Can Aliens Watch TV?

We live in a world of perception that our minds create.  While there is a real world out there, what we perceive of it is highly filtered and interpreted.  Our technological devices are tuned to our minds and senses to recreate something like what we experience from our perceptions of the real world.  They do not reproduce nature exactly, but only good enough to fool our senses.  An intelligent alien species visiting our world would not necessarily perceive the output of our technological devices the same way we do, nor would this output necessarily match their direct perceptions of the world.

Our TVs only produce three different colors: red, green, and blue.  With these three colors, our TVs are able to reproduce the sensation of any color we are capable of sensing.  This little economical trick is made possible not because of the inherent properties of light, but because of the inherent properties of our eyes.  In other words primary colors have nothing to do with the physics of light, but everything to do the eyes and the brain.

Our eyes have four different types of light-sensitive cells.  One type of cell, commonly called a rod, is very sensitive to visible light but can only distinguish varying levels of intensity.  Three other types, the cones, require higher levels of light, but they allow us to distinguish different colors because each type of cone is sensitive to a different range of frequencies.  One type of cone is most sensitive around the red range, another is sensitive near green, and a third near blue.  There is overlap.  Both the red cones and the green cones are stimulated by spectral yellow.  This allows our devices to fool our eyes and minds into seeing yellow by mixing red light and green light.  From a physics standpoint, red and green mixed is not the same as yellow, but we cannot distinguish these two cases.  The graph below shows the approximate range of sensitivity for each of the three types of cone cells.

Primary colors come in two types as shown in the image below.  Mixing light has an additive effect (shown on the left) while mixing pigments has a subtractive effect (shown on the right).

Because TVs mix light, this effect is additive (i.e. red and green make yellow, red and blue make magenta, and blue and green make cyan).  To make white we mix all three primary colors (red, green, and blue) at their full intensity.  Mixing them evenly at lower intensity levels produces gray while black is merely no light at all.  White from the TV has a fundamentally different quality compared with white from the sun.  White from the sun contains all frequencies while white from the TV only has red, green, and blue, but these whites still look the same to our eyes.

Mixing pigments takes away light.  Each pigment absorbs different frequencies so mixing them together combines these effects.  Magenta pigment absorbs green light and yellow absorbs blue light.  When these pigments are mixed, all but the red light are absorbed.  Magenta, yellow, and cyan are the three primary pigment colors used by modern printers.  There are many possible primary color schemes for pigment, but the magenta-yellow-cyan scheme works better than the red-yellow-blue scheme most of us learned in grade-school art class.  Artists know very well that you cannot mix every possible color with only red, yellow, blue, black, and white paint.  This is why oil paints come in so many different colors.

Once again, the reason mixing colors works, whether light or pigment, is because of the way our eyes work.  Our intelligent alien visitors may have eyes that work differently.  They might have a wider or narrower range of frequencies they can see.  They might see infrared or ultraviolet, or they might not even see the red or violet that we see.  They might only distinguish intensity, or they may have greater or lesser color acuity because they have more or fewer light sensitive cells analogous to our cones.  For example, if they had four cones, they might need a primary color scheme of four colors to display all the colors they can perceive.  There is no guarantee that they will look at our TVs and at the corresponding natural scene and perceive them as the same scene.

Besides color, there are other considerations as well.  We view TV at 30 frames per second and movies at 24 frames per second.  This works with the frame rate and persistence of vision characteristic of our brains to create the illusion of smooth motions.  Our alien visitors' brains may have a faster frame rate and they might see the flicker in our devices, which could be so distracting to them that they do not see or enjoy the action the way we do.  All this would also be true of our visitors' technological devices.  Their devices would be tuned to their brains and we might not perceive the output of their devices at all they way the aliens perceive it.

So whose version of reality would be more correct?  Both and neither.  Both we and our alien visitors evolved perception mechanisms suitable to our respective worlds which enabled us to survive and develop a technological society.  In a practical sense, perception is reality, just as in politics.  At the same time, it is not possible for either of our perception mechanisms to completely represent the real world.  That would be too much information to process.  Instead, evolution gives us just enough to survive better than the alternative while working within practical limits.

