Happy anniversary, Melody!

Happy anniversary, Melody!

We have now lasted 3,926.5 times as long as Romeo and Juliet!

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From Hackers to Chatbots:
A Quick Tour of Computer and AI Ethics

I have another book out...

Click here to learn more about it and to read sample pages.

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The first day of school

My first academic job was to do research on the teaching of freshman composition at the University of Southern California. On the first day, I attended a training session with over 100 graduate students who were going to teach freshman writing, along with a few postdoctoral fellows, such as myself, who were going to do the same thing.

As part of the training, we had an informal writing contest where we each had to write an essay about "an early memory" in just a few minutes, and then all the anonymous essays were passed around for judging by many (not all) of the other participants. Time limits kept everyone from seeing every essay, but I think we got a good approximation to the way the whole crowd would have voted. Contests of this type were being recommended as a classroom technique.

To my astonishment I was one of the two winners. Of course, no one knew who wrote the winning essays; the winners were announced by having the leader actually read the essays out loud. I eventually found out who the other winner was; he, too, was a postdoc.

I can remember almost every word of my essay. It was as follows:

That was Mrs. Gammage's first-grade class at R. B. Wright Elementary School, Moultrie, Georgia, in the fall of 1963. A few weeks later I was promoted to second grade.

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Remembering the segregation era

In the early 1960s, Georgia schools and public places were segregated by race. At the time, we were told what a lot of well-meaning people believed — that segregation was voluntary, that the two races were so culturally different that they preferred to do things separately and benefited from doing so.

Well... If that had been true, then occasional exceptions to segregation would have been tolerated and even encouraged, whenever someone had a good reason. But that's not what I saw. I heard loud squawks about even the smallest deviation from established practice, as if one black customer would horribly contaminate a whites-only restaurant (even if it had black employees serving those same white customers).

It was astonishing how offended people were. In retrospect, it told me how guilty they felt about the whole thing.

And that's what made it obvious to me that segregation was not well-intentioned the way people claimed.

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Going Tupperware-free

For the first time since we got married, Melody and I have, in our kitchen, no plastic food storage containers (Tupperware, Rubbermaid, or other competing brands).

We had gotten tired of them for several reasons. Over a timescale of years, they don't hold up well; they become scratched and stained inside, and we wondered if any of the plastic was getting into our food. The lids don't go into the dishwasher. The tubs do go into the dishwasher, but when we take them out, they retain a lot of water on their wide brims, and a towel is necessary. Neither the tubs nor the lids go into the microwave oven.

In their place, we have Pyrex glass storage dishes with dishwasher-safe plastic lids that actually dry in the dishwasher. Part of the secret is that the lids are held in shape by the glass dishes, which we store with the lids on; this takes away any slight warping that might have occurred during washing.

We have had a few of these for a few years already, and they hold up well.

And because we store the Pyrex dishes with the lids on, there is not going to be an accumulation of lids detached from their tubs, perhaps never to be reunited.

The lids aren't microwaveable, but the dishes, of course, are, and that saves us transferring anything into another container to warm it up.

The remaining plastic containers that are in good condition are being given to charity; the worn ones are being recycled.

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Windows 11 crashes (bluescreens) when a remote desktop user connects

Bug check code 0x0000019c, address ntoskrnl.exe+5005d0, as seen by dumping the crash results with BlueScreenView or other utilities.

My big Dell workstation is not just my main home office desktop; it also runs continuously as a file server, and I regularly log into it by Remote Desktop Protocol from elsewhere in the house.

Yesterday I had trouble logging in from downstairs, and on examination, I found that Windows had crashed each time. One time, it was displaying a blue screen; the other time, two hours later, it had successfully rebooted but showed the crash in its logs. Strikingly, there were no event log messages indicating anything but an unexpected reboot. At one point there was a fleeting message from NVIDIA software indicating a possible bug in my NVIDIA graphics driver, but I couldn't tell what it meant.

Cutting to the chase, the problem was caused by recent NVIDIA GTX 3050 drivers that enable CUDA (a system for doing matrix computations on the GPUs). Unfortunately, I had to drop back to an older driver that won't run DaVinci Resolve video software in CUDA mode. That is a small loss for me right now, and I expect NVIDIA to correct the problem soon.

Specifically, I dropped back to the driver currently distributed by Dell. NVIDIA offers two "Studio" (stable) updates, with 56 and 80 in their version numbers, and both had the problem.

Why the graphics driver? Because when a user connects remotely, the graphics system has a big task. The display has to be taken off the real screen and put onto the virtual one. Apparently, this exposed an error in the NVIDIA graphics driver.

