The celebration continues...

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50th anniversary of meeting Melody

Today Melody and I celebrated our semicentennial. We met 50 years ago today, November 8, 1975. Details of the story, which I won't repeat, are here and here.

We celebrated by taking a one-day vacation. The theme for the day was enjoying the last day of summer, in two senses: We had unseasonably warm weather (75 F), and the vacation itself was retrospective of activities we had enjoyed in earlier years.

First we revisited the exact spot where we met.

Complication: The place, a lobby in the UGA Law School, was locked. But a law student let us in, and I left my UGA business card to confirm that I had some legitimate reason for being on campus.

Here is Melody, more or less in the exact spot where I first saw her. She was entering from what was then an open breezeway, not enclosed.

And here we are in the exact spot where we met (of course, on that day we stood considerably farther apart):

What it was like meeting Melody: I've written elsewhere of her broad interests and the fact that she is the only friend I've ever had with whom I do not have to set aside, as an interest not shared, anything that really matters to me. We both started out knowing that we were multi-talented and wanting to develop more than one talent, not just for the sake of money, but for the satisfaction of it.

Far too many people, even some who liked me very much, were unable to get beyond saying, "That's amazing, I have no idea how you do it." Melody knew how I did things. Of course our talents are not the same, but we have enough of each other's talents to understand. I can't create art like hers, but I know a good bit of what she's doing when she does it. She doesn't do AI research like mine, but she knows in some detail what I'm doing when I do it.

Even before I realized the breadth of Melody's interests and the might of her intellect, on that very first day she struck me as something else: wise, mature, and honest.

In the first minutes of our friendship, she risked not being liked. She made it evident that she was serious about her studies and serious about being a Christian. That might repel a lot of college boys. It attracted me — especially because it showed me that she wasn't trying to present herself as just whatever she thought might charm me. I had met enough girls who did that (to everyone, not just to me). They were hard to get to know.

I was also tired of teenage girls who weren't mature enough to know themselves, who might vacillate from week to week as to whether they were Christians or what morality they believed in. (I'm talking about fickleness under peer pressure, not people thinking through a difficult question in a careful way.) Melody was evidently as immune to peer pressure as I was, and she knew herself well and wanted me to know her.

So we became good friends that first day, best friends as we wrote letters, and an inseparable couple while she was getting ready to enter UGA. As I've said, I was hesitant to tie her down because my own plans included five years of graduate school elsewhere. But by the middle of the first year apart, we knew we were probably going to be together forever. It was a successful long-distance relationship followed by an even more successful marriage.

I felt that a great blessing had come into my life, something much better than what I thought having a girlfriend would be like.

Now back to today's vacation. The second stop was Amicalola Falls, one of Melody's favorite places to visit with her family as a child, and also after we got together. Even with the aid of a wheelchair we brought, I couldn't get Melody to anywhere with a good view of the rather hidden waterfall, so we mostly enjoyed the scenery from the road.

However, she did hike the first 20 feet of the Appalachian Trail — not a great achievement, but it's something!

And I did get a decent picture of the top of the falls, though Melody had to stop short of the vantage point and just watch me taking it:

From there we decided to go to Perimeter Mall in Atlanta. We have been missing shopping malls; we enjoyed them in the 1980s and 1990s. But the ones near us have dried up, and anyhow, Melody can no longer walk around malls, so mall-walking ceased to be part of our life.

Today, the wheelchair solved that problem; "sometimes it's nice to have a pushy husband" I said, and in fact pushing it was hardly any more work than walking by myself.

We were glad to find Perimeter Mall looking quite prosperous, full of activity, with a decent food court. It appears that the basic problem was that there were too many malls, and Atlanta supports two or three big ones very well, while the others shrink.

