Most maps of the world that you see in the United States look something like the map shown above, with the US at the nominal center of the map. You might get the impression that the US is in some way the center of the world, and maybe some of us feel that way. More likely, putting the US on the middle of the page makes sense if you live in the US and would like to know where other countries are with respect to your location. There may be other reasons for putting the US in the center of the map; can you think of any?

This map of the world locates Germany near the center of the map. The customer is always right, so they say, and this map provides the same kind of location information for German citizens as the first map does for people in the US. Or maybe it is a matter of national pride, if you don’t like the utilitarian explanation.

This map of the world follows a similar approach as the previous two, but with a twist. Notice how the map highlights Brazil, but does not locate it at the center of the map. Perhaps this reflects Brazil’s attention to trade to the north and east, across the Atlantic Ocean, with relatively little concern for trans-Pacific trade. Perhaps being at the center of the map is, for some reason, not very important to map customers in Brazil. Or maybe there is some other explanation?

This relatively recent (2014) official Chinese government map of the world has its own unique approach. China sits near the middle of the map, but two sets of dashed lines circle areas of particular interest to China. The first circles the South China Sea while the second covers most of the North Pacific Ocean. Perhaps this approach takes a direction different from the geographic humility suggested by the map highlighting Brazil.

Utilitarian explanations and geopolitical aspirations aside, it is not much of a stretch to think that many countries feel it right and proper to be at the center of their maps. Their country is their homeland, and their world centers around them in a figurative if not literal sense. 

Turning from countries to people, this “center of the world” mindset may remind us of our political leaders, who often seem to believe that their world centers around them. The trouble starts when they believe that the rest of the world, our world, centers around them, too. Interestingly, regardless of whether they are left wing, right wing, or centrist in their political beliefs, they still think and claim that they are in the center of all that is good, proper, and reasonable. Sometimes they think they are the center. Anyone who disagrees is on the fringe and branded as extremist, radical, and possibly even falling off the edge of the political map.

Loudly or quietly, we hear this “I am the center” perspective in the news media, in our communities, and among our friends and neighbors. Maybe our friends hear it from us, too. It permeates US politics, and seeps into other areas of life. Why is it so pervasive? Proverbs 21:2 notes, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes…” We are very good at self-interest, but our situation is worse than that. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” Looking at discord all around, it is clear that we need help, but we can’t help ourselves. The leopard can’t change his spots, and we can’t fix our self-centeredness. However, God has good news for us in Jesus.

Colossians 1:15-20 says, “He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

By God’s love, the fix for our self-centeredness is Jesus, the center of all things.

Holy Week makes me pensive. Here is one of my favorite photos, taken in early March, 2019. Somehow this photo reminds me of God’s majesty. What do you see in it? Regardless, please enjoy the beauty.

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Many of us have old photo albums tucked away in a bookshelf or closet. These date from back when we shot film rather than digital images. These old photos tend to take a back seat to images we view on our computers, but you can scan or digitize them to bring them into the digital age. It takes time to digitize those images, but we started the project a couple weeks ago and have made it through 18 of about 25 albums. (About four additional years of photos did not make it into albums because life became too busy.) Those old photos show our kids growing up, remind us of many happy times visiting family, and bring back memories of fishing, camping, and other family outings. And they include a few hidden gems from scenic destinations, such as the cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde National Park shown in the link below (copy and paste if the link does not work).

https://www.picfair.com/pics/013475469-cliff-dwelling

At the risk of oversimplifying, let’s take a quick look at a complicated topic: vaccinations and infections. If you receive one of the vaccines for the coronavirus, how does that help you avoid getting ill, and how might it prevent you from being a carrier for the disease? Here are my thoughts:

When a virus or bacteria enters your body, sooner or later your immune system mobilizes a response to try and fight it off. By “sooner or later” we mean that the response takes time. If your immune system cannot catch up with the infection it loses the battle, and you get sick or possibly even die. If your immune system wins, you return to health and live, although you might be sick for a time while the immune system catches up with the infection and does its job. Regardless, it takes time for your immune system to detect the infection and respond. Simple, right? Well, no, it’s more complicated than that.

