Faith Related Ramifications of Life on Other Planets

Based on problems we have seen arise in the past, I believe that we Christians need to think about the possible ramifications of future scientific discoveries. One of these possible future discoveries is that I think we should be thinking about (and discussing) is that of the discovery of life on other planets. I cannot say that I am certain that life will be found on other planets, but with the number of new planets being discovered, it definitely doesn't seem impossible. It does seem unlikely that we will not at least find some earth-like planets soon and it does not seem out of the question that life will be found on one of them.

The current NASA mission of the spacecraft called Kepler (named after the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler) has already found 1,235 planet candidates as of February 2nd, 2011. To put this into some perspective, Kepler has only been actively searching for planets since May of 2009 and it is planned to keep looking for new planets for at least 3.5 years total (expandable to 6 years). Given the rate of discover of new planets now taking place, it is my (humble) opinion that an earth-like planet will be discovered within the next few years (we'll just say 3 years). For reference, I am defining earth-like in basically the way NASA talks about it - as a planet that is half to twice the size of Earth and in a habitable zone where liquid water could possibly exist.

Not too long ago most Christians believed that there was no way God would ever let any of his created organisms go extinct. All creation is precious in God's sight and that means that there is no way he could let any of it simply disappear of the face of the earth. However, when the bones of  things like Mastadons and Giant Ground Sloths were discovered, people finally had to come to grips with the fact that there were organisms that had once existed on the earth and were now completely extinct. God had, in fact, let many of his created species disappear of the face of the earth and today we know that somewhere upwards of 90% of all species that ever existed have subsequently gone extinct. To many people, this was proof that the God of the Bible could not possibly exist or at least not be who we thought he was.

Like I have already said, I'm certainly not going to guarantee that NASA will find life on other planets or anything, but I think we should be ready for the possibility. From our current perspective, we can see that the issue of extinction did not need to pose the threat to faith that Christians of the time thought it did, but then we commit ourselves to beliefs that could create exactly the same problems for us. Where in the Bible does it tell us that this planet holds the only life God created? Why should it threaten our beliefs to think that maybe there is life somewhere else in the universe that we have never even considered (especially when we think of all the things right here on our own planet that we haven't considered yet)?

Immediately Jesus reached out
his hand and caught him.
“You of little faith,” he said,
“why did you doubt?” - Matthew 14:31

If there is a contradiction between science and the Bible, I believe that the Bible wins simply by nature of the fact that it is the inspired Word of God. We, as Christians, should not simply surrender to everything that science proclaims as true. After all, we are commanded to have faith and not to love the world, but to love the Father. However, if the Bible doesn't talk about something, that doesn't mean it can't exist. The Bible doesn't tell us about the millions of microorganisms that live inside each of us and which we would be unable to live without, but does their presence contradict the Bible? If it does, I'm definitely not seeing it.

What I'm really trying to get across here is this; would the discovery of life outside Earth cause you to question your faith? I'm not saying necessarily that it shouldn't, but I do want to suggest that if you think it would, think about why. What about a discovery like that would cause you to question what the Bible tells you? What about the discover of other life in the universe would make you think that God isn't who you thought he was (or that he doesn't exist)?

Nature vs. Nurture Fallacy

When I hear the phrase "nature vs. nurture," what I almost immediately think of is the debates that sprung up over the past years about the "cause" of homosexuality in humans. I would like to start by saying that although this may be relevant to those debates, I do not intend this to be my entry into those arguments (though, feel free to use it for that purpose).

It is important to note that when people talk about "nature vs. nurture," there are specific meanings behind these words and the phrase as a whole. These specific meanings are important for understanding the argument and the issues as a whole.

Firstly, it is important to understand that what is being asked about with this phrase is the cause of some behavior or attribute. For instance, we could look at the texture of chocolate chip cookies or the foraging behavior of honey bees. Does the nature of the cookie (the ingredient recipe behind it) or the nurture (how it was mixed and baked) determine the texture of the resulting cookie? In the same way, we could ask whether it is the nature or the nurture of honey bee workers that cause them to be foragers.

Secondly, the word nature is used to refer to the physical origin of something or the material that actually makes something up. In the case of the chocolate chip cookie, the nature of the cookie would be the set of ingredients that go into the batter to make it. In the case of the honey bees, the nature would be the genetic information that told the cells and rest of the body what to do.

The word nurture is used to refer to the circumstances involving the development of the subject to its current state. The nurture of the cookie would be the process used to mix the ingredients and bake it. The nurture of the honey bees involves all of the things that influenced it as it was being born and raised in the colony as well as all the interactions it has with other bees, it's environment, and other organisms.

