When, and How Large?

A couple of articles in the magazine Astronomy highlight that science is about changing and reacting when researchers encounter new data.

In its September issue. Richard Turcott wrote an article about how the galaxies visible to the James Webb Space Telescope were among some of the oldest in our universe. But they were quite a bit larger than they should be. Modern cosmology's most widely accepted theories suggest that old galaxies would have been small. This was a tough piece of info that doesn't match most accepted theories of the creation and development of the universe. Were they wrong? Should they be re-thought?

Then, in an August 31 article on the website (which came out later than the issue because of print publication deadlines) Paul Sutter describes how astronomers may have been using an inaccurate measuring stick to determine distance. Rather than being far away, those galaxies were closer and thus of appropriate size.

Now astronomers and cosmologists have to study the matter to see which is which. If the galaxies are old and far away, some theories need changing. If they are close and ordinary, then the measuring methods for a lot of galaxies might need to be changed. Either way, people who understood things one way had to change their ideas when new evidence cropped up.

That's action that can be worthwhile in a lot of places.

Biiig Music

Today I received my gift for my investment in a Patreon project for a long-beloved but semi-defunct band named Caedmon's Call. They did write mostly for the Christian music market, but the primary songwriters had a telling gift for imagery and ideas that had wide appeal. Recently, for an anniversary of their initial album, they decided to reunite and re-record it. Through Patreon they offered several different gifts to help fund the project. My choice included, among other things, a vinyl double album of the release.

I'm not the guy to tell you that vinyl is superior to a CD. For one, I'm not sure there's that much difference and for another, too many loud shows in too many small clubs make sure I'll never hear whatever difference there might be. There's also the way vinyl records were pressed as CD sales rose. The records themselves became thinner and thinner -- cut a hole in the middle of one and glue it to the bottom of a top hat and you could set yourself up as Oddjob forthwith. I sold my collection about 15 years ago because I move too often and I owned about 700 heavy albums. I just kept a few and have added the odd title here and there.

The album I was sent today is a double album, gatefold cover. It's a big old chunk of memory. The ginormous photos, compared to a CD cover or worse, a digital music thumbnail. Checking out which disc is the first half and which is the second. Sliding it into place among some other remaining albums. All things that take me back to a world where cassettes were OK for cars and 8-tracks had their day, but if you wanted to listen to music the right way, you laid it on a spinning platter, cued up the needle and let it play.

Here's hoping Caedmon's Call does their second album the same way -- the first one is good but the second was my favorite. Either way, this evening sounds real, real good.

Bag of Grab

-- Ted Gioia notes that the commercial promise of artificial intelligence (AI) hasn't measured up to the hype surrounding the release. As with any number of internet advances, it has proven of most use in shady schemes to steal money from people.

-- My two favored presidential candidates right now are Tim Scott and Nikki Haley. Depending on which reaction story you may read, Scott did OK or poorly. I still like his optimistic vision for a presidency that suggests we have problems to solve, not existential crises to use as bludgeons against those with whom we disagree. I already liked Haley after her two years as ambassador to the UN, but I would like her even without that after opening up Vivek Ramaswamy's goofy, insubstantial marketing campaign and showing the box was empty.

At 37, Mr. Ramaswamy is the first millennial to campaign for a presidential nomination and his debate appearance ticked all the boxes of the stereotypes held of that generation. One of the primary and, for me, most fatal problems is the idea in this quote:  "If you have a broken down car you don't turn over the keys to the people who broke it again, you hand it over to a new generation to actually fix the problem,"  First of all, "again" should appear before "turn" or after "keys." Second of all, it's hard to see the most prosperous nation on earth as a "broken down car." It's got plenty of issues, but it still seems to be running. And third of all, Mr. Ramaswamy has done zip-a-dee-doo-dah to suggest he knows how to fix a car, let alone a nation. In fact, his appearance full of snappy put-downs and radio show call-in policy positions suggest he is part of the problem and would make it worse.

