Possible Life Sustaining Planet?

Scientists are announcing that they've discovered a planet that appears to be the right distance from its star and the right mass to possibly support life. The NYTimes reports that Gliese 581g (that's pronounced GLEE-za) is about 20 light years from earth. One scientist estimated about a 90% chance it has water on it. Which sounds pretty good, except that you don't want to spent a bazillion dollars on a probe to a planet with only a 90% chance it will find water when it gets there. Just as important as the finding of this planet is that was found relatively easily, but astronomically standards, and they therefore expect to find a bunch more.

The whole thing reminds me of the Drake Equation, which is really an interesting thought expirement. I've blogged about it before, but here it is again:

The Drake Equation:

where:
N is the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R* is the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy
fp is the fraction of those stars that have planets
ne is the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fℓ is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
fi is the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life
fc is the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space
L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
(source)

The Drake Equation, named after Astrophysicist Dr. Frank Drake, is an argument for the existence of life on other planets with whom we could communicate. The argument is based on probability, essentially arguing that if conscious, communicative life could develop on earth, than the probability is greater than zero that it could have developed elsewhere in our galaxy. While the parameters for the equation are somewhat speculative, we do have plausible value that yield a current estimate of....

N = 7 × 0.5 × 2 × 0.33 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10000 = 2.31

In other words, the best guess is that there are 2.31 civilizations in our neighbourhood of the universe capable of communication with us. Of course, if you give different values to the parameters you can make this number go up or down, but it can never be reduced to zero because, in fact, there are people to ask the question!

How cool is that?

-t

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainenance

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values is a well known book by Robert Pirsig which is part travel journal, part philosophy book, part novel. It's really a meditation on lessons learned both in academia and on the back of a motorcycle. Well worth the read.

It comes up in my mind today because Stanley Fish referenced it in his latest blog entry. In it, Fish summarizes Pirsig's phenomenological approach:

Pirsig’s example is describing the parts of a motorcycle, an exercise that has no natural stopping point. But, he insists, no matter how much data the exercise heaped up, true comprehension would still not have been achieved, for the motorcycle “so described is almost impossible to understand unless you know how it works.” Rather than building up from particulars to generals (the empiricist method), you must begin with generals — with an in-place, intuitive awareness of what motorcycles are for, of what can go wrong with them, of what can go right with them — and within that tacit knowledge you will know where to direct your analytic attention. You can’t just begin with analytic attention, with “mere” or “pure” observation, and expect to get anywhere; you must already, in a sense, be there.

The problem is that once the parts or facts are made to appear, they seem to possess an independence, and it is (literally) tempting to rest in them and to believe that they are the foundation of things. (In theology this mistake is called idolatry.) “The division of the world into parts,” says Pirsig, “is something everyone does,” but in doing it, “something is always killed” — and what is killed is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic thought has done its (necessarily) reductive work. (source)

The paradox is that a phenomenological approach, where we begin with what can be grasped will necessarily limit us to what we are able to pay attention to. Inevitably, we will focus on the wrong things. In maintenance terms, when you have a problem you tend to want to make it into a problem you have experience with in the past, even though it may be an entirely new malfunction. Trying to solve this paradox drove Prisig nearly insane.

In Matthew Crawford's recent book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work also uses mechanical labour as a way to explore grand themes of both philosophy and father-son dynamics.

In time, this realization leads him to a position like Pirsig’s, but he holds it polemically and without anxiety: “To regard universal knowledge as the whole of knowledge is to take no account of embodiment and purposiveness.” We should not, he says, “separate knowing from doing,” and it makes sense that his model of the true “knowledge worker” is not his father the theoretician, but the mechanic or craftsman whose knowledge resides in his hands and in his hands-on experience.

It follows then that the modern tendency to move further and further from the site of physical labor (by, for example, designing automobiles on a computer or teaching people to fly in a simulated cockpit) is disastrously wrong. As computer diagnosis takes the place of fiddling around with the machinery, “we have too few occasions to do anything because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.” (source)

Again, a worthwhile read--especially as regards the nature of work and craftsmanship. Though he can be a bit polemical at times.