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Windows 11 Phone Link does not work with an iPhone

Having tried to set up Windows 11 Phone Link with my iPhone, I must regrettably report that this piece of software just doesn't work. Bluetooth-pairing the phone and computer was no problem, nor was installing Link To Windows on the iPhone, but no communication was established (except that the PC could read the battery level of the phone). Instead, the setup procedure put me through an endless loop of wanting to pair the phone again and again whether or not it was already paired, and eventually displaying instructions that clearly pertained only to Android. I think their iPhone support is not ready for prime time, although their Android support reportedly works well. Maybe after a couple more Windows updates...

Some have asked why I, a technology geek, use an iPhone rather than an Android phone. Reliability! I bought it to make calls with, not to make a fashion statement. And I got it cheap because the fashionistas always sell off last year's phone secondhand in order to get the latest model.

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Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? I contend that this is a confused question, and I'll try to peel back the layers of confusion. Many people asking the question have not thought through what either "yes" or "no" would mean as an answer.

(I am a Christian. If you are not, read this as an exercise in logic.)

In what follows, I'll assume that there are not, in fact, two separate gods that both exist, one worshipped by one religion and one worshipped by the other.

And I will take it for granted that both religions think they are worshipping the omnipotent Creator.

I need to mention the possibility of impersonation, that people could be worshipping something that exists but is not God — an inanimate object, human being, angel, or fallen angel (demon). But think about how that would work.

Worship is an intentional mental act in which you have to have the recipient in mind. That is different from, for instance, paying money, which is a physical act in which you merely have to deliver something. It is easy to pay money to an impostor. But when you do, you do not intend to pay it to an impostor; you intend to pay it to the legitimate recipient.

I contend that worshipping someone is like talking about someone — inherently, you can only worship the one you intend to, just as you can only talk about the one you intend to. It is not like paying money to someone. It is not possible to worship someone while intending to worship someone different.

(That implies, of course, that my definition of worship does not include, for instance, performing a ceremony without knowing what it's about. In that situation I would say you are worshipping nobody, but you might be giving the appearance of worshipping a deity real or imaginary.)

Now what about the worship of a pagan god such as Zeus? Apart from possible impersonation, the worship of Zeus is aimed at a nonexistent, fictional deity. What is clear is that no one intends for Zeus to be the God of Christianity or Islam. Zeus is not omnipotent, not the creator. If he is not real, then he is a figment of people's imagination.

And it is possible to worship someone about whose existence you are mistaken, just as it is possible to talk about someone you mistakenly think exists. That doesn't bring them into existence.

Now for the interesting case. As I understand it, Muslims do claim that they worship the same God as Christians; it's the Christians who are not so sure. The issue is the descriptions of God. All agree that God is the omnipotent creator; Christians contend that God is triune and incarnate as Jesus, both of which Muslims deny. There are other differences, but those are the most important.

(By the way, the name "Allah" is a distraction here. It is simply Arabic for "God," and Arabic-speaking Christians also use it.)

So the issue boils down to this: How inaccurate a description of God would cause it not to be "the same God"?

I contend (following the philosopher Saul Kripke) that identifying or naming someone is not a matter of descriptions but of unbroken tradition.

We agree that we can talk about George Washington. We also agree that a person can talk about George Washington even if he is mistaken about some detail of his life. If you tell me George Washington was born in France, I can't correct you unless we are already confident we are both talking about the real George Washington.

The reason we can talk about George Washington is that we are part of an unbroken tradition of calling him that. Back in 1732, his parents named him George Washington. Everyone who knew him called him that, and so did others who knew who he was, and the name was passed down through history. If we find another person named George Washington (and I'm sure they exist), we can confidently expect that if we trace the tradition of using his name, we'll find a different origin, confirming that he is a different person. In fact, we'll find that everyone using that name for him already knew that.

Sometimes traditions break down, and we could be unsure (as I was) whether the medieval philosopher called Simon Dacus was one person or two with similar names. (Only two books survive, so we don't have to worry about more than two.) The problem here is not that we lack descriptions but that we lack a continuously-passed-down name. Or we may lack the information to disentangle different traditions, as when dealing with a large number of people named John Smith.

If anyone wanted to worship George Washington, all of this would apply. They'd have to intend to refer either to the George Washington who was our first President, or to some other specific person known by that name. I contend that you can't have worship without having an object of worship in mind.

So how does this apply to the worship of God? The Muslims, when they started, intended to refer to the same God as the Jews and Christians. They picked up the same tradition of naming. Their description of God may have become inaccurate (Christians think it did), but that did not make it "a different God."

