Category: Personal

Confessions of Faith

The biggest lesson my parents taught me was the love of truth. They were Christian missionaries, in the business of convincing other people to change their most fundamental beliefs about the world. They offered the one true Truth that stood above all others. There is such a thing as absolute reality. It’s worth knowing, even worth dying for. It’s also possible to be wrong about the universe. That’s why people have to change their beliefs when they learn something better. All this left a deep impression on me. I want to know things as they actually are, no matter how inconvenient the truth may be.

We had the World Book Encyclopedia on our shelf, and I spent many long afternoons browsing it. (The Internet hadn’t been invented yet.) One thing that frustrated me was how uncertain scientists were about their conclusions. Everything was just a theory. I dreamed of an encyclopedia that contained only things we were 100% sure about. I expected it would be a lot thinner than the World Book.

My sense of uncertainty grew as a teenager. The seeds of all that scientific thought started to take root. What if the universe were older than 6,000 years? What if life actually did evolve? It would be a disaster, of course, for my fragile evangelical beliefs.

I tried reading apologetics books by the greats, like Josh McDowell. Nothing did more to destroy my faith than “Evidence That Demands a Verdict”. It was all just a bunch of opinions by big shots. I couldn’t help but think, if that’s the best we got, then there’s no substance to this faith.

At the same time I wanted a relationship with God. A real relationship, where God talked with me and I could feel his love. Love-hunger gnawed at me, thanks to awakening hormones. Not that I confused God with a girl, just that all those powerful feelings are connected inside. But God didn’t talk to me. I felt absolutely nothing, ever, not matter how much I prayed or tried to get his attention. I could imagine what God might think about or say to me, but I could never fully convert those into a separate being inside my head.

For a while I thought God was telling me to fast. I dreaded that “voice”, but I wanted to be obedient. I skipped meals, sometimes entire days. All it did was make me hungry (and the skinniest I’ve ever been, before or since). I never felt any love from God.

Have you ever heard that miracles happen on the mission field? (They don’t happen at home, of course, because Western church-goers are spiritually deficient somehow: not enough faith, too rich, whatever.) One time a baby was born with severe encephalitis. Our church went all-out praying for that child. My dad put everything on the line, really taking a public risk.

And the baby died. If there ever were a time for God to show his reality, that was it, but he declined to do so. In my life, God has declined all such opportunities. I don’t accept the notion that miracles happen somewhere else, because I lived in that magical other place. It’s no different than right here.

I learned at an early age my own capacity for unreality. When I was about 6, we spent a year back in “the States”. We had a cabin in the Ozarks. I played with my cousin on a sawn-off-truck-bed trailer, imagining it was a rocket that would fly to the other side of the lake. We had to put rocks in it for fuel. But no matter how many rocks we put in, no matter how hard I believed, it never flew.

I also had an imaginary friend named “Wendy”. I told my cousin that she could see Wendy by looking though this kaleidoscope. She couldn’t understand why it didn’t work for her. Part of me knew this was all just a game, but I was so intense at pretending that it seemed perfectly real to her.

Many years later I told a fireside story during a camp out (Mirror of the Soul). Some of the young people came afterward and asked me if it actually happened. That surprised me, as the content was clearly impossible in the real world. Maybe I have the gift of Storyteller, like my father.

Thanks to my parents’ influence, I thought I wanted to go into the ministry. I earned a bachelor’s degree in pastoral ministries, finishing in a record 3 years. When I did the final internship, the supervising pastor had enough sense to give me permission not to continue on that path. I rebooted my life and started studying for a computer science degree at a 100% genuine secular university. It took over a decade and several more universities for me to complete a PhD in AI.

I spent years “struggling with faith”, pouring enormous amounts of emotional energy into convincing myself to believe. The process of publishing peer-reviewed journal articles gradually infected me with some expectations of any idea worthy of belief. If Christianity is the ultimate Truth, it should stand up to the most rigorous possible examination.

The study of AI gave me new ways of understanding the nature of belief itself. It’s not black-or-white, all-or-nothing. Belief is better expressed as a probability, and it can be distributed over multiple different options. This framework allowed me to embrace uncertainty as an expression of my actual state of knowledge.

