Grandson started Pre-K this week.
It was quiet in the house Monday morning. Usually, he’s over by 9:00 or so as his mom (Oldest Daughter) drops him off on her way to work. That means I’ve got to be awake and ready by 8:30. I know. Quelle horreur.
I got to sleep in, though. I may have abused the privilege since I wasn’t dressed and moving until 11.
He gets out of school at 2:15; pickup took us about twenty minutes once the line started moving. That wasn’t all that bad considering it was the first day. I felt horrible for the staff members running pickup though, because the heat index was over 140°. There’s a little bit of shade around the school, but there’s not much you can do when it’s that hot.
I knew it was coming. He’s four years old and school is just a fact of life at this age. And I’m still picking him up three days a week, so it’s not like I won’t see him at all. Just not as much.
It’ll take a little while to adjust is all. Life goes on.
Thursday at work we had intruder drills in the morning and afternoon (two different groups of students). When Diana told me about them, I realized I hadn’t thought much about something like that in a long time. I’d considered it in the abstract because I don’t go out much. But now that I’m going to be in a school environment for eight to sixteen hours a week, I have to consider it. Fortunately, both of my testing locations have decently safe areas to hide in.
The other big concern is what to do about the tests the students might be in the middle of. The drills were timed so that nobody was testing, but it’s easy to schedule drills. And while students in one location use laptops, the other testing room uses desktop machines. The testers can’t take them into hiding with them.
It made me realize that I’d slipped back into Condition White in a lot of ways. Time to relearn a Condition Yellow mindset.
I was looking something up in my hometown this week on Google Maps and I pulled up my childhood home, as I sometimes do. Google updated Street View a couple of months ago, and now it doesn’t even look like my home. The new owner made some significant changes to the front porch, swapping out the big pillars across the front for much smaller posts. The new effect looks very strange to me. Even if it’s been thirty years since I lived in that house, it had a particular look for 25 years or so that I grew used to. And it’s her house, of course; she can do whatever she wants to it. It’s just very different to me, and I don’t know that I was ready for it to change like that.
The forsythia in front of the porch has been gone for a while. So have the roses in the backyard and the south side of the front porch. The irises, too. I transplanted some of each to our last house in Columbus where they survived quite well while we were there. And I’ve got both irises and forsythia down here at Wayfarer’s Refuge. They’re just not the stuff from home.
Once in the early 70s, the previous owners’ daughter stopped in for a quick visit. I was young, still in single digits, so I didn’t really appreciate what that visit might have meant to her.
I don’t know that I’ll ever do the same thing. My emotional attachment to the house was probably too strong to be healthy, and I don’t know what going back would do for it.
Ah, nostalgia. Bittersweet.
The elementary school I attended during my younger years was just half a block away from home. That made it easy for me to go home for lunch some days. If I hurried, I’d get home just as Bob Barker was running the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right. If I missed school because I was sick, I’d get to watch the whole show. One of the many obituaries quoted him as saying, “I did Price is Right for 35 years, but all anyone wants to talk about is when I beat up Happy Gilmore.” I didn’t know he was a vegetarian or a Navy veteran. Peace and strength to his friends and family.
Reading
Generative AI
A U. S. District Court judge issued a decision last Friday on a court case involving generative AI. I didn’t say anything about it last week because I was waiting for more knowledgeable people to weigh in on the decision. Eugene Volokh at Reason discusses it at No Copyright for Certain AI-Generated Works, but Maybe Yes for Others, if Prompts are Detailed Enough. The gist seems to be that if a human being provides a detailed-enough prompt to the generative AI software, there may be some copyright protection. The court seems to have stopped short of specifying how detailed the prompt would need to be, which makes sense.
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP has more background on Dr. Thayer at Who (If Anyone) Owns AI-Generated Content? This article over at IP Watchdog points out that Dr. Thayer seeks to challenge IP laws around the world with regard to human input and authorship.
I’m not sure that I support his efforts at this point, though I don’t know much about him yet. But I think Judge Howell got it right, at least for now. There’s got to be some pretty significant amount of human input for copyright to attach to a work. And would we really want it any other way?
Generative AI only responds to input. It’s never had its heart broken, watched a loved one die, or held a lover while watching a sunset. It’s never tasted an apple straight from the tree, or fresh ice cream, or smelled a steak on the grill. Generative AI has never known the unconditional love of a pet. It’s never felt uncontrollable terror as a car skids out of control. Generative AI has never experienced these things, and it only knows what the programmers have fed into the database.
Even if you could feed the entire world’s books into a generative AI database, it wouldn’t have the experiences it would need to draw from to create the way a human being does. We writers pour everything from our lives into what we create. Artists and musicians do the same thing. How could an algorithm convey the emotions I went through when I thought my marriage was ending? You could feed it the blog posts and journal entries I wrote back then and it could regurgitate that in some form. But is that really created art?
I’m still going to use generative AI the way I have been, for post titles. But that’s all I ever see myself using it for.
Evangelicals and Homosexuality
The Roys Report had a piece about a Nazarene pastor in California who is facing discipline. California Pastor Faces Removal from Church Due to Gay Marriage Stance tells us about Pastor Dee Kelley, now apparently the former pastor at San Diego First Church of the Nazarene. He’s being disciplined over an essay he wrote entitled “A Hope For Change.” The essay (rightly, IMO) calls out the denomination for its position on homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Current Nazarene doctrine prohibits pastors from performing same-sex weddings or blessing same-sex unions.
I think Pastor Kelley makes valid points in his essay. The COTN has been, in my thirty years’ experience, pretty lethargic when it comes to making changes. Several women pastors helped found the denomination in 1908, yet its Board of General Superintendents has only called two women as members in 115 years. It took them until 2005 to select a General Superintendent who wasn’t white or American (and it took them 53 ballots to elect him). The General Assembly has never been held outside the United States. I’m not griping about DEI here. But if a denomination claims to be a “global community of faith,” shouldn’t it reflect the global community?
It seems like a real mess. Melissa Tucker, a former associate pastor at SD First, stepped down from the church and eventually relinquished her Nazarene credentials. She took a position at a Methodist church in the area and taught as an adjunct professor at Point Loma Nazarene University. In January, she was non-renewed as an adjunct because of her “progressive views on human sexuality.” Shortly after, the dean of the School of Theology and Christian Ministry, Mark Maddix, was fired. The provost claims it was for insubordination, but the school denies any connection to Tucker’s non-renewal.
Given the denomination’s long-standing conservatism—it was only in the late 80s that Nazarenes were allowed to see movies—their actions here are not at all surprising. They disappoint me strongly, but they don’t surprise me. I wish more Christians took a closer look at the book they claim to obey. They should learn more about the languages it was originally written in, and the culture and customs of the time it was created in. Then maybe they’d realize that the man they claim to love and follow was progressive and liberal enough that he probably wouldn’t be welcome in most American evangelical churches these days.
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