Entangled States

Ubuntu Mix

My friend Mel Ahlborn, the driving force behind ECVA, has created the following iTunes mix for General Convention.

(It's comprised of the tunes that will be quietly played as people are coming into the worship space and before the beginning of the preludes for the daily eucharists in Anaheim.)

General Convention in Anaheim

I started this blog just about exactly six years ago as a tool to keep people up to date on what I was hearing and seeing as a first time deputy to the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. I used it again in 2006 to report on my second convention. With my third convention hard upon us, it would be a shame not to go back to the same discipline of writing up my thinking and reporting on my experiences.

So - let’s do just that.

My first two conventions I was a deputy from the Diocese of Bethlehem and I used this tool as a way for people from that diocese and from my parish (Trinity Church in Bethlehem) to hear directly from me regarding the various controversies that were facing the Episcopal Church.

Now I’m a deputy from the Diocese of Arizona, and so I’ll be using this blog to report to them, and my new congregation, Trinity Cathedral in Phoenix.

But there will be some differences this time around too. Following the Convention in 2006 a group of us, led by Jim Naughton, created a meta-blog site called Episcopal Cafe. The blog was partly a desire to be able to have a single place for people to find out information about the Episcopal Church from a moderate/progressive viewpoint and partly to have a vehicle to quickly respond to the various charges made against the Episcopal Church’s actions in 2003 and 2006. It’s been pretty effective at that and Jim and the rest of the news team over on the Lead are planning to continue to cover convention as best they can. (I’ll be helping out a bit on the side, but not very effectively. I’ve got enough to keep me busy on the floor of Convention.)

The second difference has been the creation of similar sort of site by Craig Uffman and some friends of mine on the moderate/conservative side of things: Covenant-Communion. I’m an occasional poster to that site, and charged with keeping my eyes open for new multimedia that might be worth sharing over there. I’ve not been as active as I might have been, but I’ve learned a great deal from the conversation that occurs on the site and I’m happy to be connected with them even if it’s slightly tenuous at the moment. That site hasn’t garnered the readership of the Cafe, and has a slightly different focus, but I think if you read it and the Cafe in conversation, you’ll have a pretty decent sense of where the fully spectrum of the Episcopal Church is found these days.

Now, what do I think is going to be the big take-away from Convention this year?

Money. Specifically the lack thereof.

Between the economic meltdown and the lack of commitment to evangelism and youth ministry, the Episcopal Church is at present a rapidly aging, increasingly cash strapped entity. From what I’ve been told, there’s a 23 million dollar gap (perhaps now 30 million) between what has been asked to be funded by Convention and what income is expected to do that funding. And since a goodly chunk of our triennial budget is spent on health care, support for missions, and missionary dioceses, we really don’t have a lot areas where we can cut without significant pain.

I’ve been in this position in a number of dioceses and parishes during my ministry. The only way out of the box is to face the problem honestly and head-on. If you do that, there’s a good chance that you can grow the budget to the point that you’ll be able to restore some of the funding. If you don’t, it’s just going to get worse, probably much worse, over the next three years.

We have a limited amount of funds and a big problem.

We as a Convention are going to have to be very wise about where we put our limited resources.

As a friend of mine said the other day, if we don’t build “capacity” and our resources, we’re not going to have the tools to do justice no matter how great the need.

I wonder if the fact that we’re going to need to realize that we’re broke is going to change the dynamic at Convention? Gosh I hope so. We can’t afford business as usual anymore. Here’s hoping that we can hear that.

Macroscopic Entanglement

The mystery of avian navigation has confounded biologists for generations. It's well accepted that birds can "sense" the Earth's magnetic fields and that they use this "sense" to navigate their way across the surface of the earth.

But no one has been able to locate the center of the "sense" or figure out a mechanism by which the birds made use of it.

That is until just recently. There's a group of scientists that theorize that the birds are actually making use of quantum entanglement at the macroscopic level.

In brief:

"The system Vedral and co have studied is a model that describes how birds navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. The most recent thinking is that birds have molecules at the back of their eyes that are sensitive to both photons and the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field. When one of these molecules absorbs a photon, an electron pair is split and one of these electrons is transferred to another part of the molecule to another. These electrons then form a 'radical pair' that are entangled.

In the absence of a magnetic field, this pair would recombine to form the original molecular state. But the Earth's magnetic field can flip the spin of one of these electrons allowing them to recombine in a different way and leaving the molecule in an alternative chemical state that the bird can sense. The result is that bird 'sees' the Earth's magnetic field as it flies.

This raises an interesting question: how long does this entangled state last?

