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| It is good to be home. I am back from a deployment to the Persian Gulf.
I am the Intelligence Officer on my ship, as well as the Electronic Warfare Officer, and the Fire Control Officer. As the Intelligence Officer it fell to me to be constantly aware of all threats to our ship, targets, and vessels of interest in the area, as well as to keep them informed of current military intel and CIA foreign analysis. I also wrote and delivered a daily brief to the Captain, XO, and all the other officers each evening. Fire Control is unrelated to putting out fires, which is an understandable misconception. I am in charge of the ship's missiles and big guns, so fire control in this sense is that referred to in such commands as "Open Fire" or "Cease Fire," and is unrelated to those types of fires that we contain and fight to extinguish. Electronic Warfare is something I think best not to do more than name in this venue.
I also drove the ship and stood watch as the Combat Information Center Watch Officer.
Now I am in Virginia, and although I will be going to sea periodically for the next several months, I will not make another protracted deployment for a comfortable stretch of time, Deo Volente. | | |
| Painting can be fun, if done in moderation. | | |
| I have been taged by R. Victor, and am probably the last of the Reformed Xanga folk whose blogs I read to complete this.
1. One book that changed your life: The Lord of the Rings. It is impossible to over emphasize the influence of Tolkien upon my early and formative years. I held him and his work in absolute reverence. I read The Lord of the Rings in its entirety more than a dozen times before the age of 12. This is a strange admission, but when I was very young, the majesty and beauty of the work led my to kiss its cover before setting it down. I was unaware that Jews treat scripture in this way. I did it merely because it felt fitting and proper at the time, although I made sure no one watched that. I remember vacationing in Maine and finding a stone cliff that to my eye looked exactly something Numenorian descendents in Gondor would have carved: there were two symetrical carven seats in the stone, which looked like thrones, and to climb up to them you had to ascend multiple layers of flat stone. It looked like giant steps, leading up to a giant footstool for a massive throne on each side, set into the face of the cliff. The breakers would smash against the rocks far below, and that spot is where I would read the Return of the King, and The Sillmarillion, sitting on what I called Aaragorn's footstool, because I was unworthy to sit on the throne. I kept that place secret from my brother and friends for years. Yeah; I was almost idolatrous as a kid.
2. One book that you’ve read more than once: If I really like a book, I'm not going to read it just once. I loath bad books and am reluctant to read anything new unless it comes well recommended. There have been too many occasions in which I have finished a book only to wish I had never started it, but once I start one, it is hard to not finish. The Lord of the Rings the the book I have read the most times, but I already mentioned it. Dune, by Frank Herbert is one I have read many times. Likewise Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series of 20 work of historical fiction beginning with Master and Commander constitutes one shelf I have read many times, purely for fun. And that was before I had any relationship with the US Navy. I used to read it once a summer. I remember reading Patrick O'Brian at different CWSCs in Virginia.
3. One book you’d want on a desert island: Victor chose -Buehler's Backyard Boat Building, by George Buehler. (Hard to improve upon.) As a companion, perhaps: The American Practical Navigator, by Nathaniel Bowditch .
4. One book that made you laugh: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
5. One book that made you cry: Um... most of the ones I've mentioned.
6. One book that you wish had been written: I can't improve on Sir Artegal's invention. I'd have said something similar.
7. One book that you wish had never been written: The Qu'ran, writings of the Marguis de Sade, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinions...
8. One book you’re currently reading: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Miller. As of today I am finished with Statistics, by Freedman et al, but the course was fun.
9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: Rushdooney's Institutes
10: Tag five others. This virus hit everyone I subscribe to before I caught it, so now everyone else has immunity.
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A Canticle for Leibowitz describes the age in which men grew in knowedge and exercised dominion over creation without wisdom of how or why to exercise their power. Princes multiplied thermonuclear warheads and devised strategies for "First Strike" attacks against their enemy's weapons, which could result in victory with only the loss of a handful of major cities.
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"And Satan went forth from the presence of God and returned into the world.
"Now the Prince was not as holy Job, for when his land was afflicted with trouble and his people less rich than before, when he saw his enemy become mightier, he grew fearful and ceaced to trust in God, thinking unto himself: I must strike before the enemy overwhelmeth me without taking his sword in hand.
