This piece about the saints of our time spoke to me:

We’re in pioneer territory. The saints of old didn’t face our issues. They had their own demons to conquer and aren’t rolling over in their graves, shaking their fingers in disgust at us. They know the struggle. They know that ours is new territory with new demons to conquer and new virtues required. The saints of old remain, of course, as essential templates of Christian discipleship, living gospels, but they walked in different times.

So what kind of saints do we need today?

We need saints who can honour the goodness of the world, even as they honour God. We need women and men who can show us how to walk with a living faith inside a culture which believes that world here is enough and that the issues of God and the next life are peripheral.

I am familiar with only a few of the writers and thinkers mentioned by the article’s author Fr. Ronald Rolheiser as worthy of consideration. I am reblogging below the list of names mentioned by Fr. Rolheiser deemed worthy of consideration for my own future reference. The names below to which I have added links to Twitter accounts are the ones I have read before and enjoyed. The rest I hope to explore further at some date.

Raymond E Brown, Charles Taylor, Daniel Berrigan, Jean Vanier, Mary Jo Leddy, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Keating, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Elizabeth Johnson, Parker Palmer, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wendy Wright, Gerhard Lohfink, Kathleen Dowling Singh, Jim Forest, John Shea, James Hillman, Thomas Moore and Marilynne Robinson…

Shane Claiborne, Rachel Held Evans, James Martin, Kerry Weber, Trevor Herriot, Macy Halford, Robert Barron, Bryan Stevenson, Robert Ellsberg, Bieke Vandekerckhove and Annie Riggs.

I once made a hydrofoil using a leaf blower.

Now I need to look into building this Cheeseball Machine Gun. It looks like a fun project!

I recently discovered this special edition of IEEE Proceedings dealing with Machine Ethics and AI in autonomous systems. (I actually landed on Katina Michael’s page first, which gives a nice overview.) I haven’t had a chance to explore deeply the IEEE Proceedings special issue yet, but I hope to set aside some time for that soon. Whenever I bring this topic up with my students, it always stirs up a great deal of interest and discussion. Thinking about it reminds me of a situation I once experienced related to autonomous systems in 1991.

During Operation Desert Storm, there was a friendly fire incident in which the battleship Missouri was struck by a Phalanx Close-In Weapon System or CIWS (pronounced sea-wiz) of the escort ship USS Jarrett. Over the years since, I have come to the realization that the Jarrett CIWS at that time was functioning as an autonomous robot, having a weapon system with its own sensors and computerized decision-making capability. I don’t know if this incident has ever been described as such, but it may very well be the very first time an autonomous weapon system accidentally opened fire on friendly forces during combat.

While conducting shore bombardment operations off the coast of Kuwait in February of 1991, Iraqi forces launched two Silkworm anti-ship missiles towards the Battleship Missouri and escort ships. The USS Missouri fired its SRBOC chaff as a missile counter-measure and the nearby USS Jarrett, with its CIWS operating in full-automatic (autonomous) mode sensed the Missouri’s airborne chaff canister, interpreted it as an inbound threat and fired some rounds of CIWS projectiles towards it. Some of these rounds struck the battleship and penetrated through several bulkheads of the superstructure stopping in the passageway just outside the captain’s cabin. I took some photos of the still-existing holes when I last visited the ship in 2007.

Fortunately, no one was seriously injured in the battleship incident, but undoubtedly at some point, there will be more unintended interactions between autonomous weapon systems and humans. It reminds me of this awful scene from the 1987 science fiction movie Robocop.

You can see the full Robocop film clip here (link contains the graphic violence of an R-rated film. Not suitable for children.)

There is really no way to anticipate every situation and consequence of adopting any new technology in advance of actually using it. Autonomous systems are interesting because by nature that is what they attempt to do; sense the present, predict the future, and act accordingly. Whenever humans build automated systems, there will always be conditions that lead to unintended consequences. There have already been a number of incidents involving auto-pilot systems of Tesla automobiles and Boeing aircraft.

We will continue to see these things happening as more and more systems become automated. We need to continue having conversations about how best to adopt and implement autonomous systems.

About the Author: Bill Genereux served as a fire-control technician aboard the battleship USS Missouri during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

I can’t tell you how excited I am that I’ve signed up to attend the Writing the Unthinkable workshop with Lynda Barry, Graphic Novelist, Cartoonist and Educator. She is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

I became familiar with her in 2014 when the Brain Pickings blog discussed her fabulous book Syllabus. At the time I was getting interested in graphic syllabi, so I was blown away by her hand-drawn syllabi and assignments featured in the book. It is one of my all-time favorite books I’ve ever purchased. I look at it over and over and each time I find something new.