I can assign belief to propositions based on the amount evidence available for them. I am no longer in the business of propping up ideas. They must stand or fall on their own merits. This has brought me incredible peace. Not that everything is great. I’m still just a tiny bit afraid of being tortured for all eternity for having the wrong set of ideas at my moment of death. On the other hand, I have no hope of anything beyond this life. Compared to the agony I was in before, trying to make myself believe things without justification, this is bliss.

I’ve never really stopped believing in God. Rather, my probability weights have shifted over time. It used to be that I believed 99% in God and 1% in materialism. As the years went by, filled with zero evidence for God but a relentless stream of evidence for materialism, the weights shifted so now it is about 1% God and 99% materialism. They could shift the other way with some solid evidence.

AI shows how limited we are. We can observe only a tiny fraction of the universe (POMDP, HMM, Kalman Filters, etc.). It also explains how different people come to different beliefs. Your input stream is necessarily different from mine, because you are physically separate from me. I’m willing to accept that some people have experiences that convince them of the reality of God.

However, I suspect that more than 90% of people who call themselves believers are not really in that state. Perhaps I’m merely projecting my own experiences on others. I suspect that most people are just forcing themselves to believe, thanks to all those same horrible control mechanisms that kept me in bondage for so long.

Maybe that’s why the most vocal Christians I know are also the most hateful. At some point in your life, you either let go of uncertain beliefs or you fully embrace them. If part of you still doubts, then the effort to embrace those beliefs makes you a drowning person clinging to a millstone. You go down with it—and hate yourself for doing so. But since you can’t acknowledge that, you build all kinds of defense mechanisms. The pain and anger coming from that closed-off place in your soul turns into bitter attacks on anything or anyone who threatens the belief.

What kept me enslaved to belief for so long? Obviously, fear of Hell is a big one. It’s not something you can verify, but boy are you screwed if you end up there. Don’t take any chances. Another chain was the fear of what my parents or close friends would think of me. If you reject the Truth, it’s because you’re a bad person. You never were one of us to begin with.

Christians may use reason to move you away from another belief, but once you’re in, you are taught to distrust your own mind. Reason is broken, a part of this evil world. Instead, the Christian method of belief is authority. Anyone who dares elevate their own reason above authority is arrogant and sinful. And of course, no one wants to be rejected for such antisocial attitudes.

Eulogy for Mom

Going through mom’s pictures, flipping through her pristinely-organized file drawers, I think, “Wow, mom was really smart … and pretty.” I’ve never seen her this way before.

I wonder about that little girl growing up in Indonesia, who would jump into the ocean and swim out to arriving boats. Or the young woman standing there, pregnant with my older sister. She has a smug satisfaction in her eyes, like the cat that ate the proverbial canary. Then there’s the dreamy look as she poses for a portrait, holding a flower. The man behind the camera is my father.

I remember the look in her eyes last week as we sat at the dinner table and debated politics. All the neurons were firing. Our last photo is from the morning she went off to chemo, with a cocky look in her eyes. She’s going to fight this thing and win.

Thursday night she lay in a hospital bed, restless with pain but barely conscious. I leaned down and said, “Love you, mom. See you in the morning.” She opened her eyes for a moment and looked into mine. Was she thinking, “Yeah, right. I won’t be here in the morning.” Or perhaps, “I love you too. Goodbye.”

The last time I saw mom’s eyes was when the nurse shined a flashlight into them. Her pupils did not respond. The neurons were no longer firing.

Information Death

My mother died this morning. She was on life-support for hours as we agonized about when to let her go. Was her brain already dead, or was there a chance she could wake? We decided that if her heart stopped again, they should not do another CPR. Then her EKG line gradually faded away. Did she die at that moment?

I realized only recently that when I talk about death with others, there is some missing common ground between their views and mine. It’s easy to get caught up in arguing ethical choices and not realize that we don’t even share the same definitions. Many people work with traditional notions: death is when your heart stops beating or you stop breathing. Something similar can be said about the start of life.

This is my attempt to write down a careful account of my definitions and assumptions, to help with discussion. Thanks for taking the time to understand.

I do research in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly brain-inspired (neuromorphic) computing. There are only a few hundred people in the world who share this discipline. We design chips and software that process information using a simplified version of nerve impulses. I am deeply biased to think of the brain as a machine and the mind as information inside that machine.

In what sense is the brain a machine? It is a collection of atoms organized in a very particular way. When something happens in one part, it cause stuff to happen in other parts. All those interactions work together to control your body and process what you see and hear.

