Entangled States

Border issues and Peak Oil

Globalization drives global commodity prices downward. This causes localized economic disruption giving rise to mass migration as people move in search of work an sustenance.

Will rising oil prices (and all the associated economic quantities) short cicuit globalization quickly enough?

Would higher border tarrifs on commodities both decrease the rate of disruption as well allowing more time for the developed world to make the transition to renewable energy?

Rowan Williams on Revealed Religion

The Archbishop of Canterbury was invited to preach the annual Hulsean Sermon on "the excellence of revealed religion".

In a typical way the Archbishop turns the thing around on its head and points out that there's more to the issue of revelation than one might first guess. He takes as his subject in the sermon the question of what effect the act of revelation has upon the beholden. In particular he looks at how we are changed by knowing that God sees us in the totality of our being.

After teasing out the recognition by the beholder that the presence of a startling revelation properly leads to an intellectual humility, and finding evidence in the biblical witness about how this played out in the life of the woman by the well in Sychar ("I met a man who told me everything I ever did") and Paul of Tarsus. (He could have included Nathanael of the Gospels as well.)

Finally, discussing the implications of a proper dose of intellectual humility for the Academy and the recognition that revelatory knowledge has on epistemology, Williams ends thusly:

"Revealed religion can so easily be presented as the enemy of many things that our culture holds precious: intellectual humility and intellectual adventure; the sense of ultimate otherness or strangeness within our relations with one another; the fascination with our own inner elusiveness, our otherness to ourselves.  Yet all these themes seem themselves to arise out of the gradual apprehension of what revelation actually entails.  If theology – the theology of revealed religion - has a place in the academy, it is because of the way in which it underscores the strength of the goading to know that drives all serious mental enterprise and at the same time the unfinished character of that enterprise.  It does so not by appealing to a vague belief that all verbal forms are provisional or that the spiritual nature of human beings is worth taking seriously, but as a discipline that wrestles with intractable history and particular narrative, with the ways in which human beings think within time and relationship and create language together.

In a cultural context where – so we are repeatedly told – 'spirituality' is more popular than 'religion', it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves of what the claim to revelation and the focus on historical particulars involves for the life of faith and the exploration of that life in art or theology.  Here at least we are in a world in which the characteristic pressure of intellectual activity makes sense – the conviction of an obligation to persistence and honesty, the cautions against imagining that issues have been resolved when they have only been named; here the life of the mind and of a properly demanding imagination are recognisably involved.  Grace and struggle both belong inseparably in the process of receiving and responding to a revealing God.  What the preference for a generic spirituality may lose hold of is just this partnership of the awareness of gift and the pressure to speak as truthfully as can be in the light of the steady weight of that gift as received by generations.

To enter the world of revealed religion, to make one's own the vocabulary of a free self-disclosure on the part of the transcendent, is not to abandon discovery or darkness: because it is grounded in the simultaneous new awareness of who God is and who I and my neighbour are, it cannot be simply the delivery of the last pieces in a puzzle.  To become conscious that you are seen is potentially frightening; to become conscious that you are seen by a presence that has no selfish interest, no advantage to be exploited, no will to manipulate, but one that gratuitously shares the secret of itself, its reality and 'density', is perhaps not less frightening (you hate it because it hurts') but is also to find yourself just beginning in the way of fearlessness.  My story is told to me afresh; and I find that it is embraced, graced, opened.  'You must change your life'; but in fact my life is changed, not by me, if I can bear the gaze."

Read the full sermon here.

The last paragraph puts me in mind of the Ugaritic mythological Watchers. I never quite understood why their echo could be found in the Old Testament. Now, seeing the implications of being watched, perhaps I may be able to find a satisfactory answer.

Bp. Whalon reviews Girard's latest work

Bishop Pierre Whalon, the Episcopal Bishop of Europe, and not coincidentally a native french speaker, has the first review of Rene Girard's latest work "Finishing Clausewitz". (Which at the moment is only available in French.)

I've written here before about Girard's theories of mimetic violence and how he sees them giving a rich and self-consistent tool for understanding the Passion of the Christ. If I have a favorite theologian these days it's Girard (with perhaps Barth as a near second.)

From Bishop Whalon's very useful review:

"In Achever Clausewitz, Girard seeks to ‘finish’ Clausewitz, an intentional double entendre. Clausewitz glimpsed in his thinking the possibility of wars of total annihilation, replacing the ‘wars in lace’ (guerres en dentelle) of earlier times. The phrase ‘Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers’ (‘Gentlemen of England, fire first’) from the battle of Fontenoy in 1745 is the classic (if inexact) example of this codified and ritualized warfare. After the French Revolution with its masses of conscript soldiers, the restraints of the old system were gradually thrown off. The specter of a war of annihilation, without rhyme or reason, became apparent.