But we shouldn't loose sight of one of the other main points of these books: relationships between father and son mediated through metal. It's a trope so common as to almost slip into cliché. (Here is a picture of Prisig with his son, Chris, on the trip that became the basis for the book.) Yet I know a lot of men who bonded with their fathers in precisely this way. Indeed, the time spent with my father working on his old TR-3 are a very special memory to me. Other examples abound: a writer helps his son assemble a Shelby Cobra kit as a reward for good grades. A university professor learns to find joy in work again when he reconnects with his motorcycle mechanic father.

It's a form of benign triangulation--introducing a third party into a relationship between two tends to stabilize the emotional system and lower the anxiety in the system. (Cf. Friedman) Other father-son relationships might use sports in the same way. Really, any hobby can function to facilitate the father-son bond.

I don't know how this plays out in mother-daughter relationships. I suspect it is similar, but I've obviously never observed it from the inside. Maybe someone will comment about that.

This is on my mind for obvious reasons. Father's day approaches. And I've been thinking of what kind of father I will be by the time it comes again next year. Obviously, I hope to be a good one, but how does one go about becoming "good" at a thing like parenting without trial-and-error experience? Perhaps for this reason we should just start saving up for therapy now (advice someone gave me on Sunday), and focus instead on the second or third child. By then we may have learned something about the craft of parenting!

-t

Dualist and the Resurrection

I regularly read blogs that discuss the Sunday Bible Readings. My favourite of these is probably the Disclosing New Worlds blog. In the reflection from last week's Sunday readings (Luke 24:36-48) there is this gem:

The key question is whether this world and these bodies of ours have a future with God. It’s a question, therefore, about the meaning and content of salvation. Resurrection says that salvation is recreation - salvation for this world. God could have done at least two things differently. The first is to have abandoned us and our world because we rejected God. Resurrection tells us that God doesn’t do that - even when we have resisted God’s companionship to the point of murdering God’s Son! The second is to abandon creation but not human beings. In this case, salvation would be escape or rescue from the world. God could say, “You are not your bodies. The ‘real you’ is non-material. And this world isn’t ultimately ‘real’ - ultimate reality is another place altogether, called heaven. So let me rescue you from all this mess of creation (bodies, earth etc)”. God, in other words, could be a dualist.

But resurrection is anti-dualist. God isn’t a Hindu, or Buddhist, or classical Greek deity. The Hebrew and Christian God is a God who is inextricably linked to creation by love and a determination to save what has been created. Matter matters! Bodies matter! God embraces body in Jesus (Incarnation) and enters into our world. God becomes part of our world. And God does so in order to save it by transforming it into all that it was always intended to be. (source)

Yes, yes! Matter matters! I can't tell you how often I've preached this point. Yet the latent gnosticism of our culture (or perhaps gnosticism in inherit in some way--an aspect of original sin/existential guilt?) still tries to emerge! Sigh.

I remember eating lunch with Marilyn Adams (hard-core philosopher and theologian) in seminary many years ago and someone asked her about the meaning of bodily resurrection. She replied that she thought this was a teaching about how our distinctness from each other will be preserved in our resurrected state. In other words, our experience autonomy or separateness will have continuity between this world and next. Whereas other things, like the limitations of death or disease, will not have continuity. This is a very powerful teaching that generally doesn't get sufficient press.

-t

Explaining Religion

Last night Betsy and I attended this year's Wiegand lecture at Victoria College (part of the U of T) entitled "Explaining Religion." The Wiegand lecture is always exploring the intersection of science and religion, and this year's speaker, Professor Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford, was applying cognitive science and anthropology to explain the phenomenon of religion. In other words, his life's work is based on the premise that the universality of religion across cultures is the result of the human brain working in a certain way that gives rise to the religious impulse.

On the face of it, the idea that the human brain is wired to interact with a spiritual dimension to life is not a problem for me. I'm not offended by the notion that brains are part of the God thing, which is why it sometimes puzzles me when people freak out when they hear that stimulating certain parts of brain can make someone feel "spiritual" in one way or another. Really, I don't think this undermines the claims made by faithful at all.

