"Body" -> More Yogurt

Well I'l take back some of my comments in the following post. Through the miracle of the internet, and Google book search, I found some more information on why you heat milk before making yogurt.

The above table is from "Manufacturing Yogurt andFermented Milks" by Ramesh C. Chandan via Google book search. Chandan tells of the different manufacturing techniques for milk products. The reason for heating yogurt above killing the bad bacteria is the denaturization of the Whey Milk Proteins. You want to get around 85-90% denatured for the best holding of the water. You don't want to totally denature the protein, therefore, it is a bit tricky nature.

The table isn't perfect from my application since I heat up the milk in a double boiler, and the milk will be denatured as it raises through the various temp bands, but from what I can see, I should be allow the milk to sit around 15 minutes at 90C. I normally don't hold it at this temp that long (or at least I don't think I do, so I'll need to try and estimate next time I make yogurt).

You may want to try different hold times and see if you get better or worse yogurt.

Another interesting thing about the book is that the optimum range of temperature for growing the bacteria is 42-43 centigrade (109 degrees Fahrenheit) at 4-6 hours.

"Body" -> The Bacteria In You, Yogurt

On most Sunday mornings, before we go to Church as a family, you will find me up in the morning eating my breakfast and, at the same time, making yogurt.

Normally, when I tell most people that I make my own yogurt, they look amazed. They think that making yogurt is exceptionally hard. However, yogurt has been made for almost 5000 years. So, if it was that hard to make, the heritage wouldn't be so old.

And making your own home made yogurt can be strangely addictive. This week I went up to visit my family and my Dad in Seattle, Washington. Every summer, I try to send the kids up to spend time at my Father's rather enormous spread outside of Seattle. While this is a great family experience that the kids will remember forever, it is rather lonely for my wife and myself, who are basically two peas in a pod, and we hate to be separated for this length of time.

This year, after my wife had been in Seattle for about week and half, I snuck out of
work, and came up to see them. There was a lot of hugs and smooches, we talked about about what the kids had been doing, and the how we missed each other.

After about 15 minutes, my wife looked deeply in my eyes, and she said, "And man, I really miss your yogurt."

Love finds it form in many ways, and evidently one of the way it finds my wife is in my bacteria growing art of yogurt making.

To make yogurt, you need the right tools.

With the right tools yogurt making is exceptionally fun and easy to do. You need to follow a simple set of steps. In this blog post we are going to look at making yogurt with me in my kitchen on Sunday morning.

Probably the most important thing to making your yogurt is simply having a good double boiler.

As a matter of fact, I have a variety of tools that I am going to show you. However, there are really only two critical tools: A thermometer and a double boiler.

So, what do you want in a double boiler? Well the question is how much yogurt are you going to eat in a week? If you are used to having a small little cup of yogurt every day, then you can get by with a small Faberware double boiler from Walmart.

"Well, I don't eat that much yogurt, so this sounds fine," you might say.

Before, you decide to replicate your yogurt habits, you need to ask yourself "why do I eat this much yogurt?" Chances are that the cost of the yogurt is pretty expensive. If you eat a lot of yogurt, the cost would simply be a lot of money. However, once you understand how to make yogurt, your cost is going to be just a little more than the raw cost of the milk.

For my wife and I, it might not be uncommon to fill up a 30 ounce glass with yogurt and eat it as a meal replacement. If you do this once per day, you need a much bigger batch of yogurt.

So, if you look at the picture up above, you will see how we make yogurt. It is one gallon of milk per week. So, in this case, you want a double boiler that can handle this amount of yogurt with some room to spare. For my weekly dose of 1 gallon of yogurt, I bought a 7 quarter double boiler. If you use my tools for making yogurt, having a bigger container is key.

If you decide to get a bigger double boiler, it is important to understand that double boilers basically coming in two flavors. The smaller double boiler is generally two sauce pans that nestle together. This is good for making things like melted chocolate and small doses of yogurt.

For the gallon size batches you need the big double boilers are made for soup stock. I recommend a nice stainless steel one, and you can buy them from either Overstock.com or Amazon.com. My seven quarter double boiler was bought from Overstock for $47. (My only complaint is that the bottom has a ridge, which makes it harder to clean. However, $47 is hard to beat.)

Now, we need to look at the other tools of the trade. The picture shows a nice hand held food processor. This is actually an unbelievable helpful tool. The important thing about this food processor is the attachment at the end of the mixer bar. You might be able to see that it is basically a Milkshake attachment. This attachment mixes yogurt brilliantly and quickly, and is a snap to clean up.



I wish I knew where to tell you to buy it. The maker of my mixer is Hamilton-Beach, and I bought it at Walmart. I was so impressed with it, that I was going to buy a backup and I went back to Walmart. Why they still have the same hand held food processor, they removed the milkshake mixer in the kit of accessories with the mixer. I was very disappointed.

However, you can just mix with normal mixer, or even a spoon (which I think is suboptimal, but will work in a pinch.)

The last thing to get to make sure that you can make yogurt is a thermometer. This is another place to be a bit picky. Now, if you are in a pinch, you can go to Walmart and get a candy thermometer for a little over a buck. However, it is all the nicer to get a yogurt specific thermometer.

While you can Google "Yogurt Thermometer," I use the Yogourmet version that has made it through hundreds of batches of yogurt. It is nice that the clip stands makes the dial stand out nicely on top of the double boiler. It also has key temperature markings on it. While it got a lower rating at Amazon, the people that complained where obviously misusing it (they put it into a high temp oven or dropped it).

Okay, so now you should have your milk, your double boiler, and your thermometer. What you do is fill the bottom of the double boiler with about an inch or two of water. If you never used a double boiler, the idea of a double boiler is ingenious. By having a lower container with water, the water will keep the temperature in the upper container to less than the boiling point. This is because the upper container is only heated by the steam of the the lower container, and the steam temperature is about 212 degrees.

By heating the milk in a double boiler, the temperature of the milk is raised to around 190-200 degrees and no higher. This is exactly what you want to do with the milk for you yogurt. You want to bring it to around 190-200 degrees.

(Post edit: See next entry in my blog. After 20 years of making yogurt, I got interested in the denature process. For a good rule of thumb, you want to bring the temperature up to 90C or roughly 195 degree Fahrenheit and let it sit at this high temperature for around 5 minutes to get the milk denatured. You'll need to experiment with this, since the milk sees some denaturization as you raise the temperature.)

So the process is simple enough. Put in water into the base of the double boiler, put on the second pan of the double boiler, then pour in your milk, and wait for the temperature to rise.

So, why are raising the temperature of the milk so high?

There are two reasons that are often mentioned, and only one that really makes sense to me. The first reason that does make sense to me is that you need to raise the temperature of the milk up to the place that the molecules relax, which will produce a better texture of milk. In my mind, this does make sense as most milk is already pasteurized, which should have caused the desired effect to happen (if this really does happen.)

(Again, after reading "Manufacturing Yogurt and Fermented Milks" by Ramesh C. Chandan, the research is clear that you need to leave the temperature up higher to denature the protein. Pasteurization only increases the milk temperature up to 161F for 15-20 seconds (Wikipedia), but this clearly doesn't cause the range of denaturization necessary to get good yogurt.)

The second reason makes a lot more sense: You raise the temperature up to really kill any bacteria in the milk. Why do we kill all the bacteria? So we can introduce new bacteria. Our bacteria that makes yogurt.

So back to our yogurt. We have taken out double boiler, our milk, and a stove and we are raising our temperature up to 190 degrees Fahrenheit. However, once the milk gets up to around 140 degrees, I suggest you add something special. That something special is non-fat dried milk.

In our family, we make the non-fat version of yogurt. When you buy store bought non-fat yogurt, it is very firm. The firmness of the yogurt is easy to get used to. However, the reason that the yogurt is so firm is because the manufacturer of the yogurt has added thickeners. Now, we could add thickeners, but we are going to use the non-fat milk to both thicken and increase the nutritional value of the yogurt we are making.

Now mind you, yogurt made without thickener is perfectly eatable. As a matter of fact, when I travel to Asia-Pacific for business, they normally put me up in pretty nice hotels. In these hotels, they almost always have yogurt in a great big bowl. And this yogurt is almost always more of a running type. A lot of people like this thinner yogurt, so this is maybe something that you'll want to try.

However, let us go back to putting in non-fat dried milk. As I said, you want to let the milk warm up just a bit so that the milk melts easier. I add roughly 25-28 ounces of non-fat instant dried milk to my one gallon of yogurt. This adds calcium, a bit of calories, and ups the protein. It also makes the yogurt much thicker, and more like US commercial yogurt.

Once you've added your non-fat dried milk, you can take your hand held food processor (or spoon) and mix it in until it is nice and smooth. Continue to watch the temperature of your milk, and once it hits 190-195 degrees, you can pull it off the stove. (Since I do this on a weekly basis, I have this timed just right. Once I start the double boiler and pour in the milk, I can put in the dried milk around 20 minutes into the heating cycle, and in 35 minutes the temperature is up to the point where I pull it off the stove.)

By the way, the secret of a double boiler is making sure that the bottom pan never runs out of water.

It might not be obvious, but when the milk is very cold, the steam actually rises, hits the bottom of the milk pan, and cools back into water and drops back into the bottom pan. This means that in the earlier stages of the heating, you lose very little water in the bottom pan. However, as the milk heats up, less and less steam goes back into water since the milk doesn't cool it much. You need to watch out for this, because you can actually boil all the bottom water away. Since you are looking at the milk, you might forget that without water, the bottom pan is going to get red hot. So, make sure you have enough water in the bottom pan and that it doesn't go dry.)


Now that the milk is up to 190-195 degrees, you simply pull the milk off of the burner. The goal now is to have the milk cooler to 115 degrees. When it hits 115 degrees, you simply take a store bought container of yogurt and mix it in with the milk. This is probably the trick to making yogurt. You need to make sure that the milk gets to the right temperature. You heated the milk to kill at the bacteria that might be in it. You need to get the milk to the point where it won't kill the yogurt bacteria.

If you wait for the milk to cool naturally, you will be waiting a very long time. It may take 1-1.5 hours for the milk to get to the right temperature. This is a very, very long time. If I waited for the milk to cool gradually, I would never make it to church.



Some people simply throw ice into the milk to cool it off, but this is going to make the yogurt much more thin and closer to water. If you've taken my advise, the double boiler is going to help you again.

The secret is to fill the bottom container for the double boiler with ice. I fill it almost 1/2 to 3/4 full. Once you have the ice in the bottom, you place the top contain onto the bottom. Since there is only a thin layer of metal between the ice and the milk, the milk will cool very quickly if you stir the milk at all. I will us the hand held mixer to stir the milk, and you will actually be able to see the temperature needle move. After 5-10 minutes, you will start to reach the right temperature.

At this point, you need a commercial container of yogurt as a starter. You can also buy packages of dry starter, but the store bought stuff works great. For the most part, almost any yogurt will work. I've used all types, since most yogurts claim they have live cultures (bacteria). As a matter of fact, if it doesn't work, it says that your store bought yogurt was somehow damaged. You might want to never buy the same brand of yogurt, or change stores. Yogurt without the live cultures isn't yogurt.

However, there is a down side to this. If the temperature gets too cold, the yogurt bacteria don't like replicating. So if the temperature gets under 100 degrees, you probably won't have very good yogurt. You need to grow the yogurt cultures in the perfect range of temperatures, which means that you need to have it around 105-115 degrees.

There are different ways of introducing the cultures. Some people like to take out a bit of milk and mix it with the culture. However, I just take 3-4 big dollups of yogurt (some times an entire small container of Yoplait) and just dump it into the yogurt. Again, if you dump in the yogurt when the milk is too hot, it will kill the bacteria. If, on the other hand, the milk is pretty cool, and you dump in a bunch of cold yogurt, you will lower the temperature too much.

For my gallon of milk, if I dump in a whole container, I know that the milk will lower from 115 degrees down to about 110. This is the perfect temperature for the yogurt bacteria to grow.

Once I've dumped in the yogurt, I take the mixer and give the whole milk container a good mix. You want to thoroughly mix the two together and get the bacteria spread into every part of the milk.

If you remember, you have been mixing the milk a lot. You mixed in the non-fat dried milk, you mixed the milk to cool it down in the double boiler, and you mixed the milk to get the yogurt culture spread. After all this mixing, you will normally find a very thick layer of bubbles on top of the yogurt. This layer of bubbles does not impact the yogurt at all from a creation standpoint. The bubble normally stay around during the next stage, and it makes the top of the yogurt look a little funny.

So, I normally get a very large strainer and skim off the worse of the offending bubbles. The bubbles get throw down the sink, and it does waste a little bit of milk. However, the top of the yogurt, when it is down, does look nicer. Just think of this routine as a bit of art work on your good.

After you are done with this, we need to now grow the yogurt. You can do this in the top of the double boiler, but this is not the best of all containers. I suggest that you find plastic containers or glass jars to transfer the yogurt into. Depending on the the method you will "culture" the yogurt (or allow the bacteria to grow), you want to make sure that the you don't get the yogurt and milk mixture to get too cold. So, generally your transfer your new mixture and quickly pick a method to culture the yogurt.

So now you have everything set up and ready to grow to make your yogurt. Here is where the next decision comes in. How should you keep the temperature at just the right level. There are several ways of doing this.

1. You can use the natural temperature of your just finished product to complete the process.

2. You can pop it into a warm environment

3. You can get a specialize yogurt warmer

If we look at the first of these three options, I have used yogurts own heat to be very successful in making yogurt. To do this correctly, you need to remember that we start to introduce the yogurt into the milk at 115 degrees. If you push that up just a bit (to maybe a 120) you won't kill the yogurt, and after you've introduce the yogurt into the milk, the temperature is still going to be 115 degrees. If you then wrap up the yogurt in a blanket and put it into an insulated container, the yogurt own internal heat will stay in the range of the temperature needed for the bacteria to grow for the next 3-4 hours, and the yogurt will come out just fine.


The rule of thumb when you use this method is that you want to make sure that the yogurt starts a little on the high side for temperature. If you introduce the yogurt into the milk at 100 degrees,it will cool to such and extent that the yogurt bacteria won't grow and make the yogurt that you want.

Another variate on this idea is to pour the new mixture into a wide mouth thermos and put the top on. Since the thermos holds the heat, the temperature will stay in the right range to make yogurt. When I was first making yogurt 25 years ago, I used this method with an old wide mouth container for my very first batch. I had read about yogurt making, and I'll never forget opening the container and being floored that the milk had turned from a liquid into a solid. It was amazing to me that first time.

The second way is very popular if you have the right type of oven. Some gas ovens have a pilot light running all the time. In this case, you can check what the temperature of your oven is. Chances are that the temperature of the oven is around 100-120 degrees, thus making this the perfect place to put your yogurt. Millions of batches of yogurt have been made this way.

Some people will take an insulated chest (like in method one) and then put the yogurt in the chest with a low wattage light bulb inside. The heat from the light bulb makes the chest the perfect temperature. Now, you need to be very careful to pick a low wattage bulb, but this method has been used a lot.

The last method is the one that is clearly the best to me. I show pictures of the specialized yogurt warmer. The one that I use is the Yogourmet Yogurt Maker, which is actually made in Canada. This is just a great piece of equipment, and nothing to go wrong on it. If you have followed the post this far, you know that the milk and yogurt mixture is in the top of your double boiler. If you think about it, you may not want to store your yogurt in this container. So, you have the option to transfer it out of the double boiler into a glass or plastic container for the growth phase as I mentioned before.

The Yogourmet maker is made of two pieces, a container that holds two quarts of your mix, and a bottom heating container. For my yogurt, I transfer the milk and yogurt mixture into the yogurt container. I then put a little warm water into the bottom heating element. This is also like another double boiler. The water in the bottom unit completely surrounds the yogurt container. Since I make a gallon of yogurt every week, I have two Yogourmet makers.

After putting in the mixture, I put the Yogourmet off to the side. When the yogurt is culturing, it does not like to be disturbed.

After 4 hours, I pop off the top. If you tilt the container side to side, you can see the miraculous event that just took place. The liquid milk has turned to nice solid, a little bit like jello.

Now don't panic if the yogurt looks a little runny, because it will firm up once you put it into the refrigerator and it cools down. If the mixture doesn't look solid at all, then something went wrong. Here are the normal culprits:

1. You put in the starter culture or yogurt when the milk was too hot. You killed the bacteria and they couldn't grow.

2. You never got the mixture warm enough. You allowed the mixture to cool so much that the bacteria could never grow.

3. You haven't waited long enough. Give it 2-3 more hours.

4. The original yogurt had dead cultures.

By the way, you can allow the yogurt to grow too long. The bacteria basically chew up the milk sugar, and create a structure that is solid. If you allow these bacteria to continue to grow, they will eat all of the milk sugar. You can normally tell that you left it in a bit too long because when you pop off the top, you will see a lot of yellow liquid on top. This liquid is simply whey protein, and is good for you. (Don't throw it away.) Over growing the bacteria doesn't hurt anything other than the yogurt being a bit more sour. Some people may even like this version. This is the fun of making your own yogurt.

Finally, I normally make a smoothy with my homemade yougurt. Normally a bunch of yogurt mixed up with a 20% of Pomegranate or Blueberry juice. You can put sugar in it, but I love it with just yogurt and juice. It has a bit of a twang and it is good stuff.

Yogurt has been around for thousands of years. There are thought to be numerous health benefits to yogurt, which are still a bit debated, but I'll list them here.

*Yogurt may help with weight loss.

*Yogurt may reduce the rate of infection with colds and bacteria.

*Yogurt may help women lower their rates of vaginal infections

Less debated is the fact that milk is a pretty cheap way of getting calcium and protein into your diet. So, yogurt has the benefits of being based on milk.

However, yogurt is definitely the preferred source of milk products for those that are partially lacking lactase in their system. Generally, if you are from European genetic stock, you can digest milk sugar or lactose because you have lactase in your system. However, many people from other parts of the world (southern Europe, African, and Asia) have a large portion of their population unable to digest this milk sugar.

"Mind" -> Hurt

Hurt. Is it a post grunge band? Is it emo tending? Is it over the top? Is it alternative metal?

What ever it is, I like it.

When you do music every once in a while, you listen to a lot of stuff and you think to yourself, "Man, that is a highly overprocessed sound. I bet that I could do something like that with enough money and enough producers behind me." However, Hurt is slightly different. Now, it is highly produced. However, I like this. Face it, I think the idea that you go once into the studio and record a album is bunk. If you don't put work into it, why do it at all. Good music should be hard.

However, when you hear a album that is self written and at a constantly good level,
you think to yourself, "Well I guess that I'll never make that cut."

Hurt is a lot like that. Once you start listening, you see a very high level of craftsmanship placed into every song. Okay, they sound a little bit like an amped up Nickleback, but there is a lot worse things to be compared to.

Hurt has never cracked the Billboard top 100, but they've come very close. Their discography consists of three basic albums. Vol I and Vol II are clearly the best place to start. Both of these albums hang closely together, and they could have been released as a double set. The last album is done after a split with Capitol Records. "Goodbye to the Machine" is a good effort, but they are at the cusp of a transition. They can do the same material as the first two albums forever, and never grow, or they can branch out a bit. They try the later on Goodbye, and I'm not sure if I like it yet. A few more listens to see if they are on the road to a new sound, or if this is the swan song.

Regardless, it's a good band to explore.

"Mind & Spirit" -> Eureka 7

Okay, I'll admit it. I fell for Eureka 7, and it has become my favorite anime. Now, it is ended for me, which makes it all the better.

To understand why I like Eureka 7, and the fact that it ended, is to understand why anime stands up so well as an artistic medium.

A good anime does something that no American television can do. It is designed to have a birth and a death. Consider American television. In American TV, We start a story, but we have no idea if the series will be a hit or not. Therefore, the series starts off tentatively, only hoping to get the right ratings so that it can continue. If a show looks to be solid, the show may develop multistory arcs. Maybe these arcs will have a couple of twists, but the real conflicts will never be resolved.

In American television, the major couple will never get together (because it breaks the tension), or the major issue will never be resolved (for example the characters on "Lost" are rescued), or the major mystery is never fully solve (where is Battlestar Galactica's place to settle). You might say, "Yes, they do get resolved, on the very last show."

And that is the point of American television. We only end something when there is no other option.

And what drives this last show? Slipping ratings. The term "jumpinq the shark" is well known, as it describes a series desire to regain slipping ratings. Although it is well known, I'll relate the etymology of the phrase. In September of 1977, the television show "Happy Days" was starting to see it's ratings slips. Therefore, to get better ratings, the show started to create more and more outrageous situations. The pinnacle of this work is when the ubercool character Fonze wore a leather jacket and swim trunks to waterski jump an open pen holding a man eating shark. The best thing about this was that it was a cliffhanger.

The show had deteriorated to a shadow of itself.

Not only is the lack of knowing where the end lies before beginning a problem but the very medium of real actors makes yet another challenge.

The second problem is the power of the actor to hold the show captive. I really liked the show CSI because of the main character Grisham played by William Peterson. However, Peterson felt stiffled in his roll. So exited the main character. CSI lost a major part of itself due to an actor's desire, and not the writer's intent.

But in anime, the writer runs supreme. The characters are nothing more than drawings. Drawings cannot quit. They cannot strike for higher wages. And the beauty of Japanese anime is in the drawings. As I've scattered a few through this post, you should be able to see the creative flowing lines of a good anime.

Anime, for the most part, never has to jump the shark. When a main character is dropped, it is because story development needs it, not because the actor wanted something different.

Anime tells a story with a beginning and and end.

Often movies can do this also. They look to be self contained. However, movies are 2-3 hours at most at average. Maybe, if they know a movie will be driving a sequel, they will extend this to 2 movies, or at most, 8 with the Harry Potter movies. But even with the Harry Potter movies, they are spaced so far apart that we grow old with the wait.

Contrast this with Eureka 7, which has 50 episodes that are roughly 22 minutes long. So we get 20 hours of story telling. Yet this length show only goes 1 year in production. Having 20 hours, knowing that you must end the anime in 20 hours, gives you enough time to do character development. In 20 hours, you can make a real emotional impact.

So, why do I like E7, as it is often called by it's fans?

Superficially, it is just a dumb giant robot story. A little bit like the movie Transformers, only in a cartoon fashion. But this is just skin deep version of what we have. Of course, it does have the future version of surfing called "reffing." Reffing is a lot like surfing, only you do it on light.

Eureka 7 has the themes that we love. A 14 year boy, Renton Thurston, who is just turning into a man. Anime often picks on the 14-16 year old. Why? Because this is the age of change and discovery. This is the time when you make the decisions that will impact the rest of your life.

Into this life, he has his heroes landing literary in his front yard one day. The adventures that come from here are wild and varying. Some of the adventures pan out, some don't. However, all build toward an eventual climax.

You will see Renton struggle with a group of people know as the Gekko State. He begins to unstand that it is unclear if they are his friends or simply a bad influence. You will see him on both sides of a battle. Unclear about who is the right people to side with. For those of us with a Christian faith, it beckons to choices that we make in our own life. "Choose this day who you will serve," is a famous phrase from the Bible.

Into this frame work, we also find our young man captivated with a young girl called Eureka. For me, on a personal level, this is a touching issue. In the anime, we believe that young Renton has never been kissed, and to see him struggle with an admiration of a young woman reminds me of my own relationship with my wife. Is Renton only have a young infatuation, or is there something more than can grow here?

For me, while I had a couple of girl friends before my wife, my wife had basically none. From my perspective, not having anybody else in your life before your mate brings a clarity and deepness to your relationship. For all practical purposes, I have only loved one woman in my life. My wife has clearly only loved one man. And I love her more today than when I first met her. The question for me, in the entire series, is if this young man and young woman would find each other.

But if the story merely stopped there it would be pleasant. However, the story goes well beyond that and talks about family, war, sacrifice, and the acceptance of others. It has the wild villains and the courageous heroes, that often have problems of their own. While the large messages are strongly there, it is often the littlest things that grab me. In the course of the story, the young girl is involved in something that gives her scars on her face. When it comes to later section of the story, she is offered a miraculous chance of having those scars removed. Without a hesitation, she smiles and declines. See the scars are there to remind her of what she went through. To others, they are a deformation of a beautiful face. To her, they are a diary of past events.

We find through this anime that family can be blood, and blood can be family. However, we also find out that family can be friends and it can be adoption. Just because you are an orphan, does not mean that there is no place for you.

One of the interesting twists in the story is uncovered very early in the series, when young Renton gets to see Eureka with her crew mates. It is a shock to him to see three very young children run up to meet Eureka, and they call her "Mother." It is told quickly in the series that these are not her real children. However, how she came to adopt them is a twist that you'll remember for your life time, and I won't spoil it here.

The artwork is wonderful, with a smooth flowing anime style that is such a strong mark of the Bones studio. The drawings seem both new and old at the same time. It carries much of the traditional anime drawing style but with a coloring that seem new.

Top this off with an absolutely superb OST (Original Sound Track) by Sato Naoki, along with a single from Supercar, you have a emotional impact that will live with your long after the anime is done. If you cannot be touched by "Sorrow" by Sato Naoki, you cannot be touched.

As I finished the series, I read other people's interpretation of the events. One common theme was "it over, and I'm bummed." People got so involved in the journey that they didn't want it to end. But that is the point. The reason that we look back on the anime so fondly is that it did end.

And the ending made the journey all the sweeter.

For those of us that understand that our journey will end in not the distant future, we also look fondly at this journey we are on. Our ending will make our journey all the sweeter, also.

"Spirit" -> The Analogous Road

I had recently run into a spate of cartoons that mocked the belief in a personal God. Most of these cartoons mock the Christians strong attachment to the Bible. And, there is no doubt why doubters would go for the Bible angle.