Comparing ourselves with a hypothetical alien species is an exercise in imagining whether things are as they must be, or only as they happen to be in our particular case.  This is just another way of moving us further from the position we once occupied at the center of the universe before Copernicus and Galileo removed us from that spot more than 400 years ago.

Why Don't We Just Run Cars on Hydrogen?

Sometimes when I talk to my kids about energy-related issues, they may propose a solution that seems quite simple and obvious to them.  The problem is that the real issues may be more complex than they appear on the surface and may require some foundational knowledge to fully understand.  One such potential solution to our energy needs is hydrogen-powered cars.  Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel and is certainly plentiful given all the hydrogen that exists in Earth's oceans.  Why do we not just use hydrogen to solve our energy problems?

To understand why we do not use hydrogen more as a fuel, we need some basic chemistry knowledge.  Burning is a chemical reaction where energy is released.  When hydrogen is burned, oxygen atoms from the atmosphere each combine with two hydrogen atoms to form water as a waste product while giving off heat in the process.  Other chemical reactions consume energy rather than release energy.  The problem with hydrogen is that it is very light and very reactive.  All of the hydrogen on earth has either floated away into space because it is so light, or it has bonded with other atoms and requires at least as much energy to release as what we get from burning it.

Hydrogen then can be a convenient way to store energy, like a battery, but it is not a source of energy.  Extracting hydrogen from water takes as much energy as we recover from burning it.  It is like using boulders rolling down a hill as a source of energy.  The problem is they are all currently lying at the bottom of the hill.  We could push them to the top of the hill and then use them, but then we might as well just use the energy directly that we used to push them up the hill.

The only reason we might prefer the rolling boulders is that they give us a lot of energy fast while the process of pushing them up is longer and slower even though the total energy is equivalent (minus whatever is lost through inefficiency).  This is why hydrogen is sometimes used as rocket fuel.  The real source of energy was the coal that generated the electricity that was used to extract the hydrogen from water.  But the hydrogen works much better as rocket fuel because it can release its energy much faster.

Backing up even further, the energy in the coal ultimately came from the sun.  Prehistoric plants used photosynthesis to convert sunlight into chemical energy that was eventually buried, becoming the fossil fuels we use as our primary energy source today.  The energy from the sun comes from hydrogen, so in essence we are already running everything on hydrogen.  The difference is that the process that generates energy in the sun is nuclear rather then chemical.  Chemical processes only rearrange atoms.  Nuclear reactions change one kind of atom into another either by combining nuclei (fusion) or splitting nuclei (fission).  For elements lighter than iron, fusion releases energy, while elements heavier than iron release energy with fission.  The amounts of energy are several orders of magnitude greater than those involved with chemical reactions.

Unlike regular burning of hydrogen, nuclear fusion could provide us with all the energy we would ever need.  The problem is that extremely high temperatures and close proximity are required to start and sustain a reaction.  Stars do this with gravity, but it is not so easy on earth.  So far the only way we have been able to use the energy of nuclear fusion is in thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs.  These blow themselves apart by design.  To sustain the reaction and produce usable energy we would have to hold it together.  This is a challenge we have yet to resolve.

Orbital Dynamics

As a follow up to some of my previous posts about space flight, I have decided to discuss orbital dynamics.  The general public is grossly misinformed about real space flight thanks to so much misinformation in movies and on TV.  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an excellent tutorial here for those who want to get into even more detail about space flight.

Why discuss orbital dynamics?  Because every body in the universe is in orbit around something. Furthermore, orbital dynamics are interesting because they are so non-intuitive when it comes to maneuvering a space ship. Understanding orbital dynamics is essential to real space flight.

Johannes Kepler discovered by observation that planets follow elliptical orbits around the sun.  Isaac Newton showed that elliptical orbits are a consequence of the inverse square law of gravity.  More generally, orbits are conic sections.  When you throw a baseball, its path is a parabola.  A comet that only approaches the sun once, and then heads for interstellar space is following a hyperbolic curve.

