R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 121

Antarctica

Send to Kindle

Two organizations raced to get to their destination, stretching the available technology to achieve their goals. Only one could get there first. National pride and personal pride were at stake. But we’re not talking about a race to the moon. In the early half of the twentieth century, Amundsen and Scott were in a race to the South Pole.

People sometimes get depressed as they contemplate the sad fact that the last time human beings stood upon the surface of the moon was in 1972—nearly forty years ago. In contrast, people point to the history of aviation. Forty years after Orville and Wilbur Write made their first flight in 1903, air travel had become common. Passengers were flying around the world. The jet engine had been invented. And military aircraft were an important part of warfare.

But where is the comparable advance in space travel? Where are the lunar colonies, the flights to Mars, the mining of the asteroids and missions to the moons of Saturn?

The mistake comes in comparing two entirely different sorts of activities. Improvements in the technology of flight—the increase in size and the increase in the amount of travel actually are comparable between airplanes and spacecraft. In the forty years since Apollo ended, the ease of human travel into space has increased. Moreover, unmanned spacecraft have visited every planet in the solar system. Our civilization is dependent upon our spacefaring for its very existence now, with communication and navigation tied into the existence of orbiting satellites in ways that would have been unimaginable when Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 became the last man on the moon.

No, the better comparison to our lunar explorations of the late sixties and early seventies (1969-1972) is not the history of airplanes. Instead, it is the history of Antarctic exploration.

On December 14, 1911, a group led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first people to ever reach the South Pole. One month later, the British explorer and Royal Navy officer, Robert Scott arrived, but he died on the trip back.

For the next forty-five years, no human being ever stood upon the South Pole again. It wasn’t until October 31, 1956, when U.S. Rear Admiral George J. Dufek and his crew landed a R4D Skytrain—a modified Douglas DC-3—aircraft, that people once again touched the South Pole. They established the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is still occupied year round by researchers.

Between 1911 and 1956 there had been multiple expeditions to the continent of Antarctica. Ernest Shackleton led the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914 intending to cross the continent by way of the South Pole. His ship, the Endurance, was trapped and destroyed by the ice pack before they even reached Antarctica. They survived the disaster by trekking across pack ice to Elephant Island. Shackleton and five of his crewmates then took a small boat across the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, an island in the South Atlantic where they were finally able to get help and rescue their colleagues left behind. US Navy Rear Admiral Richard Byrd led five expeditions to Antarctica during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. He even flew an airplane over the South Pole in 1929.

But between the first visit to the South Pole by Amudsen and Scott and 1956, there was no permanent human structure at the South Pole, and very little human presence in the interior of Antarctica at all. The few scientific stations in Antarctica were located on and near its seacoast.

But since 1956, the Amudsen-Scott South Pole Station has been continuously occupied. The base has been rebuilt and modified extensively since its founding. The current station was officially dedicated on January 12, 2008. It is an 80,000 square foot, two story building of modular design. Elevated, it can be raised and adjusted to keep it above the ever deepening snow level at the South Pole. During the summer, the station population is usually around 200 people; it drops by three-fourths during the winter months, when the station is cut off from any possibility of resupply. In 2010, forty-seven people spent the winter at the station.

Forty-five years passed between the first and only visit by human beings at the South Pole until a permanent base was constructed. It has been barely forty years since the last person visited the moon.

Currently, six people continuously orbit the Earth in the International Space Station, which has an interior volume of 32,000 cubic feet, about the interior volume of an average five bedroom house. Thus, it is much smaller than the current base on the South Pole. But of course it has been a hundred years since the first person stepped on the South Pole, while the first person went into space but fifty years ago on April 5, 1961, and the first person reached the moon but 44 years ago, on July 20, 1969.

So we’re really not doing so badly as some people like to think.

Send to Kindle

How Science Fiction Becomes Mundane

Send to Kindle

In the mid-1980s a bank had a series of commercials set in a foreign country. A small boy ran about shouting “ATM, ATM” in such a way that at first one imagined he was shouting someone’s name as he looked for him or her. In the final shot, grateful tourists found the banking machine and got their desperately needed cash. Today, we don’t think twice about the ATM and rarely, if ever, have any difficulty finding one. About the only complaint we might have is the fee that we have to pay for using it, if it happens to belong to a bank that is not our own.

When I first arrived at college for my freshman year, I had no car. Therefore, when I selected my bank my selection was based on but one thing: could I easily walk to it? If I left the campus the back way and hiked over a hill, it was no more than ten minutes from my dorm room.