The backbone of the classic Protestant Christian faith is one of Sola Scriptura. It is also here that most people that were "raised in a Christian home" falls away from their faith. They don't first stop believing in Jesus. They first stop believing in the Scriptures.

I have heard and read countless number of accounts that once a person reads the scriptures with an open mind, all the contradictions in the scripture come to a head, and it causes them to abandon their faith.

"After all, the Bible is the Word Of God, and if it is the Word of God, it has to be perfect. Yet the Bible is full of errors, therefore, the Christian faith cannot be right."

We Christian often pull this problem right onto ourselves. I have gone to many a sermon where the pastor holds up his Bible and says, "I am preaching the Word of God."

However, the Bible is not the Word of God. The Bible points to the word of God. The Bible is the scriptures. The Scriptures (or the Holy Writ) explains the nature of God and points us to God.

The Bible is a sign. The Bible is not a destination. I wish that we Christians would redouble our efforts to make sure that the two things are separated: The Word Of God and The Scriptures. The scriptures is what we classically call the Bible. The Scriptures tell us enough about the Word of God so that we can get to the Word of God. There is only one Word of God, the Logos, or better known to the English speaking tribe as Jesus.

We we are supposed to worship the Logos. Yet, we often worship the Bible, and woe to us for doing such an action. Now, when you are reading this, you probably think that I'm being a bit harsh. Am I just thinly dividing a thin line? How can we study the Scriptures and not know Jesus.

Let's see what the Lord says:

John 5:38-40 (New International Version)

38...nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39 You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Tough to make it any more clear. The only reason to study the scripture is to get a better feeling of what the Christ is like. Scripture does not save. It only points to salvation.

The scripture translated, copied and handed down through the ages does not glow. It will have questions about a sentence there and a count of people there. However, if you read the book and look for a high degree of integrity, you will find it. It is like no other book. It is more than sufficient to do what is supposed to do: Lead you to salvation.

The scriptures were laid down like a highway from long ago. If we were exploring together, and we found this highway that had been built and abandoned, but was in very good shape, we could quickly identify it as something that had been done by a grand engineer. As we might take our jeep on this highway, it would allow us to drive quickly efficiently to where we wanted to go. We would recognize that somebody, somewhere had spent many hours designing and constructing this road. By studying the road, we would get to know the designer. More than this, once we got onto the road, we would be able to go places quickly.

However, the non-Christian sees our highway that we use so often, and they call the designer into doubt. "Look at mile market 23," they will say. "At mile marker 23, it is missing bumper turtles. If this road was truly made by the grand engineer, then it wouldn't be missing any bumper turtles." They could spend all day showing you the little things that were wrong with the road. They could show you all the "conflicting errors" in the traffic flow.

Well who did make the highway (or Bible). They would explain to you that it popped out trails that were made by the local towns people. That these roads just sort of grew over time. For the Old Road, they would say that there were four main designers: JEPD. They look at the highway very carefully, and they believe that they can find different color stones in the concrete.

However, a view of comparative literature just makes this laughable. To make the Bible contradict science, the atheist has to strain at the smallest knit. Mind you, there are miracles, but miracles are not logical inconsistency or obvious errors.

"Well the Bible says the Earth was made in 7 days," they'll say.

No, this is clearly a reference to seven eras.

"Well the Bible talks about the four corners of the earth," they'll say.

No, this is clearly poetic license.

Other than the story of the world being flooded, which is highly problematic (and obviously sent to test our faith) the path to reconcile science and scriptures is trivial. If I ever leave the Christian faith, it'll be of the lack of evidence of a global flood. However, the rest of the scriptures are so friendly to science that I overlook one area to have access to the others.

I hope someday I am surprised with clear geographical evidence for the flood.

Yet, this is not where the non-believer attacks. Instead, they try and say that all of the scriptures have deep issues. A matter of fact, they might even say that they can see the individuals that fabricated the Bible. "Everywhere a stone changes colors, we believe that we have a new writer," they announce. There are four major types of stones, thus four major creators of the highway.

In this analogy, the Bible is like that Highway. Most of us never got to see the structure laid down. We are viewing the Bible or the highway after many years of use. Certain parts of the scriptural highway may have been patched by man. However, if you stand back and look at the Highway, there is no doubt that whole of the Bible hangs together. Sure, are there small gaps? Are there some difficult scriptures. Sure, but there is no doubt that those that use the Highway get directly to where they want to go.

The belief of inerrancy applies to this. To be an inerrantist, like myself, you believe that the highway was laided down by many different authors over many years. Each section of highway is complete in itself. Now, each section may be of its own flavor and texture, but each small section of road is laid end to end perfectly. Even though many people did different parts of the road, each of them laid down a perfect section.

Now, from the day that the road was constructed, perhaps a couple of flaws or inconsistancies have appeared. However, there is no doubt to what the road does or where it is going. The roads were perfect as laid down, and they vary little to none from the original.

"Mind" -> Visual Basic For Excel

The age old fantasy for everybody is to have a personal butler to help oneself around the house.

In the very popular movie "Batman Begin," Alfred is the rock solid helper that assists the Batman in the times of greatness need. Not only that, but he is also taking care of the menial duties of the house so that Bruce Wayne can spend his time on better things, like saving the city from the clutches of the evil villains that beset it.

So, what does this have to do with Excel?

Chances are if you are in business and you do any work, you will be using Excel for something. It may be doing the very simple to the very complex, but you will be using it for something. Now, if you are using it on a regular basis, chance are that there is something that you do with it on either a weekly or a daily basis. Here is where the butler idea comes in. It is exceptionally easy to set up the ability for that spreadsheet to do your repetitious tasks automatically, like a personal butler for your spreadsheet.

However, you will need to use some called "Visual Basic For Applications" or VBA. I was reading an excellent blog by Jorge Camoes, who is a quant head at a company and spends a lot of time blogging on charts, and very much enjoyed his casual observation:

In an informal survey among friends and colleagues (all of them Excel users), I’ve discovered that 55% doesn’t know what VBA is, 40% knows but doesn’t want to use it, 4% uses recorded macros from time to time and 1% actually edits the recorded macros to add some sort of functionality (well, this happens to be me…).

"Oh, no," you might say. "This sounds complicated. You just told me that 40% of people don't even know what this thing is. Why should I be interested?"

Well, the first step is just you out of the class that has never heard of have heard of Visual Basic For Applications (VBA). VBA is the backend (or the device) that allows you to record macros in Excel. So, congratulations, you are now more informed than 55% of the population.

Let's talk a bit about macros. Macros used to be very, very difficult. Now, they are very, very easy.

Macros are the short way of saying macroinstruction. Since I'm an aging computer geek, I want to take you back to the early days of computing to the old "Terminate and Stay Resident" (or TSR) programs. Borland International stole this idea from a start-up and created "Superkey."

If you think about it, there were no mice on the early computers. (I know that this boggles the mind.) The way that you interacted with computer was the "Command Line Interface" or CLI. The amout of clicks that you can do from the keyboard if you are a very fast typist is 480 per minute. (think 80 words per minute at an average length of 5 letters per word and one space.) While this is extremely fast for a typist, this is very slow for a computer.

If you had a series of keystrokes that happened over and over again, you could simply capture them and replay them. The computer doesn't know if it is a human being or a program replaying the key.

The application providers realized that this really wasn't worth a stand alone program, and they started to integrate these key recorders into the applications that they made. This is when I was introduced to macros, through the DOS environment. However, the macro environment goes back earlier than this.

When I got my second degree is when I discovered Unix. Unix has two very popular editors vi and Emacs. What is an editor? Think of it as a limited word processor made specifically to write scripts or computer language type instructions. Of these two programs, Emacs is of special interest. First off, I prefered it to vi, but even more important for our story: it stands for Editing MACros. See the real computer geeks were on the Unix side, and they were working on things far before it ever came to the DOS (and later Windows) world.

I sold computer in the early days of the personal computer revolution, and when Lotus 1-2-3 2.0 came in, it had the ability to use macros. People went crazy building all types of unique additions to Lotus using the ability to replicate end user keystrokes.

The successor to the general purpose keyboard macros programs can still be found today. The most widely used free software is Autohotkey. The program is not what I call as directly friendly, as you need some ability to program. However, I recently decided that I needed to trim the first 30 seconds of of 100 podcasts. I had a program that would trim one, but it had no ability to do multiple files. So, I set up an autohotkey script to act as if it was me. It opens the files in my trimming program. It trims the file. I copies the file into a "done" folder, and then it opens the next file. You can watch it operated as it does things on my screen. It is almost spooky.

Back on subject, applications started the ability to bring in keystrokes into the programs. In a flash of brilliance (and it revolutionize the app industry) Microsoft determined that it could capture those keystrokes and convert them into a series of programming steps.

Let's use an example. Let's say that you want to save a spreadsheet. You know that the keyboard short cut is "Alt-S" and typing in "temp" and hitting enter.

The old keyboard macro would have captured:

1. Alt key down (Make code in keyboard talk)
2. s key down (Make)
3. Alt Up (Break code in keyboard talk)
4. s Up (Break)
5. t (Up and Down)
6. e (etc)
7. m
8. p
9. Enter

What Microsoft does is change this automatically to a programming language call Visual Basic. Once it records your keystrokes, it say that you did the following command:

ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:="c:\temp.xls"

Now, programming is always a bit hard to learn, but if you can learn a few rules (about 30-40 hours worth of study), but once you learn the syntax, you can open up a window and say, "I want to take the data from sheet 5 in my spread sheet. Then I'll make a Pivot table out of it. Then I'll make a button to come up to the various parts that I want to see. Then I'll save the document."

The trick part of working with VBA the first time is understanding how to refer to things and all the command to do something. Like most modern programming languages, the language has a lot object orientation in it. This make is simple to program once you understand how it thinks.

We can understand some of this by simply looking at the line of code above. What did we want to do? We wanted to save a worksheet (file), which is obvious and object. In VBA, the currently opened spreadsheet is called ActiveWorkbook. This is always an object. This object can do various actions (think verbs). The object can open. The object can close. In our case, the object will "save as". These actions are called "methods" rather than actions. If you want a object to do a method, you list the object, then you tack on the method with a period. Thus this is why we have

Activeworkbook.SaveAs (or object.method)

We are obvious lacking a file name, and if you put in a space and a "filename:=", it knows to assign the file name whatever you put behind the := in the syntax.

The other tricky thing is that most objects have properties. For example, a Pivottable has pull down menus for setting data that you want to see. In this case, you need to tell the program to find the workbook, then find a particular sheet in the workbook, then find a particular pivottable, then find the attribute or property of one of the items on the pivottable. While this sound very complicated, you basically just type down what we said.

ActiveWorkbook for the workbook
Sheets("MainPage") for the sheets inside of the workbook, and you named the sheet
Pivottables("Pivottable1")
PivotFields("MyData")
PivotItem

This is listed out as

ActivewWorkbook.Sheets("MainPage").Pivottable("Pivottable1").PivotFields("MyData").PivottableItemm

In this case, this pull down menu (PivotItems) has several things like "Sales in Feb" and "Sales In March". You can then say "please set this item to always come up "Sales in March".

However, in most cases, you don't type this in. You record yourself doing the action in Excel, then after you are done recording, you look at the commands. Simply selecting the pull down menu with record a line like the above one. While a bit complicated at first, with some training you can quickly see what it is doing. Then you can make changes to the code to modify the actions.

I know that this has been a short glimpse into VBA, but I want to give you a bit of the history and what it is doing as an overview. As stated before, it'll take 30-40 hours to learn enough to start writing a bit of code to automatically do stuff, but once you have this tool, you'll be many more times productive.

"Mind" -> Pivot Charts

Our guest for today is Hans Moravec. Now if you are familir with robots, you have probably heard of Moravec. We are not going to talk about robots, but we are going to use an idea of Moravec. We are going to use his paradox.

What is Moravec's paradox? The paradox, as Hans Moravec coined it, is the basic idea that conscious thought in doing things like playing checkers requires very little computing power.

Yet, what we consider as simple (walking for instance) has not been adequately followed by even the most sophisticated supercomputer.

Let's look at this a bit more. For instance, if you've ever played chess with a computer, you know exactly what I am talking about. Very early in computers, PCs were able to play a decent game of chess. Even my Palm Pilot, which is a very early PDA, plays chess pretty well. On the other hand, if you try and get a computer to drive a car, it is massive challenge that we have yet to master. We simply don't know how to get a computer to visually take in information and turn it into decision making. There is something in the human brain that is more powerful than any supercomputer, and allows us to deal with visual information and turn it into actionable items.

A couple of posts ago I wrote about pivot tables. Pivot tables as I've already talked about are truly magical instruments to help you analyze data. But as we've just talked about, but you can easy out do a super computer, and this is based around utilizing your visual center.

The truth is the vast majority of our brain is set up to be able to process and use of visual information. If you took all the data input that you can get through your skin, your hearing, your olfactory glands and every other part of your system, you would find out that the data flowing into your brain in any one instance is roughly somewhere between 500 Mb per second to 1 Gb.

Almost 50% of that input is based on visual input.

So let's talk about this just a bit more, if 50% of the input coming into your brain is visual information, that means that your brain needs to process visual information somewhere between 250 Mb per second to 500 Mb per sec. This is no menial task. If you want to catch a ball, you brain sees it, processes it, and then it can do things like fine motor skill so that you can catch the ball.

Processing data at this rate is really amazing. As a matter of fact, for many many years inside of the high tech industry we survive on 10 Mb ethernet or something 50 times slower than the visual bandwidth going into your brain. Even today, you may know that 100 Mb per second takes a relatively sophisticated router systems. It is only with the advent of GigE that we are starting to get data rates that allow us to stream internet information at the same rate that your great, great, great grandfather could process visual information about a farm animal.

So we want to use this supercomputer to solve problems, find anomalous data, or figure out overreaching trends. This is as easy as graphing out information. You may not be able to take the integral of a sloping line, but you can say "hey that curve looks wacky!"

The thing that you need to remember, a good chart will allow you to find something in 30 seconds that would take you an hour's worth of analyzing a number table. If you want to find something out, make sure to chart out.

This is the fastest easiest way of tapping into your hidden talent. You need to tap into your visual supercomputer.

The question then becomes is "Why don't we use more charts in our data analysis?"

The answer is because they are really hard to make. Even if you use a tool like a spreadsheet which is exceptionally useful in making charts easier to get to, it still takes a considerable amount of effort to quickly get out a series of charts using data.

Therefore we turn our attention to one of the most underutilized parts of spreadsheets today, this is called the pivot chart. A pivot chart allows to make different charts almost instantaneously once you have set it up correctly.

The big problem is the initial set up. Unfortunately, if you think that Pivot Tables are a bit hard "to get" then you will find out that Pivot Charts are even more hard "to get."

But when you get a hang of using them, they will literally become the best instrument at your disposal to be able to make convincing arguments and find trends. They will help you be successful. The good thing is that once you "get" a Pivot table or a Pivot chart, they will become second nature. Once you learn to ride a bike, you never forget. Once you get a pivot chart and table, it'll stay will you for life.

So let us go back to the post that we did on pivot tables. If you remember we were comparing three salespeople the way that they were selling hard disk drives over a series of months and a series of different hard disk drives. If somebody handed you this pivot table and you had spent a little time figuring out how to use a pivot table, it would become one of the most useful items in your arsenal. However now we are going to take the next step.

To create a pivot chart the first thing you need to have is a pivot table. I am going to be a little unfair because I have not told you yet how to create a pivot table. We'll get to that in a later post. What I want to show you now is the power of the pivot table.

So how do you create a pivot chart?

If you look at the second picture in this post above, you will see that I have placed my mouse cursor over the current pivot chart. You can then right click on the pivot chart, and an option to create a pivot chart will come up on the context menu. Alternatively, you can go to the Insert -> Chart menu. Excel knows that you can only create a pivot chart from a pivot table. Bingo. You have just created a Pivot chart.

(By the way, these charts were made with Excel 2003. Now, I have Excel 2007. Unfortunately, Excel 2007 is probably the worst upgrade made by man in the pivot table section. They took what was a beautiful analytical tool and removed a couple very important buttons off of the interface. If you are stuck with Excel 2007, don't worry you can still do everything they used to be able to do in the old version, it just does a little bit more complicated. However, it is things like this that makes me wonder how Microsoft stays in business.)

Now what do we get once we hit that magical pivot chart button? The answer? We initially get a chart that looks like an absolute mess. This is shown directly above.

This is where I noticed most people stop trying to work with a pivot chart.

See the funny thing is that hitting the button to make a pivot chart doesn't do the same things as when you make a normal chart. Most people have made a normal Excel chart. Every time that they've push the button to turn a table into a chart, Excel auto magically makes a very nice looking chart. However here for the first time, they hit the charts button and suddenly they simply get a mess.

I am now going to give you the secret of the pivot chart. By and large I've never seen this described very well, and yet it is incredibly simple. To turn this chart into something that makes sense, you simply drag what ever you are using for the x-axis down underneath the x-axis.

In our case we want to grab the little gray box that says months, and we want to drag this little gray box down to the bottom of the screen until a little blue box pops up which is the landing area for the months. We then want to take the other boxes on the chart and drag them up to the top of the chart and again that you will see a little blue box appears that will serve as the landing area for these gray boxes that you drank up to the top. In our case, we are going to drag the salesman box up to the top and we are going to drag the RPM box up to the top.

You now have a chart that looks like any normal bar chart that you could make from any normal source of information. However the secret is that you can instantaneously create new charts I simply using the pulldown menus.

Unfortunately I don't have enough time in the short blog post to take you through all of the different options. Ignoring that we don't have enough time, the good thing is now you have a chart that looks like a normal chart. The rest becomes very very simple. As I described if you want to see a chart of any individual salesperson, all you need to do is hit the little arrow on the pulldown. This will allow you to see an individual chart of any one of the three different salespeople. If you want to see a chart of the various RPM sales or you need to do is use the pull-down menu.

So suddenly you can start making all types of charts with one or two different mouse clicks. Once you start creating new charts, you will start to notice if data looks like bad data. You will also notice trends that would otherwise be unnoticeable.

We use our eyes to keep ourselves from walking into walls and hurting ourselves. A good pivot chart uses your eyes to keep you from making mistakes.

Use a chart to discover the truth.

And the best way to make a chart is through the pivot process.

Getting Things Done: The Filing Cabinets

Amazingly enough, I have not done a post on David Allen's Getting Things Done. Why is this so amazing? Because I am a major fan of Getting Things Done.

What is "Getting Things Done?" Well first off let me call it by the normal short hand: GTD. The father of the GTD system is a person called David Allen. GTD is a system for productivity. But it is also a system of stress relief.

Now I'm sure everybody would like to be less stressful.

When we first take a look at stress, the sources of our stress are not all that obvious. The obvious stuff that makes a stressed is the fact that we have so much to do. There are bills to pay. There is work to be done. It seems like work just builds up to beyond our ability to address it.

So the simple answer to this, is to say "Well I need less things to do." Asking for less things to do, however, is simply not realistic. No matter who are you, in today's environment, you are going to have too much to do. So the real challenge is how do we react to all of stuff that we need to do. David suggests a series of ideas and thoughts and processes that allow us to deal better with all the stuff that we have in our in-basket of life.

In future posts I'll try to look more at the substance of the "Getting Things Done," but for right now I want to give a suggestion just about one thing: FILING YOUR STACKS.

How much time per year do you spend looking for stuff? In reality we are just swimming in stuff. We have so much stuff that we don't even know what to do with it. I have heard that the average worker spends 150 hours per year looking for stuff. This is four weeks of working. I believe that it is true. Losing stuff is super frustrating.

So if you're like me you really have two different things that you end up doing.

Number one: you can simply throw stuff away.

Number two: you can take all your stuff and stack it or throw it into a drawer.

Now what is the problem with either one of these things. If you are throwing stuff away it is wasteful. If you are like me and was raised in a household where both of my parents came through the Great Depression, you'd simply don't throw stuff away. You save stuff. Therefore you have stacks and stacks and stacks of stuff.

The problem with having this is you may have stuff inside of baskets, inside of drawers, inside of places that you don't have the foggiest idea where the actual thing that you are looking for is. So the day that you want to use a screw, or find that clamp, or install that software you bought six months ago, you can't figure out for the life of you, what you did with that thing.

We were recently discussing this at work. I asked one of the people who used to work for me, "Let's say that you buy a switch because you think that you're going to need it someday." I then asked him "where are you going to put that switch?" He answered me "I'd probably throw it in a drawer somewhere." I then asked him would you be able to find that switch when you need it?

"Not a chance," he answered. "I would probably go off to Home Depot and buy another one."

So the answer is the following: you by filing cabinets. Now you don't by filing cabinets to store paper. You buy filing cabinets to store your little items that would otherwise get lost. So let's go back to the switch that we were talking about.

In the David Allen scenario, you would take out a manila folder. You would label that manila folder. You would then take that manila folder and put it into your filing cabinet. You would label that manila folder as "switch," and you would file it.

Even small things should be filed. If you had one screw that you knew that you were going to need later, and it took up a very very small space, you would do the above. Now this may seem wasteful, but you need to think yourself how many times have I looked for something. In this scenario you are going to be able to find.

Now you may ask "how will I know where exactly the screw is in the filing cabinet?" The answer is pretty simple. You simply look into the three or four filing selections that you knew that you may put it under. Really there are only very few ways of filing something. Maybe the screw is under "screw." Maybe this screw is under "desktop." Maybe this screw is under "china hutch." The good thing about this is you only need to look three or four different places before you find it inside your filing system. It's not like you're trying to dig around a bunch of empty baskets or pins or drawers or plastic bags.

So does the system work? It works pretty well. The biggest issue that I have, is a lack of space. So over break I started to look at Craigslist. The best thing about Craigslist is if you look hard enough you should be able to find filing cabinets for somewhere between $25-$50. Three or four of these will go a long way toward eliminating all of the stuff which has invaded your life.

If you are like me, and if you have four kids and home schooling life, you're probably going to need a few more filing cabinets. In our household we have something like 16 of them. They are scattered around the house and in the garage. Is this too many, but in reality I probably could use about twice as many.

Even with the filing cabinets that we have, as can be seen here, there is still a lot of stuff that gets left out. However having something done rather than nothing done is a lot better than having nothing to. While we may not have everything in its perfect place, it is the mental relief to have a lot of stuff in its place. The investment is well worth it.

So here, for your viewing pleasure, is our little homeschooling schoolroom. as you can see in this photograph, we have quite a few filing cabinets where we can put stuff. On top of the filing cabinets we have steel shelves that allows us to put even more stuff on top of them. This is high density storage. It allows us to store an awful lot of stuff in a very very small space.

While our filing system is not perfect, it is a whole better, then stacking stuff on top of each other into boxes and into corners.

If this thought has been interesting at all, you are now enjoying the idea of life hacking. What is "life hacking?" you may ask. Life hacking is the idea that there are lots of little tricks that will allow you to organize your life better, allow you to get more stuff done, and have less stress.

A great place to start is to go to www.lifehacker.com which is one of the more popular websites that discusses "Getting Things Done" type of systems.

Welcome to the New World.

"Mind" -> Who Killed Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer has a little bit of a stomach, and when her record company recently suggested that her video needed to be retouched to present a more attractive body, she told them to go away (in very colorful terms). She said her record company doesn't understand her listeners. This must be true, as her legions of fans have been taking pictures of their bellies and putting them on the internet in protest of her record company.

Her image, and her music, and her fans are not about being perfect.

Every once in a while I do an album review on this site. They are far and few in between because music is covered so much in the press today. What am I going to say that somebody else isn't saying better?

However, "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" is so compelling, I'll throw another log onto the fire. With a title that is a parody of the question asked in the seminal TV show "Twin Peaks," she has create a musically uplifting but lyrically disturbing album.

The few friends and family that read this blog realize that I am a strong Christian, but I believe that all "good" art is common grace. Common grace is that goodness that God gives to the just and the unjust. And Amanda, even with all of her clearly non-Christian stands, is blessed with a lot of common grace.

The music on "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" has just a hint of Ben Folds. This is no doubt tied to the fact that Ben Folds both produced and plays on the album. It was recorded at his studios in Nashville. Ben had called the Dresden Dolls two years ago and asked them to open for him. If you listen very long, you will hear that most of the album is heavily underpinned by piano. Amanda is a piano player, and her songs come out of this instrument. While she may struggle a bit on the vocals, and her piano playing is nothing to write home about, the overall album does have excellent production values.

She first gained prominence with the musical dual "The Dresden Dolls," which was born out of the Boston art scene. If you see interviews with Amanda, you will see that she is an artist first then she is a musician second. For those that think this is backward, let's remember that one of the most constructive and impactful bands of the 80's was the Talking Heads. The heads, lead by David Byrne, was nothing more that art students. Unfortunately, in this fractured culture today, we have little hope that Amanda can drive the same impact as The Talking Heads, which headed a rebellion against the 80's glitz. However, this is not to say that she is not able to impact your perceptions in a similar fashion if you find her on your playlist.

The other half of the Dresden Dolls, Brian Viglione, has decided not to do this album with Amanda, or perhaps Amanda just wanted to be by herself. Regardless, while they did some of the songs together before the album, the album is all Amanda. The roots of the music are clearly in the same vein as the original group, which is no surprise since Amanda was the main song writer.

So, what is the music? The Desden Dolls describe their music as Brechtian punk cabaret. This is a self title in an attempt to be labeled as anything but Goth. However, the music really does have a strong flavor of cabaret type music with a few ballads thrown in. Extremely strong melodic hooks with very strong lyrics that generally have about as much story line as an Coldplay (ie no story), but instead of Coldplay's lack of real poetry, Amanda strikes you straight to the core. Much as in Bruce Cockburn, she can go completely overboard. However, in the midst of her struggles, her lyrics can strike intrinsically gripping thoughts.

