Category Archives: religion

Methuselah palm finds a mate after 2100 years

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The Judean date palm was extinct until 15 years ago, remembered only through pictures, eg. on ancient coins, see below, and mentions in ancient books including the psalms of David. There were also some ancient seeds, 2100 years old, that had been found buried in a jar near the entry ramp of the fortress Masada. Sarah Sallon of Israel’s Natural Medicine Research Center became convinced that these dates had medicinal as well as historical value, and badgered the archeologists for seed samples and permission to try her luck reviving this extinct plant. The archeologists thought she was nuts but eventually she got permission to try her luck with some seeds that Prof Ehud Netzer, had stored in his desk.

Dr. Elaine Solowey, Dr. Elaine Solowey, Director of the Center for Sustainable Agriculture, and, the Methuselah tree. Note the distinctive leaves. The tree is not ten feet tall and ready to mate.

Against all odds, Dr. Sallon, in 2005, succeeded in germinating one of these ancient seeds, a feat thought to be botanically impossible. Named, Methuselah it was the oldest seed ever grown, attracting wide international attention. But it was a one-off, a male without a female plant.

Methuselah was, at that point, a historic artifact – an interesting tourist attraction at the center fro sustainable agriculture. There was no way to grow the famous Judaic dates, though without a female parent. But Dr. Sallon was undeterred, she found another archaeologist who had recovered a trove of date seeds from various sites in Qumran — the site where the Dead Sea scrolls had been discovered, plus from the Wadi Makukh and the Wadi Kelt. Some of these seeds were as old as the one that produced Methuselah.

Vespasian coin with Judaean palm and the legend “Iudaea Capta.” (Judea is captured). A Judean date palm is shown along with a mourning Jew and a triumphant Roman.

A group headed by Dr. Sallon, selected a total of 34 seeds for further study, choosing specimens that appeared to be visually to be intact, whole seeds, in good condition, and without holes. Chosen to study included more seeds from Masada (8 seeds), Qumran (18 seeds), Wadi Makukh (7 seeds), and Wadi Kelt (1 seed). The seeds were identified by code numbers, photographed, and measured for weight and length (with the exception of Masada seeds, which unfortunately were not measured). One date seed, from the Qumran excavations (HU 37 A11), was selected as a control and left unplanted.

The remaining 33 seeds were subjected to a preparatory process to increase the likelihood of germination): the seeds were soaked in water for 24 hours and in gibberellic acid (5.19 mM) (OrthoGrow, USA) for 6 hours to encourage embryonic growth. This was followed by Hormoril T8 solution (5 g/liter) (Asia-Riesel, Israel) for 6 hours to encourage rooting and KF-20 organic fertilizer (10 ml/liter) (VGI, Israel) for 12 hours. All solutions were maintained at 35°C.

Following the above procedure, one seed was found to be damaged and not planted. The others were separately potted in sterile potting soil, 1 cm below the surface, and placed in a locked quarantine site at the Arava Institute of Environmental Sciences in southern Israel.

The six young trees. the two females are at the bottom right.

Six of these germinated. Periodically they were treated with KF-20 (10 ml/liter) and iron chelate (10 g/liter). Irrigation used desalinated water, as the previous study indicated that using the region’s highly mineralized water produced “tip burn” (darkening and drying of leaves). The seeds that did not germinate were removed for further testing and the shells of the seeds that did sprout were tested to determine their sex,  Of the six, two were determined to be female and four male. The female plants have been named Judith and Hannah, two Biblical names associated with children. It will be many years before they can mate, but it’s a hopeful start. The four other plants are Adam, Jonah, Urial, and Boaz. Radio-carbon dating suggests that one of these female seeds is 2100 years old, like Methuselah, while the other is only 1900 years old. See article in AAAS.

If either of the female plants survives to maturity, and if they prove to be compatible, we may yet get to eat of the famous biblical fruit. When the Bible calls Israel is called the land of milk and honey, the honey is the date honey of this tree.  Will these dry bones yet rise and live? Perhaps so. Dr. Solloway seas the revival of this plant as a symbol of hope. I do too.

Robert E. Buxbaum, June 7, 2020, There is a bit of Frankenstein in any revival of the dead, but I’m ore comfortable bringing back ancient plants than bringing back the Wooly Mammoth, the passenger pigeon, or the T Rex.

Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

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Some days, I spend hours at a time on facebook, and when I’m done, I often feel it was a complete waste of time. I do not make friends this way, and I have little evidence that I’ve convinced anyone. Still, for some reason, I can’t seem to stay off for long, so I figure I might as well look for the attraction.

One positive thing I do (did) with FB was to run for office. I lost, but I was able to speak to more people using FB in a day than I could have otherwise. Another thing I do is to spread articles — those I find interesting, and my own writing, blog posts, mostly. I write these posts for free, and while I imagine my blog posts do some good. I sometimes get nice comments suggesting people read the blogs and think about what I say. Still, it does not make money, and takes a fair amount of effort.

I can imagine I help mankind in some subtle, long range way, or perhaps gain some long-range fame. But who cares about long-range fame? And, as for helping people, it is also possible I will hurt them too. Computers sit analyzing my words, and everyone’s, tracking their views and using the data for what. I’m just feeding the computer, and that makes me think my writing may harm more than help. What I write on FB is owned by FB. It’s free content for the owners of FB to re-use to sell: my personality, capsulated, my friends likes and dislikes, for sale at a price. My posts turn me and my friends into commodities — and there isn’t even remuneration.

It is claimed that, in the 2016 election, Trump was able to win, at low cost, through a Russian-managed facebook campaign. The educated elites of politics were not able to come with the wiley Russians, for all their brain-power, and despite help from the FBI, or so the theory goes. If so, it’s a warning that all the information I provide to facebook is available to Trump and the Russians to use against me. The management of facebook was committed to Ms Clinton in 2016, and is completely committed to Trump’s removal as best I can tell. If they are not able to beat the Russians, maybe I should not try. Then again, maybe they’re not as elite as they think.