If two space craft are orbiting the earth in the same orbit, but separated by some distance, how can they rendezvous or send items back and forth.  MIT Professor Walter Lewin discusses this problem in his ham sandwich lecture, which is posted online here.  As Lewin states it, how do you throw a ham sandwich to the hungry astronaut in the space ship that is in orbit ahead of you?  You might want to just throw it toward him, but that would put the ham sandwich into a higher orbit, thus ultimately slowing it down and sending it further away from the hungry astronaut.  The right way to send him the ham sandwich is to throw it backwards, away from his space ship.  This would initially slow down the ham sandwich, but then it would pick up speed as it fell into a lower orbit.  If done just right, the elliptical orbit of the ham sandwich would intersect the more circular orbit of the hungry astronaut's space ship at just the right time on the next orbit.

The astronauts in the Gemini program in the 60s, the first to execute a rendezvous in earth orbit, had to learn to go contrary to their intuition.  The first required maneuver was to match the plane of the target.  Next, it was necessary for the perusing ship to be in a lower orbit so it could gain on the target.  Once the target was in sight, the astronauts had to fight their natural tendency to fire thrusters to move their space ship toward the target.  Instead, they needed to maintain their lower orbit, only pulling up into the same orbit as the target at exactly the right moment.  Of course, this is all old hat now for real astronauts, but the complex and intricate details are not always fully appreciated by a general public fed with a steady diet of Star Trek and Star Wars.

Orbital dynamics also come into play in planning trajectories for interplanetary travel, but that is a subject for another post.  If you can't wait until then, check out the JPL Space Flight Tutorial I mentioned previously.

Common Sense

Everyone seems to know what common sense is, but no one has ever been able to fully explain to me exactly what they mean by it.  One idea about common sense that I have gleaned from the various opinions I have surveyed is that it is something that cannot be taught.  You either have it or you don't.  Another is that it is somehow inversely related to formal education.  Often people who are lauded as having common sense do not have much formal education while the highly educated are sometimes thought to lack it.  Common sense seems to be a type of knowledge, but which specific knowledge constitutes common sense seems to vary from one individual to another.

My ex-father-in-law was someone who was said to have a lot of common sense.  He did not have formal education beyond high school, but he ran successful businesses and made wise investments, and thus accumulated enough money to retire very early and be quite comfortable.  He also had the fortune to invest in real estate during a time when values were always rising, a condition that no longer always holds true.  My impression of him was that he was very intelligent, hard working, and constantly learning about things that were important to him.  I don't think he was born with the knowledge he had.  Perhaps common sense in this case means learning from life experience and from paying attention to things rather than in a formal classroom setting.  I am not sure why we need to make this distinction.  To me, knowledge is knowledge regardless of how we acquire it.

When my oldest son was preparing to take the written driving exam to get his learner's permit, his friend dissuaded him from studying by telling him that it is all just common sense.  My son took the test and failed.  Then he studied the material and passed it.  So does he lack common sense because could not pass the test without studying?  Did he acquire common sense after he studied, or does that not count?  Maybe only those who pass the test without the need for study are the ones with common sense.  I suspect that this friend had already acquired the knowledge in other ways.  Maybe his parents talked to him about things and he paid attention.  This same son is very good at strategy games.  No one can ever beat him.  He seems to have an intuitive knack for it.  This probably just seems like common sense for him.

Reflecting on these and other experiences, I think I might be seeing a common thread to what people mean when they speak about common sense.  The best I can figure out is that it means "what is obvious to me."  Any two people will have some knowledge in common, and other knowledge that is unique.  My wife was playing a game on a mobile device and called her daughter for help on one of the levels.  Her daughter's response was, "You're having trouble with that one?!"  She found one of the levels difficult that her daughter found easy.  The rest of the story is that her daughter had already gone through a similar game consisting of maybe 100 levels and this was my wife's first one and she was perhaps on level 16.  There are many other subjects where the roles would have been exactly reversed.  We all know different things.

This leads me to the main reason for writing this post in the first place.  People sometimes express incredulity that someone else does not know something that is obvious to them.  This is often what gets labeled as common sense.  I think that this reaction is unkind and unnecessary.  In almost every case, the roles could be reversed if the subject were different.  The concept of common sense seems to be very egocentrically defined.  A better reaction would be kindness, patience, and the willingness to share our knowledge without making any value judgements about what others ought to know.  The flip side of this is the willingness to learn something from every person we meet.  Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up this idea very well.  “In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him."

