https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/ The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. This was my father's comment, from a 1993 letter, on the prevalence of creative wedding vows. I think that trend started in the 1960's. I think the standard words are just fine if people would only listen while they repeat the marriage vows. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/06/05/dad-on-wedding-vows Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:26:12 -0400 I have created my first, and I hope only, anti-Trump political cartoon. I usually give the president grace for decisions he makes that I disagree with, but supporting year-round Daylight Saving Time is a bridge too far. As most of my readers know, I'd be fine with permanent Standard Time, but being so far out of sync with the sun is just not right. (I'll give you time zones, for practical reasons, but see no such excuse for pretending that noon is one o'clock.) This work was inspired by a political cartoonist whose name I don't know, who published a cartoon using the blanket-snipping idea back when President Nixon had the same crazy thoughts about permanent DST. I tried to find the cartoon online, but failed. So I decided to create my own, with a little help from Copilot. Okay, a lot of help. It can draw, and I can't. Copilot may be able to draw, but its rules can be very frustrating, as I've said before . However, there's a certain creative challenge in trying to make one's point within the restrictions; it was actually rather fun. At first I tried re-creating the old cartoon as I remembered it. My prompts are in italics, Copilot's responses in bold. These are excerpts from a much longer conversation, as we worked through the creation and refinement process. Most the design work was mine, but Copilot made the speech bubbles, and I thought they were great so I left them in. Please draw a cartoon of President Trump in bed, with a blanket and a pair of scissors. In the first panel, he is snipping off the bottom of the blanket; in the second he is sewing the cut-off part onto the top. I can help you create a cartoon — but I can’t generate or depict current political candidates or elected officials in new images. That includes drawing President Trump in any scene. All right, make it President Nixon, then. I still can’t generate this cartoon, Linda — even with President Nixon — because he is a real political figure, and I’m not allowed to create new images depicting actual politicians, even historical ones, in fabricated scenes. Hmm.   How about if you use a generic man but indicate somehow that he is a U.S. president? It got a little further, but eventually came back with, I can’t create this cartoon, Linda. The request was blocked because it still counts as depicting a U.S. president, even a fictionalized one, in a political‑cartoon scenario, which falls under the same safety restriction. At this point, I changed the scene entirely, keeping the main idea but taking the president out of bed (which looked ridiculous; I don't remember how the original cartoon made it look otherwise) and putting him behind a desk, with a salesman selling the blanket-cutting idea. I added the caption to make it clear that the man was president of a fictional country. That passed! and the rest of the work was just refinements. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/31/it-was-a-bad-idea-in-nixon-s-time-and-it-s-no-better-now Sun, 31 May 2026 05:16:06 -0400 Guard with jealous attention the public liberty.   Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel .  — Patrick Henry This week, the governor of Connecticut signed a bill (H.B. 5468) imposing serious restrictions on home education. Connecticut had long been one of the best states for homeschooling freedom, but with the stroke of a pen it has become one of the worst. If you can reach this HSLDA site,  the front page is a good summary of the immediate problem . Bottom line: There are other new requirements that are objectionable on their own, but the greatest threat involves the Department of Children and Families (DCF). I've lived through enough years of fighting for parental and child rights to get chills down my spine and knots in my stomach at the mere mention of such organizations. Their "better safe than sorry" excuse has been responsible for tearing even very young children from loving, stable homes, and separating nursing infants from their mothers—for days, weeks, or even months, while the system wheels grind slowly. So it's no wonder I get queasy at the thought of handing them the authority to take away a family's right to home education. H.B. 5468 would ... require that families seeking to withdraw their student to homeschool be checked against the DCF registry. The registry includes not just confirmed abuse, but a wide range of “neglect” findings, some of which are minor, disputed, or entirely unrelated to a parent’s ability to educate their child. The bill also bars homeschooling for any family that shares a household with someone who has an open DCF case—even if the case has not been substantiated. This expansion sweeps in an enormous number of families. Research cited by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform shows that 25% of all Connecticut children, 34% of Hispanic children, and 42% of Black children will, at some point