-- In surrendering to the charges brought against him in Georgia, former president Donald Trump decided his mug shot should be a ferocious scowl. It looks ridiculous. It looks like the kind of overdone response by a comedian playing a dad on a TV show when confronting his erring children, giving him the change to use his catchphrase as a non sequitur punchline. 

Dad: "Just what is the meaning of this, you two?"

Daughter: "Well I'm rebelling because you waited almost a year after knocking up my mom to marry her and then you left when I was four."

Son: "And I'm rebelling because you were sleeping with her mom before I was in kindergarten!"

Dad: "Oh, you two! I was just trying to Make America Great Again!"

(Cue laugh track for audience. Add rifle-ratchet noise if audience not loud enough)

Maybe We Do Need Some Education

In Scientific American, writer Lucy Tu describes a project that may one day help people speak who have lost the ability to do so. That condition, called "aphasia," is often a side-effect of injuries to the brain. People with damaged vocal cords can have the same condition.

Eye-movement-detecting computer screens allow many people to communicate, as did the late physicist Stephen Hawking. People without full use of vocal cords might touch a vibrating wand to their throats while speaking to make external sounds. Both techniques can sound mechanical.

But researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have gone several steps ahead of even that advance.

The team, led by researcher Robert Knight, used the electrical impulses read from research subjects as they listened to "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1", from The Wall. The subjects wore electrodes in the study so the electrical activity in their brains could be measured for another experiment on epileptic seizures.

Knight's later experiment involved people wearing the electrodes while they were undergoing surgery and the song was played during the procedure. All of the data was fed to an AI trained to decipher them, so researchers had a record of how the brain reacted to "Part One." It could distinguish which brain response reacted to which music sound. A different pitch made a different electrical response. Changes in rhythm -- which in "Part One" happen quite subtly -- also change what the brain does and the electrodes read.

Then the researchers used another AI to take the brain signals and change them into musical notes. The result, Tu writes, was a "roughly intact" melody and "garbled but discernible" lyrics. If you already know what's being sung, then you would probably be able to pick out the words. Ironically, this is the same technique used by religious rock-haters when saying that a Led Zeppelin song backwards is an homage to Satan. Sort of.

Knight said the research is in early stages and may one day actually allow people to speak in a normal human voice. He said the team chose "Part One" because it's musically complex and can bring a lot of responses in brain activity. And they like Pink Floyd.

In fact, Knight says, they might soon be able to have enough data to create a whole Pink Floyd album. Which almost certainly will get them sued by Roger Waters.

PS - Yes, I know that the post title is actually taken from lyrics in "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2." All the lyrics in Part 1 deal with the wartime death of the singer's father. Didn't want to be that much of a downer.

Royal Mulch

In recent weeks I have not been able to play my solitaire game in its free mode without seeing ad after ad after ad after ad for a cheeseball little 3-match game called "Royal Match."

Of late the ads have upped their game, using known actors as shills spokespeople. But just like the generic spokespeople found in earlier ads, they promise the same thing: A game that is ad-free (Irony alert!), cost-free and featuring smooth animation and great graphics. Often some of those features are only available on desktop console ads, but Royal Match promises them on a free app game.

The shortcomings of the game can be found anywhere from review sites to Reddit. For one, it really is just a simple 3-match game like Candy Crush and a dozen others. The storyline is the only difference, and although the plague of ads describes matches that have to save King Roger from diabolical traps, most of the matches actually just allow the player to help the doddering twerp redecorate his castle. And although the game is free to play, the upgrades that allow players to complete higher and more difficult levels do cost money to buy.

But if I had a major gripe (oh, and indeed I do), the problem is the way the game is advertised as a way to take a player's "mind off things." The idea of distracting the mind from worrying about issues is not weird in any way. It's just that there are as many other ways to do that as there are Royal Match ads. And so many of those ways are creative -- a person can read, draw, write, listen to music, play an instrument, paint, plant, cook, volunteer, study something (I have a Book to recommend) or literally anything other than smearing fingerprints across a phone screen. Putting our minds on something good or creative is a fantastic way of getting them off something stressful or upsetting.

