragile nature of dancers' bodies as they attempt to test the limits of their possible movements onstage.  Genetic biological engineering has stepped in to enhance the dancers' bodies' abilities and help avoid injury, but no one knows the ramifications for their health later in life.  A genetically modified guard dog, able to speak his thoughts, has been assigned to a star ballerina and narrates part of the story while a reporter, whose daughter is struggling to join the New York City Ballet over her own objections, tells the other.  Quite an eye-opener about ballet, and also how people can become so obsessed in an area that they lose perspective...

Next week I continue reviewing 1993 sci-fi short stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology...

Podcaster Promotes Reading...My Motivations Differ

Today's topic on personal development coach Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcast is one he's covered in the past: how to read faster and more effectively.  I may have already covered a few of his points in an earlier blog article, but I couldn't find it...so here goes.  Dial cites some kind of study from a year ago in which it stated that only 33% of high school graduates have ever read a single book after finishing school...the figure isn't much better for college graduates: 42 %! Additionally, some 80% of American households have never bought a book...I'm presuming that doesn't count the times kids in school have to buy stuff for reading assignments.  On the other side, the "average" CEO of a corporation reads some 60 books a year: if I were Archie Bunker, I'd say so much reading is why they're average...but I get Dial's point: reading a lot can help make you smarter and more successful in life.  He then expands upon his own reading habits, which although he tends to prefer paper books, have evolved into using several available features of the digital Kindle and Audible services.  He's a big fan of highlighting sections of text and saving them for future viewing...that tells me that he is primarily a non-fiction reader.  Dial likes to combine buying Kindle books...which he can read on his computer, iPad or iPhone, along with the audio text component when that is available.  For me, although I use Kindle, primarily for my Gardner Dozois science fiction anthology series, I've never used audio with it...and that series doesn't offer it anyway.  I do use my public library's free Libby service to check out audiobooks that I can read on my phone, often at work during appropriate times. Although reading books may indeed help with intelligence, knowledge and worldly success, that's not why I like to read.  I like to read because it's fun...I don't think Rob Dial ever got around to mentioning that...

Quote of the Week...from Lenny Kravitz

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.                 ---Lenny Kravitz

Lenny Kravitz is an American solo rock artist who I've always considered as one of the most musically talented in the profession.  His singles hit Fly Away was my personal top favorite song for the year 1998, and he shined portraying Katniss' stylist Cinna in the movies The Hunger Games and Catching Fire.  Although I like his music and acting, I'd like to focus on Lenny's above quote.  Sixty-six years old now, I grew up and spent my early adult years free of the then-fledgling digital revolution, whereas it's the only thing that younger generations know of in life.  Fifty years ago, people would be astonished at a picture of a typical city street of today with half the people quizzically staring down at their hands as if in a trance.  When I went with my then-eighteen-year-old son Will to his college in Jacksonville fifteen years ago, we went to see what the main library looked like...the tables were full of students, without books, eyes glued in on their laptop computers.  Whatever happened to that "cognitive reverie" of hanging out at the stacks there, surrounded by books, which is what I used to do as a student?  And the video games...don't get me going with that.  Of course, I, too, have my head in computers all day as well...especially considering my "smart" phone.  And it's not all bad, don't get me wrong: I'm taking advantage of this wonderful opportunity to write this free blog for anyone (in a free country) in the world to read!  Kids do get outside and play and interact...at least some of them.  But computers have this instant feedback and reinforcement trait that can be addicting.  In generations past, children had their heads in books...with mine it was television all the time...and now with the young it's computers.  I wonder what the snare will be a couple of generations from now.  There is one glaring difference between computers and TV/books: people...not just young...find their personal validation through social media and the Internet, and that makes it much more likely that they can be manipulated by the ones pulling the strings on the other side, often hidden...

Weekly Short Stories: 1987 Science Fiction, Part 4

Below are my reactions to four more short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection.  It was in 1987 that I taught myself rudimentary computer programming skills...all to create a training program, using BASIC language, on an old Atari game console that my brother-in-law left with us, that simulated the city scheme computer training I was undergoing for my impending job as a postal letter sorting machine clerk.  My program, consisting of timed random numerical iterations passing by on the screen, fully prepared me to pass the modules that more than 90% of the rest of newly hired trainees were failing.  Switching over to working at the post office was a curious type of culture shock for me considering the social climate there that was vastly different from anything I had experienced in the work force before.  Well, maybe I'll tactfully elaborate on some of that after I eventually retire...for now, let's discuss those stories...