Although the first ATM went into use as early as 1967 in London and the first networked ATMs appeared in the US by the early 1970s, they did not become common until the 1980s. My first exposure to something resembling an ATM came after I graduated. One of the local grocery store chains issued a card. If you put it into a machine in the back of the store and entered a code, the machine printed out a receipt that you could take to the checkout counter. The cashier would then give you however much cash you had selected, up to forty dollars. My roommate and I delighted in being able to get money on a Saturday or Sunday night for burgers or a pizza.

When my local bank first offered actual ATMs for depositing our checks or for getting cash I was initially leery. I’d been making deposits or withdrawals using the teller for so long, it was hard to imagine doing it any other way. At first, I used the ATM only on weekends or when the bank was closed. But as time went by, I became accustomed to using the ATM. It wasn’t long before I stopped using a human teller altogether, because the ATM meant—at the time—no lines. I spent much less time at the bank, and saving time was a priority for me during my years in graduate school.

By the time I got my second computer in the mid-1980s, I became an early adopter of online banking. Using dialup, it was very slow and I had to pay a monthly fee. Like the ATM, at first I was rather fearful about using it to pay my bills, preferring instead to continue the old fashioned way: writing checks and dropping them in the mail.

But after the post office lost a car payment and a couple of other bills, I eventually switched to doing all my bill paying through my computer. The postal service offered no guarantee of delivery. If they lost a bill payment, I could fill out a complaint form. But they wouldn’t fix things with my creditors. In contrast, my bank offered a guarantee: if a payment didn’t go out like it was supposed to, not only would they correct the error, they would talk to my creditor and pay any late fees. I learned that doing my bill paying electronically was not only much quicker than writing checks, it was actually safer. My bank dropped the fees for home banking in the 1990s, so paying electronically also became much cheaper than using the post office: no more buying postage stamps. Today, even the bills arrive electronically rather than by the postal service. Most of them I now pay automatically, leaving me even more time for other things.

In the 1980s it took me hours to do my taxes. Then I discovered that there were computer programs that you could buy: in modern parlance, “there’s an app for that.” As always, I was a bit reluctant to make the switch, but once I did, I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. Rather than spending hours with confusing instructions and complicated forms to fill out, the computer presents me with simple questions and does most of the work for me. No more adding and subtracting, finding a number on line 2 and writing it again on line 10. No more running back and forth to the post office or library to get more forms. What took me four or five hours, sometimes spread over a few days, I now accomplish in less than a single hour. And rather than waiting a month for my refund to come by mail, I file my taxes electronically and have the government deposit my refund directly into my banking account barely a week after filing.

Just as modern ovens and stoves have made cooking quicker, just as modern plumbing has eliminated outhouses, just as washing machines and vacuum cleaners have lessened our toil and shortened the time it takes to accomplish what our ancestors spent long hours on, so ATMs and electronic banking have made certain unpleasantries of life less annoying. And what had seemed marvelous, I now simply take for granted, like flipping a switch to turn on the lights.

Send to Kindle

Apples

Send to Kindle

When my father-in-law was still alive, we’d make an annual pilgrimage to the apple orchards at Oak Glen near Yucaipa. Crowding my three children into a minivan for the long trip was a choice my wife and I made willingly–and once they finally settled in to the two hour trek, the kids were okay with it too. The sniping and poking and complaining eventually faded away.

Among the many small shops at Oak Glen, one can purchase any number of apples and apple derived products, ranging from apple butter to apple syrup. There are places where you can taste the different varieties and sample the fresh cider. And for a small fee, you can go out into the orchards and pick baskets of apples for yourself. Remarkably, our teenage daughters actually enjoyed picking apples.

We also took a ride in a horse drawn wagon on the Riley family farm up there. A tour guide talked about the history of the region and told us a variety of facts about apples. For instance, back around 1884 when a man named Henry G. Wilshire arrived in Los Angeles, he was able to purchase about 3000 acres of land in the area for only eight dollars, plus a jug of whiskey. He’s better known for the boulevard in Los Angeles that’s named after him, of course. The three hundred or so acres that made up the Riley farm were purchased from him some years later.

After unsuccessfully attempting to grow potatoes and a couple of other different crops on those three hundred acres, the Rileys finally settled on apples and have been successful at that for the last hundred years or so. Apples are related to rose bushes. They are relatively small trees ranging between ten and forty feet tall, depending on the sort of apple tree it is. The varieties of apples are called cultivars and there are more than 7500 known cultivars or varieties. The tree originated in central Asia. The wild ancestor of the domesticated apple can still be found growing wild in parts of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and parts of China. The fruit on the wild apple tree looks not much different from the apples you might find on any more familiar modern variety, however. It is believed that apple trees were probably one of the first fruit trees to be domesticated by human beings.

At least 55 million tons of apples are produced each year. Thirty-five percent of the world yield comes from China. The United States is second, with about seven and a half percent of the production.

