We love to watch for wildlife when we travel. Over the years, we have been blessed to see two different wolf packs (Wyoming), several black bears (California, Wyoming, and Alaska), and numerous grizzly bears (Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska). Travel is not always an option, though, so here is a link to a large array of wildlife webcams:

https://explore.org/livecams

Some of our favorites are the webcams overlooking Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park, Alaska. The salmon run is in full force today, and it is fun to watch the grizzly bears (AKA brown bears) fishing, along with the seagulls and the occasional wolf.

P.S. The Brooks Falls webcams are solar powered, and when they don’t have enough sunlight to operate, the web page shows highlight video clips from previous days.

Visual Capitalist, one of my favorite sources of information portrayed by graphics and illustrations, posted a nice article showing how a Mercator projection distorts the size of countries. Many of us grew up with a Mercator projection of the world on our school classrooms, and we probably had a nagging sense that something was not quite right in the way it showed various countries. The article linked below shows the problem: the further a country lies from the equator, the more distorted its size. Australia and countries in Africa, South America, and southern Asia come out reasonably well, but the US, Canada, and countries in northern Europe and northern Asia get a bit of an unnatural boost to their size. Maybe a boost to their ego, too.

Mercator Misconceptions: Clever Map Shows the True Size of Countries

The next linked article, again from Visual Capitalist, compares the Mercator projection with other types of projections. Some are better for navigational directions and geographic positioning while others are better for sizes and distances. Unfortunately, there is no perfect way of mapping the Earth onto a flat piece of paper (or a flat computer screen) without some kind of compromise. Makes me wish for a good old-fashioned (but up to date) globe!

The Problem With Our Maps

The article linked below purports to estimate the land area needed to power the US with electricity generated by solar energy. It makes good use of easy-on-the-eye graphics to communicate information, and I like to see how writers pack as much information as possible into their illustrations. However, some questions go unanswered.

How Much Land is Needed to Power the U.S. with Solar?

For starters, estimates of US electricity needs often use phrases like “electricity to power 18.6 million American homes.” But how much power does the average American home use? Does that figure, whatever it might be, include heating and air conditioning? Maybe yes. Does it include energy to charge an electric vehicle or two, given the government push to wean us away from vehicles powered by gasoline or diesel? Maybe or maybe not. Does it reflect local attempts to block the use of natural gas for heating and cooking in new or renovated homes, which will force a switch to electric heating and cooking? Maybe not. So we may have a bit of a moving target, which reduces the credibility of projected numbers.

Next, we need to think about how solar generation supports the power grid. The article does not mention energy storage for when the sun is unavailable, nor does it discuss how relying on renewable energy might affect power grid reliability. Over the past 20 years or so, California ratepayers have been subsidizing renewable energy investments (mostly wind and solar) at the expense of other potential electric utility investments, and state government’s hand on the utilities has become heavier and heavier. Meanwhile, the power grid has become less reliable, and brownouts and blackouts come with increasing frequency. Why should ratepayers have to get used to unreliable electricity service?

Last, and probably most speculative, what happens to weather patterns if we replace enough light-colored desert, medium-colored roofs, or green grasslands with black solar panels? The panels convert only a fraction of incoming sunlight to electricity; the rest is mostly radiated as heat back into the atmosphere. In comparison, a rocky desert, colored roof, or grassy field will not radiate as much heat. On a small scale these differences may not amount to much, but if we have a thousand square miles converted from natural surfaces to what amounts to black body radiation, will the increased heat radiated into the air change anything in the weather? Or is this too hypothetical to worry about?

An old purportedly Chinese curse says, “May you live in interesting times.” Our times certainly are interesting, with changes, difficulties, and “wars and rumors of wars” (see Matthew 24:6) all around. However, these are also times of blessing from God’s hand.

The Lord brought us through some challenging times and transitions over the past couple of years. Health concerns sidelined a few of us, but many others remain active and perhaps even more engaged. Shut-ins may not be able to meet with us, but can serve as prayer warriors, bringing needs and opportunities before our Lord. And our Lord continues to bless all of us, sustaining our members, and bringing new people into our fellowship. They come, drawn by a viable alternative to the political tensions, fearmongering, and brokenness that saturate our country. A viable alternative, and the only real alternative. We are broken too, but God blesses us with hope, peace, and healing that only He can provide.

As a body, we are a mix of personalities. Some are quiet while others are outspoken. Some are reticent while others are bold. Regardless, 2 Timothy 1:7 states, “God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” Consider these three words the Holy Spirit gave the Apostle Paul to describe the Godly spirit that replaces fear: power, for energy and effectiveness; love, for motivation and selflessness; and self-control, for discipline and focus. Power, love, and self-control, all harnessed for sake of the Gospel writ large.

Interesting times are not over, and the challenges may become daunting. However, our Lord continues to bless us with opportunities, and sometimes challenges and opportunities come hand in hand. We move forward together in this team known as the church, and this is not the time for fear. Instead, let us press forward in power, love, and self-control, encouraging and supporting each other as fellow members of the body of Christ.

