Rick Melick's Blog

11:59pm: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:25:00 +0000

SUMMARY
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Al Bartlett, the retired Professor of Physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder, examines the arithmetic of steady growth, continued over modest periods of time, in a finite environment. These concepts are applied to populations and to fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal, but apply to other areas as well.

TRANSCRIPT (mp3)
Edited by Denis Morel

Thank you very much, Hugh.

It's a great pleasure to be here, and to have a chance just to share with you some very simple ideas about the problems we're facing. Some of these problems are local, some are national, some are global.

They're all tied together. They're tied together by arithmetic, and the arithmetic isn't very difficult. What I hope to do is, I hope to be able to convince you that the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Well, you say, what's the exponential function?

This is a mathematical function that you'd write down if you're going to describe the size of anything that was growing steadily. If you had something growing 5% per year, you'd write the exponential function to show how large that growing quantity was, year after year. And so we're talking about a situation where the time that's required for the growing quantity to increase by a fixed fraction is a constant: 5% per year, the 5% is a fixed fraction, the “per year” is a fixed length of time. So that's what we want to talk about: its just ordinary steady growth.

Well, if it takes a fixed length of time to grow 5%, it follows it takes a longer fixed length of time to grow 100%. That longer time's called the doubling time and we need to know how you calculate the doubling time. It's easy.

You just take the number 70, divide it by the percent growth per unit time and that gives you the doubling time. So our example of 5% per year, you divide the 5 into 70, you find that growing quantity will double in size every 14 years.

Well, you might ask, where did the 70 come from? The answer is that it's approximately 100 multiplied by the natural logarithm of two. If you wanted the time to triple, you'd use the natural logarithm of three. So it's all very logical. But you don't have to remember where it came from, just remember 70.

I wish we could get every person to make this mental calculation every time we see a percent growth rate of anything in a news story. For example, if you saw a story that said things had been growing 7% per year for several recent years, you wouldn't bat an eyelash. But when you see a headline that says crime has doubled in a decade, you say “My heavens, what's happening?”

OK, what is happening? 7% growth per year: divide the seven into 70, the doubling time is ten years. But notice, if you want to write a headline to get people's attention, you'd never write “Crime Growing 7% Per Year,” nobody would know what it means. Now, do you know what 7% means?

Let's take an example, another example from Colorado. The cost of an all-day lift ticket to ski at Vail has been growing about 7% per year ever since Vail first opened in 1963. At that time you paid $5 for an all-day lift ticket. What's the doubling time for 7% growth? Ten years. So what was the cost ten years later in 1973? (showing slides of rapidly increasing prices) Ten years later in 1983? Ten years later in 1993? What was it last year in 2003, and what do we have to look forward to? (shows "2003: $80; 2013: $160; 2023: $320; audience laughter)

This is what 7% means. Most people don't have a clue. And how is Vail doing? They're pretty much on schedule.

So let's look at a generic graph of something that’s growing steadily. After one doubling time, the growing quantity is up to twice its initial size. Two doubling times, it's up to four times its initial size. Then it goes to 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, in ten doubling times it's a thousand times larger than when it started. You can see if you try to make a graph of that on ordinary graph paper, the graph’s gonna go right through the ceiling.

Now let me give you an example to show the enormous numbers you can get with just a modest number of doublings.

Legend has it that the game of chess was invented by a mathematician who worked for a king. The king was very pleased. He said, “I want to reward you.” The mathematician said “My needs are modest. Please take my new chess board and on the first square, place one grain of wheat. On the next square, double the one to make two. On the next square, double the two to make four. Just keep doubling till you've doubled for every square, that will be an adequate payment.” We can guess the king thought, “This foolish man. I was ready to give him a real reward; all he asked for was just a few grains of wheat.”

But let's see what is involved in this. We know there are eight grains on the fourth square. I can get this number, eight, by multiplying three twos together. It's 2x2x2, it's one 2 less than the number of the square. Now that continues in each case. So on the last square, I’d find the number of grains by multiplying 63 twos together.

Now let’s look at the way the totals build up. When we add one grain on the first square, the total on the board is one. We add two grains, that makes a total of three. We put on four grains, now the total is seven. Seven is a grain less than eight, it's a grain less than three twos multiplied together. Fifteen is a grain less than four twos multiplied together. That continues in each case, so when we’re done, the total number of grains will be one grain less than the number I get multiplying 64 twos together. My question is, how much wheat is that?

You know, would that be a nice pile here in the room? Would it fill the building? Would it cover the county to a depth of two meters? How much wheat are we talking about?

The answer is, it's roughly 400 times the 1990 worldwide harvest of wheat. That could be more wheat than humans have harvested in the entire history of the earth. You say, “How did you get such a big number?” and the answer is, it was simple. We just started with one grain, but we let the number grow steadily till it had doubled a mere 63 times.

Now there's something else that’s very important: the growth in any doubling time is greater than the total of all the preceding growth. For example, when I put eight grains on the 4th square, the eight is larger than the total of seven that were already there. I put 32 grains on the 6th square. The 32 is larger than the total of 31 that were already there. Every time the growing quantity doubles, it takes more than all you’d used in all the proceeding growth.

Well, let’s translate that into the energy crisis. Here’s an ad from the year 1975. It asks the question “Could America run out of electricity?” America depends on electricity. Our need for electricity actually doubles every 10 or 12 years. That's an accurate reflection of a very long history of steady growth of the electric industry in this country, growth at a rate of around 7% per year, which gives you doubling every 10 years.

Now, with all that history of growth, they just expected the growth would go on, forever. Fortunately it stopped, not because anyone understood arithmetic, it stopped for other reasons. Well, let's ask “What if?” Suppose the growth had continued? Then we would see here the thing we just saw with the chess board. In the ten years following the appearance of this ad, in that decade, the amount of electrical energy we would have consumed in this country would have been greater than the total of all of the electrical energy we had ever consumed in the entire proceeding history of the steady growth of that industry in this country.

Now, did you realise that anything as completely acceptable as 7% growth per year could give such an incredible consequence? That in just ten years you'd use more than the total of all that had been used in all the proceeding growth?

Well, that's exactly what President Carter was referring to in his speech on energy. One of his statements was this: he said, “In each of those decades (1950s and 1960s) more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history.” By itself that's a stunning statement.

Now you can understand it. The president was telling us the simple consequence of the arithmetic of 7% growth each year in world oil consumption, and that was the historic figure up until the 1970s.

There's another beautiful consequence of this arithmetic. If you take 70 years as a period of time—and note that that's roughly one human lifetime—then any percent growth continued steadily for 70 years gives you an overall increase by a factor that's very easy to calculate. For example, 4% per year for 70 years, you find the factor by multiplying four twos together, it's a factor of 16.

A few years ago, one of the newspapers of my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, quizzed the nine members of the Boulder City Council and asked them, “What rate of growth of Boulder's population do you think it would be good to have in the coming years?” Well, the nine members of the Boulder City council gave answers ranging from a low of 1% per year. Now, that happens to match the present rate of growth of the population of the United States. We are not at zero population growth. Right now, the number of Americans increases every year by over three million people. No member of the council said Boulder should grow less rapidly than the United States is growing.

Now, the highest answer any council member gave was 5% per year. You know, I felt compelled, I had to write him a letter and say, “Did you know that 5% per year for just 70 … ” I can remember when 70 years used to seem like an awful long time, it just doesn't seem so long now. (audience laughter). Well, that means Boulder's population would increase by a factor of 32. That is, where today we have one overloaded sewer treatment plant, in 70 years, we'd need 32 overloaded sewer treatment plants.

Now did you realise that anything as completely all-American as 5% growth per year could give such an incredible consequence in such a modest period of time? Our city council people have zero understanding of this very simple arithmetic.

Well, a few years ago, I had a class of non-science students. We were interested in problems of science and society. We spent a lot of time learning to use semi-logarithmic graph paper. It's printed in such a way that these equal intervals on the vertical scale each represent an increase by a factor of 10. So you go from one thousand to ten thousand to a hundred thousand, and the reason you use this special paper is that on this paper, a straight line represents steady growth.

Now, we worked a lot of examples. I said to the students, “Let’s talk about inflation, let’s talk about 7% per year.” It wasn't this high when we did this, it's been higher since then, fortunately it's lower now. And I said to the students, as I can say to you, you have roughly sixty years life expectancy ahead of you. Let’s see what some common things will cost if we have 60 years of 7% annual inflation.

The students found that a 55-cent gallon of gasoline will cost $35.20; $2.50 for a movie will be $160; the $15 sack of groceries my mother used to buy for a dollar and a quarter, that will be $960; a $100 suit of clothes, $6,400; a $4000 automobile will cost a quarter of a million dollars; and a $45,000 home will cost nearly 3 million dollars.

Well, I gave the students these data (shows overhead). These came from a Blue Cross, Blue Shield ad. The ad appeared in Newsweek magazine and the ad gave these figures to show the cost escalation of gall bladder surgery in the years since 1950, when that surgery cost $361. I said, “Make a semi logarithmic plot, let’s see what's happening.” The students found that the first four points lined up on a straight line whose slope indicated inflation of about 6% per year, but the fourth, fifth, and sixth were on a steeper line, almost 10% inflation per year. Well, then I said to the students, “Run that steeper line on out to the year 2000, let’s get an idea of what gall bladder surgery might cost,” and this was, 2000 was four years ago—the answer is $25,000. The lesson there is awfully clear: if you're thinking about gall bladder surgery, do it now. (audience laughter)

In the summer of 1986, the news reports indicated that the world population had reached the number of five billion people growing at the rate of 1.7% per year. Well, your reaction to 1.7% might be to say “Well, that's so small, nothing bad could ever happen at 1.7% per year.” So you calculate the doubling time, you find it’s only 41 years. Now, that was back in 1986; more recently in 1999, we read that the world population had grown from five billion to six billion . The good news is that the growth rate had dropped from 1.7% to 1.3% per year. The bad news is that in spite of the drop in the growth rate, the world population today is increasing by about 75 million additional people every year.

Now, if this current modest 1.3% per year could continue, the world population would grow to a density of one person per square meter on the dry land surface of the earth in just 780 years, and the mass of people would equal the mass of the earth in just 2400 years. Well, we can smile at those, we know they couldn't happen. This one make for a cute cartoon; the caption says, “Excuse me sir, but I am prepared to make you a rather attractive offer for your square.”

