Intelligent Life in the Galaxy

This is a link to a presentation I did at a local conference (Barcamp, Omaha NE). I later gave the same presentation to a group of Omaha astronomers (the Omaha Astronomical Society).

This is NOT a scientific endeavor.  I made many assumptions that are sketchy, to say the least: for example, I assumed that intelligent life would be like us in many respects (water-based planet in the "green zone" of its sun and in the galaxy, free manipulating limbs, a society, fluent communication, various probabilities of critical events, etc.).

So this is for fun - not a "real" answer to Fermi's Paradox.  Though the "analysis" does result in a handful of intelligent species (one to six), of which we are one (though that may be subject to argument as well).

In any case, if you are in the mood to be amused by such things, here is a PDF of that presentation.

Unleashing the Demon: The Road to Superior Intelligence

Through several iterations, DeepMind (an Alphabet, Inc. company which also has Google) developed a Go-playing automaton, AlphaGo Zero, that is the best Go-player in the world. This ultimate iteration of the series of AlphaGos was self-taught. That is, by starting from a blank slate and playing millions of games against itself, it devised its winning strategies. These collection of moves were often unknown to even the best of the world’s Go players. They called them “strange,” “alien,” “beautiful,” and “brilliant.” Still, many of these moves they cannot understand. AlphaGo Zero would make strange moves, widely separated across the board, that only after a lengthy time would show their power.

     When we build a human-scale artificial intelligence, we will probably be building it for some purpose. We will build it as a series of intelligences leading up to an ultimate version. Its training will undoubtedly mimic successful past activity, perhaps like AlphaGo Zero’s.

     But whatever methods are used, we can expect superior results. The mechanism will eventually surpass our abilities in ways we cannot anticipate. It is possible, even likely, that we will not understand how this automaton achieves its ends.

     Here’s a dystopian thought. The goal of any ruling entity is to stay in power. In the case of Russia (or it’s predecessor the USSR), China, or any area ruled by a single individual, it is that individual’s goal to stay in power. In the case of a more distributed allocation of power, such as in a fair democracy, the party in power wants to stay in power. All other things are secondary. (Occasionally there arises an influential individual with higher motivations. One example is Mikhail Gorbachev who saw that the best way forward for his people was the dissolution of the USSR. Another is John McCain with his recent actions in the US Senate. However these people are rare.)

     Suppose Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, or any other dictator developed such a superior intelligence. Or suppose it was developed by something like DARPA and acquired by one of the political parties. Suppose it’s goal was to enable the ruling entity to remain in power indefinitely. Suppose its recommendations were followed explicitly. Finally suppose it was given control in the name of the ruling entity.

     We would not understand its actions though they would be ultimately effective – more than any human actions. Yes this is Skynet. I think Elon Musk (his warning is the title of this essay) and Stephen Hawking understand these possibilities. Others don’t but see a limited utility in artificial intelligence or assume it will be used for prosaic purposes.

     I think we need to be very careful. We won’t understand a vastly superior intelligence, but it will understand us.

Sapiens: A brief history of humankind - comments

Yuval Harari, an Israeli professor of history, published Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in English in 2014.  Since then it has been published in 30 languages and is an international best seller. It's a good read.  Here are some comments.

The Rise of the Sapiens

About 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, humans left Africa the second time.  The first wave of humans, such as Neanderthals, Erectus, and Homo Denisova, left about 200,000 years ago.  They didn't do much aside from spreading into Europe and the Middle East.  They left no sophisticated tools, evidence of agriculture, or domesticated animals.  Weather was different, then.  Northern Europe, including England, Scandinavia, and points east were covered with an ice sheet.  The second wave of humans had undergone, in East Africa, what Harari first called the Fictive Revolution.  It was the ability to imagine.  After that descriptive term, Harari uses the more common term Cognitive Revolution (not to be confused with an intellectual movement of the same name that occurred in the 1950's).

I liked the term Fictive Revolution because it is descriptive of what Harari believes happened: the ability to imagine.  He posits that a genetic change in the brain of a prehistoric Eve led to this.  Such a change would have happened without any changes to bone structure.  So outwardly, Eve would have appeared to be the same as her peers.  One possibility for this is a change in the distribution of long neurons in the brain.  These long neurons occur in humans, zebrafish, and other species.  Thus, by themselves, they cannot have caused the Fictive Revolution.  However, the distribution, of these long neurons may have connected disparate parts of the brains allowing our ancestors to connect ideas from multiple sources leading to ideas that would not have otherwise occurred.  Perhaps. But it doesn't matter how it happened.  It just did.