This was a bit more boring than a trip to the mall would have been in the 1990s because there was no bookstore, record store, or Radio Shack; malls today sell almost nothing but clothing and accessories. (Clothing is the one thing that hasn't been replaced by online shopping because people need to see things up close and try them on.) But we had a good meal of Asian-style American food (?) in the food court, enjoyed a stroll around, and finally came back home.

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Must the Bible be perfect in order to be authoritative?

Doctrinally conservative Christians like myself believe that the Bible is authoritative, i.e., we are not at liberty to defy its teachings. But what does that mean in detail?

Obviously that it is God-given in some special way. But does that mean God dictated every word? And what if the words that have reached us contain evident errors?

Today, at the UGA Christian Faculty Forum, I heard a very good lecture by Mike Licona. The most important of his many good points was the following.

We know that the Bible, as we have it, contains apparent errors. There is a contradiction about who killed Goliath (1 Sam. 17 describes at detail how David did; 2 Sam. 21:19 says Elhanan did; but 1 Chr. 20:5 says Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath). Luke (19:11-17) apparently jumps track when telling one version of the Parable of the Talents and gets into a different version with only three servants instead of ten; surely Jesus had told both versions, but Luke mixed them together.

Both of these could be errors copying manuscripts. Or they could be errors by the original writers. There are many more small discrepancies or difficulties of similar nature. If the original writers were receiving dictation from God, that is problematic.

But Dr. Licona's point is more subtle. If only the original uncorrupted text is authoritative, then why didn't God preserve it for us? He could have done so and didn't. Apparently God's position is that the Bible serves its purpose and is authoritative even with minor textual errors that don't undermine its teaching.

And if that is so, minor incidental errors in the original don't invalidate it either.

Please note that I'm sharing with you a point of logic made by Dr. Licona. I am not making any assertion about what specific errors might or might not be present in the original text, and I am certainly not attacking the Bible.

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The dark matter of pragmatics

Pragmatics is the area of linguistics that studies how, why, and when we say things. It includes discourse structure, context, implicit assumptions, and everything else that goes beyond the pronunciation and literal meaning of what people say.

Why is there such a thing? The main point of The Dark Matter of Pragmatics, by Stephen Levinson, is that we need pragmatics because speech is much slower than thought. We can't utter words fast enough to communicate our complete message. That is why we need a huge repertoire of conventional practices, background assumptions, ways of using context, etc., to enable us to be concise.

By "dark matter" he means the unexplained portions, like dark matter in astronomy. The purpose of the short book is to indicate what areas of pragmatics need further exploration.

Professor Levinson taught one of the first university courses in pragmatics ever, at Cambridge in 1977-78, and I was in the classroom. It was an extremely good course, and I have kept up a long-abiding interest in the subject.

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arXiv: the future of scholarly publishing?

As I've said before, I think scholarly journals are on the verge of dying out. They exist because of the high cost of printing and distribution — scientists could not just send their papers to all their colleagues — but wait a minute, now they can! We put our papers on our web pages all the time.

Enter arXiv.org, presumably pronounced "archive" but not to be confused with archive.org.

arXiv was established as a preprint server for some (not all) sciences. We can upload our papers, where they will be made accessible, indexed, and preserved, sparing us the trouble of maintaining a web site and moving it from institution to institution.

What's missing is peer review. Papers on arXiv are checked briefly to ensure that they are indeed scientific research (not political diatribes, ads, etc.) and the authors are correctly identified. But there is no vetting of the quality of the research.

The idea is that after putting your paper on arXiv to reach the audience quickly, you'd proceed to submit it to a journal. But many people skip that step. Many of the most important AI papers, including the one that launched chatbots, don't seem to go beyond arXiv.

I wish a peer review system could be added, reviewing papers after they're posted. It would have to involve more than just readers voting on a paper; reviewers would have to be rated by others as to their reliability. But it could be done.

Anyhow, I just used arXiv to release a corrected version of my classic paper on dependency parsing. A journal wouldn't take a paper that is just a correction of one already published, but arXiv.org is exactly the right place.

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