Navigating an Asteroid Field

In "The Empire Strikes Back" Han Solo navigates his Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field to escape star destroyers.  Since then, a number of other TV shows and movies have depicted similar crossings through asteroid fields where a space ship weaves through to avoid collisions.  How likely is a scenario such as this?

We do not have first hand knowledge of any actual asteroid fields similar to the one from Star Wars.  In our solar system, we have an asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but it is far more sparsely populated than the one depicted in Star Wars.  The average distance between asteroids is about 1 million miles.  All of our space probes have passed through it without incident and with no course corrections needed.  The probability of encountering even a single asteroid is remote, unless we explicitly set out to do so.

The asteroid belt was denser in the early solar system, but still nothing like the asteroid field from Star Wars.  Structures like that would be unstable.  Collisions would tend to knock asteroids further apart until they were far enough apart to make collisions a much more rare occurrence.  There are stable points of gravitational equilibrium called Lagrange points where debris could accumulate forming something as dense as that depicted in Star Wars, but these would not extend over a large area and would be very easy to avoid altogether.  Lagrange points are in known locations relative to large celestial bodies.

Perhaps it is possible for a dense asteroid field to exist for a short time before repeated collisions drive the asteroids further apart.  If so, it would always be much simpler to navigate around it rather than through it.  If it was uncharted and you came upon it suddenly, the speed differential between you and the asteroids would likely be so great that there would be no time to react before your spaceship was obliterated.  Bodies in space travel at extremely high velocities relative to each other unless they are in the same orbit around a planet or star.

The only way to produce the scene from Star Wars is to nearly match the speed of the asteroids with your spaceship before attempting to navigate through.  However, it would not look anything like that depicted on Star Wars.  The Star Wars spaceships fly more like airplanes than spaceships, which real spaceships cannot do because there is no air to push against (see blog post Spaceships That Fly Like Spaceships).  It would be more like navigating the spaceship in the old arcade game, Asteroids, but more complex because you would be dealing with three dimensions rather than two, and without the option of shooting the asteroids.

Remember also that if you have to flee from an enemy in space, you have many more possibilities than you do on the surface of the earth because you can fly in three dimensions.  It is difficult to get our minds wrapped around the possibility of traveling freely in three dimensions because we are too accustomed to traveling gravity-bound on the surface of the earth.  It is true that we can go short distances in the third dimension, but our travel on earth is predominantly in only two.  In space you could travel forever in a third dimension.

If you just need to get from point A to point B, it should be no problem to simply plan your course around the asteroid field.  Because of the way these type of structures might form, they are likely to lie in the same plane, meaning that you could just adjust your plane of travel by a small amount to get around it.

So even though the scene from Star Wars would likely never need to occur, no matter how advanced our technology, it still makes for an exciting action sequence.

The Perfect Diet Plan

Several years ago I bought a book called Games for the Superintelligent by James F. Fixx.  It contains all kinds of games and puzzles that usually require some twist or non-intuitive creative leap to solve.  The book contains an introduction entitled, "The pleasures of intelligence, and some incidental perils," that relates some amusing anecdotes featuring very intelligent people.  One of the stories theorizes a creative way to lose weight as follows.

Intelligence can cause trouble, too, by teasing the mind into supposing it can solve problems that in fact may defy solution.  One bright man, a person who on occasion enjoys a drink or two, addressed himself to the problem of losing weight while continuing to drink, with, in his own works, the following results.

"Losing weight, of course, is a matter of burning up more calories than you take in.  A calorie, as everyone knows, is defined as 'the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree centigrade'

 "Let us take a good glass of Scotch and soda.  Since a gram of water is pretty close to 1 cc (to make it simple), put in plenty of ice and fill it up to about six or seven ounces, making it, say, 200 cc.  Since it contains melting ince, its temperature must be 0 degrees centigrade (negleting the temperature lowering effects of alcohol, Scotch, and gas).