I can’t wait for November to get here!

Many things aggravate me about Facebook, but one thing that occasionally scores points fort me is the memories feature that brings back posts and photos from years past. Today I saw a photo I shared of my grandfather and myself as we departed for Washington DC on the veteran’s Honor Flight.

One of the things I am most proud of is the fact that we both served in combat; he in WWII Pacific Theater and myself in Desert Storm. He had a much more difficult time, I can assure you, slogging through the jungles of New Guinea and the southern Philippines than I did riding around on a battleship doing shore bombardment. We had a few dangerous moments, but mostly we were well fed and reasonably comfortable as compared to the average infantryman.

We had a great trip together and I learned a lot about his experiences as a WWII soldier. One of the highlights of the trip for him was seeing the actual plane that ended the war, the Enola Gay. Grandpa served in Japan after the war and saw with his own eyes the devastation brought by Enola Gay on Hiroshima. He lived the rest of his life in Kansas in the peaceful profession of horticulture. He was an expert with more than four decades of experience working with flowers and plants. In recent years, I’ve taken more of an interest in the same. It gives me a sense of peace and accomplishment. I really miss having my grandfather around to give me advice on plant growing, but I think some of what he taught me has worked because we have all kinds of plants going now I might not have had otherwise.

I even brought some plants to school this fall. We have a perfect place to grow them in the glass-covered hallway just outside my office

This first plant, I think it is a philodendron, actually was propogated from one that belonged to my grandfather. I kept his original plant when he passed away, and made this new plant start that I brought to school.

I can’t believe I will be going to a Lynda Barry workshop in November. Why? Because Lynda Barry Will Make You Believe In Yourself

This week I’m digging out some tools to help get some context of how things were in the 1980s. One fun thing I’ve found in my online research is the Wishbook archive of Christmas catalogs. This archive has scans of printed catalogs prepared for the holiday shopping season extending back into the 1930s.

For a quick reference, I’ve created a list of all of the Christmas catalogs from the 1980s in a single post. Another tool that I’ve found is this online inflation calculator that converts the prices from years past into today’s US Dollars.

Let’s dive into the archives and see what we can come up with. For this post, I am exploring the 1980 Sears catalog.

I found this stereo system that is similar to the one I bought used from a classmate about 1980.  I think I probably paid $50.00 for mine because mine only came with an 8-track player, not a cassette. New in the catalog this stereo was $149.95  That is $467.00 in today’s dollars, about the cost of a middle to high end smartphone.

One thing you have to realize that for me as a teenager in the 1980s, this stereo system was my ticket to good music and entertainment. This stereo has microphone inputs as did mine, and I used the microphones to make my own recordings and mixtapes. Young people today carry this capability around in their pocket, but my first “recording studio” was in my bedroom. Unfortunately none of the recordings I might have made back then survive today. I eventually sold my stereo and all of the 8-track tapes I had at a garage sale.

Here is another fun item that I only had infrequent access to through my school. A portable VCR with color video camera. In 1980, to record home video, you needed two separate devices, the recording capability was not built into one machine.

You could purchase the camera and VCR for around $2,000 which in today’s dollars is about $6,200. One thing that I have learned by living through the 1980s is not to buy this year’s model of technology. You’ll pay a premium and next year there will be something much better that makes you regret paying so much for what you have.

It was 1983 and Huey Lewis was at the top of his game. His smash hit single I Want a New Drug was at the top of the charts. Columbia Pictures wanted him to create a theme song for an upcoming movie called Ghostbusters, but he declined. The next year, when the Ghostbusters song was released, it was so familiar that Lewis sued Ray Parker Jr. and Columbia for copyright infringement. The songs were just too similar.

Here are the two songs in question. After all of these years, I’d been unaware of the lawsuit and the similarity of the songs.

Here is the Ghostbusters theme song

and here is I Want a New Drug

What do you think? Would you rule that the Ghostbusters song was a rip-off?

Ultimately, the dispute was settled out of court and the details were to remain undisclosed. Interestingly, when Huey Lewis spoke about details of the lawsuit on VH1 Behind the Music, Ray Parker sued Lewis for breach of confidentiality.