Apples were first introduced into the United States in the 1600s. Johnny Appleseed, born John Chapman in 1774, was a nurseryman who introduced apple trees to large parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Although the popular image of the man is of him scattering seeds at random, in fact he planted nurseries rather than orchards and built fences around them, leaving them in the care of neighbors who sold trees on shares. He would return every year or two to each nursery to tend it. Trees were ordinarily sold on credit. Johnny Appleseed would not press people for payment, however. And he spent his life wandering from place to place, wearing old used clothing. He went barefoot most of the time, even in the winter. And he was always concerned about helping those around him. For instance, if he heard that a horse was going to be put down, he would purchase the animal, buy a field for it to recover in, and then, if it did get better, he’d give the horse to a needy person, exacting a promise from him to treat the horse humanely.

Apples appear in Greek mythology. As one of his twelve labors, Hercules had to travel to the garden of Hesperides and pick the golden apples from the Tree of Life growing at its center. In another myth, the Greek goddess of discord, Eris, became angry when she was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. So she took a golden apple, wrote “For the most beautiful one” and tossed it into the middle of the wedding party. The goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite tried to claim the apple. Paris of Troy was then chosen to select the winner. Hera and Athena tried to bribe him, but Aphrodite chose to offer him the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta. So he gave the apple to Aphrodite and took Helen from Sparta, thus triggering the Trojan war.

Many believe that Adam and Eve were tempted in the Garden of Eden to eat an apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. However, the biblical story never identifies the fruit. How is it then that so many people think it was an apple? Some have suggested a mixup between the Greek myth about Hercules and the golden apples of the tree of life and the biblical story. This seems possible because of the habit many Renaissance painters had of mixing Greek mythological elements into their paintings of biblical topics. Others have pointed out that the Latin words for “apple” and “evil” are similar in the singular and identical in the plural. More likely, it is simply because in old English (and in several other languages) the word “apple” was a generic word meaning simply “fruit.”

So my family and I had a pleasant day among the apple orchards. We left with many bags full of the red fruit.

Send to Kindle

Bookmaker

Send to Kindle

When a new year begins, it is not uncommon for people to make resolutions: they find themselves dissatisfied with some aspect of themselves or their lives, and so they promise themselves that they will make a change or two. It is in January that the fitness centers are filled with people exercising, the Weight Watchers centers are filled with people who want to lose weight, and Christians begin the process of trying to read through the Bible in the next twelve months.

What did I want for this year? I wanted to make some more money from my writing. A purely mercenary resolution.

So I’ve undertaken the process of “indie publishing” where I take stuff I’ve written and haven’t gotten published yet and convert it into a format that works with the Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers. In order to do this, I essentially transform myself from being just a writer, to being a publisher: which means I had to do my own editing, copy editing, proofreading, and cover designs.

And then there’s the little question of how to let people know I’ve got books that they can purchase? There are over a million e-books for sale on Amazon; how do I stand out in such a crowd?

Of course, the situation with Amazon.com is not much different than my books in any bookstore, anywhere. Walk into a Barnes and Noble, or even your local used book store. How is it that you know to find the sort of book that you want to purchase? When I go to purchase physical books, I wander into the sections that contain the sorts of books I enjoy reading, such as the science fiction or history. When I’m searching online for a physical book or an e-book, I do much the same thing. Occasionally, I’ll look for a specific book that I’ve read or heard about in a review or from a friend’s recommendation.

I cannot think of a single book I purchased because I read an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, or because I saw an ad for it on TV.

My best selling traditionally published book thus far is The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, originally published by Reader’s Digest Books in 2008 and reissued in February, 2012 by Chartwell. The book has not been advertised anywhere. The only reviews of it that I’ve seen have been the reviews readers have posted on Amazon.com—and there are only seven of those. And despite the dearth of advertising, for the past six months, according to the data from BookScan (think Nielsen Ratings, but for books) the book has been selling at an average rate of ten copies per day. That does not seem like a lot, of course. In a month, that means only about 300 copies.

But from the publisher’s point of view, that level of sales is actually quite good for an average mid-list book. And if you’re going to do indie publishing, you need to think about book sales from the publisher’s point of view. After all, a publisher is not selling just one book. They’re selling a bunch. So let’s say the publisher is offering one hundred different titles. Ten sales per title per day means a thousand books multiplied by thirty days. If they make five dollars profit on each book, that’s 150,000 dollars per month—and 1.8 million dollars per year. Not a bad business, really. Large publishers like Random House make considerably more than this, of course.

So as an author doing indie publishing, if you want to succeed, you need to be selling more than just one book. So, I’ve made 17 of my books available as eBooks on Amazon. The list price for each is $7.99—the average cost of a trade paperback. I get a 70 percent royalty rate on each book—which works out to $5.59 per book for me, minus the 9 cents that Amazon charges as a “delivery fee.” So, on each book sold, I stand to make $5.50 (much better than the 79 cents I would make from traditional publishing with a ten percent royalty rate.)

