Turning Back the Waist of Time

By next Monday I hope to weigh the same as I did twenty-nine years ago when I graduated from the University of Texas. Last summer at this time I was 18 pounds heavier than I am today; I have five more pounds to lose. 

I know this is a modest lost in the era of a network show like “The Biggest Loser”. It does however account for 13% of my body weight. It’s also that certain kind of weight, that slow fall from youthful frame added in middle-age increment; the 2-3 pounds that slips on every year from bad habits, inconsistent exercise and holiday binges. Its a slow-motion metamorphous that’s blurs your self-image like Vaseline on a lens, your torso edges soft as you surrender not to stare too hard.  

I’m close now to shedding fifteen years worth of that surrender, a task I actually judge easier than losing the habits that got me there. It is my hope and prayer that I now have the body I’ll have till I leave it, God willing somewhere between 40- 50 years from now. 

Take a drive down any suburban main street and start counting the food establishments. This is something not necessarily noticed unless you are in constant starvation mode. When trying to avoid the sirens song of something fatty and salty, your eyes track the restaurants down the avenue like hands making their way down a set of never-ending monkey bars. We are a culture immersed in cheap, deadly food. It is obscene in fat, salt and sugar and has transmuted Americans into most overweight, least healthy people in the industrialized world. 

We are a country struggling to find a more effective health care system, but it is a climb overwhelmed by an avalanche of bad food and quick indulgences.  Political theatre has divided this country; united we could get healthy but divided we are getting fat. Of all the health care costs currently on track to bankrupt our government before we get to 2020, a full 85% of the care costs could be avoided with a healthier diet. 

That’s right, 85% of the money we spend in this country on health care is because the majority of us have succumbed to the power of food mass-marketed with the sole purpose to please instead of sustain. We are a culture that glamorizes youth and athletics but transmuted it all into a spectator sport. A sport we watch with something fried. 

This is what you turn your back to when try to return to your college weight. Its a new life full of vegetables and absent soda. Its a lifestyle where you realize you'll be surrounded for the rest of your life with people who eat the wrong food at the wrong times in the wrong amounts. You will always be outnumbered and outflanked. 

For me the low point of my highest weight came at the end of a two-week vacation through the Great Lakes exactly one year ago. I weighed 188 pounds.  I had become the Elvis of the later years. 

It took me about four months to drop ten pounds. That I sat on the weight of 178 pounds  for ten months, on occasion hitting 176 for a day but spending most the time struggling to keep under 180. 

I have the great fortune of having a chiropractor (and Biology major) as a wife. She figured out the only way to get me to my target weight was to force my body into a state of ketosis. Basically this is when you fool your body into burning muscle and fat instead of glycogen (the sugar and water stored in your body); its what happens when you fast. 

On a carefully crafted no-sugar, 1000-calorie-a-day diet it takes about four days to drop into ketosis. The discipline is to hold yourself in that state until you hit your target weight. For me it will take about three weeks. It is a very difficult thing to do but those three weeks peal away that last bit to reach back 23 years ago. The oldest fat is the hardest fat to lose. 

To sustain this state you have develop absolute will to sustain from even the smallest cheats. Your body has the ability to switch back to burning sugar in just the smallest moment of weakness. It’s this absolute that will make you face every bad habit you’ve gotten in over the last decades. Habits you’ll have to fight for the rest of your life. 

There comes a point of no return in your path to old age. It’s where either you accept the secondary state your body has become or you make a change. You’ll likely only give it a few tries (if you try at all) to become that other person. It’s not just the weight you lose but the lifetime spent afterwords keeping from making the same mistake twice. 

And realize that as a nation we are a food tragedy; blessed in the land of plenty and cursed with eating too much. Not me. Not this life. 

A Thousand Years of How

Consider a moment the last 1000 years. The changing of the calendar to the new Millennium over a decade plus ago brought a long view to that span. Without question it was the birth of modern science that separated those previous seven-millennium changes. Writing, philosophy and metal had already had a long lineage by 1000 A.D. but start of the scientific revolution still sat 500 years away. The spark I give to Copernicus and the heliocentric paradigm shift that forced a rational mind to accept a new center. In the preceding revolution our place in space and time would get smaller and smaller as our knowledge of the universe around us got larger and larger.