The actual issue here is the fact that people use evidences of the effects of nature and nurture as proofs of what caused certain behaviors and traits. One of the most commonly used incorrect phrases goes something like the following: "There is a gene for ________ (a phenotype)." This statement implies that there is no environmental component in the existence of the particular trait within the individual. Another commonly misused phrased is as follows: "Behavior/trait __________ is a learned behavior/trait." This statement implies that there is no genetic component to the development of the particular trait within the individual. The point here is that traits themselves cannot be attributed to either nature or nurture alone. There is no scientific or logical way to say that one is the cause without any effect from the other.

To go back to our cookie example, it would be completely improper to say that the chewy nature of a particular cookie is the result of how it was baked. How could you say that when there are so many factors that go into how a cookie is made? Who is to say that the ingredients of the cookie had nothing to do with the chewy nature of it? If you say that the baking is what made it chewy, why wouldn't I be able to say that that peanut butter in it is what makes it chewy (and be equally right)? Well, logically, you can't say that the chewy nature is due to any one factor because if you took out all the other factors (isolating your single variable), you wouldn't even have a cookie anymore.

What we can do is look at two cookies that have different textures (maybe one chewy and one crunchy) and define what the cause of the difference is. If we do some experiments and rule out other factors by controlling the ingredients and mixing techniques (and other things), we can determine definitely that baking is the cause for the difference between two cookies. The same thing goes for traits within animals (including humans, of course).

If interest is shown in this post, I will consider posting more extensively about this topic in the future. There are tons and tons of studies that could be discussed with respect to the nature vs. nurture fallacy and how we actually look at differences between individuals.

Computer Display Issue

I have no idea what caused this issue to occur or even exactly what the issue was, but it seemed interesting to me because I've never seen it happen before. I was simply browsing a website I go to frequently and all of a sudden the screen went black and then came back up. When it came back, it looked very odd and the error message was on in the middle of my screen as you can see in the pictures.

Since it is probably hard (or impossible) to read, this is what the error message says: "The ialmrnt5 display driver has stopped working normally. Save your work and reboot the system to restore full display functionality. The next time you reboot the machine a dialog will be displayed giving you a chance to upload data about this failure to Microsoft."

I hope it is possible to see in some of the pictures, but the most interesting thing about this error to me was what the screen looked like afterward. The resolution and proportions of things had completely changed and the coloration was not simply different, but was very weird. Instead of the colors of things being the simply changed, things that are normally uniform color, were no longer.  As you can hopefully see in the pictures, the task bar and everything at the bottom of the screen are completely discolored and crazy looking.

This is not an informative post at all, but simply an interest thing. I was really fascinated by what happened to my computer screen and wanted to share that with the wider world. For what it's worth, the problem went away as soon as I restarted my computer and I have had no further problems with this display error.

In case anyone is interested, here is what I'm running on:

Toshiba Satelite A105 S4004

Windows XP - SP3

Intel T2300 @ 1.66 GHz - 1GB RAM

Literacy (re-)Defined

Definitions of many things change over time. Literacy is something for which the popular definition really has not changed much even though the academic definition has. I would wager that most people, when asked about literacy, think almost exclusively about reading and writing. Clearly, a person who cannot read is illiterate as is a person who cannot write and a person who can do neither is still illiterate. But what about a person who can read and can write? Is that person automatically considered to be literate just based on those two skills? And at what point in the development of these skills would a person be considered literate? Shouldn't our definition of literacy have something to do with the ability to communicate? And if so, why only include the two written forms of communication?

The traditional definition of literacy basically says that if a person can communicate through reading and writing, he/she is literate. If a person knows how to spell a lot of different words, but is unable to use that knowledge to communicate through writing, he/she is illiterate. This makes sense to me, but what doesn't make sense is that we traditionally only define literacy in terms of the two written forms of communication.

If literacy is a measure of a person’s ability to communicate with other people, then many different forms of communication should factor in which have not traditionally been thought of as factors of literacy. It seems to me that literacy is something more along the lines of the ability to understand various types of communication as well as the ability to articulate one’s thoughts through those forms of communication.

One thing I think of as a non-traditional form of literacy is something often described in terms of "social cues." I hear people described often as “socially awkward,” but I would be tempted to say that a better description of these people would be “socially illiterate.” People described as socially awkward are normally people who do not pick up on normal social cues and do not use those cues themselves. This, to me, is an issue of being illiterate within a certain subject area much as many people are scientifically illiterate.