Your mind is the “state” of your brain. In a regular computer, “state” would be all the ones and zeros in memory. In the brain, state would include a lot of things, such as which neuron connects to which, how much voltage is on cell membranes, and the concentration of chemicals at certain places. Just like a computer, these are constantly changing according to rules built into the structure. The actual picture is more complicated and subtle, but this is sufficient for the sake of discussion.

Imagine that the human mind could be put into a regular computer. This is a rather controversial idea, even among AI researchers. However, it lets us make some useful analogies.

My definition of death is the permanent loss of information. If a neurosurgeon goes in and cuts out a part of my brain, the information contained in that piece dies. Maybe it is only 1% of my brain. Afterward, I am 99% of what I used to be. That is a partial death.

When part of the brain is damaged, there is a corresponding and predictable damage to the mind. IE: damage to Broca’s area impairs speech. A blow to the back of the head affects vision. Messing with serotonin re-uptake changes rational behavior. The deterioration of Alzheimer’s produces genuine changes of personality.

In computers there is a neat separation between machine structure and the information in it. Not so with brains. That’s why you can undergo anesthesia and come back to yourself again. Brain activity gets disrupted for a while, but nearly all of you is in the structure.

Some people point out that your mind resides in your body as well as your brain. This is because the structure of your body shapes how your brain processes. A similar argument could be made that your mind extends beyond your body into the surrounding environment, particularly the social structures you are part of.

While I agree with all this, it is a matter of degrees. I would guess that at least 99% of your mind is in your brain. That’s why people can get a spinal injury and still be themselves.

Suppose that some amazing new technology lets me make a backup of my brain, and from that backup we grow a replacement for the part that the neurosurgeon cut out a few paragraphs ago. I would be back to 100%. The loss is not permanent, so that part of me did not die.

As long as the information exists somewhere and can be restored, I’m in a kind of suspended animation. I only live if my mind actively runs on a computer or in a body. Being in storage creates the potential of future life. This potential is realized when the backup is either erased or restored.

(For computer experts only: This notion of mind-as-information creates some interesting scenarios. If mind can be captured in a backup, then it can be put under version control. It would be possible to have multiple branches and even merges. Then the question arises, what rights do each version of me have? The novel SuSAn explores this concept, particularly the chapters Susan Too and Custody.)

When my mother “died”, the material structure of her brain started to break down. This takes a while. Even though her brain could no longer function as a living organ, 99.99% of the structure was still there. After several hours there was still enough structure that my mother’s mind could be retrieved, if only we had the technology.

True death does not take place when the heart stops. It happens gradually over the next few hours. It makes me want to scream, the thought that my mom could still be saved, if only we had better brain-scanning technology. The fact is that we are letting her wither into oblivion right now because we’ve given up. We passively let souls be destroyed because we’ve never conceived of another possibility. Some day our descendants will look back on this era in horror.

Pissing off mechanics

I’ve recently gotten two different car service people angry with me. There must be something wrong with the way I communicate, and I feel bad about it.

Incident 1

A few weeks ago, our 2012 VW Jetta died. We were coming home from a long road trip, passing through Oklahoma on the way to Albuquerque, when the engine suddenly stopped. A local mechanic found metal fragments in the fuel filter. Turns out, that’s a symptom of catastrophic failure. Fragments of the high-pressure pump get spread through the entire fuel system, completely ruining it. The only solution is to replace everything. $$$$!

A friend came and brought us home. The next day I called a local mom & pop shop that works on German imports. “Mom & pop” are actually a young couple with a small child. The father does most of the mechanical work, but the mother is pretty knowledgeable about cars as well.

I told her what happened.

She said, “Don’t let the internet scare you. It’s a sad waste that people junk their cars when they could be fixed.” She estimated about $2000 to replace the fuel pump, parts and labor.

I felt elated. Maybe our car could be saved after all. I asked her what it would cost if they had to replace the fuel injectors as well.

Now we’re at $4000. “But it might not cost that much. We’d only charge you for the parts that actually need to be replaced.”

“The dealer is asking about $5000 for the same job.”

“Our labor rates are lower.”

“Could you start by checking the fuel injectors? That way we will know if they can be saved.”