If you want to start on Amanda, I suggest Leeds United. This features the original video where Amanda's stomach became the subject of the stomach debate.



Her voice is horse. She struggles a bit with intonation. However, she is brilliant. Listen to the refrain:

but who needs love when there’s law & order
and who needs love when there’s southern comfort
and who needs love
when the sandwiches are wicked and they know you at the mac store

Now the interesting thing about these 12 or so tracks on the album is that many of them have a video made for them. The highest production values is the video above "Leeds United," but if you go to Youtube, you will see that she made video for many of them, and while they are not slick or expensive, each one caries a gripping image to drive them.

The first track on the album is show cased in a simple video for the song called Astronaut (A Short History Of Nearly Nothing).



Somewhat inspired by the Columbia disaster, how can we not hate and love these lyrics.

YES you are, my love, the astronaut
Crashing in the name of science
Just my luck they sent your upper half
It's a very nice reminder
It's a very nice reminder

In this short post, I hope I've gotten you hooked just a bit on Amanda. One of the better people to explore as you do your musical wanderings.

All in all. A very good album.

4 out of 5 stars.

"Mind" -> Pivot The Data

My son is thinking about becoming an engineer when he grows up. At a home school assembly, he is supposed to answer some questions about his career choice. My wife and he thought I would be a good resource for information, and they were asking me what does an engineer do. Although I am in marketing today, I started off as an engineer.

One of the things that I told my son is that the hallmark of an engineer is "somebody that wants to solve problems." I find this engineering desire used in my marketing job every day, and because of this desire, I am a better marketeer.

So, if you want to find a solution to a problem, first you need to understand what is the root of the problem, and as a firm believer in "The Fifth Discipline," I know that getting to the root of the problem is not simple. There is only one way to get root cause: look at the data.

Now this sounds so very, very obvious, but I find on a consistent basis that most people don't analyze the data that they get. As a matter of fact, they often don't even use the tools that are at their disposal. So, I am immediately going to tell you that you have one fantastic tool in solving problems if you do anything with spreadsheets.

A Pivot Table.

If you don't use pivot tables, you may have your bachelor degree in solving problems, but you need to have a Master's degree or a Ph.D. in solving problems to be really successful. As a matter of fact, I work with finance people and marketing people all day, and it constantly surprises me how most people may have some familiarity with a spreadsheet, but have little to no background with Pivot Tables. The analogy is using a spreadsheet without a pivot table to analyze data is a bit like only driving your car in first gear. Your car has five gears for a reason. To have a vehicle that goes fast, you need to use all of them.

I think the biggest problem with pivot tables is that until you see them in action with somebody for a while, they aren't really clear what they are. For example, look at the description of a pivot table at Wikipedia: "A pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets...."

Wow, that's helpful...NOT!

The best way of thinking about a Pivot table is that it is a spreadsheet that has many different spreadsheets "hidden" inside, and you can almost instantly pull them out. There are two things you need to know about pivot tables:

1. How to use them
2. How to make them

On this first post, we are going to start off on "how to use them." We'll save the creation for later.

Therefore, I am going to assume that for this first step you are just going to want to become the user of a pivot table that I made for you. Since I work in the hard drive industry, I am going to give you an example from my industry, although the data is all made up.

If you are selling hard drives, you will probably track several things:

a. What is the size of the hard drive that you are selling
b. What is the RPM of the hard drive that you are selling
c. Who sold the hard drive?
d. How many sales of the hard drives have been happening every month.

Now, let's say your hard drive boss comes to you, and he says, "Hey, how have the sales of the 5400 RPM drives doing versus the 7200 RPM drives? You look in your email and you see that I have sent you a pivot table in a spreadsheet.In this case the answer is very simple. Because when you opened up the spread sheet you have the answer right before your eyes.

You say to your supervisor, "Well I have the data right here. In January and February, the 5400 RPM models sold more than the 5400 RPM models. However, in March the 7200 sold better than 5400 RPM models."

Your boss thinks for a second, and he says "well, that is interesting, but I'm curious, how are the sales team doing sell hard drives?"

Now, normally if you wanted this answer you would have to go back to another spreadsheet and pick up all the names of the sales people and see how they have been selling. However, you have a pivot table. This is where the secret sauce comes in.

Before, we get to the next step, we need to ask ourselves, "just what exactly is a spreadsheet?" The answer maybe is not exactly as simple as you might think when I tell you that you can't describe a spreadsheet as a spreadsheet.

In reality, a spreadsheet is simply a list of something. In our case, the question are being asked about the number of hard drives sold. This is the most important point because this defines the characteristic of the pivot table. Either explicitly or intuitively, you need to understand that they only reason that your boss is talking to you is about the number of hard drives sold. In the future, he may not be interested in the number of hard drives. He might be interested in the selling price of each hard driver. He may be interested in the profit of each hard drive. However, in this case, he is interested in the volume of sales for each hard drive.

This is very important because I only gave you a pivot on the quantity sold. Therefore, you know that every cell that is between the "month's column" and the "RPM row" is going to be a quantity of HDD sold. You'll need to remember this, because we always need to be able to leave the data in the pivot. (If this is confusing, just wait a minute and keep reading.)

Now, if you can get the next part of the demonstration, you are about 90% over the most difficult part of understanding what a pivot table is. In the illustration to the left, I have identified three areas of the pivot table.

The area in the upper left hand corner is the "holding pen" for the rows in the data. I have identified this with a red line. If you want to put certain types "classifications of the data" out of the current grid, or put "classifications of the data" into the current grid, you drag the classifications in and out of the holding pen.

The pink line is the "active data classification rows" that is currently being used. In the current case, it is very simple. The spreadsheet is set up to show the sales of hard drives per month, and the row shows the data classified into two different rows: 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM.

Finally, the green area is the labels for the data area.

Notice, the first column has all the "data classifications" listed: in our example, we have the ability to classify the data by Capacity, Salesman, or RPM. These are the only three things in the first column that have the special gray box.

Now, there is another gray box, but it is in the second column. It says "data," which is important. No matter how I construct the pivot table, the second column is always going to be some type of generic "data" type label. (Over simplified, but a good way of thinking about it right now.)

Now, lets go back to the second question of your supervisor. He wanted to know sales by salesman. Very simply, drag the RPM out of the row area and into the holding pen, and this action takes out the RPM classification. Then, you drag the salesman from the holding pen to the row area, and this puts the new classification in.

If you are successful, then you will have the spreadsheet off to the side. Now, the first time that you drag a row label out of the first column, it may be a little confusing. They way that you do it is to put your cursor on the grey box RPM, then click and drag the grey RPM into the holding pen.

Then click and drag the gray Salesman box onto the row area. As a hint, make sure to drag the grey box onto the row area. Remember that since the row area and the column area intersect at the top left hand corner of the spreadsheet, if you drop the label onto this box, the pivot table will try and put the salesman onto the column area and not the row area! In this case, you would have to pull the label until it was on top of the "Total" box. However, if you do this, you'll have the table with the data quickly called out. You have the answer for your supervisor with one drag of the mouse.

The final trick on a pivot table for today is the "nesting of rows."

After your box asks you this, he says, "Well that is interesting, I wish I could see the breakout of the sales of 5400 and 7200 RPM drives by sales person."

One of the magic items in pivot tables is that you can build up the row area. In this case, all we need to do is pull down the RPM into the column area without pulling out the salesman item. If you put it in the left side of the row area, the RPM will show up first. If you drag it to the right side, the salesman will show up first. If you want to switch the order on the rows, just simply drag the gray boxes either right or left.

In this case, we get this table. The answer only takes one click and drag.

Your supervisor says, "Well Sally isn't selling any 5400 RPM drives. She just got into sales, and it looks like she doesn't know how to sell them. I'll go and make sure that she gets training on how to sell these drives."

This is the magic of pivot tables. Once you have the table, you can find answers hiding in the data in seconds rather than hours. This type of work allows you to get to the bottom of questions extremely quickly.

Today, we used a very simply example. This is very good to start on. However, once you get down how a pivot table works, you will find that they can be use in much more flexible ways.

They truly are a revolutionary tool.

Learn 'em.

"Mind & Spirit" -> Exposed: Christianity as an Evolutionary Advantage

Well Ben Stein is right.

I have to admit it, I was prepared not to like the Ben Stein film "Expelled." After all, I am an evolutionist. I have grave issues on intelligent design ("ID"), and if ID is a conjecture or a science. I was ready to see a vitriolic and mindless anti-evolution diatribe. Even before seeing the film, I had read anti-Expelled web sites that talked about how Ben Stein had twisted the truth. I was ready to see through this because I had been prepared.

I was surprised.

Now mind you, Ben Stein does over represent that there are scientists on both sides of the issue. To be in the ID camp, you will probably be in the 1% of those with Ph.D.s. In reality, because saying that you'd like to study ID is a bit like saying that you're into picking your own nose and saving the results, even those that might consider ID in the academic environment would never admit to it.

However, there are just enough academics that hold to ID that it allows it to be discussed. Into this fray, Ben Stein inserts himself.

Stein's thesis is very simple:

1. To say that you base your belief system on a creator is political suicide in academic environments.

2. However, in almost all other areas of life we have the right to at least debate the issues.

3. The ID proponents are not babbling idiots.

4. Therefore, there is something amiss in the system. We should be able to question the prevailing system no matter what is the question.

Now, if Stein had stopped here, he would have only created a minor uproar, but what pushed his message into the red zone is his contention that Darwinism can lead to the idea of Social Darwinism, which helps to directly foster events like the Holocaust.

It is this last point that I agree with the most, and the point that is the most highly disagreeable to those in the academic environment. I have written some of this before, but allow me to again summarize the reasons that there is religion in the world. The following statements are mostly exclusive in their ability to reflect truth.

Hypothesis 1: Religion is around because there are gods or God that created the world. These deities that may ask us to somehow follow them. We have religions because an external force caused us to have religion.

Hypothesis 2: Religion is a construct that was created by natural forces.

Anyone that does not believe in a religion as an external force must believe hypothesis 2. However, the formation of religion or evolution of religion becomes problematic. Why was it created if it was not created by an external force?

The common sense answer to the average Joe is that "when early man didn't understand something, he would be comforted by the idea that there were gods or God behind everything." If this is true, that having religion makes one feel better, then religion is a necessary advantage to those that have it. Getting rid of religion is counter productive because it removes something that gave an evolutionary advantage over those that did not have religion. The common trait of religion is what gives a people group strength.

(This point is not mine, but I steal it here. The above thought is so obvious that many atheists spend hours trying to explain away the helpful nature of religion by saying that religion must be a spandrel or a meta-meme, both of which weak hypothesis when compared to the idea that religion results in an evolutionary advantage for those that hold onto it.)

You have two sets of conflicting hypothesis:

1. This world was made by a personal creator

2. This world was made by a fortuitous series of events.

If this world was made by a series of fortuitous events, there is no reason to help others out other than yourself. In reality, in a system that is based on evolution, you simply cannot explain how you can have free will. After all, you are a constructed being that is programmed with a certain programming. Perhaps, there was some core of chance in the way that your DNA sequences were fulfilled, but at the end of the day "it'll be all about the genes."

Evolution leads to the strong devouring the weak. It leads to fatalism. It leads to lack of control. The best of the atheist's philosophers, Dan Dennet in Freedom Evolves (and yes, I have yet to read the book, but I have read summaries) tries to argue that while man is predetermined, our ability to make informed choices--even though we are wired to make those choices--means that we have free will. Classically this is call Compatibilism. This mean that human beings may be predetermined to make a choice, but the fact that the person make the choices himself means that predetermination and free will are compatible.

To step one more time into this hole: You may determine that you don't like the weight that you are at. In fact, over 90% of people that go on a diet immediately gain back the pounds in two years. This would indicate that your programming of weight over rides your will. However, even in this case, you could pay somebody to starve you until you hit the proper weight. This is freedom. You can make a choice regardless of how you are wired.

So, by jumping through a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics, we get to an illusion or a type of free will. However, from a practical standpoint, the total population will never hear this message.

For the average Joe, all they will hear is that "we evolved to this state." There is no free will. Our wiring determines how we will react. Now, wrap this back into the idea of how we treat others. I have many discussion with atheists where they say that they are more moral than all the Christians they know. I may even agree with them, but my point is that their morality is driven by a desires to show that they are good. In more of the cases where I have asked an atheist why they are good, they have no answer.

The reason should be obvious to anybody that understand their own human nature: there is no reason that you should do good. Why help the weak and deprived if it won't help you. As a matter of fact, those that can't pull their own weight should be discarded. If you remember my last post, which can be found here, I pointed out somebody that I knew that was talking about "upgrading the team." The idea is that you should be going through the team and throwing away some individual and upgrading the rest. This is a bit of the survival of the fittest right in the work environment. I clearly see this thought process of the work upgrade as coming directly from the influence of evolution. The strong will survive.

Now if we don't like this mess of a philosophy, we can construct a very simple counter set of hypothesis to the evolutionary one. These are the other set that we started this section with:

a. There is a God.
b. He made you in his image, therefore you have free will
c. It is your choice to do the right thing

If you are a good Christian supervisor, you understand the following:

*The Lord is your master
*The Lord gave you responsibility for those under your care
*You are to be a good supervisor, and plan for the success of your people

This does not mean that we pay everybody the same. This doesn't mean that if a layoff comes that you fire people at random. It doesn't mean that somebody with a bad attitude should not be fired. What is does mean is that you are responsible for your people, and there are expectations that are given by the Lord for you to be fair and right. I would argue that in my experience that those that build this type of an organization are the ones that go to the top. A well led group of B-String players will outperform a warring class of A-String players every time.

Now. let us look at beyond the work place.

In reality, the advent of Christianity has done more than anything to make our nation powerful and great. Unfortunately, the world tries and says that this nation was not founded on Christian principles. This is a ludicrous statement. I was reminded of this by a High School friend that sent me a video that can be seen here. In a very short course in this link, David Barton gives a quick lecture on the culture of America. There is a straight line from how we were founded to the worldview of the Christian.

Over the last 50 years, the United States has been trying to dissolve this bond. Only the future will tell us how much it will hurt.

"Mind & Spirit" -> More Views On Anime And The Weakest Link

Dattebayo!

This is the phrase that is constantly added onto the end of sentences by our fictional guest today, Naruto Uzumaki. What does Datebayo mean? You might suspect that it is simply a translation of some Japanese phrase, because you know that almost all anime comes from Japan. However, it means nothing other than a key phrase that the lead character from the anime Naruto puts onto the end of his sentences. For our American audience, you might remember that the character played by Billy Bob Thornton switchblade in the movie "Switchblade" always would say "Uh, huh" after his sentences. Dattebayo is a bit like this, and it make Naruto one of the most interesting and unique characters in anime.

The twists in anime are so interesting and the span of the story arcs are so large that I do not want to spoil the anime for you. However, Naruto has a well deserved fan base because of the story. In many ways, the morals that the story tells cut right to the heart of Japanese culture, and they are the morals that make the Japenese culture so engaging.

As I have posted before, there are things that will make this anime unsuitable for smaller kids. There are multiple instances of old men that are Peeping Toms that sneak up on younger woman so they can watch them bath. The interesting thing about Japanese culture in this aspect is that they don't condone the behavior. Normally, this is considered perverted behavior and the characters will call it out as such. Also, there is alcohol that flows. In terms of actual sex, there is none. In terms of violence, there is a lot. And while not all of it is graphically shown, it can be very, very shocking. Clearly people die in this anime. If not simple death is disturbing enough, we have sororicide (killing one's sister), infanticide (the killing of a child), filicide (killing of one's child), patricide (the killing of one's father), matricide (the killing of one's mother), mariticide (the killing of one's husband) and uxoricide (the killing of one's wife) as Wikipedia would put it. If there is a "...cide" it will be found in Naruto.

However, I am not here to burry Naruto. I am here to praise it.

Why? Because all of Naruto has core values that cause the anime to be strongly redeemed.Those that are in Christ are going to recognize many of the core values of the anime are ones that we can embrace and pull close to our hearts.  These themes are ones that flow from the gospel.

These themes are as follows:

1. You only have one calling in life. To take care of those that call you family or friends. If you live your life for others, then you will find a well spring of strength inside of you.

2. Those that are cursed are not to be despised. If you hate those that are cursed, a curse will come back on you. Those that are cursed will cause your destruction.  But more than this, there are many who are cursed by things that go beyond their control, and while these people do horrible things, they are not beyond the grasp of those that can see beyond their pain.  The best thing a man can do is make their enemy a brother.

3. Life is centered around the team and the village. You should give your life for the village and the team.

This last value is one that I never see much in the USA and an attribute that I will devote the last half of this post to. 

In the anime, the story revolves around the warrior culture. Each of these characters are trained to be killers from a young age. If you have any talent, you are expected to be a soldier by the time you are 12-13. The truly exception killers are those that can lead at 10 years or younger.

However, these teams are given over to groups of three. This is the core of the warrior culture in the anime.   One of my favorite bits of animation in this series is the opening of episode #28 and following.  As the series has gone from year to year, they come up with new openings.  This particular year features a song from Asian Kung-Fu Generation, which is called Haruka Kanata. While the song is a great song, the animation is what perfectly captures the aspect of the team. Most of it is centered around images of the core three member team.

This group of three is normally lead by a leader or Sensei. The power in the culture is to have the three to operate as one. Often in this team, you will have the following:

1. The superstar
2. The leader
3. The brain
4. The strategist
5. The power

Now, depending on the group, these roles may be scattered around. In some, the superstar/leader/power may all be in one person. However, in most groups each member may take on some part of these roles. Therefore, it is only in the competion of the team does the real power happen.

While the weakest member of the team may call out that they are insecure because they know that they are the weakest, I almost never see the stronger members of the team say "hey that person is weak, let's get an upgrade to that person." Instead, the philosophy is "because I am strong, I will protect the weak."

Now, mind you, just because the weak person is weak, this does not mean that they can slack off. They must work hard. They must help the group any way that they can. They must be faithful. However, they do not have to worry that the other team members are going to leave them behind. As long as even the weakest team member is faithful, there will be a spot on the team.

Contrast the difference between this Japanese anime and the the American culture.

In the USA game show "Survivor," the constant struggle is to find the "weakest link" in the the tribe and vote them off the island. There is a constant battle of alliances an temporary agreements for people to know that they will continue to survive. However, at the end of the day, there will only be one left. It is about watching out for oneself.

Recently, I had a conversation with somebody on how they shape their team. They were saying that they were always "looking for an upgrade." In other words, they thought that the team was pulled together for them. In essence, they had control over the team, and you should be swapping out part of the team like you would be swapping out pieces of a car. If you found a better muffle on eBay, you should order the new muffler and throw out the old.

I philosophically disagree with this. The teams that we are given are not about "what can they do for us" but "how do we work together for the common good." Mind you, I believe in those that do more work should be paid more. You need to reward the superstars on your team. Those that do less should not get the same compensation as those that do more. However, people are not mufflers. Each person has something to add to the overall team. If you find that you are paying a person too much money, then you should downgrade their salary. If you find that one person is doing 150% of the work of another person, you should upgrade their salary to compensate.

Those with a bad attitude? Shoot those people on site. They pollute the entire work force, and diminish good beyond expections.

But at the end of the day, it is about the team. And team don't give up on each other.

As a parting shot, here is the opening video and lyrics.  Now, I'm never sure quite how long a video will be posted to Google video, the post does not depending on this video being around for a long time.  But if it is here, please click on it and watch it.

What you will see is a variety of images, but notice how often a series of three pops into the frame.  In almost all instances, these are the teams of three that compete for each other.

Maybe Americans can learn a bit from the Japanese.

Haruka Kanata (Far Off Distance)

Hit the gas! There's no need to finagle, oh yeah!
We'll go all through the night.
I'll complain at the end, the balance is zero, oh yeah!
We'll whittle the days away...

When you open your heart a little, and pull someone close to you,
Your feelings will surely reach them deeper, yeah...

Hurry it up! Wring it out!
Though my legs are all tangled, they will surely take me far...
Even if I steal it and manage to grasp it,
If it isn't you, then what's the point?

So I'll go further and further away!

Hit the gas! There's no need to finagle, oh yeah!
We'll go all through the night.
I'll complain at the end, the balance is zero, oh yeah!
We'll whittle the days away...

When you open your heart a little, and pull someone close to you,
Your feelings will surely reach them deeper, yeah...

Hurry it up! Wring it out!
Though my legs are all tangled, they will surely take me far...
Even if I steal it and manage to grasp it,
If it isn't you, then what's the point?

So I'll go far into the distance...

Your world will become a thing of deceit
painted all in white...

"Mind" -> Account For Yearly Gains On Etrade

I have written before how I believe that having both stocks and working covered calls can work to your advantage. However, once you get into using these tools for making money, you might not realize two very important things:

1. It becomes a little more difficult to keep track of how much money you've made or lost.

2. You absolutely need to clean up your account at the end of the year, or you'll be paying a lot more cash than you want to to the government.

Let's talk about both of these issues.

This is because the numbers that Etrade show are based on what you paid for stock, and they are not based on how much your cash position has changed over the year.

Let's say I walked into the tax year with $10,000 that I had in my pocket. On January 2, I put this money into etrade and bought myself $10,000 worth of stock by buying 100 shares of $100 stock at XYZ corporation. Once I had the 100 shares of stock, I then turned around and sold the cover calls on the stock for an additional $1000. Since I now had $1000 in my pocket, I decided to buy ten more shares of stock of XYZ. So, I have $11,000 worth of stock.

Etrade shows a running total of what you made and what you haven't made in the market. So, after the covered calls have expired, it will show you that you have $1,000 worth of gains because I sold the covered calls. In this case, let's say that it is short term because covered calls are always this. So, Etrade would show that I made $1000 short term gain.

However, let's us say that my stock, which was worth $11,000 at $100 per share, fell to $90 per share. So, I would have $9900 worth of stock. Since I bought it for $11,000, I have lost $1100. My portfolio is down 10%! What a horrible year. I lost a bunch of money.

Or have I?

If you remember, I walked into the year with $10000. If I sold all of my stock, I would get $9900. In fact, since I buy dividend stock, I also got a dividend on all of the stock. This gave me another $300 for the year (after tax). This means that I entered the year with $10000, and I exited the year with $10200. I didn't lose $1100. I made $200.

So, you need to look at all of the data to truly understand what is happening.

The challenge with Etrade is that it doesn't say that "hey you had $10000 at the beginning of the year." Instead, it will simply give you three sections that you need to check:

1. The amount that is in your banking account (Seen on the home Account Tab)
2. The amount that is in your stock account and current position (Security Tab)
3. A running total of short/long gains in your Security tab under the sub-tab.

So, even if you didn't write down how much money you had at the beginning of the year, the overall answer is pretty easy. Here are the steps:

1. Figure out how much you are worth if you liquidated everything today. In the case above, if I liquidated everything today, I would have $9900 worth of stock.

2. Now you need to figure out how much you had at the beginning of the year. This is simply taking your liquidated value ($9900) adding the losses of $1100 because the stock went down and then subtracting the short term gains from selling your covered calls.

$9900 + $1100 - $1000 = $10000 your starting cash

Now, to get your performance during the year it is simply (ending cash)/(starting cash) = 1% loss on your portfolio before we got our money from our dividends.

So, life isn't all that bad unless you forget that Uncle Sam is coming after those short term gains. This is a major issue, and one you must not get surprised on. One part of the tax code that really boths me is the fact that Uncle Sam makes it so he can get the maximum amount of tax.

Let's say that you have a job where you are making $100,000 per year. Uncle Sam and Uncle California says that you need to pay them 35% of this money to them. So, you have take-home pay of $65,000. However, they see that you had all this money from selling covered calls in the market. According to them, you made an additional $1000 in the stock market. This is income, therefore they are going to come after it. However, this is a special type of income. It was considered "easy money" and you make a big salary of $100,000. Since this was easy money and you are making a good job, they will take roughly 40% of your $1000!

Now, lets go back to our example:

You started with $10000. If you sold the stock at the next year for $90 per share, you would get $9900. So you lost $100. This isn't all that bad, until you find out on your TurboTax that the government wants another $400! This is because they say that "you made $1000 by selling the covered calls last year." So by the time that you pay your money to the government, you find out that your 1% (or $100) loss has gone to a 5% (or $500) loss. $100 because you sold the stock and the other $400 because of the government.

However, you can try and miss most of this burden.

At the end of the tax year, let's say that you knew that the stock was down and that the government was going to tax you on all your short term gains. In this case, you have a $1000 gain coming, and on December 30th you see that the stock is at $90 and you know that the stock is going to be flat for a while.

At this point, you need to sell part of your stock to register that you have a loss. Let me explain it this way. The goverment will allow you to "offset" the gain from options if you have a loss. So, all you need to do is say "well, I need to show the government that I had a loss." You do this by selling your stock that is under water to the extent that it balances out the gain.

In our case, if the stock is $90 on December 30th, we are losing $10 per share for every stock that we sell. Therefore, if we have $1000 of gain that we want to cover, we need to sell 100 shares. The $1000 in money we made in the cover calls is offset or covered by the $1000 we lost by selling the shares.

So you walk out of the year with:

$9000 from the stock that we just sold
100 shares worth $90 per share

Total = $9900

Now, since we have neither gains or losses on this, Uncle Sam charges us absolutely nothing. So by doing this one simple act, you have saved yourself $400 or 4% of your money. This is a massive difference.

Now, this is where the tax code starts to have a massive dorking effect on the economy. This is going to be a bit complicated, but stay with me. In the above example, I was assuming that the stock price was going to be $90 exiting the year and $90 during the start of the new year. However, lets say that I had a perfect time machine. I knew that the stock price was going to be $90 on Dec 30th, but $92 on January 3rd. So, if you waited just 5 days, you could sell he stock for $2 more. Would you wait?

