Truth, and How not to find it

This sermon is on various thoughts on truth that I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Idaho Falls on October 20th 2024. HTML, PDF, Youtube

Moral Questions for the 2nd and 3rd Millennium

I gave a sermon on Moral Questions for the 2nd and 3rd Millennium on Sunday 2023-October-1 on moral questions for the 2nd and 3rd millennium, how new technology like AI, nuclear weapons, and horse drawn combine harvesters lead to new ethical questions. Also available in PDF

The coming technological singulary (30 years on)

30 years ago, Vernor Vinge gave a talk: The Coming Technological Singularity It is surprisingly still good. Also, I support: pausing AI experiments with powerful computers.

Open source house plans

Here are two places I have found open source house plans.
The first is by Jay Osborne and he has put up three CC 4.0 BY-SA farmhouses: Free Farmhouse
The second is an on going project to create various sustainable houses that is open sourcing the plans: One Community Global

Alpha and Omega, Omicron and LaMDA

I gave a sermon last Sunday on Alpha (Genesis), Omicron (Evolution), LaMDA and Omega (The End of Human dominance).

So if we create an AGI and fail to get sufficiently good Ethics in ver, the result is extinction or hell. ... Evolution mindlessly created beings with better Ethics than it. Hopefully, we can mindfully create beings with better Ethics than us.

Creating a pdf book from images or pdfs

This is my method of creating a pdf book for uploading to archive.org. First, I scan it into pdfs, usually about 10 scans (10 or 20 pages depending on the size of the page). I use a HP-Laserjet-200-colorMFP-m276nw. These scripts were all done on Fedora 35. Next I split out the images from the pdf:

mkdir out
for D in t??0; do
    cd $D
    mv scan.pdf scan0000.pdf
    for S in `ls scan0*`; do
        I=`echo $S | sed 's/scan\([0-9]*\).pdf/\1/'`
        echo $D $I
        pdfimages -png scan${I}.pdf ../out/s${D}_${I}
    done
    cd ..
done

Next I have three different ways of processing the book depending on how it was scanned. For each of these, I usually open a page and figure out what numbers I should use for the crop statement. The simpliest is if I scanned two pages at once, and am not splitting them:

cd out
for I in st*.png
do
    R=`echo $I | sed 's/s/r/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    T=`echo $I | sed 's/s/t/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    if test $I -ot $R
    then
	    echo $I $R $T already done
    else
	    echo $I $R $T
	    convert $I -crop 2550x3510+0 -rotate 90 -despeckle $R
	    convert $R -resize 33% -level 10%,90%,0.5 -posterize 32 $T
    fi
done

If I had to scan each page individually, half of them will flipped, so I need to flip some of them differently. Notice for this to work, I have to make sure that I always fip the odd ones and the even ones correctly when scanning.

cd out
for I in st*[02468].png
do
    R=`echo $I | sed 's/s/r/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    T=`echo $I | sed 's/s/t/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    if test $I -ot $R
    then
    	echo $I $R $T already done
    else
	    echo $I $R $T
	    convert $I -crop 1800x2700+0 -despeckle  $R
	    convert $R  -resize 33% -level 10%,90%,0.5 -posterize 32 $T
    fi
done

for I in st*[13579].png
do
    R=`echo $I | sed 's/s/r/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    T=`echo $I | sed 's/s/t/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    if test $I -ot $R
    then
	    echo $I $R $T already done
    else
	    echo $I $R $T
	    convert $I -crop 1800x2700+0 -rotate 180 -despeckle  $R
	    convert $R  -resize 33% -level 10%,90%,0.5 -posterize 32 $T
    fi
done

If I scanned two pages at once, and am planning to split them, I have a different script:

cd out
for I in st*.png
do
    R=`echo $I | sed 's/s/r/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    RA=`echo $R | sed 's/.png/a.png/'`
    RB=`echo $R | sed 's/.png/b.png/'`
    T=`echo $I | sed 's/s/t/' | sed 's/-/_/'`
    TA=`echo $T | sed 's/.png/a.png/'`
    TB=`echo $T | sed 's/.png/b.png/'`
    if test $I -ot $R
    then
	    echo $I $R $T already done
    else
	    echo $I $R $T $RA $RB $TA $TB
	    convert $I -crop 1790x1350+0 -rotate 90 -despeckle $RB
	    convert $I  -crop 1790x1350+0+1350 -rotate 90 -despeckle $RA
	    convert $RA -resize 33% -level 10%,90%,0.5 -posterize 32 $TA
	    convert $RB -resize 33% -level 10%,90%,0.5 -posterize 32 $TB
    fi
done

Lastly, I need to create pdfs out of it.

img2pdf tt*.png --author "Fred Smith"  --title "Smithing" -o ../smithing_1925_small.pdf

img2pdf rt*.png --author "Fred Smith"  --title "Smithing" -o ../smithing_1925.pdf

Checklist for if a book or magazine might be public domain

First of all, I am not a lawyer, and so this is not legal advice. I would recommend that if you are interested in copyright terms in the United States, you read Circular 15a from the US Copyright Office

If it is a paper document (book, magazine etc) that was published more than 95 years ago, then it is out of copyright (in 2022, this is 1926, and it goes up every year until 2071, when it gets more complicated because the US laws changed in 1976/1977)

For the years till 1963, if the copyrights were not renewed, then it might be out of copyright (note that there is no completely reliable way to check that something newer than 95 years is out of copyright, since part of it could be based on something that is still in copyright). Here is my checklist for finding things that might be out of copyright

1. Published in 1963 or before
2. Published in the United States (The title page better include a United States city for the publisher, and nothing that says published in Great Britain or other country)
3. Search the Stanford's Copyright Renewal Database and make sure it is not found in it. Note that it only lists books copyrighted in the United States.
4. Search the Library of Congress Copyright Catalog. Note this includes magazines and other things besides books, but it does not include renewals before 1978, so anything published 1950 or before will not be in here (and you could renew early, so 1951 or nearby could also be missed)

If you are trying to find a book that might be in the public domain, most of these checks can be done from the information in a library catalog or a used book site. Different book subjects have different probabilities of being renewed. For example, of the math and physics books I have checked, 90% or so were renewed. For computer hardware books, only 10% or so were renewed. I have checked five difference scientific conferences (over a hundred articles) and have yet to find a paper in them that was renewed. Also, if you have a bibliography, you can do these checks with the information in the bibliography and if they pass you can then see if you can get a hold of the book, article or magazine.

If the renewal requirement hadn't been eliminated in the 1980s, I suspect there would be a lot more books in 1964 and later that would have become public domain, but are currently out of print and getting harder to find.