The Fictive Revolution Creates Religion

Harari attributes the rise of religions to this revolution.  Certainly, this is as good an explanation as any.  He mentions all of the world's major religions and many of those nearly extinct.  Anyone for Zoroastrianism?  He points out that classical Buddhism is a mental discipline (rather than a religion) in which you accept joy and sorrow and move on.  However, he points out that in most places a pantheon of Buddhas have arisen which are the Buddhist gods, similar to other polytheistic religions such as Christianity, Islam, those of ancient Rome and Greece, and a large host of others.

Religion is the source of powerful myths.  Joseph Campbell describes myth as the cohesive force in a society.  Myths are taught from early childhood.  Some are intended to be believed as fact.  Others are stories with a point.  All serve to bring the child's and young adult's mind into conformance with the others.  Those that are told as fact are beliefs shared by the others which makes them yet more powerful.  Having to defend these beliefs further increases the cohesion of the group.  This is well known by televangelists and other charlatans - they will claim the group is under attack which serves to further draw in the participants.  Beliefs are so strong that physical evidence of their falsity is ignored.

Such tactics have been used by many others to further their goals (usually profits).  The cigarette companies, the Salt Institute which promotes the use of salt and refuting the many studies documenting its harm when heavily used, the Koch Brothers and their denial of climate change which was adopted by the GOP, and others - oh so many others.

I watched Bill Moyers' ground-breaking series of interviews with Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth).  This was my first introduction to Campbell - and I found his ideas fascinating.  Others did not.  I should not have been surprised at the vehemence of the reaction by many.  Those with a firm belief in the myths of Christianity were offended by labeling them as "myths" - as if they weren't the literal truth.

Joseph Campbell describes the functions of myth:

1.  …the first function of mythology [is] to evoke in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence 
2. The second function of mythology is to present an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe. [or] …to present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with in the universe around you. 
3. The third function of a mythological order is to validate and maintain a certain sociological system: a shared set of rights and wrongs, proprieties or improprieties, on which your particular social unit depends for its existence. 
4. …the fourth function of myth is psychological. That myth must carry the individual through the stages of his life, from birth through maturity through senility to death. The mythology must do so in accords with the social order of his group, the cosmos as understood by his group, and the monstrous mystery. 

Secular systems, science and law have taken over, for most people, the second and third functions of myth.  Still there are those who hold dearly to their myths.

Humanism

Harari includes humanistic movements in the list of beliefs.  Do human rights exist?  Only in our minds. Science?  It is our faith in science that it is the path to the explanation of the universe - and that the universe is explainable at all.  He includes capitalism as one of the great beliefs.  Why is it necessary to accumulate wealth?

I think he may have missed something in this treatment.  As to humanism, we have built in a sense of empathy.  We apply this to those who we see as being like us.  So our tribe, our neighbors, those of our social caste, all may evoke our empathetic feelings.  We care about people like us.  Thus middle age warriors and kings may slaughter and starve the people because they are beneath their notice - in a humanistic sense.   In modern times, xenophobic feelings (another built-in, possibly genetic, capability) overcome empathetic feelings leading to fear of immigrants.  Terroristic bombings are conceivable because the innocents killed are not like the bombers.

Empathy is a spectrum. There are those who are highly empathetic.  They care very much about other humans.  There are sociopaths and even psychopaths who have no feelings for others.  These see others as merely fixtures in their environment who they must learn to control to survive.  Many of our politicians, CEOs, and religious leaders are sociopaths.  They can be charming people, but they don't care about you.

So we care, to a lesser or greater extent, about one another.  Such feelings no doubt have survival value.  When the lion attacks, we may jump to help our friend.  From these feelings the religion of humanism arose.

Science

So what about Science?  We have no innate scientific ability.  If we had, we would have discovered much of what we know today millennia ago.  We do want to know about our environment.  Our curiosity does have survival value.  The more we know about what's going on, the better opportunity we have for survival.  The Homo Neanderthals probably had a similar curiosity instinct.  Their ability to imagine things about the environment was probably more limited than Homo Sapiens.  So Homo Sapiens can imagine what might be happening.  But curiosity does not necessarily lead to scientific discipline.