Ah, but some may note that I play some app games to. I just confessed to playing solitaire and I have elsewhere sung the praises of Wordle. Wordle, however, besides requiring some logical reasoning, is over and done with once per day. It's a pretty good way to kickstart my brain after my alarm goes off, and then it's done. Solitaire's also a logic puzzle mixed with luck. Although my app has recently added a "solve" button. After I press it (and watch yet another Royal Match ad), all I have to do is click on the highlighted cards. I may need to find a new solitaire app if they keep going in this direction.

In any event, go ahead and let King Roger get suffocated by slime, drowned in a pool, burned by a dragon, drilled to pieces by a mining machine or toasted alive in a fire. Then maybe whatever country that's been burdened with him can switch to democracy and elect people who won't drown in a transparent sewer pipe.

Inside Outside

Over at Nautilus, a site I didn't read as much as I should have during the Long Sleep, writer Erik Hoel suggests why novels are a richer form of storytelling than are movies.

Hoel's answer is pretty straightforward. It's pretty tough to get inside the minds of the people we meet or read about in the news. Even when they tell us what's on their minds, we can get only the small piece that they intend to share. But not only can we not get any of the unspoken parts of their minds and hearts, we can't know how much of what they have said is accurate. We can't know if they simply spoke in error or from a lack of knowledge or if they flat-out lied.

Although movies might try to get behind the barrier with narration, skillful acting or flashbacks, we're still required to guess what's going on. An actress weeps and depending on her skill we might know why the character in the story is supposed to cry. Hoel says such knowledge is shallower than that available in novels.

In novels, Hoel says, we are presented with fictional characters whose motivation is laid bare by the author. The story shows us why they do what they do -- unless of course the writer's a hack, but that's a whole different problem. This could be one reason we so often say that the book is better than a movie made from it -- because the book had a flavor of the imagination that the movie could not have. 

There's a lot to this, I think. On the other hand, a skillful script and director can do some things more quickly and efficiently that a novelist can. The novelist can describe Penny's inner struggle over re-starting an affair with Maverick. The battle between desire and genuine feeling set against the bad experiences of the past and Maverick's own here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle. And then relay her decision.

But the writers, director and actress Jennifer Connelly, with less than a minute of screen time, just a few lines and a very important door, can indeed convey what is going on inside Penny's head with extreme clarity. My survey sample is every guy I know who says, "ohhh," when we discuss the movie and anyone brings up the open door. The door, for those unaware, is the one Penny leaves open after Maverick has given her a ride home on his motorcycle. It's a door she shut after an earlier ride.

I guess my take is that when a movie is made sui generis, without any adaptation, skill can bring us to the hidden space inside a character's head and heart -- because there's no deeper understanding around to make a comparison. But when a novel is around to show the depth a great writer can unmask, the movie may be great, but it will fall short. Every musical or movie made based on Les Misérables, whether awesome, awful or indifferent, does not repay the work of fighting through about 1,200 pages of the novel.

Of course, for me sometimes the opposite happens too. I've watched the Kevin Coster, Robert Duval, Annette Bening movie Open Range more often than I can count. I've read Lauran Paine's The Open Range Men exactly once.

Four-Year Saviors

Note: I actually wrote this post yesterday but it slimmed down (and cooled down) considerably once I slept on it. Taking these steps makes me an internet apostate.

A couple of things I've seen recently have reminded me of one of the flaws in how we perceive our presidents over the last forty years or so. In recent days, I've overheard and read a large number of people who plan to vote for former president Donald Trump in spite of the likelihood he will spend much of the campaign as a defendant. The rationale: Things are so bad that "Trump's the only one who can save us."

Conversely, I have friends and family who think that President Biden is doing a poor job in many areas and also believe that he is too old to be an effective president, but they will vote for him if he is the nominee to "save us from another four years of Trump." The focus is narrower, but the idea is the same: We must vote for this candidate not to be an executive as described in Article II of the Constitution but to be a savior. Article II describes presidential duties, and the word "save" or "savior" appears therein only if you cut all the letters in the article apart, mix them up and pull out the ones needed to spell the words.

