Uncomfortable Seating

This past week at Supercomputing '09, I had the surprising pleasure of listening to Al Gore, "the man who used to be the next President of the United States" (his joke, not mine). I say it was surprising not because I didn't expect him to be there, but rather because I didn't expect to enjoy it so much. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when a career politician is good at rhetoric. In any event, Mr. Gore was an appropriate speaker for a conference where "Green Computing" was a key focus, and his talk at the plenary session was both well attended and entertaining.

For context, I am a Global Warming skeptic -- I think that the measurement system is both faulty and incomplete (see this article from Analog for some thoughts on this), and that many of our proposed responses are not well thought out. Having said this, I think Gore was worth listening to, albeit not for the reasons one might think. For my own part, I think it is energy use, and not carbon emissions, that should be our real concern.

Consider, for example, the transport efficiency of your modern automobile. A typical internal-combustion engine might be 40% - 50% efficient if properly tuned and maintained. If we use that engine as part of a 3000-pound automobile carrying two adults, only 10% of the mass being moved is actually contributing to our goal of moving two people across town. This gives us 4% overall efficiency - or a waste of 96% of the fuel being consumed.

This result is significantly lower than the 99.2% quoted by Gore in his talk, but it's still a very large percentage. And even if you think that carbon emissions are essentially irrelevant, and variation in solar output is as likely to create the next ice age as it is to trigger melting ice caps, wasting that much energy should get your attention. Consider:

• The earth has an energy balance that is predominantly based on the quantity of energy being added by the sun, less the quantity being radiated into space.


• Barring the speculative future discovery of zero-point energy, this energy is finite in quantity. (see the First Law of Thermodynamics)


• Energy that is released into our system as heat is not available for other purposes, and some fraction of it will be released into space.


• Every time we convert energy from one form to another, some of it gets lost to entropy (see the Second Law of Thermodynamics), which for all practical purposes means wasted heat.

Within this framework, fossil fuels are one method for long-term storage of solar energy. If we choose to use that energy to drive to work today, it won't be available for use tomorrow.

As a technical geek, I think that solar panels are cool. I also think that wind farms are a much better choice than the current system of coal farms that are presently hurting our northeast sugar maple trees with acid rain. That said, neither of these directly impacts the planetary energy balance to the degree that efficiency improvements can do today.

I look forward to the effects that ideas like smart grid will have on customer use of energy. As W. E. Deming reminded us long ago, "what gets measured gets done." Once we can easily see how much energy they are throwing away, will we perhaps start using it better?

Hypotheses Non Fingo

It is not uncommon for those in the scientific community to criticize those of faith for the lengths we have been willing to go to in opposition of their most closely held beliefs (see, for example, the debate over Intelligent Design. For myself, I am inclined to take a view akin to the one Jesus took on taxes; to give scientific matters over to the scientific method, and to give religious matters over to faith. In saying this, I do not mean to yield the questions of human origins to the evolutionary biologists; instead, I mean to point out the absurdity of any attempt to argue the question of origins as if it were a scientific matter.

In writing his Principia Mathematica Sir Isaac Newton was careful to lay out his laws of motion while expressing Hypotheses Non Fingo ("I make no guesses" regarding the reason for those laws to be true. Noting that the culture in which Newton lived was not inclined to think scientifically, I feel that it was precisely this decision which allowed him to be successful in communicating his Principia to the world.

Modern society, on the other hand, appears to be as dependent on scientific reductionism as Newton's world was dependent on religion. Those who follow the scientific method want evidence and testability, and only those who are willing to submit to that kind of rigor will be welcomed in that discussion.

The problem with that situation is that we don't serve a God who will submit to testing. Other than tithing, I am not aware of any approved topic for testing God. Likewise, if He is really invisible or infinite (or both), measurement would not be possible either. You should also expect that miracles -- including the resurrection of Christ -- are by definition not reproducible.

Taking this one step further, those of us in the community of faith should not expect those in the community of science to be able to span the gap between science (describing what can happen) and history (describing what did happen). Thus, if you want to talk about Christ, you should expect to take some heat from those who don't follow your system of logic. This doesn't mean that your cause is hopeless; you simply have to wait for the "aha moment" when people are willing to speak about the bigger picture.

As a man who lives with one foot in each community, I run into this dichotomy on an almost daily basis. Does this make me bilingual?