In the early 17th century, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei started science.  There were earlier people who asked similar questions.  Even Aristotle.  But Newton and Galileo pushed their curiosity further than anyone else.  They lived in an environment of scientific inquiry.  There were Boyle, Hooke, Copernicus, Bacon, Kepler, Snell, Huygens, Wallis, Cabeus, Roemer, and others.  There were engineers who developed instruments for investigation: Lippershey, von Guerkicke, Gregory, and many others.  There were mathematicians who made science rigorous: Newton, Pascal, Oughtred, Descartes, Leibniz, and many others.  These were all men of the 17th century.  They had been schooled in religion.  Newton, for example, believed that the world had been created in 4004 B.C. Yet these men were willing to look beyond religion for answers.

So why science?  Francis Bacon's empiricism, the idea that knowledge can come only or primarily by direct sensory experience, was simple enough and had been proposed by others.  This idea seemed rational - thus the Age of Rationality or Age of Reason began.  It preceded the Age of Enlightenment.

Why was it so popular an idea?  I think it was because it worked.  It gave answers and revealed new things, previously unknown.  It was an empirical technique.  When one man looked and got startling results others looked as well and found the same things - and new things.

So Science, like Humanism, has a basis in the way Homo Sapiens works.  Religions probably also have the same basis in the way humans work, but don't have the cachet of rationality.  It's hard to say whether the overall impact of religion has been positive or negative.

Capitalism

What about Capitalism?  Harari points out that humans were probably happier, overall, as hunters and gatherers.  But once the population ballooned with the development of agriculture and animal domestication, it was too late to go back.  Capitalism is attractive in most cultures in which it is "installed." Individuals can survive and thrive on their own initiative.  They can be independent of governments.  In China and the USSR, capitalism was suppressed for years, but internal pressure by those hopeful of starting their own businesses caused the governments to relent slightly.  And then when the money and related taxes rolled in, governments were much more open to limited capitalism.

So capitalism is not a belief, as is religion, it returns exactly what is promised: money.  Science is not a belief - except to the extent that scientists believe the universe is rational and knowledge of the universe can be gotten through empirical investigation.  Empirical investigation of the universe has been working: it returns exactly what is promised - knowledge about the universe.  Capitalism and humanism are in conflict.  Pure raw capitalism puts workers in a bad position, so humanism has tempered capitalism.  Science and religion are in conflict.  Like it or not the impact of science is tempered by people's beliefs.  In many cases, people want some things to be true - and this desire is sufficient.  The Theory of Evolution is an early example: evidence is ignored because it conflicts with held beliefs.  Climate change and, especially anthropogenic climate change, conflicts with desired beliefs (in particular the Koch Brothers desire to make money on oil and coal).  So anthropogenic climate change is disputed and disbelieved.

Religion has utility for some humans.  It relieves, in a small way, the fear of death and sadness about those who have died.  So religion, humanism, science, and capitalism have utility.  Science and capitalism are inventions like agriculture, animal domestication, the wheel, and steel.  They exist because they are useful. But all four are powerful drivers in human destiny.

How We Are Organized

The organization of a society is a driver as well.  If you are in a society in which you are expected to do what is expected of you, to live in the caste in which you were born, nothing much will change. The rulers of such a society value constancy, lack of change.  This guarantees their own position on top.  For this reason, little changed in Asia for centuries.  For example, in the early fifteenth century, the Ming emperor sent large fleets commanded by Zheng He across the Indian ocean.  When that emperor died and the bureaucracy was usurped by the the Confucian bureaucracy, the court eunuchs, it eventually became a capital offence to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts.

I remember a Joseph Campbell lecture in which he described the line between individualism and collectivism as a physical line, the longitude that went through the Middle East.  The Bible reflects this in the story of Job and his slavish devotion to a self-obsessed God despite the evils this God visited upon him.  In other Biblical stories, each person must make individual decisions.

So east of this longitude, the Asian philosophy places the individual at the bottom of the stack and nothing much changes over the centuries. West of this longitude, it is up to the individual to fend his or her way throughout life. Change happens. Perhaps it was the Viking excursions throughout Europe and even the Mediterranean. Perhaps it was the Grail Myth as described by Joseph Campbell in which the individual seeks the Grail.  Perhaps it was an early myth, the Sumerian Gilgamesh, an individual who sought immortality. Perhaps it was all these stories and others unrecorded.

