Entangled States

McLaren responds to critiques of "A New Kind of Christianity"

2010-03-11T07:06:26-07:00

I'm leading a group here in the Diocese of Arizona that's reading through Brian McLaren's newest book. At the beginning of the week I posted a critique of his criticism of the Graeco-Roman world view and its effect on reading the Bible properly. Apparently I wasn't the only one to have the reaction I had.

So McLaren has posted a response to the critics.

"1. I would encourage people who are critical of the chapter (4) dealing with Plato and Aristotle to be sure to read the lengthy endnotes for the chapter, especially notes 1, 2, 3, 5, 14, and 17, where I address some or maybe most of their concerns. I noticed how some of the criticism paraphrases exactly the kinds of provisos and qualifications I offer in notes 1 and 2, which made me think the commenters hadn't seen those notes. Perhaps I should have included these provisos in the text itself. At any rate, in the notes (and at points in the text itself) I try to make it clear that I'm dealing with some of the popularized 'isms' associated with these great philosophers, not with their rich and nuanced thinking itself, which I also acknowledge could never be reduced to a simple or formulaic summary. If someone is seeking a thorough understanding of these philosophers themselves, I imagine Nathan would be a good source of information. My purpose was to offer some explanation for how a certain narrative alien to Jesus and his gospel may have come to frame Jesus and his gospel. Whether my proposed explanation is valid or not, this narrative still arose from somewhere, and still deserves some attention, and, I think, questioning."

Read the full response here, there's a great deal more.

To which I respond, "fair enough".

As I've gotten further into the book, McLaren's left this particular line alone and if following different ones. At the moment he's pointing out that our sense of what it is to properly interpret scripture is highly culturally conditioned. He's listing the horrific ways that the Bible was used to justify human slavery in the southern U.S. As I read these sections, there's not much to disagree with. It's pretty standard stuff and represents much of what was being discussed, taught, debated, etc at Yale when I was a student at the Divinity School there back in the late 80's.

I still think McLaren could strengthen his argument against the traditional Reformation reading of the Bible by saying it no longer makes sense to us in the 21st century rather than by dismissing the sources that the Reformers used to make their argument. But, that's a nuance and not a dismissal of the main point.

... More as I get further into the book.

Peak Oil coming in 2014?

2010-03-10T14:44:27-07:00

While some have claimed that we already passed "Peak Oil" in 2008, and others think that it's still some years away, a group of Kuwaiti petroleum engineers have developed a new method to measure the oil production curve, and predict that 2014 is the best guess.

"Ibrahim Nashawi and colleagues point out that rapid growth in global oil consumption has sparked a growing interest in predicting 'peak oil' — the point where oil production reaches a maximum and then declines. Scientists have developed several models to forecast this point, and some put the date at 2020 or later. One of the most famous forecast models, called the Hubbert model, accurately predicted that oil production would peak in the United States in 1970.
...[Their] new study describe development of a new version of the Hubbert model that accounts for these individual production trends to provide a more realistic and accurate oil production forecast. Using the new model, the scientists evaluated the oil production trends of 47 major oil-producing countries, which supply most of the world's conventional crude oil. They estimated that worldwide conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014, years earlier than anticipated. The scientists also showed that the world's oil reserves are being depleted at a rate of 2.1 percent a year. The new model could help inform energy-related decisions and public policy debate, they suggest."

From here.

Lent 3C 2010: Diana Butler Bass, guest preacher

2010-03-09T14:23:41-07:00

God is saying something to us in the earthquakes and in the natural disasters. But what? And even if we decode the message, how are we to respond?

Diana Butler Bass was our guest preacher at Trinity Cathedral this past Sunday. In this wonderful sermon she finds hope in the patience of God.

MP3 File

Some first thoughts on "A New Kind of Christianity"

2010-03-08T16:04:27-07:00

I've asked some of my "students" to read Brian McLaren's new book "A New Kind of Christianity" with me as part of our regular weekly seminar. I'm just a few chapters in and I thought it might be useful to post some of my impressions as I'm reading along. This series of posts won't be so much a book report as a journal of ideas that McLaren's writing sparks.