The notion of voting for a savior has long roots in our national history. Many say Abraham Lincoln saved the union -- but what he did was lead those who did the work, bloody and otherwise, of defeating the Confederacy and thus enabling the end of slavery along with the end of the rebellion. It's true that without Lincoln the many who desired the end of the rebellion and of slavery would still have worked for it, but without Lincoln's conviction and leadership they may not have succeeded. But without the many who desired, worked and bled, Lincoln would have done nothing. Similar caveats adorn FDR's record, or should.

In modern times, the transformation of president into savior probably began with Ronald Reagan. People who share my political persuasion see many accomplishments and many undoings of problems left by previous administrations. People who do not share my persuasion also do not have any notion of Ronald Reagan as a savior. In any event Reagan hired and appointed the people who got those things done. Again, he and others did the work, which is probably better conceived of fixing stuff rather than saving the nation.

But by the time Bill Clinton ran, the campaign made it clear he was to be voted for in order to save us from four more years of Republican presidencies. George W. Bush would save us from Al Gore's robotic goofiness and John Kerry's stentorian emptiness. Barack Obama saved us from all of the Republican evil, which at that time was concentrated in John McCain and Mitt Romney. Later, when a guy who actually was the kind of guy McCain and Romney were accused of being, everyone let them off the hook. A great deal of savior language would be applied to then-President Obama during his terms.

Many Donald Trump supporters believed he was a bad choice but he could save us from the possibility of President Hillary Clinton. And it is at this point the idea of president as savior completely falls apart. If in fact someone voted for Donald Trump for that reason, he achieved all they asked for as soon as he took office. But once taking office, presidents generally remain in that office for at least four years and we have to deal with their (usual lack of) ability during that time. In 2020, many people who thought Joe Biden was a lunkhead voted for him to save the nation from four more years of Donald Trump. And next year, we will be implored by both parties to vote for people who will peak on day one and get worse until their term ends.

Naturally, someone in my job recognizes an entirely different Savior, but many don't. I do believe that accepting the Savior I follow would improve a lot of things, but I'm not into forcing anybody. I just wonder, though, if it's too much to ask to say, "Try voting for a President rather than a savior. Just try, and let's see what happens."

Because if everybody else does the same thing in 2024 that they did in 2020 and puts two ancient grifters on the ballot again, I'll do the same thing I did and try to make the Libertarian Party nominee President of the United States.

Lycanthropy!

The condition of the title can be recognized, Johannes Actuarius tells us in his 1340 Therapeutike Methodos, by examining a person and discovering ulcerated feet and legs from nighttime hours spent wandering among tombs.

As recounted in Ask the Past, the afflicted person makes such wanderings as a wolf before returning in the morning in human form. Actuarius describes the condition as a "melancholy," which means something different to him than it does to us, but in any event the people suffering from the condition often remain silent and sad. All the same, one shouldn't try to comfort them in their wolfish form, as no amount of offered treats and "Oh, sad doggie!" are likely to curb their lupine appetite for, ah, fresh food.

Strangely, no mention is made of the clothing worn by sufferers. The snazzy dressing that makes survivors interested in the werewolf's tailor was apparently a later development.

Notes from a Cave on Chat GPT

You might not be surprised that longtime musician Nick Cave, an Australian pioneer of what is thought of today as Goth rock, would pretty much reject the idea that the Chat GPT AI has any role in creating music.

You might be surprised that a large part of Cave's argument rests on the idea that God's resting on the seventh day of creation implies "creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place." But Cave, one of secular music's few confessed Christians, has been long fascinated with the Old Testament and the struggles found therein.

His argument is simple as he answers a question from a fan who talks about hearing a songwriter praise how fast Chat GPT enables him to create lyrics. If there is no artistic struggle that he suggests is a part of all of creation, then what good is what is produced? You don't have to believe in a six-day creation to follow this idea, either. A good, old-fashioned Big Bang and evolutionary development vision of Earth will work just fine, as long as you entertain the idea that God's hand was at work. Spoiler: I sort of do.