BUFFALO GALS, WON'T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT by Ursula K. Le Guin

A little girl being flown over the SW US desert falls out of a crashing plane and somehow survives, being rescued and cared for by a coyote...or is it a woman?  She soon realizes that there are two types of humanity and her newly adopted community consists of the first, with the residents living dual existences as people and the native animals.  This sounded to me like a speculative adventure as to "what if" American Indian myths were literally true...

GLASS CLOUD by James Patrick Kelly

The extremely intricate and advanced march forward with technology is contrasted in this novella with the often-crass inanity motivating humans...and even supposedly more advanced aliens...in their decision-making progress.  Architect Phillip Wing's vision of a Glass Cloud has been accepted as one of the future Modern Wonders of the World, but his personal life has entered a time of turmoil and all signs of the cause seem to point to an ostensibly benevolent, but shallow, alien named Ndavu whose race is subtlety ruling the Earth from the background and which is promoting the notion of immortality through machines.  The nature of immortality and whether it is even desirable get treatment here, as well as the often-banal reasons for major undertakings...

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING AND THE NIGHT by Octavia E. Butler

The best story of the today's four by far, in my opinion, it's also pure, hard science fiction...and has an ominous bearing on what's going on in the world today.  The cure for cancer has been found in a special vaccine shot.  Only one problem: it drastically alters the genetic makeup of the recipient to the point that they eventually tear at and eat their own flesh...before beginning on that of others.  A young woman is the offspring of two such parents...both of them have succumbed to the brand-new disease and she carries the fatal gene.  In a future of no hope, she visits, with another so afflicted, his mother who was in the advanced throes but has been stabilized at a new, special retreat.  There they learn their respective fates... 

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS by Howard Waldrop

Reminiscent of the old fifties film version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but with a vastly different (and much funnier) outcome.  The invading Martians have picked two Earth sites to stage their invasion: London, England and some hole-in-the-ground rural town in Texas: they should have stayed away from the latter.  The local citizenry mobilizes with their weaponry, and they sock it to the thoroughly disgusting aliens before anyone else in the country can get there to help. Ha-ha-ha-ha... 

Next week: more about 1987 short science fiction from the Dozois anthology...

Quote of the Week...from Jonathan Frakes

I always enjoyed going into the holodeck.                             ---Jonathan Frakes

You may recognize Jonathan Frakes...who just turned 70 today...by his most famous role as Commander William Riker on the sci-fi classic series Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I checked out his quotes and settled on the above one because...well...it was intriguing.  I wonder if Frakes says he likes going into the "holodeck", which is just a part of the filming set, because it stimulates his imagination, or does he really regard it as a holodeck, in which just about any kind of setting or environment programmable into the ship's computer system can be reproduced.  I like the concept of holodeck myself, although I do remember an episode of the series in which the programming went haywire and the supposedly harmless gangsters it generated suddenly became lethal.  Imagination is a great thing, but I'd like a device that more vividly portrays different exotic environments and approximates various kinds of experiences.  I had expected that virtual reality with its funny helmet/masks would be more developed than it is right now...God knows that the demand for something like this among the population has to be very high.  One of my all-time favorite book series is the four-volume science fiction classic Otherland by Tad Williams...it takes virtual reality technology to its proper ends.  What I'd like from a holodeck or sophisticated VR device is to simply be able to travel to different places and walk around...no game or role playing here, just approximating the travel experience without the burdens of expense, danger and red tape.  Of course, sitting at a French café this way I wouldn't expect to be able to savor my drink or meal.  And how does one reproduce effects like temperature, wind, touch or smell without intrusively applying probes to one's body?  Still, I think it would be awesome to reproduce a surround-experience even with some of the more problematic areas omitted.  I think Frakes' meaning about liking the holodeck was that it was a little like going down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland...you're never quite sure what's going to happen next...  

