I Suppose it was Inevitable

My older brother - who is an Army revervist - has recently been informed that he will be sent to Iraq in the near future. His time with the reserves was nearly over, and if no doubt this was part of why he is being sent.

The saving grace to this is that he's a mental-health specialist, not a combat soldier. This means he'll be attached to a base attending to the needs of soldiers, which will - I hope, I hope - be safer than if he were going on the patrols himself.

If I ever hear that opponents of the war 'don't support the troops' or are secretly happen when Americans get killed, I don't know if I will be able to contain myself. This war is the product of bloodless think-tanks and armchair heroes for whom the value of a soldier's life is a purely political calculation.

Maestro C-3PO

I, Robot starring Will Smith is generally a terrible movie and an insult to Isaac Asimov. Even so, it does contain one nice bit of dialouge:

Smith: [explaining why robots can't have feelings] Could a robot write a Shakespeare, or compose a Beethoven?

Robot: Can you?

Not a bad come-back for a robot. And, indeed, I found myself thinking about it a couple of months ago while composing this string quartet for a music class.

Up until I actual took a fairly in-depth course on musical composition, it had always been a kind of sacred mystery to me. Notes followed one another in patterns which instantly let me know what sort of mood was implied, but without giving a clue as to how the composer knew how to arrange them in such a way.

As I found out, composition is not nearly as creative a process as I thought. There are many, many rules governing voice leading, harmony, chords, progressions, and transitions.

Why, then, couldn't we come up with an auto-composition computer program? It would much simpler than the old thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand typewriters bit, as there are far fewer possible note combinations than words.

The implications about human creativity are not, I think, earth-shattering. After all, doesn't the great artist know when to break the rules?

There is, I believe, a short story on this same topic, in which an old-fashioned lover of classical music teaches his robot servant to play the piano better than any human musician could. However, ultimately the robot refuses to do so, even though being a piano virtuoso is easy for him, saying "But it was not meant to be easy..."

Gore's Still Got It

My access to the internet is limited, so I'll be brief.

A few days ago I saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's deocumentary about global warming. It's detailed, concise, and terrifying. Gore is direct, thoughtful, and funny. Anybody who still has any lingering doubts about global warming needs to go see this movie (and stop watching Fox).

Does this mean a Gore run in '08? While I don't think his life-long ambition to be president has softened any, his tolerance for campaigning probably has. And while it's not impossible to come back eight years after a close presidential election and win (Nixon did it), it seems like a risk the timid Democrats won't take.