I'm going to try this at the suggestion of Diana Butler-Bass. Diana preached at Trinity Cathedral over the weekend (we'll be posting the audio of her sermon here tomorrow) and in between the services, as she was signing books and greeting visitors, our conversation turned to Brian McLaren's new book. I was sharing some of my reservations with her, and she's the one who suggested posting them so that you all might shoot at them, and that Brian might have a chance to see them.

I'm not particularly interested in condemning a book that I haven't fully read, so if you're waiting for that, you're going to be disappointed. Also, while I have some quibbles with the ideas that are presented, I actually think there's a great deal of value in what I've read so far. I get the sense that McLaren is involved in the primary theological task of the 21st century - the "re-traditioning" of the Church (to borrow a term from Butler-Bass).

The book opens with a brief manifesto of sorts, laying out the reasons why the traditional Christianity of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century is no longer working for the majority of people in the West. That's a key point I think; that it's no longer working for people in the cultural west. Because clearly the enlightenment version of Christianity that grew out of the Reformation is very effective in the developing world of Africa and in the Far East. And that goes for both the Protestant and the post-Council of Trent Catholic versions.

But I think McLaren's got the right of it in the West. The Reformation was immediately preceded by what a friend of mine names a "plausibility collapse". The web and scaffolding of ideas that upheld the Medieval worldview suddenly collapsed, almost overnight. Luther's rejection of the cult of relics and papal selling of indulgences found willing ears in a culture that suddenly couldn't find a way to make sense of what had made sense. It's seemed to me for a while now that the West underwent a similar moment of plausibility collapse back in the 1960's. (1968 I guess if you want me to pick a year.) And the reverberations and internal cognitive dissonance from that event have shaped the arc of politics, culture and theology since.

At any rate, coming out of the Sixties, the classical reformation ideas of Christianity were no longer self-evident to people. Folks began to reject them out of hand, and to date, nothing really robust has been found to replace them. (Note that I'm trying to be precise and point to the idea of classical reformation ideas.)

I think part of this has to do with the fact that going forward from the 1950's, we stopped teaching the classical canon of literature. Latin was dropped from many curricula. Classical greek is no longer common. And with the loss of the classical canon, the regular exposure to the great ideas of Greece and Rome has faded. Much of western pedagogy until the 1950's tended to follow the old Roman teaching methods of classical education. Read the Canon. Learn the Canon. Emulate the Canon. But the need to share new science and ideas pushed the classical canon aside, into a backwater of sorts, and today very few people are intimately familiar with the ideas of Plato or Aristotle.

And because so much of the Reformation grew out of the West's recovery of these classical ideas during the Renaissance, when the classical scaffolding was removed from the common experience, the Reformation's logical exposition of God ceased making sense to people.

My first quibble with McLaren's writing, so far at least, is that he's created a sort of stalking horse that he calls the "Graeco-Roman" worldview. He describes a six line narrative arc for salvation history that grows out of this Graeco-Roman worldview. And he ridicules and rejects it. He does so in much the same way that people today reject and ridicule the Anselmian doctrine of the Atonement. The problem is though that when they ridicule the ideas of Anselm, they're not actually engaging his ideas. They're engaging a parody and dismissing that. And while they're right to dismiss the parody, it might be more useful for folks to try to understand the full idea first, and then dismiss that if they so desire.

I sort of get the feeling that McLaren's rhetoric gets away from him in the first section as he poo-poos the Platonic world view. At least I hope that's what's happened. Preachers do tend to have problems with rhetorical flourishes. (Don't ask me how I know this...)