And so it was in those days that the Princes of the earth had hardened their hearts against the Law of the Lord, and of their pride there was no end. And each thought within himself that it was better for all to be destroyed than for the will of the other Princes to prevail over his." (Canticle, p. 171-2)
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So the weapons were released, and civilization ended. The fallout killed more than died in the ititial attacks, and the survivors stoned the wise men and the powerful rulers who had brought this about. The hatered and fear of the learned became a hatered of the literate, and of books. Anyone who could read was stoned and all books were burned.
The book tells the story of a monk and then the people of the monastic order he founded that secretly gathered, memorized, and coppied all the books and documents they could. Leibowitz was eventually caught by the mob of self-styled "simpletons," hanged, and burned, but his followers succeded in preserving a good bit of useful knowledge, although English quickly became a dead language and little of the content was understood by subsequent generations. They made elaboratly copied out illuminated blueprints of circuit diagrams without any idea what they represented. Latin became the universal language of the literate around the globe, and remained the language of the Catholic Church, one of the few institutions to survive.
In time civilization is rebuilt. Humans have many more deformities and suffer the effects of the fallout from the previous holocaust, but they rediscover atomics and space flight. Eventually the nations on the North American continent attacks space instalations belonging to Asia that hold nuclear missiles, but Asia retaliates by destorying their ancient capital city instead of North American space installations as expected.
When that happens and history seems about to repeat itself, the Abbot of the Abby of St. Leibowitz prepares to send several priests and a microfilm copy of the ancient memorabilia of science and knowledge to the human colony off the planet. Here are his thoughts, delivered as he looks on an image of the Blessed Leibowitz, and which I thought worthy of quotation:
He (the Abbot) fingered the mound of faggots where the wooden martyr stood. That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam's, Herod's, Judas's,... mine. Everybody's. Always culminates in the collossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by the warth of Heaven. Why? We shouted it loudly enough- God is to be obeyed by nations as well as by men. Caesar is to be God's policeman, not His plenipotentiary successor, not His heir. To all ages, all peoples-- "Whoever exalts a race, or a State, or a particular form of a State or the depositories of power...whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God...." .... But when Caesar got the power to destroy the world, wasn't he already divinized? Only by the consent of the people-same rabble that shouted: "Non habemus regem misi caesarem," when confronted by Him-God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon.
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Here is a riddle proposed in Decision Theory class today. My professor's dissertation was based on it. In all his years teaching this course, only one student was ever able to answer it correctly, without prior knowledge of the puzzle. That was when he was teaching at Princeton, before becoming the undergraduate chairman of my program at Penn, and the student was a computer science major who basically thought in algorithms. Looking up the answer ruins the fun of it, so if you are going to do that, don't copy a solution from some other site here.
"There was once a monastery in which the monks lived lives of extreme asceticism. One day the father abbot decided to give the three most outstanding monks a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 'You three are the best logicians of this order and can instantly deduce what follows from anything you are told. If you can correctly solve this riddle,' he told them, 'I will forget for one day that you are monks, and you may go to the town and live it up, which is of course what you have been secretly wanting all these years.'
The abbot placed a dot on the forehead of each of the monks, but he did it in such a way that the monks had no way of knowing whether there was anything on their own foreheads or not. Then he sent them together into an empty cell which had no mirrors or anything else which could be used to detect the presence of a dot on their own foreheads, telling each one of them 'You must determine whether there is a dot on your forehead, or not. You cannot guess: you need to supply reasoning that constitutes proof for either answer. As soon as you have your proof, come to the great hall to give me your answer.'
Then the father abbot put the three monks with dots on their foreheads into a cell. There were no mirrors and no aids that could be used to detect the presence or absence of anything on one's own forehead in the room. The monks sat silently, keeping their vows, and did not communicate at all. They each just sat there, looking at the foreheads of the other two monks, seeing those dots, but unable to figure out whether their forehead bore s similar mark or not.
When some time had elapsed the abbot returned to the cell and made an announcement. 'I will now give you all a hint: At least one person in this room does have a dot on his forehead.' (The abbot's forehead was clearly unmarked and no one was present save our three rational, if ascetic, monks.)
When he had said that, the abbot left the cell to go to the hall, and each of the three monks looked at the other two. Then they smiled, arose simultaneously, and exited their cell, went to the abbot, and correctly answered his question, earning their reward.
What was the correct reasoning each monk gave to the abbot after hearing the hint?"
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