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

In a previous post, I spoke at length about the significance of marriage and its implications for me as a man. Despite this, we live in a culture rampant divorce where one-third of people who get married eventually divorce, a rate that is shared between Christians and non-believers alike. This bothers me. And I don't think I'm the only one who shares that opinion.

A strong view of marriage and divorce was taught by Jesus, even when it wasn't popular. God hates divorce, plain and simple. If I want to be biblical in my views, then, I need to agree with him.

When I say that, however, I need to be very careful not to let any one misinterpret that sentence, and think I said that God hates divorced people. I didn't say that. And if you're one of those people who had to leave a marriage because of an abusive or adulterous spouse, I particularly feel for you, because you're the victim. For other cases, yes, the Bible calls it sin. But (big shock here, folks), I have sinned too -- my sins just aren't quite so visible.

Having said that, though, I want to get back to the original point of this post, which was to explore the reasons why God would be so strongly pro-marriage and anti-divorce. While I certainly don't claim exclusive access to the throne of God on this topic, here's a couple of thoughts that might explain what He's up to:

• Guys aren't terribly relational. Even the highly-interactive ones like me could just shut down and refuse to tell anyone anything deeply personal. Having my wife around forces me to relate, and that's good for me.


• Marriage is good for kids. Fathers hear this: regular child support payments aren't enough. Your sons need to see what it takes to be a man, and your daughters need to know how to relate to a man. Deal with it.


• Marriage is one of those images on earth that are supposed to show us how God relates to us. If we break up a marriage, we imply that God might cut us off -- and that's not how he works.

This last item is a delicate subject, and perhaps one of the more controversial points I have expressed here. It is a popular conviction that people can believe in Christ, become a Christian, and later fall away and stop believing. I just don't see it. From what I can see, salvation is a concept embedded in eternity; if God can see that we won't be saved on the Last Day, we never were, even if people thought we were.

From a perspective of marriage, however, God has a distinct advantage over us. That is, He knows our hearts, and He doesn't start a bad marriage. The rest of us make mistakes, and sometimes we have to live with the result of those mistakes. And despite what MasterCard says, "for the rest of us, there's grace."

Higher Mathematics

God's mathematics are nothing like ours. You only have to look at Gideon's army or the story of the loaves and fishes to realize that He doesn't think about numbers the way we do. Having said that, I don't think anything is as incomprehensible as the "1 + 1 = 1" mathematics behind a biblical marriage:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. (Genesis 2:24)

It's a fairly well known verse, and we quote it readily when talking about marriage; but have you ever considered the implications? When Job loses everything he has, all of his possessions are stolen or destroyed, and his children die. But only when Satan is allowed to attack his body do we hear Job's wife say "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die."

As a man, this is particularly poignant to me; whether I like it or not, discord between me and my wife tears at who I am. For years we've been reading about studies that show how married men live longer than those who are single. Some assert that this is because married men are more likely to take care of their own health. IMHO, that's one reason, but another might be simpler: "It is not good for the man to be alone." (Genesis 2:18).

I've been thinking hard about this for a bit, and I'm convinced that God wasn't correcting a mistake when He made the need for marriage. I think it was part of the original design specification.

This has significant implications for our view of marriage and divorce, but this post has gone on long enough, and I'll have to save those thoughts for another time.

A new year's resolution

Generally speaking, I don't like New Year's resolutions. They seem somehow false to me, so I haven't done them in the past. It's similar to the celebration of Lent, which I gave up (for Lent) before I ever started. But I digress...

Having had a week to cool off over the whole Mark Teixeira free-agency signing, I know understand that there is no way Boston could ever have signed him. He was apparently still upset at the Sox for how Dan Duquette treated him in the draft, and was playing them to get more money from NYY, where he really wanted to go. I'm not surprised that a limbless reptile like Scott Boras would be involved in such a ploy, but I'm disappointed in Tex, whom I'd heard was a stand-up guy.

Knowing this, I hereby make my first-ever New Year's resolution: "I will trust Theo Epstein and John Henry this year."

Repeat it with me, Red Sox Nation. Theo knows more than I do about the business of baseball. When John Henry says we're out of the running on the Teixeira sweepstakes, he knows what he's talking about. They got us a pair of World Series titles, and they can do it again. If not in 2009, then soon.

Given that my tax dollars are helping to fund the Yankees' new stadium, though, I might need another resolution, to be patient. That could be hard.