In case you didn’t notice, I took last week off from blogging, both reading and writing. I responded to a couple of comments here to avoid being discourteous. Other than that, I put myself on a strict no-blog diet.
Twyla Tharp‘s book The Creative Habit (via 43 Folders) inspired me to swear off blogs for a week. Her examples of voluntary sacrifices that can foster creativity made it clear that blogs were a perfect choice for me.
My conscience had been nagging me that blogging had become an unbalanced part of my life. My daughters often came to me as I sat on the couch reading blogs and asked to read a book or play with me. I (irritated by the distraction) would brush them aside, “Not now. I’m reading. Maybe later?”
How fucking backwards! My time with my daughters is slipping away one minute at a time, and I feel obligated to get my feed reader down to zero unread posts? That is the very definition of having my priorities upside down.
Blogging is great. I love that people the world over are having conversations. I have let that conversation with relative strangers distract from my relationship with the people closest to me. There have been far too many days where I came home from work and spent no meaningful time with my family because I was blogging.
Blogging also provides an easy way to procrastinate while feeling like I’m accomplishing something. I do my duty to stay an informed citizen by reading blogs while I put off all those projects that intimidated me too much to even start them. The blogosphere kindly provided a never ending supply of new blog posts to read. Meanwhile, I left important things undone.
So I took the week off from blogging. I also took a week off from work and spent my time at home. So what did I do with all that time? I read the newspaper. I caught up on my reading (books). I played with the girls. I watched movies. I did a few chores. We took field trips to museums and state parks. I worked on long neglected projects. I relaxed. I remembered what it was like to live in a world without blogs.
I noticed something. The non-blog stuff that I read or watched was well thought out and lucidly presented. I felt rewarded for my time spent with them. I imagine the creators put their creations through at least two drafts before giving me the finished product. Let’s face it. With occasional exceptions, a lot of the blog world barely makes it through one draft. It’s a world full of rough drafts that we dash off and send out with a spellcheck (maybe) and a smile. It’s easy to waste time on this noisy channel trying to separate out the valuable from the dross.
Perhaps I am judging the blogging world too harshly. It is more like a conversation with friends than reading a book or watching a movie. Even so, I think I should spend less time chatting with friends and more time with my girls while they’re still interested in spending time with dear ol’ Dad, more time romancing my wife, and more time accomplishing something meaningful to me.
So now what?
I’ll make a deal with you blog-o-sphere: I’ll keep reading in moderation and put my posts through at least two drafts when it’s appropriate (I sat on this post all week), if you’ll forgive me for not reading everything that comes my way. Once I can read all my blogs in about 30–45 minutes a day, I’m done. Any new kid on the block who has a chip on his shoulder and something to prove will have to bump someone else off my reading list.
Deal?
]]>In a bit of synchronicity, I watched I Am Legend last night, which revolves in its way around Marley’s music and philosophy of One Love. Marley tried to inject his message into the consciousness of the people who heard his music to cure hatred. In the movie, the protagonist recounts how two days after Marley was gunned down by men trying to stop the One Love Peace concert, he got on stage to sing anyway. When asked why, he explained that the “people that are trying to make the world worse never take a day off, why should [he]? Light up the darkness.”
I may not share Bob Marley’s trust in a God, but that’s a trivial difference between us. It shouldn’t get in the way. We share something more important. Dale McGowan defines a humanist as “somebody who thinks that people should all take care of each other, and whether there is a god or there isn’t, we should spend our time making this life and this world better.” We can all rally around our shared humanity.
So let’s get out there and stir it up.
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I’ve put off writing this post because I wanted to say something eloquent about Sita Sings the Blues, a free-culture movie masterpiece. I couldn’t muster eloquent, so I’ll make due.
Roger Ebert first turned me on to Sita. Sita is a modern take on the Ramayana on the feminist side with vocals by Annette Hanshaw. (I’m a sucker for cross-cultural mashups.) I like it. My girls like it. My youngest regularly requests the “Hindu god movie”.
So go watch it. It’s free!
]]>The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.—Oscar Wilde
I accept that idea with some skepticism. It contains a grain of truth, especially when we create the taboo that tempts us. We all know the power of the forbidden fruit. Tell any one of us that we can’t do something, and suddenly it tempts us.
In The Natural History of Alcoholism, Dr. George E. Vaillant found that cultures which forbid children from drinking and condone adult drunkenness (e.g. Ireland) have much higher incidence of alcoholism than cultures which allow children to occasionally sample alcohol and which look down upon adult drunkenness (e.g. Italy). Further, children from families who forbid drinking at the dinner table but the adults drink elsewhere are seven times more likely to become alcoholics than children who grew up with adults drinking at the dinner table and drunkenness was forbidden.