Case closed (I hope).

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The next big thing in AI

Based on what I'm hearing from many directions, I have an inkling what the next big thing in AI is going to be:

Truth, logic, and knowledge representation.

But wait a minute, wasn't that the big thing in AI in the 1980s? Yes, but back then we didn't have LLMs or even much machine learning. It was too hard to collect useful amounts of knowledge to process, or even sufficient amounts of natural-language grammar to enable automatic ingestion of data in English.

Times have changed. LLMs only know how words are used, but they can paraphrase English into differently-worded English, or into Spanish, or even (in some cases) into JSON representations of business data. Maybe we could put them to work translating human language into a formal semantic representation. Logic-based computation could then determine whether sources support or contradict each other or reliable knowledge bases.

I think this is a good direction to move in and would be glad to work with anyone conducting a research project in this area.

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Video with poor lip sync: a mystery

As some of you know, I have a YouTube channel with a motley mix of videos.

Recently, while making a video, I found that when I record video with the Windows Camera app, and import it into Adobe Premiere Elements 2019, I get poor lip sync; the audio is as much as 0.3 second out of sync with the video. That persists, of course, when I export the finished video. It looks like I'm saying something other than the words you're hearing.

[ANSWER:] Basically, recording with a webcam is apt to give poor lip sync because the sound and video are coming in through separate paths, with no special effort to keep them synchronized. Lots of YouTube videos have poor lip sync, as is evident once you start looking for it. For reliable sync, use a camcorder or DSLR. Read on for some workarounds that may help if you're using a webcam...

Here are some relevant facts I've uncovered:

• Mediainfo tells me the Camera App videos have variable frame rate. That is probably what Premiere Elements isn't decoding correctly.
• The problem goes away if I edit with ClipChamp, which is free with Windows 11. I'm not fond of ClipChamp, but it is just barely powerful enough to do what I need, so I can fall back on it if I have to.
• The problem also goes away if I transcode the camera videos using Handbrake with the default settings. Then they import into Premiere Elements fine.
• However — here's what is spooky — according to Mediainfo, the Handbrake outputs still have variable frame rate. Presumably, something that was giving Premiere Elements trouble has been changed. Maybe they would look even snappier if I transcoded them to fixed frame rate.

I don't make enough videos right now to justify spending money on Premiere Elements 2025, especially without knowing whether it fixes the problem! And I'm a bit annoyed at Adobe because Premiere Elements 2019 runs under Windows 11, it will not install under Windows 11, so I can now use it on only one of the two computers to which it's licensed, the one that was upgraded from 10 to 11.

If ClipChamp doesn't grow on me, I think my alternative is to use the free version of DaVinci Resolve. It is harder to learn, but very professional, and is distributed free in order to build a population of videographers who will be ready to use DaVinci's professional product.

Any readers who are expert videographers, do you know any more about this? If so, please drop me a line!

[UPDATE:] The Camera App videos also have bad lip-sync when imported into DaVinci Resolve, which is professional-grade software, although they do play correctly in VLC and Media Player on the same computer. This tends to point to them being nonstandard in some way. More investigation to come...

SOLUTION, such as it is: I consulted a professional videographer and learned that this is presently a notorious problem. Variable-frame-rate video doesn't decode correctly in some software. Running it through Handbrake to make it fixed-frame-rate is a complete cure. Strangely, running it through Handbrake to use a different variable-frame-rate codec is also, quite often, successful. I smell a problem with codecs. I'm surprised that the very latest version of DaVinci Resolve hasn't solved it, though.

More: The received wisdom seems to be that professional-level video editors do not handle variable-frame-rate input (at least not systematically), since it is not used in professional video. It may or may not decode correctly in a particular case. Recoding with Handbrake is recommended. I'm told that variable-frame-rate video is also produced by smartphones.

BETTER SOLUTION: ShotCut does the job! It is freeware, comparable in power to Premiere Elements, and not fazed by variable-frame-rate video. That is why I will never spend money on Premiere Elements again — freeware has caught up with it!

AND ANOTHER QUIRK: If I use Logitech Capture to record with the same webcam, I get videos with fixed frame rate that play back with poor lip sync in any player!

The bottom line is apparently that webcams, which record video and audio through separate input channels, are inherently prone to desynchronization. I'll stick with my camcorder and DSLR for serious videography!