Sometimes I imagine that the alternative of not-posting is worse; it is to have no voice at all, and to have no information of the common discussion. The newspapers seem no less biassed than those on my FB. I write then in a bizarre chasm between hope for posterity, and a better world, and out of desperation that to be an unheard, quiet one, is to be dead. I suspect I’m not unique here.

Robert E. Buxbaum, January 27, 2020.

If the test of free will is that no one can tell what I will do….

Free will is generally considered a good thing — perhaps a unique gift from the creator to man-kind. Legal philosophers contend that it is free will that makes us liable to legal punishment for our crimes. while piranhas and machines are not. We would never think of jailing a gun or a piranha even it harmed a child.

It’s not totally clear that we have free will, though, nor is it totally clear what free will is. The common test is that no one can tell what I will do. If this is the only requirement, though, it seems a random number generator should be found to have free will. One might want to add some degree of artificial intelligence so that the random numbers are used to make decisions that are rational in some sense, say choosing between tea and coffee, for example, and not tea and covfefe, but this should not be difficult. With that modification, we should find that the random device would make free decisions as boldly or conservatively as any person.

The numbers should be truly random, but even if they are not quite, this should not be a barrier. We generally take statistical things to be random, the speed of the wind tomorrow at 3:00 PM for example even though there is a likely average, and 500 mph is exceedingly unlikely. And, if that isn’t quite random enough, one could use quantum mechanics. One could devise a system that measures the time between the next two radioactive decays to an accuracy many times greater than the likely time between. If the sample has a decay every 100 seconds or so, the second and third digit of this time after the decimal is random to an extent that most would accept, and that one can predict it at all — or so we understand it. (God might be an exception here, but since He is outside of time, prediction becomes an oxymoron). Using these quantum mechanic random numbers, one should be able to make decisions showing as much free will as any person shows, and likely more . Most folks are fairly predictable.

Since God is considered to be outside of time, any mention of his fore-knowledge or pre-determination is an oxymoron. There is no pre or fore if you’re outside of time, as I’d understand things

 I notice that few people would say that a radioactive atom has free will, though, and that many doubt that people have free will. Still no one seems interested in handing major issues to a computer, or holding the machine liable if things turn out poorly. And if one wants to argue that people have no free will, it seems to me that the argument for punishment would get rather weak. Without free will, shy would it be more wrong to kill a person than a piranha, or a plant.

Robert Buxbaum, January 19, 2020. Just some random thoughts on random number generators. I’ve also had thoughts about punishments, and about job choices.

Kindness and Cholera in California

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California likely leads the nation in socially activist government kindness. It also leads the nation in homelessness, chronic homelessness, and homeless veterans. The US Council on Homelessnesses estimates that, on any given day, 129,972 Californians are homeless, including 6,702 family households, and 10,836 veterans; 34,332 people are listed among “the chronic homeless”. That is, Californians with a disability who have been continuously homeless for one year or cumulatively homeless for 12 months in the past three years. No other state comes close to these numbers. The vast majority of these homeless are in the richer areas of two rich California cities: Los Angeles and San Francisco (mostly Los Angeles). Along with the homeless in these cities, there’s been a rise in 3rd world diseases: cholera, typhoid, typhus, etc. I’d like to explore the relationship between the policies of these cities and the rise of homelessness and disease. And I’d like to suggest a few cures, mostly involving sanitation. 

A homeless encampment in LosAngeles

Most of the US homeless do not live in camps or on the streets. The better off US homelessness find it is a temporary situation. They survive living in hotels or homeless shelters, or they “couch-serf,” with family or friends. They tend to take part time jobs, or collect unemployment, and they eventually find a permanent residence. For the chronic homeless things are a lot grimmer, especially in California. The chronic unemployed do not get unemployment insurance, and California’s work rules tend to mean there are no part time jobs, and there is not even a viable can and bottle return system in California, so the homeless are denied even this source of income*. There is welfare and SSI, but you have to be somewhat stable to sign up and collect. The result is that California’s chronic homeless tend to live in squalor strewn tent cities, supported by food handouts.

Californians provide generous food handouts, but there is inadequate sewage, or trash collection, and limited access to clean water. Many of the chronic homeless are drug-dependent or mentally ill, and though they might  benefit from religion-based missions, Los Angeles has pushed the missions to the edges of the cities, away from the homeless. The excess food and lack of trash collection tends to breed rats and disease, and as in the middle ages, the rats help spread the diseases. 

Total homelessness by state, 2018; California leads the nation. The better off among these individuals do not live on the streets, but in hotels or homeless shelters. For most, this is a short term situation. The rest, about 20%, are chronically homeless. About half of these live on the streets without adequate sewage and water. Many are drug-dependent.

The first major outbreaks of the homeless camps appeared in Los Angeles in August and September of 2017. They reappeared in 2018, and by late summer, rates were roughly double 2017’s. This year, 2019, looks like it could be a real disaster. The first case of a typhoid infected police officer showed up in May. By June there were six police officers with typhoid, and that suggests record numbers are brewing among the homeless.

To see why sanitation is an important part of the cure, it’s worth noting that typhoid is a disease of unclean hands, and a relative of botulism. It is spread by people who go to the bathroom and then handle food without washing their hands first. The homeless camps do not, by and large, have hand washing stations. and forced hygiene is prohibited. Los Angeles has set up porta-potties, with no easy hand washing. The result is typhoid epidemic that’s even affecting the police (six policemen in June!).

rate od disease spread.
R-naught, reproduction number for some diseases, CDC.

Historically, the worst outbreaks of typhoid were spread by food workers. This was the case with “typhoid Mary of the early 20th century.” My guess is that some of the police who got typhoid, got it while trying to feed the needy. If so, this fellow could become another Typhoid Mary. Ideally, you’d want shelters and washing stations where the homeless are. You’d also want to pickup the dirtier among the homeless for forced washing and an occasional night in a homeless shelter. This is considered inhumane in Los Angeles, but they do things like this in New York, or they did.