(I wonder about the incidence of alcoholism among those who completely forbid alcohol.)
What I take away from that study is that in cultures where drinking will take place, it is critical that adults model moderation and make alcohol an ordinary part of life. Making alcohol a rite of passage or a secret pleasure for adults only makes alcoholism more likely.
I want to make a connection to our culture’s attitudes toward sex. I don’t have a study to cite. I have only my own experience of growing up in a culture that treats nudity and sexuality as secret rites of passage and of later rejecting those notions. We display these attitudes everywhere: we label erotic materials as “adult”, you can’t see a woman’s bare breast in a movie until you are 17, and we allow ourselves to be distracted from two wars by a few seconds of Janet Jackson’s nipple because we’re worried that children might have see it. We seem to believe that children would be asexual if not exposed to adult sexuality.
The church of my youth took this further. The LDS church taught me that I shouldn’t allow myself to express my sexuality in any meaningful way until I was a married adult. They made even sexual thoughts taboo. No wonder then that members of that culture have dysfunctional relationships with sexuality. Abuse of pornography runs rampant within the church.
I commend the LDS church leadership for addressing this issue, yet their strategy saddens me:
On the other hand, however—and extremely alarming—are the reports of the number of individuals who are utilizing the Internet for evil and degrading purposes, the viewing of pornography being the most prevalent of these purposes. My brothers and sisters, involvement in such will literally destroy the spirit. Be strong. Be clean. Avoid such degrading and destructive types of content at all costs—wherever they may be! I sound this warning to everyone, everywhere.…
My beloved friends, under no circumstances allow yourselves to become trapped in the viewing of pornography, one of the most effective of Satan’s enticements. And if you have allowed yourself to become involved in this behavior, cease now. Seek the help you need to overcome and to change the direction of your life. Take the steps necessary to get back on the strait and narrow, and then stay there. (Thomas Monson, April 2009 General Conference)
They think it best to heap on more fear and guilt for being a sexual being before you are married. The LDS—and American—fascination with sex results from a perverse set of mixed messages. I fell prey to that fascination as a child and only recently escaped. I appreciate that many of us believe we should protect children from their sexuality while (married) adults can properly enjoy sexuality away from their fragile eyes. But I see an analogy to the cultures that have high levels of alcoholism.
I recently rejected that culture and its mixed messages too. I learned to be titillated by sexual material—a healthy human response—and yet to avoid being swept away by guilt or fear. In truth, sexuality has lost some of its naughty savor as it became an ordinary part of my life enjoyed in moderation.
I suggest that we change our messages about sex to the next generation. Rather than sending them the message that seeing adult nudity is too dangerous for children, we should make nudity perfectly ordinary. I don’t foresee becoming a nudist, but viewing fine art nudes—along with other fine arts—could become an ordinary, nourishing part of childhood. We can divorce nudity from sexuality.
Likewise, we could give balanced information about sexuality and its consequences instead of short, uncomfortable, shamed discussions or over-the-top portrayals of sex in the movies. What our children need is real information.
If pornography becomes epidemic despite all our efforts, we must conclude that what we’re doing doesn’t work. We need to set aside our ideologies and ask ourselves what helps our children to grow up healthy and happy. Perhaps it is time to become more comfortable with sexuality, teaching our children through our examples how to enjoy it responsibly.
]]>This was just an idea floated out there, so I never really wore a rubber band. I had no idea how far the Mormon leadership actually took aversion therapy until recently. Many homosexual youth were subjected to aversive shock therapy in order to convert them to heterosexuality. They viewed graphic homosexual pornography in a laboratory, lab workers shocked them when they became aroused. They would then view heterosexual pornography while soothing music was played. Many of the patients had never viewed such pornography to that point in their lives.
Main Street Plaza recently highlighted a short documentary—Legacies—about men who underwent this therapy.
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Simple fairness tells us that we should all be able to choose whom to spend our life with, who gets to visit us in the hospital, who are our beneficiaries. No matter what our own opinions about those partnerships, we—the recipients of the American birthright—are duty-bound to protect the liberty of all who fall within the influence of our vote.
The commitee will hold a hearing about the bill tomorrow (Friday) at 1:30 PDT, so please take a moment and contact them immediately.
]]>If you want to protect marriage, add your name to the list of those urging the California Supreme Court to reassert that this is a land of freedom and protect 18,000 marriages, because we need to encourage more committed, nurturing relationships, not fewer. I did.
]]>By the way, 500th post!