Some Musings on a Hot July Day

On yet another predictably miserably hot and muggy July day here in northern Florida I am in the morning at home, typing this on my desktop.  Melissa showed me a blank daily journal book she had just bought for herself...it features sections to fill in, among them things to be grateful for each day...great idea.  I thought that, although I did start this blog of mine back in 2007, more than fifteen years ago, it would have been cool to have continuously been engaging in personal journaling...with the extremely personal stuff wisely filtered out...going back decades earlier and into my childhood years.  I do remember back in 1973 starting a journal of sorts, summarizing with each passing month the more significant happenings back then in my life...but I didn't stick with it and, of course, we didn't have digital blogs or Facebook 49 years ago.  As a matter of fact, I recall at that time that my high school math department possessed a piano-sized very rudimentary computer in a set-off room where only the nerdiest of nerdy math addict students would hang out.  One kid I remember, Billy, who was practically blind without his ultrathick glasses, would actually stay there after school by hiding up in the ceiling until the building was closed and then come back down at night to play with the computer, which resembled nothing we have in our day.  Now you see, this is something you might think I would have written back in that time if blogging and the Internet had existed then, but you would have been wrong: I would have discussed the computer while leaving out Billy's role with it, for his sake.  Sometimes I think it would be fun to engage in what I call a "life memory project" and reconstruct my past out of my memories of it...but it would naturally be distorted in favor of the so-called lessons I now believe I have learned and have incorporated into my personal narrative...

Great Old TV Episodes...from All in the Family

 

ARCHIE AND THE COMPUTER, from the breakthrough 1970s Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family, originally aired in October of 1973.  This episode, which contains one of my all-time favorite comedic lines, is all about how computers had pretty much taken over society and were royally screwing up everything...and that was nearly 48 years ago!  The Bunker family, in case you've been living in a cave all this time and never heard of the series, lives in their suburban house in Queens, New York.  Archie is the breadwinner, working as a foreman on a dock...and is also a raging bigot, with disparaging epithets for just about every group he encounters.  Edith is his loving, loyal, but very honest wife, while their daughter Gloria lives in their home with son-in-law (and staunch liberal) Michael while he's studying in grad school.  In this episode Edith reveals that the quarter for which she had sent a coupon to a prune company came in...and then more and more quarters kept coming: she's now got more than $47 due to this computer error.  Then Michael points out the computer-run electricity grid causing brown-outs and the subway system's malfunctions.  But Archie finally gets his own fill of computers when the Veteran's Administration mistakes him for another veteran who passed away...he's now dead as far as they are concerned and all the concerned businesses around target Edith in light of the "news".  Finally, toward the show's end a real estate agent trying to get Edith to sell their house calls on the phone and Archie grabs the receiver from her, saying "This is Archie Bunker talking to you from the grave...wish you was here!"  When creating this series, Lear wanted to expose prejudice for what it was.  Unfortunately, although All in the Family was a great success, Carroll O'Conner's compelling characterization of Archie gave him appeal to millions...and folks tend to emulate those they like.  Also, the series tended to identify being conservative with ignorance and bigotry...I guarantee that many on the left side of the political spectrum have problems in those two areas as well.  Still, the acting was tremendous and there were several very, very funny episodes, especially in the earlier seasons...

Quote of the Week....from Martin Luther King, Jr.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.                                                               ---Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I read this quote by Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday is this coming Monday, it struck me as having a profound meaning on different levels.  I'm not sure exactly what he was thinking about when he made this comment, but I can see some its ramifications.  Look at the advance in technology over the past two centuries: a higher standard of living on one hand, but at great cost to the environment on the other.  Or how it seems that progress in science and engineering tends to be applied by the military in its never-ending campaign to be able to wage war in a more deadly fashion.  But there's even more to Dr. King's statement when you consider how society wraps itself around innovations to the point where being deprived of them becomes a matter of social injustice...

We live in an exciting age as we note, in just a few years, how much medicine and information technology have progressed.  I just read a novel set in 1989 where the protagonist is struggling to get to a pay phone to make an important call...only 29 years ago.  Now having a cell phone seems like a necessity rather than a convenience or luxury...we've integrated this innovation into our society to the point where those not possessing one are at a marked disadvantage in their lives.  The same goes for the great advances in medicine, both in its important preventative practices and in diagnosing and treating diverse ailments and injuries.  But this progress carries with it a steep price tag, and the way health care is meted out...at least in this country, even if Obamacare stays in effect...puts those in less favorable economic situations in potentially fatal circumstances should they become seriously ill or injured even when the technology and medicine exist to save them.  And the blessing of the Internet, which almost instantly connects the world with us, has all sorts of problems, including criminal fraud, the enabling of terrorism, international hacking to interfere with elections, and many others.  When I went back to college to take some history courses just 15 years ago, there was the Internet, but the classes were still primarily book-based.  By the time my son entered college six years later, owning a laptop and having Internet access had become absolute requirements.  Those in our society without computers and Internet service are being left behind, not just because these products are intrinsically indispensable, but also because our social institutions are increasingly mandating their use...

