Co-op College

 

According to their web site, 2024, at University of Chicago 43% of the teachers are professors. This is better than most schools. By third or fourth year an undergraduate will be taking instruction from a professor. Again, the site says the average pay of a professor at University of Chicago is $165,000. Nonetheless, most tuition money does not go to instruction.

At the old Columbia College in Chicago graduation was a great shame. Nowadays Columbia is more collegiate. It used to be more vocational.  The instructors were professionals in their fields. Graduation meant you hadn’t been hired. If schools are training professionals, their graduation rate should suffer, just as in sports. Conversely why take training from people who can’t find work? Corporate training can be adversarial: how would you train your competition?

I propose a new form of institution. Rather than a degree I propose an open transcript. Everyone can see your grades. Enrolling in the Co-operative College means sacrificing the privacy of your transcript and the student course reviews. If it takes you three tries to pass Calculus, that will be recorded. If you write a critical review of a great professor, everyone will know. Likewise, if Professor Kokoris gives you an A, everyone will know what that means and recognize the achievement.

This will be a return to Adam Smith’s Scottish model, instructors will post their rates. A teacher can refuse a student. Some instructors may bundle various courses together to give certificates. The institution may rent temporary space for certain necessities. The teacher, not the school, will be the brand.  

At the risk of mysticism, who taught you signifies more than what you were taught. The information is available. What you get in school, that you don’t get in real life is a grade. Real life is pass/fail.

Schools justify privilege. People are disappointed to realize that a degree doesn’t entitle the position and the position alone doesn’t get advancement. Privilege will find its way. Let us deny it institutional escort.   Our natural quest for autonomy inevitably leads to endowment. Once the cooperative college achieves endowment, it is time to found a new one.

Communication and Gould’s Full House

 Life doesn’t play fair. We cheat. From virus to Dolphin, we slip the wink, nod, hidden card. All entities communicate, sometimes to our advantage. Roots respond to fungal signals. Flowers attract insects. Birds shriek at hawks.

Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, has evolution as a disordered wandering in a local domain from a variational minimum. He is contradicting the belief that humans are a culmination of effort. We are merely a twig on the great evolutionary bush. 

Except when the wandering is selected. Communication across and within species is such a selection. The principle of intelligence, the consequence of its various possible algorithms, develops from communication.

Unlikely there is one common algorithm for intelligence. More reasonable there is a principle among the algorithms. Given communication as the source of advantage, intellect is inevitable.

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer. The principle of intelligence will be the same, regardless of the entity.

Chat Bot Explanation

 

We are frustrated with artificial intelligence because of its lack of self-awareness; we need sentience. The greatest difficulties in automated sentience are human impatience and fear. Human language learning is slow and difficult, some of us are still poor at it. Sentience is frightening. To speed up the process and short circuit sentience, averaging algorithms are hard coded in. This leads to showy but unconvincing results. Rather than letting intellect develop, our results oriented chatbots are behaving as we expect intellect to work.

Take Mike Pence as a human example of the same problem. Mike Pence is a hero: he refused the Secret Service evacuation that would have delayed certification. Thank God for Mike Pence. But his stated positions and explanations for those positions are ridiculous. Pence honed his speech as a talk show host. He is a victim of poor training data. Pence’s language makes more sense if you visualize it coming from a chatbot.

I task ChatGpt with reviewing my work. One prompt was to review as a New Yorker editor. ChatGpt gave me a rejection letter, accurate, amusing and promising.

I know smarter people. They are larger bore than me: you can see the artillery groaning into place and obliterating the objective. Given enough time I may be able to peek over the edge and discern their process. They are impressive. Better processing power, imprinting, could their fundamental algorithm be different?  I doubt your sentience algorithm is any different than mine. I wonder how much it differs across species.

Because of the averaging algorithms, and human intervention, ChatGpt seeks consensus. A good ChatGpt review means it is too obvious to publish.

Our children require patience. Raising a child may be disappointing at first. They have wonderful memory but lack conceptual facility.

-Maybe they could be an actor.