Yes we should acknowledge the logic revolution by the ancient Greeks. But remember that was work on a Tabula Rasa, the thoughts shifted the world’s intellectual expansion because they were the first tremors of their kind. To claim them as the greatest thinkers of humanities arc is to replace the word pioneer with the word deity. Plato and Socrates were profound thinkers but had the advantage of the minimal constraint on what the world was made of and what governed it observable motions.

When the human evolution of collective thought turned to science to asking how instead of why, the tenements of observation, measurement and prediction produced a bedrock of discovery; the fundamentals of the physical world started to unfold. From Copernicus came Kepler and Galileo and suddenly dialectics became just another tool in the box of physical sciences. Yes, argue your point but show your evidence. Reason wins the day when reason is based on the observed and measured.

What mankind discovered in the beginnings of the age of enlightenment reviled that religion was no match to science in understanding the how. Indeed the providence of how IS the domain of science. This went far to discredit religion in the day, especially when religious authorities fought so hard to suppress discovery of such evidence against their dogma. My argument is that religion filled a void until we could fill it by discovery. It was inevitable that the mind of man would take Occam’s razor to the observable world and find better answers. This is the where evidence takes you. One can explain dogma as a cultural need where uncertainty broadens in the absence of evidence.

This is in no way closed the gap between thinking how from the thinking why. Galileo himself understood that the human mind required a higher authority to parse purpose. Only those drunk on discovery thought for a moment that reason could replace God. We weren’t finding out his secrets, merely finding out his methods. The secrets of purpose remains in his domain, it is an answer that would require all the facts of the before and after with emphasis on the after. How seems possible, why seems forever unsolved and therefore always up for debate.

Science produced its own dogmas as well, ones as dangerous as any originated from caliphate or Pope. But it is just as dangerous to assign faith in reason as the cause of Nazi eugenics or Soviet “scientific socialist” as to lay the crusades on the church. How an empire gets its citizens to risk life for expansion of power and influence should not be confused with why. Draw boundaries anywhere and those inside them will long for more land, water or resources. It is our way. These desires are played out in global trade in the new century; in the past its’ methods involved horses and swords.

The last 1000 years have seen the explosion of human knowledge but not neccessiarly understanding. Knowledge is not the same as faith nor is it a threat to it. But finding out how we got here seems both our intellcutal destiny as well as an important step in trying to understand our maker and define some purpose to it. If one is willing not to separate the two then its possible there is a logical leap of faith to take. Perhaps the how is part and parcel to the why. 

Twitting Away the News

“The Twitterization of politics,” says Commentary editor-in-chief John Podhoretz, “really is leading people to overreact.”

Technological advancement is rife with unintended consequences. An advancement in computer-driven social networks has shifted the sand under the news foundation.

During a tornado outbreak in Dallas/Fort Worth in the spring of 2011 a spotter comment was posted in a chat room run by the National Weather Service (NWS) in Fort Worth that went around the world. The is a “closed” room, the NWS office decides who gets in. most of the people in the room that were emergency responders and meteorologist for local media, airlines and utilities. There was also a network of weather spotters and ham radio operators in the room; it was from this source the phrase “wedge tornado” in an urban area went viral  Provided instant credence because of its source, area media reacted immediately to the ground report. As it was twitted by local media it was picked up by national news organizations and spread at a exponential pace for at least an hour. It was sensational, timely (there had already been a slew of confirmed tornadoes in the previous few hours) and suggested a “high-impact” event.  

The Twitter post was also untrue, a mistaken interpretation of a rain shaft and strong winds. Unfortunately the social media stream is a wave propagating out in all directions in a world where distance is irrelevant. The posts eventual correction lacked the sensation to create the same reach and span. 

The social network explosion has a potential to draw too many of us to the shallowest end of the pool of television news. Social media rewards the sensational. It provides instant comment for a treasured metric - the production of a response. It moves faster and is more public than overnight ratings, a near instant gratification that can seen, tracked and quantified. Suddenly the TV news presentation becomes an interactive video game. There is a new measurement of journalistic success: can it incite the pushing of “like” buttons and re-tweets? Can it reverberate through social media (all in a mere fraction of the time of the [now redefined] news cycle)? The desire for an affirmation fix can skew the news judgement toward emotional stories most likely to produce emotional response. The deeper water, the noble pursuit of truth and the moral core of journalism can be distracted by vigorous splashing in the shallow water.  