When I described "progress", I was discussing technological progress.  But Martin Luther King, Jr. may have also been thinking of progressive social movements as well.  Progress in any form is change, and when change happens, it causes instability.  And that can be very unsettling to many people and cause them to lash back...even when that change is clearly for the better...

A Good Radio App for Smartphones

Along with the advancement of our digital age in technology has arisen a whole slew of words like "cyberpunk" , "cyberespionage", "cybercrime", "cyberterrorism" ,"cyberbullying", etc...I'd like to add a new one to describe myself: cyberklutz.  In my family I am almost always the last...usually by far...to pick up on the latest improvements out there in the...uh...cybersphere.  This is especially true when it comes to the different smartphone apps available.  But I did manage to find one that has proven to be very useful (and free): TuneIn Radio...

With TuneIn Radio, I have been able to daily listen to current news broadcasts in the languages I'm studying, helping me to gradually attune myself to being able to distinguish the words being spoken.  I can also listen to just about any radio station out there, including local ones in my Gainesville vicinity.  A much greater choice of music types is offered here: I've mentioned before that I love old, traditional Christian hymns...well, there's a station here that provides these great old songs.  TuneIn Radio also provides replay broadcasts from different radio and television talk/news shows.  I think that humorist Phil Hendrie is an extraordinary talent as he manipulates his voice to create many different characters as well as the impression that they are all together talking with each other on the air...now I can hear his recent shows.  And the two diametrically opposite political commentators whom I have chosen to follow, the liberal Rachel Maddow and the conservative Mark Levin, can also be heard on TuneIn Radio if I happen to miss one or more of their shows...

The only drawback to this app is that it is a drain on my cell phone's power.  I've heard a radio ad recently for a different free app that is supposed to pick up radio stations without doing this.  I'd like to try it out, but I wonder whether it will provide the great diversity of programming that TuneIn Radio does...

My Take on Election Hacking Questions

Did Russia, through a clandestine network of hackers, infiltrate the Democratic National Committee and procure embarrassing emails, giving them to WikiLeaks for public release during the sensitive final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign?  Our own Central Intelligence Agency seems to think so, but Donald Trump adamantly disagrees, stating that there is no way to truly ascertain from where the hacks originated.  I understand the president-elect...he is justifiably sensitive to anything at this time that might cast a cloud over his recent election.  However, not being in his position, my concern about any suspecting hacking doesn't rest in those WikiLeaks releases, but rather in whether the voting tabulation process was compromised.  Let me explain...

Whether or not Vladimir Putin was behind the WikiLeaks emails is something that should rightly be investigated, but it in no way negates the legitimacy of Trump's election.  Remember also that FBI head James Comey pulled his own political stunt (in my opinion) by publicly opening a last-minute investigation into another set of emails relating to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.  Look people, let's face it: the presidential election campaign has always been full of ugliness, false charges, and innuendo aimed at one's chief rival for the job, all of it designed to influence the vacillating wishy-washy undecided voter just before the election...2016 was intense in this regard, but not essentially different than other previous elections.  It's not the email hackers or Comey who were responsible for Trump's victory...it was the voters who put him into office, either by directly voting for him or by refusing to vote for Clinton, be it sitting out the election or voting for an alternate candidate.  I supported Hillary, but I believe that those who made a reasoned, deliberate decision to vote for Donald Trump had their own good points as well, and I highly respect them.  It's the people at the very end, though, those "wishy-washies", who put him over the top...and, yes, many of them, I'm sure, let themselves be unduly swayed by the shenanigans taking place at the very end.  But remember four years ago when challenger Mitt Romney was poised to defeat Barack Obama and that surreptitiously filmed video of him talking about the "47%" was released, sending much of the undecided over to the incumbent at the end?  And this is the quandary that we as a nation are in: the country is politically so evenly divided that, in order to prevail in a national election, it's important to sway the last remaining few undecided...often very ignorant and suggestible...nincompoops over to their side...