Religion is the force that keeps a society organized.  The myths we tell are key, according to Joseph Campbell.  If you believe one set of myths and encounter someone who believes a different set, you distrust and, perhaps, hate them.

The Drivers

Where does the ability to imagine take us?  Religion gave us comfort in the face of death and hard times, explanations for things not seen and not understood, and the requirement to obey the priests and kings.  Religion's myths unify a society.  Where do Science, Mathematics, and Engineering take us?  Initially we gained knowledge of the universe: how light behaves, what steam does, how heat works, the existence of microbes and how disease works, and what electricity is.  But then, Engineering arose driven by Capitalism.  For example, in 1698 Thomas Slavery invented the first commercial steam engine and received a patent for it.  He built and sold steam engines for fighting fires and lifting water out of shallow mines until Thomas Newcomen created a better design - based on the piston concept invented by the Frenchman Denis Papin.  This illustrates the Standing on Shoulders process.  The synergy between Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Capitalism created a firestorm of New Things.  This will, according to some, result in a Singularity as soon as 2030 (according to Vernor Vinge) or as late as 2045 (according to Ray Kurzweil).  Other estimates put it out to 100 years from now.

According to Wikipedia the technological singularity is a hypothetical event in which an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a 'runaway reaction' of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence whose cognitive abilities could be, qualitatively, as far above humans' as human intelligence is above ape intelligence.

Well, maybe.  But certainly things are happening fast.  Capitalism has an over-riding effect on where Science and Engineering (not so much Mathematics) go.  Can this thing make me money?  Can it save me money making my profits bigger?  We have already seen the kind of slavery Capitalism creates.  Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been strikes and other conflicts from works dissatisfied with their condition.  Wikipedia lists strikes starting in 1619.  Owners and managers held a deep contempt for their workers.  For example, on March 25, 1911, a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, New York City, killed 146 garment workers, most of them women and children.  The owners of the factory had locked the doors to the stairwells and exists, a common practice keeping workers from taking unauthorized breaks.  Many of the workers could not escape and jumped from windows on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors.

Because of the depredations by the owners and management of businesses, Humanistic drivers made life better for the workers.  Because this increased cost, this accelerated the use of automation. Robots are expensive, but their upkeep is cheaper and more reliable than humans.

As we approach the singularity and artificial intelligence gains capability, robots increasingly fill human jobs.  Jobs are disappearing.  Only McJobs that are awaiting robot workers and others that no one has figured out how to do with a robot still exist. The company from which I retired a few years ago (Northrop Grumman, 120,000 employees) eliminated a whole layer of management as unnecessary - management and support jobs disappeared, hundreds of jobs.  Only top management and bottom line management was left.  Jobs are disappearing.

Universal Basic Income

So what will we do with all the unemployed?  Will we let them starve and live on the street?  No, our Humanistic tendencies will prompt us to provide a minimal level of support. Recently (2016) Switzerland voted on a universal basic income plan. If it had passed, adults would have been paid an unconditional monthly income, whether they worked or not and would have received an additional stipend for their children.  The proposal was soundly defeated, but it is remarkable for having appeared on the ballot at all.  This is just the first round in the battle, just as early strikes started the labor movement. Finland has plans to introduce a pilot program in 2017. The Alaska Permanent Fund has been providing a partial basic income since 1976. As it becomes impossible to get a job no matter your qualifications, these proposals will become more frequent and will eventually replace other forms of government welfare.

So we come full circle.  The easy days of hunting and gathering when life was easy gave way to days of endless toil where we worked from dawn to dusk every day in the fields and then in the factories. Now if we do not have to work at all, we are back to living a simple life of ease.  It won't be a luxurious life, but our basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical attention will be provided.

What will you do with your time?

A New Kitchen

These are pictures of the kitchen before we started the renovation.  The house was built in the early 1980's.  The kitchen hadn't been changed since - except for replacing the vinyl flooring with wood.

View facing south from the old dining room

View facing north-east from the entrance.  The old dining room is through the door.

View facing west from the patio doors.  The front entrance is the light coming in.  On the left (north) is the old dining room.

View from the new dining room into the old dining room - looking west.  The new dining room (behind the camera) is what used to be the living room, at the front of the house.  We never used the living room, and the old dining room was really too small.  So we changed the living room into a dining room.  The old dining room got filled with projects in various stages of completion.

