Hasta La Gadget!

I’d been a single father for about two years when I met Julie. We’d been dating for a couple of months when we saw an opportunity for her to meet my two daughters, then 4 and 8. We’d wanted to wait until we could seriously contemplate marriage, and that time had come sooner than we’d expected. We felt she had to enter fully into my family life if we were going to be able to discern whether we could make a lifelong commitment.

The nonprofit ministry where she worked was hosting a fundraiser at a local restaurant. I forwarded an email invitation to my family and a few friends. “I’m bringing Aurora and Rowan for a low-key way to meet Julie,” I wrote. “It’d be great if a few other people were there.” A close family friend, “Prudence,” replied, telling me she couldn’t meet us for dinner because she didn’t think the Bible condoned remarriage after divorce. She cited four Scripture texts. “I know that my interpretation of scripture is not popular, or pleasant,” she wrote.

I wrote back: “Prudence, I’m not sure why you are telling me this. God doesn’t need you to impose your interpretation of Scripture on me or anyone else. God calls you to love. Period.”

I went on to address each of her proof texts, one by one, telling her why her interpretations were wrong.

“God hates divorce,” I wrote. “And so do I. I hope and pray that you NEVER, EVER come to hate it as much as I do because that will mean you have suffered from it in the way that I have. Until then, you cannot understand the depths of God’s hatred of divorce. You can only understand it as some sort of moral, judgmental stance, which it is not. It is the stance of our loving God alongside those who suffer in this world … I am sorry that you feel compelled to believe what you believe. I don’t think it has any basis in Scripture and, like so many beliefs rooted in fear, it causes conflict between us and will continue to cause conflict between you and anyone who interprets Scripture outside of the very tiny minority community that you have chosen to side with. There is a great big world of Christians out there who could teach you a lot if you did not cling to fundamentalist dogma. I also love you and will continue to love you, even if you continue to sit in judgment over me. I will offer you grace as someone who hasn’t matured enough to realize that grace is the only thing worth offering each other. But you create conflict, not shalom, when you try to impose your own extra-biblical moral positions on other Christians.”

She wrote back: “I’m pretty hurt from your response … It’s a conviction that I feel from the Holy Spirit, and I have no choice but to submit to it and be open to His changing my heart on the matter … The references I sent were merely there to back my conviction, not to change yours. I must agree that grace is worth giving, but I think you have to agree that there’s absolute value in living a life based on godly conviction.”

I wrote her back saying I had felt her judgment for as long as I had known her, and those close to us had tolerated it out of love. “I just wish I could soak you in the depths of God’s love. A person sure of God’s love does not need to live with conviction … Conviction is how we seek to earn God’s love, rather than basking in God’s grace … I cannot trust you and offer you my whole self when you cling to moral perfectionism. God, my Father, has welcomed me back from the pigsty, throwing me a party in the form of a wonderful, godly woman named Julie. I wish you would come to that party, instead of grumbling about the integrity of your convictions.”

The girls did meet Julie, surrounded by family and friends, but not Prudence. More than a year later, Prudence and I finally tried to put a cap on that discussion, agreeing to disagree and never talking about it again. Our relationship has never been the same. I wish I had never responded to Prudence. I wish I had followed my own advice to just live and let live. I did the very thing I had accused Prudence of: I tried to impose my sense of morality on her. I tried to teach her love, instead of just showing it. I used grace as a weapon, trying to force Prudence toward what I thought was a truer vision of God, instead of leaving that work to God alone.

I was speaking out of my own pain, trying to throw off the shackles of my fundamentalist past, just as she was speaking out of deep concern for her own troubled marriage. Neither of us could see that clearly in the moment. We each talked as though it was our spiritual values at stake, but, in truth, it was the shape of our very lives. If my marriage could fail, permanently, so could hers, and that might have been her worst fear. On the other hand, her judgment was a threat to my future, the redemptive life I was dreaming of. In her act of disapproval, I heard condemnation to a life of loneliness. For two years I’d been going to my ex-wife every few months, asking her to reconcile, asking her to go back to counseling with me. She’d never responded. I’d done all I could, but she didn’t want to be my wife. I couldn’t understand why Prudence didn’t see that.

I’m calling her Prudence because of The Beatles’ song. It seems to me a miracle of twentieth-century pop music — a real divine intervention — that it happened to be a woman by the name of Prudence Farrow, the actress Mia’s sister, who was taking her human religious practices a bit too seriously when John Lennon and the band went to India in 1968 to study transcendental meditation. “She’d be locked in (our hut) for three weeks and was trying to reach God quicker than anyone else,” Lennon told rock journalist David Sheff. Isn’t “prudence” a double-edged sword of a character-trait? Do you know anybody like that, always trying to reach God quicker than anyone else? This little light of MINE!!!! MINE!!! I sure can relate. You have to love the prudent, because they’re trying to do the right thing, and yet they (we!) have a hard time admitting that we’re incapable of always doing the right thing. We praise the prudent, and yet they (we!) are not that fun to be around. In the Gospels, the Pharisees were the prudent ones. Jesus was the imprudent one, healing the lame on the Sabbath, knocking over tables in the Temple, dining with hookers and small-time crooks. The prudent always have something to prove, and it can make us, well, prudes. Lennon’s lyrics evoke a sense of our place in Creation, calling us to embrace what beauty is already within our reach, rather than always striving for the unattainable. I wished John could come back and sing his song to the Prudence in my life. Dear Prudence, notice the bright sky, feel the breeze, hear the birds, try to understand the real world I’m living in, not some ideal world we both wish we had. Dear Prudence, open your eyes.