Here's what I suggest to strengthen his argument - at least as far as I've read. Rather then saying that the whole enterprise of the Church is flawed because it's concept of salvation and cosmology has been understood through the lenses of a Graeco-Roman; simply say that the classical form that made sense to the Church's that grew out of the Reformation no longer works today. It no longer works because we're no longer exposed to it in school. We have been given new sets of lenses.

And just as the Reformation grew out of a cultural shift ("Emergence" to borrow Phyllis Tickle's term), what we are becoming will do that as well.

So, I agree that we must recast much of the traditional reformation language. I agree that the Reformation world view no longer works. I don't think though that it's worthy of total rejection though because there's an awful lot of useful ideas buried deep within it and rejecting the whole means we'll necessarily reject the useful parts too.

(Aside: This reminds me of something I tried to point out when teaching the History of Science. When a new paradigm comes along, the new paradigm has to be explain as much as the old paradigm did and then extend that for it to be taken seriously. Just coming up with a new paradigm and explaining something new is fun, but not terribly helpful if you can't explain the things the old paradigm did. Relativity is so impressive because in the case of slow velocity, it collapses to Newtonian physics.)

As I'm reading now (in book 1 of "A New Kind of Christianity") McLaren has called for a return to the Jewish narrative structure of the Old Testament. It seems to me that he's recapitulating the work of Hans Frei (who helped created the Yale Method of biblical criticism) - calling for us to read the biblical narrative as a narrative and not as an atomistic string of aphorisms. Yay for Brian in this.

Returning to the text, reading it anew through "Jewish" eyes is most likely going to be a profitable path. Not though because that's the secret key to unlocking everything. We already know the key: Jesus. But it's useful because rereading the texts with a new set of lenses will probably be the way we find a scaffolding and web of ideas that will allow to construct a world-view that speaks to the next 500 years or so of human experience (again a la Tickle).

... so that's what I've got so far. If you've read the book, I'd be curious to hear your reactions to the first section as well. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Anthony Dale Hunt seems to be reacting to the same thing that I am in his essay here.

Into the brave and glorious future of ubiquitous mobile networking!

2010-03-04T07:14:35-07:00

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad (which I'm going to pre-order as soon as I can) he mentioned in an almost off-hand way that, counting laptops in total, Apple has become the world's largest manufacturer of mobile device computers.

Many noticed that he said that. Many wondered why. I was one of them. But seeing this quote from one of the directors of Google today, I think I get it:

"Google believes that in three or so years desktops will give way to mobile as the primary screen from which most people will consume information and entertainment. That’s according to Google Europe boss John Herlihy who said that smart phones enhance Google’s mission to make information universal.
[...]‘In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,’ Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity."

Read the full article here.

Do you remember how Wayne Gretzky once said that he was a great player because he didn't skate to where the hockey puck was, he skated to where it was going to be?

Here you have two of the leading technology companies in the world betting on the future of mobile computing and saying that desktop computing and perhaps even laptop computers are going to be less important going forward. Desktops are already commodity devices in most cases - low profit margins and all - and used for specialized tasks like heavy gaming or content production. Laptops are heading down that path me thinks.

My daughter uses the laptop less and less in her studies and in her homework these days. I see her picking up her iPhone and using the encyclopedia app or the dictionary app. She's allowed to use her phone in Physics class because the calculator is more than adequate for what she needs. She uses her phone in lab because it has a very nice stopwatch built in.

The killer app for her with the iPad is going to be the word processing software. For me it's the application that will let me have access to the Logos theological library that I've purchased over the years. (In fact I just upgraded my license with Logos just so I could have that mobile access to my reference library.)

If you want to know where the puck is headed, look to the heavy technology consumers.

So, if this is the case, what should we in the Church be doing to live into this brave new future?

I've actually been part of a group that was planning for this transition. But decisions made by "leadership" sorts in the CoE and TEC pulled the funding for the project. I'm not optimistic that we're going to restore that. But no matter. Look at what we've managed to accomplish at places like Episcopal Cafe on a shoe string budget.