In the first two weeks of the experiment, I averaged a sales rate of a little over one book a day; that’s not a lot of money, but it’s money that I otherwise would not be getting. Obviously, if I can get my indie sales on each of the 17 titles to the levels of The Bible’s Most Fascinating People, I’d see substantial income. It hasn’t happened yet, after three months.

So how do I let people know the books are there for the buying? Do I simply hope that people will randomly come upon them? Mostly. Just like the big publishers mostly do. I have this blog (www.nettelhorst.com) and whenever I publish a book I announce it to my friends on Facebook and Twitter. And every so often I remind people.

And, periodically, for a limited time, I give books away for free. Sometimes I lower prices on select books.

So, over Christmas, I gave away the first book in a six book series, The Chronicles of Tableland. Within a day and a half more than a hundred people had “purchased” that free book, pushing it up into the top one hundred books in the category “science fiction—adventure.” This made it stand out to people looking for that sort of book—which then increased its sales all the more. My hope of course is that the readers of that free book will then fork over the cash for the remaining five books in the series. And I’m hoping that they’ll tell their friends about it. And post reviews on Amazon (assuming they actually liked the book; if they hated it, I’d prefer that they keep that to themselves. Heh.)

So, my New Year’s project, at least thus far, seems to be generating some money. More money than the books were generating just taking up space on my computer’s hard drive. It’s certainly not making me rich, however. But maybe I’ll be able to afford a coffee at Starbucks once in awhile.

So what books of mine can you buy now? As I said, I have 15 science fiction eBooks available on Amazon.com for the Kindle. If you don’t own a Kindle, you can still read these books. Amazon offers an app for Windows based computers, and for the Mac. There are also free apps for all tablet computers, whether Android, Windows 8, or iPAD. And there’s an app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows 8 phones.

1. Inheritance

2. Somewhere Obscurely

3. Antediluvian

4. The Wrong Side of Morning

5. John of the Apocalypse

6. Chronicles of Tableland 1: All His Crooked Ways

7. Chronicles of Tableland 2: Twister

8. Chronicles of Tableland 3: Dark Waters

9. Chronicles of Tableland 4: Sail My Darling Lovely

10. Chronicles of Tableland 5: Behind the Wall

11. Chronicles of Tableland 6: Day Come

12. With a Rod of Iron

13. Darkness Warping

14. Clash Point

15. Narrow Gate

Click on any of the book titles above or below. That will take you to Amazon, where you can see a brief description of each book and even read the first few pages for free.

I also have 2 non-fiction eBooks for the Kindle or Kindle apps:

1. The Complaint of Jacob

2. What Would Satan Do? The Devil’s Theology

And then there are my traditionally published books available on Amazon and wherever books are sold. Two are hardbacks and two are paperbacks.

1. The Bible’s Most Fascinating People

2. The Bible: A Reader’s Guide

3. A Year with God

4. A Year with Jesus

Thus, a total of 21 books written by me are available to be purchased by anyone so inclined. Let all your friends know.

Send to Kindle

Afterimage

Send to Kindle

It is odd what will trigger a memory. And even odder, sometimes, are the memories that are triggered. Every morning I have coffee. I have been having coffee for years, ever since I came back from my first summer trip to Israel following my Freshman year of college. I had spent my time there working on a kibbutz—a kind of communal farm—just south of the Sea of Galilee.

As I was pouring my cup of coffee one recent morning, an images from that trip replayed itself in my head. Why getting a cup of coffee that morning happened to trigger flashbacks, I’m not really sure. I’ve read that experiences such as déjà vu are the consequence of subtle cues flitting beneath our conscious awareness, particularly such things as odors, the way the light is hitting us at that moment, sounds, even our physical well-being. Maybe old memories get replayed for the same reason.

In any case, I suddenly re-experienced one of my first mornings on the kibbutz. In the mid 1970’s, Israel did not have a peace treaty with the nation of Jordan. The living areas of the kibbutz were ringed by high fences topped with razor wire, with guard towers, armed guards, and bright lights. The kibbutz was located along the Yarmuk River, right on Jordan’s border. I often worked in date fields where I could peer across the barbed wire fence and mine field that marked the frontier.