With that being said, I'm now off to call the White House and let some people know that NCLB needs to be modified to include my revised definition of literacy :)

Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360 - Product Review

The Xbox 360 is definitely one of the top two game consoles on the market with the PS3 being the obvious contender. Xbox 360 has awesome graphics and tons of great games available for play. The added Kinect hardware makes this gaming console even more desirable than it was to begin with.

Kinect for Xbox 360 is tons of fun with family, friends, kids, and really any group of people. There are already enough games available for Kinect that there is really something for everyone. It is also a surprisingly good workout. I am  not your stereotypical gamer who out of shape because of spending too much time with a bag of chips and a television. I don't work out all the time, but I stay relatively active and I was very surprised to find my muscles sore after the first weekend I had Kinect. It really works your whole body in the same way that playing most sports does.

The Kinect is also surprisingly easy to use. Both the body-controller function and the voice-controlled function are very intuitive. I have never found myself needing to contort my body in odd ways in order to get the console to do what I want it to. In the same way, I have never found myself shouting at the console or speaking in a monotone or anything else to make it understand what I am trying to say. It is very good at recognizing speech and movement the way they come naturally.

One thing to keep in mind about the Kinect is that the advertisements, like all advertisements, are misleading (my rants about advertising will wait for another day). In most of the video advertisements, you see groups of people sitting and standing at about the distance you would normally see people watching television from or maybe even a little closer. This is completely unrealistic. It takes a lot of space to play Kinect games. The living room space in my apartment is situated so that the television is in the corner of the room and my sectional sofa in the opposite corner. This makes a usable space in between the television and the sofa that is approximately 7ft deep by 10ft wide. This space is only barely passable for playing Kinect games with 2 people. With one person playing, the space works quite well, but with 2 people, the game often gets paused or just gets confused because someone stepped outside the range of the camera or couldn't step far enough back.

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The Bottom Line:

The Kinect sensor for Xbox 360 is incredibly easy to use, a good value for the price, and a ton of fun if you have the space for it, but make sure you have the space before you spend the money.

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Related Products I Recommend:

Kinect Sports - Xbox 360

Xbox 360 S - 250 GB Console

God Outside of Space-Time: Thoughts on how Einstein's theory of Special Relativity informs us about how God works

There are very few Christians who question the majority belief that God is not constrained by the same physical limitations as humans and earthly creatures are. We believe that God has the ability to be anywhere he wants, at any time he wants, and is even able to be multiple places at once. In fact, most of us believe that, in one way or another, God is really everywhere all the time. I have opinions about how the belief came about, but that is a topic for another conversation. The topic of conversation for today centers around our beliefs about how God works in relation to time.

Time is a tricky concept, at least in part, because it is something that is very difficult to define. Time seems to be simultaneously a human construct that we impose on the world in order to understand it and a real natural phenomenon we have absolutely no control over. In the same way, our discussions about how God relates to time end up being quite complicated and usually only end up making sense to the person making the argument.  For this reason, I would like to start by proposing a working definition for time before moving on to discuss how I believe God works with regard to time.

We begin our discussion with a geometry lesson: We know that in a triangle, the sum of the squares of the lengths two sides of the triangle add up to the square root of the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle. The equation that relates to this looks like this:

Many people encountered this in their middle school geometry class, found out that it is called the Pythagorean Theorem and subsequently forgot about it. Another way to think about this, is if you went a certain distance, x, in the horizontal direction and a certain distance, y, in the vertical direction, your distance from where you started (which we will call displacement from now on), in two dimensions, would be H. Your displacement in this situation is related to how far you moved in the x direction and how far you moved in the y direction. What most people don't know is that interesting similarities to this can be seen in other formulas relating to the quantifying "distances."

One similar formula can be seen in the calculation of what we might call the "hypotenuse" of a 3-dimensional triangle (really a type of prism, but that's not  important). In the example of the 3-D triangle, we can look at something like what is shown in the picture at the right which has a side in the x-direction (to the right), one in the y-direction (up), and one in the z-direction(out of the screen). If a person traveled along the x side, the y side and then the z side, the total displacement would be the side labeled I. The calculation of the length of this side comes from the formula seen here:

The similarity between this calculation and that of the hypotenuse of a 2-D triangle is clear. This may not seems stunning to many people, but it will be more interesting momentarily. The fact that, when another dimension is added into the mix, the formula simply expands to accommodate it will shed real light on the concept of time.

The next similar formula requires a little bit more upfront explanation to ensure that everyone understands (at least to some extent) where it is coming from. I'll start out by simply mentioning the theory of Special Relativity which Albert Einstein developed and which as changed very little since. Many people have probably heard of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, but most probably do not actually know what is all about. Basically, Einstein wanted to understand light better because light has a number of very odd properties. One of the more interesting things about light is that, no matter what substance it travels through, it always travels the same speed. That's really weird!