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Moultrie - a trip not made

Unfortunately, I woke up this morning with an upset stomach and was not able to drive to Moultrie as planned. Thus I won't be at Aunt Betty Jean's funeral tomorrow morning. I very much hate to miss it, especially since it is the last of her generation, probably the last at which all the available cousins will gather.

Thus, also, this evening I am not walking around the town square of Moultrie as I planned to. I have vivid memories of having lived in Moultrie as a child, mainly during the 1962-63 and 1963-64 school years, which comprised kindergarten, a few weeks of first grade, and hasty promotion to second grade.

My parents had lived in Moultrie as newlyweds, then Albany, then Valdosta (where I was born), then Moultrie, then Columbus briefly, then Moultrie again, then Valdosta. Of these, I think of Moultrie as my mother's city, since her brothers and sisters were nearby and I think she always felt more at home there than in Valdosta.

Certainly, my school years there were excellent, and I want to share with you one of the gems that I discovered there:

Photo by Michael Rivera, license CC BY-SA 4.0, source Wikipedia.

That is the Carnegie Library, the first library I ever set foot in. I only saw the children's section, accessed around the corner. Before 1971 the library moved to a much larger building near Moultrie Plaza, and I went there and actually did some research for a science fair project while on a visit to Moultrie then; it was bigger and, I thought, more academic than the Valdosta public library, despite (or perhaps because of) not having a college or university nearby.

If I can't take a walk around Moultrie's town square tonight, at least we all can do so vicariously by clicking here for Google Street View. You'll start out facing the library. You'll turn left and go one block to get to the main square, then another block in the same direction, then turn left, go a block, turn left, and go a block.

As you proceed, note that:

- The Moultrie Observer's building hasn't changed since I visited it with my second-grade class in 1964;

- the 4-story building is the old Hotel Colquitt, which used to have the Cash Drug Store on the ground floor;

- one of the storefronts near Merle Norman was a restaurant called the Gold Leaf, my mother's favorite, noted for lemon icebox pie;

- turn left at the First National Bank;

- turn around and look at the majestic courthouse, then proceed;

- the gray building on the corner was, if I recall, Register and Taylor Drugs, and I once saw them getting a sign installed;

- somewhere near Medicine Man's Vitamin Shop was Southern Auto, where my father and I went, and Mr. Suber showed us many interesting things, including how to wire a flashlight bulb to a battery;

- turn left at Griner Grill;

- Lazarus, a clothing store, has, I think been there since my childhood;

- Blue Sky Grill was Friedlander's, a fine department store that had a hardware department accessed around the corner on the side toward Lazarus, where there no longer appears to be an entrance; I am still in touch with some of the Friedlander family;

- turn left at the Courthouse Annex, which is of course after my time;

- the best shopping was along the north side of the square, and one of the two widest storefronts was Murphy's, the dime store, with its record department in the basement (I think the other was Belk's);

- if you didn't make a wrong turn, you are again looking at the Hotel Colquitt.

That is where we shopped in the early 1960s, and where my parents, as newlyweds, entertained themselves with evening window-shopping the late 1940s, a common practice at the time. Moultrie has changed less than most Georgia towns, and although all of the stores have changed, the overall look is similar. The court house, in the middle of the square, is not to be missed.

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Betty Jean Roberts Branan, 1938-2025
Last of my mother's generation

The youngest of my mother's brothers and sisters, and the last of her generation, my Aunt Betty Jean, died on July 5. She was the wife of my uncle, the late Tony Branan, whom I wrote about in December.

Visits to Aunt Betty Jean and Uncle Tony were some of the high points of my childhood. We stayed with them for three weeks in 1967 while we were between houses, and we continued to visit regularly as long as the three of us (my mother, sister, and I) were together at home. These visits excited me because they were the only branch of the Roberts family that fully embraced big-city life and higher education. Everybody else lived on farms or in small towns; they lived in Atlanta. They introduced us to shopping malls, college planning, the Fernbank Science Center, and many other things.

I have recently learned that Betty Jean and Tony were high-school sweethearts and at first planned to stay in rural Colquitt County; Tony was going to buy a farm and operate it. But other opportunities opened up. He joined the Army, then went to the University of Georgia, becoming our extended family's first college graduate. Betty Jean stuck with him. Although she didn't go to college, she had done very well in high school and was well qualified for the office work that she did, for various employers, for the rest of her life. Upon Tony's retirement, they had retired to Hiawassee, in the North Georgia mountains, which I jokingly described as the place in Georgia that is farthest from their birthplace (almost, although in fact Dillard, and also one of the two places named Pine Mountain, are farther).

May their memory be eternal.

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Georgia bans Lenovo?