“Let me ask my husband.” Several minutes passed. “He says it’s the lifting pump, not the high-pressure pump. Lifting pump. It’s in the fuel tank. The lifting pump is your problem.”

“With all due respect, that’s different from what I’ve seen. Everything says that if you get metal fragments in the fuel filter, it’s from the high-pressure pump. Could you check the service bulletins on this?”

Her voice came back, clearly irritated, “With all due respect, this conversation is taking a lot of time. Meanwhile, I’ve got twenty other customers waiting. We may decide to refuse this job.”

“Please don’t do that. I’m just need to get some certainty before spending the money to ship the car back here.”

“My husband has twenty years of experience. He knows what he’s talking about.”

There was no way I could gamble $450 to ship the car, not even knowing if they would accept the job. Worse, I couldn’t trust their estimate, since they didn’t seem to understand the situation. I sold the car to a junkyard. We’ll never know if the injectors were actually ruined.

Incident 2

I went into Midas to get a 4-wheel alignment on our “new” 2015 Nissan Altima. There were two people at the counter, a middle-aged black man and a twenty-something white man. I checked in the car, cracked a few jokes with them, then settled in the waiting room with my laptop to work on a program.

About 30 minutes later the younger man came out, handed me a sheet of paper and said, “We need to reset the computer on your power steering. It will cost twenty-nine dollars.”

“Why does it cost thirty dollars to reset a computer?” I was thinking about the tire-monitoring system on our former VW. When we changed tires on it, we had to push a button inside the glove compartment. There were sensors on each wheel, and the computer would spend the next 20 miles learning statistics about the normal pattern. All this makes perfect sense to an AI researcher. I simply assumed that the electric power steering (EPS) computer would use a similar learning procedure.

“We have to hook up a special scanner to reset it.”

I said, “I’m a computer programmer. That’s what I’m doing right now.” I showed him my laptop with code sprawled across the screen. “I can reset a computer remotely by sending a simple command to it. Why does it cost thirty dollars to do that?”

He said, “If my computer had a virus, what would you charge to remove it?”

I thought for a moment. It kind of reminded me of ransomware attacks by Russian hackers. “That’s not a good analogy.”

The older man jumped in. “The machine cost ten thousand dollars. If you have one, go ahead.”

The young man started quoting off the paper, word-for-word. It was a generic notice about the existence of EPS and the need to reset the control computer, but not a description of what the reset actually does, even in layman’s terms.

I said, “I can read. Look, go ahead and reset the computer. I want a complete job.”

He called out to the shop for them to proceed.

I asked, “When you reset the computer, that means the numbers in it change, right? Where do those numbers come from?” I wanted to find out whether the reset started a machine-learning process.

They gave me an explanation about when you do an alignment, things change.

I had a vague flicker of insight. Perhaps these are calibration parameters that need to be stored permanently, and the only time they’re available is while the car is on the alignment rig. “The numbers in there now, are they from the last alignment?”

“From the last alignment, from the dealer, from wherever.” They shrugged.

“I had a VW before. Whenever we changed the–”

The older man cut in, “That’s different.”

“Wait. Let me finish my question before you answer.” I described how we had to push the button in the glove compartment to start a 20-mile learning process.

“Yeah, the tire-management system. When you move tires around it needs to know that the left-back is now on the left front–”

“It doesn’t matter where the tire came from. All it needs are the readings from the sensor on that wheel.”

“Well, I guess you know better than me.” The older man walked out to shop in a huff. I could hear him grousing with the mechanics. The young man followed him.

A few minutes later they came back to close the job.

I told the young man, “Sorry that my way of speaking annoyed you and your coworker here. I respect that you know more about cars, just like I know more about computers, particularly robotic systems.”

The young man smiled tightly and handed me the receipt.

Conclusions

Car-service people, like physicians, preachers and so on, probably feel pressure to present certainty, even authority, to their customers. I don’t believe either of the people above had an ego issue, but they did feel threatened in their role when I asked questions beyond their knowledge.

Despite his faults, my PhD adviser taught me some important lessons. One is to be confident of your abilities in the presence of other highly-accomplished people. The other is never to claim knowledge you don’t have. In academia that would be suicide. If you don’t know the answer, immediately state your limitations.

Maybe the problem is that when I hear an incomplete or contradictory answer, I keep probing. It’s the way of the scientist. Apparently, most people aren’t trained to say, “I don’t know.” The more I probe, the more insecure they feel, until they lash out to end the conversation.

