The bad and good

First comes an exercise in stupidity. The title really says it all. I really can't improve on it!
PETA Urges Ben & Jerry's To Use Human Milk

Then something a bit better. A couple different good points in here.
If Your Right Eye Causes You To Sin

Massaging climate data

Watts Up With That nails it again.

I'll bet people think that the temperature averages are just that - the average of the temperatures of the recording stations. Ha! Don't be ridiculous. You can't just do that! You have to massage the numbers before they're of any use.

For this and other reasons, I'm beginning to seriously think that ground-based temperature recordings ought to be essentially tossed out of any scientific use. I have no doubt that they could be of use if collected and handled properly, but with all the lousy measurement sites (not a small fraction by any means) and the fiddle diddling that they receive after collection, there's no way that they can be used in anything close to the precise levels that they're being used.

Unfortunately, the fractions of a degree temperature rise (that happen to be well inside margins of error) are being used to claim the world is embarking on runaway global warming. Of course, it's all due to humans too.

Economics of 700 billion dollars

Our current debt is $9.8 trillion, not including Social Security.

The requested bailout is $0.7 trillion - a 7% increase in one shot.

Now there are some arguments that this won't be as bad as it sounds - those funds will be used to buy up bad assets which can then eventually be sold again to recoop some of the money. Sure, there would be a loss of some sort, but it won't be a full $700 billion loss. Hmmm. Not too long ago Merrill Lynch sold "assets" like the assets the govt would be buying. It sold them for $.22 cents on the dollar - a 78% loss. Those "assets" have fallen further since then with estimates running between another 30% drop in value - an original $1000 is now only worth $150.

So, the govt will be buying $700bn worth of assets that is only worth $105bn. I'm so glad to know that the govt won't be losing the full $700bn - only $595bn. Whew! I was worried there! Losing only $595bn is fine. (sarcasm there)

However, there's a part of this that isn't quite as obvious. The $700 billion is a revolving line of credit - the Fed is only allowed to have $700bn "invested" in these assets at one time. They can buy $700bn in assets, sell them for a loss of $595bn, and then go out and buy another $700bn. Rinse and repeat. That means that there's no set limit to how much money the govt could pump out. How far this would go is anyone's guess, but the price tag on this bailout isn't "just" $700bn - it's well up over a trillion dollars.

Paulson's plan that he has put forward for an emergency, rush passage has no oversight at all. This thing is a BAD idea.

So what are the reasons FOR this? Well according to Paulson, the US economy was only hours away from grinding to a complete halt because all the money is tied up in these bad assets that aren't worth much of anything, and it was almost to the point that there was no more money to pass around for loaning out for car loans, house loans, credit card loans, etc! Car loans would stop! Ford and all the auto makers would go bankrupt! Massive unemployment! Housing prices would fall through the floor since no one could buy them except for cash! Credit card companies would start failing! Disaster! Doom! Gloom!

Well, it's sort of hard to refute claims that have no evidence, so I don't have anything to really say about it other than there's no evidence that anything like that was even close to happening. Normally I tend to attribute bad decisions to stupidity on the part of the government, but this one has all the earmarks of someone making a power play.

Oh yeah. And what might happen to the inflation rate if an extra $700 billion or more gets injected? Hint: it's not pretty. That's one of the reasons that the price of oil shot up. Then it dropped when it seems that the bailout might be held up or even not passed at all.

Why I Love the Internet

The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it does tend to bring out the extremes on blogs and message boards. Here is something that seems to epitimize much behavior on the web.



And then there's the response to that: "Just agree to disagree!" (I couldn't find a good comic for that.)

Then the see-above-image-people start attacking the JATD people as morally vacuous and hopelessly baseless in everything they hold to.

The JATD people then respond that the image-people are stupid and live in bizarre boolean worlds where everyone speaks in macros.

The image-people shoot right back that the JATD people obviously don't believe than there is any such thing as truth. They must not belive that 2+2=4!

The conversation devolves from there.

Isn't the Internet wonderful!

Something new every day

Random tidbit. I just ran across the fact that one of the people Paul calls an apostle was a woman - Junia in Romans 16:7. I've got the Greek and Hebrew skills of a slug, but in a quick couple of searches, it is almost universally acknowledged that she is a she and that she was an apostle. There are also records that she was a bishop of Apameia in Syria.

I ran across this in passing when someone said a couple of translators (Piper and Grudem) were trying to change her to a him and say that she was merely known to the apostles. Apparently the attempt earned a pretty solid fisking from several other heavyweight translators. P & G didn't even quite hold it as a position so much as another equally valid translation which they thought should be used instead. Dozens of other translators seem to put together a really solid case that P & G are way off base.

Regardless of the accuracy of one's position, if you genuinely and solidly believe it is true, then you certainly don't need to much fear that someone will run across a dark corner that will completely overturn your worldview. Unfortunately P & G have influence in several translations.

In the same bit of browsing around I ran across a nice summary of the challenges of translations. I can't remember where I saw it, but it went something like this.

