As I begin this, I’m taking a brief respite in my room. We have a good chunk of the ward in our apartment tonight for “small-groups FHE”, where two homes host different groups. This as opposed to one large FHE activity at the chapel. (For some definition of “large”; this ain’t your BYU singles ward here.) And as the other group’s event got canceled due to inclement weather, we’ve got quite a lot of people here.

I’ve gotta put up a disclaimer for this post, it contains a bit of griping. I promise I’m a generally good-natured fellow.

As for the title of the post, almost a week ago I was at Institute, at a lesson taught by one of the senior missionaries in the area. It was essentially a marriage prep class, and he gave some pieces of advice that I take extreme issue with.

First of all, he conveyed a story about some area authority traveling on a plane, spotting a young couple a few seats ahead. The guy was engrossed in some mobile game, and the gal was leaning her head on his shoulder, massaging his neck and hair. And this guy’s reaction was to mentally shout at the guy, “WAKE UP!!! SHOW SOME AFFECTION!!!” Which, I guess, sure, that might be nice, but what’re you doing judging this couple just from this scene? If this traveling elder’s being internally consistent in his passing of judgement, this young fellow must show never-ending devotion, never have any time to himself, lest he draw the righteous indignation he obviously deserves.

So the lesson’s not off to a great start. Then, the teacher offered this bit of advice for young married couples. “Go move two hours away from everyone you know, and especially your parents.” He went on to tell horror stories of his own parents and their intrusion into his and his wife’s boundaries. Now, I guess that would’ve been nice for him, but as general advice it’s completely off, in my opinion. You want to take two people who’ve just made an incredible adjustment to their way of life, and tear them away from their entire support group, friends and family alike? What about when kids come into the picture? Grandparents are an incredibly valuable resource in that regard.

One more gem. And this was told by his wife. A story about how her husband had come home from work one night and was eagerly greeted by his kids and the family dog. His wife was hard at work doing dishes. He walks up, gives her a kiss, then remarks, “How come you’re not excited to see me? Even the dog is more excited.”

Mhmm. Comparing your hard-working wife to an emotional dog.

Well, it did, the story had a happy ending, the wife agreed and changed her ways. I guess this is all just a generational thing. Whatever.

On Wednesday we had the first of a series of Star Wars movie nights. I went on a date with a girl who’d never seen any of the movies, so of course we needed to fix that. I really wanted to try the Machete Order: IV, V, II, III, VI. We had a great turnout, everything was going smoothly. And then the opening crawl started. And people were still talking. I tried shushing, but to no avail. I tried pausing the movie when we couldn’t even hear the dialogue, but to no avail. I tried pointing out that we had people here who were watching for the first time, and even got one of the chief chatters to acknowledge “that’s his way of saying ‘shut up!'”, but to no avail. They. Would. Not. Stop. Talking.

It was absolutely infuriating to sit through that. In fact, afterwards one of the noisemakers acknowledged, “I’ll be quiet during a new movie, but I’ve seen that one so many times, so, y’know.” So these people for whom this was also a new movie, they just don’t matter, do they? Not one bit? Incredibly rude and selfish, to ruin the first experience they’ll have with Star Wars, because you just had to point out “oh, here it comes, here’s the line, it’s so funny!”

I’ll continue holding these things because the show must go on, but from now on I think I’ll be up front about it: I don’t care if you talk, but if I hear any off-topic chatter from people who’ve already seen the movie, I’m pausing it, with no exceptions. I figure after the third or fourth time people will get the message. Or I just don’t invite the noise-makers; but I kinda want them to be aware of the effect they’re having on the group. Like that guy yesterday in church who was banging away at his laptop keyboard during a video presentation in class. Sometimes I want sounds to have a visual representation, a rapidly-expanding sphere to help these people know just how far their noise carries.

Anyways. Just had to get that off my chest. They’re all sweet spirits, honest.

On Friday I attended the birthday party of a friend, whose actual birthday was the following day, but couldn’t be celebrated then due to a talent show. It was the sort of party where you can’t hear yourself think, can’t have a private conversation; kind of like what’s happening out in my living room, actually.

I met up there with a friend who’s over here visiting from Germany. She was actually booked to leave back to Berlin the following day, so this was her last hurrah. While the rest of the birthday bunch headed off to an improv comedy event, she and I split off and explored Seattle a bit. We later met up with another friend, and ended up staying out till 5am. My gosh. I’m glad there were no police officers on the highway on my way back, because I was honestly driving like a drunk, veering off into neighboring lanes. I evidently lived to tell the tale, however.

Right, so the reason that birthday party happened on Friday was because of a talent show on Saturday. Which was under the purview of the Service & Activities committee, which I co-chair along with a very competent gal. We spent what seemed like the entire day prepping for it. My roommate arranged for his band to play, which contributed to the complexity. But also the technical impressiveness of the set-up, since they were well-equipped to facilitate a musical event. Well, that is true, but it turns out that a family in a neighboring ward is just chock full of audio-techies, and they brought their equipment as well, resulting in an interesting interconnect of equipment, but an excellent sound design.

