Creating . . wealth

(continuing "Imago Dei")

We know art is creative.  But have you ever thought about the creation of wealth?  Wealth not just for one individual, but wealth as life-improvement spread throughout a community or nation of people.

"Think about oil for a minute.  For thousands of years, oil was a nuisance - an insoluble mess to be scrubbed from your feet if you were unlucky enough to step in it.  Then one day someone had the bright idea of burning it to provide energy.  Suddenly oil was a resource, not a nuisance.  Soon dark streets could be lit, homes heated, cars driven.  The oil hadn't changed.  But [human] ingenuity had made this formerly useless substance into something we call "black gold."  Can you imagine the world without it?

"Now let's examine sand.  Sand is everywhere.  Like oil, it's sometimes hard to get rid of!  A grain of sand by itself has no value.  But a man can take that grain and transform it into a silicon chip, and suddenly it has value.  Another man can then take that chip and impregnate it with data, making it worth even more.  And when someone else connects that chip to a computer, it is worth quite a lot.  Multibillion-dollar companies like Intel have been built on grains of sand.  The sand, of course, remains basically worthless.  It must wait for people to give it its value." (from Discipling Nations)

Like Michelangelo's chunk of marble, oil and sand had no value to people - until people applied their imagination, effort, resources, aesthetic sensibility, engineering, craftsmanship, cooperation, and problem-solving skills to them.  Then there was value. 

People create wealth for themselves and their community.

Creating . . music

(continuing "Imago Dei")

"In the barrios of Paraguay, a humble garbage picker uses his ingenuity to craft instruments out of recycled materials – and a youth orchestra is born. Music arises and children find new dreams. Our film will showcase the power of creativity, hope, empowerment, and community work."

"This is a wonderful example of what we call the development ethic from Genesis: people using what they have, the resources in their own community, to add value to their world.



"At the core of this vision is the heart and soul of people made in God’s image, acting creatively.

Creating . . art

(The rest of this week will come from the "Imago Dei" label, originally posted January 2013)

"It began as part of a mountain in Italy.  Then one day a workman came along and began chiseling out a block of marble.  Using his discerning eye and powerful hands and arms, he worked for weeks.  When the block was finally hewn from the mountain, another man with a horse-drawn wagon hauled it to Florence.  A third fellow bought the stone and had it put on a pedestal in his studio.  That man was Michelangelo.  As he went about his other work, the artist would often pause to gaze at the immense, flawed block.  Perhaps months later, Michelangelo saw what lay hidden in the stone.  Finally, he picked up his hammer and chisel and began to reveal it.  Today we call what was once a buried chunk of marble a priceless masterpiece -The David."   Discipling Nations

That buried chunk of stone was worthless to people.  Then three individuals (in this story) applied their effort and intelligence and genius to the stone, and the original material (it was always in there) now had huge value, huge worth.  That value, that wealth of beauty, was created by people.

Author J.R.R. Tolkien says, ". . we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker."  J. R. R. TOLKIEN, On Fairy-Stories

So we are able to create . . because we are created . . by our Creator . . to be like Him.

Progress

Good news doesn't often make headlines like bad new does. But not all world news is bad. Here is news that confirms Hans Roslings' information about progress:

"Over the past three years, an additional 200 million people have climbed above the international poverty line . . For the first time in world history, less than 10 percent of the global population will be living in extreme poverty."

There's even more. That record low percentage of people in extreme poverty has happened under a toughened definition of the term, from the $1.25/day of the past to today's $1.90/day standard. The definition is more broad-based but still the percentage is a record low.

Christmas Day

Hark! The herald angels sing,

“Glory to the newborn King;

Peace on earth, and mercy mild,

God and sinners reconciled!”

Joyful, all ye nations rise,

Join the triumph of the skies;

With th’angelic host proclaim,

“Christ is born in Bethlehem!”

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!

Hail the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all He brings,

Ris’n with healing in His wings.

Mild He lays His glory by,

Born that man no more may die;

Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.

Christmas Eve

Nothing sets a Christmas feeling for me like music. This Christmas carol mentions the town of Bethlehem, where God incarnate entered society on the planet He had made.

O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie!

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light;

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

Did it

SpaceX has accomplished one of their major goals - they safely landed a rocket back on earth yesterday after it had launched satellites while in space.

Blue Origin, too, accomplished the safe return of a rocket from space, about a month ago. Owner Jeff Bezos (he also owns Amazon) says, "“Now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas is the rarest of beasts—a used rocket.”

According to Elon Musk (CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla), "That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.” 

Two obvious reasons for that . . human space explorers have to return to earth alive, and there's much more that can be done if the cost of sending up a rocket is cut by 90-1000%.

Job culture 2

(cont'd)

In addition to freedom/flexibility and team collaboration (yesterday), millennials are also looking a work culture that will:

* facilitate life success - a "recognition that people’s lives matter . .  requires leaders and managers who are strong coaches and mentors .  . 79% of Millennials say this is important to them."