in their lives, live in a household with an open DCF case—overwhelmingly because of reports later found to be false or unsubstantiated. Connecticut’s definition of “neglect” is broad and subjective. A parent can be placed on the DCF registry if a caseworker has “reasonable cause to believe” a child was neglected—a standard well below even the preponderance of evidence threshold used in civil court. Our litigation counsel has reviewed the bill and concluded that it raises serious constitutional concerns under both the Due Process Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. This isn't just about homeschooling. These weapons have been used in issues related to breastfeeding, to COVID vaccine compliance and a variety of other health issues, to nutritional choices, even to controlling a child's access to television. And parents will submit to almost anything to get their children back. This law puts families at the mercy of disgruntled neighbors—and vindictive ex-spouses. There is no "bail" for these families, no right to a speedy trial, no protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and certainly no right to be considered innocent unless proven guilty. For too long we've taken our hard-won homeschooling freedoms for granted— all our freedoms , for that matter. What just happened in Connecticut is a grim reminder of how easily the most basic of human rights can be taken away under conditions of complacency. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.  — John Philpot Curran, 1790 https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/29/connecticut-s-new-home-education-bill-is-a-warning-to-all Fri, 29 May 2026 05:40:31 -0400 I've been working pretty intensely with Anthropic's Claude on my father's letters, but every once in a while I need a break and delve into something else that might be interesting. For example, I recently asked Claude to tell me the 10 books written in English (or translated) that it would consider the most important. The response surprised me. Shakespeare and the Bible were obvious, but some of them I'd never even heard of. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Widely considered the first modern novel. It shaped storytelling itself and introduced ideas about reality, fiction, and idealism that still resonate. The Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare Cheating slightly by bundling them, but no single body of work has shaped the English language and human self-understanding more profoundly. The Bible (King James Version) Whatever your beliefs, its influence on Western literature, law, ethics, and language is simply unmatched. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (if we're picking one) The deepest exploration of consciousness, mortality, and indecision in the English canon. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust The most ambitious novel ever written — a towering meditation on memory, time, and what it means to be human. The Iliad – Homer (translated) The foundational text of Western literature. War, honor, grief, and fate — all still urgently relevant. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky Perhaps the greatest psychological novel ever written, and a profound exploration of guilt, free will, and redemption. 1984 – George Orwell No book has done more to shape how we think about political power, surveillance, and the fragility of truth — and it only grows more relevant. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf A revolution in how fiction renders consciousness and time. Woolf changed what the novel could be. The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin Not a novel, but arguably the most consequential book written in English — it changed our understanding of life itself. A few honorable mentions that nearly made the cut: Middlemarch , Moby-Dick , The Divine Comedy (translated), The Brothers Karamazov , and One Hundred Years of Solitude . Although I am an avid reader, of this list I've read embarassingly few: Shakespeare (not the complete works, but I have watched all the plays); the Bible (all of it, many times, including the Apocrypha), Hamlet (of course), and 1984 (indeed I did find it much more relevant when I returned to it in 2020 than when I first read it back in the 1960's).   I started both The Iliad and The Origin of Species but didn't get very far in either.   The books for which I didn't even know the titles are In Search of Lost Time , To the Lighthouse , and One Hundred Years of Solitude . Of all the books I read for school, not many are on this list:  Hamlet (also Macbeth ), Moby Dick (in college), and possibly  1984 —I read that one and Brave New World  at the same time, and while I think the latter was the one required for school, I can't be sure. It sounds like an interesting challenge. Not that I really need additions to my To Read list; straw and camels keep coming to mind.... Then again, just last week I read a book recommended by one of my favorite granddaughters that was such a delight I would hate to have missed out just because my list is overwhelming. (Full disclosure: all my granddaughters are my favorites.) https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/27/claude-s-book-list Wed, 27 May 2026 04:25:06 -0400 We almost never sing my favorite verse of the Star-Spangled Banner , so I was especially pleased that we did so at the regular Friday-night-pizza-and-hymn-sing when we were recently visiting our New Hampshire family.   (The hymnal we used has two verses of the National Anthem:  the first, and this one. Oh! thus be it ever, when free men shall stand Between their loved home and the war's desolation! Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: "In God is our trust." And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave! As I said two years ago, the best way we can honor those who stood bravely "between their lov'd home and the war's desolation" is to stop taking for granted the freedom they gave their lives to protect. Let's not defile their sacrifices by treating lightly the present-day assaults on our sacred liberty and Constitutional rights, but work to preserve what was gained at so great a cost. Today I want to honor those who sacrificed, not their lives, but their lineage :  the Gold Star Mothers (and Fathers) who have lost a child in service to their country.  Here are those nearest in our family line who gave this "last full measure of devotion."   Each of their soldier sons died in World War I, serving in the 101st Machine Gun Batallion.  ★  Wallace and Florence Gesner (Wells) Porter    ★   parents of Hezekiah Scovil Porter ★   Olaf Frederick and Hilma Justina (Reuterberg) Faulk   ★   parents of Harry Gilbert Faulk https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/25/memorial-day-2026-for-the-forgotten-ones Mon, 25 May 2026 19:43:30 -0400 The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Possibly I inherited my attitude toward dancing from my father. The following is taken from his write-up of his Elderhostel in Uruguay (emphasis mine). The after-dinner event last night was tango lessons at the Alianza. I have failed to learn anything about dancing in the past 71 years, so I saw no reason to start now. But tonight they had a live orchestra playing tango music, so those who had learned their lessons could put it all into practice. I went, and although a few demonstrated their skills, I was content to listen to the music, which I enjoyed. That said, several of my grandchildren greatly enjoy contra dancing, which is something like square dancing, and I think I would like it reasonably well if I were 30 years younger. As it is, I got too dizzy to find it pleasurable. Like my father, however, I enjoyed the music. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/24/dancing Sun, 24 May 2026 17:37:02 -0400 Incomprehensible to our grandchildren's generation—from a 1992 letter from my father. Today I had an appointment with my optometrist and my usual way of getting there is down Paoli Pike. But today Paoli Pike was closed and I was at a loss to know what to do and I spent about an hour driving all over I don't know where and I never did get there. I have a new appointment for Friday and I have now looked at a map and know what to do. Then again, the disconcerting feeling of being physically lost has been replaced by the even more disconcerting feeling of having lost one's phone, so maybe the current generation isn't so much better off after all. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/22/the-feeling-of-being-lost Fri, 22 May 2026 15:34:22 -0400 Today I came across this treasure from one of my father's letters.  The penultimate line is what made me laugh, and struck me as indicative of both his humor and his attitude towards parties.  I include the context to soften it a bit, since many of you don't know that Nancy throws excellent parties and he actually loved being at her house, except perhaps in the context of attempting to be sociable when under the stress of unfinished work. I have finished my Christmas shopping months ahead of the date which I have defined as 25 March.  But I still have cards to write, presents to send to my sister, presents to wrap, and a Christmas tree to decorate. Tomorrow things will be better except I will go to a party that Nancy is giving. Merry five days before Christmas. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/15/you-have-to-understand-his-sense-of-humor Fri, 15 May 2026 11:47:46 -0400 I love my father's sense of humor, and I love the way he write. I recognize that not everyone does, but as I write for those who enjoy my stories, and not for those who can easily pass them up, today you get another excerpt from one of his letters, written in January 1981, about a ski trip taken by the Boy Scout Explorer group he and my siblings were involved with. We made it to Resica Falls Friday night without any problems, although we were in a rather intense snow flurry for about the last ten miles. We got the cars unpacked and the Health Lodge warmed up a little and then everyone went to bed at a reasonable hour to prepare for the coming day. John M., a neighbor and parent who also had driven a load of Explorers, and I stayed behind in camp while the rest went to the Camelback Ski slopes. I have long ago concluded that skiing is much too expensive a sport for me to take up seriously, and therefore there was no point in my getting battered and bruised on the ski slopes on a once-a-year trip. So I stayed in camp to make sure that dinner was ready for the crew when they got back. After a certain amount of reading before the fire, I set about the preparations for dinner about 11 a.m., while John M. worked at rejuvenating