Anyway, part of what he ended up doing was looking at the behavior of other types of matter when they moved at high rates of speed. What he discovered is that the faster something moves, the slower time goes by. This is a really odd concept, but it has been documented extensively by now. Scientists have calibrated two atomic clocks, kept one on the ground and took the other into a fast jet that flew around for a while and when it landed, the clock from the jet was behind the clock that stayed on the ground (There are also many more complicated predictions and findings, but we need not concern ourselves with them given our current purposes). What this told Einstein is that time is not really a fixed construct like we normally think of it as. It can, in fact, be changed to some extent.

One of the results of Einstein's work on the theory of Special Relativity was his development of the concept of space-time. Space-time is a concept used in many science fiction movies and whatnot, but it is never really explained. Basically, it is exactly what it sounds like - a combination of space and time. It is really a mathematical model that looks at the combination of space and time which is based on Einstein's ideas that space and time are actually related due to the theory of Special Relativity. Just like we have calculations to figure out the displacement of a person who moves in 2-dimensional space or in 3-dimensional space, we also have a calculation for the displacement of a person moving in space-time:

In this formula, everything is the same as in the 3-D one except that now we add in a quantity of time. What is being looked at is how far someone moves in each of the three dimensions along with how much time it takes and what we get is the quantity represented by J which is the displacement in space-time. It is largely because of this formula, that time is sometimes referred to as "the fourth dimension."

What we can learn from this last formula and its similarities to the other formulae is that time is really just a dimension like the three dimensions (length, width, height) we normally talk about. Time truly is just the fourth dimension of the universe we live in. So the question that interests me from all this is in relation to how we should think about God's relationship to time.

What it says to me about how God works in relation to time is that he is not constrained by time in any way at all. As discussed at the beginning, many Christians do not have a problem believing that God does not have to operate within our limitations regarding space. He can be (and I would argue he probably is) simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. I certainly do not believe this previous statement literally as it is because, in reality, I believe that God simply does not need to "play by the rules" when it comes to spatial constrictions. As parts of his creation, we cannot operate outside of the concept of space as defined by the physical laws God created and which are interpreted and defined by us in terms of mathematical models. I do not believe, however, that God needs to operate within the physical law he set out to be the foundation of his creation. It is from this belief accompanied by the limited understanding of what time really is that I draw the conclusion that God does not operate within time at all, but time is merely another part of his set of laws for this physical world he created.

I am not simply saying that I believe God is able to move through time as he pleases, any more than I would say that he can move through space as he pleases. Sure, those things are probably true, but it goes so far beyond that. God does not even need to exist within space even though I believe he probably chooses to at times. In the same way, God does not even need to exist within time regardless of whether he chooses to.

Just as width is a feature of space, so time is a feature of space-time. And just as I believe God is not constrained to operate within any width-related boundaries, so I believe he is not constrained to operate within any time-related boundaries. God created everything that exists including the laws that govern the universe (like space-time). Though he may choose to exist within his creation, and even within the physical laws that he created to keep order his creation, he certainly is not bound to be governed by any aspect of his creation.

Butterscotch-Pecan Pancakes

When I was a kid, I always enjoyed when my mother would spoil me with chocolate-chip pancakes because they were still pancakes, but had that little bit of internal sweetness which eliminated the need for syrup. This simple modification of the breakfast classic holds similar appeal for me.

I visited my brother recently and he introduced me to this concoction which I have now completely fallen in love with. It apparently all originated with a friend of his who is a good cook and enjoys coming up with new dishes. There is very little to actually say about this breakfast marvel, but I wanted to share it anyway just because I like it so much.

The idea is simple and the title has already told you almost everything there is to tell. Putting things into pancakes is not even close to a new idea, but I had never heard of this particular set of additives before. The pancake batter is made however you normally make it and before dropping dollops of it onto a hot skillet, butterscotch chips (like the kind you put in cookies - same as chocolate chips only they’re butterscotch flavored) and some crushed pecans. The butterscotch chips add the sweetness that I loved in the chocolate-chip pancakes of my youth and the pecans add a satisfying crunch as well as a feeling of sophistication that surpasses even the classy, fruit-infused flap-jacks served at country clubs.

Overall, if you enjoy bread-derived breakfast foods, have a somewhat youthful sweet-tooth, and appreciate a rather contrived feeling of refinement, then grab a cup of coffee or your favorite fruit juice (or maybe chocolate milk?) and enjoy.