Once I reviewed a novel for a fellow writer in which one of the characters was a psychologist with two (!) PhDs. The character was portrayed as arrogant and overly certain of her own knowledge. I felt like my category of people was being insulted by this depiction, just like a race or sexual orientation.

Most of the people I work with have PhDs, and to me they’re just people like everyone else. I pointed out to the fellow writer that someone who completes a PhD will usually be humble about their knowledge, because they have learned their limits. And nobody actually earns two PhDs. One is bad enough.

I suspect that my strident assertions about the good character of PhDs only served to reinforce his impression that we’re arrogant.

Crystal’s Teaching Experience

Crystal and I have been dealing with shock and anger all weekend. She has been in a student-teaching placement since the start of the fall term at a local high school. This last Monday her placement was terminated by her mentor teacher. That was totally unexpected, but in some way a relief, because Crystal has been working from dawn until she goes to sleep (12-14 hours) every day for the last several weeks trying to put together lessons using technology she is not familiar with. (Albuquerque Public Schools is doing 100% electronic learning this term as a response to COVID.)

Then this Friday we learned the specific charges leveled against her, and also the consequences to us. The charges include dishonesty, defiance and unwillingness to improve her teaching methods, lack of responsibility, and even backstabbing another teacher in front of his students. Crystal may have many faults, but none of those charges describe her. The consequences include having to do a new student-teaching placement, her second and final chance to complete the program she has been in for the last 2 years. If she fails this final attempt, all that work will be lost. It will cost us another $4600 to try again, in addition to the $4600 it cost us for this attempt, and all the thousands we spent for course-work leading to this point hang in the balance.

Given the severity of consequences, we feel that there should have been a high bar for termination, including multiple opportunities to work out differences in person and ensure an accurate understanding on everyone’s part. Right now our goal is simply to clear Crystal’s name and to rebuild any lost trust with the school she’s been associated with for 5 years now.

(A few days later …)

We met with the principal and vice principal this last Thursday. The outcome was rather neutral. The principal took the opportunity to point out a couple of issues with Crystal’s communication style, and we also learned that the principal herself was the one who reported the past incident about undermining another teacher. It was difficult to hear through this to any empathy she might have expressed. The vice principal was mostly quiet, but did express the desire to keep a relationship between Crystal and the school. This is what Crystal cared about the most.

I showed the principal a log of the last 4 days of Crystal’s text messages with her mentor. They revealed two people in open and reasonably friendly conversation up until that Monday. I showed several other documents, some of which seemed to expand the principal’s understanding. There’s quite a bit of additional material, but the principal did not seem to have the time for more. I concluded by pointing out that Crystal worked extremely hard to serve the students, and that deserved both recognition and grace.

We gave them a bag of fudge afterward, literally leaving a sweet taste in their mouth. It’s difficult to say whether we “parted on good terms” or are “back together again”. It feels more like the former to me. Crystal is mostly at peace with that now, but she is still traumatized by the whole experience, not sure who she can trust anymore.

So far, neither institution involved has said, “This was mishandled, and we own a share of responsibility for what happened to you.” They have put the entire weight of self-reflection and repentance on Crystal.

(And finally …)

As I have reflect on this over the months since, it seems clear that Crystal did nothing wrong. The mentor rushed Crystal into full takeover so the mentor could leave for a couple of weeks to deal with personal issues. When the mentor returned, she terminated Crystal. Perhaps because of the damning nature of this situation, the mentor felt the need to smear Crystal’s character as justification.

Both the mentor and the principal were operating on a rather low bar of professional ethics, and no one was there who could hold them to account. Similarly, Crystal’s university disposed of the case in way that was most convenient to the corporation, keeping thousands of dollars without giving corresponding value.

All these relationships have ended, and it is not worth the cost and grief for us to fight this battle any more. Crystal has her Masters in Education and is moving on to other things.

The Ultimate Cell Phone

A couple of days ago, Crystal asked me to come check the clothes washer. It was making some unusual clacking sound. I told her not to worry about it, figuring that she’s was being oversensitive to every little possible problem.

Finally went to investigate. Sounded like a rock was in with the clothes, so I stopped the machine and fished around for minute. Came up with my cell phone.