Suppose you are translating for a Polynesian island's people somewhere the phrase "I stand at the door and knock," but the people don't have doors on their huts. There are a couple different approaches to the problem. One is to provide exhaustive extra teaching to explain to the Islanders what a door is and what it is to knock and what that signifies. The other is to paraphrase something like "I stand outside your hut and call for you."

The problem is exacerbated when you find out that a subset of the island's people speak a dialect that doesn't use the word "hut". Instead they use "house". The rest of the island's inhabitants use the word "house" too, but their meaning to the word "house" is more like a public building than a personal dwelling. Now what do you do?

Lots of fun.

Anyway, this and several other items I've run across have given me a new appreciation for how difficult translation can be, and also how paraphrases can sometimes carry a much more accurate meaning than the direct, word-for-word translation. Sure, if you feel like going in to study pages and pages of translators' commentary you can discover the meaning in a place where the word-for-word doesn't quite come across right, but for more casual readers the paraphrase can be much more accurate.

Renn Fest 08

It was over a week ago now, but on the 13th we went with some friends to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. It was Scottish weekend, so I got the crack-brained idea that I would like to go with a kilt. I knew that there's no way that I could actually afford the official MacConnell tartan material, so I found a relatively close tartan on Friday night at Hancock Fabrics and started muddling through a kilt-creation project without ever bothering to find out how to properly create/wear a kilt.

Though she had a board meeting that night and got home late to see her husband dressed up in a silly costume, my dear, slightly-addled-for-putting-up-with-me wife stayed up until after midnight helping me fiddle with it.

The result was ... interesting, but I was able to cheat and it didn't come out too horribly bad.



Muchas, muchas gracias to the B family for letting us tag along! As usual, the festival was great with much jousting, juggling, laughing, eating and acting.

I got way too ambitious with that belt, because it doesn't really show up, but it was handmade in the back of the truck on the drive to the festival. Oh well, there's always next year. Hopefully I'll be able to work out a better kilt and a way to show off the belt. In spite of their cheesy appearances, I am inordinately fond of them and plan on using them again.

(and yes, that is an earring you see on me)

The LHC destroying the world

There have been a few stories floating around about how the Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world. There are three media hound crackpots out there who have managed to make enough stink on this that relatively mainstream media has picked up on these stories. Most of the stories say that it is very unlikely that it can destroy the world. That leaves the suggestion in people's minds that there is some small chance that it could actually destroy the world.

One number that was pulled mostly out of thin air is 1% and another is 1 in 50,000,000 (0.00000002%). The 1% number has some people worried and talking about how irresponsible they are to take even a 1% chance on destroying the world. Similar, though to a lesser extent, is the reaction to the 0.00000002% chance. One clever reader to that and multiplied it by the "cost" of 6 billion lives and came up with the "insurance" cost of 120 lives per LHC collision.

Sigh. Stupidity. Then there are the groups that are skeptical of science's understanding of anything and so think that it should never be turned on because no one really knows what could happen because it's all theory. Groan.

So, I did a bit of quick math, went out and Googled the topic and found some actual scientists who said the exact same stuff, only with more concrete figures, and I've put together a not-so-quick summary of what might happen.

I've tried to stick to worst case scenario and not even touch anything that might be even slightly theoretical. As far as I can tell, there's nothing in here that is in the least controversial, in fact most of it is simple algebra-level math. I had to go look up how big the black holes would be, and ran across a couple other details, like how they would be really spinning and how that would affect things.

What I "know" about black holes is pretty small. However, what I do know is how to take the absolute worst case scenarios and see what they would do. I don't know what truly will happen - it's still a lot of theory - but I can take the worst case scenario and see what would happen.

So, worst case scenario: micro black holes (mBH) generated by the millions with each LHC collision and they don't evaporate like Susskind and Hawking say they should. (and that theory is VERY strong, not quite Theory of Relativity strong, but still very reliable)

First off, these things are tiny. Comparing these things to an atomic nucleus is like comparing a marble to an elephant. In this case the elephant (atomic nucleus) is mostly space with three dust specks (quarks) floating around inside. Scatter these elephants miles apart from each other, and then shoot your marble black hole through. That's the analogy of the mBH going through the earth.

Mathematically I (and others) can calculate the odds of the mBH hitting one of those specks of dust. The density of iron (Earth) is 7870 kg/m^3 which means roughly 8.7×10^28 nucleons per m^3. The mBH's Schwartzchild radius (size of effect) would be about 10^-18 m for a 1 Teravolt mBH (the estimated mBH that might be made from the LHC). That means its cross section is about 10^-36 sq m.