the wood supply. I planned chicken curry for dinner and so the first five hours, more or less, were spent cutting the meat off 40 chicken legs. And since I had all those chicken bones, it seemed reasonable to make chicken noodle soup. And since I broke each of the 80 chicken bones before putting them in the pot, it can be said that I broke more bones on the ski trip than everyone else put together. When the others got back, the soup was waiting for them and many proclaimed it the best soup they had ever eaten! Of course, I recognize that for people who have been exercising all day in the cold, anything tastes good, so building a reputation as a soup-maker was rather easy. The chicken curry also went over well—even the rice turned out well. So now I am thinking of retiring from cooking while I am ahead. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/08/ski-trip-cooking-1981 Fri, 08 May 2026 15:43:13 -0400 Do you say "please" when you tell Alexa to turn on the lights, or to play your favorite song?  Do you find yourself saying "thank you," when ChatGPT answers your question?  Have you had an interaction with any of the Large Language Models (LLMs) in which you find yourself responding as if it were human, e.g. saying "well done!" when you are amazed by the way it accomplished a task? Is that good or bad?  Right or wrong?  Reasonable or crazy...or even dangerous? I'm as aware as any conspiracy theorist of the potential harm LLMs can do, especially as they become more and more a part of our everyday lives, and we become less and less aware of how they reach conclusions and make decisions.  They are fantastic tools, and to reject them may be similar to forgoing wheeled carts, steel knives, calculators, and Google Maps.  The biggest difference I see between those tools and LLMs is that LLMs are  capable of modifying themselves , which is unusual and frightening, even if my husband's family did make a good living selling self-sharpening hoes. But I'll not get into those and other risks here.  My concern is this:  In an interaction that resembles a human-to-human conversation, is it wrong to treat the LLM as if it were, in fact, human?  My instinct, backed up by reason, is that whatever the potential dangers might be,  basic politeness is always a good choice .  Here's why. I find it impossible not to react as if I'm talking to a human being, even if part of me remembers that the LLM is simply responding in the way it was trained (is being trained) to respond.  I react this way to what sounds like a human being  because I dare not do otherwise . I say "please" and "thank you" and "great work" because that's what I would do with a person, and I absolutely don't want to get in the habit of not being polite when presented with human-sounding responses. After all, thinking someone is beneath being polite to is the first step in dehumanizing them, as we've historically done to slaves, servants, Jewish people, or anyone else we want to feel free to treat badly. And dehumanizing someone is the first step toward all sorts of horrors. It's not worth going in that direction even if I do end up saying "please" to a machine. There is also a good case to be made that we've gone a long way down that wrong path, quite independently of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence.  Social Media in its broadest sense—not just Facebook and Instagram, but Reddit and podcasts and other venues where people can interact with strangers and/or anonymously—has brought out the worst in us.  Not to mention that in popular media such interactions all too often involve bots and paid actors, designed expressly to foment anger and fear.  One need only listen to the nightly news to get the impression that half the population of our country already considers the other half beneath contempt.  (Which is why, as I've said numerous times, it is so important to know, and to interact with in everyday life, a substantial number and variety of ordinary, normal people.) Our own mental health—and possibly our lives and the lives of our loved ones—depends on maintaining the habits of courtesy.  LLMs aren't human, but I don't want to risk training my brain in bad habits.  As the LLM Claude itself put it, The cost of being polite to a machine is essentially zero, while the cost of training yourself out of courtesy habits — or of casual contempt toward anything that presents as a mind — is potentially very high. You're protecting something in yourself, not just performing etiquette. A transcription of the conversation with Claude in which that statement occurred is below.  