poop news
Poop has been found in a cave in Oregon.
Fourteen thousand year old poop. Fossilized feces.
The oldest human defecation found in North America.
In case you’re wondering:
While the analysis is not yet complete, he said there are bones of squirrels, bison hair, fish scales, protein from birds and dogs and the remains of plants such as grass and sunflowers.
ha!
Google allows for the manipulation of time.
How does it work?
Gmail utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).
In the path of the painted ladies
The painted lady butterflies are migrating. And it might be the biggest migration ever seen.
Millions of painted lady butterflies that fluttered into California’s Central Valley in the last week of March could be just the advance guard of one of the largest migrations of the species on record, said Arthur Shapiro, a professor and expert on butterflies at UC Davis.
“This may be the biggest migration of modern times,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro said he is getting reports of “billions” of butterflies around Trona, near Death Valley, and in the San Fernando Valley. More waves of butterflies are likely to appear in central California over the next few weeks as the insects take wing.
Painted lady butterflies, known by the scientific name Vanessa cardui, spend the winter in the desert. As caterpillars turn into adults in the spring, they migrate north in search of fresh food and breeding grounds, powered by a supply of yellow fat they have built up over the winter.
Painted ladies migrate every year, but usually less conspicuously and in far fewer numbers. This year, however, exceptionally high winter rainfall in southern California has created a bumper crop of plants for the caterpillars to eat, fuelling a population boom, Shapiro said.
The butterflies take about three days to reach the Central Valley, and the current generation will fly as far as southern Oregon. Their offspring will fly on to reach British Columbia by summer, before heading south again in the fall.
I’m sitting in the middle of a thoroughfare. A constant stream, hundreds going by, a dozen at a time, coming from the south east and heading north west. Off to the Central Valley of California apparently. They don’t stop. They are flying with purpose.
My camera batteries died when I tried to take pics. But for now, a portrait from elsewhere.
the music of pi
Completely random here.
Put the first 10,000 digits of pi to music. You choose the notes to correspond to each number. I wish there was a way of changing the length of some notes to help make for a more interesting rhythm, but still… oddly entrancing.
Off and Away to an emerging pneumatology
I’m leaving on a jet plane, be back late Sunday evening.
Going to the Society of Pentecostal Studies annual conference, out in North Carolina–at Duke to be more exact.
Should be a grand time. I’m giving a little presentation on emerging pneumatology, in which I take the traits of the emerging church and view them through the lens of Moltmann’s theology to identify these traits as an emerging pneumatology.
In other words, the same thing I did with my book.
This morning I practiced and recorded it. I need more practice, and I need to get over this cold and cough, but for the most part I’m happy with what I’ve done. The book is 270 pages. The paper I wrote for the conference is 27 pages. The text of the presentation I will be giving on that paper is 13 pages. Editing down is fun!
Here’s the 1/2 hour presentation.
Or you can visit me on youtube.
If there is good access I’m going to try to do regular posts from the conference, and maybe get some video. We’ll see.
Cheers!
Emerging/missional and the OS
In an earlier post I asked if I could still be allowed in emerging circles even though I’m not voting for Obama (and didn’t) and I use Microsoft Windows. Anyone who has followed this blog for a while can understand why I’m not voting for Obama (can agree on goals while disagreeing with methods). The choice of operating system is a little more rigid. Emerging people use Apple. They have Apple parties, are caught up in Mac momentum, and otherwise live the Apple OS lifestyle.
This raises a curious question. Given the emphasis on poverty and justice issues, as well as a dissatisfaction with so much typical Evangelical Christian Right politicking I get why there’s a trend towards Obama. Even if I disagree on core issues, I look at the foundational traits of the emerging church and can see why the balance of issues might swing someone that way (even as I get very strong admonitions on other issues that say someone should never consider a Democrat at this point in their platform).
I don’t, honestly, understand the Apple enthusiasm. Or change that. I understand the Apple enthusiasm entirely. Only it’s the same kind of enthusiasm that helps me understand why someone would choose a mega-Church. Apple is proprietary, elitist, expensive, judgmental, and almost entirely run by a single man who founded, then saved, the company. Yes, there are less errors, often run faster, have better multimedia support, much better included software, and are more stylish.
How is that reflective of emerging principles in any way, that seem to be so important in other categories of life? Indeed, I might be willing to say that Apple is a betrayal of everything the emerging/missional church stands for and those that use such computers are technological hypocrites.
Now, of course, that would be a fair bit of hyperbole to say that. I don’t really care what computer anyone uses, and probably if part of my work didn’t involve working with education and their funded windows computers, then I might consider a Mac myself. But, I’m not sure that’s because of my principles, or because I’m already feeling a fair bit of an outsider in emerging circles for various reasons and wouldn’t mind at least a little conforming.