There's already a BCP app for the iPhone. There are multiple free and paid versions of the Bible for the iPhone and for the Android platform. Keynote on the iPad should allow folks who uses "slides" in worship or teaching full access.

What to do next?

Here's a thought... there's a free service out there that will let you build your own app for the iPhone and iPad that makes it dead simple to get your website content onto the mobile device. We have a pretty active website at the Cathedral I serve. We chose our web server software to make it easy to update the site daily with news. I'm thinking it's time for us to have a Trinity Cathedral iPhone app. I think that's going to be my after Easter project this year. (It would be a nice gift to the Cathedral if I am called away later this year to a new ministry too.)

I've thought too about spending a little money and creating a ubiquitous wireless network in the nave of the Cathedral. Someday I think we'll get to the point where people will be able to arrive for an event and use their phone or their iPad like device to download the service information or concert program - thus saving the use of our copier.

Bible study, etc is an obvious application.

We moved our accounting and membership software to a cloud-based computing service and now I can get full access to membership information via my iPhone or off-site. (And so can key members of the Cathedral staff.)

Any suggestions about how to use mobile tech more effectively in Christian Education? With Youth ministry?

The coolest use I've heard of was using texting to send intercessionary prayers to the screens at large worship events. As people are praying, the special requests from the stadium crowd flash across the screen.

Just some first thoughts as we contemplate moving into the brave new world of ubiquitous networked ministry.

Sermon for Lent 2C 2010: Jesus our Savior

2010-03-03T07:55:02-07:00

We focus on the language of Lord, we focus on the image of Messiah. We seek the wisdom of the itinerant rabbi. But Jesus is first and foremost our savior. Whether we seek his shelter or not.

He saves because that is his fundamental nature.

"Do not be afraid Abram, I will be your shield"

MP3 File

Saying "no" to "Good Buddy Jesus"

2010-03-02T06:28:48-07:00

DB Hamill writes of his realization that his exclusive focus on Jesus as Hamill's friend and invisible companion was less than helpful to his spiritual growth.

The phenomenon of thinking about Jesus as an invisible friend, of the sort that lots of children have in their youth, is not terribly common experience in the Episcopal Church, but it is so within Pentecostal circles. Perhaps it's more common because within Pentecostal churches there's more of an experiential and emotional aspect to faith. (Not something that I personally find compelling, but I'm odd that way.) Perhaps it's common in the American South because of it's deep Baptist roots and the Baptist thread of ideas around solo, not sola scriptura. (Solo, as I mean it, is that it is the job of the individual believer, guided by scripture, to determine the truth of God.)

Whatever the root cause, the idea of the individual experience of God taking precedence over the communal or common, a special American charism apparently, must underlie the idea of Jesus as personal God and guide. Good Buddy Jesus. Precious Moments Jesus. "He walks with me and He talks with me" Jesus.

Hamill describes his own experience in rather therapeutic terms, and as growing out of his own psychological needs, but I think you can properly broaden the causes. The idea of personal Jesus is so endemic in American religious thought that there must be more than one constellation of cause.

At any rate Hamill describes the thinking that has led him to a "breakup with Jesus":

"The man who took the romance out of my relationship with Jesus was a theologian called James Alison and he pointed out that, if the witnesses are to be believed, Jesus had some quite specific concerns about the ongoing relationship that his disciples would have with him. The same Jesus who gave himself again to his disciple after they had contributed to the process by which he was killed, this same Jesus was concerned (prior to his death) that he be remembered precisely for and in his death. This is my body broken for you. This is my blood shed for you. Do this to remember me! The Jesus of Christian faith is not an invisible psychological aid. The experience of resurrection is this: living he confronts us with his death. He wants us to know him as a man who poured himself out for the world and also as a man who was broken by the world. This death is the culmination of the person and it is this that determines whatever kind of ‘relationship’ we might have with him.
I guess if there is a sense now that I have a ‘relationship’ with Jesus (and the term relationship certainly sticks in my throat) it is in the sense that I know Jesus now as my ‘victim’ – my divine victim. What I need is something like a ‘liturgical’ relationship with Jesus rather than a romantic one. I need to be constantly addressed by the drama of God’s encounter with the world as it culminates in the great revelatory victory of the cross of Christ. As I am addressed by this drama I learn to respond to it, to act a part within it. After all in spite of it I still find myself constantly drawn into a world process which produces new victims and I am constantly drawn to deny my complicity in this process. Unless I am liturgically confronted by the forgiveness of my divine victim, Jesus, I will never be truly human nor truly participate in God’s life for which I was created. My hope is that eucharistic liturgy is the Spirit’s way of casting out romantic narcissism and making disciples."