The seductive idea that emotional response is a good metric to judge news value is to forget that crazy person you dated briefly in collage. He/she excelled in pushing you around the sharp edges of of jealousy and desire. Do you remember how exhausting all that was? Good relationships shouldn't create big drama, if might make for a good segment for a daytime talk show, such theatre is usually a sign that a relationship ISN’T working. Would you ever have a news director say the same of a news story? 

These are dangerous times for news integrity. It is a certain irony that the free enterprise system in a two-party democracy (one would argue in its current state a plutocracy-funded “party of the incumbent”) has produced the equivalent of state-run television that serves a political purpose. There is a media business model now that takes the complexity of governance and renders it a shallow blood sport in a culture war. 

 Instead of serving a political party with emotional hooks news would serve reasoned debate.  News should serve knowledge for knowledge’s sake, try to ignore the fact that facts have become politicized. How will it be possible to have reasoned debate unless we embrace reason as a better response to fear and parsing the complex. 

To evolve toward this betterment requires a rebuke to the momentum of a celebrity culture that cultivates emotional response. A response that has found a linked-in feedback mechanism for instant gratification the social media provides. It is the newest echo chamber but does ringing its bell produce a hollow sound?

Getting Personal in Science verse Religion

It is not a war of science against religion. It a war within ourselves. 

Literature is old, science is new. Cuneiform on clay started 5,500 years ago, modern science didn’t show until 3,000 years later.  

Though the infancy of empirical investigations was birthed in Greek times, its rebellious adolescence that was the Scientific Revolution started around 1550 (above: a painting of Copernicus). It wasn’t long before those who ruled the providence of the established literature (at the time almost all of it religious) saw this new way of thinking as a threat to their social dominion. Knowledge started to burst out from everywhere colliding with the controlled explanations of the day. 

And so began the uneasy space between the new and the tradition and the two natural states juxtaposed in man.  One fueled by a hard-wired curiosity and ambition wired in our brain and the other from a soul that savors tradition and comforts in order and the predictable. A soul helps find our way teamed with a mind that helps us wander away from it. 

Science has continued to be the driving force in what expands our species. Science and its cousin of implication (and joined at the hip) technology constantly stirs the culture pot. It jostles around our sense of order brewing new possibilities and unintended consequences.  Culture moves forward but continues linked with what doesn’t change. The readings of Homer reveal a literary truth; our knowledge might expand but our emotions stay grounded in our core.  Culture is about humanity anchoring best we can on a world that spins. Science makes the spin faster. 

So lets talk about Science. It is at war with our religion only in the same way change and new information is at war with our traditions. Science is not a set of facts but a process. It is profoundly a human endeavor full of discarded assumptions and sudden turns. It is littered with wrong ideas. But wrong isn’t the right word. It’s simply a new idea replaced by a better one, an evolution breeding better answers. Knowledge rests no where but stays suspended on a thousand hands in a steady flux of breadth.  Yet it is a thin fabric; only a momentary understanding in words and numbers. “Everything known is only some kind of approximation” said Richard Feyman. The library stacks are just a scaffolding of understanding built around a real world, a facade of words and theorms. Understanding can only pierce so deep. Culture helps us go deeper while science heads in every direction like universe expansion itself. Faith and belief roots us into an understanding and a place, science follows evidence and takes us everywhere. It is a difficult thing to be in two places at once.  

The clash between religion and science is a phrase that externalizes the inherent clash within ourselves. We have been gifted an inquiring brain, it has built this world and taken us into space. Our understanding expands on what happened before we arrived and what will transpire in the future. Our knowledge fixes our place among the moving stars but doesn’t explain why they are there. Science is good about the how but the why remains just out of its reach. 

Science is a process and knowledge a moving target...but the soul is a thing. We are part wired to wonder why and part wired to believe. Life forces us to find balance in the place between, unable to ignore either. Culture helps define our beauty and help explain who we are but the core of every world religion rests in an individual soul.  Religion and science are not at war. It is just a phrase that embodies our humanity. Part of us wants to wander the stars, part of us want to stay rooted to the ground. We are both at the same time. Both of these things as the world spins around a fixed star. 

How Much Solar System Does it Take?

The miracle of life is not a story about efficiency of energy, material or space.

When you start thinking about the amount of space required to create one Earth the efficiency of creating self-sustaining life seems not very. 