Every morning I was awakened for work at about 3:30 AM by one of the guards, armed with either an Uzi or an M-16. Of course, most of the people on the kibbutz carried automatic weapons. And they were well trained professionals, given that every man and woman above the age of 18 had spent four years on active duty in the Israeli army and were in the reserves until they hit 65. Every man and woman I met on the kibbutz had fought in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

After awakening, I, along with a bunch of other college students, would wander out of the dorms, down the path to the hut—a sort of shed where we volunteer workers assembled to await being picked up for transport to the fields. In the hut, there were always boxes of cookies—the sort that come in those round tins at Christmas time here in the United States. There were also several handleless Pyrex cups and a teapot. We’d scoop espresso ground coffee into the cups and then pour boiling water over the grounds and stir. After waiting a minute or two for the grounds to settle, we could drink the resulting coffee. There was always creamer and sugar that we could add if we were so inclined.

I vividly remember the rough gray wood of the bench on which the coffee and cookies rested, the strong smell of the freshly made and horrendously strong coffee, and the look of the mud-like sludge left on the bottom of the cups after we drank the coffee.

Afterwards, we clambered onto the flatbed trailers hitched to the back of a blue Ford tractor. It’s engine grumbled and snorted . The trailer bounced and swayed while we clung tightly to keep from sliding off. The air was filled with the stench of diesel, while overhead the sky had turned a brilliant blue, though the sun had not quite risen. Around us, the noisy squeal of birds, insects and other assorted beasts filled the air with an endless background thrum.

The other powerful memory of that long ago morning was the bone-weary exhaustion, the dull weariness that was never alleviated no matter how much coffee I drank. For eight weeks, six days a week, I did farm labor in 100 degree temperatures on an average of five hours sleep a night.

From that memory, my mind ricocheted to an overnight stay in Zurich, Switzerland, where, after an exhausting eight hour flight from New York in the middle of the night I arrived in a nearly empty airport shortly after sunrise on a Sunday morning. After speeding through customs, I boarded a bus that took me to a hotel somewhere near Lake Zurich, downtown.

Despite the overwhelming tiredness, knowing I had but twenty-four hours before I’d take a connecting flight to Tel Aviv, I quickly made my way out into the city, intent on sucking up as much of it as I could.

So many decades later, what I can re-experience in my mind are afterimages associated with strong smells: somehow I discovered an underground mall and wandered into the food court. Given that it was around lunch time, I ordered some food—specifically, what the tiny restaurant advertised as “American style Hamburgers.” Their smell was oddly spicy, with a strong hint of relish. It was undersized and overcooked, perhaps made of beef, and stuffed between some rounded, puffy bread that vaguely resembled a bun. I’m still not quite sure what the Swiss meant by “American style Hamburger.” Certainly it wasn’t the taste, which was nothing like any hamburger I’ve ever had before or since. Perhaps they meant simply that its appearance would remind you of a real hamburger if you turned off the lights and you squinted just right.

So why these memories on that particular morning not so very long ago? Perhaps it was simply the combination of the coffee I poured and the fatigue I felt on a Monday after not quite enough sleep.

Send to Kindle

Judas the Quisling

In 1940, as the Germans invaded Norway, Vidkun Quisling, head of the Norwegian Fascist Party, announced a coup d’etat against his own Norwegian government. He subsequently collaborated with the Nazis and served as Minister President of Norway under the Nazi occupation from 1942 until the end of World War II in 1945. His name has become a synonym for “traitor” in English and several other European languages.

Now, imagine, that a short story written this year of 2013 surfaces claiming that Quisling is really a good guy, that he was actually working for the Allies, and that he’s been horribly misunderstood and slandered all these years. Would anyone pay any attention? Would anyone accept the rehabilitation of Quisling on the basis of a document written years after Quisling’s death, by someone who never knew Quisling and has no documentation or any other evidence to support a position that is at odds with all the other records of history?

Probably not.

And yet, each year around Easter the news media will trot out texts that have no connection to Jesus other than the fact that his name appears in them. For instance, not long ago the Gnostic Gospel of Judas received a lot of attention from magazines, websites, and newspapers. (And before that, it was The Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic text.) But in reality, the Gospel of Judas has as much connection to the historical person of Judas as my proposed short story of 2013 has to Quisling–and yet people all over started wondering “maybe there’s something to it.”

Odd. Very odd. Maybe I could actually make a buck with a short story about Quisling, huh? Or maybe about Benedict Arnold?

Of course, the current nutjob President of Iran (along with the majority of the Moslem world) imagines that the Holocaust never happened. There are the willfully stupid who don’t think Al-Qaeda had anything to do with 911. There are people who believe the President of the United States was born in Kenya. There are the morons who don’t think anyone has been to the moon. And some fools believe that vaccines are bad, or that psychiatry is of the devil, or that eating certain fruits and vegitables will cure cancer. Sigh. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that there are pundits and others who think there might be something to the Gnostic literature. Ignorance and folly are widespread. And as Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

So what is the Gospel of Judas? It is a Gnostic text written more than a hundred years after Judas’ death; and it is, to put it bluntly, simply made-up, the same way I recently wrote a novel about a nineteenth century patent medicine conman who comes into possession of a time machine. The Gospel of Judas was part of a genre of pseudo-gospels written from the second century onward, in which the authors simply invented the stories in order to perpetuate their aberrant beliefs.