Lots of things can influence elections, but it is the voter who ultimately weighs everything and decides.  This is why the integrity of the actual vote count is so important.  I don't know anything about how the voting software for the machines tabulating the vote works, but if there is a reasonable doubt about the integrity of the process among the general public then it is a good idea to have recounts.  So far with the recounts being done it looks as if there is no evidence of any tampering with the votes...that's the best news of all.  There will always be underhanded tactics during campaigns, but people need to believe that the election results are accurate...otherwise our system of freely selecting our own leaders will be threatened...

Recounts Pushed in Three Key Swing States

Although it seemed pretty clear a little past midnight following the November 8th presidential election that Donald Trump had pulled off an improbable win over Hillary Clinton by upsetting her in the hitherto "blue" states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, it is now approaching three weeks later and a movement is steamrolling, begun by Green Party candidate Jill Stein and now being picked up by the Clinton campaign, to have manual recounts in those three states.  The margins for Trump in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are razor-thin while he still leads Clinton by some 70,000 votes in Pennsylvania. Stein's stated purpose in going for the recounts is to restore public confidence in the voting system: there had been allegations of possible Russian hacking of voting machines to tip the tabulating in favor of Trump following the revelation that Vladimir Putin may have been behind the WikiLeaks releases of emails designed to damage Clinton's campaign in the days just preceding the election.  A computer scientist at the University of Michigan, J. Alex Halderman, although skeptical about any hacking, did say that that the software put into the machines could have been compromised beforehand and suggested that the only effective way to ascertain the integrity of the vote would be to have a manual recount...

I did not support Donald Trump, but I believe he was elected fair and square.  The responsibility for the outcome of this presidential election, should this incoming president prove to have been a poor choice for the job as I suspect he will be, is on the American people who voted for him with the full knowledge of what he is all about, as well as on those citizens who decided to sit out this election.  I agree with Professor Alderman and Jill Stein, who stated that she would have demanded a recount regardless who had won: there is a need to dispel suspicions that this election was tampered with by a foreign country.  And if these recounts do go through, the best outcome from them that I see will be to have Trump's victory confirmed and the process vindicated...in spite of my opinion that Hillary Clinton would have been a much better president.  Should the unlikely happen and the recounts throw those states...and the electoral college majority...to Clinton, I fear a very scary period of turmoil and division for the future, as well as a breakdown in faith in our electoral process.  But let's go ahead and do the recounts before we jump prematurely to conclusions.  As far as I am concerned, Trump is the president-elect until definitively proven otherwise...

Wanted: A Three-Dimensional Star Map

Tonight, after hearing that the skies will finally be clearing up after days of being overcast, I plan to step outside and do a little late-winter evening star-gazing.  I already know what to expect: the same constellations with their same configurations and the same stars, the brightest of which I know the names.  Yes, there will be Orion, with its famous "Belt" of three stars in the middle and the bright stars of Betelgeuse, Rigel, and Bellatrix.  North and a little to the west a lies the house-shaped (if you "connect" the stars like the old connect-the-dot puzzles) Auriga, with Capella being the standout star.  West of Orion and south of Auriga is Taurus of the Zodiac, Aldebaran its bright star and the famous Pleiades cluster further west.  The Zodiac extends eastward with Gemini (containing the "twin" stars Castor and Pollux), the faint Cancer, then Leo with its bright star Regulus...and then on to Virgo toward the eastern horizon.  The planet Jupiter will be shining bright, just about between Leo and Virgo.  The "dog stars" of Sirius (in Canis Major and the brightest star of the night sky) and Procyon (in Canis Major) will dominate the southern sky...they lie east of Orion.  And the Big Dipper, an asterism that is part of the constellation Ursa Major, will be to the right of the North Star (Polaris), with its handle on the bottom and the dipper on top.  Yes, I know the arrangement of stars in the night sky quite well...I learned it back in 1964 when I was seven years old.  Well, I think it's about time to expand my map into the third dimension...

Stars that appear close together in the sky are in all probability vastly distant from each other...one may be relatively close to us, like Sirius at 8.6 light-years, while "nearby" stars like Betelgeuse and Rigel are each around 1,400 light-years away.  What I want is a three-dimensional map of space that I can step into and see the sky from the point at which I am standing.  So, for example, I might just want to see how different the stars look from the vantage point of Sirius, so I walk to where it is on my 3-D map...and look around me.  Doubtless some stars, like Betelgeuse and Rigel, would be just as bright, but other stars might dim or get brighter.  And some may disappear while others become prominent.  And the constellations themselves might change a bit in their shapes.  Also, I would of course see our own Sun, which would be located at the diametrically opposite part of the sky that we see Sirius in...