Back in May I made fun of the way the Writers Guild of America strike might produce no noticeable dropoff in the quality of movie and TV writing, and in fact we might be better off if some of the Guild's members reduced their output.

But their reasoning is sound: Among other things, writers don't want studios to replace them with AIs  Even though so very much of modern TV and movies are written by hacks or by people performing an amazing imitation of them, the shows are still being written by people. There is a minute but real probability that whichever wordsmith threw the paint-by-numbers chum onto the screen in one of  Dick Wolf's retreads could get better.

Could Chat GPI? Not in any real way that counts. If someone is more specific in their requests -- a task which suggests a knowledge of language that ought to be put to use on a keyboard instead of a query box -- and if we feed the maw of the disposal more real words and real work, then it might produce something "better" than it does now. But it would be the same as the difference between finding a completely smushed tomato and a miraculously whole one that survived the reducing knives of the InsinkErator. It's still stuff that came out of the drain.

Chat GPI is less messy on your carpet. But like Nick Cave, I believe it robs humans of the work of creating. And, for myself, it involves giving up a piece of the image of God written into all of us, and exchanging it for speed. It won't be a good bargain.

Lament, Grave-Dancing or Warning?

I frequently read some very online writers, especially in the entertainment media, who lament and warn that Elon Musk will destroy Twitter -- or X as he calls it these days. Some of the stories gush schadenfreud at the predicted death of the company because Mr. Musk is pretty into letting people say what they want on his recently-acquired platform. Such users are very into letting people say what such users want and nothing else. Personally I don't care how it dies, I just want it dead. In the meantime, I can't figure out how I am supposed to approach a multibillionaire's purchase of a specific set of lines of code how he treats his purchase. My gut is to roll with the fact that this year marks 300 years since the birth of Adam Smith and just let a private individual do what he wants with what he bought as long as it's not illegal.

Besides, this is the only X I care about anyway

LEGO Science!

If you were a reader before I hibernated, you know that I enjoy the science writing of the German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. While I was sleeping, Dr. Hossenfelder added a newsletter with regular videos, a Patreon page and, as I discovered in a recent newsletter, a podcast as well as a second book.

In last week's newsletter, Dr. Hossenfelder picked up an item about biophysicists at the University of Arizona who needed what's called a "gradient mixer" to help purify something called DNA nanostructures. If you remember your high school science (or X-men movies) you might recall that DNA is a double-helix shape of protein molecules -- a twisty ladder. Scientists assemble these arrangements into larger shapes called nanostructures. The nanostructures can be made to carry information, leading to the possibility of biological computer processing. As well as a bunch of other things I am nowhere near understanding.

Anyway, to purify the structure, the biological material must be rotated in a "gradient mixer." Such mixers can be made of finely-tuned expensive parts. Or they can, as the team at Arizona learned, be made from LEGOs for much much less. I confess I find myself less fascinated by the science involved and much, much more interested in the way LEGO parts make up the equipment.

I'll keep my shoes on if walking around the lab in the dark, though. Stepping on those is still painful, even if they're being used for science.

Database

My posting was spotty the last several days due to some fun transferring a membership roll from an existing Excel spreadsheet to a new one in which the data were organized completely differently. The old one had merged cells, data not required in the new one that was linked directly to the data I wanted from the old one, and other sundry inconveniences.

Some of my transfer problems come, of course, from my limited ability to navigate Excel. I'm sure there are experienced users who could have gone "click, click" and had everything done before their coffee was cold. But some of the problems come because Excel is a spreadsheet app being used as a database, and those are two different things.

The electronic heirs of Messrs. Webster and Merriam identify a spreadsheet as "a computer program that allows the entry, calculation, and storage of data in columns and rows." The word first appeared in 1981. Whereas a database is "a usually large collection of data organized especially for rapid search and retrieval (as by a computer)." That word goes back to 1962. The entry also tells me, erroneously, that "database" can be used as a transitive verb. 