For Clausewitz, this absolute war is a theoretical possibility, though his treatise, which he re-worked several times while never completing it, argues that war can never actually get to that point. His notion of war is that of a duel (Zweikraft) akin to a wrestling match, and a war is a congeries of these ‘duels.’ For Girard, absolute war has now become a daily possibility, if not certainty, with the capacity we now possess to destroy the planet. The apocalyptic literature found in the New Testament especially is not predictive of the final cataclysm, he says. Rather, it is ‘Christianity predicting its own failure’, he declares provocatively, ‘the only religion ever to do so.’

The premise makes sense: if we as a species rely on violence as a means of communal life (Girard’s essential point), and if we are now controlled by our technology rather than controlling it (Heidegger’s famous thesis), it follows that the extinction of the human race by our own hand is inevitable, as we now have the technology to destroy the planet in an act of war. Furthermore, as Christian apocalyptic literature predicts an ‘end of days,’ this part of the Bible can no longer be dismissed merely as an embarrassment to Christians other than fundamentalists with political axes to grind. Deprived as we are of the archaic scapegoat mechanism by the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have been trying to find new ways forward within a transformed religious perspective. These are bound to fail, for war is part of the essence of human life and society, not simply an aberration we fall into."

Read the full article here.

It's certainly a word to the world at this moment of perceived scarcity and zero-sum economic solutions. Girard's idea may also be a hint perhaps about how God intends to heal the world by the sharp two edged words that issue from the mouth of the slain lamb.

: Mars says, - "I'm not dead yet..." Martian Methane Reveals the Red Planet is not a Dead Planet

NASA is indicating something very unexpected is going on the surface of Mars:

"New research reveals there is hope for Mars yet. The first definitive detection of methane in the atmosphere of Mars indicates the planet is still alive, in either a biologic or geologic sense, according to a team of NASA and university scientists"

Read the full article here.

Most planetologists thought that Mars had an inactive solid core - like the Moon or Mercury. (Earth, Venus and all the Gas Giants are still active and molten.) This research would indicate that not to be the case.

OR...

This might represent the presence of some sort of subsurface microbial life on Mars that is "pooping" out Methane as part of it's life-process. Which would mean, as some are suggesting, that we've finally discovered life on other planets.

The former would be interesting. The latter would phenomenal.

:New Scientist: "Our world may be a giant hologram"

Here's an article in New Scientist that poses a very challenging idea:

"For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into 'grains', just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. 'It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,' says Hogan."

(Fair enough. Finding the cause of anomalous "noise" was got Penzias and Wilson the Nobel Prize for discovering the Cosmic Background radiation.)

It's not surprising that there's a fundamental graininess to the space-time continuum. That's pretty much the direct implication of the Plank Constant being non-zero.

What's interesting here is by detecting the granularity, and getting a "scale" for it.

Add to this the application of the holographic principle as a tool for describing the fundamental working of the Universe:

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard 't Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

This is actually useful when we talk about looking at quantum fluctuations on the "surface" of a black-hole event horizon.

Since, at least mathematically, we can treat the observable Universe as an expanding black-hole, it means that we can, in principle, apply the holographic idea to the "surface" of the expanding observable Universe...

So...

If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. "Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry," says Hogan.

This is good news for anyone trying to probe the smallest unit of space-time. "Contrary to all expectations, it brings its microscopic quantum structure within reach of current experiments," says Hogan. So while the Planck length is too small for experiments to detect, the holographic "projection" of that graininess could be much, much larger, at around 10-16 metres. "If you lived inside a hologram, you could tell by measuring the blurring," he says.

So that's why this particular experiment underway is so interesting. It holds out the promise of being able to detect the graininess that we should be able to see if we live in a giant "hologram".

Which means that events that occur on the out-bounds of space-time have measurable consequences in the interior, though we don't really understand how or what the consequences would be yet. At this point there's just a recognition that a causal connection can be made.

Heh. The heavens do control our lives on earth... just not exactly the way Astrologers have imagined.

Read the full article here.

Wintertime in Phoenix

I woke up this morning and the bedroom was 70 degrees. So I climbed out of bed, wearing my warm sleep pants, turtleneck and thick socks and added a fleece vest, slippers and a warm robe. It’s good to be well fortified against the cold.

The odd thing is that I’m not exaggerating. Having lived here in Phoenix for three winters now, 70 degrees really does feel uncomfortably cold. Going outside in 50 degree weather requires a cap, jacket, scarf - and if I’m going to be outside for any length, gloves. I don’t think the temperatures are comfortable anymore unless they’re in the 90’s. My family is now the same way. My daughter who used to insist she was plenty warm when it was in the 30’s and she was just wearing a light jacket, is now complaining about how cold her room is and sleeping under a great pile of blankets.

People who’ve lived in Phoenix for a while tell me that this isn’t all that unusual. After about three years it’s common to hear people say that your blood “thins”. There’s truth to the fact that there’s a change, but it’s the other way around apparently. After a few years of living in the hottest city in the US, your blood actually thickens, not thins. But either way, it’s a real and very noticeable change. It’s obvious in town during these months who lives year-round in Phoenix, and who’s a winter visitor (snow bird). The Phoenicians are walking around in this 70 weather all wearing jackets. The visitors are all walking around wearing shorts. (It’s really quite striking when you walk down the street.)