"Sooner or later the body must furnish 7400 calories (200 cc * 37 degrees C) to bring it up to body temperature.  Since the calorie-counter books show Scotch is 100 calories per shot, and club soda as 0 calories, we should be able to sit around all day, drinking Scotch and soda, and losing weight like mad.

 "P.S.: I tried this and it didn't work."  So much for the power of pure reason.

When I read this, I immediately saw the flaw in the proposed diet plan and why it did not work.  The author was too quick to give up on reason and logic because they were not the problem.  The author never reveals the flaw.  It bothered me that a book supposed to be for the superintelligent contained an error like this.  I thought of writing the author, until I saw that the book was published in 1972.  I am sure that the author did receive mail about this and I was far too late.  The author says that some problems defy solutions.  He may be right, but this one is not an example of a problem that defies solution.  His concluding remark, "So much for the power of pure reason" disturbed me the most.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the reasoning in this case or with reasoning in general.  The reasoning is sound and the math is all correct.  There is just one tiny factual error that invalidates the whole argument.

The fact that I caught the error means nothing more than me knowing a trivial fact that the Scotch drinker and the author did not.  It does not make me more intelligent than either of them.  It does, however, illustrate how easy it is to make errors that can lead to completely wrong conclusions, even for intelligent people.  I am not sure how common the knowledge of the key fact is in this case.  The only reason that I remembered it is because of an experiment I did in a seventh grade science class.

In my science class we were attempting to measure the caloric content of food by burning it and measuring the rise in temperature of a beaker of water.  My partner and I burned a piece of a walnut.  After performing the required calculations we came up with a figure of something like 3500 calories for the walnut piece.  I was pretty sure that this could not possibly be correct.  I showed our results to the teacher, explaining that I thought we made a mistake somewhere.  He said that we probably got it right because it was a reasonable answer.  He then explained the key fact that reveals why the Scotch drinker's diet does not work.

If you already know the fact I learned that day in seventh grade science, then you already know why the diet does not work.  The Scotch drinker was using calories (with a little "c") to calculate how much energy the body would have to expend to raise the temperature of the Scotch and soda while the Calories in the Scotch (with a big "C") are actually kilocalories.  A food Calorie is 1000 of the calories defined as the amount of heat it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.  So the 7400 calories he thought he was burning were only 7.4 Calories, hardly enough to make any difference at all for weight loss.  An equivalent way to look at it is that the Scotch contains 100,000 calories (with a little "c").  Either way, he was consuming much more than he was burning.

Now that I know more about the Calorie content of walnuts, I think my seventh grade measurement was too low.  It should have been more like 20-30 Calories rather than 3.5.  This may have been partly because we did not completely burn the walnut and because the heat transfer from flame to water was not perfectly efficient.  Some of the heat escaped into the air and some of it heated the beaker.  It could also be that we made an arithmetic error or that the walnut was smaller than I remember.  I have no way now to go back and check.  My science teacher, however, knew the results typically attained from past classes so he knew that our results were in the ballpark.  At least they were not off by a factor of 1000 as the Scotch drinker's were.

Spaceships That Fly Like Spaceships

Science fiction movies and TV shows consistently get many things wrong about flying a spaceship. Some of these errors may be intentional for ease of filming or to make things more visually appealing or intuitive for the Earth-bound audience, while some may be from ignorance.  The main issue I want to discuss here is that spaceships in movies and television fly like airplanes rather than spaceships.  This is true for practically every movie and TV show I have ever seen depicting space flight, which makes it all the more striking that one show finally got it basically correct.

First of all, let's address what most shows get wrong.  There is absolutely no reason for a spaceship to have wings unless it sometimes flies in the atmosphere of a planet.  When does so, it can and should fly like an airplane.  But in space it should still fly like a spaceship.  That means that it needs maneuvering thrusters to control its attitude along all three axes of rotation (roll, pitch, and yaw) as well as a powerful main engine.  There is no reason for a spaceship to bank when it turns.  There is nothing in space for the wings to push against.  The only thing that a spaceship can do to change its velocity (which consists of both speed and direction) is to fire its main engine or rely on the gravitational pull of a planet or star.  Very small changes in velocity can be accomplished with thrusters alone (when docking, for example), but large changes require the main engine.  The thrusters are primarily for attitude control to point the main engine in the right direction for firing.