There's a very profound lesson in that cartoon. The lesson is that zero population growth is going to happen. Now, we can debate whether we like zero population growth or don't like it, it’s going to happen. Whether we debate it or not, whether we like it or not, it’s absolutely certain. People could never live at that density on the dry land surface of the earth. Therefore, today’s high birth rates will drop; today’s low death rates will rise till they have exactly the same numerical value. That will certainly be in a time short compared to 780 years. So maybe you're wondering then, what options are available if we wanted to address the problem.

In the left hand column, I’ve listed some of those things that we should encourage if we want to raise the rate of growth of population and in so doing, make the problem worse. Just look at the list. Everything in the list is as sacred as motherhood. There's immigration, medicine, public health, sanitation. These are all devoted to the humane goals of lowering the death rate and that’s very important to me, if it’s my death they’re lowering. But then I’ve got to realise that anything that just lowers the death rate makes the population problem worse.

There’s peace, law and order; scientific agriculture has lowered the death rate due to famine—that just makes the population problem worse. It’s widely reported that the 55 mph speed limit saved thousands of lives—that just makes the population problem worse. Clean air makes it worse.

Now, in this column are some of the things we should encourage if we want to lower the rate of growth of population and in so doing, help solve the population problem. Well, there’s abstention, contraception, abortion, small families, stop immigration, disease, war, murder, famine, accidents. Now, smoking clearly raises the death rate; well, that helps solve the problem.

Remember our conclusion from the cartoon of one person per square meter; we concluded that zero population growth is going to happen. Let’s state that conclusion in other terms and say it’s obvious nature is going to choose from the right hand list and we don't have to do anything—except be prepared to live with whatever nature chooses from that right hand list. Or we can exercise the one option that’s open to us, and that option is to choose first from the right hand list. We gotta find something here we can go out and campaign for. Anyone here for promoting disease? (audience laughter)

We now have the capability of incredible war; would you like more murder, more famine, more accidents? Well, here we can see the human dilemma—everything we regard as good makes the population problem worse, everything we regard as bad helps solve the problem. There is a dilemma if ever there was one.

The one remaining question is education: does it go in the left hand column or the right hand column? I’d have to say thus far in this country it’s been in the left hand column—it's done very little to reduce ignorance of the problem.

So where do we start? Well, let’s start in Boulder, Colorado. Here’s my home town. There’s the 1950 census figure, 1960, 1970—in that period of twenty years, the average growth rate of Boulder’s population was 6% per year. With big efforts, we’ve been able to slow the growth somewhat. There’s the 2000 census figure. I’d like to ask people: let’s start with that 2000 figure, go another 70 years—one human life time—and ask: what rate of growth would we need in Boulder’s population in the next 70 years so that at the end of 70 years, the population of Boulder would equal today’s population of your choice of major American cities?

Boulder in 70 years could be as big as Boston is today if we just grew 2.58% per year. Now, if we thought Detroit was a better model, we’ll have to shoot for 31?4% per year. Remember the historic figure on the preceding slide, 6% per year? If that could continue for one lifetime, the population of Boulder would be larger than the population of Los Angeles. Well, I’ll just tell you, you couldn’t put the population of Los Angles in the Boulder valley. Therefore it’s obvious, Boulder’s population growth is going to stop and the only question is, will we be able to stop it while there is still some open space, or will we wait until it’s wall-to-wall people and we’re all choking to death?

Now, every once in a while somebody says to me, “But you know, a bigger city might be a better city,” and I have to say, “Wait a minute, we’ve done that experiment!” We don’t need to wonder what will be the effect of growth on Boulder because Boulder tomorrow can be seen in Los Angeles today. And for the price of an airplane ticket, we can step 70 years into the future and see exactly what it’s like. What is it like? There’s an interesting headline from Los Angeles. (“…carcinogens in air…”) Maybe that has something to do with this headline from Los Angeles. (“Smog kills 1,600 annually…”)

So how are we doing in Colorado? Well, we’re the growth capital of the USA and proud of it. The Rocky Mountain News tells us to expect another million people in the Front Range in the next 20 years, and what are the consequences of all this? (“Denver's traffic…3rd worst in US…”) These are totally predictable, there are no surprises here, we know exactly what happens when you crowd more people into an area.

Well, as you can imagine, growth control is very controversial, and I treasure the letter from which these quotations are taken. Now, this letter was written to me by a leading citizen of our community. He’s a leading proponent of “controlled growth.” “Controlled growth” just means “growth.” This man writes, “I take no exception to your arguments regarding exponential growth.” “I don't believe the exponential argument is valid at the local level.”

So you see, arithmetic doesn't hold in Boulder. (audience laughs) I have to admit, that man has a degree from the University of Colorado. It’s not a degree in mathematics, in science, or in engineering. All right, let’s look now at what happens when we have this kind of steady growth in a finite environment.

Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.

I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.

And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?

Now, in the ongoing controversy over growth in Boulder, someone wrote to the newspaper some years ago and said “Look, there’s no problem with population growth in Boulder, because,” the writer said, “we have fifteen times as much open space as we've already used.” So let me ask you, what time was it in Boulder when the open space was fifteen times the amount of space we’d already used? The answer is, it was four minutes before 12:00 in Boulder Valley. Well, suppose that at 2 minutes before 12:00, some of the bacteria realise they’re running out of space, so they launch a great search for new bottles. They search offshore on the outer continental shelf and in the overthrust belt and in the Arctic, and they find three new bottles. Now that’s an incredible discovery, that’s three times the total amount of resource they ever knew about before. They now have four bottles, before their discovery, there was only one. Now surely this will give them a sustainable society, won’t it?

You know what the third question is: how long can the growth continue as a result of this magnificent discovery? Well, look at the score: at 12:00 noon, one bottle is filled, there are three to go; 12:01, two bottles are filled, there are two to go; and at 12:02, all four are filled and that’s the end of the line.

Now, you don't need any more arithmetic than this to evaluate the absolutely contradictory statements that we’ve all heard and read from experts who tell us in one breath we can go on increasing our rates of consumption of fossil fuels, in the next breath they say “Don't worry, we will always be able to make the discoveries of new resources that we need to meet the requirements of that growth.”

Well, a few years ago in Washington, our energy secretary observed that in the energy crisis, “we have a classic case of exponential growth against a finite source.” So let's look now at some of these finite sources. We turn to the work of the late Dr. M. King Hubbert. He’s plotted here a semi-logarithmic graph of world oil production. You can see the lines have been approximately straight for about 100 years, clear up here to 1970, average growth rate very close to 7% per year. So it’s logical to ask, well, how much longer could that 7% growth continue? That’s answered by the numbers in this table (shows slide). The numbers in the top line tell us that in the year 1973, world oil production was 20 billion barrels; the total production in all of history, 300 billion; the remaining reserves, 1700 billion.

Now, those are data. The rest of this table is just calculated out assuming the historic 7% growth continued in the years following 1973 exactly as it had been for the proceeding 100 years.

Now, in fact the growth stopped; it stopped because OPEC raised their oil prices. So we’re asking here, what if? Suppose we just decided to stay on that 7% growth curve? Let’s go back to 1981. By 1981 on the 7% curve, the total usage in all of history would add up to 500 billion barrels; the remaining reserves, 1500 billion. At that point, the remaining reserves are three times the total of everything we’d used in all of history. That’s an enormous reserve, but what time is it when the remaining reserve is three times the total of all you’ve used in all of history? The answer is, it’s two minutes before 12:00.

We know for 7% growth, the doubling time is 10 years. We go from 1981 to 1991. By 1991 on the 7% curve, the total usage in all of history would add up to 1000 billion barrels; there would be 1000 billion left. At that point, the remaining oil would be equal in quantity to the total of everything we’d used in the entire history of the oil industry on this earth, 130 years of oil consumption. You'd say, “That’s an enormous reserve.” But what time is it when the remaining reserve is equal to all you’ve used in all of history? And the answer is, it’s one minute before 12:00. So we go one more decade to the turn of the century—that’s like right now—that’s when 7% would finish using up the oil reserves of the earth.

So let's look at this in a very nice graphical way. Suppose the area of this tiny rectangle represents all the oil we used on this earth before 1940; then in the decade of the 40s, we used this much (uncovering part of chart): that's equal to all that had been used in all of history. In the decade of the 50s, we used this much (uncovering more of chart) : that's equal to all that had been used in all of history. In the decade of the 60s, we used this much (uncovering more of chart): again that's equal to the total of all the proceeding usage. Here we see graphically what President Carter told us. Now, if that 7% growth had continued through the 70s. 80s, and 90s, there's what we’d need (uncovering rest of chart) . But that's all the oil there is.

Now, there’s a widely held belief that if you throw enough money at holes in the ground, oil is sure to come up. Well, there will be discoveries in new oil; there may be major discoveries. But look: we would have to discover this much new oil if we would have that 7% growth continue ten more years. Ask yourself: what do you think is the chance that oil discovered after the close of our meeting today will be in an amount equal to the total of all we’ve known about in all of history? And then realise if all that new oil could be found, that would be sufficient to let the historic 7% growth continue ten more years.

Well, it’s interesting to see what the experts say. Here’s from an interview in Time magazine, an interview with one of the most widely quoted oil experts in all of Texas. They asked him, “But haven’t many of our bigger fields been drilled nearly dry?” And he responds, saying “There’s still as much oil to be found in the US as has ever been produced.” Now, lets assume he’s right. What time is it? And the answer: one minute before 12:00. I’ve read several things this guy’s written; I don't think he has any understanding of this very simple arithmetic.

Well, in the energy crisis about thirty years ago, we saw ads such as this (shows slide). This is from the American Electric Power Company. It’s a bit reassuring, sort of saying, now, don’t worry too much, because “we’re sitting on half of the world’s known supply of coal, enough for over 500 years.” Well, where did that “500 year” figure come from? It may have had its origin in this report to the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Senate, because in that report we find this sentence: “At current levels of output and recovery, these American coal reserves can be expected to last more than 500 years.”

There is one of the most dangerous statements in the literature. It’s dangerous because it’s true. It isn’t the truth that makes it dangerous, the danger lies in the fact that people take the sentence apart: they just say coal will last 500 years. They forget the caveat with which the sentence started. Now, what were those opening words? “At current levels.” What does that mean? That means if—and only if—we maintain zero growth of coal production.