Our solar system pivots on the center; the sun represents not only the starting point but also 99.86% of the mass of the entire system. As far as we know you can’t have life without a star and that life certainly can’t be on the star. It is literally the ring leader; almost all the cosmic dust for our solar system went to form the sun. What’s left after the formation of the mandatory center is a mere one-tenth of 1% of building material, barely a dropping from a scrape. You probably couldn’t vacuum your floor cleaner. Yet that one-tenth of 1% produced eight planets and one icy dwarf. 

Imagine a 100 liters of water, about 26 gallons (or 220 pounds if you prefer). Dip out one centiliter or about two teaspoons. The water that remains, the 26 gallons minus your two teaspoons, represents the mass of the sun. That small bit that you took out represents all the planets. Almost all of that two teaspoons, 71% of all the planetary mass, is found in one sibling, the gas giant Jupiter. 

As far as all the life in this solar system, at least what we can confirm, all of it is found on just one planet. The mass required to create the Earth amounts to only .002% of those two teaspoons.  That is two-thousandth of one percent. There are almost ten milliliters in the two teaspoons of water, earth’s mass is .02% of one milliliter. Look at a milliliter of water, in your mind divide it into 100 parts and take two of them.  I remind you that all that planetary mass is only one-tenth of one percent of the solar system. Think of the barrel holding 26 gallons. Earth’s mass is just a little bigger than a droplet of mist.

So all this material to make a solar system and only one planet to show life. The truth of gravity is that it hogs orbital planes. There is little chance that two planetary bodies could orbit close enough to share the “sweet spot” of water and life in our system, that   distance from the sun not too hot nor too cold from the infernal center. All the life on Earth requires a mere fraction of a fraction of total solar output; only .00000005% or one part of 2.2 billion of the sun's total photons. Given how precious life is you’d think we could have a little more stardust and squeeze in a 100 more earths in the system. In the scale of things there is plenty of room and ample sunshine. Alas the forming of all this from dust abandons any sense of economy of purpose. The laws of gravity to work out the maintaining of planetary orbits; it’s a balance of time and space that is well understood mathematically though we remain clueless on it physically. Gravity pulls on us; we are not sure what it pulls with. 

Water, sunlight and earth are the root of life on this planet; two come from above and can’t occur at the same time. Rain, by time, is a short stay over a land mass compared with sun. Both are needed for all lifeforms unless you want to suck on sulfur deep undersea next to a smoking vent. Sunlight radiates from the center and never blinks, we are blessed with an orbit so to hide from it for a night. The sun is the center of our physical existence but certainly not our spiritual one. Before you start wondering why we don’t thank the sun enough for its light and its anchoring role I remind you of our fate. In about five billion years the sun will expend its hydrogen and turns red. When it reaches that stage it expands in size and reaches our orbit.  Dust to dust. 

THINKING BIGGER, EMBRACING SMALLER

As mankind’s knowledge continues to expand the scale of our physical existence finds a smaller and smaller place in time and distance. Who doesn’t love a little existential irony?

Since the1920’s we knew that the universe was expanding. Since 1998 we discovered that that expansion is speeding up due to the force of dark energy, a word we’ve given to a force that we can’t explain yet. 

It seems the bigger a space we envision the bigger the questions (bigger in that the mystery covers more and more space). It’s like clearing a forest; the bigger the open space the more there is to maintain. The calm that religion can install within us weaves a tighter rope between the physical reality of our small individual space with a bigger picture. Yet the better we comprehend that physical reality the more that rope is stretched and thinned. The scientific endeavor has pushed out the edges of the universe out in time and distance. Copernicus showed that Earth is not the center of the stars and Sun. Then we learned that our solar system isn’t even at the middle of our galaxy. Edwin Hubble (and latter his namesake) discovered that our entire galaxy is but one in approximately 200 billion. Physics has taken us back to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, about 13.75 billion years ago. Our brain expansion seems merely a placemark to hold bigger and bigger questions. 

Like that we can only account for 7% of a the universes mass as we understand the laws of gravity. Either we don’t understand gravity on a galactic scale or 94% of the universe has in it something we can’t measure.* Lets just call it one big dark question. Or the centuries-long debate on if light is a wave or a particle settled on by declaring it both. At some point we had to stop questioning everything we see. 

Like the red shift itself our body of knowledge expands, pressing against the edges of what we don’t know. Our sense of placement in the physical universe scales smaller as we better the measurement on how bigger it is. As we garner a deeper and clearer understanding of the past a human lifetime in it gets smaller and smaller. The price of our expanding brains? Learning that our place in the time/space continuum is just a tiny corner where we set and observe what has already happened. As history layers on names and accomplishments our moment shrinks to even briefer a description. 