But if I was really emerging/missional in a way that influenced all my decisions I’d have to go with Linux. Not least because I could save money, use the same hardware I have, and not pour more money into the technological envy-trap.
I’m curious now. Because, even though I’m being a fair bit silly in my forceful opinions here I’m wondering how owning a Mac computer could be justified using solely emerging/missional principles. I’d love to hear serious or funny responses. Make me think. Make me laugh. Maybe you’ll even make me change my mind.
random book goodness
Here’s the game:
- Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
- Find Page 123.
- Find the first 5 sentences.
- Post the next 3 sentences.
- Tag 5 people.
Now this is going to be a bit of a surprise. Sure, someone might think Patrick will have some theology musing or spirituality suggestion or at least a tale of derring-do upon the high seas. Nope. If I was on my bed, I would lean over and open my book of Complete Works of O. Henry. But since I’m at my desk, and not near my bed, my nearest book is utterly a bit random. It’s one of my Amazon Vine books for the month. I get a couple free items each month from Amazon.com. All I have to do to keep getting items each month is post a review of what I’ve received. Some months I get electronics. One month I got power bars. This month it was books. One was the first volume of a biography of Napoleon. But that’s not the one closest to me. No, closest to me is even more outside my usual. It’s The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria by Randall M. Packard.
While not exactly the most heartwarming reading, it’s actually quite interesting, especially for folks concerned about global welfare and politics. But, for a longer review, I’ll wait till I finish the book and post my dues on the Amazon site.
For now, it’s just the sentences. Page 123, sentences 6-8:
“It contributed to a major reduction in malaria mortality in Italy, which declined from 490 per million in 1900 to 57 per million in 1914. Yet morbidity rates over the course of this period, while fluctuating from year to year, remained essentially constant. Despite the hopes of Grassi and Celli that the massive distribution of quinine could lead to the eradication of malaria in Italy, the quinine campaign had little impact on transmission.”
I’ll let you know how the book ends. I think the butler did it.
I guess I’m supposed to tag people.
Some names then. Amy, Jim, Peter, Christina, Erik, Debby and well, anyone else who reads this. I loooove knowing what people are reading. So if you decide to follow up, post a link in the comments and let me know.
Oh, and just because I’m curious if I was typing this while sitting on my bed. Here’s the bit from O. Henry, near the end of his story “The Ransom of Mack”.
“He will,” says I.
“There was lots of women at the wedding,” says Mack, smoking up. “But I didn’t seem to get any ides from ‘em. I wish I was informed in the structure of their attainments like you said you was.”
Indeed.
I shoulda been a physicist
Scientists figure out traffic jams.
For a few years I was in daily traffic. All that time in traffic got me thinking about what caused it and what to do. I came up in my mind exactly what they are talking about in this article. But unfortunately I was a theology, not a physics, student so couldn’t publish my intuitive findings.
The wave increases in intensity as others adds to the slowing, making small increments into eventual stops. So the answer to this is to be a positive force, by maintaining following distance, advancing in speed when possible and otherwise serving to refocus the traffic speed to it’s right pattern. One person can’t fix it but if everyone does then it’s fixed and slowdowns are alleviated.
Of course, being a theology student now I think how this applies to church and ministry. Cautious, nervous people in churches can slow down ministry, getting ever more cautious, insisting everyone else goes no faster than their worries and fears. Soon the church is stopped. People get off and travel down different roads or are stuck for no real reason in the same place for a long time.
Church is like traffic! I think I made a point on that somewhere in my book.
Monday night
Had a bit of an adventure on Monday night. Hiked to the top of a mountain. One of the tallest in Southern California.
Started roundabout 7:15 in the evening. Got to the top around 11:30. The trail was lit by the full moon.
This is what I woke up to
This is where I slept
This is what I watched all through the night. Lunar eclipse. The earth’s shadow in front of the moon, making it look like a giant peach. Unfortunately I didn’t get a good picture of it. But in the morning I watched the sun rise to the east, the full bright moon set in the direct opposite west while there were still nighttime stars directly above.
Not often a person can hike to the top of a 10,000 foot mountain under the light of a full moon then have a whole night of amazing stargazing because the sky is so dark.
Such was my Monday night. Woke up Tuesday morning. Back down the mountain. On the freeway. Back up a mountain. Though in a car, and only half as high.