Well we just did the first case. In this case, we would have $9900 in money left over. But what about the case where we waited?

In this case, lets say that we held our stock until January 3rd and sold. So you would have

110 shares * $92 = $10120 worth of money. However, the government still thinks that you made $1000 last year on the options, therefore, they still are going to charge you another $400 for the money you made last year, regardless if just 3 days into the new year you sold the stock for a loss. So, your net gain?

$10,120 - $400 = $9720 or $180 worse than if you had sold for $2 less just 5 days ago!

This fact is not miss on anybody that is handling money a lot.

Always clean out your accounts at the end of the year

"Mind" -> Soul Eater

Okay, I'll admit it.

Soul Eater has to be my favorite anime right now.

Now perhaps you know about anime, and in this case, this post will absolutely no interest to you. After all, you know the beat and what is going on. If you are not familiar with anime, let me introduce you to my subworld.

Anime is nothing more and nothing less than a Japanese cartoon. Anime = animation. Anime has played a pivotal role in Japanese entertainment. While it traces it roots back to USA animation, really the core of anime took off in the 70's and from Manga. Manga is basically a comic book. Similar to the USA cartoon characters--Superman, Spiderman, Batman--what appeared in comic books (Manga) eventually got animated or turned inot anime. What we have today is a very robust manga industry that eventually take popular manga (cheap to produce) and turn it into popular anime (more expensive to produce).

Anime landed many years ago in the USA, for example "Speed Racer" started as part of the first way of anime in the 70's anime explosion. However, taking the chance that a Japanese cartoon could be shown in the USA after being dubbed and distributed was a fairly risky deal. So, for the most part, anime was a very small niche, and then mainly applied to cartoons for children. However, in Japan the entertainment form continued to grow and press the boundaries of what was kid entertainment and what was suitable for people 16 and older.

If the USA distributors were scared to bring over children entertainment, they did think at all about bringing over the more sophisticated entertainment. Afterall, this was too risky.

As you might expect, the internet changed everything. Anime is here in force in the USA, only anime is watched almost exclusively on the internet in the USA.

I am sure that sooner or later, this is going to be shut down for copyright infringement, but until it is, the art of Japan is seeing its way across America. The train is as follows:

1. On Wednesday, Soul Eater is shown on Japanese Television
2. Somebody in Japan records it off the air.
3. They then place this onto BitTorrent
4. The US/Japanese speakers grab the Torrent
5. They put subtitles on the file
6. The file is sent forward in a variety of different formats
7. The movement grows

These subtitling of the anime from Japan TV is called "fansubs" and they can generally be found many, many places on the internet. You can view thousands of hours of "fansubs" of Bleach, Naruto, and others. Some of these are so big that eventually they are bought and dubbed. The Cartoon Network with their "Adult Swim" time slots has caused a much wider acceptance of this entertainment.

Now, there is some very sophisticated anime. As an example of this, "Ghosts in the Shell" and "Death Note" have an unbelieable amount of weirdness and eruditeness about them. Some, such as Blood+ have some very disturbing elements involving things such as rape.

Generally, however, many of the anime show the following:

1. A boy or a girl coming of age. Call it from 13 up to 18

2. Many times there will be a lot of sexual overtones, although not a lot of graph nudity

3. Some bad words, and maybe some inappropriate touching (which always results in the man being slapped silly by the touched woman, which always meant to be humorous. Clearly nothing that would fly in American culture.)

4. And if you think #3 is bad, some Japanese show racial stereotypes that would cause a race riot in America.

But, even with all these problem, the stories or "Arcs" in the various series are amazing in their span and their attention to detail. Each episode will build on each other with stories that are carefully weaved together over dozens of hours of animation.

If it stop there it would be highly interesting.

Now, I have always been a fan of movie soundtracks. The ability of a great composer to help drive a mood is very important to the entertainment value of film.

And what is done on a successful anime holds up against anything that is done for the US cinemas. One of the best composers today for this music is Taku Iwasaki, who is pictured here and is the genius behind the music of Soul Eater.

I was already a fan of his from his music for the anime "Read or Die," and he has really outdone himself for this series. Just brilliant, brilliant stuff. As a composer (read mediocre to bad) myself, I can appreciate his ability to go anywhere he wants: New age. Moodscape. Hard Rock. Rap.

It is all in there. Each track builds brilliantly. These songs are woven into the story. For instance, the current series is up to 26 episodes (there will be 50 in all). If you watch the anime weekly, you will get a point where you notice how well the songs are crafted into the story. Without even knowing what is happening, the songs will carry you along.

Unfortunately, his music is lacking in the US. Luckily, you can go to Last.fm, which is a Brit internet radio station, and you can listen to this type of music. Not perfect, since there is no Taku Iwasaki radio station, but at least you can get some sense.

In addition, the animation art is just wonderful stuff. It is warped and strange, and yet familiar. Really, the art is simply images that can burn into your brain. At first I wasn't sure if I liked something so stylized and strange. Now, I can't get enough. You will be a very short time into the first episode when you'll meet the hero of the anime.

However, one of the non-convential things with the Soul Eater anime is that the hero is actually a heroine. Maka. You can see a picture of her to the left.

She is the central character of the anime, and captivating in her style.

Thing that you love about her is the fact that she is 100% a young woman that has a wonderful blend of personality traits: She is 100% aggressive in her stance as a "Meister" of justice. She is more than willing to give her life in the fight against evil. Yet, she is incredibly insightful into human nature. Although it takes over 20 episodes to get to one of the cruxes of the story, I was very moved when she has brilliant insight into how to reach a person that was hurting. It grabbed me on a very deep emotional level. She is the heroine of the show and while she is very smart, she is not the strongest. This makes her all the more appealing.

Now, the characters go beyond Maka. You have probably heard that the Japanese are all about team work. Many times in USA based dramas we will show a "team" or "essemble" cast. However, regardless off all the characters, we know that CSI is really about Gil Grissom. You know that 24 is about Jack Bauer. Mind you there are some essemble casts, but often one person will rise about the rest.

In anime, it is the cast that pulls it all together most of the time. Each member will often reflect a key emotion. An you need to see all the emotions...because anime is all about emotions.

The Japanese have a very reserved culture, and anime is the way that they express emotions that they other wise can't. In the story you have the young braggart that does nothing but say how great he is. You have the Father that bursts into tears because he believes that he'll never be a good Father.

Personally, for an anime to really strike home, you need to have a character that you really resonant with.

For me, this is Franken Stein. Yes, the name is a clear tribute to the horror novel, and this them is used over and over in the novel. I will not ruin the anime by describe how he is used in the plot, but I can see a lot of myself in him. I can see that if I was not who I am today, and placed in a similar circumstance stance (no matter how unbelievable since it is fantasy), I would be this character.

I will not destroy the anime by describing the character completely, but he is a bit unhinged, extremely scientific, and explodes when pushed too far. A man after my own heart.

Now, I have thought that I would like to show this stuff to my own kids. There are some very valuable lessons in these stories. However, you'll find several issues:

1. There are bad words that the characters say. Sigh, I wish I could find a version that had #$(@*)% as the swear words. Strike one.

2. Somehow, there always seem to be some type of mild perversion in Japan anime. Many times this has to do with inappropriate relationships between older men, fathers or brothers with younger girls. Maddening. Why do the Japanese seem to think so much about incest? Mind you, it is never, never said. It is kidded about. Inappropriate? Sure.

3. Finally, there is almost always some fixation on breast. Why? I guess it is the Japanese way.

So, I won't be showing this to my kids.

In summary, you have all the emotion that you'd never see in real life. Is it over the top?? You bet. And I love it.

"Mind" -> Allais Paradox And My Investment Strategy

As we often do on this blog, we have a special guest for today.

I am happy to say that we are going to be spending a little time talking about the psychology of risk with Maurice Allais. Unfortunately, this Nobel Prize winner is dead, but we can honor him by kicking around one of the more famous of his concepts, then we'll use this idea to examine the stock market today.

The Allais Paradox is a hallmark of the way that we are wired, and the best way to look at this is by having you immediately take a quiz. To be effective on this, you are going to have to actually take the quiz, and not just read ahead. Okay? Here we go.

I am a very generous blog writer, and I find a comment that you have posted on my website. I like your comment so very, very much that I write you an email, with the following being written:

"Dear XXXX,

You insight and comments on my blog posting are so very, very good, that I want to reward you somehow. However, I have been taking a look at risk lately, so I am going to reward you with a decision. I am going to give you 2 choices:

Choice A: I will give you a 100% chance of giving you 1 million dollars.

OR

Choice B: I will give you a 25% chance of winning 5 million dollars.

Thanks Again For Your Comments,
Theo"

Now what choice would you take? Come on. Be honest.

Why or why not? Just stop and think about this for a while. You may even want to write down your answer. You'll see later what most people pick. (Because this is "illogical," this is referred to as the Allais paradox, after our good friend Maurice. You have just participated in the Allais Paradox.)

Let's do another quiz. This is a follow-on to the Maurice Paradox.

Let's say that you are pulled up in front of a judge. He is very mad at you for speeding. So, he says the following:

"Hey look, I have a 6 sided dice," he says. "I'll roll the dice. If it comes up as a 1, you'll pay us zero. If it comes up any thing else, you'll owe $6000. However, to make it interesting, I'll give you another choice. No dice roll, but you'll pay me $5000 right now. So what will it be?"

So, would you take the 1/6 chance of paying no fine, or would you simply pay the $5000. What would your answer be? Again, why don't you write down the reason for your second choice. Also, note if you changed your mind after thinking about it for a while.

The first example involves upside. This was the original Allais Paradox. The second example involves downside. This was a variation on the Allais Paradox. This was done by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.

Here is a picture of Kahneman. Unfortunately, Amos Tversky died of skin cancer. However, Kahneman went on to win a Nobel prize for the work he did with his long time collaborator. Too bad Tversky was not there to see it.

What is the answer to above questions?

Well on the letter from me, most people would pick the "sure fire" $1M dollars over the 25% chance of winning $5M dollars. As for the speeding ticket? Most people would pick the "roll of the dice" over handing over $5000.

If we only played the odds, we would have always picked the $5M upside opportunity. After all, getting a 25% chance at $5M dollars is $1.25M on average. As for the roll of the dice, there should have been no preference. Both come out to be $10.

However, people are not wired that way. On "upsides" most people want to lock in the "sure fire" thing. On downsides, they believe "well, it won't happen to me. I won't be picked."

What is interesting is that researchers have looked at this trend in all types of cultures and all types of languages. You would think that the response to this issue would be driven a lot by culture, however, whatever culture you are in, the reaction is basically the same.

Once you start testing this on large groups of people, you can start to plot out the "value vs the risk" on a scale. Kahneman and Tversky did just this. The eventual curve that they built is now known as the "Prospective Curve."

The "Prospect Curve," which I've stolen from Wikipedia, is shown to the side of this text.

If you examine this curve, you will see that it has two axis. The curve plots out the value of gains and losses.

You can see, that minor gains are appreciated, but quickly they level off. So, in this case, you may feel good if I gave you a million dollars. However, you won't feel "five times as good" if I give you five million dollars. This is why most people chose the "sure thing" over the $5M dollar gamble. You have almost four times the risk on $5M, but you won't get twice the pleasure.

On the other side, you can see that losing $1M is more painful than gaining $1M dollars! The curve goes down further for losses than it goes up for gains. Once you have something, it is hard to give it up.

On the down side, if if the odds look "about even," and the pain is pretty painful, most people will pick the result where maybe they'll get lucky and pay nothing. This is section of the down curve where it is less than a 45 degree angle.

"Well, once I lose $5,000, it is only a little more painful to lose $6,000," you might say. "Besides, maybe I can lose nothing and really feel good."

One of my co-workers says, "I'm numb" once he gets beyond a certain point in a quarter. I believe him. However, he is willing to take a little bit of a gamble, and get all the way back up the curve.

This is exactly what happens on the stock market, and this is why I am adjusting my portfolio.

The market is down 15% for the year. The financial sector has many skeletons in their closet. The government is taking over all the major financial institutions. And what is the hope of most of the people on Wall Street? They are rolling the dice, hoping to get lucky and cause their portfolio to regain the loses that they have had for the year.

However, I think that all the cards are pointing to a difficult 18-24 months. I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm in the part of the curve where I haven't lost much, and I want to preserve what I have.

Let me take you though some high level trends.

What I am showing on the chart to the side is the S&P 500 index. This is the "average" value of the stock market over the last 10 years.

Why am I showing you the S&P 500?

You are probably familiar with some type of mutual fund because you have a 401K plan. What you are doing is handing money to "professional money managers" that are supposed to give you good returns.

However, the real secret is that 80-90% of "professional managers" don't beat the S&P500! The other 10% are simply lucky.

The only guy that seems to have a 30 year track record of beating the street is Warren Buffet. He has been preaching for years that having a professional manage your money means that you will suffer. Finally, somebody showed up from New York, and challenged Buffet on this. Very simply, they wagered $1M on the following:

“Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S&P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”

Buffet will pay $1M to a charity if he loses. However, he won't lose. The bet can be found here.

So, now we are looking at a graph of what a "good" return should be. If you look at the S&P 500 index, you will see that it had a tremendous run-up going into calendar year 2000. If you remember back in time, the run up was due to the "tech bubble." At that time, the best way for Investment Banks to make money was to get any tech company that looked even half making a lot of money was to found a company and take it public.

Once you did your IPO (Initial Public Offering) everybody in the market would jump in and make money. Tremendous money was flowing into the technology sector, and stock price was going absolutely crazy. The real winners were the investment banks that made a ton off of every public offering.

However, technology wasn't backed by anything that could give returns. When it was found out that many of these companies couldn't make a buck, the tech market collapsed. Unfortunately, many investors lost a ton of money.

I think that I am "unique" in recognizing that our problems today go back to the problems in the technology sector. There was a massive machine all tuned up and ready to make money. This was the investment banks. Now, I hate and love these guys. They are greed personified. They do all types of stupid stuff to make money. However, they serve a very good purpose. This is how people get their companies started. Without them we'd be in trouble also.

With a lot of people losing a lot of money, Alan Greenspan, who may go down as a worse Fed Reserve chairman than George Bush was a president, lowered the Federal Reserve rate down to 1%. Now, considering that Greespan had given extremely cheap money to anybody that wanted it, all that the banks needed to do was find somebody to borrow it.

The idea that you could borrow money cheap, then lend it out to house owners was beyond anything that Wall Street could turn down.

So when there wasn't a technology industry to make money, the commercial and investment banks started doing stupid loans off of the "new bubble." The new bubble was this real estate.

Now, this is bad enough. However, to make this plausible, they need some type of insurance in case things went bad. However, insurance needs a reserve "just in case" somebody needs to actually use the insurance. However, there wasn't enough money to actually insure all the lending that was going on.

Therefore, Phil Gramm (former McCann man that was helping him with how to handle the economy in his election campaign for the presidency, pictured here with McCann) sponsored credit default swaps in our senate, with a little help from Phil Lugar.

As a matter of fact, this former McCann staffer may be the single reason for the melt down in the market today. Again, credit default swaps is just another name for "insurance." Only, Gramm was able to drive a bill that made it illegal for credit default swaps to be called insurance. Unlike insurance, which is tightly regulated, these vehicles require NO BACKING IN CASE OF DEFAULT.

In other words, the insurer is not required to be able to deliver the insurnace.

When Buffet heard about this, he said that credit default swaps were "time bombs." How right he was. The bombs are starting to go off. Interesting, Buffet is voting for Obama. While Buffet has talked about tax rates, I think one of the main issue is that McCann seemed to embrace Gramm (until Gramm put his foot in his mouth once too many times by saying that the economy was just doing fine, and anybody that said different was a whiner).

Buffet has picked the lessor of two evils by picking Obama in his mind.

However, things run in cycles. We are not in the great depression, no matter what some headlines are saying. We don't have a run on the bank. We have crippled outselves with large debt loads as a nation, but the core of the USA is fine. It is just an extended house remodeling that we need to do.

The interesting thing about the "general problems" with the last bubble in the economy was that it took two years to hit bottom. In our new situation, I think that we will also take about two years to hit bottom. Clearly, we have launched into an unknown space. The government has made the most massive investment (or bail out) in our history. The impacts of this will not wind its way through our economy for 2-3 years from now.

So, what is my suggestion?

Well, if you like risk, you can start to short the market. This is what I've been doing all this year through a moderate "covered calls" strategy. Because of my strategy, my portfolio is down 5% for the year instead of the 15% for the S&P 500. I was actually up 5% just a couple of months ago, but made some slip ups in my investment strategy, which was completely foreseeable. (Basically, you can't run a personal portfolio AND do a stressful job. You will slip up on something.) However, I'm pretty proud of outperforming the market.

However, this last week gave me quite a scare. There was a point where the market was down over 20% year to date. If not for a phenomenal intervention by the government, and a crazy rally on Friday, I would have been down 15% for the year.

When the market popped back on Friday morning, I immediately liquidated part of my assets. I now have 20% of my liquid net worth in cash. In 27 days, once the next option expiry date, I will convert another 20% of my portfolio into cash. So exiting October, I will have at least 40% of my money in hard cold cash. By December, exiting the year, I will have 80-85% of my portfolio in cash.

So, once you have all your assets in cash, what do you do?

1. Put them in a safe place.
2. Wait for the market to turn around

Where is a safe place? Well the BEST place is T-Bills or government back bonds. However, they both have a problem in that they are are not liquid. The best thing about have cash is if the market does take a massive nose dive, you may want to actually buy something along the way. A house. A car. Even an investment. If you are a Wall Street firm, this is no problem. If you are an individual, there is nothing like a savings or checking account.

Now, lets say that you've been saving for a number of years, and you have at least $150K saved up. My suggestion is to have your money in at least four FDIC banks, spread evenly with no more than $100K at each bank (or $200K if you have a joint account with your spouse). The key is a minimum of four banks, regardless if you have a $800K or $80K. FDIC banks will cover any bankruptcy up to $100K for single people, and $200K for married couples.

If you are just starting out with $1K for savings, my advice is getting saving more. Cash is king in an uncertain time. However, you can probably get away with just one bank.

The reason for multiple banks is to be able to get you your cash at anytime regardless of bankruptcy. A local bank IndyMac, went bankrupt because of the market. While the invest is secured, it takes an extended time to get your money out of the bank. Spread risk by having your bank accounts spread out.

Some of my ideas for banks?

Ing Direct (if you ask me for a referral, they'll pay me $10!) They pay around 3% on savings accounts.

E*Trade Bank. While there are cheaper stock trades, E*Trade blends them all together seamlessly. They also pay around 3% on savings.

HSBC Direct. Another online bank with a 3% interest.

Finally, I have an account at Bank of America. They pay lousy, lousy. But their cash machines are all over the place.

Just hang onto cash for the next 18-24 months.

"Mind" -> The Lack Of Science In Global Warming

The topic for today is how the scientific community tries and comes to agreement about what and is not true.

Science can be more than a bit of religion. Mind you, I am not talking mathematics. Math is often pure and perfect. Science is dirty.

There is a story by Richard Dawkins, the high priest of science, where he describes a classroom setting and a professor and a student that are having a debate over the proof of a concept. When the student showed that his idea was true, the professor graciously said, "Good job, I'm glad to see science happening." Then the classroom breaks into applause at how the scientific method happened.

This nice little anecdotal story belongs in the fiction section of the bookstore. In reality, I see most of science of having as much bias (ignoring math) as any other field or endeavor. The issue is the the "problem of the mind and biases."

The problem with the mind is that it is so powerful in its ability to define reality that most people cannot escape this. It is the same for both Christians and non-Christians. We see what we think that we should see. I am not blaming the scientist, but I am saying that the scientists are no more and no less susceptible than anybody else. Once we expect to see something, we do see it.

So, with that lengthy preamble, let us dive into Global Warming.

Take the advent of global warming as driven by our carbon dioxide footprint. If you listen to public radio, the impacts of global warming is said so often that it must be one of the most often theme that is said.

Drought in Australia? Human carbon dioxide emissions.
Hurricane Ike? Carbon dioxide from humans.
The Netherlands? Soon to be impacted from carbon dioxide when the sea rises.

With the massive impact of the global warming, you would think that the information on this would be widespread and greatly debated. Yet, I have had many conversations about this with people. On both sides of the debate is an amazing lack of knowledge at the lay level.

Even worse, I often find the liberals that believe in global warming, and want the US bought into the Kyoto accord, but have yet little idea of a fundamental tenet:

a. What will this cost?
b. What will be the benefit?
c. What is the payoff?

Instead, there is banal whining about "well our children will have to pay for it." My question is, "What will they have to pay?"

There are the conservatives that don't believe the idea of global warming, but my conservative friends haven't even the most passing knowledge of the data behind those facts. They just say "well I don't feel hotter." They really have abdicated their responsibility to understand the facts.

So, let's talk about global warming at a high level. Conservative or liberal, we should have some idea of the concepts of global warming, and what that means for us.

There are three main ideas, and each much be looked at separately.

Climate change
Global warming
Carbon dioxide (or CO2 in chemistry terms) as the source of global warming

So here is the logic. Man has been introducing industry. This industry releases Carbon Dioxide or CO2. This CO2 increases something called greenhouse gases. These greenhouse gas will trap more heat in the earth's atmosphere. The earth will heat up. However, the heating up just doesn't mean that the earth gets a little hotter. Instead, this increase in heat unleashes cooler weather and hotter weather. It unleashes hurricanes and tornadoes. The impact of the warming is much higher than the movement in temperature.

The first rule of science is to try to watch out for correlation vs causation.

I often am very, very happy that I only have one wife and an exceptionally strong marriage. However, I look at myself and many, many times I think to myself "anybody could live with my wife. She is cheery, full of laughter, and very helpful. What person would ever get divorce living with her?" In other words, I can't take credit for a good marriage. Just because I'm in a good marriage, doesn't mean that I am the reason that the marriage is good.

Climate warming is a bit like this. It is very true that C02 is coming up in concentrations. However, most people don't understand that we measure C02 in parts per MILLION. In other words, CO2 is almost non-existent. If you read any reports on climate change that blames CO2, you will see scary graphs. Almost all of these are shown in highly deceptive fashions designed to create an emotive result.

Let's talk a bit about CO2. Perhaps you have fallen asleep or heard that people will fall asleep in high concentrations of CO2. This is at the 1% level. If the CO2 levels get to 7-10%, then most people will get dizzy. Let's look at a chart that shows the concentration of CO2 at Mauna, HI since 1959. The bottom of the chart is 0% CO2, and the top of the chart is 1%, where we would start to feel drowsy, but nowhere near toxic levels that would immediately kill you.

CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas. For all practical purposes, it very inert. You should be very familiar with it. Every time that you buy a soda pop, the bubbles in the water is carbon dioxide. If CO2 was a highly toxic substance, you certainly would not be drinking it!

Now, let's go back to the chart above.

As can see from the chart, the levels of carbon dioxide have increased and incredible 7 one thousandths of 1% over forty years. In other words, the increases in the percentage of carbon dioxide is unmeasurable with all but the most sophisticated equipment.

Now, mind you, you should not wallow in CO2 as it can create carbonic acid inside of your body. According to Wikipedia, any above one half of one percentage (which is equivalent to half way up the graph) is going to have bad health effects. However, as you can see, the amount of CO2 in the air is basically flat. Now, in recent years, I have read some papers that say "well humans may not do well in environments higher than 400 ppm. However, as far as I'm concerned, the concern that 400 ppm would hurt in anyway is simply laughable.

The best data we have is from people that have extensive times on nuclear submarines. A number of years ago, our sailors were exposed commonly to concentrations of CO2 of 3000-4000 (on averge) ppm without any clear deleterious effects according to research published by the US Navy.

Considering our long term use of CO2 and the lack of any good data showing that it harmful, we should not be worrying about slightly higher levels in our atmosphere.

If you believe in an old earth, as I do, then you can start looking at this question along even longer timelines. Having slightly higher levels of CO2 is a minor nit if you consider that higher levels of CO2 have been the norm over the span of the earth's time line.

Once you start to examine the earth's atmosphere in terms of many millions of years, the story even becomes a lot more clear. This site has some nice graphics of the overall temperature of the earth.

If you look to the right, there is a chart that shows both the CO2 levels and the temperature of the earth. (This chart comes up a bit small, but you can click on it to see a bigger picture. However, let me also describe this to you.)

The chart shows the average temperature of the earth over the last 600 million years. The Co2 levels are in black. The temperature is in blue. Now take a look at 450M years ago. The CO2 levels are very, very high. Yet the temperature plunges down to 12C. This caused what is known as the Ordovician–Silurian Extinction. So now we have an extremely cold earth. So cold that it caused massive change. Yet, the CO2 levels were much, much higher than today's environment. It should strike you as strange. There have been clear times where CO2 has been much, much higher than today, yet the temperature was much, much colder.

Some say that there was a massive bit of gamma radiation coming from a star 6,000 light years away that impacted our earth and this created a special condition that dropped the temperature. They think that it may have stripped away all the ozone, and this somehow triggered a massive ice age. Regardless if this is true or not, the issue is clear. The earth has seen much greater swings in temperature, and some how it has been able to survive them.

In reality, the earth is about as cold as it has ever been. Now, we may not be at the absolute bottom, but we are very, very close to the absolute bottom. The earth is running a little over 12C as an average temperature. This is vastly different that the majority of the past, where the earth have been running at 22C as an average.

We can get a bit more of a picture around this if we look at a much smaller time period. One of the neatest things that we been able to use to determine "short term" time periods are the polar ice caps. Humans had gone to the poles, and we drill down into the ice. The ice is like layers of a cake, with the lower levels being deposited many thousands of years ago. Just like looking at tree rings, we can determine the amount of snow fall, and even the atmosphere conditions that were present. This data can be use to figure out the amount of amount of ice that was deposited. If you look at the chart above, you can see a clear cycle in the ice that is deposited.

