9/16/2023 – Thoughts are Free by Bob Meyerson

Sep 18, 2023 | Worship Service, Worship Services

Our Sept. speaker is Bob Meyerson
Topic: “Thoughts Are Free,” from a 500 year old German Folk Song. Bob will talk about how free thought and free expression can be instruments of positive change, whether for major political reasons or religious thought.

Topic:  “Thoughts Are Free,” from a 500 year old German Folk Song. Bob will talk about how free thought and free expression can be instruments of positive change, whether for major political reasons or religious thought.
Bob grew up in New Jersey and spent his career in the insurance business and graduated from Farleigh Dickinson University .  He later attended Starr King Unitarian Universalist Church in Hayward, and became a UU in 2001. “I was always a UU, but didn’t know it ‘til then.

Bob  has led services at Starr King and about 6 or 7 churches in Northern
California. Bob is a folk music buff, and he feels that carrying on the folk tradition is one of his callings, He has had a long history of supporting liberal causes from his early 20’s and ongoing. Civil Rights have been a passion with Bob since his teenage years. He was a founder and first president of the West Essex (NJ) Human Relations Council, and Chairperson of the Caldwell (NJ) Board of Health.

Philosophy in a Nutshell

Sep 11, 2023 | News

Rev. Todd Eklof teams up with a variety of Artificial Intelligent tools and Wikipedia to create an amazing set  short videos high lighting ancient Greek Philosophers. Besides being engaging, visually stunning and informative, Todd claims the videos were easy and quick to create.

We hope you enjoy the videos and subscribe to the YouTube Channel  for notifications has more philosophers

are added to the series.

 

 

Mama Bear and AI

Aug 15, 2023 | News

There is much uncertainty and uneasiness about what Artificial Intelligence will mean for our future but, for now, it’s already being employed by millions of people to save time researching, writing, creating art, and producing media. Not wishing to be left behind, I recently started dabbling with AI myself and have been overwhelmed by its creative possibilities.

My exploration began by taking a children’s story I’d written several years ago about a mama bear and her hungry cubs. I pasted its transcript into ElevenLabs AI, a text-to-speech program, chose a voice, and within seconds had a flawless voice-track telling the story. Then I asked ChatGPT to create a storyboard. The story was immediately broken down into scenes, complete with descriptions that I could then use as image prompts in Leonardo AI, a text-to-image program. After I had all the original AI generated royalty free pictures needed for the story, I animated and made them 3D in LeiaPix AI. Finally, I asked Tracksy AI to compose an original piece of music, lullaby-like, to play in the background (also royalty free). Then I edited it all together the old-fashioned way, using Adobe’s Premiere Pro.

The most time-consuming part of the process was the extra time it took to learn these various (mostly free) programs and how best to prompt them for my desired outcomes. (It’s a whole lot easier than learning the symbolic language necessary to code!) This only amounted to minutes, not hours or days. That’s it! Check out the accompanying link to see the outcome for yourself.

By NAUA President, Rev. Dr. Todd Eklof

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn6a4g2tYqA

Ban Nuclear Weapons

Aug 4, 2023 | News, Peace

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japan. Since then the potential for nuclear catastrophe has grown to a frightening scale.
In our work for peace, we should following the will of the United Nations General Assembly that voted with an overwhelming majority to abolish nuclear weapons.
As long as they exist, they pose an intolerable danger to all life on this planet.
https://www.voices-uri.org/nuclear-prayer-day
Submitted by Bruce Knotts