Read the full article here.

H/T to Ben Myers

If you're looking for something to meditate upon this Lent, this would be an excellent line to follow.

My sermon from Sunday discussed, from the idea of the Hen of God, the idea of Jesus as ur-victim. I'll post it later this morning, he writes hopefully...

Irrational actors

2010-03-01T10:02:52-07:00

Most of modern economic theory (at least as well as I can follow it) seems to be predicated that the individual consumer and supplier will act in rational ways that seek to serve their own best interest.

But now social scientists are discovering that it "ain't necessarily so". Looking at how pay scale effects work output they uncovered a surprise:

"For example, Ariely describes a series of experiments that measure work performance among randomly selected groups of people where one group is paid nothing, one group is paid a little, and a third is paid a lot. The group that was paid a little did a little. The group that was paid a lot did a lot. The group that was paid nothing did even more. Ariely and colleagues go on to refine this experiment by changing the reward to gifts (chocolates) instead of money, then to gifts whose value is enumerated ('you will receive a $5 box of Godiva chocolates') and examines how this effects performance. He also examines what happens to performance in situations in which one is at first paid to work, then asked to do the same work again for free.
The results are fascinating, and point to the idea that we work hard for money, and we work hard for social reasons, but that one can short-circuit the other, and lastingly so. He then goes on to explain how companies that ask their employees to work harder for social reasons ('you're part of the team') but dismiss the employees for economic reasons ('we need to cut costs') end up in an impossible place. So do companies that ask customers to come make a purchase as a social transaction ('join the family!') but then treat the transaction after the fact as a purely economic matter ('you should have read the fine-print')."

Read the full article here.

Those of us who work in the non-profit world, and who depend on the gifts of volunteers, would do well to read, mark and inwardly digest this information. It helps explain why congregational economics are so different than non-profit hospital corporations, which are different from giant multi-national companies.

Which is a good thing I think.

Credo: Why the Ancient Greeks were wrong about morality

2010-02-27T20:00:30-07:00

Brilliant essay by Rabbi Sacks in the Guardian today, of which this is just a part:

"Nowadays the very concept of personal ethics has become problematic in one domain after another. Why shouldn’t a businessman or banker pay himself the highest salary he can get away with? Why shouldn’t teenagers treat sex as a game so long as they take proper precautions? Why shouldn’t the media be sensationalist if that sells papers, programmes and films? Why should we treat life as sacred if abortion and euthanasia are what people want? Even Bernard Williams came to call morality a ‘peculiar institution’. Things that once made sense — duty, obligation, self-restraint, the distinction between what we desire to do and what we ought to do — to many people now make no sense at all.
This does not mean that people are less ethical than they were, but it does mean that we have adopted an entirely different ethical system from the one people used to have. What we have today is not the religious ethic of Judaism and Christianity but the civic ethic of the Ancient Greeks. For the Greeks, the political was all. What you did in your private life was up to you. Sexual life was the pursuit of desire. Abortion and euthanasia were freely practised. The Greeks produced much of the greatest art and architecture, philosophy and drama, the world has ever known. What they did not produce was a society capable of surviving.