And for those who might suffer romantic delusions about the Gnostics, imagining that they were unjustly labeled heretics by a domineering, patriarchal church bent on eliminating creative alternative interpretations to the narrow orthodoxy, let’s take a look at what the Gnostics actually believed.

They believed that the physical world was created by an angry god whom they identified with the God of the Old Testament. They argued that Jesus had been sent by a different god, who had nothing to do with the created world. Gnostics were polytheists.

Because they believed that the material universe had been created by an evil god, Gnostics strove to avoid all contact with the created world. They believed that matter was intrinsically evil. They abhorred the flesh and wished more than anything to be freed from the bondage of the body. They were generally celibate, and ascetic. They did not even allow the use of wine at communion, insisting only on bread. They also denied the authority of the Old Testament, and most of the Gospels. Their only scriptures were portions of Luke, and only ten out of thirteen letters attributed to Paul that are found in the New Testament. They rejected the rest of the New Testament.

Why did they reject the Old Testament and most of the New Testament? Because the Bible, both Old and New Testament, is filled with stories about the wonders of creation. God keeps saying that creation is good. Genesis 1:31 for instance, states “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The Song of Songs describes and rejoices in the sensuous love between a man and a woman. In Acts 14, we find Paul preaching to the Greeks in Athens and telling them that the God he worships and has come to tell them about is “the God who made the world and everything in it.” The New Testament argues that the God who was the father of Jesus was the same God who had made the material world. In the Gospel of John, which the Gnostics rejected, Jesus’ first miracle (John 2) happened while he was at a party. They ran out of booze, so Jesus made more.

All the Gnostic sects seem to have condemned marriage. They believed sex was a bad thing. While they acknowledged that Jesus had been born of a woman, they claimed that Jesus had never touched Mary’s body or gotten any nourishment from her womb. Dan Brown’s popular novel, The DaVinci Code, reverses the beliefs of early Christians and the Gnostics. Early Christians would have seen nothing odd or wrong in Jesus being married and having children. After all, a basic Christian doctrine is that Jesus was fully human. What could prove that better than for him to have fathered children? What could have been more ordinary? But for the Gnostics, such a notion would have been shocking and completely vile, an idea to be opposed with every fiber of their beings.

The earliest Christians seem to have foreseen that something like Gnosticism would attempt to substitute itself for Christianity. In Paul’s first letter to Timothy he specifically warned about the false teachings that would arise that would forbid marriage, order people not to eat meat and to abstain from other foods. In opposition to such false notions, Paul asserted that God had created these things to be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:1-5). Paul believed that “everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected.” The Gnostic author of the Gospel of Judas would have been horrified by what Paul taught.

Gnosticism’s hatred of the created world, of sex, of eating, of essentially anything that is fun, sets it in direct opposition to Jewish and Christian doctrine from the first chapter of Genesis all the way through to the end of the New Testament. Gnosticism also tended to be misogynistic. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic text dating from about the same time as the Gospel of Judas, concludes with this peculiar exchange, made up by its author, with no connection to anything in the New Testament:

“Simon Peter said to him, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’

“Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’”

This odd Gnostic notion regarding the status and value of women contrasts sharply with Paul’s statement (recorded in a letter he wrote to a church in Galatia) that men and women are equal (Galatians 3:28), or with the fact that wealthy women were the source of the finanacial support for Jesus and his disciples as they wandered about ancient Israel (as recorded in the Gospel of Luke 8:1-3).

The Gnostics were not the downtrodden, misunderstood members of a happier, freer, more vibrant version of Christianity, unjustly oppressed and suppressed by “the man.” Instead, they have more in common with our modern perception of Puritanism. H.L. Mencken, in Sententiae: The Citizen and the State, wrote of Puritanism that it is “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Customer Service

After I graduated with an undergraduate degree in History, I went to UCLA to pursue my master’s degree in Semitic languages. To pay for all of that, as well as an apartment and food, I worked at the Burbank Airport driving a shuttle bus from a parking lot to the terminals and back, eight hours a day, forty hours a week. I met several famous people and got to chat with them on the way to and from their flights. I also met people who were not so famous.

One afternoon, I took an older gentleman to the airport. He was dressed in a dark gray tweed suit, with a plain gray tie. His hair matched the color of his suit. I struck up a conversation with him and discovered that he was the founder and owner of a major drug store chain. He told me that he was traveling back east to go to a hospital where one of his employees, a cashier, had just been admitted. She had been injured during a holdup at one of his stores and he wanted to be there and find out if there was anything he could do to help.

