Social != Socialist

Right now I'm buzzing on about 1400% of my daily allotment of vitamin B (thank you odwalla), so please excuse any incoherency in my writing.

Today was an exquisitely awesome day. The awesomeness is due to it being a Friday. The exquisiteness is due to a couple friends I was able to hang out with this evening.

Wait... I forgot the weather... make that an incredibly exquisite and awesome day.

The awesomeness and incredibleness need no further explanation, but let me speak to the social aspect of the day. Introverted guy that I am, it takes the persistence of a tidal current to pull me from the deep, dark crevice in which I make my abode. Thankfully, my cousin Linnae possesses persistence in rare quantities. She and her boyfriend Jeff took me for a grand tour of the OSU campus, including the library, dorms, cafeteria, and stadium. Oh, and we also toured an excellent frozen yogurt place off of Monroe avenue. Highly recommended (the yogurt place, not the campus). Just kidding.

You'll be glad to know that OSU has a building dedicated to César Chávez. He's my role model for all things socialist. [/sarcasm]

Here and Now

Today I reviewed my life plan. Wow. It made me cringe to think how ostentatious I was when I wrote it. It's a very self-centered document, focused around my desires, wishes, and goals with very little regard to God's kingdom. Personal goals are good, but they should do more than provide mere window-dressing or lip-service to the Author of the Universe.

Well... I won't say that the entire document was out of whack. Getting married by age 25 would be a good thing, though the timing is ultimately up to God. Doing some domestic traveling in my mid-30's would be excellent, though I'd be better served by traveling with a Godly ulterior motive.

Over the past few weeks, I've been thinking about life.  For some reason, God's pointed me in a very tech-oriented direction for now. He doesn't seem to be leading me into the ministry, or long-term missions. My one-time Ph.D. ambitions seem to have been misplaced, so a life of academia won't be mine either.

Where does He seem to be leading? Well, He's instilled in me a love for my country, and a patriotic spirit desiring a respect for God to be expressed by our people once again. It may be that He wants me to serve in some kind of political role, to somehow apply a proper understanding of history to the problems we face as a country.

I'm not a great debater or exegetical master, but I know what I believe and am willing to state it publicly. As a youth, I lack the wisdom that comes with years, and the authority that comes of serving in a leadership role. Nevertheless, in the years and decades to follow, I want to learn to be a leader of men, to be a scholar of truth, and to be a champion of Jesus Christ.

In my life plan, I had written that "by the age of 55...I will begin to scale back my work load". This is folly. The world says that when your prime of life is over, there's nothing left but taking it easy for the remainder of life. Duties shift, certainly, but retirement is not a concept taught in Scripture. At the age of 55, Ronald Reagan stepped into the political arena by being elected governor of California. Fourteen years later, he would assume the most powerful office in the world, bringing to bear a passion and eloquence that would ensure a legacy lasting far beyond his death.

God has the ultimate perspective on life. In 30 years, He knows exactly where you should be serving, and He knows exactly what needs to happen now to get you there. Trust his will, and there's no limit to how He can use you.

It looks like I'll be doing a rewrite of my life plan.

The Nemesis of Noise

I'm a quiet guy. Very quiet. I tiptoe around in bare feet, make a game of closing doors such that the latch doesn't click back in place, and have a broom within two feet of my smoke detector at all times.

This is why my morning routine is so out of character.

Every morning, I head for the kitchen, grab fruit, yogurt, and milk from the refrigerator, and pull out the blender. Blenders are very noisy. My antithesis in a way. They seem to take a fiendish delight out of notifying all living organisms within a half-mile of their existence. If you throw in a half-pound of frozen strawberries, that radius increases to a mile... at least.

For a couple months now, I've been stumped by this problem. Living next door to the manager has given me a unique perspective on noise, and I try to avoid it as much as possible. However, hitting the "liquify" button once a day hasn't done much to help my cause. Yesterday, I hit on a solution.

1. Grab a full-size towel from the bathroom
2. Fold it in half, length-wise
3. Fold it in half, width-wise
4. Wrap it around the base and sides of your misbehaving blender
5. Turn on the machine

Eureka! It helped to drastically reduce my noise footprint. Maybe I should patent my discovery...

In other news, I had a screening interview today with FEI. They called again around 4:00pm to let me know they'd like to have an in-person interview with me on Friday. As much as I love pushing buttons on a screen all day, if this position involves the slightest amount of coding, I'm probably ready for a career change.

Home and Reality

I stayed at my parent's home over the weekend. It was a bitter-sweet experience, full of perspective.

On the one hand, I'd kind of forgotten how much stress and conflict there is in a large family such as mine. There are personality clashes, unlimited demands on limited time, and dying chickens. Familial unity often seems like a fleeting fantasy, and makes one consider a solitary existence with Kodiak bears in the Alaskan wilderness.

On the other hand, the beauty and tranquility of the country was very soothing and relaxing. Also, as much as relationships can be stressful, they can also be a source of great joy and companionship. For me, the time away from family has helped to cement the reality of this. People need to be around other people. Not strangers, but those to whom they can relate, strengthen, and draw from in time of need.