So that was exhausting. Luckily I didn’t need to be at church until 1pm the next day. There they announced that we were having small-group FHE at our apartment. Well, they announced they were having it at “Michael’s apartment”, you can get the address for Michael’s apartment from him, Michael will tell you all how to get to his apartment. He’s understandably a much more extroverted guy, I get that, I was just a bit miffed, as the one who furnished the place and who’s paying a vast majority of the rent. Heh, I even ran into a couple friends in the ward as I was getting back to my apartment after work, who were here for FHE. “Oh, you live here too? With Michael?”

I am glad though that my roommate’s on his feet and has his own “place” in the ward. And to be entirely fair, Facebook postings included both our names.

Yesterday evening I watched The Cokeville Miracle for the first time. Interesting stuff. That night I stayed up to hopefully snag a set of Paris Temple open-house tickets. Not knowing when they were to become available, we could only see that reservations would open “on Monday”. Well, midnight counts, technically. So at 11pm my time I furiously refreshed the page, but no joy. Hmm, the other pending open house invitation said it’ll be open up at 10am – on a different day, but it was a fair guess that the same time would hold for this reservation set as well. And in a couple more hours it would become 10am in Paris. So I stayed up till then. I was quite tired, but my strategy was to stay out in my living room with the heat off; I dozed, sure, but the cold woke me up frequently enough that I was able to check at 10:10am Paris local time. Still, no joy. It wasn’t until this morning at 10am MST that reservations became available, at which point Dad and I tag-teamed it to snatch the tickets at the earliest opportunity. Hoo-rah.

Well it sounds like enough people have left that the ambient noise level is manageable again. I’ll leave you with a very cool motorcycle I came across the other day at work.

Love ya! Can’t wait to see Dad and Mattie in Europe!

…is what my beard would title this week’s post, as it got a mite shorter.

On Friday I went out on a fourple-date to see the new Lego Batman movie, which I highly recommend. Two enthusiastic thumbs up.

On Saturday a friend from my Provo days came to town to visit family. We went together to another friend’s “Roarin’ 20’s” birthday party. I brought the fixin’s for popcorn, cause I figured, ‘they ate popcorn in the 20’s, right?’ Everything was going well until I realized that in my rush to head out the door I’d left the kernels on the kitchen counter. Takes some next-level skill to make do without those.

Today we had Mix ‘n Mingle after church, which was great cause I was getting the trembles, being all tired and hungry. The theme was “food you wouldn’t want to eat on a date” and featured spaghetti, musubi, corndogs, cheesy-bread, the works. I actuall had hoped to make musubi, but couldn’t figure out how to make it and have it still be warm by the time it was eatin’ time, so I was glad someone else made it.

After church we had a “member-missionary fireside”, a program put on by the mission for the benefit of new members and investigators. My roommate spoke, and gave a very abbreviated version of his conversion story.

I was exceedingly tired this morning, having gotten to sleep pretty late after a night of skiing. Slept in till 10:30, then darting off to Ward Council at 11:00 without having breakfast, sticking around the chapel till church began at 1pm, ending up not eating till 5:15pm. Church turned great though, when we got to sing If You Could Hie to Kolob as the closing prayer, my favorite. I’m convinced that Orson Scott Card took inspiration from that hymn when writing some of his later Ender-series books.

On Monday we had a huge amount of snow fall on us. Half my team, including myself, stayed off the roads and worked from home. Many activities got cancelled. It’s fun to snigger at Washington’s susceptibility to snow, but there are a few mitigating factors – they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with the occasional snowfall, it does get quite icy on the roads at night, and the drivers aren’t as adept at navigating the weather.

On Wednesday we got to take a work trip up to Stevens Pass, a local ski resort. What with all the recent snow, it was full of fresh powder. I hadn’t been in something like seven or eight years, but I picked it right up, and had a blast.

The next few days it got decidedly warmer, but no less wet.

In less exciting news, my roommate has gone and leased himself a brand new car, which he loves to show off.

A quick aside, to bring up a story you all are probably familiar with. Four years ago I was in California, working an internship, and I decided to stop in on the house I’d grown up in, on Pecan Place. I arrive, bask in nostaliga for a bit, then this guy comes up and starts grilling me on what I’m doing, looking in people’s windows and back yards and whatnot. He turned out to be a cop, and was very good at his job of making people uncomfortable. It was one of those times where, ever since that day, you look back and wish you could’ve actually been ready to say all the quick-witted things you came up with in the days and weeks since. In reality I just meekly got back to my car and headed off, then de-stressed for a bit.

So, as Bill Cosby would say, I told you that story to tell you this one. On Friday we had a book author come speak to us at work. We occasionally get speakers of various kinds – late last year we had Nick Offerman a.k.a. Ron Swanson come speak about his new woodworking book. The talk this week was by a woman who’d just authored a book on the encroaching hypersexualization of life as an American teenager, addressing phenomenon like Tinder and Snapchat. Despite commendable motivations, this author really got under my skin. She decided to spend most of her time berating technologists for not coming up with solutions to these problems, such as the nonconsensual sharing of nude images. (Person A shares explicit photos with person B; they break up, and person B shares the photos far and wide.) She insists, “you’re so smart, come up with a solution!” One questioner asked to what degree she’d support wide-scale censorship of such photos, and she immediately misinterpreted the question, going on a tirade – “you people always come back to censorship, well let me tell you, the First Amendment doesn’t protect sharing nude photographs, the Founding Fathers never heard of any of this technology. No I’m not for censorship, I’m for protecting our kids!” etc etc. Some other fun tid-bits were: “How can you work at Google and not know what Kik is?” “You gotta just ignore the lawyers for a bit, you’re Google, come out and say how bad [some random messenger app] is for kids.”

