Theater naptime is over

Most of my posts carry a distinctly political edge intersperced with stories of math and my bird...this one is going to be a little different.

My significant-other (I refuse to use the word girlfriend) Jenni runs a theatre company called the Nova Arts Project. I met Jenni by pretending to be interested in one of their shows so I could get to know her and ended up liking the show too. Since then, I have seen each of their productions and I have to say, they serve their motto well - theater naptime is over.

This month, they are on the cover of ArtsHouston magazine and I am so proud of her, I can't help but gush about it on my blog. Check out the article then check out their next production...if you find yourself not enjoying the show, you can always spend your time admiring the cute red-head in the director's booth :-)

On Twain, James and Churchill

This weekend I marched with Planned Parenthood in the Houston Pride Parade and hosted the Planned Parenthood after party. The entire event was rejuvenating – particularly the march. Planned Parenthood has one of the less visually impressive entries – no float, no flashing lights, no music – just a bunch of people holding a banner and handing out condoms with information on when to come for free HIV testing. I didn’t expect the reception we got...

The women in the audience cheered and screamed so loudly for us, I figured Brad Pitt was standing behind me. I couldn’t figure out why until one of them ran up to me, hugged me and said “thank you for representing us.” It suddenly became very clear how frustrating it must be for women knowing the decisions affecting your reproductive choices are being made by a group of old men who will never be directly affected by their votes. As a protestor-turned-volunteer once put it, “everyone is pro-life until they need an abortion.”

I spent Sunday with J and we had a long, wonderful discussion about the experience. Specifically, she asked my why I seemed to care so much what evangelical Christians believe. She has a point – after all, there are people in this world who staunchly hold that the earth is flat. Compared to them, the idea that a man born of a virgin could perform magic and rise from the dead seems almost logical! But we live in a democracy, and while I couldn’t care less about how they think, I am forced to care about how they vote.

Mark Twain once quipped that a jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. His commentary on the American judicial system applies to democracy as well. When I have just as much say over federal funding for stem-cell research and tax law as do geneticists and economists, a unique situation arises in which questions of policy are decided not by those who know the most but by those who can best summarize their argument into a short, memorable, emotionally-charged sound bite. The situation is only exasperated in the age of the internet when anyone can learn just enough about a subject to be dangerous as evidenced by the sudden surge in experts on evolution, global warming and genetics.

My problem is not with faith – my problem is with dogma. I am a person of great faith, and while most would not call that in which I choose to place my faith a religion, I disagree. I have great faith that if each person serves the greater good to their utmost capacity, society will progress; that there are no bad people, only misguided people; that the path to progress is not in believing that you have the ultimate truth but in admitting that you know very little and proceeding with humility. I have no proof to back up these assertions which are the guiding principles of my life – never attained, always followed. If that’s not a religion, I don’t know what is.

This in mind, my problem is not with those who believe they possess the written word of God – after all, I have no more proof to back up my assertions than they. What bothers me are those who allow others to do the thinking for them. At a wedding recently, the priest gave a homily in which he stated what Paul meant was... I found myself thinking you have no idea what Paul meant – only your interpretation of his intent. Those who read their religious texts and come up with their own interpretation are religious in the healthiest of senses – but I fear they are in the minority. In my experience, the vast majority of the world’s population think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices as William James so eloquently put it.

And so we are left with a choice – play the game and fight sound-bites with sound-bites or sit back and hope that in the end, that which is right will win. Churchill was right - democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Move aside Concorde

The shuttle just landed, and even though I had nothing to do with this (or for that matter any) mission (I work for the Space Station Program), I am so happy right now! I have every intention of becoming a doctor and leaving the space program...but I will miss days like today.

In this picture, Atlantis is about a minute away from landing flying an approach slope of negative 22 degrees (seven times steeper than a commercial aircraft's approach)! The vehicle is impressive in so many ways, but there is one story which ranks as one of my favorites.