So how could a real spaceship execute something like a 90 degree turn?  There would hardly ever be a reason for such a maneuver.  Trajectories are carefully planned because adjustments are very costly.  Furthermore, it would be difficult to define what a 90 degree turn in space is.  It would need to be relative to something.  Everything is in motion: every star, every planet, every asteroid, and every comet.  If they were not in motion, gravity would pull them all together.  There is no such thing as absolute rest (something every Star Trek series got wrong with their "full stop" commands).

So ignoring these difficulties for a moment, lets execute a 90 degree turn.  We will ignore gravity (which we can never do in the real universe) and execute a 90 degree turn in a hypothetical gravity-free coordinate system.  Lets suppose we are traveling at 20,000 mph in the y direction.  In order to turn so that we are now traveling at 20,000 mph in the x direction, what do we do?  We cannot simply bank and turn using our current momentum.  We have to completely stop our momentum in the y direction and then get it going in the x direction.  We can do this with a combination of maneuvers or with a single maneuver.  With a single maneuver, we would use thrusters to point our spaceship so its nose is pointed towards the positive x and negative y direction at a 45 degree angle (towards quadrant IV in a Cartesian coordinate system).  We would then fire for the appropriate amount of time.  We could calculate the firing length ahead of time using vectors.  Alternately, we can point our ship backwards relative to our direction of travel and fire our engine until our velocity is 0.  Then we can point our nose in then new direction and fire our engine until our new velocity in that direction is 20,000 mph.  Either way we do it would consume exactly the same amount of fuel because two directions of motion are independent from a physics standpoint.  It is also exactly the amount of fuel required to completely reverse our direction and go back where we came at the same speed.

Real spaceships fly in 3 dimensions similar to the way the spaceship flies in 2 dimensions in the classic arcade game, Asteroids.  The only thing the Asteroids spaceship gets wrong is the inertia of rotation.  In a real spaceship you fire thrusters to start rotating and then you have to fire again to stop it.  Just like our simple example, the Asteroids game ignores gravity.  In the real universe we cannot ignore gravity because it affects every trajectory.  When a spaceship leaves planetary orbit, it is still in orbit around a star.  When it leaves a solar system, it is still in orbit about the center of the galaxy.  Galaxies and galaxy clusters mutually orbit each other also.  Our spaceship is part of this complex system of orbits within orbits and nothing is at rest.  We can usually just take into account the most dominant gravitational body, but the point is that we are always orbiting something, even if our orbit is hyperbolic.  Orbital dynamics can be very non-intuitive, but that is a subject for another time.

So which show gets it right?  It is not always exactly right, but very often the small fighters in Battlestar Galactica fly almost like real spaceships.  They use thrusters to control their attitude and they do not always point in their direction of travel.  They tumble without changing their velocity.  Sometimes you can see them adjusting their attitude and then firing their main engine to maneuver.  The trajectories and maneuvers are much more like those of a real spaceship than any other show I have seen.  Above all, they do not turn by simply banking and continuing to basically fly forward.  They do have wings, but that is because they are capable of flying in a planetary atmosphere.  I am sure that this was no accident.  Undoubtedly, they had good advisors and chose to try for greater realism, at least in this one area.

The Power of Conviction

It is a curious fact that, in my observation, people seem to have strong convictions only about that which is unknown or even unknowable.  Imagine someone expressing the conviction that the force of gravity follows an inverse square law.  We just do not hear people expressing strong convictions about well-established facts on which there is widespread agreement.

People express convictions about religion, politics, the best way to raise children, the best sports teams, and the best schools to attend.  You do not typically hear convictions expressed about the general theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, or the atomic structure of matter.  These ideas have been very carefully built up from piles of evidence and careful, rigorous logic.  There is no need for convictions.