]]>And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. (Genesis 1:2)
One billion years have passed on the Cosmic Calendar since the Big Bang. Much of that time has been spent in the darkness known as the Dark Ages. The universe created no new light since the time that the photons that were released during Recombination, the time when the primordial plasma of electrons and atomic nuclei coalesced into a sea of hydrogen and helium atoms. The universe continued to expand and cool. From this beginning, we might expect the universe to end in frozen darkness, yet when we look to the heavens we see myriad stars, blazing stellar furnaces.
What happened to change the cold, dark fate of the universe?
The early universe was also very homogeneous. The matter and energy in the universe was spread out smoothly, almost perfectly so. Small fluctuations did exist,1 yet the universe was so smooth—How smooth was it?—it would be like hiking the 4,500 kilometers2 from Los Angeles to New York in an alternate universe where the terrain was flatter than Kansas, like glass. The only landmark to relieve the monotony of the months of hiking across glassy plains would be a single blip of a hill perhaps seven stories tall.3
Yet the universe isn’t so plain and boring now. Everywhere we look we see a riot of diversity and complexity. How did unrelenting plainness become practically infinite diversity?
The Dark Ages weren’t an uneventful chapter in our story. Things were taking shape in the darkness.
Some of the answers to our questions may lie in the colossal inflation of the universe that happened during the Electroweak Epoch. If inflationary theory is correct, those tiny fluctuations in the early universe became the seeds for the structure that we see today. When the universe began to inflate to about 1026 times its size, these quantum fluctuations smaller than atoms got caught up in inflation. They grew to galactic proportions and started in motion the formation of structure.
In its early history, the universe was dominated by the expansion of the Big Bang. As time went on, another force began to assert itself at large scales: gravitation, the force that attracts all particles of matter to each other.4 Inflated quantum fluctuations created some places of greater density where more matter was packed into a small space. Because these places of greater density had more matter, they had greater gravity. Because they had greater gravity, they could attract even more matter. An so on.
In the inky darkness, the first structures began to take shape.
The first structures to form were what we see today as galaxy clusters. Dense clouds of hydrogen and helium gas and dark matter collapsed in on themselves due to the force of their own gravity. Like a runaway train, nothing was yet able to stop this collapse.
Smaller parts of these huge clouds were denser than others and began the process of gravitational collapse at a smaller scale. As the clouds of atoms and dark matter collapsed, they began to spin, forming the first nascent galaxies, including our own Milky Way. As atoms fell into these swirling vortices, they collided with each other. These collisions created heat. The universe began to warm up again.
At the heart of most large galaxies is a supermassive black hole 105 to 1010 times as massive as the sun.5 A black hole is a region of space that is so dense that its tremendous gravity captures everything that comes too close. Even light is unable to escape its gravity once it gets too close.
These monsters had a voracious appetite, consuming tremendous amounts of matter in the early universe. As the black hole eats, it is thought to create very dense regions where the infalling matter has been packed together very tightly. This somehow releases tremendous energy and light. These bright phenomena are known as quasars, the brightest objects in the visible universe. The brightest quasar in our sky would be as bright as the sun if it were 33 light years away, almost 2 million times as far away as the sun. This particular quasar is therefore about 2 trillion times as bright as the sun or 100 times as bright as the average galaxy!
Of the 100,000 known quasars, the nearest to us is 780 million light years away. Most of them are much farther. Quasars were therefore more common in the early universe. Once they run out of matter to consume, quasars turn off. It seems that the age of quasars is over.
Parts of these galaxies were denser than others, so the process of collapse repeated itself yet again at smaller scales. Clouds of gas inside galaxies began to collapse in on themselves and spin just like their parent galaxies had. These spinning clouds of gas were the beginnings of the first stars. As they collapsed, they generated even more heat, enough to strip the electrons from the nuclei of atoms. These proto-stars eventually got dense and hot enough that the bare atomic nuclei began to fuse together to form heavier elements when they collided. When nuclei fuse together, some of their mass is lost and is converted directly into energy and light. Nuclear fusion is what lights the stars.
The stellar furnaces had been lit.
Nuclear fusion is also what finally stops the progress of gravitational collapse. Stellar radiation and heat exerts an outward pressure that balances against the inward pull of gravity. This dynamic equilibrium holds stars together and prevents them from collapsing altogether.
The radiation from newly formed stars began to heat up the gas between the stars. These gaseous atoms also lost their electrons and became ions again. The atoms were ions when they first formed, before they trapped electrons during Recombination. Today, almost all of the visible matter in the universe is ionized. For this reason, this period of reheating is known as Reionization, the time when the universe lit itself again and came out of the Dark Ages. On the Cosmic Calendar, this period began on January 5th and lasted until about today, the 27th (13,550–12,700 million years ago).
That is how the cosmos came to have the shape and light that we see.
As I began with a biblical passage, I must end with the Galaxy Song. How amazingly unlikely is our birth indeed!
We will continue our story at the end of August.