We were privileged to have the use of the sanctuary at Ascension Lutheran Church (LCMS) of East Lansing, Michigan. Everyone at Ascension was amazingly welcoming and kind, and their church is both beautiful and filled with beautiful art.
The wedding was very traditional, presided over by our former Pastor who is now retired and living in Michigan. This Pastor confirmed our notoriously verbal, honest, and inquisitive daughter, so it was only fair that he had an opportunity to get in an uninterrupted last few words. We celebrated communion, which is unusual but not rare for weddings in the Lutheran Church.
The reception was likewise quite traditional, but did not feel stale. This was due in part to the venue, in part to the DJ, and more than anything else to tone set by the bride and the groom, their maid of honor and best man, and all the bridesmaids and groomsmen. Yes, we did the daddy-daughter dance to “Teach Your Children” by CSN&Y. Thanks again to GM for the suggestion!
There's an old joke in my family, about how in a wedding, you do not lose a daughter, you gain a bathroom. We feel as though we've gained a son, and a new set of wonderful relations from his side.
A curiosity of the Greek language is that there is not a separate word for ‘wedding’ and ‘marriage,’ as the word γάμος does duty for both. If the author wants to emphasize the celebration that marks the official beginning of a marriage, he'll include a form of the word γίνομαι, which has a tremendously long lexical entry which might be summarized by “comes into being by a natural process,” or more simply “be born,” as in the following familiar verse:
John 2:1 Καὶ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ γάμος ἐγένετο ἐν Κανὰ τῆς Γαλιλαίας, καὶ ἦν ἡ μήτηρ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ ἐκεῖ·
John 2:1 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
γάμος ἐγένετο· ἁλληλουϊά.
Peace
17 comments:
I don't want my daughters to get married yet. One just turned 10, and then other is three. I can't even think about them dating yet.
The whole idea makes me furious.
Maybe by the time they're twenty I'll see this differently.
I have enjoyed your sanguine reflections during this process.
But doesn't it seem just a little bit like a funeral for the little child that she was? (I hope that doesn't seem morbid.)
I just mean, how can you let go?
I can't stand the thought of any of our kids leaving the house.
That makes me want to cry.
Btw., I watched a video about Kasparov and Deep Blue last night that I think you might enjoy. Kasparov claims that IBM cheated and used human intervention at key points in the match. The IBM team claimed they didn't, but wouldn't let anyone examine the computer, and right after the match they retired the computer, so that it would retire undefeated.
I was thinking I might send it to you.
At any rate, I hate people leaving the house, or the very idea of it.
However, I think you're right to see in it the positive sense -- you're not losing a daughter you're gaining a bathroom (whatever that meant), or you're gaining something.
I guess that's true, too.
Especially in that you really seem to like the young man.
Good luck to them!
I feel like Elmer Fudd, nevertheless.
Kirby—
I don't want my daughters to get married yet. One just turned 10, and then other is three. I can't even think about them dating yet.
The whole idea makes me furious.
Maybe by the time they're twenty I'll see this differently.
If your eldest daughter hasn't worn you down by the time she's fifteen or sixteen, I'll doubt her initiative. There are big changes ahead over the next five years. Fortunately, they mostly take place in imperceptible little steps. I'm not saying that you'll be happy with when (let alone, whom) she starts dating, just that you'll know that it is time.
But doesn't it seem just a little bit like a funeral for the little child that she was? (I hope that doesn't seem morbid.)
I just mean, how can you let go?
I can't stand the thought of any of our kids leaving the house.
It's certainly a step into a different role. But it is the life we've been preparing her for since she was born. I'll note, too, that for us the separation issues are long since mooted. Our daughter left home to go to college when she was 18 years old. We expected that she'd be back for summers, but she wasn't. She used the summers to single up on her most difficult classes, which allowed her to graduate in four years (which is unusual these days -- you should base your financial planning for your kids in college on at least five years). During her last two years in college, she dated and became attached to the man who is now her husband. The were engaged about the time she graduated, and moved off to Colorado together.
I did think about this during this past week -- how much more difficult it must be for mothers and fathers who will be losing someone who has been a constant companion for twenty or more years, and for whom the wedding marks a real change in their lives, too. It was not so for us.