What’s particularly striking to me is how this adaption happens automatically. It’s really just a matter of living here. You immerse yourself in this climate and in a few years what you perceive as hot or cold changes.

I’m thinking it’s like that in our ability to perceive the world around us as well. Here in America we’ve been living in period of our history where the culture around us has tacitly decided that the greatest common good is most efficiently found by the free market models of Adam Smith. The character Gordon Gecko coined the phrase “Greed is good” in a movie back in the eighties, and because we’ve lived so long in a culture that acts on the belief, we’ve come to think of the desire to acquire goods and power as not just normal but laudatory.

Mind you, there’s something to this idea. It turns out that when we model various different kinds of economic systems, the most equitable distribution of goods and resources happens if every agent involved acts in the most personally greedy way possible. The problem is that not everyone acts equally greedy, not everyone plays fair, and most distressingly, the equilibrium state can take generations to achieve. The latter seems to me to be the root cause of most of the pain people experience because we are living in a period when the true equilibrium is yet to be achieved. And since it’s not clear that we as a society are willing to live into the pain it will cause to allow the market forces the freedom they require to find their optimum function, it may be that the economic disparity and inefficiency we endure will be never ending.

I wonder if the present recession/depression is going to be the catalyst for changing our perception of what is normal and acceptable for our common economic life? I’m told that the Great Depression had that effect. The reason the “greatest generation” was the greatest generation was because they discovered the interconnectedness needed in society to navigate their way through that particular economic downturn. The seeds of our present greed were sowed in the time of great abundance in the 60’s and 70’s when it seemed that resources were limitless and upward economic trends would continue forever.

In the parable of the Talents and the parable of the Shrewd Steward Jesus seems to be telling us that we need learn to connect with the community and work cooperatively if we want to be able to survive and prosper. (See my sermons on these topics this past fall for the full explanation of why.)

Maybe it’s time we gave Our Lord’s counsel a try? The idea of everyone acting in their own self-interest doesn’t seem to have born the fruit we were promised.

City dwelling is deleterious

It's reasonably well known that crowded urban environments create enough stress that physical and mental performance declines in biological species. (I remember a reading about a study done on rats years ago that showed that at a certain level of crowding female rats began to spontaneously end pregnancies with miscarriages and were more likely to eat the babies if they were live born.) There's evidence that too much crowding in a human environment causes a measurable and significant decline in mental and physical function - something on the order of 20% or so.

I once wrote on an essay I submitted for some position along the way that "there's nothing that has ever happened to me that I haven't been able to manage in some way by spending time in the outdoors". I thought it was just me, and the fact that the happiest memories of my childhood are the days that I spent in the summers basically living outdoors.

Now I'm reading that there's something more fundamental going on. According to a new study from the University of Michigan:

"'Interacting with nature can have similar effects as meditating,' Berman said. 'People don't have to enjoy the walk to get the benefits. We found the same benefits when it was 80 degrees and sunny over the summer as when the temperatures dropped to 25 degrees in January. The only difference was that participants enjoyed the walks more in the spring and summer than in the dead of winter.'"

Read the full article here.

Hmmm.

We started a new program here at the Cathedral this winter. We meet twice a month for a Sat. morning hike. We do a relatively easy hike and call it the "Dean's Hike" and a then alternate that with much more challenging hike (led by the Cathedral Wardens) and called the "Wardens' Walk". We've had as many as 25 people join us. Phoenix is particularly well suited for this given the extensive park system within the city boundaries.

I thought I'd been feeling better as a result... Now I'm thinking it's not just the physical exercise that I'm noticing. There's an increase in creativity and decreases in mental stress that's going on as well. Perhaps I need to be a little more pushy about encouraging others to join me.

(h/t to Slashdot.)

Some Twitter accounts hacked

Someone has figured out how to crack into a number of high profile twitter user accounts. FoxNews, CNN, Brittany Spears and President-elect Obama's accounts were all compromised somehow.

According to an article:

"Some suspected that the hacks today were associated with the weekend's phishing attacks, but the Fox News account isn't following anyone - so no one could have direct messaged it. That's how accounts were taken over via phishing. Something else is afoot.

If the hacker is associated with the affiliate link sent out over Obama's account, it may not be hard to discover who did this. Time will tell.

Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and lead engineer Alex Payne have posted no messages since the attacks emerged. This can't be good for Twitter. What major brand will be excited to sign up for the service now? Who would pay, even, to be put at such risk?"

Read the full article here.

I checked my twitter account. Everything appeared to be in order. But I did get a couple of twitter-spam messages today from a relatively obscure user that I've been following. It looks like it's not just the big fish that are in danger of being caught by the fail-whale today.

Camelback Mountain and Star Troopers

Typical day in Phoenix. Climb Camelback at dawn. Get home in time to walk over and see the Fiesta Bowl Parade. (Texas marching band pick included.) And then be surprised by the Fist of Vader Imperial Storm Troopers drill team. Awesome.