There are very clear cycles in how much ice accumulates over the last half of million years. What we are seeing now looks just like the same pattern as we have always seen.

We are actually living in an ice age. This is called Quaternary glaciation in most people's book. The earth simply has been abnormally cold for many millions of years. The problem with ice ages is that we really don't understand what creates them or gets rid of them. There is evidence that we've had ice ages when CO2 has been high, and ice ages when it has been very low.

Inside of these rather large cycles, we have a smaller "ice age" cycle. For example, just 11,000 years ago, we had our ice cycle. We can take core samples from the ice caps to discover the rate of ice accumulation. The chart above is a chart from Wikipedia. You can see that roughly every 100,000 to 150,000 years, ice either builds up or doesn't build up. The movement from build to non-build is very quickly.

With or without a massive influx from humans, it is clearer that we have seen a massive change in how much ice has been building up over the last 11,000 years.

Really, if the earth is warming because of a greenhouse effect, it is not carbon dioxide driving this. There is really one greenhouse gas that we need to worry about.

That is water vapor.

Here is a nice little chart from this web site.

One of the best things about the industry that I am in is the tools that we use to find "root cause." Let's us say that you have a customer that wants a hard drive that fails less. So, you have customers start to ship you the hard drives back and asks you why they failed.

What you will find out that hard drives fail for a variety of things. So, we graph out all the ways a hard drive fails, and we have found that we always need to start to focus on fixing the issues that are the "top hitters."

We need to do the same with the greenhouse gases that we have. We need to figure out what is the contribution to the "problem" of greenhouse gases.

So, what is the #1 greenhouse gas? The answer is water vapor. As a major of fact, water vapor so dominates the results, everything else is inconsequential to the equation.

Right around 3.5% of the green house gas is from carbon dioxide. 95% of the effect of the green house gas is caused by good old water vapor. The problem become even more clear when we start to talk about man's contribution to CO2. This is estimated as anywhere from man is creating 30% of the problem for the increases in the amount of CO2 that is in the air down to around 3-4% of the CO2 that is in the air is due to man. There has always been CO2 in the atmosphere, and what is exceptionally clear is that we are at a very, very low level of CO2 in the air in this time.

As you might expect, one of the major issue that we have is no clear cause and effect of man's output of carbon dioxide and the concentration of the carbon dioxide that is in the air. The chart from the side is from this site.You can see that there are two lines. One of the lines show the concentration of CO2 in the air. The other line shows the impact of man's introduction of CO2 into the air after the industrial revolution.

This is one of the ironic charts that people hope to show the "horrible impact of man," and if you can just read the chart, you can see how it directly does not support the ideas.

The first curve is the impact of concentration of CO2 in the air. If you compare this chart to my earlier chart, you will see that they nicely line up with each other, with one exception. This chart cut the Y-Axis so that it starts at 280 ppm before the industrial age. This means that our atmosphere was approximately .03% (3 one hundredths of one percent) CO2. Now, after hundreds of years of carbon emission, the level has gone up to .04% (4 one hundredths of one percent).

By the way, you should be able to clearly see that before the industrial revolution, the CO2 in the air was going up. Why? What was causing it to go up, even though we had no massive influx of human activity to drive it.

Now, lets take a couple of key data points off of the chart, and you will have to work with me. Often when we see a chart like this, we simply don't understand that it drives an emotive reaction. We see two lines going up, and we say "oh, they must be related." A way of getting around this is to look at case examples of the data off the graph.

In 1950:

*The CO2 concentration was 300 ppm
*The man made Metric Tons was 1 million

In 2000:

*The CO2 concentration was 370 ppm
*The man made M Metric Tons was 6.5 million

The contribution from made went up 650%. The free CO2 went up 23%. Anybody can see that if the two numbers are correlated the leverage between them is tiny. In other words, man had to ramp his production like mad, and even then the impact on the CO2 levels look to be tiny.

What you will often here is "well CO2 is up 23%! But remember that it is water vapor that is driving force in the greenhouse effect. This means that CO2 may have gone from 4% of the green house gases to 5% of the green house gas in the atmosphere. Big deal. This is not the primary problem that we have.

We can go back to before the industrial revolution, and if man is 100% responsible for all of the increases in the CO2 levels increasing (but since the levels were rising before our industries arrived, this is highly doubtful), we would be able to "lower" the green house gas by 1%.

No matter how you cut the data, man can not simply impact our global enough to seriously impact global climate conditions to the extent of the concerns that are being voiced.

Now, let us add an even more jade eye to the subject. Let's say that we give in, and agree with all the dire projections that are being given out. Wikipedia has a nice chart of all the models that are out and the total increase in temperature that could happen. Here is the chart.

100 years from now, the earth is going to be somewhere between 2 to 4.5" degrees hotter than it is today. Shocking. How will we ever survive such a massive swing in our temperature.

I'm obviously being sarcastic. When compared with the span of the earth, an increase in temperature of this swing is no where outside the norms of what we might expect. Will it cause us to re-examine where we live? The answer is yes. Is it a global catastrophe? The answer is no. Even under these highly pessimistic models. The earth has been colder. The earth has been hotter. We were able to survive all of this.

Now, you might look at me and say, "well that guy does not believe in all this stuff. I bet he is driving a big SUV."

The answer is no. As far as I know, I am probably the most "green" person that I know. Only, I don't do it because I believe in global warming. I do it because of two things:

1. Pollution
2. Peak Oil

Even if Global Warming and CO2 impacts are not meaningful, the same behavior that solves for the perceived problems of Green house gases, also solves truly difficult problems.

We are doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

As a final shot, here is a short video by Bob Carter. Well worth your time.

"Mind" -> The Disturbing Surfwise

Doc Paskowitz and his family is the subject of a fascinating documentary called Surfwise. This documentary is available on Netflix direct streaming, and if you don't want to deal with spoilers, I suggest that you see the film then read the rest of the post. For those that don't mind a bit of revelation, you can read the following:

Doc, as everybody seems to call him, was a medical doctor that got his degree from Stanford. He was pursuing a very successful career, when he started to experience panic attacks. Because of this, he flipped out. He basically walked away from it all, and decided to start surfing. Through a series of adventures, he eventually meets his third wife. One of the main points of this relationship was a very robust sex life. From here, he plotted a life that is far different than any that I have heard before.

His wife and he started to have a family. A big family. 9 children with 8 boys and 1 daughter. Rather than living a normal life, he placed all nine children into a very small trailer, then started to drive all of North America and some of of South America. He would go every where with his family and they would surf. With hardly a penny to their name, he considered it a great adventure for the family.

The father was a dictator. He insisted that all of the children surfed. However, all of the children learned to love the sport. However, he also decided that sugar was absolutely horrible. Their main staple in the morning consisted of some type of feed that Doc would buy for them. It was unclear exactly where this feed came from. One of the brother on NPR stated that the children thought that it might have been horse feed or bird feed. For dinner, they would have some type of soup or beans.

One doesn't have 9 children without having sex. And in the movie all the children seemed to hate the fact that their parents would have loud sex all of the time. After all, there was 11 of them in and extremely small trailer, and everyone could see what was happening every night.

Doc declared that there was knowledge and there was wisdom. Sending children to school only gave knowledge and no wisdom. Therefore, none of the children went to school. There is a particularly heart melting scene when one of the children describes the fact that his desire to go into medicine was crush when he found out that he was so far behind that he could never get a regular college degree. He would never be a doctor.

This is not to say that the children were dumb. They read a lot, even if they didn't do much math. Opera was played all of the time, and several of the children went into music later in life.

When the children was in the family with the iron dictator running the trailer, everything was happy. The main issue is that having an iron hand from somebody else on your life only creates children that had no ability to govern themselves.  Eventually, the children decided that they had enough, and one by one they all left the circle that they stood in.  As they left the family, they really left the family.  While some of them were a little closer than others, the film basically shows that the family had been in each other's way for so many years that they could no longer stand to be intimate any more.

I think we have all been tempted to leave our current life behind us. We desire to leave the pressure of our lives behind, and take off in a trailer to live our own life. This film is highly instrumental in showing the pleasure and the price for living this type of life.  Children leave the family social structure never to return, and at best they can be called quirky.  At worse, they can be called highly disfuntional.

What is my take away from the film is that living the free life messes you up. Responsibility is not something to flee from, but something to be embraced. Keeping your children separated from the world is not to say that they will be safe from the world.

Hebrew's 12 tells us

"No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."

Your children deserve to be treated with love and respect. Sometimes this means that you need to get them to do their school work, and clean their rooms. But this film shows that their is a limit to how hard to push. You cannot make your children into your own image.  You cannot ask them to turn their back on the world.  What we must do is teach our children how to stand in the world.

Moderation is a virtue. We should all experience more of it.

Quantum Mechanics

Welcome our guest today: Hugh Everett III.

He has come up with the idea that some call the most important idea since the theory of relativity. Too bad after his Ph.D, he gave up on academia because nobody would touch his radical ideas. Some simply considered him a raving lunatic. Because he was a rabid atheist, who insisted that his ashes should be thrown out in the trash after he died, he would not like that I am going to use his ideas to justify a view of God.

Over time his ideas have gotten a strong following, and he is no longer rejected as he was when he first proposed his ideas. I am going to take his ideas today, and apply as he would never accept them. To talk about the very nature of God and how we will be judged.

I had a close friend in high school who was Dutch. The interesting thing is that he was raised in Holland and came over at a young age. His parents spoke with a heavy accent, and whenever the kids were at home they did not speak English. They spoke Dutch.

I remembering asking the kids in the family how it was to switch from one language to the next. They told me that sometimes it didn't even register. They weren't conscious of moving from English to Dutch. I asked if this every turned into an issue in real life.

"Oh yes," said the mother. "I remember that one time I was talking on the telephone to a friend. As close as I came remember it, I started the conversation in English, but somehow I switch over to Dutch. I had been talking for quite a while, and the friend was saying nothing. Finally, I realized what I had done, and because my friend did not speak Dutch, they simply did not know what was going on."

I recently had a conversation with my nieces husband where I started to explain quantum mechanics. When I got to the part where I was trying to explain how quantum mechanics formed my views on freewill, I could see that I had so totally lost him that I might as well had been talking in Dutch.

Hopefully, you can stick with me a bit longer today. You need to try and grasp the Dutch.

We have know about Quantum Mechanics for many years, and yet the common person has no idea what Quantum Mechanics actually are. I was in San Jose with some people from my work, and I was describing some interesting Quantum Mechanics. These are all intelligent people, yet they didn't know what I was talking about. As a matter of fact, if not for Quantum tunneling, we couldn't even have hard drives, which is the product that I deal in.

The problem of Quantum physics is that particles simply do not exist unless you observe them. I could spend a lot of time describing this, but the thoughts are so intuitively stupid and unbelievable that it is almost not worth it. You need to take it on faith, when you get to very small particles, they don't exist.

Now, this doesn't seem to be very satisfying. Small stuff doesn't exist? Crazy. Yet, we look at big stuff all around us, and that exists. It the big stuff made out of the small stuff?

The answer is yes, and the difference between the big stuff and the small stuff is that the big stuff is observed and the small stuff may not be. As soon as we observe something, it turns into "real stuff."

Thus the age old question, "If I tree falls in the forest, and if there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?" is simply reframed. In our new world, the question is if a neutron is split into two particles and nobody sees it, does either particle have a definite state. The answer to the second question is "no."

Now, you may ask "how do you expect me to believe this? I would have to see it with my own eyes." I will answer this is actually not that big of a deal. The scientific community have many experiments that will show that particles are not particles until you observe them, and you can run an experiment yourself to see it. The problem is "why" particles are not particles until you see them.

This is the rub. We can come up with math that describes these particles very nicely. This math is based around carryng around vectors that have probability embedded in then. Once you observe a particle, it goes from a chance of a particle to a real particle, and once it is a real particle it instantaneously communicate to any other particle it is related to and causes those particles to also snap into reality. This is called collapsing the wave function.

Without getting into quarks (which make up atoms), lets say we split a sub-atomic particle into two pieces. Whenever we split this particle, we can tell that one particle has an "up" value. The other particle has a "down" value. So, we find out that the particle that we broke apart only has quarks with 1 "up" value, and 1 "down" value. So, if we see that one particle is "up," then we know that the other particle is "down."

However, if you remember from the previous discussion, particles aren't really present until you observe them. So, lets say that the two particle you observe are flying in different directions. One is flying to the north universe 7.5 billion light years away, and the other particle is flying to the south galaxy 7.5 billion light years away. Now, in 7.5B light years, the two particles are 15B light years apart from where you started them. However, as we discussed, they aren't particles until you observe them. If you then view just one particle, you know that the other particle must have the opposite value. So, you observe one particle, and you see that it is an "up" particle. The math tells us that the opposite particle 15 billion light years away instantaneous turns into a "down" particle. This means that somehow information is passed faster than the speed of light. Even though the particles are 15B light years apart, they instantaneously communicate to each other.

However, the idea of particles not being real is pretty highly disturbing. The idea that one observation can impact another particle 15B light years away is highly disturbing. I have noticed that most scientist simply do not like to think a lot about this. In many ways, the idea of Quantum physics can led directly into religion. Observation leads to reality. I agree with the physicist that think this way. Just because some is bizarre on a microlevel, it does not give rise to the idea that somehow this impacts the world for larger objects. We may not understand the microworld at all. However, this does not mean that we don't understand the macro or Newtonian world.

One of the interesting things about this, however, is that we still must try and deal with the idea that particles are not particles until they are observed. In a famous thought experiment, Schrödinger suggest that if a cat was set up to be killed by a Quantum event, then the cat would neither be dead or alive until somebody observed the event!

To get pass this, Hugh Everett in 1957 came up with the idea that any time we have an event triggered by a Quantum event, two separate universes spun off or there are separate quantum worlds. Although Everett did not call it "Many-worlds interpretation," this is name that has stuck. The idea is that there are many overlapping quantum worlds that take on any possible outcome. In essence, our universe is one of an infinite series of universes. They all overlap in some sense, but they are all separate. Every event in an universe creates at least two new universes. For all practical purposes, there is a mass of infinite universes that had common histories and then split. In other words, even if an event didn't happen in our universe, then it happened somewhere else.

You may has seen episodes like this on Star Trek. There is an alternative universe where there is an evil Kirk. Or where the Enterprise and Jean Picard is destroyed in a black hole. However, there is another universe of "good Kirk" and where the enterprise is not destroyed.

So if we review the current state of quantum physics, we basically have two ideas:

1. Sub-atomic particles don't exist until we see them and if they don't exist, perhaps events that rely on the particle's state doesn't exist.

2. If an event is triggered by the state of a subatomic particle, then multiple time lines are spun off. Each one is a new new world that is decoherent (which means they cannot interact) with each other.

Now, are you grabbing your head? I know it makes my head spin. Now the idea of many worlds probably is seen as a weird idea that isn't generally accepted, but if you dig into the literature, you will find out that many worlds very nicely deal with a bunch of sticky philosophical problems. So much so, that is one of the mainstream models that many physicists accept.

Hawking has used the idea of many worlds to get around the idea that information is destroyed in Black Holes, which is a highly problematic issue in physics. While Susskind and other have come up with other ideas on how to preserve information, my point is that some good minds have accepted the many worlds hypothesis.

Now, why is this important?

While we have bounced around a lot of subjects, the whole of the post so far boils down to the idea that there may be multiple overlapping universes where many different versions of YOU exist. This is a bit odd, but fits inside of one of the models of how to interpret physics.

To some people, they would think that I'm crazy to go down this path. As I started this post, my niece's husband just thought this was crazy.

"I can believe that God would create many versions of us," he stated.

I want to turn this thought on its head. It is not about what is intuitive to us. Quantum mechanics is completely unintuitive. It screams "it makes no sense." Particles are not particles.

Roman 1:20 tells us "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made...."

Really, if the above is true and scripture is the word of God, we need to embrace that the study of the building blocks of nature will give us clarity about his attributes.

So, let us just imagine for a moment that the many worlds interpretation is true. What would this say about our lives?

This would mean that we are living an almost infinite series of lives. We are living lives where circumstances cause us to be the best Christian in the world. We are living lives where circumstances have us do horrible things. There are lives where we are lost at birth. There are lives that we are rich.

This might horrify you. "You mean that there may be worlds that I am not a Christian?" The answer is yes. This would mean that there are worlds where evil men are pious and devoted family men.

The many world interpretation is not scary to me because it means that God would see me and others in all circumstances. He would see how I would have reacted. I believe that over the sum of all these different lives, people's nature will be clearly defined. Are they evil? Then this becomes clear as they are put into all possible circumstances. Are they good? Then the overall series of lives will show them as moving toward God.

The biggest problem with this interpretation is from a scriptural viewpoint. We know that hoses that call on the Lord will be saved. If there are lives where we live that we are not saved and lives where we are saved, then which set of lives determine how we will be saved. If we have an almost infinite set of selves, does this mean that eventually we will have one life where all are merged together? Or do we have multiple sets of heaven?

The problems for this viewpoint are strong and many.

However, I can also see places where this viewpoint could solve a lot of issues. In this viewpoint, all of these lives are somehow tied back together again at the judgement. In this viewpoint, we are completely without excuse. God can objectively point to all of our lives and say "it is clear that given an infinite numbers of circumstances, you consistently chose those paths that were evil." In this viewpoint, God does not "force" any of us down a path. Instead, all paths are explored. In this viewpoint, we have complete freewill.

I've taken you through a lot of thoughts, and if you have never studied the idea of Quantum Physics, I might as well be speaking Dutch. However, before I conclude this post, I want to wrap this back into another aspect of science and the way that we should think about this possibility of the multiple world hypothesis.

Mathematics allow us to explore virtually all of the known universe. I am hoping that you took enough high school math to come across a very simple idea. This is the idea of the formula as written as y =f(x). What does this mean?

It means that given a certain input of x, we can run it through a formula or function f( ), which will transform x into y. There are only two things that matter as inputs and outputs. The input is x. The output is y.

Every formula can be broken down into this idea. For a given input x, we get out another output called y. The interesting thing about this idea is not x and y. This is so common that we always refer to these ideas simply as x and y.

The interesting thing is the f(x) or the function of x. The formula can be as simple as

a. y = x + 1

or a quadratic equation

b. y = x*x + 2x + 1

or to much more difficult equations.

Now, let us stop thinking about this as a simple equation. Let us say we are the equation. I'm saying that our life is the equation.

The output or y is the things that we do: we feed the poor, we accept Christ, we are bad, or we are good. The x is the things that are feed into our life: are we raised as Christians, were we well treated, or did we get killed at a young age.

In many mathematical formulas of similar class, you can get any y out of the formula by changing the x. And this is what we argue with God about.

"Well, God, you can't judge me because I wasn't told about Christ," we might say.

"God, I had a mental problem that kept me from being righteous," is another excuse.

What we are saying is that our function (or us) is lacking because we didn't get the right circumstance in our life. And this is a problem in elementary mathematics because if we just looked at one x and one y, we have no idea of what the equation is. All we have is a single input and a single output.

So, what we learn to do in mathematics is graph out the function. In other words, we put many, many different x's into the equations to get out many, many y's. Once we have done this many, many times, we can step back from the equation to see the shape of the equation. We can see where the equation dips. We can see where it soars. We can get a good idea of the nature of the equation.

It is well understood that graphing out an equation is a prerequisite of understand mathematical formulas. Everybody does this.

If the multiple world hypothesis is correct, then what is happening is nothing other than many different inputs are put into our nature to determine what we are actually made of. In the same sense that man can only see the math formula by graphing out the formula, maybe the only way for us to understand our true nature at judgment is to have all of our lives shown in many different circumstances.

A strange thought? Absolutely. Logical? Disturbingly so.

We'll see at judgement.

The Test Of Elijah

My niece and her husband are thinking of switching to the Greek Orthodox church, and I was asking them why they were going to change. This got into why we believe what we believe. This then got into a conversation on what truth is.

To them, truth is simply Christ Jesus and Christ Jesus is the truth. To me it is not that simple. As I like to say, nowhere inside of the scriptures does it say to blindly believe.

It is fine to discuss this in abstract, but I came up with a scenario which revolved around the Christian college that we went to. Although this college was supposed to be evangelical, the religious department was very liberal. As my niece said, "...that professor said that he was going to demolish any idea that scripture was the inerrant word of God." Now, she is a very strong and evangelistic Christian, so she was unhappy with the approach the college took.

So my question for the day was "what should have been taught in that class?" To the kids, they were thinking that theology should not be taught at all. Theology is something that is done inside of the confines of worship. Worship is the path to God, and inside of worship and the sacraments can we find truth. Jesus is truth, and experiencing him is all we need. One of the major attractions of the Greek Orthodox church is it reinforcement of the sacraments, which have power in they giving of the sacraments to strengthen our faith. Thus their potential conversion to Greek Orthodox was the the idea that this would strength their faith.

This to me smacks of fideism.

If I had the the curriculum at this college, I would bring the best and strongest defenders of the faith and those that were most against the faith. I would allow an open and honest debate. For me, it is only inside the debate of open ideas do the best ideas win out. If Christianity is not the best idea, then it should not win out. However, if Christianity was true, it would win out.

They thought that this was just a bit too risky. In some ways, the argument is very convincing, since I am not exposing my children to all the influences of the world today. (Some day I will, but I believe in a base before testing.) The most convincing argument on this was my niece's husband who stated that two family members had left the faith because of allowing strong examination of their faith. By doing this, they both had left traditional Christianity, which they considered a tragedy.

In my mind, however, the would have left the faith anyways. See, people who leave the faith do it on the basis of wanting to be be free of the judgment. This fact is obvious as the nose on my face. It is so true that it provoke laughter on Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" on the radio. In a recent broadcast, he said because a few too many infidelities had happened, the local church brought in an evangelist. The evangelist pointed out that hell and damnation await those that were bad, thus a little bit of pleasure in the short term would not make up for an eternity of punishment.

"You know," Keillor said, "What makes perfect sense loses perspective when are are getting progressively close to the short term pleasure." However, if there is no Hell, then you can do what ever you want.

However, in my faith, I will go back to the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel. I believe that Christianity can take any comers in an open discussion in the same way that Elijah could take on the 450 prophets of Baal. Let the arguments for non-Christianity happen. Let's discuss the other faiths. Let's discuss atheism. If Christianity doesn't win in the end, then it wasn't a faith worth having. If my God can defend his turf, then he is no God at all.

What happened at Mount Carmel? Very simply the mother of all debates happened.

The debate at the time is whose God is better. The God of Abraham or the God of Baal. So to determine this, a show down was called. Elijah suggested a very simple test. Whoever had the more powerful God would simply ask God to consume a sacrifice that they built.

450 prophets of Baal built their alter, and no god came to take their sacrifice. In the subtext of the conversion of the story to text, we lose how exactly strong the contest was. After nothing happened, Elijah started to jeer them. This isn't a nice prophet. This is a prophet that has nothing but contempt for the competition. Although it was been bowdlerized out of the Bible, I have read that the original Hebrew had Elijah yelling, "Hey guys, yell louder. I think your God is taking a crap and can't hear you."

The net sum of of the story is that when Elijah stood up, he called on the Lord and a fire fell from heaven and took the sacrifice. Elijah then turned to the assembly and said, "Kill those false prophets at the Kishon."

The problem with the Church today is that we've gotten completely weak or completely stupid.

What is being completely weak? Completely weak means that we allow anything to happen. Do others have different faiths? Sure let them have different faiths. As long as they don't threaten me, then I won't threaten them. We'll figure out better ways to program our Children through home schooling. They can program their children. This is the cowards way.

The completely stupid way is to have "Might makes right." These people say that "we'll pass laws against homosexuality. We'll legislate morality. We'll pass laws to keep the bad guys out. We'll burn the witch and kill the heretic." By the sword the religion will live and by the sword the religion will die.

I have the third option. Challenge God to show himself. Argue the faith. Show that the only faith that logically hangs together is Christianity. If we do this, we'll abandon positions that are indefensible (the Earth is flat or the Universe is only a few thousand years old), and we'll be forced to find those positions that that make Christianity unique (The Bible is historically accurate or is the only pre 15th century mythos that can be reconciled with the creation of the universe).

I have done my study. The Bible is unique. The mythos is unique. The faith has unique attributes that bring reasonable certainty to our Faith. Now is the evidence circumstantial?

The answer is yes. The evidence is completely circumstantial for us today. However, every legal system today will remove somebody's life based on circumstantial evidence. If we are willing to removed life because of circumstantial evidence, we need to also take up our own life based on excellent circumstantial evidence.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part VI

So far we have been examining the scale. I think most shocking thing about the scale is understanding that the structure doesn't spread the notes equally across the keyboard. The most important thing about the scale is that it is lumpy regardless if it sounds smooth.

As a review, any major scale is made up of the following: whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. You will often see this abreviated as ws, ws, hs, ws, ws, ws, hs. To review this, a tetrachord is a ws, ws, hs. So a scale is simply two tetrachords separated by a whole step.

The two most popular instruments today is guitar derived instruments and piano derived instruments. There is little doubt that the guitar player is much more close to his instrument. They are lighter, cheaper, the are tuned by the player, and they are more microtonial. On a piano you are always going to get the same short term notes. On the guitar you can bend notes to get a greater degree of note variation.

It is also impossible to hide these note gaps on the guitar. If you go back to my last post, I showed you a keyboard, and I removed a note to show you the parallel structure of the octave. The piano is very deceptive, since it base based on the idea that there was a "perfect" scale. Since that scale had half notes in it, we wanted to hide the half notes. Therefore, all the keys are white, and on the piano the half step note looks just like a full step, in our C scale.