A close-up picture of the old dining room and its plethora of projects.  Note the wall straight ahead with its side window.  This wall with its window and the wall on the left will disappear.

We had saved for many years, maybe 30, for a kitchen remodel.  Now we started talking about what we wanted in a new kitchen - floor plan, appliances, and so on.  I had started drawing up floor plans, but when I mentioned some ideas to Donna, she said, "Hey, I've got a dozen that I've done." So I took a look at them.  Most of them were better than mine, and two were really good.  She said, "Those are my favorites, too."

So Donna talked to many of the remodeling contractors in the Omaha area.  I went on some of these visits.  A couple had come to the house to see what the job would be like.  We were not impressed with any of them.  Some ignored our stated desires and their plans showed what they liked instead.  Others had a great deal of trouble estimating the cost of the job.  This second group didn't seem to have much experience in actually doing the work.  This went on for a couple of years.  We were considering doing the work ourselves, using Ikea cabinetry.  We like Ikea products, mostly, and the cabinets are very much cheaper than the custom built cabinets touted by many of the contractors we talked with.

Then Shelley said she had noticed a sign on a front yard that said, "Ikea Kitchens." Donna and I had seen these signs, too.  Shelley said when she drove by, there was someone in the front yard - so she stopped.  And got invited in.  The lady had a lot of good things to say about her kitchen remodel, and Shelley said the kitchen was beautiful.  So what the hell ... Donna called the guy: Mike Schmidt.  He came out to the house.  Donna showed him our plans and we talked.  He took our plans, measurements of the existing kitchen, old dining room, and new dining room, and list of our "wants." Then he came back a couple of days later with a detailed estimate: both cost and time.  During that time we discovered he'd been doing kitchen remodels for many years in the Omaha area.

We liked him, personally, we liked his price, and looking at his previous work, we liked that, too.  We gave him the go-ahead, and he said he could start in about a week or ten days, depending on some other work he was finishing.  If we couldn't be ready by then, it would have to be in the fall.  So we decided to get ready.  We had to clear out everything in the kitchen, old dining room, and new dining room.

Then Mike called again and said he could start on Monday.  This was Friday.  Yikes!  So we got to work.

You won't see Donna in any of these pictures, but she's always there - taking the pictures.

The kitchen was the hardest.  So much stuff!  Notice that we forgot the copper pots on the soffits.  Here and in the next picture you can see the hole I had made in the soffit over the counter.  This was so I could hook up the plumbing for the tub in the bathroom just above.  Donna and I had done that remodel ourselves - and was one reason we wanted someone else to do the kitchen.  Damn that's a lot of work.

Shelley is moving fast toward the wine.

Shelley and I, wiped out after we moved everything into the garage.

Can't.  Move.

New dining room.  The wire on the wall is an audio hook-up from the equipment stack in the family room.

So they didn't actually start on Monday.  Mike asked us if we wanted to get building permits.  We thought about it and decided it might be nice to do that for a change.  I'd gotten one for the deck I built and it didn't seem like a big deal.  But it turns out the Bellevue building inspectors actually wanted to look at the plans.  That took a couple of days.  They started, I think, on Wednesday.



The first thing, of course was to lose the rug.  Here, in the new dining room they are putting down plywood for the wood floor to come.  The electrician is moving a lot of wiring around - thus the wire hanging out of the wall.  There are two other things to notice in this picture.  On the upper right, you can see where they cut away the wallboard to check the support over the doorway between the old and new dining rooms.  They also cut away the wallboard at the bottom of the supports in the arches to take a look at that.  They looked at the bottom of the floor from the basement side and noticed that this part of the floor is not supported.  There's only plywood holding up the wall.  So they had to reinforce the floor there.  In doing that, they had to elevate the upper floor a little - the doors upstairs wouldn't close until they took out the floor jacks.

That's something Donna and I would not have noticed.  I'm glad it's done.

They pulled the bottoms of the soffits off to see how much of that they remove.  The one across the middle of the picture carries plumbing, but others could be removed.  The middle soffit will be made much shallower and will mirror the island counter as you will see.  In the back of the picture, the windows and sliding door will be removed for new ones.  The double window on the back right of the old kitchen was placed by the original builders in an unfortunate location.  You can see the soffit across the top of the sliding door and window on its right.  This encloses a beam that supports the edge of the roof.  When they installed the double window, they cut the support for that beam.  The roof had been sagging there for several years.  As you will see, Mike's guys fixed that.