But the methods and presumptions that Whitehouse makes in his effort to "explain" religion have a lot of problems. For one thing, the whole category of "religion" is really a modern, Western concept that would be unrecognizable in many other cultures and times. So to arbitrarily group one set of human behavioural and cognitive phenomenon is to determine the outcome ahead of time. Second, he is critical of previous attempts by great thinkers in the humanities to "explain" religion (cf. Freud, Marx, etc.) because they attempted to put the origin of religion on too simple a concept. But even though Whitehouse is arguing for a variety of cognitive features of the brain that give rise to a variety of religious thoughts and behaviours, it's still, at the end of the day, possibly naive to think that all aspects of religion can be explained by a sufficiently complex understanding of cognitive science. In other words, just because you have an excellent dictionary doesn't mean you can "explain" literature. The notion that something like religiosity can be "explained" is also possibly naive.

Another thing I found problematic was the notion that religion is a kind of primitive thing that society and individuals "grow" out of. There was a tendency to infantilize the "primitive" tribes he studied. When a questioner compared them (and Roman Catholics) to "children" he did not correct the notion, but instead cooperated with this line of reasoning. Telling was the questioners ignorance ("as far as I'm concerned the Roman Catholic Church's only purpose is to launder money for organized crime") which made the whole auditorium murmur. Again, Whitehouse felt no obligation to defend the people he studies.

He also excuses himself from existential questions. When one person challenged him on the need to engage notions of value and meaning, he brushed these off like a 19th century botanist compiling a taxonomy of exotic orchids. BHe really believes that he can break down every category of human religious belief and practice and that once he does so he'll see clear connections between these and how the brain is structured. Interesting, but I'm not sure it's possible. Whatever categories he uses will probably turn out to be too arbitrary to allow the kinds of patterns he wishes to see emerge.

Still, he had a couple of things to share. For one thing, there is an inverse relationship between the emotional intensity of a ritual and the frequency with which individuals do it. In other words, the more intense the ritual, less frequently it is performed. This makes a sense, though you might have thought there were communities of people that dedicated themselves to frequent, emotionally arousing rituals. Apparently, we humans aren't built that way.

Another thing he has discovered is that people's tendency to give meaning to ritual (exegesis) is related to the emotional arousal. The more emotionally arousing the ritual, the more people give it meaning. Again, this seems intuitive, but has implications for those of us that make a living acting out rituals.

I really regret that I never took the ritual studies course at Yale. But there was only one year when I could have taken it, and the professor teaching it didn't like me very much (which was weird, since I was a big supporter of hers). Betsy took it and got a lot from it.

-t

De gustibus non est disputandum

I was checking out the "Barter" section of Craig's List Toronto the other day came across this gem:

Funny Barter...But Serious-Ladies...

Date: 2009-03-13, 9:46PM EDT

I've had this wish forever but have done nothing to realize it! Here is what I'm offering.....
Seeking a young (21 to 40) career woman for whom I can buy NICE Ferragamo, Cole Haan, 9 West Pumps for you to wear. Then at the end of the summer, I just want to give you a new pair of shoes in exchange for the old stinky pair. I am willing to do this over, and over! ;) Please, someone attractive, cute, help me realize this fantasy. ;-)
Yes, it is freaky, but smelly heels happen to be my curse of a fantasy. I am an otherwise normal guy with a 9 to 5 job...just love women's foot. Thanks...eagerly awaiting response. (source)

Thing is, I totally sympathize that this "normal" guy who has a a "curse" of a fantasy. He likes what he likes. Stinky shoes aren't my thing, but hey: De gustibus non est disputandum: "There is no accounting for taste. And like all true fetishes, it's completely out of his control. Hence his evident humility and his language of this being a "curse." Poor guy, I genuinely hope he finds someone willing to take him up on his offer of free shoes. It takes serious courage to put an ad like that on the web.