I suspect that such attention to one’s employees is now rare among CEOs in the corporate world, just as their attention to their customers is likewise not quite as intense. I thought of that man, doubtless long since retired, as I waited at the local pharmacy where I was attempting to pick up my daughter’s prescriptions that help her with her ADHD. The pharmacy I use is not part of the chain that was owned by that gentleman. In fact, that particular chain was bought up by some other corporation several years ago.

Perhaps if that elderly gentleman were in charge of the pharmacy I use, I would not have had the problems I encountered last year. I dropped off two prescriptions for my youngest daughter at 10:30 AM. The employee who took them from me told me they would be ready at 1 PM. I returned about 2 PM expecting—not unreasonably— to pick up the two prescriptions. But, not only could the employee who was supposedly helping me not find record of the prescriptions in his computer, he then spent about ten minutes hunting through the stack of prescriptions turned in during that day before he finally located mine. To this point, his attitude toward me suggested that I was lying to him about having turned in the prescriptions, as if I had nothing better to do than just to wander into a random pharmacy and ask for non-existent prescriptions. This from a man who has seen my face once or twice a month now for the last year getting this exact same set of prescriptions.

Having found that indeed I had turned in the prescriptions this morning he now informed me that “nothing had been done yet,” but he assured me that they could have it ready in “just five minutes” if I would care to wait—pointing to the pharmacist who happened to be in conversation with some other customer –since all she had to do was “count out the pills.” Since I had to pick up my daughters from school at 2:30, I told him that I couldn’t wait, but that I’d be back within an hour or so.

So, I returned again about 3:45 PM. Not only were the prescriptions still not ready—due to the fact that someone had “mistyped” the labels—only one of the two prescriptions I had turned in could be found. Of course, they didn’t know that there were supposed to be two prescriptions until I asked where the other one was as they handed me only the one—and once again, the implication expressed was that somehow I didn’t know what I was talking about. They called my daughter’s pediatrician and learned that indeed I wasn’t just making up a story to annoy them, but that now it would “take a few minutes” for them to get the new copy for the one they had “misplaced.” I told them I had to get my daughter to her soccer practice, so I finally was able to pay for the one prescription they had finally managed to give to me and leave. I noticed that they still had mistyped this one prescription—it had the name of my middle daughter on it, rather than my youngest, for whom the prescription was actually for. However, I was in no mood to point that out to them and then have to wait an additional half hour, especially since I didn’t have that half hour to wait.

Besides being frustrated by the continual disappointment of my not unreasonable expectations of having my prescriptions filled in a timely manner—and of having wasted my time and my rather expensive gasoline in making more than the one trip I had needed to make and knowing that I would still have to make an additional trip the following day to get the prescription that they had lost (and wondering, now, based on their track record, if I would have to make multiple trips on that next day as well)—I was frustrated by the rather blasé attitude displayed by the pharmacy staff, who spent all this time silently bustling about, who never apologized, and looked at me as if I was somehow disturbing their routine and probably behaving unreasonably. They weren’t obviously mean to me: they didn’t yell at me or call me names, but they seemed oblivious to the level of inconvenience they were subjecting me to.

I suspect, that if that gentleman I met many years ago when I drove him to his flight in Burbank was the owner of my pharmacy, those employees would probably never have been hired in the first place. What makes me very sad, however, is that the level of incompetence demonstrated by my pharmacy has become the norm: I see it at the department store, the grocery store, and every time I visit a fast food restaurant. And given that all the businesses I go to treat me with the same level of contempt, I have trouble “taking my business elsewhere.” There’s simply nowhere else to go…

Well…except online to Amazon–where I find service tends to be much better than in most of the local businesses, whether independent or chain. And brick and mortar stores wonder why they’re losing customers. It’s not just about the prices. Customer service matters. I’ll pay extra not to be treated as a problem, potential thief, or idiot. I’ll pay extra to actually find what I’m looking for.

Life As We Don’t Know It

“The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” So said J.B.S. Haldane in Possible Worlds and Other Papers in 1927. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the astronomer Percival Lowell mesmerized the world with his vision of a Mars crisscrossed with canals, the home of an ancient, advanced race trying to survive on a dying planet. Then, in 1965, the first space probe to send back photographs from Mars, the Mariner 4, showed, not canals, but a world that looked much like the moon, pockmarked by craters, cold, with a thin wisp of an atmosphere. It seemed to demonstrate beyond all doubt that nothing could be living there. Around the same time, the space probes that visitede Venus revealed a world bathed in sulfuric acid clouds with surface temperatures surpassing the boiling point of lead, at over 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The solar system beyond earth seemed clearly dead and lifeless. Only our home world appeared able to support life.