Typhus is another major disease of the California homeless camps. It is related to typhoid but spread by rodents and their fleas. Infected rodents are attracted to the homeless camps by the excess food. When the rodents die, their infected fleas jump to the nearest warm body. Sometimes that’s a person, sometimes another animal. In a nastier city, like New York, the police come by and take away old food, dead animals, and dirty clothing; in Los Angeles they don’t. They believe the homeless have significant squatters rights. California’s kindness here results in typhus.

Reproduction number and generation time for some diseases.

The last of the major diseases of the homeless camps is cholera. It’s different from the others in that it is not dependent on squalor, just poor health. Cholera is an airborne disease, spread by coughing and sneezing. In California’s camps, the crazy and sick dwell close to each other and close to healthy tourists. Cholera outbreaks are a predictable result. And they can easily spread beyond the camps to your home town, and if that happens a national plague could spread really fast.

I’d discussed R-naught as a measure of contagiousness some months ago, comparing it to the reproductive number of an atom bomb design, but there is more to understanding a disease outbreak. R-naught refers merely to the number of people that each infected person will infect before getting cured or dying. An R-naught greater than one means the disease will spread, but to understand the rate of spread you also need the generation time. That’s the average time between when the host becomes infected, and when he or she infects others. The chart above shows that, for cholera, r-naught is about 10, and the latency period is short, about 9 days. Without a serious change in California’s treatment of the homeless, each cholera case in June will result in over 100 cases in July, and well over 10,000 in August. Cholera is somewhat contained in the camps, but once an outbreak leaves the camps, we could have a pandemic. Cholera is currently 80% curable by antibiotics, so a pandemic would be deadly.

Hygiene is the normal way to prevent all these outbreaks. To stop typhoid, make bathrooms available, with washing stations, and temporary shelters, ideally these should be run by the religious groups: the Salvation Army, the Catholic Church, “Loaveser and Fishes”, etc. To prevent typhus, clean the encampments on a regular basis, removing food, clothing, feces and moving squatters. For cholera, provide healthcare and temporary shelters where people will get clean water, clean food, and a bed. Allow the homeless to work at menial jobs by relaxing worker hiring and pay requirements. A high minimum wage is a killer that nearly destroyed Detroit. Allow a business to hire the homeless to sweep the street for $2/hour or for a sandwich, but make a condition that they wash their hands, and throw out the leftovers. I suspect that a lot of the problems of Puerto Rico are caused by a too-high minimum wage by the way. There will always be poor among you, says the Bible, but there doesn’t have to be typhoid among the poor, says Dr. Robert Buxbaum.

*California has a very strict can and bottle return law where — everything is supposed to be recycled– but there are very few recycling centers, and most stores refuse to take returns. This is a problem in big government states: it’s so much easier to mandate things than to achieve them.

July 30, 2019. I ran for water commissioner in Oakland county, Michigan, 2016. If there is interest, I’ll run again. One of my big issues is clean water. Oakland could use some help in this regard.

How tall could you make a skyscraper?

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Built in 1931, the highest usable floor space of the Empire State building is 1250 feet (381m) above the ground. In 1973, that record was beaten by the World Trade Center building 1, 1,368 feet (417 m, building 2 was eight feet shorter). The Willis Tower followed 1974, and by 2004, the tallest building was the Taipei Tower, 1471 feet. Building heights had grown by 221 feet since 1931, and then the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, 2,426 ft ( 739.44m):. This is over 1000 feet taller than the new freedom tower, and nearly as much taller than the previous record holder. With the Saudi’s beginning work on a building even taller, it’s worthwhile asking how tall you could go, if your only  limitations were ego and materials’ strength.

Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, Concrete + glass structure. Dubai tourism image.

Having written about how long you could make a (steel) suspension bridge, the maximum height of a skyscraper seems like a logical next step. At first glance this would seem like a ridiculously easy calculation based on the math used to calculate the maximum length of a suspension bridge. As with the bridge, we’d make the structure from the strongest normal material: T1, low carbon, vanadium steel, and we’d determine the height by balancing this material’s  yield strength, 100,000 psi (pounds per square inch), against its density, .2833 pounds per cubic inch.

If you balance these numbers, you calculate a height: 353,000 inches, 5.57 miles, but this is the maximum only for a certain structure, a wide flag-pole of T1 steel in the absent of wind. A more realistic height assumes a building where half the volume is empty space, used for living and otherwise, where 40% of the interior space contains vertical columns of T1 steel, and where there’s a significant amount of dead-weight from floors, windows, people, furniture, etc. Assume the dead weight is the equivalent of filling 10% of the volume with T1 steel that provides no structural support. The resulting building has an average density = (1/2 x 0.2833 pound/in3), and the average strength= (0.4 x 100,000 pound/in2). Dividing these numbers we get a maximum height, but only for a cylindrical building with no safety margin, and no allowance for wind.

H’max-cylinder = 0.4 x 100,000 pound/in2/ (.5 x 0.2833 pound/in3) = 282,400 inches = 23,532 ft = 4.46 miles.

This is more than ten times the Burj Khalifa, but it likely underestimates the maximum for a steel building, or even a concrete building because a cylinder is not the optimum shape for maximum height. If the towers were constructed conical or pyramidal, the height could be much greater: three times greater because the volume of a cone and thus its weight is 1/3 that of a cylinder for the same base and height. Using the same materials and assumptions,

The tallest building of Europe is the Shard; it’s a cone. The Eiffel tower, built in the 1800s, is taller.

H’max-cone = 3 H’max-cylinder =  13.37 miles.

A cone is a better shape for a very tall tower, and it is the shape chosen for “the shard”, the second tallest building in Europe, but it’s not the ideal shape. The ideal, as we’ll see, is something like the Eiffel tower.