So let’s look at a few numbers. We go to the Annual Energy Review, published by the Department of Energy. They give this (pointing) as the coal demonstrated reserve base in the United States. It has a footnote that says “about half the demonstrated reserve base… is estimated to be recoverable.” You cannot recover —get out of the ground and use—100% of the coal that’s there. So this number then, is ½of this number (pointing). We’ll come back to those in just a moment. The report also tells us that in 1971, we were mining coal at this rate, twenty years later at this rate (pointing). Put those numbers together, the average growth rate of coal production in that twenty years: 2.86% per year. And so we have to ask, well, how long would a resource last if you have steady growth in the rate of consumption until the last bit of it is used?

I’ll show you the equation here for the expiration time. I’ll tell you it takes first year college calculus to derive that equation, so it can’t be very difficult. You know, I have a feeling there must be dozens of people in this country who’ve had first year college calculus, but let me suggest, I think that equation is probably the best-kept scientific secret of the century!

Now, let me show you why. If you use that equation to calculate the life expectancy of the reserve base, or of the 1?2 they think is recoverable, for different steady rates of growth, you find if the growth rate is zero, the small estimate would go about 240 years and the large one would go close to 500 years. So that report to the Congress was correct. But look what we get if we plug in steady growth. Back in the 1960s, it was our national goal to achieve growth of coal production up around 8% per year. If you could achieve that and continue it, coal would last between 37 and 46 years. President Carter cut that goal roughly in half, hoping to reach 4% per year. If that could continue, coal would last between 59 and 75 years. Here’s that 2.86%, the average for the recent period of twenty years. If that could continue, coal would last between 72 and 94 years. That’s within the life expectancy of children born today.

The only way you are going to get anywhere near this widely quoted 500 year figure, is to be able to do simultaneously two highly improbable things: number one, you’ve got to figure out how to use 100% of the coal that is in the ground; number two, you’ve got to figure out how to have 500 years of zero growth of coal production. Look at those figures: those are facts.

Back in the 1970s, there was great national concern about energy. But these concerns disappeared in the 80s. Now, the concerns about energy in the 70s prompted experts, journalists, and scientists to assure the American people that there was no reason to be concerned. So let’s go back now and look at some of those assurances from the 70s so we can see what to expect now that the energy crisis is returning.

Here is the director of the energy division of the Oakridge National Laboratories telling us how expensive it is to import oil, telling us we must have big increases (and) rapid growth in our use of coal. Under these conditions, he estimates, America’s coal reserves are so huge they can last “a minimum of 300 years, probably a maximum of 1000 years.” You’ve just seen the facts, now you see what an expert tells us, and what can you conclude?

There was a three-hour television special on CBS on energy. The reporter said, “By the lowest estimate, we have enough (coal) for 200 years, by the highest, enough for more than 1000 years.” You’ve just seen the facts, now you can see what a journalist tells us after careful study, and what can you conclude?

In the Journal of Chemical Education, on the page for high school chemistry teachers in an article by the scientific staff of the journal, they tell us our proven coal reserves are “enormous” and they give a figure: “these could satisfy present US energy needs for nearly 1000 years.” Well, let's do long division. You take the coal they say is there, divide by what was then the current rate of consumption, you get 180 years. Now they didn’t say “current rate of consumption,” they said “present US energy needs.” Coal today supplies about 1?5, about 20% of the energy we use in this country, so if you’d like to calculate how long this quantity of coal could satisfy present US energy needs, you have to multiply this denominator by five. When you do that you get 36 years. They said nearly 1000 years.

Newsweek magazine, in a cover story on energy, said that at present rates of consumption, we have enough coal for 666.5 years—the point 5 means they think it’ll run out in July instead of January. (audience laughter) If you round that off, and say roughly 600 years, that’s close enough to 500 to lie within the uncertainty of our knowledge of the size of the resource. So with that observation, that's a reasonable statement; but what this lead into was a story about how we have to have major rapid growth in coal consumption. Well, it’s obvious isn’t it? If you have the growth that they’re writing about, it won’t last as long as they said it would last with zero growth. They never mentioned this. I wrote them a long letter, told them I thought it was a serious misrepresentation to give the readers the feeling we can have all this growth that they were writing about and still have coal around for 600 years. I got back a nice form letter; it had nothing to do with what I’d tried to explain to them.

I gave this talk at a high school in Omaha, and after the talk, the high school physics teacher came to me, and he had a booklet. He said, “Have you seen this?” and I hadn't seen it; he said, “Look at this: ‘We've got coal coming out of our ears.’” As reported by Forbes magazine (that's a prominent business magazine), the United States has 437 billion tons of coal reserves. That’s a good number; this is equivalent to a lot of BTUs or it’s “enough energy to keep 100 million large generating plants going for the next 800 years or so…” And the teacher said to me, “How can that be true? That’s one large electric generating plant for every two people in the United States!” I said, “Of course it can’t be true, it’s absolute nonsense. Let’s do long division to see how crazy it is.” So you take the coal they say is there, divide by what was then the current rate of consumption, you find you couldn’t keep that up for 800 years and we hardly at that time had 500 large electric plants—they said it would be good for a 100 million such plants.

Time magazine tells us that “beneath the pit heads of Appalachia and the Ohio Valley, and under the sprawling strip mines of the west, lie coal seams rich enough to meet the country’s power needs for centuries, no matter how much energy consumption may grow.” So I give you a very fundamental observation: don't believe any prediction of the life expectancy of a non-renewable resource until you have confirmed the prediction by repeating the calculation. As a corollary, we have to note that the more optimistic the prediction, the greater is the probability that it’s based on faulty arithmetic or on no arithmetic at all.

Again from Time magazine: “Energy industries agree that to achieve some form of energy self- sufficiency, the US must mine all the coal that it can.” Now think about that for just a moment. Let me paraphrase it: the more rapidly we consume our resources, the more self-sufficient we’ll be. Isn’t that what it says?

David Brower called this the policy of “strength through exhaustion.” Here’s an example of strength through exhaustion: here is William Simon, energy advisor to the president of the United States. Simon says, “We should be trying to get as many holes drilled as possible to get the proven oil reserves.” The more rapidly we can get the last of that oil up out of the ground and finish using it, the better off we’ll be.

So let’s look at Dr Hubbert’s graph for the lower 48 states in oil production, again it’s semi-logarithmic. Here we have a straight line section of steady growth, but for quite a while now, production has fallen below the growth curve, while our demand continued on up this growth curve until the 1970s. It’s obvious the difference between the two curves has to be made up with imports. And it was in early 1995 that we read that the year 1994 was the first year in our nation’s history in which we had to import more oil than we were able to get out of our own ground.

Well, maybe you’re wondering, does it make any sense to imagine that we can have steady growth in the rate of consumption of a resource till the last bit of it was used, then the rate of consumption would plunge abruptly to zero? I say no, that doesn't make sense. Okay, you say, why bother us with the calculation of this expiration time? My answer is this: every segment of our society, our business leaders, government leaders, political leaders, at the local level, state level, national level—every one aspires to maintain a society in which all measures of material consumption continue to grow steadily, year after year after year, world without end.

Since that’s so central to every thing we do, we ought to know where it would lead. On the other hand, we should recognise there’s a better model and again we turn to the work of the late Dr Hubbert. He’s plotted the rate of consumption of resources that have already expired; he finds yes, there is an early period of steady growth in the rate of consumption. But then the rate goes through a maximum and comes back down in a nice symmetric bell-shaped curve. Now, when he did this, some years ago, and fitted it to the oil production in the US, he found at that time we were right there (pointing). We were at the peak; we were halfway through the resource. That’s exactly what that Texas expert said that I quoted a minute ago.

Now, let’s see what it means. It means that from now on, domestic oil production can only go downhill, and it’s downhill all the rest of the way, and it doesn’t matter what they say inside the beltway in Washington DC.

Now, it means we can work hard and put some bumps on the downhill side of the curve; you’ll see there are bumps on the uphill side. The debate is heating up over drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. I’ve seen the estimate that they might find 3.2 billion barrels of oil up there. 3.2 billion is the area of that little tiny square (pointing); that’s less than one year’s consumption in the United States. So let’s look at the curve in this way: the area under the total curve, that represents the total resource in the United States. It’s been divided into three parts: here is the oil we’ve taken from the ground (pointing): we’ve used it, it’s gone. This vertical shaded band, that’s the oil we’ve drilled into: we’ve found it, we’re pumping it today. Shaded in green on the right is the undiscovered oil. We have very good ways now of estimating how much oil remains undiscovered. This is the oil we’ve got to find if we’re going to make it down the curve on schedule.

Now every once in a while somebody says to me, “But you know, a hundred years ago, somebody did a calculation and predicted the US would be out of oil in 25 years.” The calculation must’ve been wrong; therefore, of course, all calculations are wrong. Let’s understand what they did. One hundred years ago, this band of discovered oil was over in here somewhere (points to beginning of curve). All they did was to take the discovered oil, divide it by how rapidly it was being used, and came up with 25 years. They had no idea then how much oil was undiscovered. Well, it’s obvious; you’ve got to make a new calculation every time you make a new discovery. We’re not asking today how long will the discovered oil last, we’re asking about the discovered and the undiscovered—we're now talking about the rest of the oil. And what does the US Geological Survey tell us?

Back in 1984, they said the estimated US supply from undiscovered resources and demonstrated reserves was 36 years at present rates of production, or 19 years in the absence of imports. Five years later in 1989, that 36 years is down to 32 years, the 19 years is down to 16 years. So the numbers are holding together as we march down the right-hand side of the Hubbert curve.

Well, every once in awhile we run into somebody who says we shouldn’t worry about the problem, we can solve it. In this case, we can solve it by growing corn, distilling it into ethanol, and run all the vehicles in the US on ethanol. Lets just look what he says, he says today ethanol production displaces over 43 ½million barrels of imported oil annually. That sounds pretty good doesn't it, until you think. First question you’ve got to ask: 43 ½million barrels, what fraction is that of US vehicle consumption in a year? The answer is, it’s 1%.

You would have to multiply corn production devoted to ethanol by a factor of 100 just to make the numbers look right. There isn't that much total agricultural land in the United States. There’s a bigger problem. It takes diesel fuel to plough the ground to plant the corn, to make the fertiliser to make the corn grow, to tend the corn, to harvest the corn. It takes more energy to distill it. You finally get a gallon of ethanol, you will be lucky if there’s as much energy in the gallon as it took to produce it. In general, it's a loser. But this guy (Paul Harvey) says not to worry, we can solve it that way.