Vedral and co have done the numbers and say it lasts for at least 100 microseconds. That's an extraordinary figure. The best humans have measured is 80 microseconds for so-called electron spin relaxation in C60 buckyballs."

Read the full article here.

Besides being way cool if true, this system would represent a macroscopic manifestation of entanglement. For those who are trying to find the effective limits of this uniquely quantum mechanical phenomenon, this is might likely call for some re-tuning of the models.

Yay for bird-brains!

Shutting down open communication is the first sign of real trouble

Interesting article on the New Scientist about an analysis of the communication patterns of the Enron Corporation leading up to it's collapse into scandal a few years ago.

Two researchers, Collingsworth and Menezes were given access to the final 18 months worth of email logs of Enron.

"Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. They presented their findings at the International Workshop on Complex Networks, held last month in Catania, Italy."

Read the full article here.

Interesting finding, but not terribly surprising. We all know that we're in trouble when we walk into a room at work and people stop talking. We know that when we're feeling threatened, we reach out to an ally for a private talk.

This is just that human instinct writ large and empowered by technology.

The import of this though is that it should in principle to be able to work up some sort of "closed communication index" or something, that would measure the degree of open communication lines in an institution. The more closed the communications, the more dire the prospects of the organization.

I suppose investors would love to get their hands on that sort of information. And I would imagine that a wise CEO and board would want to monitor the index regularly. Done right, it ought to be relatively easy to measure without betraying any private or confidential information.

The article goes on to suggest some other sorts of things that can be found by looking through the email logs in an aggregate ways. Worth the 5 minutes it takes to read.

And makes me glad there's no single email supplier for the Episcopal Church. Ignorance can be bliss I guess. Grin.

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive - Telegraph

There's been some talk over the past week of whether or not it makes sense to proactively shrink the size of American cities that are no longer economically sustainable.

There's an interesting article on the Telegraph's site that discusses the possibility of flattening a large part of Flint Michigan as a test case.

It features Dan Kildee who's been asked to come up with a plan for Flint that might be extended to at least another 50 cities in the US that are in the same situation.

Interesting point made in the article:

"But Mr Kildee, who has lived [in Flint] nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that 'big is good' and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: 'The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing.'

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn't downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added."

Read the full article here.

The issue isn't growth anymore, it's sustainability. Cities need to become sustainable in terms of economics, energy, supply chains, etc.

I write this only a few minutes away from large cities in Arizona that were created out of the desert for the sole reason that land was cheap there. There's no real economic reason they should exist.

And they're slowly falling down now too.

This is going to be a very difficult time for the outer-ring exurbs.

Corpus Christi: Whither the body?

Sam Norton, an Anglican priest points out that they way we've thought about the nature of the Body of Christ (Corpus Christi) has changed from the first millennium to the second:

"For the first thousand years or so of Christianity, the 'corpus verum', the body that could be touched and handled with reverence, referred to the church, ie the community of the baptised. So, your neighbour in the community was worthy of reverence and respect. Harming your neighbour, eg murder, wasn't just immoral, it was blasphemy. Correlative with that, the 'corpus mysticum' - that which could only be perceived with the eyes of faith - was the host, that which was consumed in the context of Eucharistic worship.

In the course of the twelfth century, in the Western church, these meanings were reversed, with awful consequences."

Read the full article here.

As a Puseyite, I can only add my fervent AMEN to Sam's point.

String theory and super-fluiditiy

Saw this today. If for no other reason, it's worth reading the highlighted portion below... because you'll wish you'd thought to say it.

"'Despite formidable odds, condensed matter physicists have made a breakthrough most thought impossible — finding a practical use for string theory. The initial breakthrough was made by physicist and cosmologist Juan Maldacena. His theory states that the known universe is only a 2D construct in anti-de-Sitter space, projected into 3 dimensions. This theory manages to model black holes and quantum theory congruently, a feat that has eluded scientists for decades; but it fails to correspond to the shape of space-time in the known universe. However, it does predict thermodynamic properties of black holes, including higher-dimensional viscosity — the equations for which elegantly and almost exactly calculate the behavior of quark-gluon plasma and other superfluids. According to Jan Zaanen at the University of Leiden, 'The theory is calculating precisely what we are seeing in experiments.' Unfortunately, the correspondence cannot prove or disprove string theory, although it is a positive step.'"

Read the full article here.

Of course, all that being said, there's no report about whether the developed theory was able to discriminate between to competing claims...

Where are they? Another solution to Fermi's paradox.

Fermi's paradox is the most frequent objection to the idea that there exists intelligent extra-terrestial life.

Now there's appears to be a new solution to the paradox - perhaps the implicit assumption that populations of sentient beings will grow continuously and exponentially is wrong.