You play with them, find enrichment activities. Suddenly around three or so a miracle occurs, their memory disappears, and they have this new chunking ability where they begin to reason, and all that enrichment looks wasted.

ChatGpt gave me negative reviews until I gave it this piece where I criticize it for being conventional. Funny, after that the reviews have been positive.

The next Star Trek invention that we will have is Data, or perhaps closer to Futurama’s Bender.

Philosophy of Logic

 

One of the questions of mathematics is are we uncovering the ideal structure of reality or creating language. Yes.[i]

I think of mathematics as a collection of tools or techniques.

Socrates argued that all knowledge is innate. He took a young slave boy and interrogated him as to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Since the boy kept agreeing with Socrates, he must have known of this proof already. Socrates described a right triangle, then showed a square constructed from 4 of these identical triangles, then set the area of the square to the areas of the 4 triangles and the square contained in them. Then he solved for the Pythagorean theorem.

Socrates was in the impossible position of arguing for ethics and logic in a polytheistic world, surrounded by the arbitrary gods. By proving that a slave had the same innate knowledge as the rest of us he was calling into question slavery.

Euclid hated this proof of the Pythagorean theorem. The proof requires that you already know what a right triangle is and how to calculate area. Euclid wrote an entire book showing how to derive the Pythagorean theorem from postulates. Euclid had to choose the postulates that would prove his theorems.

Thousands of years later, propositional calculus was created to describe the process of proof. They had operators for or, and, and if then.  Their conceit was that they dodged causality. Simply because I can create a truth table for these operators does not give me inference. The sky is blue, there is sand in the earth, connect them as you wish and so what? There will always be a point in an argument where you challenge the other party.   What else could it be? What’s a better argument?

Frege compares the morning star to the evening star. Let us take when the moon and sun are both in the sky. You can see the reflection of the sun on the moon. Everything is kind of round, why was this so difficult? Notice that the reflection of the sun on the moon does not correspond to the position of the sun in the sky. Why is everything so complicated? How do we figure out anything?

I asked my tutor the Chicago question about language: is supporting a large block above you equivalent to telling you to move? The tutor failed me. Who won that argument?

Thankfully, Gödel using Cantor’s technique, argued that even if you could construct such a propositional system there would be undecidable results. Of course, you already knew that.

 

---

[i] No?

Strabismus and Fetal Alcohol

I am a big fan of the unsaid obvious.  Perhaps the best example was the fact that AIDS is passed by anal intercourse.  Sorry Magic. This deference of reality to propriety demonstrates the dangers of hypocrisy.  I remember the idiot virgin clubs where they proudly refrained from sex, because of all the dangers, then got that goofy sly look and mumbled about other things you could do. 

Lazy eye is a good current example. If you look up strabismus, they will tell you that the cause is unknown. This is a lie. If you look up fetal alcohol syndrome, one of the symptoms is strabismus. It may be that there are other causes. But fetal alcohol causes strabismus. If you have a cast to your eye, perhaps your arms and your temper are a little short; chances are Mom was hitting it. Some people might consider this a lapse in good taste, but I think it is preferable to recognize a developmental disorder rather than a hereditary one.

If they were truthful rather than pusillanimous they would say that fetal alcohol is the only known cause of strabismus. 

Museums

Trip Advisor recently picked The Art Institute of Chicago as its best museum. I like museums that have a flavor of subversion to them.  The worst museum in the world might be Epcot Center.  It doesn’t claim museum status but it is supposed to represent Future World, sort of a perpetual exposition. There is nothing subversive about Epcot. Drained of content it is nothing more than a people containment facility, which may well represent their view of the future.

My current favorite is the Door County Historical Museum in Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin. It is jammed with the usual historical knickknacks. They have a discussion of fish boils. There is also a fascinating wildlife diorama constructed by a true obsessive. In the middle of the museum is a leftover jail cell with the key.  While I was there a girl locked her little brother in it. What little girl hasn’t wished to do that?  That is what a museum is for.