However, trying to hide it really wasn't in the cards for guitar. The guitar is a much more simple instrument. A fret board and a way of tightening strings. On the guitar it is very obvious because you must jump over a fret to get a full step. Now, there is a beauty about the guitar. Since all the steps are equally spaced as half steps, you can't really "hide" a whole or half step. You know exactly where the half steps and the wholes steps are. This gives a the very beginning guitar player a problem if he is being compared with the piano player out the gate playing in C. While the piano player only has seven even spaced keys to press, the guitar player has to remember that he only jumps a half step between the E note and the F note. However, as soon as the piano player gets off the C scale, suddenly he needs to start using all those black notes notes.

C scales has no black note.
G has one black note.
D has two black notes
A has three black notes

You continue this special assortment of black notes all the way through the 12 major scales. So, just to get the major scales down you have to memorize 12 different patterns. If you throw the natural minor scale, harmonic minor, and melodic minor on top of the major, you will have 48 different keys that you will need to memorize.

Let me say that again.

12 starting notes
4 different scales (and the melodic minor actually is two different scales, different on up and down)

= 48 different scales

Each scale is going to have different fingering.

Now, let's look at our friendly guitar. Once you have the fingering down for a C scale on a guitar, you have the fingering figured out for all the other scales also. In the picture on the left from the ScaleFinder Website, they will show you the fingering for any scale that you want. In this case, I took two pictures of a guitar with the scales on it. You can see that the D scale is just two frets above the C scale. So, the entire scale moves right on the fret board. Nothing changes in your fingering, other than the fret board is a bit smaller because you moved closer to the bottom of the guitar.

Unlike the piano, there is no major fingering change. To get all the fingering in a guitar, you need to learn one major scale and three minor scales. Then all you need to do to start another scale is to move to a different starting point.

Therefore, it would seem that the guitar would be the superior instrument. Right? It has a much easier to learn keyboard that you can move to any scale.

However, the guitar has some serious problems. The biggest problem is that it takes two hands to play it. One hand must hold down the right note, and the other one adds the power to the string to make the noise. The piano transfers the energy from pressing a key into a mechanism that hits the string to make a noise. This is a fundamental issue with the guitar. You can only pick two or three notes at any one time, so the music is simply not as dense as a nice piano piece.

Well, almost.

Guitarists have longed for the density capability of the piano. With the advent of amplification, it was found out that you could make a nice sound by simply tapping a string. So rather than having to hold and pluck, the guitarist simply holds down a string, and that striking motion will generate a sound. Now, the sound is very quiet, but with amplification, it can be made loud.

If you youtube "guitar tapping" you will see people doing just this. The interesting thing about guitar tapping is that it takes a guitar and turns it into a keyboard. These guys are simply pushing down on the string like a keyboardist would push down on a key.

The one problem with a guitar is that keyboards are very abstracted from the signal. This is why keyboards are the popular choice for synthesizers. As soon as you get to a synth, pressing a key doesn't trigger a hammer to hit a string. It triggers a piece of software. Often that software may sound like a cello, a square wave, or trumpet. It may even sound like a guitar.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part VI

We've covered a lot of ground, and on many of these subjects, we've hardly have scratched the surface. On just the subject of scales, some people spend the rest of their lives thinking about this. Once you discover that our basis for a scale is made up, you can change your assumptions and create a whole separate music system. So we have the field of micro-tonal music, where some strange people are pulling out new bases for scales, and creating new music. It is my observation of this music is that this music is horrible, since we are already programmed to a musical scale early in life. You can no more hear a new musical scale than you can hear phonemes once your brain has gone past plasticity.

So, what have we found out up to now? What we have found out is that there are 12 candidate notes, and the major cultures selected notes for their scale. We've found out that their are pentatonic scale and heptatonic scales.

In Western music, we picked the heptatonic scale that we call "The Major Scale." Now, most of Western Music is based around fourths and fifths.

If you remembered the previous posts, we found out that the fifth was very popular. It vibrates 150 percent faster than the base note. The fourth is a fifth below the root that has been shifted up one octave. While the fourth and fifth isn't in every culture, it is certainly in ours. Due to something called overtones, these sound pleasent to our ears.

So lets draw out our scale again:

C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C

The gap between C and F is a fourth. The gap between C and G is a fifth. The gap between F and G is called a whole note. When we look at the whole note, it is found almost always between any two notes on a Major Scale. This would be great, but there is one issue with the whole step. There is not an even number of whole steps between the tonic note and the dominate note (between C and G). You need to go three and one half steps to go from the tonic note to the dominant note.

Now, this is a very big deal. Remember that the reason that we have three and a half notes is because there is a whole step between the forth and fifth note on the scale. These three notes are the notes that sounds good.

However our nice scale system falls apart below the subdominant note (F in our case), because we need 2.5 notes to get back to the tonic note. The answer is very simple. We need to take two whole steps and one half step. We've been writing about the major scale and the major scale picked that the step between 3 and 4 would be the half step. If you go back to our post on cutting the string down to find different notes

So, we find out that the major scale goes like this to the fourth

C to D (whole step), then D to E (whole step), then E to F (half step). This is a very important series of notes. This is so important that we've given it a name, the "tetrachord" and western music is built around it. A tetrachord is a chord made up of 2.5 steps to get to a fourth.

We say that the major scale, up to the fifth is as follows: Whole, Whole, Half, Whole, or 3.5 steps.

Once we have gotten to the dominant note (G in our case), we need to climb all the way up to C.

How much higher is the C than the G note? It is a fourth higher. Now, we just found out that the fourth is made up of 2.5 steps and is called a tetrachord. We are going to reuse our tetrachort, and use the exact same interval steps in our last fourth.

G to A (whole step), A to B (whole step), and finally B to C (half step).

The octave, in this system, is built around two tetrachords separated by a whole note.

CDEF is a tetrachord made up of whole, whole, half steps.
GABC is a tetrachort made up of whole, whol, half steps.

There is a space of 1 whole note between these two tetrachords.

Let's look at a piano keyboard. You can see that I've labeled the keys on the keyboard.

You may have remembered, if you look piano lessons at any time, that if you start on C, the scale is just the "white notes." I remember when I was a kid, the other kids saying things like, "Wow, the black notes, I don't even know what those things do."

Once you start to understand the scale, you'll start to understand that each key on the keyboard is spaced exactly the same amount apart (on a decibel scale, that it, which we won't get into now.) Thus any time that you cross a line, you will go up exactly a half step. The interesting this about the scale, as we've just learned, is that the scale for Western Civilization has a couple of tricky things about it. Again, look at the photo. To go from the E note to the F note is just a half note because it only crosses one line. Even if you are extremely musical, most people do not hear just a half note between E and F. What they hear is the next step on the scale. This is an auditory illusion. While it may sound as if each step is equal, in reality, the jump from E to F (or in our other terminology the move from the submediant--the third note--to the subdominant--the fourth note) is just a half of step.

Now we are going to take that exact same picture that we showed above to graphically point out what I've stated before. A scale is just two tetrachords. There is a tetrachord between C and F. Then there is a whole note--which I've removed from the picture. The gap from G back to C is a fourth, and without the note in the way, you can see that it is a mirror image of the bottom of the scale. So, in our music, the octave goes as follows:

Whole Step, Whole Step, Half Step

Whole Step Breather

Repeat the Whole Step, Whole Step, Half Step sequence.

Once you start thinking about this, it becomes very strange. If you were going to logically put together a keyboard, and all the notes were exactly half steps apart, why wouldn't you simply place each key exactly a half step apart? If this keyboard, instead of being a nice white key for F, you would simply make the F a black key and continue to alternative White and Black keys.

This exact keyboard and others have been made. These are called the bilinear keyboard, and a bit more strange, but heralded when introduced, the Janko keyboard, looked at this.

In both cases, the keyboard failed because of resistance by the public. We'll look at this in a future post.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part V

In the last post, we continued to take a look at ways that we found the scale. The most important thing that we learned is that the two biggest cultures in the world, the Chinese and the West, figured out that there was a "candidate list" of tones. From these many tones, the various cultures picked their scales. We found out that the Chinese were ahead of the west in discovering that if you continued to divide the string, by a third, 53 times, you would finally come up with a division that brought you back very, very close to the original note. This was called "Mercator Comma" in the west. (A comma is just the remainder from not quite matching up.)

We could address the fact of the comma now, but we are going to leave this on the back burner for just a little bit. What we are going to look at now is this whole idea of "picking" notes out of a candidate list. As we found out, for reasons that we'll explore later, both the Chinese and the West have the 12 different tones to pick from, but the Chinese went pentatonic (5 notes) and the west went heptatonic (7 notes). However, when I say "picked," it really doesn't describe what happened.

From everything that we can see, every modern culture has music. As the music theory was being formed it fell into the culture in which is was being made. This is a great mystery to me. If you think about it, what gives us boundaries are the instruments that we make. If you want to know what a C sounds like, you will go over to your piano and play a C. Your instrument then becomes the basis for all of our music. At least this is what happens for most people.

As I talked about a bit in my last post, there are a few very remarkable people that have what is called perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is the ability to simply remember what a C sounds like. In science this ability is know better as absolute pitch.

Let's examine this a bit more, only we are going to use the analogy of colors.

If I showed you red, you will remember that it is red. If I come back the next day and show you a red card, you will go "that's red." Music is not like that. The key for music is that most people need somebody to play a note and then the note becomes the reference for the rest of our music.

The equivalent in colors would be like the following:

Maybe you took a bit of color lessons when you were young. A woman would come to your house and she would take you to the family color player. A color player is an instrument that throws light on a wall and has keys like on a piano. There are 12 different colors that are used over and over. After you use the 12 colors, it has another set of keys that are higher on the keyboard. However, the higher colors are the same as the lower colors, only a bit brighter. So you have 12 colors repeating on the keyboard.

She taught you how to push the keys so that certain series of colors would flow across the wall. The flow of lights are very pleasing to the eye, and words are said with the flow of light to make it even more memorable. Good words with good light is very nice and pleasing to most people. As you age, you really don't have time for doing the colors yourself. Therefore, you log onto the iColor store and download series of pleasing color sequences from color groups. Each color sequence costs just .99 per download.

Now, your walking with a new friend of yours, and you see a tree. He says, "What color is this?"

"I don't know," you answer.

"It's definitely green," he answers.

You have no idea of how he knows that it is green. So you grab a leaf, and take it back to your house. You go to your color player, and press what you know is the green key. Once you have the green on the wall, you hold it up to the color on the wall, and sure enough, the colors match.

"How did you know it was green?" you ask.

"I been able to do this since I've been small," he answers.

Perfect pitch is just like this. You can be phenomenally talented in music and not have perfect pitch (or absolute pitch. However, I have read a few description of people with perfect pitch and they describe that they can hear the notes of raindrops falling. The note of a church bell ringing. Every sound that comes out, the gurgling of the fish tank, or the squeal of a blender, all of these sounds will have a fundamental note. If you have perfect pitch, then you are going to quickly understand which note that it is.

If you do not have perfect pitch, then it is only through training do you start to figure out that it is all based off of blending the colors together from a certain base color. The base color is our tonic note (or color). But here is the rub, I would suggest that having perfect pitch may be very helpful for an individual to compose in a culture, but it doesn't allow the culture to expand its musical horizons. Perfect picture can create a fence, and not having a fence around your pitch will allow more diversity.

Let's go back to the time of the Chinese and their 12 Lu scale, and remember that the Chinese population has a much higher percentage of people with perfect pitch. This means that once the scale has been decided (through whatever culture factors created it), there are more people inside of the culture that can hear somebody that diverges from it. They quickly say, "Hey, that's out of tune." Now, combine that ability to see "outside the lines" with a culture that is much more respectful of tradition and being "inside the lines," and you will get a culture that locks in to a tradition and has a tough time changing.

It would be a little like having a GPS in your car, and a great respect for efficiency and traffic patterns. You would always drive to your destination in the exact same way. If you started to get off course, your GPS (or absolute pitch) would quickly remind you that "you are off course, please turn around."

In the Western Culture, we have no GPS in our car. We have a general sense of where we want to go, but if things are off a bit, we really don't notice that quickly. As a matter of fact, we find out that we find things on our journey. We have discovered new stopping off points and restaurants. How many times have you discovered new stuff because you were lost?

In Western music, we have gotten lost a lot. And because of this, we have polyphony. We have transposition. We have all types of minor scales: natural minor, melodic minor, and harmonic minor.

I believe that in Western Culture, the inability of our ears to hear perfect notes allowed more creativity in picking different scales and different harmonies. In Chinese culture, with a much higher percentage of people having perfect pitch, you had a more rigorous establishment of the defined scales. They were less free, in some sense, to evolve their music.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part IV

We have really been focusing on theory and not on practical issues. However, before we leave the system of scales, we are going just a little bit farther and today we want to discuss the two great civilizations that drove what we call technology: The West and China.

Before we get there, let's do just a little bit of review of where we have been already.

We found out that our scale has seven notes. In the course of this series of posts, I have called out these notes as several different names. For the most part, I have called them

Do or C
Re or D
Me or E
Fa or F
So or G
La or A
Ti or B

This is the basis of all Western music. These series of notes make up the diatonic scale, or the Ionian scale. The key to the diatonic scale is the tonic note. This is call Do or C in our example. If C is called the tonic, the perfect fifth note, which is Sol or G in our example, is call the dominant note, since this is an extremely attractive note in most music. We often build to this note. If we almost get to this note, we call this the subdominant note.

So we can take our scale and find a couple of key intervals.

Do (or C) is the tonic note
Fa (or F) is the subdominant note
So (of G) is the dominant note

Now, there is a secret about the subdominant note. That secret is that it is very much like the dominant note only in reverse. If we layout the scale, we'll see that the dominant note is 5 steps above the C. However, we know that on most all instruments, we can find any note and go below this note. The subdominant note is exactly one fifth below C.

See here:

F G A B C D E F G

What I have done is layout a series of notes. You can see that if we started playing at F on our scale, we would need to go up five steps to get to C. Once we're at C, we need to go up 5 notes to get to G. So in any scale, the note that is five below the dominant note is called the subdominant note. However, since we can always double the frequency of the note, and make it go up an octave, the subdominant note is in two places. One place is a perfect fifth below the current note. The other place is a perfect fourth above the current note. You will also note, pun intended, the dominant note is both a perfect fourth below the fifth and a perfect fifth above.

So the fourth is a fifth, and the fifth is a fourth. Sounds confusing? Well is it is a bit. When we find out about overtones, we'll see that these types of relationships are extremely important. Music basically goes around and around in a circle.

However, we don't want this post just to focus on review, we wanted to talk a bit more about the derivation of scales.

We understand that seven notes is the derived scale that we use in Western Music. Let's review what we learned here.

The first tuning of 7 notes was probably done with Just Tuning.

Just tuning was when some musician somewhere took a string and started to cut it down. We found out that cutting it in half gave you an octave. An octave, for lack of a better word, is boring. If you cut the string by a third, you got a perfect fifth. If you cut the string by a fourth, you got a perfect fourth. If you cut the string by a fifth, you'll get a third (almost). We have just found the tonic, dominant and subdominant notes of the scale, and we've thrown in a third for good measure. For a variety of reason, cutting things into 3s, 4s and 5s is obvious. After you do this, you also find out that the sounds just "sound" like they are working with each other. (Up coming lesson on overtones to address this fact.)

So finding Do, Me, Fa, So on any stringed instrument seems pretty obvious. However, we have just found 4 notes. There are 3 missing in action.

I have been calling our 7 note scale as the Ionian or diatonic scale. The diantonic scale is just a special case of having 7 notes. Many cultures will pick different numbers of notes in there scale. However, we have a special name for all scales that have 7 notes. All of these scales are call Heptatonic scales.

There are a few more cases of these types of scales.

Heptatonic means 7 notes
Hexatonic means 6 notes (you might recongize this as the blues scale)
Pentatonic means 5 notes (this is the basis of a lot historical Chinese music)

Let's write a bit about the pentatonic scale. This is the scale of a billion Chinese. We were fortunate enough in the West to have a more complex musical system than many different cultures. While I am calling our scale "heptatonic" in reality is is chromatic. (We'll get to this later.) Our current musical instruments can replicate closely many different musical systems.

On the Pentatonic scales, they come in two types:

1. Anhemitonic
2. Hemitonic

Sound like big words? Yes, but they have simple meanings. An anhemitonic scale simply means that you can pick 5 notes off of our diatonic scale, and play this music just find. If you were playing Chinese music on a piano, you would only use C, D, E, G, and A.

So, this seems to also answers Matt's question about some cultures without fifths in their music. All we are missing the F out of this scale. Therefore, Chinese music doesn't have a fifth, right?

Well there are two answers for this. The first answer goes back to our discussion on dominant and subdominant. Do you remember that the subdominant note is just a fifth, only it is a fifth below C? Well in music, anytime that you have a fourth, you also really have a fifth. So, one could argue this either way. You can say that Chinese music has no fifth, or you could simply say that the fifth is the one below the tonic cord. This is why I referred to Indonesian music. Their scale really lands on the cracks.

One thing that you will see about all these scales, they are bits and pieces of the western scale. For the most part we can play the Western music on these scales. You may ask why.

The reason is that the Chinese also did the trick of subdividing the string muliple times until it wrapped around. Once they got all the possible notes, they then selected just five notes, from all the possible notes, to play their music. The ancient writings of China describes creating 12 bamboo pipes, or 12 lü.

So, we have both the West and the East run into the same problem. We want to find a few notes, and a few other notes come along for the ride. What both cultures eventually ended up doing was to say, "Well there are really 12 notes that are candidates for selection. However, we don't want all of those candidates. We'll pick some from this selection. These 12 notes are called the chromatic scale, and if you go to a piano, you will find there are 12 notes between any two octave notes.

But here is the rub to plague music students for all times. The problem with having all these notes is that you actually don't end up using all of them when you are playing a piece of music. We'll have to talk about this a bit more later, but this is an important thought.

What is important is that both the Chinese and the West said "there are 12 candidates to pick from in any musical scale." They pick their playing scale from the same type of chromatic scale that we did. I find this one of the most fascinating ideas in the world. If would appear that two separate cultures, once they had explored music and figured out overtones, would both come up with a candidate list for scales. The problem is that the two different cultures picked two different list of possible candidates.

At first though, you may think the Chinese didn't have a good understanding of what they were doing. However, they seemed to be far ahead of the West.

Do you remember that we talked about Pythagoras comma? This is the bit left over when you subdivid the string to find different notes. After 12 times, the next division gets you very, very close to your original note. For the West, we said "we'll good enough, who cares about a little left over." We then went on to build a bunch of music around these 12 notes. But not the Chinese. They were curious about the left over bit.

Ching Fang, around 50 years before the birth of Christ, said that he wondered if he kept subdividing the string if he couldn't get much closer to the original C. He went on to calculate that if you divided the string 53 times, you could get exceptionally close. Since he was Chinese, we never recognized his contribution. We recognize Nicholoas Mercator's reinvention of this technique 1600 years later. We now call this Mercator's comma.

What drives a culture to different musical scales? This is unclear. However, I do believe that it is tied back into the language. The Chinese language, mandarin, is tone based language. If you are ever listening to mandarin being spoken, you will quickly be familiar that there is almost a "sing song" quality to it. Unlike western language, if you say the exact same word with a rising tone or a falling tone, it changes the meaning of the word. The joke is that the word for donkey and Mom is the same. Western's forget to say the right pitch, and they'll say that they miss their donkey. (Instead of Mom.)

Because of this, speaker of Mandarin really have much better training of scales, or a concept of perfect (or absolute) pitch. If you had to sing everything, you have a bit of an idea of what this would do to your singing skills. It would be very great.

Therefore, the Chinese-Mandarin speaker have a phenomenally high percentage of people with perfect pitch when compared to Western Cultures, as reported by Diana Deutsche, who studies these types of things.

Confusingly, this ability to deal with pitch created a less diverse scale. We'll discuss this in our next post.

In both Western and Chinese music, we recognized that there were many notes. In both great civilizations, a subset of 12 notes were taken to come up with our scales. The difference is that the West picked 7 notes, and the Chinese picked 5.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part III

We are going to return to our friend Pythagoras, and therefore I thought that I would start off this post with a nice photo of his bust.

You probably know him for a² + b² = c² , but we learned in the last post, he is also credited with the unique way of subdividing a string to give us an musical scale, or what is called Pythagorean Tuning.

However, if we are to trust the archaeologists, we will find out that although he was credited with the scale, there were many before him that had actually developed it. While this may be strictly true, we will use the common vernacular to allow Pythagorean Tuning to be a particular type of tuning.

In the last post, I spent a lot of time talking about how your could grab a guitar, and recreate some experiments to figure out how to find notes that are pretty close to our notes. However, once you get into the math of music, you will find out that saying things like "divide the string down by 1/3" is fine for the first step. In the second step, we want to understand what it means from a mathematical standpoint what the dividing of the string does.

So imagine that you have a string and it is going up and down 100 times per second. This note would be below middle C on the piano, since you should be able to remember middle C is 261.626 beats per second (or hertz). Now, if you cut this string in half at the same tension, you will get a string that vibrates at 200 hertz, or twice as fast. As we stated, twice as fast means an octave higher. From a mathematical standpoint, we look at these two notes as a series of ratios. The lower note is at 100 and the top note is at 200. Thus the ratio of the vibrations are at 2:1, or you get 2 vibrations on the top note for every vibration on the bottom note. Since the bottom note is the base (or fundamental or tonic note), we write this as 2:1 or as 2/1. If you Google scales, you will see this in many descriptions.

What happens if we cut down the string by 1/3? I never took you through the math of why a string vibrates twice as fast when it was cut in half, as this probably was obvious. What happens when we cut a string by a different amount? Well it obviously won't vibrate twice as fast, so you will intuitively grasp that the range of the vibration is between 1 and 2. What we will find out, with all the right instrumentation, is that the vibration of the string is proportional with the length of the string. If you want to make the string vibrate twice as fast, cut it in half. If you want to make the string vibrate three times as fast, cut it by three, and let only a third vibrate.

As long as we are here in our post, we are going to take a bit of a side division. We've been talking a lot about "dividing down" a string. However, let's talk about this a bit more. There are three ways to influence how fast a string vibrates.

1. It's length
2. It's tension
3. It's width

Given two strings of equal length and tension, the heavier one will sound lower. If you look at a piano or a guitar or other stringed instruments, you'll see that they really use both length and width to change the note. Why do they do this?

The problem with thick strings are that they don't sound very good at short lengths. The problem with thin strings is that they would have to be very, very long to sound good at low notes. The best sounding instruments are those that can vary all three factors to get the best sound. Some instruments like guitars can only vary two factors. Therefore, guitars will never have the same range as a piano.

In the next video, I'll try and demonstrate this on the guitar. In the video, I am playing a G note two ways. I am plucking the G string (3rd string from the bottom) and I am also plucking the E string only made very, very short by holding down the string. They both are the same note. However, the short G string is a bit dull. The nice long G string is quite a bit fuller. (And yes, I did think that the term G-string was funny in this post.) However, when you play the two strings together, you really can't hear the difference.



The last thing I'll leave you with is that the reason that the the short and thick string sounds less interesting than the long string is because of something called "overtones." I don't want you to know about overtones yet. All I want you to remember is that overtones are good stuff and make music sound more interesting.

Now, let's get this post back on track. Instead of talking about cutting down a string for a higher note, we were talking about how we derived our scale from Pythagoras.

What we have done is cut the string by 1/3, which leaves 2/3 of the string left. The math is pretty simple, to find out how much faster the string vibrates, you invert the fraction of the length of the string to make it 3/2, and you get 1.5. So the cut down string vibrates exactly 150% faster than the tonic or base note. However, we normally leave the number in the ratio of 3/2. Trim off 1/3 of the string, and you get a string that vibrates 3/2 faster.

If you remember that the the fourth note came from trimming off 1/4 of the string, you'll realize that you have 3/4 of the string left. As in the example above, the speed of the string is 4/3 or 1.333.... times faster. Now this series of threes never stops, so it is really necessary to keep the fraction of 4/3.

The above is a pretty important point, because from now on in this series of posts, we'll be explaining notes in terms of how much faster it vibrates than the tonic (or root or fundamental) note. However, you can remember that just because we are describing it this way, it still goes back to how you cut the string. So, we are talking about math, but it is all about the length of the string.

So, now we want to go back to our friendly Pythagorean tuning. If you remember from the last post, I said that they trimmed the string down by 1/3 and got another note. This note was exactly a musical fifth above the starting note. In this case, lets pretend he started at Do (or we can call it C). He went up a 5th, which is just another way of saying that he shortened the string by a third. Just a couple of paragraphs ago, we found out that this will vibrate 3/2 faster than the base note. This note is now So (or we can give it the name G).

The next step would be to go up another fifth, and we'd find Re (or D). The problem is that this is out of our current octave. We vibrated 3/2 faster, then another 3/2 faster. This means that we are now vibrating 9/4 faster than our base note, or 2.25 times faster. Remember that an octave is just 2 times faster. So, how do we get it back into the octave?

This is very simple from a mathematical perspective. You take the note, and drop it by an octave. So what we need to do is cut the vibration in half. You can easily do this by dividing the number by 2. 9/4 divided by 2 is 9/8 (to divide, you multiple 9/4 times 1/2). Thus D, in the octave, is 9/8 times faster than the base note. By doing this, we have gotten our note back into the octave.

If you continue to do this procedure, you will come up with all the notes of the scale: Do, Ra, Me, So, La, Ti. This almost gives you your scale.

The one problem is Fa. In our division, we get all the notes except for Fa. The last note we will find is Ti. However, dividing the string again gives you a funny sounding note, which we'll address in a second. So rather than dealing with a bunch of funny sounding notes, we simply make the string 1/3 longer. This makes the string vibrate 1/3 slower, or the vibration speed is 2/3 of the tonic note. By doing this, we find a note below our starting note. Now, to bring it up an octave, we multiply by 2 and we get a note 4/3 faster than our tonic (or C in our case) note.