Well, back in 1956, Dr Hubbert addressed a convention of petroleum geologists and engineers. He told them that his calculations led him to believe that “the peak of US oil and gas production could be expected to occur between 1966 and 1971.” No one took him seriously. So let’s see what’s happened. The data here is from the Department of Energy. Here is steady growth (pointing). Here is 1956, when Dr Hubbert did his analysis. He said at that time that peak would occur between 1966-1971. There’s the peak, 1970. It was followed by a very rapid decline. Then the Alaskan pipeline started delivering oil, and it was a partial recovery. That production has now peaked and everything’s going downhill in unison in the right hand side of the curve. And when I go to my home computer to figure out the parameters of the curve that’s the best fit to the data, from that fit it looks to me as though we have consumed ¾of the recoverable oil that was ever in our ground in the United States and we are now coasting downhill on the last 25% of that once enormous resource. So we have to ask about world oil.

Dr Hubbert in 1974 predicted that the peak of world oil would occur around 1995, so lets see what's happened. Here we have the data from the Department of Energy. A long period of steady growth, there’s quite a big drop there (pointing), and then there was a speedy recovery; then an enormous drop and a very slow recovery. Those drops are each due to a price hike from OPEC. Well, it’s clear we’re not yet over the peak, so when I now go to fit the curve, I need one more bit of information before I can do the fit. I have to go to the geology literature and ask the literature, “What do you think is the total amount of oil we will ever find on this earth?” The consensus figure in the literature is 2000 billion barrels. Now, that’s quite uncertain, plus or minus maybe 40 or 50%. If I plug that in and do the fit, the peak is this year (2004). If I assume there is 50% more than the consensus figure, the peak moves back to 2019. If I assume there’s twice as much as the consensus figure, the peak moves back to 2030.

So no matter how you cut it, in your life expectancy, you are going to see the peak of world oil production. And you’ve got to ask yourself, what is life going to be like when we have a declining world production of petroleum, and we have a growing world population, and we have a growing world per capita demand for oil. Think about it.

In the March 1998 issue of Scientific American, there was a major article by two real petroleum geologists. They said this peak would occur before 2010, so we’re all in the same ball park. Now, that article in Scientific American triggered a lot of discussion. Here is an article in Fortune magazine, November 1999, talking about “Oil Forever,” and in that article, we see a criticism of the geologists’ analysis, and this is from an emeritus professor of economics at MIT. And he said, “This analysis (by the geologists) is a piece of foolishness, the world will never run out of oil, not in 10,000 years.” So let's look at what’s been happening.

Here we have two graphs, on one scale, we have here in the graphs, that’s the annual discoveries of oil each year (pointing); here is the annual production of oil each year. Notice since the 1980s, we’ve been producing about twice as much as we’ve been finding. Yet you’ve seen and read and heard statements from PhD non-scientists saying that we have greater resources of petroleum now than ever before in history. What in the world are they smoking? (audience laughter)

Now, here is another look at world oil production, but this is per capita. This is litres per person each day. There is two litres (pointing). A litre is about a quart, and so two litres is about ½gallon. The upper curve assumes there was no growth in the world population since 1920, that it stayed fixed at 1.8 billion. This then is just a copy of that earlier curve. The lower curve uses the actual population of the world, and what you find is that with a growing world population, this curve is pulled down more and more as you go farther to the right. And notice it peaked at about 2.2 litres per person a day in the 1970s. It is now down to about 1.7 litres a person a day, so we can say that on any day any one of us uses more than 1.7 litres of petroleum directly or indirectly, we’re using more than our share. Now, just think about what that means.

Well, we do have to ask about new discoveries. Here is a discussion from about eleven years ago about the largest discovery of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in the past twenty years, an estimated 700 million barrels of oil. That’s a lot of oil, but a lot compared to what? At that time, we were consuming 16.6 million barrels every day in the United States. Divide the 16.6 into 700 and you find that discovery would meet US needs for 42 days.

On the front page of the Wall Street Journal, we read about the new Hibernia oil field off the south coast of Newfoundland. Please read this one line in the headline: “Now it will last fifty years.” That gives you some kind of a feeling for what amount of oil may be up there. So let’s follow up and read from that story in the Wall Street Journal: “The Hibernia field, one of the largest oil discoveries in North America in decades, should deliver its first oil by the end of the year. At least 20 more fields may follow, offering well over one billion barrels of high-quality crude, promising a steady flow of oil just a quick tanker-run away from the energy-thirsty East Coast”.

So let’s do some arithmetic. We take the amount of oil that we think is up there, a billion barrels. Now the US consumption has grown to about 18 million barrels a day; divide the 18 million into the billion and you find that would meet US needs for 56 days.

Now, what was the impression you had from that line in the headline in the Wall Street Journal? And as you think about this, think about the definition of modern agriculture: it's “the use of land to convert petroleum into food.” And we can see the end of the petroleum.

Dr Hubbert testified before a committee of the Congress. He told them that “the exponential phase of the industrial growth which has dominated human activities during the last couple of centuries is now drawing to a close. Yet during the last two centuries of unbroken industrial growth, we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture.” I would say, it’s more than a culture: it’s our national religion, because we worship growth. Pick up any newspaper; you’ll see headlines such as this: "State forecasts ‘robust’ growth."

Have you ever heard of a physician diagnosing a cancer in a patient and telling the patient, “You have a robust cancer?” And it isn’t just in the United States that we have this terrible addiction (quoting Wall Street Journal): “The Japanese are so accustomed to growth that economists in Tokyo usually speak of a recession as any time the growth rate dips below 3% per year.”

So, what do we do?

In the words of Winston Churchill, “Sometimes we have to do what is required.” First of all, as a nation we’ve got to get serious about renewable energy. As a a start, we ought to have a big increase in the funding for research in the development and dispersion of renewable energy. We have to educate all of our people to an understanding of the arithmetic and the consequences of growth, especially in terms of populations and in terms of the earth’s finite resources. We must educate people to recognise the fact that growth of populations and growth of rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. What’s the first law of sustainability? You’ve heard thousands of people talking endlessly about sustainability; did they ever tell you the first law? Here it is: population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. That’s simple arithmetic. Yet nobody that I'm encountering will tell you about that when they're talking about sustainability. So I think it’s intellectually dishonest to talk about saving the environment, which is sustainability, without stressing the obvious fact that stopping population growth is a necessary condition for saving the environment and for sustainability.

We must educate people to see the need to examine carefully the allegations of the technological optimists who assure us that science and technology will always be able to solve all of our problems of population growth, food, energy, and resources.

Chief amongst these optimists was the late Dr Julian Simon, formerly professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois, and later at the University of Maryland. With regard to copper, Simon has written that we will never run out of copper because “copper can be made from other metals.” The letters to the editor jumped all over him, told him about chemistry. He just brushed it off: “Don’t worry,” he said, “if it’s ever important, we can make copper out of other metals.”

Now, Simon had a book that was published by the Princeton University Press. In that book, he’s writing about oil from many sources, including biomass, and he says, “Clearly there is no meaningful limit to this source except for the sun’s energy.” He goes on to note, “But even if our sun was not so vast as it is, there may well be other suns elsewhere.” Well, Simon’s right; there are other suns elsewhere, but the question is, would you base public policy on the belief that if we need another sun, we will figure out how to go get it and haul it back into our solar system? (audience laughter)

Now, you cannot laugh: for decades before his death, this man was a trusted policy advisor at the very highest levels in Washington DC.

Bill Moyers interviewed Isaac Asimov. He asked Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if this population growth continues?” and Asimov says, “It’ll be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then they both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. And everyone believes in freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the constitution. But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there’s no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, ‘Aren't you through yet?’ and so on.” And Asimov concluded with one of the most profound observations I've seen in years. He said, “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more people there are, the less one individual matters.”

And so, central to the things that we must do, is to recognise that population growth is the immediate cause of all our resource and environmental crises.

And in the last one hour, the world population has increased by about 10,000 people and the population of the United States has increased by about 280 people. So to be successful with this experiment of human life on earth, we have to understand the laws of nature as we encounter them in the study of science and mathematics. We should remember the words of Aldous Huxley, that “facts do not cease to exist because they're ignored”. We should remember the words of Eric Sevareid; he observed that “the chief source of problems is solutions.” This is what we encounter every day: solutions to problems just make the problems worse. We should remember the message of this cartoon: “Thinking is very upsetting, it tells us things we’d rather not know." We should remember the words of Galileo; he said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” If there is one message, it is this: we cannot let other people do our thinking for us.

Now, except for those petroleum graphs, the things I’ve told you are not predictions of the future, I’m only reporting facts, and the results of some very simple arithmetic. But I do so with confidence that these facts, this arithmetic and more importantly, our level of understanding of them, will play a major role in shaping our future. Now, don’t take what I’ve said blindly or uncritically, because of the rhetoric, or for any other reason. Please, you check the facts. Please check my arithmetic. If you find errors, please let me know. If you don't find errors, then I hope you’ll take this very, very seriously.

Now, you are important people because you can think. If there’s anything that is in short supply in the world today, it’s people who are willing to think. So here’s a challenge. Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long term solution is in any demonstratable way, aided, assisted, or advanced by having larger populations in our local levels, state levels, national level, or global level? Can you think of anything that can get better if we crowd more people into our cities, our towns, into our state, our nation, or on this earth?

And I'll close with these words from the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He said, “Unlike the plagues of the dark ages, or contemporary diseases which we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is solvable with means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution, but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and the education of the billions who are its victims.”

So I hope I’ve made a reasonable case for my opening statement, that I think the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand this very simple arithmetic.

Thank you very, very much.

The Meaning of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 23:16:00 +0000

Joseph Campbell was a life-long student and teacher of the human spirit and mythology--not just the mythology of cultures long dead, but of living myth, as it made itself known in the work of modern artists and philosophers--individuals who searched within themselves and their societies to identify the need about which they were passionate. He called this burning need that they sought to fulfill their bliss.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are -- if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

This blog posting is broken up into five sections. To begin, I listen to average people just like me. I then discover the touching story of a man who reflects on a lifetime of service to students. I also learn from a man who loved a life of discovery and learning. There's the Academy-Award® nominated short-story of a lonely inventor by Mark Osborne. Finally, DeepThought gives an answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. - Bento d’Espiñoza, Ethics, bk. II, prop. VII

If the nature of the universe is to compute, life could be a meaning in and of itself. I mean all of the pains and joys of growing, learning, expressing, loving, working, relationships, worship, wonder, appreciating, helping others, etc... In other words, the purpose of our life is exactly what we are living right now (good, bad or indifferent).