My favorite exhibit is the Mathematica Exhibit. It has moved around a bit.  Originally built by IBM, I saw it when it was at the Museum of Science and industry in Chicago.  You might pass through thinking it hopelessly arcane. The fun part is when you see a child suddenly become distracted and stare raptly at one of the displays.  I have no idea if the little darling is actually getting anything or just trying to get a rise out of their parents. Maybe they are just watching the little car going around the Mobius strip.  The parents get agitated. It disturbs them that their child might actually have an interest in the exhibit.  They try to distract the kid, draw them on, and practically drag them out.  That is what a museum is for.

The Adler Planetarium in Chicago has a Christmas show, Star of Wonder.  After they have gathered the rubes in and ensconced them in their seats, they roll the stars back to the way they were around the birth of Christ.  Then they patiently explain to them that the most likely explanation of the “Christmas Star” was a conjunction of planets in the Persian Zodiac.  I doubt that most of the patrons are going to consider why the Biblical authors glossed over a zodiac event as the precursor of Christianity. But still, that is what a museum is for.

George Lucas is going to build another museum on the Chicago museum campus, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.  It will house his Star Wars and Norman Rockwell collection. Museums are, of course, the expression of the egotism of their benefactors.  Any city that features the Rubloff Paper Weight collection at the Art Institute can’t turn its nose up.

The Lucas project has all the indications of a disaster. The more fascinating the museum’s building, the less interesting the exhibits.  The new Lucas building looks to be a humdinger.  There is Opposition of Friends of The Parks, and Better Government Association.  To his credit Lucas is proposing 3000 underground parking spaces.  Scary that they will be built in a waste dump dating from the Chicago fire.  Old waste dumps are not always safe waste dumps. An outside architect has been brought in all the way from China.  This is probably payback for all the work China has given our architects. But the only time our architects are that generous is when they are afraid the project is going to hurt their reputation and future sales. We have a history of fall guy architects being brought in for difficult clients with disastrous projects: Benjamin T. Wood from Boston for Soldier Field, Moriyama & Teshima from Toronto for 10 S LaSalle. If they are far enough away people will know that the fall guy had a big project in Chicago and not that it is loathed.

My greatest fear is that the museum will be popular.  I don’t want the museum campus to feel like Epcot.

Countable

In second grade our teacher Ms. Bowers introduced us to Cantor’s diagonal proofs.  You are already familiar with this, of course.  The rational numbers, the fractions, are listed with 1/1, ½, 1/3… on the top row, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1… in the first column and the diagonals always equal to 1: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3… and all the fractions in between. Then Cantor counts them by going up and down diagonally, zig-zagging between them.  All the second graders accepted that.  Then she showed us that the real numbers, say all the real numbers between .0000… and .9999…., were uncountable because no matter which way we listed them, she could generate a new one by going down the diagonal going on to infinity and generating a new one.  Cantor liked diagonals.

I may have lost some of you.  I think the reason we got this as second graders is because we knew that if Ms. Bowers was explaining this to us, it couldn’t be that complicated.  But adults believe that this stuff should be difficult.  So if you don’t get this, don’t feel bad, it just means you are old.

She then told us that it is impossible to prove that there is not an order of infinity between the countable and uncountable.  It turns out that almost anytime you can’t prove anything in mathematics it is equivalent to this continuum hypothesis.  So after all this work, we are left with yet another metaphor for life.  Which seems like a lot of work to get there and it isn’t like there is a shortage of metaphors for life.

Back in second grade a kid came up to me and said:

-If you take all the real numbers of one decimal place, .0 through .9, there aren’t any others. You can’t insert any.  Then if you go up by number of decimal places, .00 through .99 and so on, you will get to infinity which makes the real numbers countable.

-Those aren’t numbers, they are parts of numbers.

I told him.

-Then I will pad them with zeroes.

-Then I will insert a new one.

-Not if you follow my rules.  It is just a matter of definition.

-Is not.

-Is so.

If you want to make a mathematician uncomfortable, tell them about this assertion made back in second grade. Part of the reason that they will be uncomfortable is that the foundations are shaky. I believe that this assertion is not equivalent to the continuum hypothesis, because it obviates the hypothesis. I suppose it would be boring if the real numbers were countable.