The shuttle experiences eight minutes of powered flight during its ascent. During these eight minutes, a variety of abort options exist should an engine go out, a cabin leak develop, etc... During roughly the first half of the ascent, the vehicle would have to flip and come back to the Kennedy Space Center - a maneuver we would rather not do in a vehicle which has been described as a "flying brick." During the next 1.5-2 minutes, the vehicle still lacks the energy to make it into orbit on fewer than three engines, but could make it to a landing site in Europe or on the eastern seaboard (depending on the launch inclination). After about the T+5:30 mark, the vehicle has enough energy to make it into a lower-than-desired but safe orbit in a maneuver called an Abort To Orbit (ATO).

In the history of the shuttle program, only one in-flight abort has ever been called. It was on Challenger's STS 51-F which launched in the summer of 1985. At T+5:45, a main engine shut down and the crew initiated an ATO - burning the remaining engines longer to achieve a stable orbit. Had the engine shut down 30 seconds earlier, the crew would have turned the vehicle upright and flown to a European landing site. Years later, the pilot of that mission (Gen. Roy Bridges) was speaking to a group of us at Purdue (his alma-mater) when he mentioned that there was always a small part of him that wished that engine had gone out earlier. "We would have reset the trans-Atlantic crossing record" he explained. The current record is 2 hours 53 minutes by the Concorde[1] - Challenger would have reset it to 22 minutes!

BioDiesel is made of people!

As most of you know, I am no longer the proud owner of a Prius. I loved everything about that car – except for the monthly payment! I decided to downgrade to a slightly less fancy, slightly more used, slightly better for the environment car...introducing my new bug:

Yep, it’s official – I’m a hippie. I have long(er than most engineers) hair, am fiercely liberal and now I drive a Beetle! Of course, one of my friends astutely pointed out that I can never be a hippie given that I “work for the man” (in reference to the fact that I am a civil servant). My response was to point out that what I do rarely actually requires an engineering degree, so I am sticking it to the man by being over paid.

The reason I am so excited about driving this Beetle in particular is that it is a diesel Beetle, which means I can now fill up from this very special station (the only one of its type in Houston). Houston BioDiesel creates its fuels from plants – which has its pros and cons on the environmental side [1].

On the plus side, plants derive their carbon from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which is returned to the atmosphere upon combustion in an engine. This makes the recycling period of carbon in a biodiesel cycle on the order of a few years. Carbon derived from fossil fuels has to be absorbed by plants, eaten by animals and converted into fossils over the course of millions of years. The earth is well equipped to handle the recycling of carbon in its atmosphere at steady-state...it’s the introduction of carbon from within its bowels into the atmosphere which raises the carbon dioxide level.

However, a complete switch to biodiesel would have plenty of negative environmental impacts. We wouldn’t eat less produce as we transitioned to biodiesel, thereby necessitating the clearing of more forest to make room for growing the necessary crops. In fact, U.S. heating and transportation needs alone would require 2/3 the U.S. land area to be devoted to rapeseed production [2]! Can someone please hurry up and perfect controlled fusion so we can switch to an entirely electric society with no pollution to speak of!

Actually, my favorite part of biodiesel is its smell – or rather lack thereof. It smells like canola oil (which I learned today is a shortened form of the abbreviation "Can.O., L-A." for Canadian Oilseed, Low-Acid) [3].

P.S. Neil and I just finished another segment of our Christianity Interview – click here or the link on the right to see it.

I recognize the lion by his paw

One of my co-workers is very involved with the Boy Scouts (an organization I used to support financially until they decided being gay meant you couldn’t keep your hands off of young boys, but that’s another point altogether). We were chatting a few days ago and he mentioned a competition called the ‘Pinewood Derby’ which has to be one of the coolest competitions I have ever heard of! Each child is given a block of wood (made of pine) with two notches for wheels, four plastic wheels and four nails. The finished car must use all nine pieces, must not exceed a certain weight (usually five ounces), must not exceed a certain length and must fit on the track used by that particular scout pack. On competition day, all the cars are placed at the top of the track and released at the same time – first car to the bottom wins[1].

I started thinking about how I would build my own Pinewood Derby car and it made me think of one of my favorite physics stories – the story of the Brachistochrone. Here is the story for those of you who aren’t dorky engineers and then for those of you who are, I have a question.

The word Brachistochrone comes from the Greek words brachistos (shortest) and chronos (time)[2]. In 1696, Johann Bernoulli (tutor to Euler and l'Hôpital and father of Daniel Bernoulli for whom Bernoulli’s Principle is named) posed the following problem having already solved it himself:

Given two points A and B in a vertical plane, what is the curve traced out by a point acted on only by gravity, which starts at A and reaches B in the shortest time.

