Meanderings, 27 January 2023

One of our delights each January is to drive to Florida to spend a couple weeks in warmer weather. We don’t miss the snow and cold and shoveling, and we do enjoy the pileated woodpeckers and ospreys and palm warblers and ibises, and do our best to spot the occasional gator. Saw a hefty one Thursday. We stay near Ft Myers so we drove coast line. The devastation along the coast remains a stunning witness to the overwhelming force of wind and water and ocean surges. Resilience makes up these people, resilience. They say it will take five years, but it’s a Ft Myers Strong mentality down here.

Photo by Patrice Bouchard on Unsplash

James Ernest, who calls it as it is. It makes no sense.

So Angela Rigas, Michigan state representative for the district in which I live, considers red-flag laws (extreme-risk protection orders), universal background checks, and requirements for safe storage of guns to be violations of the Second Amendment. Most Americans do not.

Americans (and Michiganians) have differing opinions on all sorts of things. On some questions relating to guns, we are about equally divided. But the three types of legislation to which Angela is objecting here are overwhelmingly popular. Polls have found that large majorities of Americans favor red-flag laws. Expanded requirement for background checks are also popular. And laws requiring safe storage of guns are also broadly popular. (See also this report on Pew findings, this APM data on opinions regarding safe storage, and many other polls that you can find as easily as I.)

That is to say, while some people are gun haters who think all guns should be banned everywhere, and some people exhibit signs of having a gun fetish, most Americans believe that gun ownership should be legal, but that laws should permit taking guns away from people who show signs of being prepared to use them to kill themselves and other people, and that would-be purchasers of guns should have to pass background checks, and that owners of guns should be legally required to store them safely in their homes, so that, for example, children cannot take them and shoot themselves and other people. This strikes most of us as common sense.

Angela Rigas thinks otherwise.

It’s coming, singularity that is. No, it’s not predicted in the Book of Revelation!

In the world of artificial intelligence, the idea of “singularity” looms large. This slippery concept describes the moment AI exceeds beyond human control and rapidly transforms society. The tricky thing about AI singularity (and why it borrows terminology from black hole physics) is that it’s enormously difficult to predict where it begins and nearly impossible to know what’s beyond this technological “event horizon.”

However, some AI researchers are on the hunt for signs of reaching singularity measured by AI progress approaching the skills and ability comparable to a human. One such metric, defined by Translated, a Rome-based translation company, is an AI’s ability to translate speech at the accuracy of a human. Language is one of the most difficult AI challenges, but a computer that could close that gap could theoretically show signs of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

“That’s because language is the most natural thing for humans,” Translated CEO Marco Trombetti said at a conference in Orlando, Florida, in December. “Nonetheless, the data Translated collected clearly shows that machines are not that far from closing the gap.”

HT: JE

For some fun, for cat lovers, catechism and the cat by my friend and colleague, Beth Jones.

How does this happen?

BATON ROUGE, La. -- LSU accidentally overpaid Tigers football coach Brian Kelly by $1 million during the first year of a 10-year, $100 million contract, but discovered the error and has moved to correct it, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor's office said Wednesday.

Kelly was overpaid $1,001,368 in supplemental payments in 2022 because of duplicate payments made both to Kelly's LLC and to the coach directly.

The double payments began in May and continued until LSU officials detected the errors in November.

"LSU management and the head football coach have enacted an adjusted payment schedule so the amount of overpayment will be recouped by the conclusion of fiscal year 2023," the Legislative Auditor's report stated.

John Hawthorne’s courageous challenge:

What happens when the constructed systems of the Christian Worldview don’t hold? For too many Christians in their 30s and 40s, they feel adrift. Those that are from highly structured environments will struggle with reconciling new ideas. Those with little faith commitments may not feel they are Christians at all. Many others fall between the two responses.

Sociologically, this is what Peter Berger described as “plausibility structures”. These systems of ideas exist not only external to the individual (through socialization) but must also hold together subjectively. It’s what James Davison Hunter refers to in his work on evangelicals as “cognitive bargaining”.

It is a challenge to work through these various epistemological threats. First, the college student leaves home and church of origin (if it exists) and comes to college. There are well-documented shifts that occur throughout the college years.

Then comes the move beyond the cloistered Christian campus out into "the real world".

What if, rather than seeing questioning of the Christian Worldview as an institutional challenge that must be controlled, we see it as an inevitable part of the student’s growth? If that were the case, the struggles faced by those in their 30s or 40s or later might be addressed sooner but within the context of a supportive community?

If we instead saw Deconstruction as a natural part of subjective faith development, we could prepare students for the questions that will arise.

Not because we fed them predetermined answers, but because we provided them with the requisite intellectual and spiritual tools.

A very serious challenge facing so many churches, if not almost all of them:

Let’s start with a scenario that your church has an average worship attendance of 100. I use that number for simplicity. The median worship attendance is 65.

Now, let’s ask a simple question. How many attendees do you have to add to your attendance in a year to stay even?

The answer for a typical church is 32 with a worship attendance of 100. You can double the number to 64 if the church’s attendance is 200.

Did you get that? A church has to increase the number of attendees by 32 percent each year just to stay even.

In a church with 100 in attendance, an additional 32 attendees would have to be added to stay even, and they would have to attend every Sunday. If they attend every other Sunday, the church would need an additional 64 attendees.

[SMcK: he continues with deaths (1), moving away (9), changing churches (7), and declining attendance (15).]