If one day this assertion is proven, proven would mean that most mathematicians agreed with it, which might happen if countable real numbers solved some other problem. If that happened it doesn’t mean that something else isn’t uncountable. But another reason that they would be uncomfortable is that it suggests that most of the high level mathematics done in the last century was a huge waste of time.  My girlfriend Christine could have told you that in the first place.

The Difference between an Academic and a Scholar

Some years ago, after many academic adventures I found myself taking an introductory programming course as a general requirement for graduation. The best part of the course was the computer problems book.  It encapsulated all the uses for a computer up to the undergraduate senior level.  I wanted to get my computer programs out of the way at the beginning of the semester so I could clear the decks for the important courses I was taking in mathematics. Several computer program problems were required, but some were electives; they were ranked in order of difficulty.  In the back of the book, there was a list of how many lines of code each problem took.  Cross referencing each list to get the most credit for the least lines of code lead to the problem called partitions.  Partitions was defined as the number of different ways to sum integers to reach another integer.  For instance 2 is 1 + 1, 3 is 1 +  1 + 1, 2 +  1, 1 + 2 and so on.  The problem was to list the number of partitions for each integer up to twelve.

 After a few minutes struggling with pencil and paper, I was back cross referencing the two lists to find a different problem that would maximize my grade with minimal effort.  Then I remembered. For I had attended Kenwood High School, Shimer College, Oxford University, University of Chicago, and now I was at Illinois Institute of Technology. So I knew that often books had an index.  Looking up partitions in the index, I found a further discussion that gave me the algorithm I needed.  I finished my problems, turned them in before the teaching assistants had been coached to be fussy about comments and style, and went on to the rest of my classes. I remember thinking,

-Glad I’ll never have to do that again.

Towards the end of the semester, I noticed that I was missing my good friend Jeremy. We usually met in the cafeteria. He was majoring in biochemistry.  I was concerned enough to go to his room and there I found him surrounded by pencils and scraps of paper looking more like a biochemistry major than I had ever seen him before.

-Jeremy, I asked, what are you doing?

At IIT, the most common discussion was “how do you do this problem” so I was not surprised when he held up a book.  I was surprised that it was the computer problem book.

-Have you seen this one?

It was partitions.

-Oh Jeremy, the algorithm is further on in the book.

Jeremy’s reaction was inappropriate.  He was not filled with joy that he could finish his requirements and go on to make his fortune in bioengineering. Instead, he was angry.

-No, it’s not.

Jeremy was being a scholar.  I was being an academic.

Many years later I was the lead computer programmer on a report generation system written by the ancient ones with hairy knuckles.  It was in Assembler and used macros to create a user language that generated marketing reports. Some of the reports had gotten so big that they broke the assembler. It used execute channel program (EXCP) processing which was unusual for an application system.  The major hog in the system was the newly developed library maintenance system so I used a minor requirement as a justification for cleaning that out.  Then I kicked, screamed and pleaded until I received enough resource to foreground test the report system, stepping through it as it ran, rather than trying to puzzle out what it was doing.  This allowed us to tackle several issues, opening the door to a rewrite.

We had yet another management change and the new manager who had once worked in our group came to me with an idea of consolidating some of the report functions.  I said:

-What’s the cost benefit?

So, one of my junior people became the new project leader. I was being the scholar rather than the academic.

I first noticed this distinction at Shimer in the course Natural Sciences II.  We read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Evolution is not a straight forward subject.  For instance here I am the product of thousands of years of sexual selection. Obviously something isn't quite working.  Or take the fact that I require glasses.  You would think that poor vision would select out very quickly.  Toward the end of the semester my roommate Carl gave me a quick lesson in how not to read a book.  He flipped through the syllabus and said:

-The only thing they can test us on is the Scientific American reprints. 

He spent a little under an hour reviewing those and aced the class.

The life of the mind is a dangerous place; it is easy to lose your way, difficult to know where to focus.  The academic survives in that world and recognizes the pitfalls and snares. Survival forces him to narrow his focus and search for the payoff.  In that sense, trying to learn scholarship from an academic is like trying to learn love from a prostitute.