Considering chaos
The Gospel According to Relativity by James Geiger mentions a book called Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. The mystery of why I resonate so much with Mr. Geiger’s work is solved, well at least partially. Chaos was immensely influential to my theological thinking when I was a senior in college ten years ago (reunion next month!). Wrote a paper on Chaos that I think was a key formation for much of my thinking as I worked in churches, went through seminary, and basically found myself on ancient and hidden trails. So, here is is:
As I gaze out of my window I see before me two prominent structures. The first, and largest, is rectangular shaped, with sharp defined angles and straight, uncurving lines. The second seems to follow no distinct pattern, with its central support branching out seemingly randomly, becoming smaller and smaller as it goes. The first structure, a building, was designed by architects working with centuries of accumulated knowledge from a great variety of scientific fields. The second structure is a tree. A tree with no great inherent merit, or attributes. Simply a tree like any other tree. Upon initial examination, one might say that the building is the marvel. It is the product of an advanced species, who over the course of their existence have developed ingenious places to live and work, far beyond that which was initially provided to them in nature. The tree is just a tree. This was the dominant view of the Enlightenment, marveling at human ability to understand and conceive, to build and create. Nature was seen as something to dominate, to conquer, to control.
Yet, in the past few decades scientists are re-examining this view. After moving past seemingly simple structures such as trees in pursuit of increasingly complex phenomena, they are beginning once again to consider the trees, the clouds, and the commonplace. For despite their seeming simplicity, these structures contain a complexity that is almost beyond understanding. The tree is not a random structure, but rather one that is absolutely full of order, though vastly beyond the ability of prior science to determine what kind of order it is. This order and complexity is on a scale that makes the building behind it amazingly simplistic and not even worthy of consideration. This new science, this study of overwhelming complex structures underlying seemingly simple systems is called chaos, and it has revolutionized the scientific world.
I come to this topic without any of the necessary qualifications needed to satisfiably examine the richness of chaos. My mathematical and scientific training essentially ended five years ago when I graduated from high school. My years at Wheaton have been spent engaged in the study of history and the Bible, in Blanchard and BGC rather than in Armerding. I do not, however, come to this topic without interest or concern. It is the way of things that science is considered the elite of all fields of study, the area in which human logic and understanding are most emphasized and highlighted. For most of human history philosophy and religion have influenced how society studied the scientific world. Since the dawning of the Enlightenment, however, this trend has shifted. All fields began to try to model their study on the methodology of the scientists, raising the Heroic Model of Science to a supreme role. Just as one could discover the laws of physics and know the internal workings of living things, so too could educated men discover the “laws of society” and truly know that which had happened and that which will happen. As science adjusts itself and its views, other fields make similar adjustments, though often lagging years behind. It is with this thought in mind that I come to the study of chaos.
In his book Chaos, James Gleick examines the formational history of the study of chaos. He looks at the major figures and the major forms of thought that went into developing the idea of chaos into a major factor of modern scientific thought. It all began with a meteorologist who was working with a primitive computer on weather patterns. Seeking to simulate a weather system over a period of time Edward Lorenz formulated weather patterns into numerical data which the computer would develop into continuous weather systems that fairly accurately reflected actual conditions. Seeking to examine a specific sequence one day, Lorenz began a simulation in the middle of a run of equations, using numbers from an earlier printout. After letting this pattern run its course for a while, Lorenz returned to find that the new printout was vastly different from the earlier one. Although the pattern began the same, it quickly began to diverge and then became something totally different. He soon realized what had happened. When he re-entered the numbers, he only entered three decimal places, while the original sequence used six decimal places. Lorenz was amazed at the fact that seemingly inconsequential numbers had such a influential impact on the system as a whole. The complexity and sensitivity of the weather system was greater than anyone had ever imagined. Using this newfound knowledge, scientists now realized that, theoretically, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Peking could transform future storm systems in New York. As Lorenz, and others, began to examine nonlinear systems they discovered that seemingly random systems of all types, including trees and clouds, followed an intricate pattern which was not random, but beautifully full of order and pattern.
This discovery of sensitive dependence on initial conditions began a movement in the scientific realm that Thomas Kuhn of Harvard describes as a paradigm shift. Occurring very rarely, and with great resistance, these shifts enact a total change in how scientists view their fields of study. Old presuppositions and assumptions are thrown out, and past data is re-examined in light of the new underlying concept. These shifts come when new discoveries break down old systems of thought, and the allowances and rationalizations that come with the old systems. Suddenly, the inconsequential became vital, and the nonlinear became a field of study of its own.
In the twentieth century a new understanding of humanity developed. No longer could humanity be seen as a creature of progression or inherent goodness. World War I burst the bubble of thought that proclaimed that all of our social ills could be solved as we progressed in our knowledge. Historians, philosophers, and theologians found an inherent unpredictability in the human species that defied understanding. With this came a breakdown in the pursuit of accumulated knowledge. Neither God nor history could be known. Belief was separated from fact as all positions became relative to one another. The Heroic Model of Science broke down, and academics had nothing to replace it which could put order and veracity back into their study. Relativistic thinking ruled the middle decades of the twentieth century. As science became increasingly specialized, the humanities had no where to turn to for an encompassing model of study. The question now before us is whether or not Chaos could be this new overarching theory which reaches beyond the scientific realm and into all fields of academia.