Btw., I watched a video about Kasparov and Deep Blue last night that I think you might enjoy. Kasparov claims that IBM cheated and used human intervention at key points in the match. The IBM team claimed they didn't, but wouldn't let anyone examine the computer, and right after the match they retired the computer, so that it would retire undefeated.
I've heard the claim. But Kasparov was the strongest human player in the world at the time. You don't beat a strong grandmaster by combining the advice of two weak grandmasters. I don't see how human intervention would have helped.
That said, there is one tricky aspect -- how deep do you search? The problem is that players are limited by a clock, and not all moves are worthy of equal consideration. Perhaps a strong human could help a strong computer player by simply noting whether the board condition justified expending extra time. I doubt we'll ever know.
Especially in that you really seem to like the young man.
We do! It takes real character to deal with our daughter on anything like equal terms. He does.
Good luck to them!
I feel like Elmer Fudd, nevertheless.
Don't worry, your daughters still have a lot of years left in which to teach you how to let them go.
I thought GK's contention was that they programmed the computer to play against his playing style -- not solely to play chess.
That is, that Deep Blue was a "beat GK" machine, not a chess-playing machine.
Having said that, GK has to be the most awesomely insane people on the planet.
That site will give you hours of fun.
crap -- "one of the most" -- stupid no editing function.
crap -- "one of the most" -- stupid no editing function.
Yeah. One of the more annoying aspects of blogger. OTOH, and I can see the potential difficulties with letting people be able to edit their parts of a conversation after the fact.
I thought GK's contention was that they programmed the computer to play against his playing style -- not solely to play chess.
That is, that Deep Blue was a "beat GK" machine, not a chess-playing machine.
A strange objection, although not entirely insane.
If there were a specific flaw in Kasparov's game, e.g., a tendency towards slightly unsound material/positional tradeoffs (something that was very evident in Alekhine's game), the machine could be tuned to exploit this by evaluating positions that could lead an opponent to such an unsound tradeoff slightly more highly than they otherwise would have been. This sort of thing could have been discovered "off-line," i.e., in deep retrospective analyses of Kasparov's past games. Real grandmasters do such analyses all the time when preparing for a match against a known opponent, so it's not clear exactly what his beef was. Playing to your opponent's weakness -- giving them every opportunity to make an unforced error -- is a part of any game.
Still, it seems to me that at the time of the match, if you beat Kasparov, you beat the world.
Kasparov argued that computers would always deal with material -- taking a pawn when it could. He destroyed the computer in game one in 1997. In game two the computer reacted totally differently.
They had all kinds of grandmasters hidden in a room in the back, and perhaps one of them said, here we need to think about positionality. Kasparov could easily have drawn the game, but decided to trick the computer by offering a pawn.
The computer gave up the pawn, and played instead for position, and this is where Kasparov thought the computer had a second identity that stepped in.
By game 6 he claimed that he didn't care anymore, but just wanted the money, and wanted out.
IBM also had a telescope focused on his face for the whole time from another building, his side claimed.
The claim in the video is that the computer played him, but there were also human analysts who could override the computer's materialistic computations, and play instead for position, which apparently is very hard to put into the computer.
Kasparov's games were also intensely studied for years, while Kasparov was not permitted to see any of the computer's previous games.
Usually you can study any other grandmaster's games -- they have a track record of years of games and you can see their personality.
But this was game was blind in that sense, plus they may have cheated.
I'll send you the DVD, Stu, if you want it.
Oh, yes, KARPOV was in the back room with the computer.
In fact, Kasparov thought the winning move was right out of KARPOV's lexicon.
Later, Karpov actually beat Kasparov in a rematch (in 2002).
Kasparov was a Russian Jew and beat the whole monolithic Russian machine in 1985 to the consternation of the whole Russian chess establishment.
He's now a big wheel in terms of Russian democracy. I think he's ok.
He says the current regime in Russia of which Putin is the leader is just a huge mafia-esque kleptocracy.
He's one of the few that can say that without being disappeared.