The very fact that someone feels a need to express a conviction is, to me, an admission that something is a shaky proposition.  In other words, strength of conviction typically does not correlate with the actual probability that something is true, but usually quite the opposite.  I would even add one more category to those on which people typically express convictions: unknown, unknowable, and demonstrably false.

Many convictions do not really deal with truth at all in any objective way.  Some convictions are about how we ought to best treat each other.  This is part of the broader categories of ethics and morals.  I do have opinions about this that may rise to the level of convictions, and I will likely express them at some point.  However, this is more human convention than anything else.  It does not go against my assertion that strength of conviction is unrelated to truth.

I have not yet mentioned God, so I will do that now.  Some people have the conviction that they speak for God or that they know what God wants other people to do.  These convictions may include God's word being available in a particular book.  These types of claims are many and varied.  I do not doubt the strength of convictions such as these.  What I question is that the strength of a conviction constitutes proof of anything whatsoever.

My approach to questions of God and religion is pragmatic.  Do what works for you.  Do what helps you make sense of things and helps you find meaning, and leave me free to do the same.  Above all, do not assume that what you have found to work for you necessarily works for everyone, and give up the notion that it represents any sort of absolute universal truth.  It is enough that it works for you.

Remember that your strength of conviction proves nothing.  Of course, I have merely been expressing my convictions on this subject.  So you are free to take it or leave it.  I have not proved anything either.

Meeting My Soulmate

Five years ago this month is my fifth wedding anniversary.  My sweetheart and I found each other on the New Order Mormon message board.  We sent our first emails on Valentines Day 2007.  We carried on a long-distance relationship, flying to see each other as often as we could afford, until we were married later that year.  While driving back home to Colorado after our honeymoon, I received and accepted a job offer in California.  Less than a month after we were married, we were together in California

My wife and I have so many important things in common that it seemed unreal when we first started discovering this.  We are both former Mormons and both of us were divorced by our former spouses when we could no longer accept all the beliefs of that faith. We are both accomplished musicians.  We both love to read and listen to audio books.  We both love to learn.  She also has two bachelor's degrees and recently finished a master's degree.  I was intrigued when we first started writing that her degrees were in psychology and sociology and yet she taught high school math and had also taught chemistry, band, and choir.  When I was a freshman in college and first heard of the concept of a renaissance man, I decided that's what I wanted to be.  It was exciting to find a real renaissance woman with interests as diverse as my own and with so much overlap.

Our common interests are not the best part.  The best part is that she is so genuinely kind and compassionate with nothing but the best intentions toward every living creature.  That would have been enough even if we did not share so many interests.  We share a deep emotional bond because our experiences growing up affected us so similarly.  We can each empathize with the other in almost any situation.

After five years we are still deeply in love.  It has felt like one long honeymoon since the day we were married.  After my first marriage, I did not know that this was possible.  Life can be surprising.

Introduction

Hello.  This is my first blog post ever.  I am interested in a wide variety of subjects.  I am a musician and a software developer.  I am a former Mormon, and now a practicing Catholic (practicing as in trying to get better).  However, I do not define myself by my career or my religion.  I insist on deciding what to think for myself rather than parroting some organization.

Although I am a registered Democrat, I do not define myself by that party's platform.  I used to be a registered Republican and my current views overlap both parties.  I decide what to think on an issue by issue basis.  On a great number of topics I have no opinion at all.  I don't have enough information.  I have some strong opinions and many non-opinions.  I do not feel compelled to have an opinion on every subject.

I love learning and never plan to stop.  I have two bachelor's degrees in unrelated subjects.  I also have a master's degree and almost a second, again unrelated.  I have studied other subjects in enough depth to have other degrees, which is not hard in today's free information climate.  The more I learn, the more ignorant I feel.  Not all learning expands the mind.  We can become so wrapped up in what we think we know that we close ourselves to other possibilities.

Max Planck, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, said "science advances one funeral at a time."  This is a testament to the difficulty we humans have of changing our minds and letting go of dearly held beliefs, regardless of how much evidence mounts against them.  I aspire to try to buck that trend, but who knows whether or not I succeed.  I am too close to my own thoughts to perceive them objectively.  Probably the best I can hope for is to know that I know nothing, as Socrates did.