This then became the basis of western music. All is solved.

Or is it?

Remember to get this scale, we have been going up a fifth, then bringing the note back down to the original music octave. As I stated above, an odd thing happens when you get to Ti. A fifth above Ti leads you to another note. A note that doesn't fit into the scale. We'll talk about the impact of this note later, but for now, we'll just go ahead and plot where this lands.

The note, a fifth above Ti, is a little higher than Fa. It is like a Fa+ note. We would call it today as F# (in our special case). We've been calling things the solfege names. However, solfege couldn't handle this note at first. Here is a new note cropping out of nowhere. Later in life, we did give it a name. If the close to note was Fa, then the slightly higher note was Fi. (A note a little higher than Do is Di, and similar So has Si. Pretty creative, huh?)

If you keep this up, going up fifth, then bringing it back down, you will eventually get to Fa (or F in our case). The next fifth up from Fa is Do (or C). So, we can also find Do this way.

By the way, by doing the 12 division method you will eventually land very close to Do. How many times do you need to do this routine of going up a fifth, then bring it back down before you get back to Do (or C in our case)?

The answer shouldn't surprise you. The answer is the number of keys that we have on on our scale. You need to do it 13 times. In what almost sounds magical, we have simply divided the string by 1/3 until we have gotten back our original note.

Well, almost gotten back our original note.

Remember I said that after doing this 13 times you are very close? Well you are left 23 cents away from perfect. This left over bit is called the Pythagorean comma. In other words, left overs are called commas. There are alternative tunings, and they also made have commas, so you best remember the word.

Now, what is a cent? We'll need to get to this later on, but simply think that the distance between any two notes is like a dollar. How many cents (think century) in a dollar? Obviously 100 of them. Therefore, there are 100 cents in between each note on a piano. 25 cents is enough to be noticed. Normally, a few cents are not. So what is the easiest way to close the circle? Well you could have 1 note that is 25 cents apart on your keyboard. However, the better way is to simply have the 25 cents scattered in all the notes that you just found.

This "mixing in" of a little remainder is called "tempered scale" and was to revolutionize music. However, we have not explored enough of the Pythagorean scale yet.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part II

As discussed earlier, the roots for Western music derives from the Greeks and specifically the Lyre, which was a four string instrument in its simplest form. However, I doubt if you have a lyre in your house, but if you do have a guitar, I suggest you grab it now.

Guitars are about as close as you can get to a Lyre. If you look at a guitar it will have 6 strings, but for today we are only going to use one of them. The biggest string is called the E string. If you look at the guitar held by the young girl at the right, it is the string to the far left on the fret board. The surface of the guitar neck (or fretboard) has a series of frets or bars on it. These frets make it very easy to nicely subdivided the string. By holding your finger behind a fret, the string is clamped at that point and the vibrating string can be cut to various lengths. If you look at the fret board, you can she it has two dots on it. These dots are special.

If I pick up my guitar, I can measure how long the string is, for the section that vibrates. On my guitar it is 65.4mm long. If you remember in the last section, we said that an octave is when you played a note then played another note that vibrated twice as fast as the first note. So how do you make a note vibrate twice as fast? Well you can do two thing, you can take a string and stretch it harder, but this is difficult to do quickly and accurately. The easier thing is to cut the length of the string in half.

This is what we'll do with our guitar. So we measure out half of the string, and we find it is 32.7mm. Guess where this position is on our fret board? It is at the two dots.

The guitar makers clearly mark the octave point so you can quickly find it when you are learning to play. You want to raise the note by one octave? Just hold down the string at the two dots.

Let go back to the ancient Greeks and Pythagoras, who is credited with popularizing the first scale. Pythagoras found the string just the same same that we did and thought about dividing it to get different notes. However, instead of dividing it by two, which sounded very boring, since this was just an octave, he asked himself what were important numbers.

Pythagoras had actually created a cult of numbers. It might seem strange today, but his followers thought integer numbers as magic. (Another post in the future could be given over to this.) In many senses, we should not be surprised at this because Christianity does the exact thing. Number 7 has a very important meaning. Number 3 has a very important meaning. These number reappear on the Bible on a very consistent basis, and they mean something in and of themselves. Pythagoras and his followers simply made the numbers idols.

Pythagoras thought certain numbers had power. The powerful numbers? These were the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. So, let's go back to our guitar string. We can lop off 1/2 of the guitar string to get our octave. That is very straight forward. If you listen to the string cut in half, the sound is "boring." As we stated before, half a string is just an octave, and an octave brings nothing new to the table.

So, let's do something more interesting. Since 1 over 3 is a magic fraction, let's cut the length of the vibrating string by 1/3, thus leaving two thirds to vibrate, and we'll have a new note.

If you take that guitar that we had and times the length by 2/3 you will get a length of 43.6mm. If you measure out 43.6 on most guitars, you will find that you will land on another dot, which may be marked on the side of the guitar. If you play this note at this fret you will find out that it is what we call in music "a fifth." In other words, when you cut down the string by one third, you get a note that makes up a fifth with the original note.

Let's go back to our other post. Do you remember that I said that the original scale was Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti and Do?

In our case, the open string note is "Do." We have just found out that Pythagoras thought that the "magic fraction" gave us So. To our ear this is a very pleasing sound. It just sounds like the two notes should "go" together. There is a reason for why these notes go together, which are called overtones, which we'll look at later.

These notes so much so blend together, we say in music theory that if the open string (or base of our Ionian or better termed "diatonic" scale) is the tonic note (think of the tonic note as the base note) and the dominant note is So. The dominant name can be a little confusing. However, it is used so much, it would be good to really try and remember this. The base note is call the tonic. The fifth note (or the magic cutting of the string down by one third) is the dominant note. Now, remember that dividing the string length by 1/3 gives us a fifth! This is a little less confusing than it sounds because once you know how to divide the length of the string down by a third, you never think of it that way.

Whew, got it? Then let's go to the next step.

We've cut our string down by the magic third. What would be another good fraction? How about one over four. So, we divide our string by three quarters, and this will come to be 49 cm on our guitar. You will find another dot here. This is a fourth on our musical scale. In our scale, we have found Fa. In our music in the west, we find that this interval is very attractive from an auditory sense. Many songs are drawn toward this note. Not as much as the fifth, however. So what will name this special note in our diatonic scale? It isn't quite dominant, so we'll call it Subdominant. Now, things may get a little confusing. This dividing stuff: it seems to give you a specific note; it seems to give you a ratio. I'm even bringing up names like dominant and subdominant. Once you get into music, you'll find that there is always multiple ways of calling the same thing a different name. My only advice is to get used to it.

Now, we have a bunch of other notes to do. The question is do these fall in line with all the other notes that we created. We've show that it is very easy to find the fourth and fifth, but what about the other notes.

This is where things get quite a bit more sticky. If you grab your guitar and do what I did, it would seem very obvious. You've divided the string down by 1/3, 1/4, so the next division should be 1/5. Once we get into the heart of this, we'll find out that the right interval is 17 over 81. This is very, very close to 1/5 (just .09 away).

Why is it 17/81? We'll go into the finer details later, but the conventional wisdom is Pythagoras created the scale by taking a string and dividing it down by one third. (Remember, we found the dominate note "So" this way.) Then they think that he took this string and divided it down by one third again. Thus the string length was 2/3 times 2/3 or 4/9ths. He kept dividing this string down by 1/3 until he got back to an octave, and if you counted all the times you would need to divide the string to get an octave, you would find it took you 8 times. So you have another note, but this note is very, very high. So high, that it doesn't fit in the scale. So, he decided to lower the note by octaves. This is very simple. He simple divided the vibrations by 4 to slow it down and get it closer to the original note.

Now, this is the theory. However, if you go back to the art from Greece, you will find many pictures of lyres. It is obvious to me that they didn't have any real ability to divide a long string the way that it is supposed to have been accomplished. The Greeks may have eventually gotten to a place were they carefully derived the scale from continuously dividing a string by one third, but my guess is that they found Do, Me, Fa, and So by simply dividing by a fifth, a fourth and a third.

This is obvious to more than just me, because I'm "just" explaining it. This type of fraction based tuning is called "Just Intonation." Just intonation is built off of the idea that all notes are based on common fractions. So we have most of the divisions, but we are missing Ra, La, and Ti. The only fraction that is a bit "odd" is the Ti fraction.






It was only later that somebody came back and built up the continuous dividing of the string by one third. The idea of "Just Intonation" was very popular, and many people played in this scale for many hundreds of years. The problem is that it sounds "wrong" if you modulate out of this scale into another key.

So what was it? Are the classic roots of our music just intonation or Pythagorean tuning? Clearly, from the literature, there were people that understood and played in both.

The root of the problem is that we really don't have the right evidence. There are no MP3 from ancient times, and most instruments don't have enough left on them to determine the pitch. If you are looking at the fossilized lyre from Greece, you will have no idea of the string tension. At the same time, many popular instruments were reed based. Virtually impossible to understand how these were tuned.

We are very fortunately, however, to have a pretty good idea of how these were played. You can see this in the picture that I clipped from the web. In this case, a lyre is being held. The man is hold a plectrum (like a guitar pick), and he uses his other hand to quiet certain notes.

As a side note to this, probably the best way of surmising the tuning would be to get a nice wind instrument that we dig up out of the ground, if it were perfectly preserved. Since there is no stringing, you would guess that it would be much easier to figure out the tuning.

We are fortunate enough to find out that such instruments exist in the Jiahu bone flutes. If you look at the pictures below, you will see the actual flutes that I'm talking about.

In an architecture dig in the China region of Jiahu, a bunch of flutes were found from 9000 years ago. They were in remarkably good shape, and extensive analyzing of the flutes was done. My take away from the research is that you can make an argument that some of these these flute could do a very workable Pentatonic scale (we'll cover this later, but this is the classic Chinese sounding scale that can be tied into the Western Scale), and others of the flutes simply were not able to pass for the normal pentatonic scale. The issue is that we'll never know because we weren't there

Now, Matt, in his comments to my last post, said that he heard that all music world wide has in common octaves, fifths, and fourths. He asked me if I believed this was true. On the face of it, the answer is obviously no. I mentioned the slendro scale, which is used in Indonesian music. If you youtube slendro, you can eventually find some singing in this style. It simply sounds off key. However, there is an argument as to why the western diatonic (Ionian) scale will win out from a sheer aesthetic reason. However, this is quite a few posts away. I think we've crammed enough information into our brains for this post.

"Mind" -> The Scale Of Music Part I

Music and religion make up large parts of my life. Recently, Matt Petersen, friend of the family, made some comments about the trinity and music. He suggested that the trinity could resonant like a perfect chord. Interestingly, Matt is not the first person to think about this, and the fundamentals of music and the Godhead have been related for many years in the Christian faith.

The only problem is that what you might assume is true is not. And what isn't true needs some explanation. Hang onto your hat, we're going on a musical journey.

The fundamental step of music theory is really understanding the scale. I have remarked about this before, but I have never spent a lot of time on this in the blog.

So, what is a scale? A scale is simply a series of notes. Therefore, we must ask, "what is a note?"

A note is nothing more than a sound wave that is periodic. For our examples, we'll take about sound waves that are made by a string. If a string goes up and down that is termed "one cycle." As the string moves up and down, it creates little ridges of pressure that we hear as a sound wave to our ear.

The number of cycles in a second is call Hertz, like in the rental car. 60 Hertz is how fast the electricity in your wall swing from positive to negative. However, we are not concerned about electricity. We want the musical scales.

So, let look at our vibrating string. There are a bunch of instruments with strings, but for me, the easiest thing to describe is the piano, since this is a very straightforward instrument. If you go to a piano player, he or she should quickly point out the "C" note that is in the middle of the instrument. This is called "Middle C" because it is musically in the middle of the treble and bass clefs in musical notation. It is in the middle of the piano keyboard.

Now, when you hit a note, the string will vibrate. The vibration of the common middle C in most tunings is 261626 (2,6,1,6,2,6). Now, I've left out a decimal point to make the point that the number is very interesting. With the decimal point, we get 261.626 cycles per second or 261.626 Hertz. If you go and make the vibrations twice as fast you will get 523.251 Hertz. However, this is a bit difficult to remember, and since musicians want to play music and not memorize numbers, many instruments are tuned against concert A, which is the "A note" above middle C. This has a very nice 440 cycles per second, and no decimal points.

However, let's go back to middle C. If you can get a string vibrating at a nice interval of this vibration, it will "sound in tune." The easiest ratio to get is another vibration running either twice as fast or twice as slow. If it is twice as fast, it is an "octave" above the note. If it twice as slow, it is an octave below the note. So, if you hear a note, you can quickly find the octave above or below simply by knowing that it vibrates twice as fast or twice as slow. And it doesn't stop there, if it vibrates three times as fast, it is two octaves above the middle C.

In Western Modern Music, we simply say that this note that is exactly twice as fast is call "C" just like the note that was originally played. It is the same note, only played 1, 2, 3 or 4 times slower or faster. From a mathematical prospect, this makes a lot of sense. Music and math are very related, and a good mathematician often make good students of music theory.

You don't need to know what an octave sounds like. I am simply trying to get you understand that any note (which is just a vibration at a given frequency) can go a even integer faster or slower, and this new vibration is an octave. (For purposes of this post, "note" "tone" and "pitch" will be used to mean the same thing, although strictly they may not be.)

The octave is a new development in music theory. We use it extensively today to explain the whys and hows of music. However, the fathers of music is not the modern world but the Greeks. Things get a little confusing here, if we go far enough back in time, because the Greeks made all of their music around the "tetrachord."

What was the tetrachord? The musical instrument of choice was the lyre, and it had 4 strings. The top and bottom strings were four (tetra) notes apart. So a perfect fourth divided by two middle notes is a tetrachord. However, it quickly apparent to Western Music that the octave was to be the hero of our music. (Even the Greeks knew about the Octave, but it was simply considered the interval between two tetrachords and a spacer note.)

In the middle ages, the "perfect" scale was considered the Ionian scale, which is often called the major scale. There were 7 notes in this scale, and these notes were named by the monks.

These notes are very familiar to those that have seen "The Sound Of Music."

They are

1 Do
2 Re
3 Me
4 Fa
5 So
6 La
7 Ti

Which will bring us finally back to "Do." As we describe previously, C that is twice as fast as the original C is still called C. Therefore, if you have a Do twice as fast as the original Do, it is still called Do.

It is commonly recognized that Guido of Arezzo invented the modern musical notation around 1000 AD, and he was the father of the these notes as called out as Do, Re, Me. (Commonly thought to be derived from a Latin Hymn.) Before our good friend Guido, it really wasn't possible to know how exactly any song went. However, Arezzo invent the familar musical notes and staves that we use today (or pretty close to it).

The beauty behind a good musical notation is that music that was written 300 years ago and then just discovered can be played exactly as if the author demonstrated it. Although we might not personally know Mozart, by having his written music, we can hear exactly what he wrote. Arezzo was a genious.

So, we have a little background and history of the scale and the Ionian or Major scale of Western Music. Yet, we have hardly scratched the surface.

But this will need to wait for a later post.

"Spirit" -> The Homosexual Agenda

Can we, as Christians, legislate morality?

Recently, my home state's court declared that homosexuals could be recognized in marriage. If you believe that the Bible is the Word of God, inerrant and read at face value, you believe that homosexuality is not right. Most Evangelical Christians fight what they call the homosexual agenda. They believe that by allowing things like homosexual marriage we are allowing sin in our midst and possibly even judgment on ourselves. What we can't do, in their minds, is allow marriage to happen.

In contrast to this viewpoint, I am not for homosexual marriage but I will not fight it. I think that reflection and prayer will lead you to the same conclusion.

Most people don't have any idea of the Biblical message of how to fight homosexuality. If you are a fundamentalist believer in Christ going to a good Bible believing Church, you are probably oppose the homosexual agenda. Therefore, when you read this, you might think me as quite mad or not a real Christian.

"What do you mean?" you'll say. "I fight the homosexual agenda because the Bible said that we should oppose it."

What you are thinking about is the Levitical code that proscribes homosexual relationships. Yet, the Law is dead. We no longer live under the Law. As a matter of fact, not only are we not under the Levitical code, we should never suggest that the code was to be lived outside of the tribes of Israel. (About the best you can do is suggest that Acts 21:25 hits up a narrow list of things from the law that Gentile Christians believers must hold. Even here, of these lists of items for Gentile Christians, "eating meeting sacrificed to idols" is later overturned in Paul's writings. No where is it suggested that Christians should be trying to foist our beliefs on others.)

Punishment by death for a homosexual act was created for a very particular time. This is when Israel was under a Theocracy and "the Law" was in effect. Now, I am not saying that the Law is bad. I am a big advocate that many things in the Old Testament are models and foretastes for the Church. I have written on some of this before, and hopefully I will more in the future. The net is that many things in the Old Testament are made for Christians, and they are not made for "the World."

Yet, we want to place the burden of the Old Testament on the World. Even worse, we Christians seem to pick and chose the ones we want to enforce. There seems to be no clear method for applying the rules. Thus, the world makes fun of the Christian Church when we decry homosexuality over our Sunday dinner ham. They say that the same law that says no homosexual relationships also says no pork.

"Well what about Paul?" you ask. "Didn't he forbid it?" The answer is yes, but if you look at it, he never said to try and get the World to forbid it.

Let's look at I Cor 6:9

Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

If you read his words, he is calling out that their are many sins that are clear signs that will be an evidence against your salvation. He says that homosexuality is in line with being drunk. I know many that would easily live with individuals that get hammered on the weekends would decry somebody that was gay. Yet, to Paul, they both will not be in the Kingdom of Heaven.

If the Church would try and stop the "alcohol agenda" with the same passion as the homosexual agenda I would call them misguided but consistent. However, they are not consistent. They are not because they do not understand the scriptures or the words that spoken therein. Let me repeat, the Old Testament is a model for the Church. It is not a model for the world.

What was physical death in the Old Testament is now understood to be Spiritual death in the New Testament. What was the tribe of Israel is the Church in the new Testament. Once you understand this, the scripture opens up very dramatically and what was foggy becomes clear.

See Paul never once in all the letters he wrote said that "we needed to stop the homosexual agenda." Paul was not one to mince words. There was plenty of homosexual behavior in his day. Paul calls out that it is not right, but he spend little time on it other than a few verses. Our Lord doesn't even address it at all.

So, what do I believe?

Being gay and being a Christians possible. However, you cannot express your homosexuality, and you must be celibate. Fantasies are wrong, and to be fought. You were dealt a deck of cards that is unfortunate. Some people are given a genetic disposition toward alcoholism. Some are given a bad temper. All of this is wrong. Despite our flesh, we are called to ask for help to live beyond our weakness. In as much as I believe there is a genetic component of being gay, this does not give you a license to indulge your weakness.

However, if you are outside the Church, then you are going to be ruled by your human desires. Paul tells us about this in Philippians 3

[19] Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is on earthly things.

The world is not going to allow us to stop their god. By coming in and trying to stop them, we are only going to insult their God. If we think that we can stop this by legislative acts, we deceive ourselves.

You may say, "Well, we need to protect them from themselves."

See, this is how the world thinks and not the Christian. It is the nature of our God to allow the tools of our own destruction. Jesus's first miracle in The Gospel of John was the changing of water into wine.I believe that a simple reading of this is that our Lord had made an alcoholic drink. Undoubtedly this would used by some in the party to become drunk. Now, Jesus could of said, "I will not make anything that could lead to sin." However, he did not say this. What he did was make something that some in the party would abuse.

This is the way in which this world was made. We have both good and bad that we can do with many things. It is up to man to make the decision about how we will respond to the opportunity.

Is this to say that Churches should be open to homosexuals?

My answer is absolutely yes. We should embrace them with open arms and love in our hearts. We should feed them and take them in. We should encourage them and give them jobs. Then we must ask them to accept Jesus and turn from their habits. Their habits only become a problem once they call themselves a Christian and engage in this habit. If a Christian brother or sister is okay with being gay, we cannot be.

For me, the biggest thing is what to do about the influence of this world on our children, but even here I doubt that we should fear the gay agenda more than many other things. For us, we did not pull out our Children from the public schools because of the homosexual agenda. We pulled them out because we see many things that are horribly against the will of God. Really, keeping our kids safe from homosexuality is the least of problems in the schools.

In my mind, having exposure to "two Moms" or "two Dads" as an alternative family unit needs to be understood and tolerated in any environment. It should never be formally embraced in the confines of the Christian church, but to be anything but hospital and kind to these families is to appeal to the flesh and not the spirit.

"Well, how can you allow Gay Marriage?" you may ask.

I ask how can you allow divorce? Marriage is about one man and one woman joined forever together to raise a family. Yes, homosexual marriage is a warping of the original purpose of marriage, but so is the many, many divorces and remarriages that happen. Ask yourself why gay people want to get married. It is to limit their sexual explorations. It is to have financial security. It is to raise a family. If you are worried about Children being indoctrinated in homosexuality, I would suggest that you should stop Mormon marriage since it also indoctrinates to a false religion.

Many years ago, my Father somebody gay working for him in one of the side businesses that he owned. Some other employees can to my Dad to ask him to get rid of this person. My Dad is about as fundamentalist as they come. He thought and prayed about it, and finally he said, "What this boy does on his own time is between him and God."

My mother agreed, and she said, "If we don't treat them fair, how will they ever come to know Jesus?"

I can hardly think of more Godly parents.

"Spirit and Mind" -> What Is Kenosis?

By in large, I try to stay away from terms like "trinity." With my track record of literal interpretation of the the Bible, and my attraction to theology, you would think that I would be talking about it all the time. As a matter of fact, the early Church quickly came to love the term trinity. Wittiness the Athanasian Creed:

So that in all things, as is aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.
He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.

My biggest problem is that trinity is not mentioned anywhere in the scripture. We have the Father, who is God, the Spirit, who is God, and the Son, who is God. We know that there is only one God. Therefore, you would at surface value seem to have all the parts of the Trinity. However, I am uncomfortable simply calling this the Trinity, simply because if this was the label that we were to use, then I think God would use it in the Bible. Now, mind you, the Trinity is what I believe. However, I just believe that we can never fully understand the relationship of the Godhead.

So, with this being said, I am going to go directly into classical theology and use the term Trinity.

I am assuming that you either know about the basic framing of the doctrine of the Trinity or you can read about the basic framing of the Trinity on Wikipedia. What I would like to into the mechanics of the Trinity, and then I would like to look at the idea of Kenosis, which recently came up in the comments of this blog.

Let's hit a couple of highlights of the Trinity.

1. There is only one God.
2. This Godhead has separate persons.
3. All of these persons have their own roles

Now, if you do wander over to Wikipedia, you will see the Shield of The Trinity, or Scutum Fidei, which is at the beginning of this post. I think this does about as good as job as we can in giving a visual aid to the concept. However, as mentioned before, I also think that you can visualize a rough allegory in your own being. Here is the translated version of this very old device to describe the trinity.

You probably recognize that you are more than one thing. At the very least, you are familiar with a perception of dualism: that you have a mind and a separate body. While you recognize both exist, you are only whole when both are present. (And I have argued for a tri-nature in this blog, but since you may not be able to perceive it, I will not write about that here.) You are familiar with how the body will do things without you even thinking about it. The mind can ignore things that the body does. So, are you two people? No. There is only unity in the whole.

Now the above analogy quickly breaks down as it does not suggest the fullness of intelligence and personality in the Trinity, but it can give you a flavor of what we might call the Trinity. You have three parts of the Godhead, each with its own personality that may seem separate on one level, but they are all necessary to make up the Godhead.

Let's pull out another $.50 big word: Immutability.

Immutability is the belief that God is unchanging. I strongly adhere to this. God is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow. A number of years ago, I was in a Sunday School class with a teacher that was elected to the position more because of his financial success rather than his knowledge of the Bible. (Sad but true. Often we ascribe financial success as equal to spirituality smart.) As he was teaching the Bible to us, he suggested that God had changed from the Old Testament to the New Testament.

"Wait a minute," I said. "Are you suggesting that God evolves?"

He answered in the affirmative.

Unfortunately, this was directly against the tenet held by the Church that I we were attending. I vigorously objected, and if I remember correctly, I basically drove this guy out of teaching. In retrospect, I did it in a very wrong way, as I should have restored him gently, but I will not spend more time on my own failures in the post.

I have seen this many times before. Both in Christian circles and non-Christian circles. People will read the New Testament and not the Old Testament. They will read the Gospels but not Revelation. The reason that they do this is that they are uncomfortable with the entire scripture. However, Jesus himself told us that the entire scripture was valid. If you have seen Jesus, you have seen the Father.

If we simply stop here, that Jesus and the Father is one with the Spirit, we then lose the flavor of what the scripture actually says about the Godhead. This is where we want to go back to the original picture at the beginning of the post. While Jesus is God, he is not the Father. I can't reinforce how important this is. To understand the Trinity, we must recognize that there is separation as well as unity.

Recently, on of the comments in this blog said, "...that means that indeed suffering (immutably and eternally) for the sins of the world, is not only something Christ does, but something the Father does as well."

See, while this is an attractive simplification of the Trinity unfortunately it leads to what some would call the heresy of Patripassianism, another $.50 word for the day. The derivation of the word should be pretty clear.

Patris = Father.
Passion = Suffering on the Cross.

This is closely related to a similar $.50 word: Sabellianism.

Let's talk about this for a minute. In the picture to the left you will see the famous book cover of Douglas R Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach. In the picture, a cube hangs from a strings. Now, three lights are shown in three different directions, and you get 3 different letters on the wall. So, even though the object is the same, you see it in three different ways. Now, I have heard some people use analogies exactly like this to frame what the trinity is like. This means that God is all the same thing, but sometimes we see him in different ways. So the difference in the trinity is our perception of God, not in God intrinsically. This is Sabellianism, and it is strictly wrong.