Think of your exposure to an infectious agent (viral or bacterial) as a dose. A dose is not simply the amount of virus you receive; it also reflects how quickly you receive it. Receiving a lot of the virus all at once would be more severe than the same amount spread out over several days because the longer time period gives your immune system more time to respond. A large enough dose overwhelms your immune system while a small dose might make you sick while your immune system responds and eventually prevails. And you might not notice any effects from an even smaller dose, since your immune system fights it off before it can cause any symptoms.

Statistically, the size of the dose required to generate symptoms (or the size of the larger dose required for lethality) varies from one person to another. The variability comes from our different levels of health, different qualities of immune systems, and pre-existing conditions such as other illnesses, and it can be substantial.

So how does vaccination help? In the case of coronavirus or other infectious agents, the vaccine increases your immune system’s sensitivity to the virus. In effect, it makes your immune system spring-loaded so that it responds more quickly and with better effect when you encounter the virus. It helps your body fight it off so well that you may never even notice. This is why reports on the coronavirus vaccines are usually careful to say that they prevent severe (rather than all) Covid-19 cases.

But can a vaccinated person carry enough coronavirus to infect someone else? Unless I am missing something, the answer is probably not, and here’s why: First, any coronavirus that enters a vaccinated person’s body will trigger an immune system response that impedes the virus in replicating itself. Coronavirus particles riding on your skin or in your nostrils are out of direct reach of your immune system, so they might be available to infect others under the right circumstances (e.g., a large, juicy sneeze without a mask). But this leads to the second consideration. Recall that it takes a statistically significant dose of virus to infect a person. Does the amount of virus you launch with a sneeze create a large enough dose? Well, there have to be enough particles launched, they have to travel far enough, and the other person has to breathe in enough of them to receive a dose large enough for infection. It might be hypothetically possible, but a vaccinated person is not replicating a lot of virus, so it seems unlikely that a vaccinated person could infect an unvaccinated person. We need additional research (already in progress) to confirm or correct this understanding.

There are a lot of things we still do not know about the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, or about coronaviruses in general. However, experience with infectious viral and bacterial agents helps us understand how the new vaccines can protect us. If you have a chance to get the Covid-19 vaccination, I encourage you to take it.

English is my first language followed, I suppose, by mathematics. People with fluency in multiple languages live all around. In fact, well over 100 different language are spoken just in the Bay Area, often by people who know two, three, or even more languages. Maybe it is finally time to learn a new language. If so, which would you choose to learn?

Ranked: The Countries with the Most Linguistic Diversity

Visualizing the History of Pandemics

Full disclosures, up front: I think evaluations of 1) full life cycle costs, 2) carbon footprint, 3) disposition needs for the end of the technology life cycle, 4) impact on wildlife and environment, or 5) strategic materials needs are often incomplete for large-scale use of either solar or wind energy. Such evaluations are complicated and usually more difficult than you might think. And of course we still lack large-scale energy storage technologies for power grid applications. The main problem (as our friends in Texas recently learned the hard way) seems to be that politicians and bureaucrats rather than engineers and scientists guide US energy planning and decisions. Sad, but no surprise.

Remember our post about large river basin drainage areas? A technically-minded friend recently sent the “tidal power project” article linked below, and asked what I thought:

JFK’s Dream of Breakthrough Energy Technology: It Was Real; It Was Passamaquoddy

The article about tidal hydroelectricity is interesting, but I don’t think it would be easy to make such a system work. The problem is that most natural situations involving flowing water include a delicate balance between the kinetic energy of the water currents and the amount and sediment load (silt by suspension, sand by saltation along the bottom) carried by the water. If kinetic energy decreases, sediment settles out. Examples include river deltas, where sediment carried by the river settles out and eventually creates sand bars, mud flats, and ultimately a growing delta because the kinetic energy of the river current dissipates as it enters a lake, the upstream end of a reservoir, or the ocean.