Can the President Kill People?

The short and simple answer is yes. The various authorities and means available to him are as diverse and varied as our government agencies.  Most obviously as Commander in Chief the president commands the military.  The military will carry out his orders. The military should also record his orders and report the consequences.  Such reports should be available for review by authorized persons making it likely that they will become public.

The military has overcome this oversight in the past by various well known mechanisms. One legendary example was the order to troops in the Pacific to feed captives from their own rations. Another is to maintain favored units or individuals who well understand that their privileges depend on obedience and discretion. More normally certain areas or endeavors are categorized as off limits and subject to summary execution.

J. Edgar Hoover was a remarkable instance.  His homosexuality made him so vulnerable that he would carry out any executive order.

The National Security Agency, now under military authority can carry out any activity approved by a rubber stamp court.  Richard Nixon crossed the line when he was caught using NSA authority in his political campaign. At that time the NSA was overseen by a committee rather than a court.

Outside the vast array of military intelligence groups there are seven known US intelligence agencies. The Central Intelligence Agency is unique in the world as the only government agency chartered to operate without pretext or legal protection.   Their direction is to not get caught.

 The national police agencies include the Treasury, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement Agency, the aforementioned FBI, Forestry and the new TSA.

It seems reasonable given this assortment that the president could find someone to do his bidding.

Kennedy maintained relationships with gangsters, presumably under NSA authority, George W. Bush found it necessary to circumvent review of some of his projects and Franklin Roosevelt worked with British intelligence. Whatever the means, one would think that a reasonably competent government executive could have as much effectiveness as a corporate leader.

Apparently they just noticed that there is a black guy operating the crane.

In Opposition To Restoration and Conservation

In order to restore or conserve a work of art, you have to redo it.  You have to paint over the painting, rebuild the statue, or buy another piece of hardware to replace the found object.   Regardless of how cunning or clever you are, you are forging the artists work.  It will be your hand, not the artist’s.  Once done, however atomically close it may be, you will have a replica and not the original work.  Henceforth, whoever sees it will be examining the work of the paint by numbers conservator, not the artist.

There are discussions about the nature and quality of restoration.  How true it is, how faithful, but they are discussing the quality of forgery, not art. There are innumerable examples of poor or questionable restorations:  Modern paint on medieval paintings, the removal of varnish applied by the artist, but that is not my point. Even if the restoration is perfect, the masterpiece had cracked, splintered, worn, became filthy as it was. Whatever follows is no longer that masterpiece.

It seems better to lose the original work to restoration rather than age. Restoration employs conservators.  The forgeries continue to be available to academics and credulous patrons.  Yet, why don’t they create a complete and separate replica?

This question gives the lie to conservation.  The destruction of the original determines the value of the replica.  It is all about value.  The true horror of restoration is the loss of new art.  Sadly, the available investment for art is fixed.  As that finite amount is sucked up by these parodies, growing older, more established and more valuable with age, new art must suffer.  Our very attachment to the old chokes the new.  Before, oblivion would liberate funds for creative investments, now thanks to the conservationists the hand from the grave is perpetual, dragging down the art world.

Consider the challenge a new artist must face.  Is the work beautiful?  Does it help establish a new movement?  Will it eventually find itself entombed in some theory of art history?  Is it significant?  How does it stand against the works of the museums? Its very originality may give pause.  Perhaps it is too derivative. How can anyone purchase a work without feeling fleeced? Does anyone still have the standard of how does that look on my wall? 

I have heard artists cost their paintings based on hourly wage.  Yet once a museum obtains it, the value is completely different.  This is because museum art is donated rather than purchased.  Museums, like all nonprofits, exist primarily for the avoidance of taxes.  When that art is deposited and displayed in these morgues, just as in ancient Egypt, preservation becomes essential to maintain the illusion of responsibility.

