One flesh

I wrote several years ago complaining about Augustine's take on sex: he only had a concubine, not a wife, and thus probably lacked full appreciation of the matter. Wanting privacy isn't the same as shame.

Another aspect came to mind today. Genesis said and Jesus emphasized that "the two become one flesh." I'm a bit protective of my flesh, and I don't want my internal organs exposed to the day and the inspection of outsiders. (Surgery is a big deal!) It interferes with the mutual operations of the organs, and leaves the self in an inharmonious state, not an organic whole. If two are one flesh, an outsider likewise leaves their "one flesh" in an inharmonious condition, not a unified whole.

I've heard it claimed that a couple is "one flesh" in their children, which is no doubt true in some sense, but not, I think, the main meaning. Paul wasn't writing about having children with prostitutes.

Dogs and puppies

The story of Jesus and the Syrian woman is one of those rather jarring anecdotes and parables that leave you wondering "What gives?" Jesus calls her a dog?

I was told that the translation is traditional, but poor -- there are two words for dog and this is the one "kynarion" that means puppy, as opposed to "kyon" (as used in Revelation 22:15) that means "dog" in a perjorative sense. The Mark passage reads a little differently with that translation:

it is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the puppies. But she answered and said to Him, "Yes, Lord, but even the puppies under the table feed on the children's crumbs"

You get the picture, right? Kids feeding the pet dog under the table? It's a lot less harsh.

I gather (same source) that some preachers want to imagine that Jesus learned a valuable lesson about racism from the woman's faith, i.e. Gentiles are just as good as Jews.

Well, there's an extended story that Mark tells earlier, from Mark 4:35-5:43. Jesus tells His disciples to head to the other side of the lake. A storm scares them half to death and nigh sinks the boat. On the other side they meet a demon-possessed pagan, whom Jesus exorcises and sends home with the mission to tell everyone about what God did for him. AFAIK, this is the first apostle whom Jesus commissioned. Jesus cared enough about this (pagan) man and his subsequent mission that travel, scaring His (jewish) disciples silly, the fate of a herd of pigs, and even the temporary death of Jairus' (jewish) daughter were secondary.

That sounds like He had very different priorities than I would have, but they're certainly not bigoted.

Connections

Some mathematician with a sense of humor decided to borrow a bit from the study of graphs to illustrate how significant Erdos has been in modern math. You are "connected" to Erdos if you have co-authored a paper with him, or with someone who has co-authored, or with … and so on. Erdos himself has number 0, someone who wrote a paper with him has number 1, someone who wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him has 2, and so on. I have Erdos number 4 – not because I'm a good mathematician (far from it) but because I was part of a physics experiment in which some theorists (who I actually never met) had co-authored a paper with some mathematicians who had number 2. The connection between me and Erdos is tenuous enough to make the matter completely silly.

It's the "6 degrees of separation" thing, just applied to a particular man.

Just for fun, can we extend this to Epstein? He's number 0, and just for fun assign 0 to Maxwell too.

But what do we mean by connection? Having spent time with him or in his parties, or having had professional dealings with him? Maybe both? His guards or his chef would have "Null" for social connections and "1" for professional. Trump and Clinton have a "1" for social connections; dunno about professional ones. In fact, never mind the professional connections, it's boring.

Do I need to say that I'm not going to be in the lists? I don't run in "connected" circles. But pretty much everybody in the House and Senate is either a 1 or 2: knew him or knew someone who did. The people who know/work with them in turn are 2's or 3's in social connections. The next ring out will be the state legislators and such.

So if you know a state legislator (a former one was in a Bible class with me), you might have an Epstein number of 5 or so. Of course that's attenuated enough to be pretty meaningless too.

Me? Well, theorists like Hawking (a "1"; Epstein seems to have liked to hang out with scientists) tended to hang out with theorists, but the top guys do meet sometimes, so I'm probably at least a 5, maybe a 4. I don't feel particularly tainted by such a distant association.

Pick a figure or two you don't like. How connected are you to them?

It seems trivial to say that the "well-connected" will be have more connections to each other than to the rest of us, but the rest of us group into clusters too. I had one set of connections at the university, and a different set at church. At separations of less than about 3, there was pretty much no overlap.