We can find an example involving tides here in California, right outside the Golden Gate. The current sweeping in and out through the Golden Gate with every change of the tides is quite strong in each direction, but the net movement of its sediment load is out to sea rather than back into the Bay. And when the current carrying the sediment flows far enough outside the Golden Gate, the kinetic energy dissipates, and it drops its sediment load. This in turn creates an arc-shaped ring of sand bars some distance outside the Golden Gate. You can find maps of the sand bars online, and the Bar Pilots use detailed maps of those sand bars for navigating ships in and out of the Gate.

My grandfather (and other people, I suppose) once proposed anchoring barges on the “Muddy Mississippi” River to generate electric power. The idea was to use the river current to turn a propellor under the barge to generate electricity. I don’t think anyone ever tried it because removing energy from the flow would create a sand bar just downstream from the propellor as the sediment fell out of the flow, and the sand bar would eventually divert flow away from the propellor. 

Bottom line is that I expect a scheme to generate energy from tidal currents would cause the flow to drop whatever silt or sand it might be carrying, and it would clog up the system. Make sense, or am I missing something?

Mapped: The Drainage Basins of the World’s Longest Rivers

Let’s do a thought experiment. When Adam first met his wife, Eve, how did he respond? Genesis 2:23 tells us what he said: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” But we don’t have his tone of voice, movement of the hands, facial expression, or body language. How do you think he said it?

Do you suppose he made these comments out of a sense of obligation? After all, God went to a lot of trouble to create Eve, and it would not do for Adam to be impolite in meeting his new companion. Or do you think he could have been disappointed? Eve was the first woman Adam ever saw, so how could he be disappointed? Or perhaps Adam was so surprised that that he freaked out for a moment. No, none of these seem likely. Look again at Adam’s words.

Look especially how Adam’s response starts: “This at last…” God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone, so He made Eve. Adam needed a human being to accompany, support, and complete him. So he responded with a passionate “at last,” reflecting a combination of relief, thanksgiving, joy, and even some elation at meeting Eve. This multifaceted creation of husband and wife included companionship, conversation, sexuality, mutual support, and a relationship with God their Creator (see Malachi 2:15 for a hint about God’s role in marriage). And like the rest of creation, God’s design of male and female was a blessing, and it was good.

Interestingly, Jesus endorsed all of this in Matthew 19:4-6, saying, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

Every marriage has good days and not-so-good days, good times and rough times. We are sinners living in a fallen world, so it goes with the territory. Sadly, some people today question whether marriage is a blessing or a burden. Some even question whether being born male or female is a blessing or a burden. If we turn our back on God’s design, the blessings do become burdens. But God offers redemption, His promises still stand, and His blessings are there for us if we don’t walk away.

“Reforming Journalism,” by Marvin Olasky, lays out a disciplined alternative to what usually passes for journalism in America today. Olasky organizes his book in three parts. The first starts with a short situation analysis and then examines basics such as objectivity, motives, details versus abstractions, and likely challenges and pitfalls. The second digs into nuts and bolts of reporting, including collecting information, triaging and organizing material to make it tell a story, effective writing skills, and integrity under fire. The third part describes the history of American journalism (along with some European origins) in a lively, well-documented narrative to explain how we got here; this background sets the stage for how a motivated journalist can make a valuable difference.

Most major news organizations today seem aligned with political movements (name two that are not). Further, many reporters work inside a box of political beliefs. Interestingly, these reporters and their parent organizations all work from essentially the same basic underlying worldview when it comes to how they understand their work, and even how they understand truth. Olasky’s book proposes a fundamental reform for those bold enough to break from the pack. I recommend it in particular for those considering a career in journalism and for those wishing to understand what, besides profit, drives today’s corporate news media.