Before speaking about this shape, I’d like to speak about building materials. At the heights we’re discussing, it becomes fairly ridiculous to talk about a steel and glass building. Tall steel buildings have serious vibration problems. Even at heights far before they are destroyed by wind and vibration , the people at the top will begin to feel quite sea-sick. Because of this, the tallest buildings have been constructed out of concrete and glass. Concrete is not practical for bridges since concrete is poor in tension, but concrete can be quite strong in compression, as I discussed here.  And concrete is fire resistant, sound-deadening, and vibration dampening. It is also far cheaper than steel when you consider the ease of construction. The Trump Tower in New York and Chicago was the first major building here to be made this way. It, and it’s brother building in Chicago were considered aesthetic marvels until Trump became president. Since then, everything he’s done is ridiculed. Like the Trump tower, the Burj Khalifa is concrete and glass, and I’ll assume this construction from here on.

let’s choose to build out of high-silica, low aggregate, UHPC-3, the strongest concrete in normal construction use. It has a compressive strength of 135 MPa (about 19,500 psi). and a density of 2400 kg/m3 or about 0.0866 lb/in3. Its cost is around $600/m3 today (2019); this is about 4 times the cost of normal highway concrete, but it provides about 8 times the compressive strength. As with the steel building above, I will assume that, at every floor, half of the volume is living space; that 40% is support structure, UHPC-3, and that the other 10% is other dead weight, plumbing, glass, stairs, furniture, and people. Calculating in SI units,

H’max-cylinder-concrete = .4 x 135,000,000 Pa/(.5 x 2400 kg/m3 x 9.8 m/s2) = 4591 m = 2.85 miles.

The factor 9.8 m/s2 is necessary when using SI units to account for the acceleration of gravity; it converts convert kg-weights to Newtons. Pascals, by the way, are Newtons divided by square meters, as in this joke. We get the same answer with less difficulty using inches.

H’max-cylinder-concrete = .4 x 19,500 psi/(.5 x.0866  lb/in3) = 180,138″ = 15,012 ft = 2.84 miles

These maximum heights are not as great as for a steel construction, but there are a few advantages; the price per square foot is generally less. Also, you have fewer problems with noise, sway, and fire: all very important for a large building. The maximum height for a conical concrete building is three times that of a cylindrical building of the same design:

H’max–cone-concrete = 3 x H’max-cylinder-concrete = 3 x 2.84 miles = 8.53 miles.

Mount Everest, picture from the Encyclopedia Britannica, a stone cone, 5.5 miles high.

That this is a reasonable number can be seen from the height of Mount Everest. Everest is rough cone , 5.498 miles high. This is not much less than what we calculate above. To reach this height with a building that withstands winds, you have to make the base quite wide, as with Everest. In the absence of wind the base of the cone could be much narrower, but the maximum height would be the same, 8.53 miles, but a cone is not the optimal shape for a very tall building.

I will now calculate the optimal shape for a tall building in the absence of wind. I will start at the top, but I will aim for high rent space. I thus choose to make the top section 31 feet on a side, 1,000 ft2, or 100 m2. As before, I’ll make 50% of this area living space. Thus, each apartment provides 500 ft2 of living space. My reason for choosing this size is the sense that this is the smallest apartment you could sell for a high premium price. Assuming no wind, I can make this part of the building a rectangular cylinder, 2.84 miles tall, but this is just the upper tower. Below this, the building must widen at every floor to withstand the weight of the tower and the floors above. The necessary area increases for every increase in height as follows:

dA/dΗ = 1/σ dW/dH.

Here, A is the cross-sectional area of the building (square inches), H is height (inches), σ is the strength of the building material per area of building (0.4 x 19,500 as above), and dW/dH is the weight of building per inch of height. dW/dH equals  A x (.5 x.0866  lb/in3), and

dA/dΗ = 1/ ( .4 x 19,500 psi) x A x (.5 x.0866  lb/in3).

dA/A = 5.55 x 10-6 dH,

∫dA/A = ∫5.55 x 10-6 dH,

ln (Abase/Atop) = 5.55 x 10-6 ∆H,

Here, (Abase/Atop) = Abase sq feet /1000, and ∆H is the height of the curvy part of the tower, the part between the ground and the 2.84 mile-tall, rectangular tower at the top.

Since there is no real limit to how big the base can be, there is hardly a limit to how tall the tower can be. Still, aesthetics place a limit, even in the absence of wind. It can be shown from the last equation above that stability requires that the area of the curved part of the tower has to double for every 1.98 miles of height: 1.98 miles = ln(2) /5.55 x 10-6 inches, but the rate of area expansion also keeps getting bigger as the tower gets heavier.  I’m going to speculate that, because of artistic ego, no builder will want a tower that slants more than 45° at the ground level (the Eiffel tower slants at 51°). For the building above, it can be shown that this occurs when:

dA/dH = 4√Abase.  But since

dA/dH = A 5.55 x 10-6 , we find that, at the base,

5.55 x 10-6 √Abase = 4.

At the base, the length of a building side is Lbase = √Abase=  4 /5.55 x 10-6 inches = 60060 ft = 11.4  miles. Artistic ego thus limits the area of the building to slightly over 11 miles wide of 129.4 square miles. This is about the area of Detroit. From the above, we calculate the additional height of the tower as

∆H = ln (Abase/Atop)/ 5.55 x 10-6 inches =  15.1/ 5.55 x 10-6 inches = 2,720,400 inches = 226,700 feet = 42.94 miles.

Hmax-concrete =  2.84 miles + ∆H = 45.78 miles. This is eight times the height of Everest, and while air pressure is pretty low at this altitude, it’s not so low that wind could be ignored. One of these days, I plan to show how you redo this calculation without the need for calculus, but with the inclusion of wind. I did the former here, for a bridge, and treated wind here. Anyone wishing to do this calculation for a basic maximum wind speed (100 mph?) will get a mention here.