"Humans are the best value in computers. Where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160 lbs., having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor?" -- Scott Crossfield

The Meaning of Life, by Jon Cortelyou. "What is your personal meaning of life?" This is a documentary (left) about people answering this fundamental, timeless question. It is a difficult question, and there are no right or wrong answers. Filmed in San Francisco, California

“True success and happiness depend more on love, unselfish living and hard work than on being smart and talented.” – Jennie Deever

Another possibility is that we are to be co-creators with God. Creators of life, of our own lives and/or helping others to be successful in their lives.

“Life is like a garden. It takes plowing and harrowing to break up the clods.It takes seed sowing and cultivation, with lots of discipline to bring beauty and fragrance, the flowers in the garden.” – John Bixler Deever

Part 2,
The Last Lecture of Randy Pausch

By Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Randy Pausch set the tone early at his farewell lecture at Carnegie Mellon University.

"If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you," said Dr. Pausch, a 46-year-old computer science professor who has incurable pancreatic cancer.

It's not that he's in denial about the fact that he only has months to live, he told the 400 listeners packed into McConomy Auditorium on the campus, and the hundreds more listening to a live Web cast. It's more that "I am in phenomenally good health right now; it's the greatest cognitive dissonance you will ever see -- the fact is, I'm in better shape than most of you," he said. And then, to the appreciative laughs and applause of his audience, Dr. Pausch dropped to the stage floor and did a set of pushups.

"So anyone who wants to cry or pity me can come down here and do a few of those, and then you may pity me," he said.

"What we're not going to talk about today," he continued, "is cancer, because I've spent a lot of time talking about that ... and we're not going to talk about things that are even more important, like my wife and [three preschool] kids, because I'm good, but I'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing up."

What he was there to discuss was how to fulfill your childhood dreams, and the lessons he had learned on his life's journey.

When he was a boy, Dr. Pausch said, he had a concrete set of dreams: He wanted to experience the weightlessness of zero gravity; he wanted to play football in the NFL; he wanted to write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia ("You can tell the nerds early on," he joked); he wanted to be Captain Kirk from "Star Trek"; and he wanted to work for the Disney Co.

In the end, he got to tackle all of them, he said -- even if his football accomplishments fell somewhere short of the NFL.

In his 10 years at Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Pausch helped found the Entertainment Technology Center, which one video game executive yesterday called the premier institution in the world for training students in video game and other interactive technology.

He also established an annual virtual reality contest that has become a campuswide sensation, and helped start the Alice program, an animation-based curriculum for teaching high school and college students how to have fun while learning computer programming.

It was the virtual reality work, in which participants wear a headset that puts them in an artificial digital environment, that earned him and his Carnegie Mellon students a chance to go on the U.S. Air Force plane known as the "vomit comet," which creates moments of weightlessness, and which the students promised to model with VR technology.

And even though his football career ended in high school, he said, he probably learned more from that experience than all the other childhood goals he did achieve.

Among other things, he learned the value of the coach yelling at him for his mistakes, because an assistant coach told him after one particularly brutal practice: "When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."

While he didn't get to be Captain Kirk, actor William Shatner, who played Kirk, did visit him at Carnegie Mellon in recent years.

"It's cool to meet your boyhood idol," Dr. Pausch said. "It's even cooler when he comes to you to see what you're doing in your lab."

And he got the chance to write the World Book's article on virtual reality.

Known for his flamboyance and showmanship as a teacher and mentor, Dr. Pausch talked Disney officials into letting him work on sabbatical at the company, helping design such virtual reality rides as the Magic Carpet and Pirates of the Caribbean.

More recently, he got the chance to intern with Electronic Arts, the video game company, and that relationship prompted the firm to give Carnegie Mellon the right to use its famous Sims animated characters as part of the Alice curriculum.

Near the end of his talk yesterday, Dr. Pausch surprised his wife, Jai, with a cake for her birthday on Monday, and persuaded the audience to sing for her. She managed to choke back her tears long enough to blow out the single candle on top.

To honor his life and career, Electronic Arts announced it was setting up a scholarship fund for deserving female computer science majors at Carnegie Mellon.

And the school itself said it would put his name on the footbridge that will connect the new Gates Computer Sciences Building and the Purnell Center for the Arts, symbolizing the way he linked those disciplines.

Dr. Pausch's ordeal began a year ago, when he began to feel bloated and his bowel movements changed, he said in an e-mail interview. When doctors did a CT scan to see if he had gallstones, they spotted a tumor.

"I got the news from my GP," he wrote, "who said 'There's a mass on your pancreas, and it's not fair.'

"As I later told him, it's unfortunate, and it's unlucky, but it's not unfair. As I always tell my 5-year-old, it's not 'unfair' when you don't get what you want. We all run the risk of getting hit by the cancer dart."

By Annie O'Neill
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
In a Web-based diary he kept of his treatment, Dr. Pausch concentrated on trying to improve his survival odds. He knew it would be an uphill battle. Despite improvements in treatment, the overall five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is just 5 percent. Even the one-year rate is only 26 percent.

The first step was surgery, which took place exactly one year ago today at UPMC Shadyside. Surgeons took out his gall bladder, a third of his pancreas, part of his stomach and several feet of small intestine.

As he recovered, Dr. Pausch discovered that M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston was carrying out an experimental, highly toxic radiation and chemotherapy regimen for pancreatic cancer that might increase his five-year survival odds to almost 45 percent.

The treatments began in November and didn't end until the following May. The low point, he wrote, was on Christmas Day of last year: "My wife and children were in Norfolk, and I was in Houston getting poison put in my veins. I was never depressed, but that was the day I was really squeezing the lemons hard to get lemonade."

But later, less than a week after finishing chemotherapy and radiation, Dr. Pausch was playing flag football with his recreational league team again.

"First play of the game, I caught a 25-yard pass over the middle," he said in his diary. "Granted, I was sucking wind the whole game, but damn it's good to be back on the field."

In mid-summer, after tests initially showed he was clear of cancer, he added two rounds of treatment with an experimental cancer vaccine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. And then, just as he was finally feeling healthy again late last month, Dr. Pausch sent out this message to his diary readers:

"A recent CT scan showed that there are 10 tumors in my liver, and my spleen is also peppered with small tumors. The doctors say that it is one of the most aggressive recurrences they have ever seen."

He and Jai moved their family to Chesapeake, Va., so she would be near her relatives. They made initial plans for hospice care, and Dr. Pausch began palliative chemotherapy to give him some extra time.

"I find that I am completely positive," he wrote. "The only times I cry are when I think about the kids -- and it's not so much the 'Gee, I'll miss seeing their first bicycle ride' type of stuff as it is a sense of unfulfilled duty -- that I will not be there to help raise them, and that I have left a very heavy burden for my wife."

He is concentrating now on creating videos for his children. With his oldest son, 5-year-old Dylan, Dr. Pausch went on a recent trip to Disney World and to swim with dolphins, thinking Dylan may be the only child who will have strong direct memories of him.

His wife and children, he said, "mean everything to me. They give a purpose to life and a depth of joy that no job [and I've had some of the most awesome jobs in the world] can begin to provide.

"I hope my wife is able to remarry down the line. And I hope they will remember me as a man who loved them, and did everything he could for them." - Source: Mark Roth, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 19, 2007

Part 3,
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word "Sat" means being. "Chit" means consciousness. "Ananda" means bliss or rapture. I thought, "I don't know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don't know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked. --Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp. 113, 120

Why do we do science? Beyond altruistic and self-aggrandizing motivations, many of our best scientists work long hours seeking the electric thrill that comes only from learning something that nobody knew before. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a collection of previously unpublished or difficult-to-find short works by maverick physicist Richard Feynman, takes its title from his own answer. From TV interview transcripts to his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, we see his quick, sharp wit, his devotion to his work, and his unwillingness to bow to social pressure or convention. It's no wonder he was only grudgingly admired by the establishment during his lifetime--read his "Minority Report to the Space Shuttle Challenger Inquiry" to see him blowing off political considerations as impediments to finding the truth.

Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), scientist, teacher, raconteur, and musician. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb, expanded the understanding of quantum electrodynamics, translated Mayan hieroglyphics, and cut to the heart of the Challenger disaster. But beyond all of that, Richard Feynman was a unique and multi-faceted individual.

THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT was filmed in 1981 and will delight and inspire anyone who would like to share something of the joys of scientific discovery. Feynman is a master storyteller, and his tales -- about childhood, Los Alamos and the Bomb, or how he won a Nobel Prize -- are a vivid and entertaining insight into the mind of a great scientist at work and play.

Part 4,
MORE, by Mark Osborne

The Academy-Award® nominated animated short-film tells the story of a lonely inventor, whose colorless existence is brightened only by dreams of the carefree bliss of his youth.

By day, he is trapped in a dehumanizing job in a joyless world. But by night, he tinkers away on a visionary invention, desperate to translate his inspiration into something meaningful.

When his invention is complete, it will change the way people see the world. But he will find that success comes at a high price, as it changes himself, as well.

Part 5,
DeepThought

The story of a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer was revealed, they were told to build a more powerful computer to work out what the Ultimate Question actually was, but their plans never come to fruition. From, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Care to guess where the computer is? The computer, often mistaken for a planet (because of its size and use of biological components), was the Earth. The meaning of our lives was (is) to calculate the ultimate question.

Eve of Destruction

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:21:00 +0000

Are we the only intelligent creatures in the universe?

Our own intellectual history suggests that we are probably not alone. Everything we once thought unique and central about our situation has been "dethroned" by the advance of knowledge.

1. No, the Sun does not revolve around the Earth. The Earth revolves around the Sun, with a lot of other stuff.

2. No, the Sun itself is not particularly important, just one rather average star among tens of billions in an "island universe."

3. No, even that "island universe" is not unique or extraordinary, merely one of a trillion like it.

4. No, we do not stand high above the animal kingdom. We are part of it, and arose from it.

5. No, our mental states are not, or at best not entirely, the product of our wills acting upon a divine spark of ineffable transcendence. They can be changed completely by the ingestion of pharmaceutical compounds.

It would be surprising, after all that dethroning, if we turned out to be the only intelligent species in the cosmos. It might, nonetheless, be so.

1. Presumably any intelligent species would have mastered the radio spectrum, as we have, and thrown out distinctive radio waves across interstellar space, as we are doing. No such waves have been detected after decades of searching.