Some of those clusters map onto tribes, and some of the tribes are hostile, but even so there are still connections. If your church is helping some of the poor, members will be establishing relationships with them (I hope), and have less separation from the underclasses than, say, members of the math department will have with them.

Connections can be curious. How is O'Hare airport connected to Al Capone? If you don't know…

UPDATE: Closer than I thought! Lisa Randall spent some time in the CDF control room. IIRC the accelerator was down and so we talked a bit about what I was reading to pass the time: Augustine's Confessions. This was before 2008, so I doubt that there would have been any.

Love and Death

O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Holy Spirit and pour into our hearts your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue, without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you. Grant this for the sake of your only Son Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

love ... without which whoever lives is accounted dead before you

The prayer isn't gospel, of course, but since God is love, if we don't have love we, that far, do not fully have God in our life. Which is like not having life in our life.

We kid ourselves about love a lot, of course, thinking we're better at it than we really are, and mistaking sexual attraction and inoffensive habits for the deeper thing.

How much of what I did today was infused with "willing the good of another"? Was all the rest "wood, hay, and stubble"?

Hands-on science demonstrations

The elementary school science night is coming up next month, and I'm debating what to demonstrate this year. Part of the point of it is getting the kids up close and personal with the equipment (or the rocks, or the crafts, or the snakes in the case of the snake show people), so the demonstations have to be short – no big lecture hall demonstrations, all hands-on or hands-close.

I have the usual lasers and lenses, diffraction gratings and polarizing filters, and this year I can do a double-slit demonstration too. And I can do some electrostatics demonstrations this year, not just the usual magnetic field demos.

A kids' favorite is the Newton's cradle with 1 pound steel balls. It is a bit too battered to be a nice momentum/energy demo (it doesn't keep clacking back and forth for very long), but with bits of paper in the middle there's a nice connection to meteors. Unfortunately the fishing line breaks a lot on that one and the younger kids want to make the balls flail around, so it needs extra supervision.

This year I got a cheap geiger counter, and wonder if some simple demonstrations of radioactivity are in order. Pro: they may not see this again until college, if then. Con: some people freak out easily and fear is contagious. But then people seem OK with the snake demo crowd, so maybe that's OK.

Since I'm alone at the table I have to supervise all the demonstration gear and do the spiel for the current demo at the same time. That's another limit on what I can do.

I've a uranium glass plate that makes the counter sing, but not much else. I could open up a smoke detector (I'm not such a fool as to try to get the source out of the well, though), but I'd probably get in trouble for that unless I posted it. The counter's not sensitive enough to pick up potassium chloride pills, much less bananas. The old thorium lantern mantles haven't been made for years. Any inexpensive suggestions? I can order some uranium ore, but I've already got uranium in the plate.

What would you have gone for? This is indoors, so nothing explosive or flammable, and the age range is 4 to 11 years or so.

A daughter generally does rocks and minerals at a different table. A rocket club shows some of their rockets but doesn't launch anything. A pity. Outdoors we could tether a rocket to wrap around a bar, or try a pinwheel.

News

Some of the social media, and sometimes the news, reminds me of Kipling: If ye find that the bullock can toss you, or the heavy-browed Sambhur can gore; Ye need not stop work to inform us. We knew it ten seasons before.

Sports events

If I'm playing in the game,(*) I'm excited about it. If a family member or friend is playing, I'll watch and stay interested. If I don't know a soul, I have trouble caring.

I'm just not part of our harmless ritual of belonging: fans rooting for their team.

I've been like that all my life. It's probably a deficit of character somehow. It's not at though I spend the time with more productive pursuits -- I manage to waste time other, generally less social, ways.

It certainly cuts down on the small-talk possibilities.

(*) My knees say playing baseball is much less likely than it used to be, and once I was out of school and away from PE, it was improbable even then.

UPDATE: For anyone looking back on this years from now, wondering what brought the subject up, the Super Bowl was a few days ago and the Winter Olympics is still on.

Different takes

Tonight we were talking over Luke 13:6-9, the parable of the fig tree being given one extra year. I'd thought of it as a warning that (contra the prosperity gospel), having lots of material and even apparent spiritual goods might be a sign that this was your last chance. Someone else looked at the context ("but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish") and suggested that the vineyard-keeper was the one repenting from not having done his job taking care of the fig tree.