Deafened by my own defensiveness, I couldn’t hear that Prudence was trying to be true to herself more than she was judging me. She couldn’t see that I was gasping for the air of freedom. In those moments, there was too much at stake for us just to let each other be, and we hurt each other badly in the volley. She, at least, was true to her beliefs. I was so busy protecting mine that I forgot to live them.

Author/musician Jesse James DeConto performed this Beatles song with his band The Pinkerton Raid at the 2014 Paradoxos Festival in Durham, N.C. He is releasing this video and accompanying book-excerpt as part of a series celebrating the release of his spiritual memoir, This Littler Light: Some Thoughts on NOT Changing the World.

This New York City artist is thinking outside the (cereal) box.

Sarah Rosado makes portraits of major performers out of cornflakes. With works that feature greats like John Lennon and Elvis Presley to latter-day stars like Beyonce and Lady Gaga, Rosado has rendered the breakfast staple into art.

Beyonce

“One morning, I remember eating cornflakes and listening to the Beatles’ song [“Eleanor Rigby”] and at that moment I was struck with the idea to create images of my favorite artists with the cereal,” she told The Huffington Post.

Drake

Rosado, 31, said each piece requires 6 to 8 hours to finish.

“There’s a lot of effort that goes into creating each one,” she explained. “The cereal has to be crushed into very tiny pieces for the special features such as the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. It’s almost like working with a broken puzzle; each bit and piece has to have the right size to fit perfectly.”

Rihanna

Elvis

Lady Gaga

Visit Rosado’s website for a full gallery. You’ll go gaga for the other portraits, too.

This is one you will hear in physics classrooms and read in physics textbooks. It even seems to be familiar experience. The magnetic repulsion between the like poles of two small bar magnets easily overcomes their mutual gravitational attraction.

But the sun and Earth have magnetic fields too, and their mutual gravitational attraction easily overcomes their magnetic interaction. When Newton derived Kepler’s laws of planetary motion he just needed his law of gravity and did not have to take into account the magnetic and electric fields of the sun and planets.

So it’s not so obvious. Electromagnetism dominates at the atomic and subatomic levels. But on the planetary level it’s the other way around.

The magnetic force results from electric currents that are moving electric charges. It is part of the same phenomenon as static electricity, referred to as electromagnetism. If you are in a reference frame in which a charge is at rest, you see electricity. If you are in a reference frame in which a charge is moving, you see magnetism.

The static electric force between two charged bodies is given by Coulomb’s law, which says that the force between two point charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

The gravitational force between two particles is given by Newton’s law of gravity, which says that the force between two point masses is proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

The electric and gravitational force laws are both inverse square laws, so if one computes the ratio of the forces between two bodies, the distances cancel. For the electron and proton, the gravitational force is 39 orders of magnitude weaker than the electrical force. This is the source of the myth that gravity is a much weaker force than electromagnetism.

Why base our estimate of the relative strength of gravity and electromagnetism on these two particular particles? The proton is not even elementary but composed of quarks.

In fact, there is no universal way we can specify the absolute strength of the gravitational force. Newton’s gravitational constant G is not dimensionless and so is not a good measure of the strength of gravity since it depends on what units you use.

The absolute strength of the electromagnetic force is specified by a dimensionless parameter alpha called, for historical reasons, the fine structure constant. It is actually not a constant but varies with energy. However that variation is very gradual and for most practical purposes alpha can be taken to have a value of 1/137.

Conventionally a dimensionless parameter alpha-G is defined to represent the gravitational force strength. It is proportional to the square of the proton mass and has a value 23 orders of magnitude less than alpha. So “officially,” gravity is this much weaker than electromagnetism.

However, as we have already noted, the proton is not even a fundamental particle so it makes no sense to use it to define the strength of gravity. The only natural mass that can be formed from the basic constants of physics is the Planck mass, which is macroscopically large. It is about 22 micrograms, whereas a speck of dust is only about 1 microgram. If you define the dimensionless strength of gravity using the Planck mass you get exactly 1. In the case, gravity is 137 times stronger than electromagnetism.

Gravity is so weak at the atomic and subatomic level because the masses of atoms and subatomic particles are so small. It is strong on the planetary scale because the masses of planets are so large.

However, a good question is: Why are the masses of elementary particles so small compared to the Planck mass? This is a major puzzle called the hierarchy problem that physicists have still not solved. However, it is to be noted that, in the standard model, all elementary particle masses are intrinsically zero and their masses are small corrections resulting from the Higgs mechanism and other processes. The hierarchy problem can be recast to ask why the corrections are not on the order of the Planck mass.

The lack of an absolute strength of gravity does not mean that its strength relative to the other forces is not important. Changing the definition of the strength parameter does not change the ratio of the forces between two bodies in any specific situation. But, the point is, that ratio is not the same in all cases. In fact, it can be almost anything, depending on the masses and charges of the bodies being compared. In short, it makes no sense to even ask what is the relative strength of gravity and electromagnetism.

If you’ve tried playing a retro console on a modern HDTV, you may not have liked what you saw — smeary, stretched images that are a far cry from the sharp chunky blocks of yesteryear. Luckily, there’s a better way for purists to get a crystal clear image that doesn’t involve buying an old CRT TV.

Read more…

Since the iPhone’s launch in 2007, Apple has kept screen sizes simple, offering only four options. Now, the company may be taking a different approach. Bloomberg reports that Apple will launch a 12.9-inch iPad in early 2015, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

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