So like my run-in with the cop in Brentwood, I only came up with all my retorts after the question-and-answer portion was concluded. Well, that’s not quite true, I had a few things I wanted to say, but I was so ticked I didn’t feel like arguing. Unfortunately, I think that attitude may continue to drive a wedge between good-intentioned-but-misinformed people like her, and engineers who do actually care about the children but also know just how hard these problems are to solve technologically.

See, this isn’t a First Amendment issue at all. The Constitution limits what the government can do to prevent people from expressing themselves, but it says nothing about what a company like Google/Facebook/Tinder can or cannot do with their content. “Censorship” in the sense used by that questioner means nothing more than the removal of material from the Internet. Which is exactly what this author wants, removal of certain photographs being shared non-consensually. (The original question, then, was really asking what the author thought of the prospect of simply banning any and all sharing of nude photos, regardless of whether they were being shared consensually.)

But then you get into the quagmire of how exactly to do this selective removal at the scale these companies operate at. How is a computer supposed to know whether an image is being shared consensually or not? In fact it’s only been quite recently that computer vision has gotten good enough that automatic recognition of nude photographs is even feasible. But now you want the computer to somehow read the mind of whomever’s posting the image, to make sure they have permission to do so?

To draw an analogy, it’s as if this author were addressing the staff of a hospital, and conveying her frustration with doctors: “They’re so smart, they need to just put their heads together and figure out how to stop lung cancer. Don’t they care about poor smokers?” Like yeah, medicine/technology is amazing, and we can do more things with it every day, but it’s not magic. We can’t regrow lungs / read users’ minds. For now prevention is a better strategy.

The author also took Tinder to task for continuing to allow sub-18-year-olds on their service. Except they explicitly don’t, they only allow 18+-year-olds. However, the issue is that they do age-verification through Facebook, and many kids are known to create fake Facebook accounts in order to get access to Tinder. So this author is impatiently waiting for Tinder to come up with a solution to this issue, all the while thinking ill of these “brogrammers” who just don’t get it, why won’t they think of the children. I would ask how she expects Tinder to know someone’s age, without requiring something like a government-issued ID. And then you get into the hairy mess of interfacing with government databases the world over to ensure people aren’t uploading fake IDs. And that leads to the very real possibility that this will leak to the government which online services their citizens are using. I don’t think people would take too kindly to that.

The very first person to raise their hand and ask a question actually made an awesome point. “I’ve heard you say plenty of things on technology, but I’ve waited this entire time to hear you say one thing on the role of parents, and I haven’t heard anything about it.” He’s completely right, the technology layer is the wrong place to begin worrying about this stuff; parents need to be more involved. And not just that, I worry for kids growing up today with ideas of moral relativity, it doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you stay safe and you both enjoy yourselves, etc etc. The Church’s teachings on morality and the purpose of sexuality are incredibly useful pieces of the overall picture.

One of my all-time favorite lectures was actually given on this subject, the intersection of technology and parenting, by one of my former CS professors. Listen here. Money quote: (story begins at 28:51) “You’ve got a fourteen-year-old with a cell phone and a girlfriend? You don’t have a technology problem. You have a spiritual problem. You have a parental problem, and a familial problem and a priesthood problem. You’ve got some other problem, but it’s not fundamentally a technology problem.”

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Ok, rant over, time for more pictures. On Saturday morning I was able to attend the endowment of a good friend I’ve known since my first Sunday here. At the time she was a not-so-recent convert, but my does time fly.

Had to dash off from there to head back to Stevens Pass for some night skiing with a friend in a neighboring ward. The lift ticket and equipment rental prices hurt a bit, but boy was it fun. In fact, way more fun than Wednesday. Powder is great and all, but skidding across the frozen surface of hills pounded smooth by a day’s worth of skiing was just magical.

So I got back late from this, leading into my aforementioned exhaustion this morning. This evening I met up with my Service & Activities committee to make brownies and drop them off at less-actives houses, along with a flyer advertising our upcoming talent show. We collected our names, headed out to the farthest one with the intent of working our way back towards our part of town, and promptly spent all our time trying to find this random trailer address in the dark. At one point the two guys on this expedition, myself and my roommate, left the girls in the car while we walked up to the trashiest trailer I ever have seen. Piles of garbage tossed just outside the front door; while we were waiting for the door to open we noticed a large rat crawl out a hole in one of the garbage bags. We decided it wasn’t worth waiting any longer and high-tailed it back to the car. Didn’t end up seeing anyone this evening; but it’s the thought that counts right?