2. Presumably a species just a few hundred years more advanced than us in technology would have embarked on engineering projects, like the Dyson sphere, that would be visible across the gulfs of interstellar space. We don't see any.

3. Presumably any sufficiently advanced species would spread itself out among the stars. We have not been visited in any obvious way, and it is hard to see the point of anyone crossing the galaxy to visit us in some non-obvious way.

4. Nor is it likely that we are just ahead of everyone else. There are stars billions of years older than the Sun. If intelligent life developed on their planets, there ought to be civilizations far advanced in relation to who we are developmentally.

Does it matter if the human race comes to an end? If we are indeed alone, it may be that once any species attains a certain level of technological sophistication it is certain to destroy itself. Or it may be that life is so extraordinary that its existence on our own planet is a huge stroke of luck, never repeated elsewhere.

The familiar old doomsday scenarios are still looming large. Two or more of these happening would certainly send us back to the Stone Age, or wipe us out all together.

From Space:
o Surprise asteroid or comet impact.
o Head-on gamma ray burst.

From Mother Nature:
o Viral Pandemics
o Volcanism or other forms of out-gassing.

From Ourselves:
o Viral Pandemics (accidental or terrorism)
o Mutual Nuclear Destruction
o Catastrophic loss of critical infrastructure components.

From Ourselves (in progress):
o Environmental Devastation / Loss of Human Habitat (land, water, air)
o Mass Extinction / Decline of Biodiversity
o Toxins / Genetic Mutations or Disease

Superfund365

In Sir Martin Rees's book, Our Final Hour, he doesn't think that we — the human race — are going to make it alive to the next century.

1. In many fields of scientific and technological research, notably biology and particle physics, we are now tinkering with deep fundamentals that we don't completely understand. We can now create physical situations and processes that do not occur in the natural universe at all:

· He cites the gravitational wave detector at Stanford University. It contains a metal bar weighing over a ton, cooled to within a tiny fraction of a degree of absolute zero (minus 459° Fahrenheit). Unless there are extraterrestrial intelligences conducting similar experiments somewhere, this is easily the coldest large object in the universe. The midwinter night-time surface of Pluto is not that cold; inter-galactic space is not that cold; nothing in nature is that cold, because the "background radiation" left over from the Big Bang keeps the universe simmering at a steady 3 degrees above absolute zero. The entire universe resembles the interior of a microwave oven; the Stanford experimenters have shielded their equipment from that background radiation by very ingenious means.

· Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman at the University of Colorado got down to 20 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, thereby creating an entirely new state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Said Cornell: "This state could never have existed naturally anywhere in the universe. So the sample in our lab is the only chunk of this stuff in the universe, unless it is in a lab in some other solar system."

· The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being built in a circular tunnel 17 miles in circumference to smash protons moving at 99.999999% of the speed of light into each other and so recreate conditions a fraction of a second after the big bang. The tunnel is buried up to 575 feet underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. It planned to circulate the first beams in May 2008. First collisions at high energy are expected mid-2008 with the first results from the experiments soon after.

"Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale." - The Guardian

2. The kinds of experiments we shall soon be conducting might, according to perfectly respectable theories, have very dire results:

· One possibility is the swift reduction of our planet to a sphere of super-dense "strange matter" about a hundred yards across.

· Another is the annihilation of space-time itself — though since the sphere of annihilation could expand only at the speed of light; it would take a few billion years to swallow up the whole universe.2. There is a tremendous "force multiplier" effect in a lot of modern and soon-to-come technologies that will give malign small groups, or even malign individuals, the power to wreak terrible havoc.

· New Zealand handyman Bruce Simpson is building a cruise missile in his garage. He claims he can do the whole thing for less than NZ$5,000 (about $2,900), using off-the-shelf parts he buys mostly via the Internet.

· Back in the 1990s the Japanese cult called Aum Shinrikyo tried unsuccessfully to track down the Ebola virus in Africa. Nowadays, according to Sir Martin, they could assemble it in a home lab, using mail-order ingredients and information available on the Internet. Sir Martin: "I staked one thousand dollars on a bet: 'That by the year 2020 an instance of bioterrorism or bioterrorism will have killed a million people.' Of course, I fervently hope to lose this bet. But I honestly do not expect to..."

· One of his sub-theses is that human or human-machine evolution may be about to speed up dramatically. "The post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions," Rees says.

The new science of extremely tiny machines, what is called "nanotechnology," might bring down the curtain on our little freak-show, dog & pony act, or whatever life is. One scenario was thought up back in the 1980s by Eric Drexler, who wrote the first book on nanotech. This is the "gray goo" catastrophe. Tiny omnivorous self-replicating machines could spread exponentially, chewing their way through the entire biosphere in a matter of days, leaving the earth's surface stripped of all life.

And/Or, we might create a god-like, super intelligence – a Human 2.0 – that is not a kind, benevolent being serving our interests. One who decides that it has no use for humans! “Treat your inferiors as you would have your superiors treat you,” the Meta Golden Rule.

Source: The End Is at Hand, John Derbyshire, NRO, June 20, 2003

The shape of the universe?

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 03:47:00 +0000

If God were to make a simple rule to operate on and create the Universe, what might such a rule look like? Well, it just might look like this regular complex polytope of 248 dimensions, called E8. It is represented here in 2 dimensions. The coefficients of the Lusztig-Vogan polynomial matrices are irreducible.

It was first discovered by Wilhelm Killing (1888-1890). It recently took a group of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists 4 years to work it out; and, if written in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan! It is quite beautiful, and perhaps the shape of the Universe, or a fundamental rule which outputs the Universe.

This month, Garrett Lisi rocked the sciences with, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, "All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection," said Lisi.

From, "Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything," by Roger Highfield, Science Editor, telegraph.co.uk, what makes E8 so exciting is that nature seems to have the heart of many bits of physics embedded in it. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8. Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world.

What Lisi said he realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. But, the crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is reported to be calculating the masses of 20 unknown particles, for example those particles that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.

As for Chemistry, Seth Lloyd recently said in, Programming the Universe, A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On the Cosmos (Knopf, 2006), that since catalytic chemical reactions can carry out COPY, NOT and the AND operations, we know that chemistry is computationally universal. To continue the logic, Stephen Wolfram might also argue that the universe is ultimately deterministic. So, random-looking seeds that feed into the universe‘s computation aren‘t in fact really random, they‘re pseudorandom sequences generated by a lower level randomizing computation. Perhaps E8 is one computation generating said apparent randomness.

It is looking more and more like the universe computes itself and there‘s nothing particularly surprising about the level of complexity that we find around us. To suggests that God wrote out the history of the universe before it happened is not quite accurate. It is programmed!!

Another Way of Knowing God

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 07:49:00 +0000

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable, deterministic rules. I claim that these rules are what God actually created, and the Genesis account is metaphor or allegory appropriate for our level of maturation in a process of spiritual growth.

The human mind itself is made of computations, too. Percepts, emotions, intentions, plans, consciousness, etc. The universe consists of many such computations at high and low levels. And, because the effects of the underlying rules are so unpredictable, we can think that we have free will. (We really don't have free will.)

The complex moving patterns and natural processes in this little seashell visually display one example of the unpredictable, deterministic rules that God breathed out and brought the whole of creation.

Taxonomy of computations can give us insight into what kinds of phenomena can exist. This is an experimental kind of computer science in an observational sense. Stephen Wolfram led the way with his book, A New Kind of Science. There is a lot of exploration still to do. Mechanized searches of computational space will be insightful and therefore fruitful.

For example, the simple rule in blue on the left produces the complex output on the right after enough iteration.Rudy Rucker is another influential visionary in this new kind of science. Here is an example of relatively simple rules producing surprisingly complex behavior. Experimental and computational studies of the formation and evolution of scroll waves in three-dimensional excitable media are presented on the left. Scroll waves are initiated in the simulated Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction by perturbing traveling waves transverse to their direction of propagation. Scroll rings are generated by perturbing circular waves, which expand or contract depending on the strength of an imposed excitability gradient and its direction relative to the rotational direction of the scroll wave. Indeed, more evidence that nature can compute far better than big, black, buzzing servers.

Consequences

1. Wolfram’s Principle of Computational Equivalence. Most naturally occurring processes are universal computations. If a complicated algorithm can achieve a given effect, a very simple algorithm can do it too.

2. Principle of Unpredictability. Most natural processes are unpredictable, that is, they can’t be emulated faster than they occur (computational irreducibility). The theory of chaos uncovers a new, "uncertainty principle," which governs how the real world behaves. The only way to know the output is to just let the rules run and the system evolve over time. I claim this gives raise to an illusion of free will.

3. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem applied to Nature. Given any scientific theory of the world 'T,' and given any complex natural process 'P,' there are statements about process 'P' which theory 'T' is unable to prove or disprove. I claim this gives raise to beliefs and faiths. What is faith? The core of faith and beliefs are revealed through scriptures -> Illumined by tradition -> Vivified in personal experience -> Confirmed by reason. This differs from the scientific method wherein Theories -> Predictions -> Experiments -> Better Theories.

Since 1994, Rudy Rucker’s CAPOW (Cellular Automata & Electric Power) has been researching new kinds of continuous-valued cellular automata for use in simulating the flow of electricity in a power grid (above). The outputs of a couple of these automata look shockingly familiar. My guess is that this computational space is likely applicable to other areas physics or cosmology. Gravity, space, time and quantum mechanics might show, too, that they are governed by the same deterministic rules of computational irreducibility and uncertainty.

Star Wars Mythology

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 06:41:00 +0000

Lucas' fascination with mythology led to an enduring friendship with the late Joseph Campbell, perhaps the best-known expert in the field. Campbell -- known to mass audiences through The Power of Myth, the PBS TV series based on his books -- was an expert in the construction and cultural resonance of mythology. One thing that has always resonated with me is Yoda's progression of fear to suffering, "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."

Whether or not it is fear of the unknown; fear of what we do not understand; fear of God; fear of not achieving a personal goal; fear of losing something/someone we love; fear of being wrong; fear of sex; fear of change; etc., we all manage our fears on a daily basis. Unchecked, our fears can consume us (consciously and unconsciously) and morph into anger, hate and suffering (for yourself and others). If you trace the geneology of most suffering in the world, you end up at a common ancestor: Fear. I propose that the only true axis of evil in our world today is a trifecta of fear, anger and hatred -- wherever it exists you'll find suffering. Drawing upon my own traditions, I'm reminded that Jesus frequently greeted his friends with the salutation, "Don't be afraid." After the resurrection, Jesus appeared with the familiar greeting, "Peace be with you."