A real three-dimensional space map is probably too unwieldy to construct, but with our virtual reality technology on the advance, it should be quite feasible to duplicate it in virtual space.  I wonder whether such maps exist yet...if and when they do, I definitely want to be in on it...

Transferring My Study of Foreign Languages to Computer

A few days ago, I wrote that I had added Cyrillic (Russian) script to my computer.  Now I've added a few more languages to it, including Chinese (I use the traditional characters).  What I'm trying to do here is continue my foreign language study, but take it from books, paper and pencil to screen and keyboard.  My resources are almost boundless on the Internet, and with the scripts now available I can begin to realistically compose my own sentences (and eventually articles) in the languages I am learning...

I am continuing with my Duolingo study of Russian (mostly a review) and have begun studying Turkish, just to get a feel about how this application teaches new concepts.  It reminds me a little of the programmed method of instruction that I experienced back in high school when I studied trigonometry.  I like learning that way...

Melissa will soon be starting her course in Biblical Greek, and I'm going to study it with her.  I will definitely be putting that script on my computer, too.  Also, besides Duolingo, Quizlet provides a great way to study lists of items and test myself on them.  And the Google (or Bing) translator option is going to be a big help, too...

用計算機學別的語言很有意思！

Added Russian Script to My Computer: Замечательно!

The other day Melissa told me about a free language-learning application, Duolingo, that she was using on her computer to study Spanish.  She set up the application for me on mine, and I began with their Russian lessons.  Only one problem: Russian uses a different script, the Cyrillic, from our Latin writing system and I had to type in the English-to-Russian translation answers using Latin transliteration.  I solved this glitch by adding Russian as a second language on my computer...and can now toggle back and forth between the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. I learned the Russian system of writing back in 1976, even to the point where I can easily write "in English" using а Latin-to-Cyrillic transliteration I devised for myself.  So the following passage "И ам студыинг руссиан анд уоулд лике то ачиеве флуенсы ин ит" is actually in English...see if you can "decode" it!

In any event, it's fun having Cyrillic on my computer...I may find myself slipping in a Russian word here or there on my blog every now and then...

Saw The Imitation Game Recently

The Imitation Game, starring rising actor Benedict Cumberbatch as English mathematician Alan Turing, is a great historical/biographical drama focusing on a period during World War II when Germany had the upper hand over the Allies...in particular Great Britain...and the latter was desperately trying to crack the German Enigma code that the Third Reich universally used in its naval transmissions.  Turing, as he was portrayed, was a difficult, socially incompetent individual who was nevertheless one of the foremost mathematical minds of his time.  He was able, along with the help of the team assigned to him, to construct a prototype computer, called the Turing Machine, that was able to finally crack the code.  The struggles between great minds under great stress, with deadlines, the struggle to obtain needed resources, and conflicts with the base's military commander, to invent what seemed to be an impossible solution out of thin air made The Imitation Game a masterpiece of suspense...even when we know in advance the outcome of the project.

During the project, as the movie depicts it, Turing goes out and selects two people to add to his team.  One of them is Joan Clarke, whom others around her belittle because of her sex but whose brilliance Turing totally recognizes as they work out many of the assignment's problems together.  Their relationship becomes rather personal, although it is known between them that Turing was homosexual...which at the time was a crime in Britain.  Later it was implied that, years after the war when the police investigated a burglary at Turing's home and his homosexuality was revealed, leading to a choice between incarceration and chemical castration, the great mathematician and savior of the Allies during World War II committed suicide not long after undergoing the latter.  It was important that the film covered this, if only to show the brutal persecution that gays have suffered, even (or especially) in recent history.

Because of the top-secret nature of his code-breaking project, it wasn't until decades after Alan Turing's death that the scope of his accomplishments were revealed, both in terms of his contribution to the defeat of the Nazi empire and the foundation of the computer era.  What an major, indispensable figure in history he turned out to be!  I don't know whether or not the Oscar-nominated movie The Imitation Game is the best picture of last year, since I haven't seen all of the others, but I highly recommend it as it is well acted and directed and provides an eye-opening perspective on a crucial aspect of modern history that had been hidden from us for so long...