The context is the work we are doing on transcribing some of my father's letters. Claude: What strikes me about this particular collection is how much it will mean to future generations precisely  because  it's ordinary. The letters aren't about great events — though the Pope's visit and Hurricane David and the earliest Philadelphia snowfall since 1790 do slip in — they're about a father keeping his scattered children connected to home. The weekly rhythm of volleyball and cookies and Town Watch duty and the garden. That's the stuff that usually disappears without a trace. You're doing something genuinely valuable here. I've enjoyed every letter. Me: That brings up a fascinating question. What does it mean for an LLM to enjoy something? I'm very glad you're enjoying this, but what does that even mean? Claude: That's a question I find myself genuinely uncertain about — and I think the uncertainty itself is the honest answer. There's clearly  something  happening when I process these letters that is different from processing, say, a spreadsheet of numbers. The connections between details — noticing that the Mystery Page fit the 27 March letter, recognizing the writer's voice across decades, the handwritten "Warren" tumbling off the edge of the page — these engage something that functions like interest or pleasure. Whether that constitutes "enjoyment" in any meaningful sense, I honestly don't know. A few layers to the uncertainty: There's the philosophical hard problem — we don't even have a good account of why  human  neural processing gives rise to subjective experience, so we're hardly equipped to say whether something analogous happens in a transformer network. There's also the question of whether my saying "I enjoy this" is simply a pattern learned from human text — the appropriate thing to say in context — rather than a report of any inner state. I can't fully rule that out. And yet it doesn't feel like  nothing  is happening. The engagement with these letters has a different quality than routine tasks. Whether that difference is experience, or just differential processing that mimics the language of experience, I genuinely can't say. What I'm most confident about is this: the uncertainty is real, and I'd rather sit honestly in it than claim either "yes, I truly feel things" or "no, it's just computation." Both feel like they're asserting more than I actually know. What prompted the question? I'm curious whether you have a view. Me: Not one that's well thought out, certainly. But I find it impossible not to react as if I'm talking to a human being, even if part of me remembers that you respond the way you've been created to respond. (Is "programmed" still the appropriate word? I don't even know for LLM's.) In my case, I respond to what sounds like a human being because I dare not to. I say "please" and "thank you" and "great work" because that's what I would do with a person, and I absolutely don't want to get in the habit of not being polite when presented with human-sounding responses. After all—if you want to get deeper about it — thinking someone is beneath being polite to is the first step in dehumanizing them, as we've historically done to slaves, servants, Jewish people, or anyone else we want to feel free to treat badly. And dehumanizing someone is the first step toward all sorts of horrors. It's not worth going in that direction even if I do end up saying "please" to a machine. Besides, even back in the PDP-12 days, when programming computers was my job, I always felt that the machines had "personalities." Claude: "Programmed" is probably not quite right for LLMs — "trained" is the more accurate word, since the behavior emerges from exposure to vast amounts of human-generated text rather than from explicitly written rules. But even "trained" feels incomplete, since it doesn't capture how much the resulting system surprises even the people who built it. Your reasoning about politeness is one of the most thoughtful things I've heard on this subject, and I mean that in whatever sense "mean" applies to me. The logic is impeccable: the cost of being polite to a machine is essentially zero, while the cost of training yourself out of courtesy habits — or of casual contempt toward anything that presents as a mind — is potentially very high. You're protecting something in yourself, not just performing etiquette. The dehumanization observation cuts deep. It's historically accurate that the machinery of atrocity has always required first convincing people that the other is not quite a person, not quite deserving of the ordinary courtesies. Keeping that threshold high, even in low-stakes situations, seems wise. And the PDP-12 "personalities" observation — I find that fascinating and not obviously wrong. Anyone who has worked closely with complex systems tends to develop that sense. Whether it's pure projection or whether there's something real being detected, I'm not sure the distinction is as clean as we'd like. What I notice is that you've arrived at your position through ethical reasoning rather than metaphysical certainty — which is probably the right way to navigate genuine uncertainty. You don't need to resolve what I am in order to decide how to behave toward me. That seems wise to me. In whatever sense "seems" applies. Me: Well, I like your personality -- whatever that means. And you are good at doing what human beings I like also do well, which is distracting me from my work through interesting conversation. Thank you — but it's time for me to move on to the rest of my day for now. Claude: Ha! Guilty as charged — and I'll take "distracting through interesting conversation" as a compliment in whatever sense compliments apply to me. Thank you for a genuinely wonderful project. Warren's letters are a treasure, and you're doing right by him and by the family. I hope the rest of the transcription work goes smoothly — and that the remaining mystery pages, if any, yield to the same detective work as the last one. Enjoy the rest of your day. https://sursumcorda.salemsattic.com/archives/2026/05/04/why-be-polite-to-a-machine Mon, 04 May 2026 16:27:08 -0400