Wall removed.  Also most of the soffits have been removed, but a new one is necessary for the plumbing at the top of the picture.

They've removed the double window that was on the right of the back of the old kitchen.  There's a new support post in place (the small ladder is leaning against it.  This mandates that the new windows will be of different sizes.  In the old dining room, they've cut the supports for the floor and replaced them with a beam.  Unfortunately, that beam is too short.  It was supposed to extend all the way across that part of the wall.  They replaced it later with a new beam.

You can see the two white waste-water pipes and the two copper pipes are in place.  One of the white pipes is a vent pipe.

Men at work.

Shallow soffit constructed that will mirror the island below it.

Couple of guys at work.

The green beam is the replacement.  This is two large pieces of wood each 1-3/4 inches thick to make a single 3-1/2 inch thick beam.  Joe, the foreman, said this stuff was relatively expensive.  The blue and white wires in the soffit are mine.  while I had the chance, I ran three Ethernet and a coax cable from a switch in the basement (where the Cox cable enters the house and connects to the cable modem and then to a router).  These will hook to a small television on the wall on the far side of the picture.  the guy on the far left is Joe, the foreman.  Good guy.

Men at work.

Back of the kitchen.  Wallboard replaced and soffit completed.

This soffit carries heat and A/C to the upper floor.  We couldn't get rid of it.

Ikea cabinets being installed.

David's Floors is doing the floors.  They decided to do them after the cabinets were in place.  Notice the shallow soffit.

More cabinets and some window work.

The small and large windows on the back right side of the picture are in.  Donna had ordered the windows from Home Depot; they were custom sized.  They got the specs wrong on the small window so it didn't match, exactly its brother - it was the right size but when installed, its vertical size was wrong.  Home Depot had to reorder the window.

Heime at work.

Heime is the mudder.  This guy is a real artist.  Both Donna and I have mudded walls.  It's a hard job.  We inevitably put on too much and sand off too much.  Heime has the right touch.  The guy is amazing.

Before the floors are in place.

Floors are in but covered with paper.

When David's Floors put the floor in, they left the old wooden floor in the kitchen.  They cut out some of the planks on the edge of the old floor and slid in new planks in their place, making a seamless floor with the random plank spacing you expect.  They cut the old plank by running a circular saw down the plank to make grooves down to to the subfloor - about three per plank.  Then they just pulled out the pieces.  Pretty cool.  After the floor was refinished you couldn't tell which was old floor and which was new.

When they put down the stain and polyurethane the house was pretty stinky.  But that only lasted a day.  But then they did it again.  Woof.

Window in place.

The large window on the right is two side stationary windows and two sliding doors.  The doors open by sliding in front of the windows.

There I am, doing my impression of The Flash.

Doors to the deck and the side window are in place.

Marble (white) and granite (dark gray) counter tops in place.  Faucet and sink in place.

Paper removed from floors.  Refrigerator and freezer in place.  

The refrigerator and freezer are separate units, but side-by-side they look like one.  Looks like a commercial installation, but is much cheaper.

The stove, of which you can just see the top of over the counters, is pretty cool.  It's a six-burner gas top with an electric oven.  The burners are of various sizes: some small for small pots and for warming, others capable of 20K BTU/hr.  Water boils pretty fast.  The oven has steam injection.  The plumber had never seen one like it.  The steam keeps meat a little juicier and makes bread crustier.  Nice computer control, too.  It has a bread proofing mode that keeps the oven at 100 deg. F.  The wall oven is nice, too.  Double-door and can be controlled by a smart-phone.



The ceiling fan, which you see as a blur, is pretty cool.  It looks like a three-bladed airplane propeller. Made by Fanimation, sold at Lowes.



The round table is the old wood table from the original kitchen.  Donna stained it "espresso." The chairs came from NFM. We sat in all the chairs in NFM.  These were the most comfortable.

Finally.  Everything is back.

It took us a lot longer to bring all the stuff back in.  But we did get rid of a lot of it.  Some of it went to Jonathan.  A the rest went to New Life Thrift (36th and Harrison).  I like those guys.  They'll take anything.

Here are some of the guys who did the work.