First order pleasures

All I know of Scrooge McDuck is that he had nephews and he loved to dive and swim in a vault of money.

Never mind petty details about the density and viscosity of cash. He wants to swim in it because other people value it -- not because of its beauty or sensual pleasure. Gold can be pretty, but piles of it aren't terribly aesthetic, though perhaps Smaug might see it so.

Which makes the pleasure rather second-order; not that it is pleasant in itself but it's pleasant because of what other people think about it. You don't enjoy it directly.

One first-order pleasure is admiring the beauty of the refracting crystals in the snow as your headlights shine on them as you drive. Not that I want to swim in the snow, but it makes me happier to look at it, no matter what Vogue says about this year's flake styles.

That's not to say that "first order" is better. Some pleasures are greater when shared, and you can have joy in the pleasure someone you love takes in a gift -- child with a new puppy?

But ... Arm candy or a friend? Caviar or red beans and rice? Up until the xrays burned out my taste buds, I could truthfully claim that no restaurant made the latter dish as well as my mother did, or my wife, or even me.

Living by the calendar

I read an essay by someone who deprecated life "lived by the calendar" as mechanical and dead. I looked at our calendar. It's more a matter of living by the promises we made.

Distinguishing different types of concerts

Are the "nose-bleed seats" in the Sherpa-guided upper-upper balcony, or down in front by the wall of speakers?

Romans 7 and zombies

A few years back I puzzled a bit about the popularity of zombie stories, and puzzled again.. I was thinking then in terms of fear of dissolution of social bonds and expectations, but ...

The zombie is a live body but dead mind and spirit. It looks alive, but isn't really.

Suppose one has a live body and live mind but dead spirit?

What could kill the spirit, though? Christians will probably see where I'm going with this; think of yourself in a world of living dead, with the fear that you are one of them yourself -- or can be one. Or were one.

"Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works." — Robert Farrar Capon

"Apocolypse" means "unveiling", so the zombie apocolypse means the revealing of a world of living dead.

Spiritual Disciplines

"You fight the way you train"

What spiritual challenges and temptations do you expect to face? Not the easy ones, the weaknesses you don't like to think about.

How do you want to respond to them?

How can you train for that response?

I'm not thinking about plotting out dialog. Jesus deprecated that. Explaining the hope that is in you isn't what I'm talking about either.

When I remember some of the things I have faced and try to come up with exercises to train my reactions to try to do better next time, two things come quickly to mind. Some of those old stories about what saints did don't sound quite so outlandish, and "Lead us not into temptation". I can only do so much.

Fast Breaking News

often reminds me of Twain's story of The Admiral in Roughing It.

Strangely dim

"Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face, and the things of Earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace."

The Beatific Vision -- seeing God as we've never seen Him before -- is almost by definition greater than anything we see in the world.

And yet I think the wording of the hymn isn't quite right. I think the better we see God, the better we see Him in everything else as well. "Strangely dim" -- but only relatively so.

Privateers

Grim's sense is that privateers could work better than the more bureaucratic armed forces. He has far more experience with the bureaucratic armed forces than I, but I worry about a few details.

To whom do the privateers owe primary allegiance? Their organization or the country for whom they are fighting? With just a smidgeon of corruption and media connivance (you tell me if that exists in this country) it wouldn't be hard for a cartel to get approval and funding to attack their rivals.

Even with an organization with less disreputable initial aims than a cartel, mission creep can turn it into a public menace.

Going further, what would privateering look like in an era of drones? Drones can be carried and controlled in a truck as easily as in a boat--probably more so. Inconvenient prosecutors or judges might have to hide. Organizations do go rogue sometimes.

And as the cited Sal Mercogliano video notes, it isn't as though the US has a small navy anymore: 2nd largest in the world (Sal says 1st, but that's the Chinese). Recent events show that bureaucracies don't have to slow it down that much.

The law might have one useful side effect--it could force Congress to decide what sort of relationship we have with hostile non-state armed organizations. Is it a war, or something else--and when do we know we've won?

Cold

Below about 5F is biting cold. Up near freezing, with the air loaded with moisture, is hammering cold.