The ad raises all kinds of interesting questions about the nature of desire in the internet age. These days people with the most obscure interests--say collecting photographs of lawn gnomes or building replicas of Captain Kirk's Chair--can connect with each other via the power of the Internet. It's not just that fixations on the most obscure interests are more acceptable, it's that the attention to such interests are being rewarded. These days, if you are obsessing over building the perfect replica TARDIS you can connect with lots of people with precisely complementary interests. In fact, the more obscure the interest, the more rewarding it must be to connect with others who share it.

Growing up as a kind of nerdy guy, I remember alternating between feeling very alone in my interests and yet also very gratified that I knew more about them than most. For instance, the high school version of myself could have sketched out, in detail, how to make basic explosives (nitroglycerin, ANFO, etc.). I wasn't crazy, just curious and capable of backing up that curiosity with a little library research. Of course, I never tried it--partly because my research also revealed how dangerous this stuff is.* Like a lot of people, I think I felt that my passion for learning about the things that interested me isolated me from the mainstream. Probably most people feel this way about some things in life. If I could talk to myself at age 12 or 13 I could say some very reassuring things about just how valuable that curiosity would be. Most of us only really excel when we align our passions with our occupations.

The sad thing is all the people out there who never have an opportunity to pursue their interests. The Internet has made information (on anything) cheaper to attain, but it's still not free! Even if it were possible to give access to everyone, it might not be advisable. As Paul says, all things may be lawful, but not all things are beneficial. In other words, just because we can share secrets, doesn't mean we should! Some knowledge is dangerous. Really. And I'm not just talking about chemistry.

The worst abuse of this knowledge-as-power idea in the realm of religion comes in the form of what Christians have classically called "Gnosticism." At the root, this is a fetish for "secret" initiations and "knowledge" hidden from casual view. it leads to hierarchies of initiation and the notion that some are more advanced than others simply because they have been given access the "secrets" hidden from others. Think of the religious groups that require people to pay to receive the teachings of the "church." But from the Patristic age the Christian mainstream has believed that the wisdom of Christ is available to all who seek it. In that sense, the christian enterprise has always been allied with those who want to share information, not hide it.

Edward Albee spoke once at my college. In the Q&A time I asked him what he thought of those who propose that unlimited access to information leads to chaos in the Internet age. (I admit, I was baiting him to say something pro-openness as I was advocating for greater openness in the College's Internet policies at the time.) Anyway, he startled me with his direct and clear answer: "I'll take chaos over censorship any day." He said it with a ferocity that I felt in the bottom of my spine. He wasn't kidding.

At the end of the day we are all pursing our diverse and arbitrary interests. I sympathize with anyone brave enough to advertise them on Craigslist!

-t

*Closest I ever came to making explosives was (while supervised by my professor) making gun powder based on sugar for a College chemistry class. I had to balance the Redox reaction and then actually mix the stuff and then burn it. The flash was very satisfying.

Donatism and Roland Burris

Stanley Fish wrote an interesting piece of his NYTimes Blog about the application of the theological heresy known as Donatism to the Roland Burris situation.

Burris, as you probably know, was appointed to the U.S. Senate by a state Governor accused of corruption. The argument of many against accepting the Governor's appointment is that his malfeasance "taints" Burris' appointment. The question then becomes, to what degree is the validity of any official act of office dependent upon the purity of the person performing it. In other words, if we accept that Burris' appointment is "tainted" by the Governor's alleged misconduct, are the actions of other disgraced officials also up for review?

This last question is not new. It was debated in the 4th and 5th centuries in the context of what is known as the Donatist controversy. This debate was about the status of churchmen who had cooperated with the emperor Diocletian during the period when he was actively persecuting Christians. The Donatists argued that those who had betrayed their faith under pressure and then returned to the fold when the persecutions were over had lost the authority to perform their priestly offices, including the offices of administering the sacraments and making ecclesiastical appointments. In their view, priestly authority was a function of personal virtue, and when a new bishop was consecrated by someone they considered tainted, they rejected him and consecrated another. (source)

Donatism has always fascinated me. It's one of those heresies that keeps manifesting in subtle forms despite the Gospel. To be clear: sacraments are the work of God and do not depend on a priest's purity to be effectual. If they did, we'd all be in trouble! But God's forgiving and bountiful grace is sufficient to make up for any lack that me or my brother/sister priests may have! That's not to say that the ethics of priests are irrelevant, only that the "taint" of sin is not perpetuated upon the sheep!