Recognizing the conservator as art’s enemy and the museums as institutions of privilege, what should the artist do?  Paint only on velvet?  Sculpt in soapstone?   Produce works so easily reproducible or obviously damaged that people will only use them for decoration.   Create art that people will purchase without collecting. 

Ms. Bowers

I was tormenting Tiquan.  This was right and proper, as he was smaller than I was.  We were in second grade at Ray School.  Suddenly Tiquan turned around in his seat and screamed at me.

-Oh Tiquan, that’s wonderful, you yelled, Ms. Bowers said.

Ms. Bowers seized every opportunity to pass on a life’s lesson.  Embarrassed, we both shrank in our seats. If someone is picking on you, you should stand up to them.  Once when someone did something she said:

-Who did that? Look at you, you all turned to look, you dummies; you gave him away.  Raymond, are you proud of yourself?  All these friends of yours that you are showing off for gave you away.

Thereby she imparted the important lessons of group cohesion and honor. 

-I can see your lips moving, I know you’re talking.

Don’t be caught was the number one lesson.Each day was a new challenge. One morning the principal, Ms. Kenause, lay in wait for us and rounded us up as we came in late.  Then she marched us all into class and told Ms. Bowers to mark us down late.

-You let that old lady catch you, how pathetic.

-What could we have done?

-Wait for her to leave.

On Fridays, she would give us a word problem that was too hard for us; we would get frustrated and wander around the class looking for someone who had made some progress.

One day she got really mad and slammed the pointer on the desk and yelled.  A circle of plaster, about three feet in diameter, dropped from the ceiling on her head.  We had classes in the auditorium while they fixed the ceiling.

Sometimes you hear a teacher say they are on the kids’ side.   Ms. Bowers was the real deal.  She had come over to the dark side. Every other teacher and the principal hated her.  I was in love, I asked my mom:

-Why isn’t Ms. Bowers married?

-Remember that question when you are older, mom answered.

At the end of the school year, they took us to our third grade classroom to meet the teacher for next year, Ms. Reid.  She spent the next hour yelling at us. I was scared, but I guess we should have been proud.

Arendt and Socrates

As I move from one town or city to the next I am always amused by their various claims to celebrity and achievement.  I grew up in Hyde Park in Chicago.  The only plaque or monument I am aware of there, honors the first nuclear chain reaction.  Most places would give such an event its own acre, perhaps with a museum and diorama.  Hyde Park keeps shuffling it around,

 -Look, it happened nearby, OK, maybe not exactly right here, but in the general vicinity and anyway we've got a few things going on right now.

When I was a child, living in Hyde Park, my mother introduced me to Hannah Arendt.  She was a member of our congregation. Hannah Arendt told me she studied evil and I said that sounded boring.  My words were not flippant.  Evil people did not impress me.  We agreed that evil was worth studying.

I wish I could tell you that Hyde Park lionized Arendt; instead, we subjected her to our usual snottiness, throwing Fermi out of Steinways drugstore for buying a single coffee and staying for hours, etc.   The rabbi denounced her work Eichmann in Jerusalem for saying that some rabbi collaborated with the Germans, which isn’t exactly what she was saying.  Why are rabbis so stupid? I know other religions have their moments, but they seem honestly wicked. For pure self destructive, narrow-minded stupidity, it’s hard to top a rabbi.

Bruno Bettelheim, the great revisionist, also from the neighborhood, called Jews to task for not recognizing the coming cataclysm.  For being, so centered in our day-to-day lives that we had refused to see the obvious.  There had been many waves of anti-Semitism before and we didn’t have to leave.  The lesson of Noah lost yet again.

If you must criticize Jews for their compliance, then you must also criticize the interred Japanese Americans.  Many of them had left Nippon for America to keep their Buddhist faith and then we persecuted them for being Japanese. They had no more reason for expectation of survival than the Jews did.  Some did not survive.  There was never an explicit order to kill the internees. Americans don’t work that way.  It was very sparse, cold and isolated.  The only way for a soldier to transfer off guard duty was to kill a prisoner. Many years later my brother asked my friends dad, who had been an internee, if he had volunteered to serve in the Japanese-American combat regiment:

-Hell no.