From the above, it’s clear that our present buildings are nowhere near the maximum achievable, even for construction with normal materials. We should be able to make buildings several times the height of Everest. Such Buildings are worthy of Nimrod (Gen 10:10, etc.) for several reasons. Not only because of the lack of a safety factor, but because the height far exceeds that of the highest mountain. Also, as with Nimrod’s construction, there is a likely social problem. Let’s assume that floors are 16.5 feet apart (1 rod). The first 1.98 miles of tower will have 634 floors with each being about the size of Detroit. Lets then assume the population per floor will be about 1 million; the population of Detroit was about 2 million in 1950 (it’s 0.65 million today, a result of bad government). At this density, the first 1.98 miles will have a population of 634 million, about double that of the United States, and the rest of the tower will have the same population because the tower area contracts by half every 1.98 miles, and 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 … = 1.

Nimrod examining the tower, Peter Breugel

We thus expect the tower to hold 1.28 Billion people. With a population this size, the tower will develop different cultures, and will begin to speak different languages. They may well go to war too — a real problem in a confined space. I assume there is a moral in there somewhere, like that too much unity is not good. For what it’s worth, I even doubt the sanity of having a single government for 1.28 billion, even when spread out (e.g. China).

Robert Buxbaum, June 3, 2019.

Google+ vs Facebook and Twitter; of virtue and sin

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Google has just announced the end of support for Google+; I’m sorry to see it go. It was supposed to be the better version of Facebook killer. It was, and I suspect that’s why it died. Unlike Facebook, Google+ allowed me to decide which group of friends I would get to see which group of my posts. I thought that was a good thing. I only shared political posts with some folks — those who I thought would not mind; and only shared jokes with other folks; family photos with yet others; religion thoughts with others, and technical thoughts with other folks still.

Google+ called the different groups in your life, “rings of friendship,” and it seemed to me that such rings were an important part of being able to live in a polite society. Any normal person shares different things with different people. There will be some overlap, of course, but rings of friendship allowed you to shield your friends from your religious and political views, and allowed you to shield technical colleagues from family photos that would bore them. Behaving this way is common sense and simple politeness.

Google+ died, in part I think, because maintaining rings of friendship requires forethought. It also requires that your friends honor your privacy, and accept that they will not be a complete part of your life and confidence. But such activity requires work, both on the part of the poster, and on the part of the recipient. Besides, posting this way tends to make your posts dull. It reduced the number of eye-ball-grabbing rants that get seen by people who are highly offended by seeing the rant. Facebook, by contrast, uses and algorithm to decide who sees what. It requires no work from us, and I suspect the algorithm makes posts more interesting as it seems to favor the sensational, salacious, and inappropriate.

Facebook spreads the most salacious posts, I think, to increase the amount of time people spend on FB. That would be entirely self-serving, but it also gives the user a thrill as you see how many likes and followers, Facebook suggests “friends” that you never knew, who your other friends know, or who have similar interests. People friend these folks they hardly know, and post the most controversial of things in hope of getting followers and “likes.” It’s destructive to privacy, but it’s a dopamine rush in having people think you are a more interesting and exciting person than you are. The graphic below associates FB with the deadly sin of Envy — the desire to have what you don’t have.

An interesting take on social media

An interesting take on social media — the main platforms are the seven deadly sins.

There are six other deadly sins, and six of the other major social platforms seem designed to target one each. LinkedIn seems to target greed; Tinder targets Lust and Yelp targets gluttony. Instagram targets pride, the greatest of the deadly sins. It was natural that Facebook would acquire Instagram as Facebook had the most money, and pride is the strongest draw among the sins. In the graphic above Netflix is associated with sloth; I’m not sure that’s entirely fair: Netflix is passive, but no more passive than YouTube (owned by Google).

Twitter deserves a special mention. It was designed to be more immediate than FB, and I find it’s even more tipped to the salacious. When you post to Twitter, you have no control over who sees it; your only control is over what you see, and most people like to see salacious. President Donald Trump’s presidency is largely built on his Twitter posts. He claims he’s the Hemingway of 140 characters, and he certainly is good at grabbing eyeballs with outrageous comments and short simplifications of difficult matters. Last week his Twitter insult of Congressman Adam Schiff caught the news services all about. Similarly several congressmen calling Trump a mother***ker made news, Trump’s insult was more amusing, IMHO, if you read the name Adam a variant pronunciation. Facebook can tolerate the salacious like this, but it still limits the number of eyeballs to friends and acquaintances. Twitter is the home of wrath, and so far it seems a lot more successful than Google+.

Google+ was a reminder that world of social media is not all darkness and deadly sins. To my mind, Google+ was supposed to contract the evils of envy and intemperance with the virtue of temperance. That is Google+ was one of the cardinal virtues: Temperance in this case amounted to giving the appropriate amount of information to each of your friends, and not being excessive with any. It’s possible that the failure of Google+ was that it did not directly go after the audience for LinkedIn, but instead tried to mimic Facebook. Linked In (Greed) is almost exactly the opposite of Temperance.

The seven godly virtues are listed below, as set out by Pope Gregory, based on Paul. The first three are considered Godly, the other four Cardinal.

  1. Faith: belief in the right things (including the virtues!).
  2. Hope: taking a positive future view, that good will prevail.
  3. Charity: concern for, and active helping of, others.
  4. Fortitude: never giving up.
  5. Justice: being fair and equitable with others.
  6. Prudence: care of and moderation with money.
  7. Temperance: moderation of needed things and abstinence from things which are not needed.

Looking at this list it strikes me that the first three virtues are already present in social media. I associate Wikipedia with Faith, I associate it with a belief in knowledge itself, and in the ability of people to self govern. I associate Google, before it decided to be political, with Hope. It was based on a positive view of nature and people: that given free access to organized information they will come to the right conclusions. I liked that originally, ranking was decided based on people’s common choice. It was anti-FB, and humbling: there was no way that you could proclaim yourself greater than your neighbor if others didn’t see you that way. Currently Google allows paid customers to promote themselves, and conforms search for political patrons, eg China. In this way, it has become more like FB.