But in the last two decades or so, the outlook for life beyond Earth in our solar system has undergone a radical transformation. Where before, it seemed impossible that life could survive out there, scientists are now beginning to speculate that life—and not just life as we know it, but life as we don’t know it—may be abundant in our solar system.

Mars, rather than being a dead, lifeless analogue of the moon, turned out to be a place that at some time in its distant past had abundant flowing water that formed rivers and streams, lakes and seas. In fact, about one third of its surface was covered with water. Even now, there are vast ice fields at its poles. Scientists wonder if perhaps there might be life clinging to underground pockets of liquid water. On top of that, there were anomalous readings from an experiment on the Viking 1 lander in 1976. Even now, there are burps of methane coming from the planet that either indicate there is continuing volcanic activity—or that something alive is producing the gas, since methane on Earth comes from only those two sources. The Curiosity Rover recently determined that conditions in Mar’s past were indeed comfortable for life as we know it.

Venus seems utterly lifeless on the surface, based on the high surface temperatures and poisonous composition of its atmosphere. But readings of its upper atmosphere show conditions that are not quite so harsh–in fact, conditions are almost comfortable. And oddly enough, the atmosphere contains particles that seems to have the characteristics of living cells. But much more study is needed to be sure.

Europa, one of the largest moons of Jupiter that was originally discovered by Galileo back in 1610, has turned out to be covered with ice. Based on the cracked surface and readings from the Galileo space probe that circled Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, most scientists believe that there is a subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath the ice perhaps as deep as 60 miles. If this is true, then Europa has more liquid water than the Earth does. And where there is liquid water and energy, the chances that life as we know it could exist are much better. Recent measurements indicate that not only could microbial life survive, but the amount of oxygen and energy in the system would allow fish-sized organisms to prosper. Meanwhile, another moon of Jupiter, Ganyamede, like Europa, also has a subsurface ocean. Thus, there are prospects of life there as well.

Further out in the Solar system, Encyladis, a large moon of Saturn, has geysers of water shooting from the surface and spraying out into space. Once again, liquid water under its icy surface indicates a chance that life could survive.

Weirdest of all is Titan, the largest moon around Saturn. It has a thick atmosphere. Temperatures are always 250 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Water is solid and rock-like. But methane is a liquid and Titan has an abundance of that liquid. It flows down rivers and forms lakes and seas. The methane lake Kraken, near the north pole, is larger than the Caspian Sea. The methane on Titan cycles around the planet just the way water cycles on Earth. It evaporates from the surface, condenses into clouds and then rains back down onto the land. The surface of Titan is covered with organic compounds. The photographs of the surface, sent back by the probe Huygens as it descended on parachute, reveal a world that looks more like Earth than any other, with its rolling hills, and jagged coastlines.

In 2005 some scientists speculated on how life could exist on Titan. Such life would depend upon liquid methane and ethane like we depend upon water. It would breathe in hydrogen, breathe out methane, and eat acetylene. If such life existed on Titan, then the scientists predicted that Titan’s atmosphere would be depleted of hydrogen near the surface. The acetylene that the atmosphere produced should also decrease near the surface. Subsequently, recent measurements from the Cassini space probe in orbit around Saturn have indicated that exactly those things are happening there. Does that mean Titan has life, but not life as we know it here on Earth?

At this point, all we have is speculation based on some rather unusual bits of data for the worlds beyond Earth in our solar system. Alternative explanations dependent upon non-biological processes could easily explain all the data. But then again, maybe not. Occam’s razor offers no help yet in discovering what the truth is. We simply don’t have enough information yet to make the judgment. Future space probes will ultimately answer the question of the existence of life elsewhere in our solar system, one way or another.

Planet Pi

If you click on the infographic it will give you a much larger version.

Source: JPL

Moon and Jupiter

Tonight we attempted to see the comet PanSTARRS again; but we had prayer meeting tonight and by the time we got outside the comet had set. But, I had my telescope with me (a Meade 3 1/2 inch Maksutov–Cassegrain with a field tripod and equatorial mount with motor drive) and so we looked at the crescent moon and Jupiter. Jupiter was beautiful tonight, near Taurus. And all four of the Galilean satellites were visible! This is what we saw:



This is based on a nifty java app that is on the Sky and Telescope website, called Jupiter’s Moons. It can give you a picture of the four Galilean satellites in real time, so you’ll know exactly what you’re looking at through a telescope or good pair of binoculars.

I modified the Sky and Telescope image using the opensource program GIMP, an excellent image manipulation program; it’s very powerful and can do most of what PhotoShop can do, but for free. If you don’t have a high end image manipulation program such as PhotoShop, and you need it, I recommend you get GIMP. It has a bit of a learning curve, but there are plenty of help files and tutorials available on the GIMP website and on YouTube.