Using those and some basic math, you can tell that on average the mBH will encounter a nucleus every 100,000 km (100,000 km travel distance × 10^-36 sq m cross section × density of nucleons of 8.7×10^28 nucleons per m^3 equals one nucleon). The nucleus is mostly empty space with some quarks floating around, and the odds are around 1 in 10^3 that the mBH will actually affect the nucleus even when it flies right through. (ratio of Schwartzchild radius to size of nucleus) So the mBH will need to travel around 100,000,000 km through the earth before affecting even a single atom. (earth is only 12,700 km in diameter)

Most of the mBH, if they actually exist, would be generated with a velocity close to the speed of light and would fly away never to be seen again. I don't know how to calculate the % that would be generated with a velocity less than Earth's escape velocity, but others do and their numbers vary, but even the largest percentage is 1 in a hundred billion. Remember, most of them would have velocities of appreciable fractions of the speed of light (c) while Earth's escape velocity is only 0.00004% of c. The probability distribution of mBH beam and transverse velocity is a typical bell curve, with the top of the curve around .01c to .2c (1% to 20% of c) and by the time the percentages of the bell curve get down to 0.00004% of c, the chances are 1 in a billion billions. (the place I got this didn't give the exact numbers, so I was having to guesstimate based on the image of their plot)

So, in the worst case scenario of each LHC collision creating a million mBH that don't evaporate, it would take millions of LHC collisions before even 1 would start orbiting the earth, passing through it every LONG once in a while. (the LHC will only run thousands of collisions over its lifetime) Remember, one of the mBHs needs to pass through 7900 Earths to interact with one quark, and most of the time the mBH would be orbiting earth in some sort of highly elliptical orbit that would mostly be through space, occasionally happening to pass through the earth.

Now what happens when the mBH does interact with a quark in the 1 in 7900 orbits? (saying each orbit took it directly through the earth, and remembering that each orbit takes days to years) No one knows for sure, but they can rule out some possibilities. The mBHs would be generated with MASSIVE spin; there's no ifs about that - basic conservation of momentum. The behavior can be described with a sink drain analogy. The water going down the drain spins around and even something moving straight toward it gets spun off to the side with the water before it starts orbiting around the drain and finally going down. That's with a drain that is standing still. With the mBH that is spinning and moving very quickly along, the quark would never be sucked in, rather it would be spun off to the side, and the mBH would pass on by without "eating" the quark. They don't know what that would do to the atom, but at worst it might make the particular proton or neutron decay. At best, it makes the proton or neutron wiggle a bit. The mBH might lose a bit of speed - a REALLY tiny bit of speed. Give it a not-so-few trillion interactions and maybe it will slow down, but even if it were sitting at rest at the middle of the earth, it still wouldn't be gobbling up anything because the atoms would still be rapidly moving in relation to the mBH.

All that stuff was taking the absolutely WORST possible case, and even then the world can't be destroyed. Scientists don't really know for sure what will happen, but they can rule out things that can't happen.

Summary:
One mBH generated that would orbit around and through the earth in millions of LHC runs. (there will only be thousands of runs) That mBH would only affect one atom in passing through the diameter of the earth 7900 times. Even then it wouldn't "eat" the atom. Let's pretend it does eat one of the protons. It will need to eat 1,000,000 protons to grow to just the size of a proton, and even then it won't start some sort of geometric growth to gobble up the earth.

That's why scientists and I can say with certainty that even though we don't know what will happen, we can most certainly know what won't happen. Even if the worst does happen, the universe will have long since vanished before some mBH can devour Earth.

Some of these calculations I ran myself, and some were found in various papers and textbooks. There are even some science blogs/articles out there who run through the same basic thing.

For a bit of humor, here's a webcam of the LHC. Ahhhhh!

What I've read today

Waiting for 1.4 GB downloads is a pain in the neck, even at 600 to 900 KB/s. So, I got some reading done that normally would have waited for lunch time. I guess I'm on a theological bent at the moment, at least that's what my reading seems to reflect. Beyond that, I'm in an anti-political mood too, so that probably trimmed down my reading a bit.

(and then I got slammed with a half-dozen different items and I am just now [5:41PM] restarting this post)

First off, here's some of the update on Orissa, and the violence against Christians that is going on there. The significance of this list is that they've gone through and verified these happenings. The list is impressive, especially considering that there is very likely much more going on than what this lists.

Orissa Christian Persecution Fact Finding Report

On a similar note, IM posts about an African student who was Muslim but became a Christian while at IM's college. The student is worried about heading back to Africa and her family and the possible/probable persecution there. That's why I am glad this gal had much more wise people around her to help than me. Really, how would you seriously discuss that with her?

Since I've mentioned IM, here is a post from him that's an interview with a popular blogger who expressed some dissatisfaction with her church, and with some of the general aspects of Christian, megachurch culture. (a culture even small churches like to emulate) I might as well link over to the blogger's original post. IM suggested reading it first, but I would suggest reading the interview first, and then the original post. (make sure you get them both) The interview was well enough done that the original isn't necessary to appreciate the interview and what is being said.

On IM's other blog, Jesus Shaped Spirituality, he wrote a great essay on how he tries to apply Jesus Shape-ness. I have a suspicion that the thread will veer off onto a Lutheran-version-of-Eucharist-is-correct sort of direction, but the essay is excellent.

Another view from India

Another Word for Shame

I hope I'm not boring anyone with stuff so trivial to our lives as brothers and sisters being murdered, beaten, raped, burned out, and driven out for the cause of Christ.

If not, read the above link and then this link below. The one below has a wonderful set of comments.

Mild Case of Christian versus Hindu Violence (the title is sarcastic)