I associate “Go fund me,” with the virtue of Charity, and would like to propose that perhaps Prudence is Consumer Reports, or maybe e-bay. This leaves room for Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance (now that Google+ is dead). I leave it to you to fill in the gap.

Robert Buxbaum, January 8, 2019. There is a great manga fiction involving the seven deadly sins; Full Metal Alchemist. Also I should note that there are many versions of the seven virtues including the seven virtues of Buddhism: Right decisions, Valor, Benevolence, Respect, Honesty, Honor, and Loyalty.

Of God and gauge blocks

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Most scientists are religious on some level. There’s clear evidence for a big bang, and thus for a God-of-Creation. But the creation event is so distant and huge that no personal God is implied. I’d like to suggest that the God of creation is close by and as a beginning to this, I’d like to discus Johansson gauge blocks, the standard tool used to measure machine parts accurately.

jo4

A pair of Johansson blocks supporting 100 kg in a 1917 demonstration. This is 33 times atmospheric pressure, about 470 psi.

Lets say you’re making a complicated piece of commercial machinery, a car engine for example. Generally you’ll need to make many parts in several different shops using several different machines. If you want to be sure the parts will fit together, a representative number of each part must be checked for dimensional accuracy in several places. An accuracy requirement of 0.01 mm is not uncommon. How would you do this? The way it’s been done, at least since the days of Henry Ford, is to mount the parts to a flat surface and use a feeler gauge to compare the heights of the parts to the height of stacks of precisely manufactured gauge blocks. Called Johansson gauge blocks after the inventor and original manufacturer, Henrik Johansson, the blocks are typically made of steel, 1.35″ wide by .35″ thick (0.47 in2 surface), and of various heights. Different height blocks can be stacked to produce any desired height in multiples of 0.01 mm. To give accuracy to the measurements, the blocks must be manufactured flat to within 1/10000 of a millimeter. This is 0.1µ, or about 1/5 the wavelength of visible light. At this degree of flatness an amazing thing is seen to happen: Jo blocks stick together when stacked with a force of 100 kg (220 pounds) or more, an effect called, “wringing.” See picture at right from a 1917 advertising demonstration.

This 220 lbs of force measured in the picture suggests an invisible pressure of 470 psi at least that holds the blocks together (220 lbs/0.47 in2 = 470 psi). This is 32 times the pressure of the atmosphere. It is independent of air, or temperature, or the metal used to make the blocks. Since pressure times volume equals energy, and this pressure can be thought of as a vacuum energy density arising “out of the nothingness.” We find that each cubic foot of space between the blocks contains, 470 foot-lbs of energy. This is the equivalent of 0.9 kWh per cubic meter, energy you can not see, but you can feel. That is a lot of energy in the nothingness, but the energy (and the pressure) get larger the flatter you make the surfaces, or the closer together you bring them together. This is an odd observation since, generally get more dense the smaller you divide them. Clean metal surfaces that are flat enough will weld together without the need for heat, a trick we have used in the manufacture of purifiers.

A standard way to think of quantum scattering is that the particle is scattered by invisible bits of light (virtual photons), the wavy lines. In this view, the force that pushes two flat surfaces together is from a slight deficiency in the amount of invisible light in the small space between them.

A standard way to think of quantum scattering of an atom (solid line) is that it is scattered by invisible bits of light, virtual photons (the wavy lines). In this view, the force that pushes two blocks together comes from a slight deficiency in the number of virtual photons in the small space between the blocks.

The empty space between two flat surfaces also has the power to scatter light or atoms that pass between them. This scattering is seen even in vacuum at zero degrees Kelvin, absolute zero. Somehow the light or atoms picks up energy, “out of the nothingness,” and shoots up or down. It’s a “quantum effect,” and after a while physics students forget how odd it is for energy to come out of nothing. Not only do students stop wondering about where the energy comes from, they stop wondering why it is that the scattering energy gets bigger the closer you bring the surfaces. With Johansson block sticking and with quantum scattering, the energy density gets higher the closer the surface, and this is accepted as normal, just Heisenberg’s uncertainly in two contexts. You can calculate the force from the zero-point energy of vacuum, but you must add a relativistic wrinkle: the distance between two surfaces shrinks the faster you move according to relativity, but measurable force should not. A calculation of the force that includes both quantum mechanics and relativity was derived by Hendrik Casimir:

Energy per volume = P = F/A = πhc/ 480 L4,

where P is pressure, F is force, A is area, h is plank’s quantum constant, 6.63×10−34 Js, c is the speed of light, 3×108 m/s, and L is the distance between the plates, m. Experiments have been found to match the above prediction to within 2%, experimental error, but the energy density this implies is huge, especially when L is small, the equation must apply down to plank lengths, 1.6×10-35 m. Even at the size of an atom, 1×10-10m, the amount of the energy you can see is 3.6 GWhr/m3, 3.6 Giga Watts. 3.6 GigaWatt hrs is one hour’s energy output of three to four large nuclear plants. We see only a tiny portion of the Plank-length vacuum energy when we stick Johansson gauge blocks together, but the rest is there, near invisible, in every bit of empty space. The implication of this enormous energy remains baffling in any analysis. I see it as an indication that God is everywhere, exceedingly powerful, filling the universe, and holding everything together. Take a look, and come to your own conclusions.

As a homiletic, it seems to me that God likes friendship, but does not desire shaman, folks to stand between man and Him. Why do I say that? The huge force-energy between plates brings them together, but scatters anything that goes between. And now you know something about nothing.

Robert Buxbaum, November 7, 2018. Physics references: H. B. G. Casimir and D. Polder. The Influence of Retardation on the London-van der Waals Forces. Phys. Rev. 73, 360 (1948).
S. Lamoreaux, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 5 (1996).