Two scientists at Penn State University suggest that:

"The problem is that this kind of growth may not be possible and they look at Earth as an example. For any expansion to be sustainable, the growth in resource consumption cannot exceed the growth in resource production. And since Earth's resources are finite, it has a finite mass and receives solar radiation at a constant rate, human civilization cannot sustain an indefinite, exponential growth.

So we'll have trouble colonising the galaxy, if we ever decide that's necessary. At the very least, the spread of our civilisation will not be exponential, if it is possible at all.

Haqq-Misra and Baum say that this argument means that any extraterrestrial civilisation must be similarly constrained."

Read the full article here.

Interesting idea. Certainly we can see how difficult it is to create sustainability in social organizations. Church congregations for instance seem to have at least four inherent population plateaus - at least in the Episcopal Church - according to research Arlen Rothage did back in the 70's. It's possible to overcome the plateau limit, but it takes a great deal of work.

Perhaps this same phenomenon is at work in the galaxy. Planetary civilizations might be limited in the degree that they can expand by technology and/or lifespan issues. Perhaps there are plateaus at the planetary, the planetary system level and at the interstellar level. Which would make sense - each scale involves multiple order of magnitudes scale changes.

Hmmm.

I wonder if there's a ubiquity or fractal distribution law at work? I've wondered that for some time about whether that exists for congregation sizes. We know that it exists for city sizes. Seems like the same basic resource and scaling plateaus that exist here on earth would exist in the galaxy as well.

Sunday's Communion Anthem: Lift Your Voice Rejoicing

This Sunday's anthem, a world premiere of a piece arranged by a member of our Cathedral Choir.

Arrangement by Peter Lafford of Thomas Foster's "Lift your voice, rejoicing", Hymn 190 in the Episcopal Hymnal 1982, to the tune "Fisk of Gloucester".

Première performance Sunday, May 31, 2009, by the Trinity Cathedral Choir, Phoenix, Arizona.

Conducted by Peter Lafford, with William Barnett accompanying.

What it's like in the former industrial heartland

James Kunstler writes a weekly column reporting on what he forsees as the western economy's coming collapse and the effect it will have on the United States.

This week, as the news of the collapse of General Motors is highlighted on the hour, he writes of a recent trip to western and northern New York state:

"You get into these far reaches of upstate New York and your senses report that you have entered something like an HP Lovecraft story, where the sun comes up twenty minutes late, and the magnetic poles are not where they're supposed to be, and the few remaining denizens of the towns all have eleven fingers.... Even though I've seen plenty of desolation like it in other parts of the country -- the back roads of Ohio, the Mississippi River towns of the upper Midwest, the morbid stretch of blue highway between Memphis and Little Rock -- I've never encountered a landscape so shattered by the mere ravages of economic fate.

The most striking feature is how all the things once so 'modern,' all the roadside business enterprises designed along 'space age' motifs -- the car dealerships with boomerang-shaped signs, the rocket-ship-style food huts, the schools that look like atomic power installations -- all teeter now in sublime decrepitude. The reversal of spirit from childlike exuberance of the 1960s to the senile sclerosis of today said everything about where America is at. Much of what existed before the space age is not even there anymore, bulldozed decades ago in our haste to erase pre-drive-in living, as if it branded us a lower life-form than, say, our arch-enemy, the Soviets.  I've wondered for many years what Modernism would be like when time finally passed it by, when it was no longer the sole thing it declared itself to be, up-to-date -- and there it was smeared all over the landscape like so much road kill."

Read the full article here.

Having lived and worked in parts of PA very much like northern New York, this description rings true to me. I was told years ago that PA, once the powerhouse of the Industrial revolution, is now the state with the highest number of people living in rural zip codes. In other words, it's becoming a farming state once again. (Which isn't a bad thing - the coast needs to eat, and PA has excellent farm land an easy short haul a way.)

I've been thinking about the effect this level of disruption is going to have on churches for a long while. I had hoped that it was going to be a truly pressing problem in a few more decades, but it appears that the future is now upon us.

There's a great deal of hope for the Church I think, but it's going to require people to think carefully about how to use the increasingly scarce resource of seminary trained clergy, and increase the role of the volunteer lay person in supporting the work of the community. Total Ministry is one model, and there's a great deal to learn from it.

But I'm not aware of many congregations that have managed to grow using that model - it feels to me more like a way of trying to forestall an inevitable collapse than it does a new model to evangelize the world.

I'm thinking it might be worth having a conversation here about different models that might be created to try to transition ministry from the old pastoral model to a newer model that uses all the resources at hand - big churches, program style churches, missions and cell groups to rejigger our parish ministry model.

Any interest?