As a retired University employee, I got a notice the other day that the University of Georgia, as a branch of the state government, can no longer buy Lenovo computers. But it doesn't have to cancel orders already placed or stop using computers already on hand.

Well... I no longer work for the state, so I wasn't able to access their full explanation, but in our house we have three Lenovo laptops in active use. They are exceptionally well-built and competitively priced. So should I be worried?

It turns out that the issue is Lenovo's ties to the government of China (let's not forget that China still calls itself Communist), together with some past security incidents involving software preinstalled by Lenovo. The seriousness of these is uncertain.

I'm going to keep my ears open. I'd expect the risk to be greatest with computers that have just arrived from Lenovo and haven't received any Windows Updates or anything else subsequently.

It sounds like Georgia is concerned about spyware Lenovo might install in the future, not currently existing hazards. Note that U.S.-China relations are deteriorating.

I note also that we're not just talking about passwords or confidential data. Large-scale spying could focus on where the computers are (broadly), how much they are used, etc., to track such things as troop movements.

Of course, the whole computer security community is on the alert now, and when I hear about any actual vulnerabilities that are discovered, I'll take appropriate action. I expect Microsoft's built-in antivirus software to keep up with this, so I'm not buying any additional antivirus software.

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Our divided nation: Winner-stomp-on-all

Congress has just passed Trump's controversial and clumsy budget package by an extremely slim majority. Somehow, that has triggered rejoicing, as if some kind of enemy has been defeated.

Don't its supporters realize that a slim majority is vulnerable? If one Congressman changes his mind, it might all come tumbling down.

This isn't a football game, where a score of 51 to 49 makes one team the winner and the other the loser. The whole of Congress is still there and accountable to the whole country.

Nearly 50 years ago, my British friends asked me, "Why are your two American political parties so much alike?" and I could truthfully answer, "Because they are trying to get the same people to vote for them." Not any more.

What needs to be vanquished is this destructive idea that losers have no rights — that if 51% of the voters or of Congress want to stomp on the other 49%, they have a perfect right to.

Maybe Americans are having trouble distinguishing sports from the real world.

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Do not type https:// at the beginning of a web address

Handy hint: Do not type https:// or http:// at the beginning of a web address. Let your browser sort it out.

The reason is that HTTPS does not work with web addresses that are redirections, such as my www.eeyounglearners.com and www.dslrbook.com. Those are sites for which I pay Redirection.NET to register the names and direct them to pages on the Covington Innovations site. (Try it!) Of course, you get a secure HTTPS connection when you land at the destination.

What's worse, if you mistakenly type https:// where you shouldn't, your browser may remember and auto-fill it afterward, until you type the address with http:// or delete your browsing history. So it was that one of browsers lost the ability to get to www.eeyounglearners.com and I thought the site was down.

That auto-fill can make perfectly good web sites inaccessible!

The rest of the story: The page that was giving me trouble actually had an incorrect canonical link that gave the redirection URL but with https:// in front of it. I think the browswer was picking that up and storing it. I am not seeing the auto-fill after correcting that — but I don't know the browser designers' intentions, so the problem could resurface.

When putting links into web pages or documents, you may have to include https:// or http://. In that case, make sure you have the right one. Preferably, go to the actual site and copy its address from your browser's address bar.

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New "Endure" fonts from Amazon

Have you noticed that over the years, as printers have gotten sharper, fonts have gotten thinner (lighter)? The original LaTeX fonts, for instance, were very readable on 300 dpi printers but are a bit spidery at 1200 dpi.

My usual font these days is Georgia, distributed free with Windows, designed by Matthew Carter. In the 1990s, with different software, I regularly used his earlier font, Charter.

When typesetting my next book (yes, there's another book coming out soon!), I was going to use Georgia but found myself wishing for something heavier, to hold up better at high-resolution printing. Amazon has delivered. Their new "Endure" font family is very much in the Carter (Charter) tradition, though actually designed by someone else (2K/Denmark).

It is specifically designed to be readable at 9-point size, so that paperback books can save paper. However, it will take more than that to get me to use 9-point. It is very readable at 10.5-point, and that's how I like it.

Compared to earlier fonts, it's heavier. That's the main change, and a welcome one.

(And no, I don't know why bold, in Word, is not as heavy as semibold. Unsolved mysteries of the universe...)

You can download Endure free from Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Look for it on this page: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230.

Although they promote it directly only to KDP authors, Amazon has assured me that there are no restrictions on its use (assuming of course you don't re-sell the font). They do advise telling Word and PDF creators to embed the font, since most people viewing your document will not have it.

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