Of God and Hubble

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Edwin Hubble and Andromeda Photograph

Edwin Hubble and Andromeda Photograph

Perhaps my favorite proof of God is that, as best we can tell using the best science we have, everything we see today, popped into existence some 14 billion years ago. The event is called “the big bang,” and before that, it appears, there was nothing. After that, there was everything, and as best we can tell, not an atom has popped into existence since. I see this as the miracle of creation: Ex nihilo, Genesis, Something from nothing.

The fellow who saw this miracle first was an American, Edwin P. Hubble, born 1889. Hubble got a law degree and then a PhD (physics) studying photographs of faint nebula. That is, he studied the small, glowing, fuzzy areas of the night sky, producing a PhD thesis titled: “Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae.” Hubble served in the army (WWI) and continued his photographic work at the Mount Wilson Observatory, home to the world’s largest telescope at the time. He concluded that many of these fuzzy nebula were complete galaxies outside of our own. Most of the stars we see unaided are located relatively near us, in our own, local area, or our own, “Milky Way” galaxy, that is within a swirling star blob that appears to be some 250,000 light years across. Through study of photographs of the Andromeda “nebula”, Hubble concluded it was another swirling galaxy quite like ours, but some 900,000 light years away. (A light year is 5,900,000,000 miles, the distance light would travel in a year). Finding another galaxy was a wonderful find; better yet, there were more swirling galaxies besides Andromeda, about 100 billion of them, we now think. Each galaxy contains about 100 billion stars; there is plenty of room for intelligent life. 

Emission from Galaxy NGC 5181. The bright, hydrogen ß line should be at but it's at

Emission spectrum from Galaxy NGC 5181. The bright, hydrogen ß line should be at 4861.3 Å, but it’s at about 4900 Å. This difference tells you the speed of the galaxy.

But the discovery of galaxies beyond our own is not what Hubble is most famous for. Hubble was able to measure the distance to some of these galaxies, mostly by their apparent brightness, and was able to measure the speed of the galaxies relative to us by use of the Doppler shift, the same phenomenon that causes a train whistle to sound differently when the train is coming towards you or going away from you. In this case, he used the frequency spectrum of light for example, at right, for NGC 5181. The color of the spectral lines of light from the galaxy is shifted to the red, long wavelengths. Hubble picked some recognizable spectral line, like the hydrogen emission line, and determined the galactic velocity by the formula,

V= c (λ – λ*)/λ*.

In this equation, V is the velocity of the galaxy relative to us, c is the speed of light, 300,000,000 m/s, λ is the observed wavelength of the particular spectral line, and λ*is the wavelength observed for non-moving sources. Hubble found that all the distant galaxies were moving away from us, and some were moving quite fast. What’s more, the speed of a galaxy away from us was roughly proportional to the distance. How odd. There were only two explanations for this: (1) All other galaxies were propelled away from us by some, earth-based anti-gravity that became more powerful with distance (2) The whole universe was expanding at a constant rate, and thus every galaxy sees itself moving away from every other galaxy at a speed proportional to the distance between them.

This second explanation seems a lot more likely than the first, but it suggests something very interesting. If the speed is proportional to the distance, and you carry the motion backwards in time, it seems there must have been a time, some 14 billion years ago, when all matter was in one small bit of space. It seems there was one origin spot for everything, and one origin time when everything popped into existence. This is evidence for creation, even for God. The term “Big Bang” comes from a rival astronomer, Fred Hoyle, who found the whole creation idea silly. With each new observation of a galaxy moving away from us, the idea became that much less silly. Besides, it’s long been known that the universe can’t be uniform and endless.

Whatever we call the creation event, we can’t say it was an accident: a lot of stuff popped out at one time, and nothing at all similar has happened since. Nor can we call it a random fluctuation since there are just too many stars and too many galaxies in close proximity to us for it to be the result of random atoms moving. If it were all random, we’d expect to see only one star and our one planet. That so much stuff popped out in so little time suggests a God of creation. We’d have to go to other areas of science to suggest it’s a personal God, one nearby who might listen to prayer, but this is a start. 

If you want to go through the Hubble calculations yourself, you can find pictures and spectra of galaxies here for the 24 or so original galaxies studied by Hubble: http://astro.wku.edu/astr106/Hubble_intro.html. Based on your analysis, you’ll likely calculate a slightly different time for creation from the standard 14 billion, but you’ll find you calculate something close to what Hubble did. To do better, you’ll need to look deeper into space, and that would take a better telescope, e.g.  the “Hubble space telescope”

Robert E. Buxbaum, October 28, 2018.

A Pastor to Trump’s Soul

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Trump’s religious connection is so different from the norm that most people think it must be fake, but the truth of his connection to Christianity, as best I can determine it, is even more bizarre than the assumption that there is none. From the time that he was six years old, Donald Trump attended a famous church in New York City, The Marble Collegiate Presbyterian Church. He attended along with his grandfather, his parents, his brother, and his sisters. He was married in this church as was his sister. Both his parents funerals were in the sanctuary, and unlike most children in a family church, he seems to have been generally moved by the sermons — moved to change his life.

Trump and NVP

Various scenes of Trump and his family with Dr. Norma Vincent Peale.

The pastor of the church and the author of these sermons was not a standard Christian, though. It was Norman Vincent Peele, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking.” According to President Trump, he loved the sermons almost from the beginning. They went on for an hour or so and as Trump remembers it, the Reverend Peele could have spoken for twice as long at least. Dr. Peale did not talk fo sin, but rather of success and other of the most positive things. Peale claimed that you could do anything you wanted with the help of God and proving you believed in your self and didn’t let anything anyone said interfere. He backed up this take on the bible by a cherry-picked selection from all the positive lines in the Bible — Lines that are really there, but that most pastors avoid because they can make a person arrogant (or seem arrogant). A source for all of president Trumps bizarre self-image ideas can be found in Peele’s “The power of positive thinking,”I  find.presidents-billy-right-960x640BG-Kennedy-960x640

Dwight Eishenhouer

Some other US presidents with Reverend Billy Graham.