Almost six months ago I opened a photo gallery on Picfair. With 189 photos posted, the gallery has received nearly 3000 views. Judging by number of views, here are the four most popular images from the selection, plus a bonus fifth image for your enjoyment:

The Biden administration recently announced a goal for 2030 that 50% of new vehicles sold in the US will be electric vehicles. The automaker R&D and design departments better get crackin’ because we have questions:

None of the currently available electric passenger cars have a range of more than about 400 miles per charge. Drivers won’t usually drive until the batteries are dead, so that means the effective range is 400 miles minus your comfort zone on when to stop to recharge. And when you do stop to charge your Tesla (or whatever), it may take up to an hour or more at one of Tesla’s Superchargers. Of course, that also depends on whether you can plan your route around the available network of chargers. Our last road trip involved two consecutive days of driving over 700 miles, so does this mean our elected servants want to preclude family vacations and trips to see relatives who live beyond that 400 mile range? Or just make them so difficult as to be impractical? And what if you want to go camping in the boonies, away from charging networks?

Electric cars aside (at least until the designers solve the questions of range and recharge), consider for a moment how safety standards require putting our children into a succession of car seats from the time they are infants until they reach a certain size and age. Then they switch to what amounts to an engineered booster seat for maybe another year or more, until they have finally grown large enough for an adult safety belt. Consumer Reports and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommend that kids use booster seats until they are at least 4 feet 9 inches tall and 8 to 12 years old. So, how many passenger cars have enough room for a father, mother, and two child seats? What about three child seats? Or even four seats? Unless you have the money for a minivan or a medium to large SUV, the safety regulations seem to work against having more than one or two children. Safety is certainly a good thing, but do policy makers know or care that they are working against “large” families?

Last but not least, while we are asking questions about cars, our local planners want to try cutting one of our city’s major streets from four lanes to two lanes. They say this will make space for bike lanes, but much of the street already has bike lanes. For the part of the street that is too congested for bike lanes, riders can find safe bike routes that parallel the street only two or three blocks over (I know because I used to take those routes when I biked to work). So what is the reason to narrow the thoroughfare? Maybe to get us out of our cars and into something like Uber? But Uber drives cars, too. Maybe to force us onto a bus? But the buses do not run often enough or cover enough locations for that to be practical. (By the way, I rode a bus for years to get to graduate school, and was surprised to discover things called bus schedules. Why surprised? Because I never saw a bus run on schedule, so I did not know real schedules existed. Who knew?) Back to the planner questions. Maybe they simply want us to walk? That would be good for our health and the shoe industry, but also time-consuming. All of this leaves us wondering if the impact of narrowing the street is a bug or a feature in the eyes of the planners.

OK, enough rambling questions for now. Suggestion: on this as well as so many other current events, it is always a good time to make your views known in the marketplace, in your elected representative’s mail, and at the ballot box.

How often do you answer phone calls or emails asking you to participate in an opinion poll? My guess would be not very often, if ever. Nevertheless, the volume of letters to the editor in our local papers and results of broader surveys by professional pollsters (see the tabulations at RealClearPolitics.com, for example) suggest that many people feel that our city, county, state, or country are on the wrong track. Maybe you agree, or maybe not, but other than voting in elections, what can we do?

It is easy to grouse about problems we see on the news and grouse about the problems the news media try to hide from us, but we miss opportunities to make a difference if grousing is all we do. Commentators may try to convince us to take action, but they rarely have any actionable ideas for how to make an impact. However, Joy Pullman recently published a refreshing article that offers a wide range of suggestions to make a positive difference. Entitled, “85 Things You Can Do to Help the United States Shake Wide Awake,” you can find it online at https://thefederalist.com/2021/08/11/85-things-you-can-do-to-help-the-united-states-shake-wide-awake/ (copy and paste this link in your web browser to find the article). Some the ideas may strike your fancy while others won’t, but take a look and see what you can do.

This is still amazing to me. Like most people, I use the words vaccination and immunization almost interchangeably, although a vaccination is technically not the same as an immunization. Like many people, I don’t think coronavirus is lurking outside, waiting for its chance to come across the street and kill me. Nevertheless, I am personally immunized against polio, smallpox, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, flu (many times), pneumonia, and shingles. Also coronavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and tetanus. And those are just the ones that come to mind. Why would anyone turn down immunization against a disease, and particularly a disease that can make them seriously ill? Unless they have some kind of underlying health condition that prevents it, turning down the immunization simply boggles the mind!

One of my favorite information sources, OurWorldInData.org, recently published this analysis of average income vs child mortality rate for a large number of countries. Please note that both axes of the scatter plot shown above use a log scale, each dot or bubble represents a country, and the size of each bubble represents the relative population of the given country. The scatter plot shows a general trend indicating a rough inverse correlation between child mortality rate and a nation’s GDP per capita. No surprise, poorer countries have higher child mortality rates.

Child mortality rate, for this analysis, is the percentage of children born alive that do not live long enough to reach their fifth birthday. The data from 2017 used to create the chart indicate that about 5.4 million children worldwide die each year before the age of five. Relatively few news articles seem to discuss child mortality on such a global scale, and those that do discuss child mortality usually fail to mention that about 50-55 million abortions happen worldwide each year in addition to the child mortality figures mentioned above. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but five and a half million children dying is a tragedy, and ten times that amount dying in abortions is ten times the tragedy.

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