God is made up three distinct personalities, and these three are separate and equal. They are all the same substance, they share all in common, they are one, yet they are different.

So, Jesus did suffer on the cross, but the Father did not. Patripassianism begs Sabellianism, and restores all linkage of the trinity so that no separation exists. However, if you examine the Bible you will see that God the Father is never called out as suffering. If you go to classical catechisms, such as Westminster, you will find that he call out that God has no emotional swings, which is called the impassibility of God.

Even if we call out that certain parts of the Godhead may be impassible, you have to be crazy to say that the Word was impassible. I believe that Son has emotions, and reading Jesus weeping over Jerusalem only points to this emotion. To be human is to have emotions. Therefore, in the Old Testament, when God became angry, at least the Personhood of the Son that had these emotions.

(The alternative, for the classic holder of impassibility is to suggest that these emotions were simply an anthropomorphic image, but this is completely unnecessary if you believe in the emotions of the Son.)

Now, you can see that this is all getting very confusing. This is beyond our conception, and every time we try and get a handle on it, we try and simplify it, which then leads to real problems. The best way of remembering this is not to know "what the Trinity is." We simply have to remember what the Trinity "is not."

However, even in this confusing area, we can put a little bit of a framework to help us.

For me, I find it helpful to think of the Godhead in terms of roles, characteristics, and actions.

1. The persons of the Godhead have separate roles.
2. The persons of the Godhead have the same characteristics, which are immutable.
3. The persons of the God have separate actions, which change according to the circumstances, and in these actions the may perform as different agents in the overall plan of God. This change in agency is not a difference in roles.

Let us return to impassibility. Now, at the risk of an imperfect analogy, my wife and I are one. However, in the family, we take very different roles. I will tell you that I will be tough to our children, when she is soft. When I know that she is grieving, I will be strong. If I am busy in the garage, she will be fixing meals. While this is trivial in comparison, I think it does illustrate a principle where God the Son suffers, so the God the Father does not. I think the doctrine of impassibility, as reflected in different roles in the Godhead, is the most rational exegesis of the scripture.

Let's explore the roles a bit more.

In the Godhead, the Father has the ultimate role of the Father. The best analogy to the Father? Obviously, it is what a good Father should be. A good Father holds the family together. The good Father leads the family. A good Father is the ultimate holder of responsibility. Do any of these adequately reflect the Father's role? No. But it is good enough for us to get a handle on it.

In the Godhead, the Spirit is the most mysterious of the personalities. The Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox split because of the Filioque Clause in the Nicene creed. I will not get into this here, but I believe God left it hazy for a purpose. You can read my thoughts here. Needless to say, the Spirit is clearly an agent that acts for the Godhead. Often it equips the Saints for Action.

In the Godhead, the Son has the role of Maker. All things are made in him and through him. The nature of the Godhead is one of redemption. I cannot stress this enough, and I wish I had already done a post on this. However, the immutable nature of redemption in the Trinity made it so that some mechanism of reconciling us to the Godhead would be achieved. In this light, it was Christ that became the sacrifice for us to be saved.

Now, HOW we are saved is under a lot of debate, and this is called Soteriology in theology. I have no desire to open this up now, but only to say that blood must be shed by Jesus to attain our salvation, and our belief in this as our salvation saves us. We can debate the mechanics of this, but the act to become saved is clear.

So, remember that the roles of the Godhead are all very different.

While the Godhead has these roles defined clearly, these roles will also drive different agencies (or sub-roles) depending on the circumstance. John 1 tells us that the Word (Jesus) made the earth. In his role as maker, he was a formative agent. However, Jesus was also responsible for making a device to reconcile God to man, which was to create the perfect sacrifice for our sins. In his role as sacrifice, he was a sacrificial agent. The agency change to fit the issue, but the role always staid the same. So, while the agency of maker of the earth, seems to be strongly different than the agency of sacrifice, we can recognize that both of these agencies fulfill the role of Maker.

After the role of sacrifice is done, Jesus will take on a different agency. He will still be the lamb, but he will act in a different way. While on earth, he would not break a bruised reed. In Revelations, he is a terrible and mighty lamb, whose wrath is fearful to the nations that have not accepted him as savior.

So, now we finally come to the idea of Kenosis. Unless you are an Open Theist, which I consider just plan wacky, you believe that God is immutable. The problem with this is that Jesus as incarnate, does not seem immutable at face value. Somehow, Christ emptied himself. This is called Kenosis, which is just the Greek word for emptying or empty.

Now, we get into a fight of the Church. What does Kenosis really mean? Those that adhere to a strong version of Kenosis would suggest that Jesus emptied himself of many characteristics of being God. He was no longer omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience. However, by taking this view, you step right into the hands of Arius and Arianism. A strong belief in Kenosis would brand you a neo-arianist.

Arius believed that Jesus did not always exist with God the Father. Thus, when on earth, Jesus was part God, but did not have the entirety of God in him. Obviously, if the Son was apart from the Father then not all of the immutable nature of the Godhead existed in the incarnation. Therefore, many of the "problems" of Jesus as fully God and fully man goes away.

I simply do not believe this because I believe that this is putting logic to a problem that is not understood.

And while this post has turned into a bit of a book, if you have made it this far, this is the most important part of this post.

Most people spend way too much time on figure to figuring out HOW Jesus became flesh, rather than ask WHY Jesus became flesh.

"Well, that is easy," you'll answer. "He became flesh to become a sacrifice."

To this, I will simply ask "Why?" Why did he need to come to earth? Why did this sacrifice happen on a cross. Why did it have to happen in Jerusalem? Why?

Jesus could have made the sacrifice well away from this earth. He could have had it done in an instant. He did have to become flesh. So, why did he?

If you think about it for a while, it becomes obvious. The reason that Jesus came to earth was to be an example. He lived the life that we were to live. Now, that he has done this, we can follow his example. He deserves praise and glory because he showed us how to live.

Why was Jesus born? To show us how to be born.
Why was Jesus obedient to his parents? To show us how to be obedient.
Why was Jesus baptized? To show us how to be baptized.
Why was Jesus preaching? To show us how to preach.
Why was Jesus suffering? To show us how to suffer.
Why was Jesus mocked? To show us how to return good for bad.
Why was Jesus killed? To show us how to lay down our lives.

See those that believe in strong Kenosis point to how Jesus called on the Father for help.

"See," they say, "if he was omnipotent, he would have used his own power."

They miss the point. Christ asked the Father for help because he was showing us the way. Even though Christ had omniscience, he would ask for guidance.

When Calvin wrote about Phil 2:5ff, he wrote that God emptied himself of glory, and while having all the immutable characteristics of God, he hid his glory behind a veil of flesh. He did not empty his Godhood. He only hid his Godhood.

At the end of the day, I feel most comfortable with Calvin's thoughts here.

"Spirit" -> The Problem Of Genocide

Recently a family member railed against the newest Prince Caspian movie that has been put out. Now, for me as the marketing dweeb, my first thoughts on this type of activity is the commercial aspect of the film. It has grossed all of $75M, which means that it has gotten a slow start out of the blocks. The reviews have been pretty good, but the newest movie fails the impact of the first installment of the series. Therefore, it will be questionable if it gets a follow-up third episode, as it needs to get to $400M to make enough money to justify making the next one.

Now, while I have not been able to see the film, when my family member savaged it on his blog, I was curious as to why he disliked it so much. The main bone of his contention is that the story, which he has only seen in the movies since he has not read the book, is very anti-Christian to him. At the core of his issue is Aslan, who is obviously a incarnation of the Christ, and his violent crushing of his foes.

My favorite line from him is as follows:

"If the Church stands behind "Christian" stories such as this one, We make Ourselves into little more than the White Islam. We claim to love peace one moment, only to claim the next moment is special or too much and calls for anything-but peace."

In this post, I want to open up the problem of violence, and what it means. Those that criticize a violent God have the exact same core of the problem as those that do violence to others. Because they do not understand the fundamental nature of God and his rights, we misinterpret what the scriptures say, and we don't understand who God is.

Before we talk about the right viewpoint of God and violence, we need to first understand the two viewpoints commonly held in the church today.

Viewpoint 1: God Has Changed

This is the viewpoint that I see in our young reviewer above. To him and his friends, the image of God as a violent being that expresses this violence through people has clearly passed. He consider who Christ was and the time that he walked on this earth. Their logic goes something like this:

If we look in the Old Testament, we see God prohibiting a lot of things. For example, prostitutes were to be executed. People caught in adultery were to executed. Yet, when we get to the figure of Christ, we find a man that was willing to eat with the prostitutes. We see him saving a woman in adultery. The message that Jesus brings to the earth is that "we are all sinners." We should try and do good, but if we do bad, then we are forgiven.

So, the God in the Old Testament has transformed. He now has a New Testament and a New Covenant. We have the propitiation model.

Nobody is perfect, and that is okay.

Viewpoint 2: God As Being Justified In His Actions And Sometime Violence Is Okay

These people are much more open to violence of all sorts. They are the ones that are willing to go to Iran to fight. They are for a strong defense. They believe that America is right to go to war.

Now, let's look at a troubling passage in Numbers 31:

" 13 Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. 14 Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

15 "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

I had one of my family members state that God was justified in condoning this activity because the Midianites burned their babies. They were so bad, God just needed to kill off these people. So, in really "bad" cases, God will commit genocide. Thus, having a little war for a good cause is just fine. In really bad cases, God may need to wipe somebody out.

So, let us look at both of these viewpoint from a scriptural standpoint. Do these hold up?

For the new found tolerant person, they ignore Revelations 19.

11 I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. 12 His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13 He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. "He will rule them with an iron scepter."[a] He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:

KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun, who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, "Come, gather together for the great supper of God, 18 so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals, and mighty men, of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, small and great."

We find out that the risen Lord is not a man of passiveness. We find he is not a man of tolerance. We find out that he is violent in nature, and his slaughter is so great that the birds feast on the flesh of the dead enemy.

Our milquetoast savior is gone. Left is a might force that is terrible to behold. A force the same as his Father.

The tolerant viewpoint just doesn't stand up.

But, how about the other viewpoint. The idea that in "really bad" cases, violence is okay?

This is as fatally flawed as the tolerant person. We must start off with the example of the early church. The gospel was spread by a group of individuals that were kind to all. They took in the prostitute and the greedy.

However, from a complete scriptural standpoint, these views are most difficult to puncture. So, of the two viewpoint this is the less egregious of the two.

However, we must appeal to commonsense here. One only needs to read of the 30 Year War that demolished the continental Europe to understand what religious "intolerance" means. Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists all killing each other because they had the "right view" of scripture. Schwedentrunk being practiced by the armies of the religious. Intolerance breeds destruction and curses down on the heads of Christians.

So, what is the right viewpoint?

The first thing to realize is that God knows and approves every death. Did you die in the great slaughter of Numbers 31? Yes? Then God approved this death.

Did you die of a heart attack? If the answer is yes, then God approved this death. Were you tortured and killed? Then God approved this death.

As hard as it may seem to us, God allows torture, suffering and pain. God approves and allows every death. Not a sparrow falls from the sky that God doesn't know about it.

"How can God be so heartless?" one might ask.

See this is the secret of the incarnation. With this act, God declares that "I ask you no more than what I did." Christ allowed himself to be tortured beyond belief, and see the worse of all deaths. While we may hate suffering, to God it is all part of life. It is not desired, and Christ asked for the cup to pass him by. But the lesson of the incarnation is that we must all take the road in front of us. I will not seek it out, as I am not a masochist. If asked to suffer, I will go begging and screaming in the other direction. However, I have no perception that this is "unfair." I am scared of it, but accepting.

It is my belief that killing is not wrong. The key, however, is that it must be God who directly commands the killing, for it to be right.

Now we get to the whole point of the right view of killing, tolerance, suffering, and genocide. The tolerant viewpoint gets it wrong, because they believe that God has changed. This is incorrect. He is exactly the same. With the advent of our Lord on Earth, what has changed is our rights and our relationship with the Lord. In the Old Covenant, we were dead under the law. In the New Covenant, we are freed from the law. However, because we are forgiven, there is no right for us to judge. By in large, we must give up our desire for revenge, and we must forgive.

I will not cast a stone at homosexual, and neither will I put an adulterer to death. I am a part of the new covenant, and I am following our Lord's example of how to live an earthly life.

However, this does not mean that the Lord has continued in this role. Mind you, we are not under the Old Testament Law. It is passed. However, holiness and purity are still required. Violence is no longer our option, but it is our Lord's.

We cannot listen to a crazy person or a pastor that tells us to take arms. We should not be convinced in some slick propaganda that we are "doing the right thing and defending our country."

However, if the Lord appears tomorrow on a White Horse and commands me to take up my sword....

I will do it willingly. And if that seems disturbing, I have great confidence that it will only happen after the rapture or the resurrection.

"Body" -> The Law As Advisor And Not Prosecution

(Warning: Adult subject matter. Maybe even married subject matter. Kids shouldn't read this post....)

How we relate to the Old Testament is more than an interesting question for the Church today. We spend so much time arguing about the nature of the New Testament tradition (communion, baptism, and speaking in tongues) that most churches won't go near the Old Testament other than to read the praise sections from the Psalms, the prophecy section of Isaiah, and the Wisdom literature of Proverbs.

The normal reason for the mainstream Church to ignore the Old Testament is to call out the "Old." To many there is another revelation in the New Testament. I have heard this in many ways. For instance, the Sabbath was something given only to the Jews. For instance, tithing was something given to the Jews.

Yet if I asked you who said, "Love your neighbor as yourself," you might be surprised that this comes from Leviticus 19:18. The section of the scripture that is known as "The Law." When you understand this, you begin to understand why Christ was trying to teach them about the concept of "who was your neighbor?" Rather than trying to talk them into loving their neighbor. The Law teaches the loving your neighbor part very clearly. Christ helped us understand the whole of this commandment.

Because we throw away the Old Testament,we hurt ourselves almost beyond repair. We are a church of weakness and not of power. In the canon of the scripture,we must view the entire Bible as a seamless whole. We do need to read the law in a different light because our Lord came to die for us, but we need to recognize his death now allows us to read the law. We have now the ability to read the Old Testament with the correct reading.

The Law is no longer an instrument to condemn us. It is no longer only suited to lead to our death.

The Law goes from being a" Law of Sin" to becoming a "Law of Advice." The Law goes from being a horrible jailer carrying us to death, to becoming a coach that helps us think about the choices that we should make.

For example, there are three ways in which some have looked at the Sabbath:

1. As the day that is known as Saturday that we must observe as a rest and worship day. If you use Sunday as the Sabbath, then you are breaking a law which cannot be broken without causing real harm.

2. As a day of the Law that should be forgotten since it is a remnant of the Law that only serves to remind us of how far we are away from forgiveness. It is believes that the Law was only given to show sin. Therefore, the Law can be ignored for the most part, and various churches can take and leave parts of the law they don't like. Some will say that the prohibitions against missing the Sabbath is like the prohibition against homosexuality. They were for a different time and a different people.

3. The Sabbath was a principle of good health. The key behind this is not a mechanistic reading of Saturday, but an understanding that God wishes us to leave behind the world for one day a week, and concentrate on resting in him. Do not ignore this principle, be it Saturday or Sunday.

If it is not obvious, I clearly believe the later. For the most part I try and follow the Law not as a guide to sin, but as a guide to health. Think of the relief that you have because there is a break in the week. This is not tied to one day, but a principle.

I think it simply is wrong to do as the Seventh Day Adventist do and declare "God called out the Shabbat (or Sabbath) as Saturday, therefore, we are sinners if we celebrate Sunday as a day of rest."

The Seventh Day Adventist are doing exactly wrong. They are taking the principle and turning it into sin. The Law goes back to bringing death rather than life.

The Sabbath is something that was given to us for health. It was a principle that man must have a day of rest in his weekly cycle. However, more than this, he must allow others to rest. This principle means that men must cease from not only striving, but from harm.

In "The Slavery Reader," a collection of stories about slavery (Heuman and Walvin, 2002), McDonald reports that many slaves did get no or light work on Sunday. Even the people that we think of cruel saw the goodness in the scripture dictates. I am sure that this one day was a relief to an otherwise intolerable existence. The principle is obvious and good. It has nothing to do with a particular day, but a principle of renewal.

It is difficult to understand, however, where the principle starts and the law starts. So, it has happened that sometimes we stop doing the Law because we think that it is tied to an old system that is no longer to be followed due to our freedom in Jesus Christ.

For example, the Law says that human waste should be left outside of the camp and buried. It says that hands should be washed before eating. Why was this done? Was it because of a meaningless ritual that could be ignored?

Those in the middle ages thought such. Raw sewerage was dumped in the middle of the street to be washed down the curb side drain. This filth fell into the water supply of many cities, and wide spread disease was the result.

Things that we consider so obvious now, are only obvious over the last 200 years as we begun to understand the ideas of microbes.

There is little doubt that the act of circumcision helps prevents both cancer and disease, and yet it is not required for salvation. However, by hanging onto this "outdated" regulation from the law, much suffering can be prevented. The research is showing that this outdated idea of circumcision helps make people healthier. Now, it does NOT guaranty that we are saved. It is not a ritual that gives us salvation. To this, Paul rightly declares that by marking it as such, we sin, but it is correlated with better health.

Even today, the question may be "well what about things like pigs? I can understand that pigs were more parasite susceptible, but with our farming habits today, I think they are fine."

Indeed, we may argue that pig farming is fine today for an individual. However, the biological similarities between pigs and humans are very close. We are familiar with the bird flu, since it was recent. However, the older people may remember the "swine flu." The receptors on the lungs of pigs are very similar to humans, and birds are not. The thought process in most epidemiology is that flu is a result of a mutation in either bird populations or swine populations. The flu can be generated from either group, and is often from both groups. But in the back of my mind, I am worried that the ultimate pandemic will be caused by a virus that jumps from bird to swine to human. I wonder that by not eating swine, if the human race can take out a serious threat to our existence. There are some that think that the pandemic of 1918 may have been due to the missing link of swine making it the crossing path for humans. What is clear, is that the amount of pigs we have and the way that they are farmed worldwide is opening us up for disease.

People also reject the proscription against adultery, fornication, and homosexuality. Sometimes we only attack the Law for its law against homosexuality, but in reality, the Bible calls out for sexual purity on all fronts. Now, if for some reason we could follow the dictates of The Law on Sexual Purity, we would have no problems with sexually transmitted diseases. Period.

Sexual disease only spreads when we have non-monogamous relationships.

For instance, through 2005, here was the USA cumulated HIV cases from Cases of HIV infection and AIDS in the United States and Dependent Areas, 2005. The first column is the age of the person. The second column is the number of cases in 2005. The third is the cumulative cases, with a final sum number at the bottom.

Under 13:	68	9,112
Ages 13-14:	86	1,065
Ages 15-19:	447	5,289
Ages 20-24:	1,836	34,795
Ages 25-29:	3,407	114,141
Ages 30-34:	5,122	193,926
Ages 35-39:	7,246	208,505
Ages 40-44:	8,210	164,697
Ages 45-49:	6,418	102,732
Ages 50-54:	3,935	56,950
Ages 55-59:	2,064	30,424
Ages 60-64:	967	16,493
Ages 65 or older:	801	14,503
		952,632

By 2008, we will be over 1M cases of HIV. I have read that that the average direct cost of treating HIV is $100,000. Thus, we will spend $100B dollars as a nation because we don't value the law. The USA is lucky, because we can afford this bill. (Or even bills like the Iraq war which is 5 times higher.) However, other parts of the world have been set back decades. And there are many other sexually transmitted diseases to run up this bill.

Now, some will say that "we can educate our way out of STD problem."

The challenges are very, very great here simply because there are only two ways to avoid STDs. One is sexual abstinence and the other is condoms. However, the invention of latex and condoms is new. There was no other way to stem the tide of sexual disease other than living a pure life before latex.

The pain of STD is tremendous indeed in many ways. While STDs can impact individuals, it also impacts people groups as a whole

For instance, gonorrhea is directly related to sterility rates. a 20% rate of gonorrhea drops fetility by 50%. It is not hard, and it has been seen, that high gonorrhea rates will cause populations to drop (Brunham, Garnett, Swinton, and Anderson 1992; Swinton, Garnett, Brunham, and Anderson 1992). This literary places a people group at risk. The engine of growth and prosperity in ancient times was the health of its people.

This is not to ignore individual suffering from STDs. Certain diseases like Syphilis, as appeared with a mutated strain in the late 1400's that plague us today, are so unbelievably gross and painful with modern medicines that it is beyond belief.

So for the thousands of people groups before this, the Law was the only way to stop needless suffering. You may ask, "Why were people stoning each other over martial infidelity and homosexuality?" I don't think that there would be any argumentation that by curtailing this activity, you create strong people groups and better societies.

What happens in the Old Testament is that it takes a serious step away from "only" a Code of Hammurabi clone or follow-on. While there is little in the Hammurabic code on sexual purity, there is a lot in the Mosaic code. The core of the Hammurabic code is "an eye for an eye, or a tooth for a tooth." You get to exact revenge as pain was given. However, in the Levitical code, it goes much further by saying, "You will be killed for supporting a social atmosphere that will cause others to die."

This is the only way that I've found to reconcile the idea of brutally killing people for sexual deviation as laid out in the Bible. I am not saying that these are easy words to hear, but I do think that it is logical.

Perhaps, we can look at a new issue in our society today to layout how this would work.

Drunk driving kills 50,000 people a year. Now, we did not have the advent of drunk driving in the Old Testament. However, if we did, we would executed drunk drivers even through that had killed no one. Hang onto this bizarre idea for a second. If a driver was found drunk, given a breathalizer, and then killed for driving drunk, I am sure we would be offended.

However, I have no doubt that the overall death rates for the entire people group would drop. This sounds very harsh, but it is logical in its standpoint. There are 50,000 people killed. How many execution would need to take place? 10,000? 5,000? In reality, a very few would be killed then we would see a massive change in our society.

If we actually killed people for the potential of drinking and driving, very, very quickly people would simply not drink and drive. They would give their keys away. They would sell their cars. They would change their life styles.

Mind you, I am not saying that this is an easy thing. Normally, we take a person's life for taking another person's life. ("An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.") In this case, we are killing a few to save many.

It is because many of us have driven drunk before, and the thought of being execute "for only drinking and driving" simply seems like an extremely harsh sentence. And more than this, we are killing somebody not for his sin, but for the chance of sinning. However, even this all of this strangeness, it would be a more healthy society.

However, we are not thinking about drunk driving. We are thinking about sexual purity. We have developed something can restrain this, as we talked about earlier. The device is called a condom. Some have suggested that more condoms and more education will take care of the issue.

Now as a user of such devices, I think I can speak authoritatively:

1. They aren't very pleasurable

2. They aren't perfectly reliable

If you add 1 and 2 together, you will quickly realize that no amount of education will cause all people to use the condom, and even if people do, it may well not be reliable. How many people have you heard of that "have unprotected sex?" Educated people. People how can afford to have plenty of condoms.

In reality, the infection rates of HIV has been pretty much flat for the last 10 years or so.

So what would have been the impact of the Law? The Hebrews, in as much as they followed the law, were a freaking terror of good health. They ate food which was good for them. They had an amazing lack of STDs because of these laws. Their children grew up in disease free atmospheres. They were strong in battle.

This is why it is good to consider the Law, and how marvelous it is. We may not sin when we ignore it, however, we may find out that our health is better. Even if you are shocked and dismayed by the idea that some sexual actions are punishable by death, I hope at least you can see some logic in it.

As for the culture today, should we still be placing the homosexual to death? Should we kill those we find in adultery? I will confess that I would not. I understand the Law, and I marvel at its ramifications. However, an adherence to the Law is beyond our society. However, it was not always in the Americas. For example John Winthrop describes at least one case of executions do to adultery and a young girl named Mary Latham and one of her lovers. I find it interesting that this young woman confessed her sin, and she was willing to die. It is said that she told the other women at her hanging that they should be obedient to their parents and pure. She was confident that she had sinned, but that she would be accepted among the saints. Strange? Yes. Illogical? Not if you believe in the reality of an after life.

Now, I have only touched on the physical part of the law. The question now becomes "fine, but we have health clinics today, what can the law do for me spiritually?"

I would argue our health clinics aren't perfect, but even if we ignore the Law as physical advice, we can also see the spiritual help it gives.

We'll talk about the spirit in another post.

Update 6.14.2008

While recently listening to Elizabeth Pisani, the epidemiologist that wrote "The Wisdom of Whores," she pointed out that due to antiretroviral drugs many patients are living longer and almost healthy lives. She credits that the Bush's administration of these drugs to Africa has eliminated an unbelievable amount of suffering. However, she is bitter that the Bush led initiatives on prevention is dedicated mainly to promoting abstinence. She flatly says that this is not working in the US, where over 70% of children that take a abstinence vow do not follow through on this. Thus, she wants to institute a program of condom use.

Elizabeth is very bright, and a good lecturer. I agree with her. The abstinence programs that are in place today are highly ineffective. However, this actually points to why the Law ultimately makes sense. Saying that you are going to get a disease that "may kill you" is clearly not a big enough threat to make the population to change their habits. The violent act of simply putting people to death is, regardless if it is not accepted by Western Culture.

If you examine the Muslim countries in Africa, you will find out AIDS is at an extremely low level. While some researchers say this is due to under reporting, I personally believe it is a much more simple explanation. By-in-large, Muslim countries will do violent acts to their people for moral reinforcement. The execution rate for the sexually promiscuous is far higher, and thus has a higher impact.

On the other front, Elizabeth reports that the overall effectiveness of antiretroviral drugs may well be driving lower rates of condoms use, thus opening up the population to a greater spread of AIDS. She finds this trend disturbing.