The Athens of Socrates and Plato was glorious, but extraordinarily short-lived. By now, by contrast, Christianity has survived for two millennia, Judaism for four. The Judaeo-Christian ethic is not the only way of being moral; but it is the only system that has endured. If we lose the Judaeo-Christian ethic, we will lose the greatest system ever devised for building a society on personal virtue and covenantal responsibility, on righteousness and humility, forgiveness and love."

Read the full article here.

I'm not sure that you can say that Judeo-Christian ethics are the only ethics that can create a lasting society - Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism seem to have done okay for themselves over a couple of millennia or more too. But the point about the Greeks is very well taken.

H/T to Kendall Harmon

Swarming stars in the galactic core

2010-02-26T06:35:21-07:00

Astronomers are pretty much convinced that there's a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. (Just writing that sentence reminds me about how quickly opinions can change in science - years ago people doubted the existence of black holes, much less even imagined that they could come in a super massive variety.)

The reason for this belief is not theory. It's experimental data. Check out the AMAZING video of 15 years worth of stellar observations of the galactic core. (Much of the data comes from the new adaptive optical telescopes on Mt. Keck in Hawaii.)

Some of the stars in that video are O and A class main sequence stars - which means they're many time more massive than the Sun. And the galactic core is playing catch with those stars making them orbit with a period of 15 years or less.

There's no way to get that sort of orbital behavior without putting something very very massive at the core. Like something with a mass of millions of suns. And there's no way for something so massive to be able to exist in a normal space. The self-gravity of such an object is so strong that it would immediately collapse on itself and disappear into a singularity. A black hole.

Observational evidence of a black hole. I can't tell you how amazing that is to me.

Sermon for Lent 1C 2010

2010-02-24T13:45:42-07:00

Moses goes to mountaintop, talks with God and receives the Law.

Jesus goes to wilderness and speaks with the Satan.

What is really happening in this gospel passage? And what lesson are we to take with us as we begin our Lenten journey this year?

MP3 File

"The middle is always evil"

2010-02-23T06:49:19-07:00

There's been a resurgence of interest in the objectivist moral philosophy of Ayn Rand. If you listen carefully you can hear much of her thought in the speeches of the extreme libertarians. I've wondered for years whether or not Rand is Rush Limbaugh's primary philosophical influence.

There's an article on Rand and her thinking in the Globe and Mail today. In the middle of the article, the author points out the shadow side of Rand's arguments. She connects something I hand't thought about before. Rand's hyper positivism argues for an objective truth - and totally rejects any sense of subjectivism. In an perfect world, the disputation of competing claims leads one to determine what is true and what is false. And the false must be rejected and the truth followed.

But casting the Universe into binary terms, while naively useful scientifically, can have deadly consequences in terms of morality:

"In pure form, Ayn Rand's philosophy would work very well if human beings were never helpless and dependent on others through no fault of their own. Unsurprisingly, many people become infatuated with her philosophy as teenagers only to leave it behind when concerns of family, children, and aging make that fantasy seem more and more implausible. For some, she becomes a conduit to more sensible small-government philosophies.
But Ms. Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect – one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Ms. Rand declared, ‘There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.’ She lambasted free-market theorists such as Friedrich A. Hayek for their lack of purity in allowing the government a legitimate role in alleviating poverty and its effects. In her novels, supporters of various forms of collectivism – moochers and looters – are shown as acting by stealth to take over and corrupt society and culture."

From here. (H/T to Kendall Harmon)

I've had any number of conversations lately with folks about the broken legislative processes in Congress, and the parallel inability of even the Church to find ways of allowing people to feel included in its common life. One of the reoccurring themes of modern debate is that the people in the middle are basically weak, timid obstructionists who need to decide one way or the other so that the final decision can be made. You can hear this from both sides in modern debate. The moderates are to be pitied at best and converted one way or the other if at all possible. It's apparently inconceivable that there can be any value in moderation to many.