They seem very similar, of course, but as one who has used both Microsoft Access and Excel I can assure you that they are different. Access is designed to organize and sort data. Doing so on the program is intuitive and the rows and columns of a database can be sorted, organized and changed around very simply. Had our church's list and the requested format both been in Access the transfer would have been a lot quicker and a lot easier on my eyes.

But...Access is not offered for Mac users nor is it offered on Microsoft's home computer package. Most home users might not need it, but it seems to me that enough Mac-based businesses would probably buy it to make the conversion worth the while. Although maybe Microsoft knows things I don't that would make it not as easy as I believe it would be. Apple does offer database software but it's not bilingual, as it were, either.

So we are stuck with Excel -- which can be used as a non-accounting database most of the time even though the non-most times are a considerable pain -- because Excel is one of the programs Microsoft makes for Macs. We can all muddle through with a lesser tool because it's available for everyone.

This is just one of the things I remember every time I see or hear a Mac or PC ad that talks about how their products are designed with me, the user, in mind. Very little of the online or computing world is designed with the user in mind, except when the user is a source of revenue. For a continuing -- and better-written -- version of this rant focused on Facebook, see this post from Ted Gioia.

Maybe the Enemy is, But...

In recent days Fitch Ratings downgraded the debt of the United States from its highest standard, AAA, to AA+.  One possible consequence is a sell-off of U.S. securities, which are our instruments of debt. People buy them so the government has cash to start its tailgate bonfires, with the idea that one day, the government will buy them back at an increased price and the person who bought them in the first place will make money. Which, OK, everybody has to believe in something.

A couple of things should be noted -- Fitch Ratings says it has taken this move because of "a steady deterioration in standards of government." In the immortal words of John McLain, (no, not those), "Welcome to the party, pal!"

Our tendencies in government have been towards crowning our president, pundityfying our Congress and turning our Supreme Court into a super-legislature. The "steady deterioration" has been going on for a long time. The leaders of our parties are people who work for jobs they can't do and, apparently, don't want. Yes, Nancy Pelosi was pretty good at getting votes out of her party's members and Kevin McCarthy has rediscovered Article 1, Section 1 and is putting on a pretty good King Josiah act. But think back to the years between the election of Barack Obama and the death of Senator Ted Kennedy.

The Democratic Party controlled the White House, House of Representatives and had a veto-proof majority in the United States Senate. Yet it took then-Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi and then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid until 2010 and any number of parliamentary shenanigans to get the president's number-one desire, health care passed. If you remember the 1980s, do you have any doubt that had Tip O'Neil been around he would have had some kind of health care reform passed before Mitch McConnell came in to work and John Boehner finished his smoke?

The fuss should not be that Fitch has noticed steady deterioration in 2023 -- it should be that these standards have been deteriorating for quite the while now. Plus, AA+ will still let you buy a few tanks and such on credit; it's not that bad.

To close, several opinion pieces about the downgrade seemed to give it more impact than it has - as professor Don Boudreaux notes in this piece, our government has been downgraded. We're just fine.

...As Lonely Does

I have become an immense fan of Bari Weiss's The Free Press website, featuring a ton of great articles on fascinating things going on in our society. One that grabbed my attention was a recent item by Jenny Powers, an author who had been researching a book on the phone-sex industry in a time when no one actually calls on their phones.

Powers made an fascinating discovery -- large numbers of the men who call are not calling to talk dirty, but just to talk. And especially to talk to a woman. Our society has not lost the image of women as more ready to listen and more caring, and Powers says that many of the operators create what are called "vanilla" profiles in order to capitalize on the lonely guy market.

COVID might have played a role, Powers says, but Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that on a 2014 listening tour of the country he encountered a lot of people who felt invisible and alone. Robert Putnam wrote about civic disengagement, reducing the number of places where people might connect, in 2000's Bowling Alone.