Regardless of our faith-based beliefs, the best way to deal with fear is to simply dismiss it. Forgiveness is also a dismissal of fear. We must be quick to forgive ourselves and others of wrongdoing. There are lots of things to think about in our lives, but nothing to worry about. That takes practice to become a habit and a way of life. I struggle daily.

When good people do evil...

Re: http://www.godhatesfags.com/, they were on the news tonight. Made me think...

From, A Designer Universe?, "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion," Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin, Winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics.

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'you helped this happen.'", Jerry Falwell, September 13, 2001. More Quotes: http://tailrank.com/1937169/Jerry-Falwell-Quotes

Are we real?

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 06:06:00 +0000

Are we real? How do we know if we really exist or whether we could be living in a computer simulation, somewhat like The Matrix? The simulation argument puts forward the view that we are almost definitely living in a computer simulation.

In Are We Real? (2004) Martin Rees navigates the extraordinary territory between science fact and science fiction.

"The simulation hypothesis, that we are currently living in a computer simulation, should be understood literally, it's not just in a metaphorical sense whereby one could view the universe as a simulation, but literally we would be living in a simulation created by some advanced civilization in a computer they built in their universe. And everything we see and our brains themselves would just be parts of this simulation," Oxford University philosopher Dr Nick Bostrom echoes the thoughts of sci-fi writers and scientists alike. The simulation hypothesis is not sci-fi, it's serious academic thought.

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

Big Omega (thinking of God)

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 06:01:00 +0000

They say there are no new ideas. I read this and I liked it. Somewhere in this world I have another brother. Unfortunately, I've lost track of the guy's URL. (His words below, not mine.)

Let's suppose the Big Omega is the guy in question, someone so vast and powerful that all your conceptions of God, no matter how elaborate or degenerate, all fit inside with plenty of room to spare. We're talking a God who can happily create walls so high he can't jump over them, who can solve the General Halting Problem, who is benevolent, irrelevant, and malignant at the same time, who exceeds any origin or ending, who is contained by no distinction, who is bigger than any God any religion ever invented or can ever invent. The kind of God that's bigger than this page can distinguish. The God so big he doesn't care whether or not you capitalize his name. The God who owns all names, all behaviors, all attributes, all physics, all specifications, and all infinities. A God who forgives and damns you no matter what you do, who is 100%, completely, utterly, and without bound, unpredictable, an impartial God of random chance and an intimate God of unfailing love at the same time. The mystery God who resembles, cherishes, and ignores you neither more nor less than he resembles, cherishes, and ignores lichen, water, cattle, neutrinos, stars, pistachio jelly beans, the story of the Lusitania, and one particular cherry-red 1968 Plymouth Barracuda.

The trouble with most theists is they can't stand the idea of a really big God like this. They want a God that acts like their parents did. Someone who buys you ice cream if you're good and sends you to the eternal lake of fire if you're bad. The idea of a God of howling chaos, crystalline order, and all myriad flowing variations in between just scares them stupid, or else their imaginations are too impoverished to conceptualize someone that large.

In a similar way, I loved this web page, too: http://web.archive.org/web/20050418112235/http://laptop.gorknet.org/God_is_the_Machine.html

Baruch Spinoza

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:57:00 +0000

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), a brilliant Jewish Philosopher, was a liberator from Protestantism as Luther was a liberator from Catholicism. Spinoza was an unsung hero who deserves much credit for influencing the constitutional rights we enjoy in our modern democracy today from a philosophical perspective.

Graetz's, 'Censure of Spinoza,' paragraphs 8, 9, and 10 are reprinted here for gaining a deeper understanding of Spinoza's ideas as they relate to this blog, setting aside the work on his political thesis.

[8] The whole universe, all individual things, and their active powers are, according to Spinoza, not merely from G-D, but of G-D; they constitute the infinite succession of forms in which G-D reveals Himself, through which He eternally works according to His eternal Nature—the soul, as it were, of thinking bodies, the body of the soul extended in space. G-D is the indwelling, not the external efficient cause of all things; all is in G-D and moves in G-D. G-D as creator and generator of all things is generative or self-producing Nature. The whole of nature is animate, and ideas, as bodies, move in eternity on lines running parallel to or intersecting one another. Though the fullness of things which have proceeded from G-D and which exist in Him, are not of an eternal, but of a perishable nature, yet they are not limited or defined by chance, but by the necessity of the Divine Nature, each in its own way existing or acting within its smaller or larger sphere. The eternal and constant Nature of G-D works in them through the eternal laws communicated to them. Things could, therefore, not be constituted otherwise than they are; for they are the manifestations, entering into existence in an eternal stream, of G-D in the intimate connection of thought and extension.

[9] What is man's place in this logical system? How is he to act and work? Even he, with all his greatness and littleness, his strength and weakness, his heaven-aspiring mind, and his body subject to the need of sustenance, is nothing more than a form of existence (Modus) of G-D. Man after man, generation after generation, springs up and perishes, flows away like a drop in a perpetual stream, but his Nature, the laws by which he moves bodily and mentally in the peculiar connection of mind and matter, reflect the Divine Being. Especially the human mind, or rather the various modes of thought, the feelings and conceptions of all men, form the eternal reason of G-D. But man is as little free as things, as the stone which rolls down from the mountain; he has to obey the causes which influence him from within and without. Each of his actions is the product of an infinite series of causes and effects {Chain of Natural Events}, which he can scarcely discern, much less control and alter at will. The good man and the bad, the martyr who sacrifices himself for a noble object, as well as the execrable villain and the murderer, are all like clay in the hands of G-D; they act, the one well, the other ill, compelled by their inner nature. They all act from rigid necessity. No man can reproach G-D for having given him a weak nature or a clouded intellect, as it would be irrational if a circle should complain that G-D has not given it the nature and properties of the sphere. It is not the lot of every man to be strong-minded, and it lies as little in his power to have a sound mind as a sound body.

[10] On one side man is, to a certain extent, free, or rather some men of special mental endowments can free themselves a little from the pressure exercised upon them. Man is a slave chiefly through his passions. Love {need}, hate, anger, thirst for glory, avarice, make him the slave of the external world. These passions spring from the perplexity of the soul, which thinks it can control things, but wears itself out, so to speak, against their obstinate resistance, and suffers pain thereby. The better the soul succeeds in comprehending the succession of causes and effects and the necessity of phenomena in the plan of the universe, the better able is it to change pain into a sense of comfort. Through higher insight, man, if he allows himself to be led by reason, can acquire strength of soul, and feel increased love to G-D, that is, to the eternal whole. On the one hand, this secures nobility of mind to aid men and to win them by mildness and benevolence; and creates, on the other, satisfaction, joy, and happiness. He who is gifted with highest knowledge lives in G-D, and G-D in him. Knowledge is virtue, as ignorance is, to a certain extent, vice. Whilst the wise man, or strictly speaking, the philosopher, thanks to his higher insight and his love of G-D, enjoys tranquillity of soul, the man of clouded intellect, who abandons himself to the madness of his passions, must dispense with this joyousness, and often perishes in consequence. The highest virtue, according to Spinoza's system, is self-renunciation through knowledge, keeping in a state of passiveness, coming as little as possible in contact with the crushing machinery of forces—avoiding them if they come near, or submitting to them if their wild career overthrows the individual. But as he who is beset by desires deserves no blame, so no praise is due the wise man who practices self-renunciation; both follow the law of their nature. Higher knowledge and wisdom cannot be attained if the conditions are wanting, namely, a mind susceptible of knowledge and truth, which one can neither give himself, nor throw off. Man has thus no final aim, any more than the eternal substance.

OO God

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 05:49:00 +0000

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say unto you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner.” {John 5:19}

The Trinity:

At the risk of being blasphemous I have found it helpful to begin thinking about the Trinity of God, the Godhead, in a pseudo object-oriented (OO) way. For the historical Jesus, "instantiates,” the Godhead into the human condition and facilitates the Spirit to work in each of our lives.

The basic idea in object-oriented programming is that a big problem is broken down into many smaller problems (divide and conquer) and solutions are created for each of them. If you are able to solve all of the small problems, you have solved the big problem as a whole. Therefore, there is only one object about which an object needs to know everything: itself. And, there is only one problem an object needs to solve: its own.

Poor code does not follow this approach to creating a solution. Instead, much of a program's overall functionality is coded into a single object. Because this object holds so much data and has so many methods, its role in the program becomes all encompassing. Instead of objects communicating amongst themselves directly, the other objects rely on the core object. Because the core object is referenced by so much of the other code, maintenance becomes more difficult than it otherwise would. (This is analogous to failing to use subroutines in procedural programming languages.)

In this example, God (as, “main”) has author/creator/sender/savior/helper methods and is multi-threaded. God has five properties: eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and immutable. Jesus and Spirit (instances of God) inherit all properties of God and methods sender/savior (Jesus) and helper (Spirit).

Inheritance is a way of saying --in OO terms-- that you may not touch the mother or core classes but may create any variety of instances of them. Jesus, “is a,” God (is God). The Spirit, “is a,” God (is God). Not different gods, rather instances of the one God.

The Creation - some observations:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." {Genesis 1:26}

It’s interesting to postulate how we each may also inherit a helper method, but none of the properties: eternal (except perhaps in the case of our souls), omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and immutable. Maybe this is what is meant when the Godhead says of the Trinity, "we will create in our image." Our lives and our work have purpose and meaning. We are connected.

God is no doubt displeased with my helper output much of the time. (Free will is akin to overriding your helper method.) I throw a lot of exceptions! I frequently have to invoke the helper method of the Spirit, my super. But, thanks to Jesus’ savior method, those exceptions can be caught and I know that I am none-the-less justified.

The Word - approaching the source:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. {John 1:1}

What is this, "Word of God?" - The Bible? DNA? Jesus?
What is meant when God reveals that He, "spoke," creation into existence?

All modern languages have etymological roots in classical languages. But, in the language of God, “Words,” are instances of pre-defined classes; a concept that drives OO today. God defined classes so exhaustive Words cover the material and abstract --indeed cosmic-- experiences known and unknown to us. The connection is qualitatively more than etymological.

The Word is a revelation via an abstraction or representation, yet retains all of the essence of what is meant. Namely, it should be thought of as the forerunner of formal language theory used to specify computer languages. That is the paradigm being referenced by the, "Word."