Clearly, the shortest path would be a straight line, but would that be the quickest? As it turns out, no...the quickest path between these points is the upside-down cycloid (path drawn by a point on the rim of a rolling wheel) which is vertical at point A and intercepts point B as shown here:

The three signed solutions sent to Johann Bernoulli represent a who’s who of late seventeenth century mathematics – Johann’s older brother Jacob Bernoulli, Gottfried Leibniz and Guillaume de l'Hôpital. A fourth, unsigned solution also arrived at Benoulli’s doorstep. Upon recognizing it as the work of Isaac Newton, Bernoulli is said to have exclaimed I recognize the lion by his paw. (Interestingly, the cycloid is also the tautochrone – the curve along which a marble placed at any point will reach the bottom at the same time)

This got me thinking – and here is the question for my engineering colleagues – wouldn’t the fastest Pinewood Derby car be one in which the c.m. followed (to as great a degree as possible) the brachistochrone curve? Imagine hollowing out the piece of wood, standing it upright and placing a metal sphere attached to a spring on the inside. By choosing a spring with the right gain, one could make the c.m. of the system follow a [nearly] cycloidal trajectory during the descent. I’m guessing this is well outside the rules, but I’m also guessing that it would look pretty neat to the observer – one car speeding ahead of the others despite being rather odd looking and having no regard for air-resistance :-)

Absolutely

I just posted another installment of Neil’s and my Christianity Interview, this one a follow-up to my last question on Biblical interpretation. Click here or on the link to the right to read it.

This question and response touch at the very heart of why dogma can be such a dangerous force. Neil takes great care to justify his stances through personal interpretations, but in my experience, most do not. In fact, I am routinely astonished by how often I find myself giving Bible lessons to Christians. It used to amuse me, now it just annoys me.

I am not surprised that a majority of the world’s population believes they have access to the absolute truth – after all, it is a very comforting idea. Nor am I surprised that their interpretations of those texts are what shape most people’s moral stances. What does surprise me is the fervor with which people point to their respective religious texts as proof that their stance is inarguably correct while in the same sentence correcting past interpretations of that text used to justify atrocities.

This, in a nutshell, is why I cannot take so many of the dogmatized seriously. It’s not that I think the prospect of a divinely inspired text is impossible – improbable perhaps, but not impossible. What humors me is the idea held by so many that to disagree with them is to disagree with the absolute truth when in fact, to disagree with them is to disagree with their interpretation of a text containing the absolute truth – the difference is subtle but critical.

My father is fond of Schoepenhouer who famous explained that all truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally, it is accepted as self-evident. I am keenly aware of the fact that today’s hotly contested issues will be tomorrow’s self-evident truths and I try to keep in mind that tomorrow’s hotly contested issues are so benign by today’s standards as to be unrecognizable. This in mind, what amuses me most is not those who think they have access to the absolute truth but rather those who think their interpretation is unique – that after centuries of mistakes, they finally got it right. Neil is not one of these – perhaps that’s why we get along.

Once the religious acknowledge that believing they have access to the absolute truth does nothing to guarantee they have extracted it properly, the walls between the pious and the secular can begin to crumble. If only every religious person realized how naïve it is to assume their interpretation is infallible – it wouldn’t change the outcome of the dialogue, but it would make it much more enjoyable…more like this one.

Life after the MCAT

This weekend was one of the happiest of my life (note that the weekend began after the MCAT). My little brother Farris got married in Kansas City and I spent four days with my family. It is ironic that someone who insists he doesn't want a family is happiest when he is with his own - but this weekend my cheeks hurt from smiling so much.

Here are Farris and Beth Saadah:

My parents, brothers, sister-in-law and my neice:

All nine grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a boyfriend:

...and my little neice Maddie and me dancing:

Kansas City is beautiful - I'll be back there this coming weekend for another wedding - that of my best friend Curt and his fiancé Sara. Theirs will involve a full Catholic mass - I think I might sneak out and grab a bite to eat somewhere in there. Do you think they would notice if the best man left and came back with a gyro? :-)