Walker

Walker joined Difficult Run as an editor in August 2013. He graduated from the University of North Texas with an MBA in Strategic Management and a BBA in Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management. He's currently a grad student in Government at Johns Hopkins University. He has been published in SquareTwo, BYU Studies Quarterly, Dialogue, Graziadio Business Review, and Economic Affairs. He also contributed to Julie Smith's (ed.) 'As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture'. His other online writing can be found at Worlds Without End and Times & Seasons. He lives in Denton, Texas, with his wife.

Scientist Priests

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Georges Lemaitre: scientist priest
Georges Lemaitre: scientist priest

Nathaniel made an interesting observation the other day about physicist Andrei Linde’s reaction to the new evidence for cosmic inflation. The scientist worried, “What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful?” This led to a discussion about religious faith and scientific evidence. It might be worth remembering in light of the new discovery that Georges Lemaitre, the Father of the Big Bang, was a Catholic priest and a physicist at the Catholic University of Louvain. RealClearScience has a couple brief pieces on the history of scientific and religious thinkers:

Check them out.

The Symbol of a Lie

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Kevin Williamson at National Review has an article on the “coat hanger” mythology surrounding the abortion debate. Quoting the DC Abortion Fund, Williamson writes,

“The coat hanger is a symbol of the reproductive justice movement because lack of access to abortion causes women to go to desperate lengths to terminate a pregnancy, similar to those undertaken in the pre–Roe vs. Wade era. At that time, consuming Lysol and household poisons was not uncommon to instigate abortion. Nor was inserting knitting needles, Coke bottles, and — yes — wire coat hangers into their cervices.”

As Williamson explains, “That is untrue. It has long been known to be untrue. The wire hanger is indeed a powerful symbol — the symbol of a lie engineered with malice aforethought.”

See why in the full article.

Hebrew Translation of Tolkien

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"One does not simply expect Israeli POWs to read Tolkien and do nothing."
“One does not simply expect Israeli POWs to read Tolkien and do nothing.”

This article in The Jerusalem Post is a few years old, but it is a great story:

Of the two Hebrew translations of JRR Tolkien’s classic book The Hobbit, one of them was painstakingly written down in Egyptian exercise books by [Rami] Harpaz and nine other Israeli prisoners-of-war languishing in a Cairo jail. They were eventually released in a prisoner swap brokered after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. To tackle translating Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the forerunner to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was the brainchild of Harpaz. On the back cover of the prisoners’ Hebrew version of The Hobbit, however, no name appears for the translation – just a mention that it was a group effort by Israeli prisoners-of-war during their years of captivity in the Abaseyar prison.

“We finished The Hobbit after four months. Basically, we became two groups – those who translated and those who read the translation – and for this reason we decided not to translate the trilogy, as it was important to keep the group together as one unit,” said Yitzhak Pe’er, one of the translators. “Two of us would sit out in the sun reading sentence by sentence in English, but out loud giving a word-for-word literal translation into Hebrew while another would be jotting it all down. We had many arguments, even shouting matches, about how this or that should be translated. I think one of our total failures was the translation of the songs, as none of us really had sufficient talent to do them the justice they deserve. It was extremely difficult to translate idioms and other special words, as we wanted not only the words but also the mood of the author.”

Check out the full article.

The “Smoking Gun” For Cosmic Inflation

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The New York Times has an excellent article on the recently reported discovery of gravitational waves, providing what is being called the “smoking gun” of cosmic inflation. The article provides a simple, but detailed explanation of the theory of inflation:

THE UNIVERSE  is just under 14 billion years old. From our position in the Milky Way galaxy, we can observe a sphere — the visible universe — extending 14 billion light-years in every direction. But there’s a mystery. Wherever we look, the universe has an even temperature.

NOT ENOUGH TIME  The universe is not old enough for light to travel the 28 billion light-years from one side of the universe to the other, and there has not been enough time for scattered patches of hot and cold to mix into an even temperature.

DISTANT COFFEE  At a smaller scale, imagine using a telescope to look a mile in one direction. You see a coffee cup, and from the amount of steam, you can estimate its temperature and how much it has cooled.

COFFEE EVERYWHERE  Now turn around and look a mile in the other direction. You see a similar coffee cup, at exactly the same temperature. Coincidence? Maybe. But if you see a similar cup in every direction, you might want to look for another explanation.

STILL NOT ENOUGH TIME  There has not been enough time to carry coffee cups from place to place before they get cold. But if all the coffee cups were somehow filled from a single coffee pot, all at the same time, that might explain their even temperature.

INFLATION  solves this problem. The theory proposes that, less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded faster than the speed of light. Tiny ripples in the violently expanding energy field eventually grew into the large-scale structures of the universe.

FLUCTUATION  Astronomers have now detected evidence of these ancient fluctuations in swirls of polarized light in the cosmic background radiation, which is energy left over from the early universe. These are gravitational waves predicted by Einstein.

EXPANSION  Returning to our coffee, imagine a single, central pot expanding faster than light and cooling to an even temperature as it expands. That is something like inflation. And the structure of the universe mirrors the froth and foam of the original pot.

Andrei Linde, the physicist who championed the notion of chaotic inflation in 1983, was surprised with the news at his home by Stanford’s Chao-Lin Kuo, a member of the research team behind the new discovery.