All things considered, I guess my time at home felt more "real" than my shuttered lifestyle down here in Corvallis. There aren't any relational problems (well, mostly), life is regular and predictable (a.k.a. boring), and the food is definitely sub-standard (raw, fried, and blended foods are good and well, but there are only so many combinations one can make with bananas and apples). It's a sterile existence, but a good time for pondering life and making difficult decisions.

Without a doubt, Christians are never really alone, for God is with them. If you put yourself in a position where you're forced to spend time alone with God, He will be found when you seek Him. It's to my detriment that I haven't discovered this until now.

Cage Free Eggs

Today, for the first time since I moved down to Corvallis, my weekly grocery binge totaled less than $50. I guess skipping the wine aisle does help! Who knew?

I was a bit surprised, because I bought more natural (read... "more expensive") foods than usual, including:

• One gallon of organic whole milk ($5.48... ouch)
  
• Half-gallon of Nancy's yogurt ($3.42... not too bad actually. It was only 12 cents more expensive than buying two half-gallon containers of the kind without bacteria.)
  
• Four pounds of Smucker's jam ($5.98... causing me to really appreciate the cost-effectiveness of home-made jam)
  
• Cage free eggs (as opposed to cage free hens... there's a loop hole here somewhere, I know it...)

We'll see if this trend continues. The moment I start flirting with the Odwalla cooler, it's all over.

NOTE: The wine aisle wise-crack was just that, a wise-crack. I choose not to blog in an inebriated state, even though the comedic value of my posts would probably shoot through the roof. Fear not, I'm not the indulging type.

Beware of the Camera

Apparently, I have a reputation.

Most of you know that I like shooting pictures, candid ones especially. My DSLR can also capture video, which has been handy for recording those... surreal... moments when a mere picture won't do. At a recent ball, I just put my camera on a tripod, turned it on, and walked away. It's amusing what some people will do in front of an unattended camera.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPt7k26xS3E

Anyways, like I say, I have a reputation. This past weekend several of my homeschool friends graduated from high school, so I and my camera ended up in attendance at a few gatherings.

The first occasion was at a graduation ceremony. I snapped away cheerfully and uploaded the images after reaching home. These pictures were received with grace and good humor. So far, so good.

The second occasion was at a graduation reception. While capturing images with gusto, I noticed a few sideways glances. If these were expressions of enmity, I was blissfully unaware. Upon returning to my apartment, I uploaded these pictures as well, which were received with great joy by those not captured by my lens.

The third occasion was at a post-graduation party. About mid-way through the event, I noted aloud the desire to retrieve my camera. Surprisingly, jokes were made concerning the physical safety of cameras left in storage. There was a slight chill in the air, and an unspoken strain twitched briefly in the stolid expressions of the jokesters. I relented.

There's a lesson in all this. Candidness is to be appreciated, memories are to be savored, but a man with the gift of moderation is to be highly exalted. If you're a philosopher, know thyself. If you're a photographer, know the limits of thy audience. Enough said.

Baryogenesis and the Big Bang Conundrum

One of the greatest unsolved problems in physics revolves around a concept known as "antimatter". You heard right. Just as regular matter is composed of particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, so antimatter is composed of antiparticles, such as antielectrons, antiprotons, and antineutrons. In fact, every element in the periodic table has an equivalent antimatter element... antihydrogen, anybody?

I'm not making this up. These particles actually exist and have been created in the laboratory with the help of high-energy particle accelerators such as that at CERN.

There's one problem. When a piece of antimatter hits a piece of matter, the result is a tremendous release of energy as both are annihilated. For perspective, the release of energy is about 10,000 times as great as nuclear fission (think A-bomb) and about 100 times as great as nuclear fusion (think H-bomb), given the same amount of material. Antimatter and matter are very symmetrical with regards to one another, and very ill tempered.

Herein lies one of the greatest problems of the Big Bang theory. According to evolutionary theory, everything in the universe today was spawned from nothing. In other words, the net sum of matter and antimatter before the Big Bang was zero before the Big Bang (antimatter + matter = nothing).

However, antimatter is extremely rare in the Universe today, such that the ratio between matter and antimatter is 1,000,000,000:1. This is a problem. If the Universe was created from nothing, this ratio should be 1:1. There should be vast pools of antimatter in the universe, just as we have vast oasis's of galaxies made from matter. However, these pools do not exist.

This is a serious dead-end for Big Bang theorists. Baryogenesis is the branch of physics that is devoted to understanding and explaining the antimatter/matter discrepancy. However, thus far there has not been a good explanation for the asymmetric existence of baryons (matter) and antibaryons (antimatter). According to the models, the baryons and antibaryons should have all eliminated one another, leaving us with... nothing.

Just some food for thought. The reason this intrigued me is that Christians are fond of saying that the only way something could come from nothing is for God to have created it. I believe this. However, finding out about the existence of antimatter seemed to throw a monkey wrench into the works. Since antimatter + matter = nothing, a non-Christian could argue that this could actually occur without divine intervention. However, after doing a little research, it seems as though their theory falls apart entirely.