The post title is taken from a song on The dBs third album, Like This. Called "Lonely Is (As Lonely Does), it makes the point that some of the cause of our loneliness rests on our own shoulders. And that's certainly true. I live alone and try to take steps to give myself some personal contact so it doesn't fall into the $1.99-a-minute category. The other youth leaders on Wednesday eat together but I eat with the kids. They asked how I could stand the noise and I said that almost my entire life is quiet. The noise they bring kind of energizes me.

But a lot of our lonely has come from the way our society has been moving towards atomization. Our own phones, our own music, our own entertainment, our own wrapped-up little world. It takes work to stop it -- eating with noisy kids who are one explosion away from throwing Cheetos. Eating out about once a week, just to be around people and talk to some of them.

And the work is a constant -- as Mr. Holsapple says, "Lonely's with us every day."

Astronomical

 I am an avid fan of the magazine Astronomy. Earlier versions of their online format were oddly, for a magazine devoted to science, awful. But I didn’t hesitate to go back to paper - and my local library is grateful, as they receive past issues.

Today I was reading one of their brief snippet stories and it spoke of something some millions of light years off. If you don’t know, that’s something so far off that light takes millions of years to get to us - it may look nothing like what we see if we were able somehow to see it in real time.

I read these figures frequently in the magazine but this evening for some reason the immensity and vastness of the universe truly struck me on this occasion. I’d sit out tonight and contemplate it but it’s going to be 93 degrees at 10 PM so I’ll imagine.

We really are small. I really am small. But my way of thinking gives me a Creator who can encompass both the vastness of the universe and me at one time. You, too. 

Somehow, that’s an even bigger “Whoa!”

The Book, Dramatized

I've been a fan of the multi-season biblical drama The Chosen, written by Tyler Thomson, Ryan Hopkins and creator-director Dallas Jenkins. Some of that is because it focuses heavily on the disciples, the normal human beings who have to try to navigate life while following Jesus. Some of it is because it features a vision of Jesus I like -- funny, wry and mountain-strong against the injustices the Pharisees and Romans inflict on the people.

Jenkins is the son of writer Jerry Jenkins, who tried to write about the second coming of Christ but was hampered by Tim LaHaye's rigid dispensationalism. After some failed commercial filmmaking Dallas found himself drawn to making religiously-themed movies, but without the preachiness or stodgy demeanor found in many of these films. Asked to provide a video for his church for Christmas 2017, Jenkins created The Shepherd, which became the pilot for The Chosen.

Genuine actors show up on the screen of these episodes -- the first season featured well-known character actor Erick Amari as Nicodemus in a poignant role. Frequent TV guest star Jonathan Roumie exults in humanizing Jesus, Shahar Isaac shows Peter as the leader Jesus needs him to be as well as the uncertain man who will one day deny his Lord. Oklahoma's own Elizabeth Tabish absolutely nails the pivotal role of Mary Magdalene, one of the most important women in Jesus' ministry.

Anyway, The Chosen has been around for awhile now and I didn't intend to write about it. It just gave me an idea. A professor at Westmont University in California named Sandra Richter did a video study on the biblical book of Ruth that could create an excellent screenplay. The Moabite woman who accompanied her widowed, childless mother in law back to Israel and left her own people and homeland. Through a course of fortuitous events -- and some nudging from the mother-in-law -- she catches the eye of a wealthy distant kinsman named Boaz. Eventually they marry and have a son, Obed, who was the grandfather of King David. She is one of the five women named in Jesus' genealogy.

Richter's understanding, which is drawn from 20-some years of studying the Old Testament and the environment of its people, suggests that rather than a romantic entanglement, Boaz takes Ruth in marriage because of her great devotion to her mother-in-law and her own cleverness in getting his attention. The next part is of her own devising, but Richter envisions a union of legal custom and respect growing into love, despite the age differences.

Neither filmed version of Ruth and Boaz's story takes this angle, focusing on romance (1960's The Story of Ruth)  or the sanctifying of the biblical characters (2009's The Book of Ruth).

I just kind of thought I'd like to see that version filmed because in my mind, it matched some of the mindset of the creators of The Chosen and it turned Ruth into my favorite book of the Bible. Every now and again, I guess I'm still going to ramble.