Big ideas that scan the universe perched from the smallest of places. Our entire life’s understanding of it woven in 1400 grams of synaptic threading. And sitting just outside of  7mm of skull plate everything else.   

*If I could propose a theory on dark energy it would start with the Big Bang. The assumption is that the creation of time/space in a gravitational field is uniform. I’d guess that it’s not, that dark energy is actually just “irregularities” in the time/space field left over from the matter/anti-matter split in the Big Bang. Are these massive open spaces cold enough to take on quantum charateristics?  Of course the real answer will likely be a little vague. Quantum mechanics has taught us that a definitive answer is somewhat an illusion, that outcomes are merely a range of probability of possible outcomes.

RADIO LEGEND DEAD AT 68 YEARS OLD

 I worked with Coyote at a Nashville radio station calling in every morning to give a weather forecast. Bob August (middle) called in to do the traffic.  On Thursday we’d do a bit on science, he’d introduce me by saying “and here is Jeff Ray the science guy, wearing nothing but a lab coat”. He lived on a houseboat only about 5 minutes from my house. On his fly bridge we would sit and talk philosophy and cultural history for hours on end. Portions of this were used in the his front page obit that ran in the Tennessean.

Coyote McCloud was the most famous of all my friends,  an outlier in the bell curve of anything toward a common life. His was not country, not urban, and certainly not suburban. He was a riparian in complete violation to Corp of Engineer law, he took refuge from normalcy on a houseboat for the last six years of his life. He spent his life as an entertainer, a radio personality whose banter exuded freely and effortlessly as the propagation of a modulated radio wave. His telling of the various degrees of separation from famous musicians could fill an afternoon. Think of the covers of Rolling Stone magazine across the 70‘s through the 90’s and he had conversed with a majority of them at one point or another. One summer afternoon I picked him up at his boat dock to take him to a my father’s annual Fourth of July picnic (he was a regular).  I had my well-read 18-year-old nephew riding along. He had never heard of Coyote and asked him what he did. “I played rock n’ roll music” he replied. My nephew preceded to name every famous musician he could think of since the inception of Rock and Roll. The ride took twenty minutes, the names never stopped. Coyote had meet every one of them, adding where he meet them and the circumstance and something they said or did. Coyote’s brain was like a recording device; even inside your own conversation with him he’d ask you about something you mentioned 30 minutes before. We was always doing an interview, somehow in that brain of his always taking notes. 

It was a life well lived, one reasoned and suburban men day dream about. Parties, award shows, MC events, run-ins with management and lovers. There were the radio hysterics- the Y107 melt over a German Shepard and a girl. The Where’s the Beef” record, the only song ever released in every Wendy’s restaurant in America. He could talk all day about his studio work and the people he co-wrote with. The stories never ended, anything you talked about he could link to somehow. He was an encyclopedia of musical knowledge, the hits just kept coming. The course of his life was a raging river with sharp bends and benders. He reminisced every outcrop he hit along the way, under his fame was an iceberg size history of firings, displacements and immediate family left unattended. What we remember is that which rose well above sea level. For long stretches he got hang time...air time. We would call that moments of fame, Coyote would simply call it fun. A average man might get that 15-minute flight once in a life time. For Coyote it arrived in 4 or 5 year bursts. Like all the very talented people he made it seem effortless. It was a life lived absolutely absent of fear of failure, a life of legendary reverie for living and full of deep friendships and a thousand acquaintances. He built a library of a thousand well told stories. What a life. What a ride. 

Coyote died from cirrhosis of the liver, on his boat April 6h, 2011. By his side was his ex-wife Susan Brown (of the Tennessean),  one of his most successful radio show partners Cathy Martindale, and his good friend Bobby Miller, the captain of his houseboat that rarely sailed. Coyote had refused a hospital or hospice, he just wanted to drift away while still tethered to his closest friends and family. Coyote was a radio star. Despite the advent of MTV, video didn’t kill him, it couldn’t touch him.  

If would be wildly inappropriate to offer a toast in honor of my friend given the nature of his demise. So instead just make a promise. Learn from him to live fearless. The next time an idea hangs back in your throat, suppressed  because you fear sounding the fool,  I know how to be brave. I learned this from a my good friend Coyote McCloud. Just tip up your chin and let loose a howl. Then turn to the mic and say something.