One of the philosophical consequences of this contra-Donatist position put forth by St. Augustine is that a certain insulation is introduced between the person and the office they hold. In other words, some actions derive their authority from the office rather that the merit of the person filling it. This is counter-cultural right now, where increasingly people are motivated by the chrism of the officer rather than their relationship to the office. The modern shift is towards privileging relationship over contract.

Another problematic aspect of this understanding is that it emphasizes the duality of official leadership. For instance, when in the 16th century when lawyers for the English Crown argued that the “The king has in him two bodies, a body natural and a body politic.” His body natural is “subject to all infirmities that come by nature,” but his body politic does not have a bodily and imperfect form; rather it consists of “policy and government” that has been “constituted for the direction of the people” (source). This duality can create understandable confusion!

The real question to resolve, as Fish points out, is what kind of framework of judgment ought to be applied in the Burris case.

The legitimacy of an appointment can be either a procedural or a moral matter. If it is a procedural matter, authority is conferred by the right credentials, and that’s that. If it is a moral matter – only the good can be truly authoritative (this was John Milton’s position) – authority is always precarious, and the structures of government and law are always in danger of being dissolved.

The (perhaps paradoxical) truth is that while governing has or should have a moral purpose — to safeguard and advance the health and prosperity of the polity — it is not a moral practice. That is, one engages in it not by applying moral principles but by applying legal principles. Senator Reid and his colleagues in the Democratic party seem finally to have figured that out, which is why, in the absence of any more bombshell revelations, Roland Burris will be seated as the junior senator from Illinois. (source)

See, knowledge of the Church Fathers and the early controversies of the church does have practical value!

-t

Flight Delays

Betsy's parents arrived by car today from Pennsylvania with few difficulties except an hour delay at the border crossing. Her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, however, have had to deal with airport delays. Luckily, I found a very cool website for tracking virtually real-time flight information. FlightAware.com uses real-time data from the ATC (Air Traffic Control) network to provide very detailed flight information. You can even see a track on a map based on transponder and Radar plots made every 60-90 seconds. As I write this I know that USAir flight 1782 is flying at 424 knots climbing through 23900 ft. At least, that's what the airplane's transponder is telling Air Traffic Control. They even overlay weather radar data on the track, so I'm curious to see whether they actually fly around some of the nasty weather in the region.

Today was a long day. Did some stuff at work, then came home to help Betsy get the house ready for family. Some of the finishing touches include hanging pictures that hadn't been hung since we moved in, installing a toddler gate to help keep our nephew managed, hauling in firewood, hauling out garbage, fixing the legs on the sofa, assembling some Ikea furniture Betsy bought today, installing a child seat in our car, etc., etc. Good thing we got so much done yesterday.

Did I mention that I had to adjust the tension for one of the belts in the engine of the car to stop it from squeaking? Doing it as the sun set in the cold was no fun at all--especially when a certain beautiful lady who shall remain nameless managed to drop the socket into an out-of-reach part of the engine compartment. Of course, she redeemed herself by making a tool to retrieve it. In the mean time, the next door neighbor lent me his socket set to complete the fix.

On mind, the Toronto Star article. Should be in tomorrow's paper. Today they asked me for a headshot. I retrieved one. I hope people like it. I worry that some people will feel that I either didn't do enough to defend Christmas from the creeping tide of secularism or just the opposite, that I failed to relate Christianity to the concerns of the wider culture. Actually, I tried to avoid both Scylla and Charybdis on this one by pulling a Hegel: two extremes always give rise to a synthesis that is both and neither. In other words, I tried to abide above the fray. "The Dude abides.. I take great comfort in that" (The Big Lebowski).

Anyway, enough philosophy for tonight. If people like the article I'll be pleased. If they don't, I'll try to be pleased with that, too.

-t