 

This is very exciting.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theology as Rhetoric

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My friend Tyler Andersen recently completed his MA in Rhetorical Studies at Idaho State University. His graduate paper explored the theology of German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer–who was hanged by the Nazis for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler–through the lens of rhetorical devices ethos, logos, and pathos. The paper is titled “Ein Festre Burg: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Use of Theology as Rhetoric.” As an admirer of Bonhoeffer (I have to agree with Tyler that he was “a god among men”), I was thoroughly impressed with the paper. Be sure to check it out. Tyler notes that Bonhoeffer is “little known outside theological seminars and niche academic circles” (pg. 2). We should all become more familiar with this man.

500+ Economists Against Raising Labor Costs

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Over 500 economists (including three Nobel laureates) have signed a letter to “Federal Policy Makers” arguing that hiking the minimum wage would be damaging to job creation and the economy:*

As economists, we understand the fragile nature of this recovery and the dire financial realities of the nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty. To alleviate these burdens for families and improve our local, regional, and national economies, we need a mix of solutions that encourage employment, business creation, and boost earnings rather than across-the-board mandates that raise the cost of labor. One of the serious consequences of raising the minimum wage is that business owners saddled with a higher cost of labor will need to cut costs, or pass the increase to their consumers in order to make ends meet. Many of the businesses that pay their workers minimum wage operate on extremely tight profit margins, with any increase in the cost of labor threatening this delicate balance…For these reasons, we encourage federal policymakers to examine creative, comprehensive policy solutions that truly help address poverty, boost incomes from work, and increase upward mobility by fostering growth in our nation’s economy.

Check it out.

*Pic from Mark Perry

The Slow Hunch: Aesthetically Pleasing

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Over at The Slow Hunch, I have a post on the importance of aesthetics within organizations. I draw heavily from philosopher Roger Scruton and ICU physician and cultural historian (not mention fellow Mormon) Samuel Brown. While organizations often get the first two of the ancient triad Truth (science), Goodness (ethics), and Beauty (aesthetics) correct, the third tends to be ignored. Both organizations and the people they serve would be better off if it wasn’t.

Check it out.

Cultural Norms and Social Mobility

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Over at the Brookings Institution there is a fantastic post on how cultural norms affects social mobility with numerous links to pertinent research. For example:

  • Neighborhood cultures that accept dropping out of high school, out-of-wedlock births, and unemployment hinder social mobility.
  • These cultures often lead to obesity, smoking, and other similar habits.
  • Religion is connected to greater social capital and mobility.
  • Traits like saving are rooted in community cultures.

Definitely worth checking out.

The Man Who Fought Green Imperialism

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There is a great post over at the Newton Blog on RealClearScience about Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was the Father of the Green Revolution. It demonstrates the difference between the Green Revolution and Green Imperialism. Starting in Mexico, he toiled “for endless hours in the lab and in the fields to breed a wheat plant that was resistant to disease, thick-stemmed, and enormously productive.” Mexico’s wheat yield was six times higher in 1963, sixteen years after Borlaug’s arrival. Ninety-five percent of Mexico’s wheat was of “Borlaug’s dwarf variety.” Developing nations began sowing Borlaug’s crop. The results? “Global yields skyrocketed. Starvation rates decreased. Doom was postponed.”

Yet, environmental lobbyists attempted to block Borlaug’s expansion into Africa. They even convinced the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation to cut funding. While Borlaug was able to boost Ethiopia’s wheat yield to record levels, Africa is still steeped in starvation.

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists…” he told The Atlantic. “If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

But the post doesn’t stop there. It captures perfectly what is often wrong with environmental debates:

As with most debates, this one comes down to intrinsic values. From our lofty position in the developed world, we have the luxury to value the fallacious image of pristine, untouched nature over feeding ourselves. Hunger simply isn’t something that most of us are familiar with.

“These people have never been around hungry people,” Borlaug says of people like this. “They’re Utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.”

Proselytizing is easy. But try doing it when you’re starving.

Green Imperialism

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Having failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to begin with.

So begins a recent op-ed in the Financial Times by Roger Pielke (University of Colorado) and Daniel Sarewitz (Arizona State University). The attempt to cap carbon emissions in developing countries has vast consequences for the poor:

A recent report from the non-profit Center for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it would supply about 90m people – three times as many.

In Nigeria, the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment . . .in residential and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from plentiful local sources.

Or consider Pakistan, where energy shortages in a rapidly growing nation of 180m have led to civil unrest – as well as rampant destruction of forests, mostly to provide firewood for cooking and heating. Western development agencies have refused to finance a project to use Pakistan’s Thar coal deposits for low-carbon natural gas production and electricity generation because of concerns over carbon emissions.

This is worth considering, especially on the heels of Nathaniel’s climate science post. Science writer Matt Ridley has compared the policies proposed to address climate change to a tourniquet being used to stop a nosebleed: the bleeding is real, but the solution will do more harm than good. It is actually my acceptance of climate change that drives my support for innovation-based solutions. It strikes me as morally wrong to deny the poor energy consumption (such as a washing machine). As Pielke and Sarewitz write,

…[I]f the rapidly urbanising poor are to have any chance of prosperity, they need access to energy on the same scale as all modern economies. Climate activists warn that the inhabitants of poor countries are especially vulnerable to the future climate changes that our greenhouse gas emissions will cause. Why then, do they simultaneously promote the green imperialism that helps lock in the poverty that makes these countries so vulnerable?

Indeed.