Bishop Marshall once remarked of conflicts in the Church that we tend to "learn and then adopt the values of our oppressors". I wonder if the Episcopal Church in the 20th century, which has been forced again and again to try to justify her existence to people and a society who believe we've grown beyond that need, and who have elevated the individuals right to happiness over that of the needs of the broader community, hasn't fallen into that trap Bishop Marshall describes.

When a standard candle isn't a standard candle

2010-02-22T19:48:33-07:00

The idea of a standard candle is very important in Astronomy. The concept is simple. We understand (thanks to Sir Newton) how the inverse square law connects brightness with distance. If we know the absolute brightness of an object (like a candle) and we then measure how bright it appears, we can work out how far away it is. Using this idea with stars (which aren't very standard in terms of brightness) we can work out things like the distance to nebulas, galaxies, and clusters of stars.

But when you're looking at things very very far away, the candidates for standard candles become very few. You need something very bright so that you can see it, even dimly, halfway across the Universe. That's why there's been such an interest in a certain kind of supernova over the years. The explosion *is* very very bright. And, because it was thought to be caused by a very simple mechanism - a white dwarf star exceeding the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses - each explosion should be just about exactly the same. Which makes it an excellent standard candle.

In fact it's so good that it was the first place people were able to observe the increasing inflation of the Universe. Hubble first saw that the Universe was expanding. But in the late 80's people, using the standard candle novas saw that the rate of expansion was getting greater the further out one looked.

No one nows exactly why this should be. The best answer at the moment is the invocation of the mysterious entity of Dark Energy. Which means..., well actually no one is sure. But we have to come up with something to explain what we're seeing and you have to admit, that's a really cool name.

Except that perhaps we don't have to come up with something. Because maybe things are as we thought they were. Turns out that standard candles we've been using aren't all that standard. Researchers announced this morning that the explosions aren't being caused by white dwarfs gradually exceeding the limit as thought - the explosions seem to be caused by collisions between degenerate matter objects. Which means the explosions could be much brighter than we thought (in absolute terms) which means we're overestimating their distance from us...

"Mario Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said that while the new results and the idea of two classes of supernovas ‘muddies the water,’ they would not affect the measurements of dark energy. Most of the supernovas in those studies, he said, came from spiral galaxies, and the astronomers, moreover, were very careful to calibrate their data.
‘The main results so far will remain unchanged,’ Dr. Livio said."

I'm glad he thinks that. But I'm not quite as optimistic. This whole idea of Dark Energy violates Occams Razor six ways to Sunday. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other calibration errors out there.

Like what happened when we figured out that another kind of intermediate standard candle - the Cephid Variable Star - came in different forms. They can still function as a sort of candle, but you have to be very careful now.

Read the full account in the New York Times here.

Napping your way to success?

2010-02-22T09:20:46-07:00

Saw this report this morning:

"A power nap indeed works to recharge the brain, improving memory, according to findings of a study on sleep and midday napping by researchers from the University of California at Berkley. Led by study author Matthew Walker, the team of scientists compared the results of memory tests after a group of test subjects took a 100-minute nap versus those who did not.
The findings were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego.

The results, though preliminary, showed the group that powered down for a spell during the afternoon did better on the memory test, which was designed to stimulate the hippocampus, a part of the brain thought to be linked to memory function. Walker compared napping to clearing your e-mail inbox or rebooting a computer."

Read the full article here.

One of the unexpected consequences of moving to Phoenix is I sleep a lot better at night - the allergens out here are a lot less bothersome as far as my body is concerned. I do notice that I'm able to concentrate better. At least I think I am...

Maybe it's time to return to the afternoon nap. That used to be an option when the rectory was relatively close to the parish building. It's not terribly convenient these days, but if it helps us be sharper for evening meetings, perhaps driving home is worth the inconvenience.

Lookout Mountain Hike

2010-02-20T19:01:58-07:00

Here's the gang just before the rain started. Our "Dean's Hikes" this year have been rainy every single time. Which means that we're going to have a great wildflower season this year I think.