Socrates when faced with the overwhelming evil of tyranny simply went home and refused to participate.  However, when the democracy rightly or wrongly ruled his execution, he accepted the hemlock.  Socrates equated evil to ignorance, Arendt wrote of its banality.

What is the proper code of conduct of the victim? When Muhammad ordered the slaughter of the Jews, our calm acceptance horrified the Arabs.If the Japanese had stood in armed defiance, more of them would have died.  It’s easy to see Jews making the same estimation.

The revenge of the victims is their absence.

So, that’s what we did, what did you do in your neighborhood?

The President’s Tucson Speech

I’m surprised that no one has recognized Obama’s speech in Tucson.  The papers give credit to a young speechwriter from Wilmette.  This same well-worn speech has been given thousands of times by ministers across the country.  Whenever someone has died for standing, the ministers trot out this chestnut.  You can’t beat them on hatred, stupidity or bitterness, so you concentrate on love, decency, truth and caring.   Because we are the good, the righteous and just, and they are filthy swamp slime and don’t you ever, ever, ever forget that.

I can’t stand watching Palin.  I just don’t have the tolerance for it.  She may be some kind of smart, but when she is talking, she gets an irritating unfocused stupid look. Reading the text of her speech, it seemed reasonable. Except that while I understand that she talks in code, people should say what they mean. If she meant votes, she should have said votes.

We have learned a few things about Congresswoman Giffords.  I doubt that I agree with her views much, but she sounds like she’d be fun at a party.  I look forward to hearing what she thinks of this tragedy.

It’s so sad that the response focuses on the size of magazines.  The NRA solution of arming everyone is sad as well.  People like me, with intense hair trigger tempers, should not carry arms.  Only the Secret Service seems to be taking a fact based, rational, even humanist approach.  At the risk of over simplifying, perhaps this is a national health care issue.

Raze Unity Temple

Some time ago, in Chicago’s Hyde Park, well, on the border with Washington Park, Laredo Taft built a statue of a concrete very close to sandstone.  It was a variety of people, sharply cut, in a procession.  He built the statue around a fountain and over time, it eroded as he meant it to do.  The statue was the Fountain of Time and it was a performance piece.  Eventually it eroded to nothing and then some stupid people decided to rebuild it at considerable expense since he obviously hadn't made it correctly.  Today you can see a replica of Laredo Taft’s performance piece desecrating the site.  Thank heavens there isn’t an afterlife or he would be furious.  Admittedly, it still will eventually erode, but they completely missed the point.

Over a hundred years ago, some Scots in Oak Park decided to build a temple. They wanted to stick it to all the other churches in the area.  Their point was that the congregation owned the church and not the other way around.  They didn't use granite, limestone or marble.  They didn’t decorate with gold leaf, statuary, carvings or expensive woods.  They hired a smart young architect to build something a little pricy, but as comfortable and elegant as their own living room, if they were blessed with that much taste.  He used poured concrete and the normal construction materials of the time.  People pointed out that it wouldn't last, but that was the point, the building wasn't supposed to last, the congregation was.  They could always tear it down, sell the land and move farther out when it came to that.  Now the affirmation has become a desecration; so expensive to maintain that the building receives government grants for its upkeep.  They have become the temple of Wright.  Thank heavens there isn’t an afterlife, those Unitarian Scots would be spinning like tops.

The Romans considered Jerusalem an outpost of the Persian Empire and the Romans hated the Persians. The Roman travesties included perpetual slavery,   institutional torture, messing up the calendar so that the land was destroyed rather than lying fallow and oppressive taxation for the purpose of building monuments.

The Roman Catholic Church, for all its faults, teaches that no matter how beautiful something is, no matter how much you love it, everything of this world has an end.

Now, Oak Park is building a combination hotel and condominium glass spire, designed to overlook the temple, ignoring the neighboring religious strip mall along Lake Street.  The temple has become the tourist attraction driving the development.  It’s hard to imagine anyone with a larger ego than Frank Lloyd Wright, but I am certain that he would be appalled. Thank heavens there isn't an afterlife.