On the basis of an exhustive, finite number of rules He built the whole structure of Creation. The rules’ shape has remained unchanged and constant, for it was God who formalized their grammar and usage. No new classes have needed to be added to it since then. It is significant that no new classes have had to be created. This is the property of God that is immutable, yet allows for highly efficient processes in the created, such as evolution.

On God

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 04:45:00 +0000

(download the PDF)
”…to love Him is the chief occupation of man…” – Rev. John Bixler Deever, 1890

I suppose I should begin to try to articulate my beliefs regarding God and religion after thinking about it for nearly four decades. Because, if there is such a thing as a, “god gene,” I certainly have it. Maybe not to the extent of some of the rest of the family on my mother’s side who get caught in the, “Gospel net,” like: Martha (Deever) Matteson; Philip Otterbein Deever; Otterbein Thomas Deever; John Bixler Deever and all the rest, however its still there whispering to me.

I considered the ministry briefly in the late 1980s, but am glad that my life unfolded in such a way as to not allow that to happen. So, maybe something else is going on? I’ve always marched to the beat of a different drummer, and that personal characteristic permeates every facet of my life – including my take on religion and my relationship with God.

“Childhood activities do much to Fashion one’s [religious] thinking later in life.” – Rev. O.T. Deever, 1962

I grew up in the University Heights United Methodist Church, Indianapolis, Indiana. My Deever grandparents were members of that church as are my parents as am I. I have a lot of fond memories of life in the church growing up including attending worship services together as a family on Sunday mornings; attending pre-school there at the church; participating in the children’s choir and later the, “Bell Choir,” as a teenager; Sunday school classes following the worship service; the, “Youth Fellowship,” group and associated plethora of activities; helping install a new A/V system with an electrical engineer I really admired; serving as an acolyte and an usher from time-to-time; sharing meals together with others in, “Fellowship Hall,” during special occasions; and all of the many, many friends I had there growing up together. Some of those friends I even went to school with, so I’d see them on Mondays through Fridays. And, we’d often hang out at the mall or go to see a movie together on Saturdays as well! A few of those friends are still my friends to this day.

Just like there are seasons in a year, “There are seasons of the soul.” - Rev. O.T. Deever, 1962

Life leads to growth, which leads to change. In my twenties, something happened. I started to see the world through a different lens and grew increasingly liberal in my socio-political outlook. I struggled with homosexual feelings, yet strongly desired to be a good person and, “do what is right,” as I understood it at the time. Also, for the first time in my life, I began to struggle with depression. I don’t perceive the onset of my depression to be the result of any trauma or excessive drama in my life at the time, but rather a medical, chemical imbalance that began to express itself following my teenage years and through present day.

Figure 1: History of the United Methodist Church

“God is not limited to one method of work.” - Rev. O.T. Deever, 1962

I believe that God could be envisioned as a kind of, “black box.” By that I mean, we may not know what’s inside of the black box or how it all works, yet we know how to interact with it and what outputs to expect from it.

Having said that, I believe that God is big enough to be known by different names, in different ways, by different cultures and at different times throughout human history. In other words, there has been (is) more than one way to interact with God. Some of the inputs may be drastically different. Some of the outputs may be may be similar or overlapping. Even within the Judeo-Christian tradition alone, God has multiple covenants with peoples, which is exactly the point I am trying to make here now.

Therefore, I believe that a relationship with God is an intrinsically personal relationship. What that means for one’s self is entirely different than what it might mean for someone else. Our personal relationship with God frees us to do what is right on our individual faith journeys. How do we know what is right? Because, God plants seeds in our hearts and minds which stretch us and expand our horizons in ways that are unique to each of us. This begins in the home and its most binding and lasting influences are fashioned there.

“Take for example the human eye. How could anyone who studies even just the human eye deny the existence of God?” - Dr. John W. Deever, M.D.

I believe God, “is.” By that I literally mean a very binary kind of thing: 1 or 0; true or false; is or isn’t, etc… So when I say that I believe God, “is,” I mean everything that ever has been or will be -- from the beginning of time through present day throughout infinity: every star, every microbe, every experience, you and me.

That is not to say, for example, that you are God. Rather, it is fundamentally different to say that God is you. Anything is a subset of the everything that comprises God, namely all that is or was. Furthermore, God’s signature is everywhere.

Whatever the purpose of God might be, I believe that God rolls dice. In the last decade one of the most important realizations in the study of algorithms is a new understanding and appreciation of randomization. Namely, in certain sufficiently complex systems (i.e., the whole of creation would qualify), randomized methods are actually superior to deterministic ones in reaching a final conclusion in the shortest amount of time. This is not to say that the God has given up omnipotence. Rather, there are limitations on ability that are compatible with omnipotence. You can go research these on your own. I am merely claiming that chance is a necessary part of God’s plan. This includes evolution (genetic mutations) and human, “free will,” too!

“The Word has a cleansing, creating, renewing power, which comes into human life and changes it. The Word has an uplifting, enabling influence. Honey is more than the sweetened water of the flower. It is also part of the Bee.” – Maude Deever

I believe that Heaven is here now, only we can’t perceive it. In recent years, physicists have been struggling with a unifying theory to explain everything, a theory that would account for the strong electro-magnetic forces, the strong sub-atomic forces and the weak force of gravity.

What have been predicted as a result of the unifying theory are multiple dimensions (very, very tiny from our perception) besides the three dimensions we presently occupy, plus time. I believe that Heaven resides within some of these other dimensions. Furthermore, just as gravity may be a strong force in one of the other dimensions (as has been predicted) and “bleeds” through to our dimension as a relatively weak force, so too our souls may transcend these dimensions in similar fashion.

There are at least sixteen parables of Jesus that have to do with the character of God and his kingdom. Three deserve special attention now: the seed growing secretly {Mark 4:26-29}, the mustard seed {Matthew 13:31-32; Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18} and the leaven in dough {Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20-21}.

Based largely on the work of Dr. Philip O. Deever, what these parables share in common about the kingdom are the following facts:

- The yeast is “hidden” within the dough; the small seed grows secretly.
- Seed and leaven, as they work in nature, point where a power-not-of-ourselves is at work among us and how we can rely upon it.
- The kingdom is not just a small seed or yeast, but rather likened to a whole process: from something small through something to something grand.
- These parables stress the kingdom as present-day reality.

“Faith is not instinct. Faith is not intuition. It is not a natural outreach of the heart. Faith is a gift of God only when there is response to Bible teaching. ‘Faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the word of God.’ There is no saving faith in Jesus Christ apart from the teaching of the revelation of God in the Bible”- Rev. O.T. Deever, 1962

I believe that every word of Scripture is from the mouth of God. Scripture didn’t originate on the human level but with the Holy Spirit, who “moved” upon the authors to write it. Since God has nowhere promised an inerrant transmission of Scripture, it is necessary to affirm that only the autographic text of the original documents was inspired.

The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic. New Testament was written in Greek. By comparing and analyzing copies of the documents through a process called, “textual criticism,” Biblical scholars are able to determine what the original manuscripts said and where variations crept into the copies. That process has confirmed that God has accurately preserved His Word for us.

I believe Jesus’ faith saves mankind. Based largely on the work of Dr. Luke T. Johnson (one of my former Religious Studies professors and world renowned scholar on the writings of the New Testament), in Paul, salvation is through the faith of Christ rather than through Christians' faith in Christ.

The Greek phrase "p i s t i s c r i s t o u " (pistis christou) occurs in several places in Paul's letters. The genitive noun christou can be translated two ways, to read either "the faith (pistis) of Christ" or "faith in Christ." If you translate it the latter way, it means the believers' faith in Christ, but if you translate it the former way, it refers to Christ's faith in God. The grammatical context demands a "faith of Christ" reading, Johnson claims. Some examples:

{Galatians 2:20-21} and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. {21} I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

Alternative Reading: and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. {21} I do not nullify the grace of God; for if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

The alternative reading is the correct one. Justification is not through human faith but through Christ's faith.

{Philippians 3:8-9} More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ {9} and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

Alternative Reading: More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ {9} and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through the faith of Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.

Again, the alternative reading shifts the focus from believers' faith to Christ's faith. In the third example, the phrase pistis christou (or a similar phrase) occurs three times.

{Romans 3:21-26} But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, {22} the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, {23} since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; {24} they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, {25} whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; {26} it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.

Alternative Reading: But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed, and is attested by the law and the prophets, {22} the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, {23} since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; {24} they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, {25} whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement through his faithful death. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; {26} it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies out of the faith of Jesus.

What, then, is this faith of Jesus? Just like Dr. Johnson, I believe that it is obedience. Paul speaks of Abraham's faith in Romans 4, shown in an act of obedience (to be willing to sacrifice Isaac), and of Jesus' death on the cross, an act of obedience to God. In Romans 5, Paul compares Adam and Christ, the first a disobedient man, the second an obedient man. Paul compares two human beings and their human responses to God.

As Dr. Johnson points out, The Philippians’ Hymn {Philippians 2:5-11} also highlights Jesus' obedience, "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, {6} who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, {7} but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, {8} he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. {9} Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, {10} so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, {11} and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

Our salvation is justified not by our faith but by Jesus' faith. That means that all human beings have access to salvation, not just believers, since it is not the faith of believers that justifies. Perhaps this is what Paul is thinking when he writes {Romans 3:3}, "since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith."

“Church union is good because it works to the glory of God.” - Rev. O.T. Deever, 1962

In conclusion, since God is one we all are one... all 4,200 religions; denominations; religious bodies; faith groups; tribes; cultures; movements; ultimate concerns and etc. we find in our world today. Love each other, if we are to love God. Accept one another, if we are to glorify Him. Be at peace within yourself and with each other, if we are to put into practice our acceptance and our love. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” – The Golden Rule {Matthew 7:12}

The Paradoxical Commandments,” by Dr. Kent M. Keith

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.
People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway

God and Computers

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Wed, 11 May 2005 05:30:00 +0000

If you are a fan of TeX or “The Art of Programming,” you know him. He's just down the road from me at Stanford. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/

He also did a MIT God and Computers Lecture Series - Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. The audio is here (highly recommended): http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_program.html?program_id=50

The lecture mostly deals with his book, “3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated.” I was definitely impressed by this book and his approach. It shows the power of the Bible to inspire and speak to people on so many different levels (even through something this unique). The book and the approach would be great for Bible study groups, I think. More information on the book is here: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html

You can buy the book on Amazon here (recommended): http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0895792524/qid=1115790634/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-0137486-7974355?v=glance&s=books&n=507846