Think Pink

Each year, the Houston Coalition for Life (HCfL) sponsors ’40 Days for Life’ during which they maintain a 24 hour presence outside of various Planned Parenthood clinics. Though the event is designed to be disruptive to Planned Parenthood, it tends to accomplish the exact opposite. At any given time, one or two people end up standing outside of the clinic quietly praying (my favorite type of protest) and most clients don’t even notice they are there. However, the press that HCfL puts out for the event ends up inadvertently recruiting dozens of new Planned Parenthood volunteers who stay on afterwards. In addition, monetary donations always increase as a result of the event, helping us to better provide for our clients.

Yesterday, the Planned Parenthood volunteers received an e-mail containing the following text and picture:

Your efforts on behalf of PPHSET clients, guests, and staff is appreciated. Donors are speaking with contributions to support what you are doing throughout the 40 Days! ...For each $25 donated another bow will be tied on the window treatment at Fannin Center, at the Bryan Health Center, and at the Lufkin Health Center.

...then came this morning’s volunteer e-mail from the Houston Coalition for Life:

Today Planned Parenthood covered their front windows with pink bows. These are not the breast cancer awareness bows, they are a little darker. While we don’t really understand the significance, we think that they must represent the baby girls who are aborted every week in their abortion facility. We are wondering when they will add the little blue bows to the front of their building, maybe tomorrow.

That’s good stuff – I am SO tempted to tie ribbons of all different colors to the windows just to see what HCfL comes up with as an explanation :-)

Goodbye Matt

It’s been a while since I posted – it’s not that noteworthy events haven’t been happening; it’s just that one in particular is difficult to write about.

Last Monday, my little brother’s best friend died in his sleep at the age of 25. He was a second year law student with a wife and eight month old daughter. He and my brother were the best men at each others’ weddings and as close as too friends could be. I flew home as soon as I found out and spent three days with my brother and his wife attending the viewing, the funeral and the spontaneous gatherings which occurred on our porch as friends stopped by to reminisce and console one another. As I later told my brother, the event was the saddest and in many ways, most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

My brother gave a beautiful speech at the funeral during which he recounted a story involving him and Matt during a trip to Greece:

We were at the beach jumping off of rocks into the ocean. We kept finding higher and higher rocks off of which to jump. Finally, we made our way out to a rock a full five-minute swim away from the shore and climbed it. This rock was giant – much higher than any of the others, and when Matt looked at me, he could tell I was scared. Seeing this, he said to me ‘I’m jumping off this rock, and if you don’t jump with me, I’m going to climb back up here and throw you off!’ This story is very indicative of the kind of relationship Matt and I had – he was always pushing me to better myself.

Matt – I knew you as a person, a husband and a father, but most of all as my little brother’s best friend. The most painful thing I have ever experienced is watching the grief your passing is causing him – I’m certain though that the joy your friendship brought him was more than worth the sadness he feels today. Goodbye Matt – we will all miss you very much.

On Kepler and Howell

My favorite undergraduate professor, Dr. Kathleen Howell, spent the first day of each semester explaining the history of orbital mechanics and the lesson we should all take from it.

The ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus was among the first to formulate a theory of the geometry of planetary motion in the 3rd century B.C.E. The geocentric universe he proposed was endorsed by Aristotle who believed that all planets and the sun circled the earth in perfect circles. However, the theory did not explain planetary observations. Some four hundred years later in C.E. 150, the Greek scientist Ptolemy outlined his theory of planetary motion which has come to be known as the Ptolemaic system. Ptolemy expanded Aristotle’s theory by explaining that planets traveled on small circles (epicycles) which were superimposed on their larger orbital circles. Despite years of efforts to calculate the number and characteristics of these epicycles, this theory also failed to explain observations.

Over the course of the next thirteen hundred years, the idea of a geocentric universe slowly fell out of favor as more evidence to support a heliocentric universe emerged. In the early sixteenth century, a Prussian astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus first began to develop significant support for a theory which placed the sun at the center of the universe with planets again laying on epicycles – circles upon circles. Galileo’s endorsement of the Copernican model added even more weight to the idea that our planet earth orbited the sun in a circular orbit. Yet neither the Ptolemaic system nor the Copernican system explained observations no matter how many epicycles were used.

Around the same time, a Danish nobleman named Tycho Brahe was making painstakingly accurate measurements of celestial positions in an effort to determine empirically which system was correct – the Ptolemaic or the Copernican. A lifetime of observation managed only to show that no known combination of circles could account for observations. When Brahe died in 1601, his German assistant, Johannes Kepler inherited the data and continued the necessary observations. It took eight years of pouring over the data for Kepler to finally solve the mystery.

Seventeen hundred years had been spent trying to make theory match observation by changing the orbit’s center, yet nobody thought to challenge the fundamental assumption behind both theories – that orbits were circular. In 1609, Kepler published Astronomia Nova in which his first two laws of planetary motion were detailed. The sun was the center of the solar system, he argued, but planets did not travel in circles - they traveled in ellipses. In 1631, using his three newly formulated laws or orbital motion, Kepler became the first scientist to accurately predict a transit of Venus across the sun (an event which happens only four times every 243 years).

Although he was not able to explain why planets travel in ellipses (that would take Isaac Newton’s laws of motion formulated some 78 years later), Kepler was able to break a 1700 year gap in progress by doing the one thing nobody else thought to do – consider the possibility that the initial assumption was flawed.