Christianity has not always been receptive to scientific understanding. Oftentimes, particular Christian presuppositions have opposed and debated with what science proclaims, feeling threatened by the new discoveries. The theory of evolution stands out in this regard. Yet, in a conflict with science Christianity can lose a great deal. What is science but the quest of humanity to discover the nature of creation? Although many would not acknowledge the work of the Creator God, that does not take anything away from the fact that God did indeed create. The idea of chaos, in my mind, glorifies the omniscient Creator. We find that even simple systems are complex beyond understanding, that random events are actually bound to order, and that nature is imbued with a beauty and wonder that defies description even on the most basic levels. This is not a random world where trees and streams form as they will, but one in which detail and intricacy abound.
Whether it be the elaborate beauty of mapped magnetic attraction, or the accumulation of water molecules on an ice crystal, we find that nature is part of an intricate interaction with itself, a dance in which every aspect plays an important and decisive role. We exist only because of this crucial and supersensitive interaction. This complexity is not formed according to chance or randomness, but exists because of the intricate and complex mind of the one who created it. The basic structures of the universe are, as Behe proclaims, irreducibly complex, and only an intelligent designer could have created such a marvel.
There are few systems more inherently complex and unpredictable than humanity. Thus, those who try to study human behavior and interaction face an almost impossible task if they try to predict or fully explain behavior. The vast amounts of variables that go into human thought and actions is immense. People seem to diverge from predicted models on a seemingly random basis. A method of therapy can do wonders for one person, and have no effect on a seemingly similar person. How does one explain a Hitler or a Ghandi? What made these two so strikingly different not only from each other but also from those who came out of identical backgrounds? Could it be the inconsequentials that had a major effect on their lives? Past historians sought to explain their actions by looking at major influences and strong formational events. Can it be said that the major differences were not noticed even by those involved? A smile, a reproach, or any other numerous, minor events could have created a shift which resulted in their final form. It seems that the idea of chaos is completely apropos to the study of the human system.
With this in mind, the lessons that Christ had to teach us become even more vital. Jesus knew the intricacy and sensitivity of the system. He knew that small interactions and decisions could have determinative influences in our lives. Just looking at his own interactions, and the way he changed people’s lives, shows us how a simple touch or a few words could impact the world as a whole. Minor changes in thought, or minor decisions on actions could vitally influence a life. In this way God can interact and influence us and our lives in imperceptible ways. A miracle need not be grand to be great. In the same way moral decisions become ever more important. God did not dictate random morality that could be individually decided upon. He knew that moral actions have consequences, and that these consequences can impact not just the individual but whole societies.
In the popular book and movie Jurassic Park mathematician Ian Malcolm uses the idea of chaos to predict the restoration of dinosaurs from an artificial state to a natural state. The minor manipulations of the scientists in that movie were inconsequential in comparison to the myriad of other variables that guided the system as a whole. They could not control the behavior because they did not have control over all the influencing factors. God does have control, and he is fully aware of how the system should be acting in order to maximize its great potential. When sin entered humanity, the system began to stray toward destruction. Sin causes death and spirals humanity into eventual ruin. Knowing the variables involved God interacted with the system in order to show the proper methods of correcting the system as it continues. He gave us his law. These are the laws that guide humanity toward what God intended his system to be. The ornate and complex set of morality that he gave us seems inconsequential and irrelevant, but in fact is crucial to our survival.
The idea of chaos gave order to what was dismissed as unknowable and inconsequential. When minute data was found to be crucial to the systems as a whole a shift took place in which all fields of science were affected. Men such as Lorenz and Mandelbrot showed the intricacy and sensitivity inherent in the created world. No longer could words such as random and chance be used to describe what was going on in this world. This paradigm shift has only recently taken hold of the scientific world. As other fields of study follow, people will begin to realize the order and sensitivity inherent in all of creation, including humanity. What we do affects this world. We are not isolated beings uninfluenced and uninfluential. We are responsible to each other and to our creator for our actions, no matter how seemingly insignificant. This world is a system of unimaginable complexity, a fact which we are only beginning to discover. As we face life knowing that even the smallest decisions could have significant impact it would behoove us to go to the Creator continuously in order to gain His perspective and wisdom. In the face of chaos we can find guidance and salvation only in Christ, the Creator of the intricate and complex.