Yes, the cell phone was in the washer, clanking around. Normally this would be the death of a phone, or at least a reason to leave it in a bag of desiccant for a few days. This is a Samsung Galaxy S7, their first model with heavy waterproofing. The phone is still running just fine. This thing is a beast!

You are precious

I believe that individual human beings are the most valuable thing in the universe. Your mind, with the unique experiences that have formed your view of the world, and the well-being of the body that carries that mind, are very important to me.

I won’t pretend to always live up to this principle. I’m a selfish and reclusive person, but I aspire to treat everyone well, even those I might hate.

Bubonicon, the day after

Bubonicon is over. Throughout the conference, successful authors sat on panels discussing various literary topics. Many of them were quite smart, the kind of people you would enjoy talking to as a friend. And some had a real warmth in their artistic outlook on life.

I felt a bit jealous of their success. The truth is, they probably are better writers than me. At the very least, they wrote well enough to attract an audience.

On the last day I went to a session on AI/Robotics. The panel was stocked with people who write on the topic, just like I do. Their level of qualification in the field? One did server administration. Another had a wife that does server administration.

Again I felt jealous. This time it wasn’t because they were better at their art. Rather, they were honored as experts while I was asked to keep quiet, even though I had substantially greater qualifications as a scientist.

Pulling the plug on a dream

Today, after less than a year of marriage, Elizabeth becomes a widow.

A gangly young woman, shy and self deprecating, she grew up in the intellectual safety of homeschooling and fundamental Judeo-Christian values. When she finally went off to the University of Arkansas to study Chemical Engineering, she wore a promise ring on her left hand to ward off any guys who might take a premarital interest in her.

Upon graduation, Elizabeth got a job at a battery engineering firm in Joplin (yeah, the town that got sucked up by a huge tornado a few years ago). She lived alone in a small apartment and filled her social time with visits to mom and dad on the weekends. As a woman she was considered qualified to fetch coffee for the “real” engineers, but she worked her way up to battery tester.

There she met Aaron, an equally awkward young man. The son of a Lutheran minister, he had lost his first wife to divorce. Perhaps it had something to do with the leukemia that was slowly killing him.

Eventually Aaron had to stop working, and moved back with his parents. Elizabeth embarked on a wild lifestyle of driving up to visit him on the weekends, gradually drifting away from her parents. Much to their disapproval, she and Aaron married in September.

She knew he could die, but like all young lovers they dreamed of a life that extended to the horizon. The bone marrow transplants would work, medical science would find a cure, or God would heal him. Aaron wanted to go to seminary and become a pastor, and Elizabeth would study alongside him.

They visited Bunker Hill in March. Aaron only dared to come inside the underground building for a few brief moments, wearing a medical mask to prevent any mold spores from transgressing his weakened immune system. The rest of the time he walked outside in the grass and wildflowers. He pulled out an RC airplane and flew it in the thermals above the hill. He made blunt statements about how the gas tank ruined the view of the valley.

Elizabeth gave everything, even her own body, to fill this young man’s last few days with happiness. What little she had to gain from the relationship is now lost. Without warning the battery company laid her off two weeks ago, putting her medical insurance in jeopardy. At the same time Aaron took a turn for the worse. That last marrow transplant did not work.

This morning the family is gathering around his unconscious form to say their final goodbyes. Then they will disconnect the life support machines. By noon, barring a miracle, Elizabeth will be a widow.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Here’s to your true love story, Liz, stronger than anything by Jane Austen or Stephenie Meyer.

P.S. — Aaron died around 15:00, just a couple of hours after they stopped the ventilator. I never told him or Elizabeth, but we plan to move the gas tank. Every time I look at the morning mist in the valley, I will remember him.

At the funeral the preacher talked about hope of the resurrection. All the while I felt an incredible sense of failure. We, humanity, science, couldn’t do enough. The information pattern that was Aaron is lost forever. If we have any choice in the matter, it is an unforgivable waste.

“Do not go gentle into that good night, … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Although he did not fall in battle, they gave Aaron full military honors, during which the crowd broke into audible weeping. The guard knelt and handed the triangle-folded flag to Elizabeth with the words “On behalf of the President of the United States … thank you for your loved one’s service.” Almost immediately the funeral director stood and said something to the effect of “That’s all folks, you can go home now.” But no one moved. It seemed like the moment of silence should last a bit longer.