Most other American pastors have emphasized self reflection and humility. They would pray for the power to avoid bragging or other forms of puffing one’s self up —  the very opposite approach of Dr. Peale’s. The most popular of the alternates approaches, one embraced by virtually every president from 1952 to today was Billy Graham’s fire humility.

Eisenhower golfed with Graham regularly, as did Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and G. H.W. Bush. Graham was a feature at prayer breakfasts with Johnson and Reagan, and Carter. In time of trouble it was Billy Graham who counseled Carter, Clinton, and Nixon, and it was Graham who got George W. Bush to give up drinking. After a time, one could imagine that Billy Graham’s quiet humility and fiery faith was the real American belief. Or at least that this was the form of American soul that one associated with success.bill graham reagan BG-JOHNSON

After decades of seeing Billy Graham at the White House, one began to believe that his was the image of the believing American. To believe meant to see oneself as a sinner who often made mistakes but was genuinely sorry for these failures. A believing American was genuinely penitent, but not too loudly. Was reborn, but didn’t make too much fuss of it. Thus it’s more than a little shock to find believer in God’s plan who claims to believes that God wants him to have success, money, and power, and who claims, as Trump does, that those who criticize him are “fake news”.

I’ve mentioned before that a strong belief in ones self has a positive side for leaders, but it strikes me that perhaps it’s also good for religion. These lines really do appear in the Bible, Humility is there too, of course, but we could all use a reminder that “God gives to all who believe in Him.”

Robert Buxbaum, September 3, 2018

Japanese zen art – just go away

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Japanese zen spiral -- it's a cartoon about meditation. It looks like a monk and a spiral, and note that both ends point inward.

Japanese zen spiral — it’s a cartoon about meditation. It looks like a monk and a spiral, and note that both ends point inward. Cute.

The purpose of art is not generally to show the world as it is, but to show a new, better way to look at the world. As such, my take on Japanese zen art, is that it is a very cool, fun way to say “just go away.” What follows are some nice (to my eyes) examples, with my commentary.

As with most Japanese art, the zen art looks simpler and more free-form than western religious art. In a sense that is true: there are far fewer lines, but the paintings take as long to make, to a good estimate, since they only appear to have been made with casual ease: flicks of the wrist and waves of the hand. In actuality the artist had a vision of what he wanted, and then made free-hand waving copy after copy until he had some correct, free-looking ones ready for delivery. Because of this, you can look for a meaning in every wiggle — something that you would not do with US free-form abstracts, or with religious paintings of the 1600s. Take daVinci’s last supper — the grand layout is clearly planned and meaningful, the details of the wrinkles, not really. With these, though, no detail is accidental, and the non-accidental sense, as I see it, is “just go away.”

Buddhist Master. I can imagine this work is effective at keeping guests from over-staying their welcome.

Buddhist Master. Art like this keeps away guests.

Take the spiral at left. It’s sort of cool, and claims to be an allusion to meditation. Mystic, no? As I look carefully a the spiral, the first remarkable thing I see is that it circles in on itself at both ends. At a simple level, I think that’s an allusion to the inward nature of meditation, but note that, at the top end of the coil there’s a wiggle that looks like a face. I take that to be a monk’s face, looking away. The geometry of the coil then suggests the legs and thighs of the rest of the monk (sitting?). If that’s the image (and I think it is) the fact that the monk is facing away from you, leaving you behind suggests to me that the owner has no desire to have you join him. I see nothing in this that would cause another person to want to meditate either. There is nothing attractively persuasive as in western religious art. Here’s an essay I wrote on meditation.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I also imagine these artists living on an industrial treadmill, making painting after painting in his shop and throwing most away because, for example, the monk’s back extended past the paper. Western expressionism also sometimes puts many paintings on a single canvas, but the hidden image stays, at least in a sort-of half shadow. And the wiggles strive to be less learned, even if the faces of some western religious art is distant –even more distant often. At right, above, you’ll find another popular zen-art approach. It shows a zen master in nearly full face. As with most zen art, the master (Buddha or a disciple) looks calm -ish with a sense of the put-upon, as if he were Christ carrying the cross of you being there. Perhaps the intent was to make you go off and meditate, or to see society as worthless, but I think the more-likely message in the master’s look is “why me Lord.” The master looks like he isn’t unhappy with life, just unhappy with you being there. I imagine that this work was placed in a noble’s living room or study for the same reason that many American today put up a picture of Yosemite Sam, sometimes (for those who don’t get art) “Keep Out! This means you.”

A monkey looks at the moon in a well. Don't touch, the moon seems to say.

A monkey looks at the moon in a well. Don’t touch, the moon seems to say.

As with the Warner-bros. classic, there is a flowing look to the brushwork, but a fair amount of detail. As with the Warner Bros. cartoon, the casual lines seem to serve the purpose of keeping the viewer from taking offense at the message. Sort of like, “Don’t go away mad, just go away.” Cool, but I also like Western cartooning.

As one last example, at left you’ll see a painting illustrating a zen parable. in this case it’s the parable of the monkey’s and the image of the moon. Shown is the moon’s reflection in the water of a well — moon is that big round face. A monkey is about to touch the moon-image, and as we can expect, when the monkey touches the image, it disappears. There are several understandings to be gained from this, e.g. that all is illusion (similar to Plato and his cave), or suggesting that it is better to look at life than to interact with it. Which is the main meaning? In this picture, my sense is that the moon seems put-upon, and afraid. Thus, the lesson I take from the picture is one of inaction: “don’t touch the reflection.” Once again, the choice to depict a frightened moon rather than an impassive one, seems to be the painter’s way of saying “please go away.” Very cool image, but as messages go, that’s the one I see in most Japanese zen art.

Robert Buxbaum, August 17, 2017. I’ve also written on surreal art (I like it a lot, and find it ‘funny’) and on Dada, and conceptual (I like it too, playfully meaningful, IMHO). If you like zen jokes (and who doesn’t) here’s a story of the Buddhist and the hot-dog vendor, and how many zen Buddhists does it take to change a lightbulb? Four. See why.