He's the Aung San Kyi of crypto-klepto-kommunist Russia, except he can play chess...
She isn't even that good at checkers.
Kasparov argued that computers would always deal with material -- taking a pawn when it could. He destroyed the computer in game one in 1997. In game two the computer reacted totally differently.
They had all kinds of grandmasters hidden in a room in the back, and perhaps one of them said, here we need to think about positionality. Kasparov could easily have drawn the game, but decided to trick the computer by offering a pawn.
Trust me, programmers who write chess programs know about positionality, which nine times out of ten is just a delayed material advantage. If the delay is less than the ply depth of the evaluation strategy, then there is no difficulty.
I think that a human who tries to "psychoanalyze" a computer program is likely to run into big problems. The computer does not have a psyche -- instead, what it has (most likely) is a weighted combination of distinct strategies, with dynamically changing weights. Small changes early can result in very different weights being assigned to substrategies, giving a very different "feel" to the way the machine responds.
IBM also had a telescope focused on his face for the whole time from another building, his side claimed.
This sounds more like paranoia than reality. I suppose that a program could, in principle, make some deductions about the particular focus of the opponent, but this seems like a harder problem to solve than chess itself.
The claim in the video is that the computer played him, but there were also human analysts who could override the computer's materialistic computations, and play instead for position, which apparently is very hard to put into the computer.
Bunk. It's not that hard to deal with position -- which as I say, is almost always little more than a delayed material advantage.
Kasparov's games were also intensely studied for years, while Kasparov was not permitted to see any of the computer's previous games.
A legitimate point, if true.
I'll send you the DVD, Stu, if you want it.
No thanks -- which is to say, maybe later :-).
Oh, yes, KARPOV was in the back room with the computer.
In fact, Kasparov thought the winning move was right out of KARPOV's lexicon.
Is this conjecture or fact? It wouldn't surprise me at all if the computer somehow had a library of many games by grandmasters, Karpov included, and could somehow "reduce" a given board position to a library position.
He says the current regime in Russia of which Putin is the leader is just a huge mafia-esque kleptocracy.
He's not alone, in this.
Kirby:
I've won a few bucks in chess tournaments over the yrs, but have shifted my gaming interest to my local Scrabble club (in which we have two nationally-ranked players--not I, BTW).
Nevertheless, I'm in awe of Kasparov as both a chess grandmaster and a courageous partisan of democracy in KGB-trained Putin's kleptocracy.
stu:
Convey my and Emmy's best wishes and blessings for your daughter and new son-in-law; may they be as happy as Kitty and Levin at the end of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina!"
You guys totally didn't check out the link, did you?
The link is why I said awesomely insane.
Kasparov openly CONJECTURED that Karpov had dealt him the death blow personally in the 2nd game.
Apparently a grandmaster with a computer can move much faster and more competently than a computer alone, or a grandmaster alone. I bow to you guys on these facts, as they are way over my head.
GM -- I looked at the link, but have to really work on that to get it, and am out of time. What does Kasparov say, in brief, that I should read that? I'd have to work had at that for a half hour at least, and don't have that much time. Could you abbreviate what's said?
basically those folks believe that history only goes back accurately to about the 14th century or so and before that all of the historical empires were really one vast empire -- so Rome & Jerusalem &c get conflated into one big place & the dark ages never happened.
Fun stuff for sure.
What is the point of it, its tendency? Like, what is the argument? Surely there is some kind of reason they are saying this, something relevant to our own world, as opposed to being purely a historical timeline problem?
they claim to be trans-nationalists -- that nations are an artificial state caused after the collapse of Rome -- something along those lines.
They want a world government?
Hey Stu,
I saw CSN last night
and they closed with "Teach Your Children."
It was pretty awesome.
Stills' voice is mostly a wreck, but he was chanting "Go Gators!" all night, so I guess I'll forgive him.
Graham Nash was good as ever.
David Crosby's voice, if anything, has improved and gotten more powerful with age.
I was surprised to learn that Stills plays all the leads (except Young's -- but they didn't play any of his songs), as I thought Crosby did some of that. I thought wrong, though.
Stills was on fire playing the guitar.
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