* communicate how they plan to change the world - example: everyone who works at Tesla Motors knows that Elon Musk's goal is to reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuel

(quotes from "Why millennials don't want to work for you" at Forbes)

In my own family, my daughter-in-law just changed jobs and happened to site the second item (yesterday's post) as part of the reason why she did. Makes total sense to me.

Job culture 1

Workplace environment is changing in some good ways. That was my impression after reading "Why millennials don't want to work for you" at Forbes.

Millennials (age 18-34) are of course a growing percentage of the work force. What they're looking for is :

*  entrepreneurial culture -. the freedom to "work when, where and how you like as long as you are delivering results . .  the flexibility and freedom – where possible – to be [your] own boss with a focus exclusively on results."

*  team collaboration - "When I think of effective teams and the concept of true collaboration for a common purpose, there is no better example than a medical trauma ward. On such a team, competition, silos and politics are dangerous. Everyone must be unified and focused on a single outcome to achieve success."

These points would have improved the jobs I've had. Two more tomorrow.

(cont'd tomorrow)

.Independence

Malik Fal, originally from Senegal, is Harvard-educated. He's had a career in business and as a consultant.



"The sooner Africa can graduate from its dependence on aid, the better, because that would allow businesses to flourish."

Africans' challenge today is an economic one, he says. Their fathers' challenge was to achieve political independence, but now they must achieve economic independence. Political independence "doesn't mean much unless they can sustain themselves."

"When you have a local business that's striving, that's enabling employees to send their kids to school . . this is what really transforms communities."

Perpetuating

Economist Dambisa Moyo, originally from Zambia, says that aid from the West to developing countries in Africa has become a self-perpetuating industry. "Glamour Aid" promoted by celebrities has strayed so far from its well-meaning intent that it actually brings harm to today's African people.



It should be noted that she's talking about huge government-to-government payments (not humanitarian aid in crises). She says only about 20% of that aid actually makes it through government hands down to the country's people.

(cont'd tomorrow)

"Don't panic"

(cont'd)

Hans made three points while surveying his audience in the TED talk  (last two days of posts) regarding girls' education, natural disaster survival, and decline of abject poverty, all global in scope.  His fourth point was that people in general are ignorant of the good news about the first three points.

He's made an hour-long documentary demonstrating all of that. See the progress for one Mozambique family: "It's so great seeing Olivia and Andrea pedaling their way out of extreme poverty!" Their newly purchased bicycle eliminates hours of walking to sell their crops, bring water, and go to literacy class.


A vivid illustration shows why global population will undoubtedly decline after peaking in only a few decades. (Estimates of the peak number vary from eight to 11 billion.)

At about 44:45 in the video, Hans shows us his own absolute favorite chart. It's stunning! At least find and watch this part. I'd hate for you to miss it. 

Better

(cont'd)  Spoiler alert: if you didn't start the talk by Hans Rosling in yesterday's post and answer the 3 quick survey questions at the beginning, do it now before reading further

Hans started "Gapminder" to help people develop a view of the world that is based on facts, that is, information that represents reality.  I think it's a worthy labor. As he says in the talk, we need "to know about the present" in order to think clearly about the future. 

There's good news that should be told. About a billion people have risen out of abject poverty over the last ~30 years. Why don't people know it? Maybe because they get their news from the world of entertainment (you know the standard, "if it bleeds it leads").

We discover that, contrary to conventional wisdom,  most girls in the world are educated, natural disasters kill far fewer people, and there are far fewer in desperate poverty today than just a few years ago.

Perhaps the reporting of news is somewhat agenda-driven. Maybe it serves some ideology to emphasize the bad news and under-report the improvements, the good news.

(cont'd tomorrow)

Not ignorant

Here is that charismatic, number-crunching Swede, Hans Rosling, with a new TED talk (that I just discovered, though it's over a year old), determined to make us all less "ignorant about the world." As usual, his audience loves it.

Answer his survey questions at the beginning of the video for yourself and see how you compare to other audiences including Swedes, Americans, and chimpanzees :)



(cont'd tomorrow)

Lowline Lab

(cont'd from last Friday)

Lowline Lab is a demonstration of the technology that's going to produce a green park below street level on the lower east side of Manhattan - New York's first underground park.

To get sunlight below Delancey Street so there could be plants in the park, James Ramsey developed an "optical system" which is highlighted in this lab as a "proof of concept." Tubes overhead use mirrors and lenses to take the light down underground. A flexible metal canopy over the lab helps to reflect light down on the plants according to where it's needed.

Ramsey is working with Dan Barasch to develop the park. Here is the TED talk Dan did about the project:

Church people

Did Rich Mullins really say this, as I saw on facebook? He could have. But it's true regardless of who said it:

"I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite, because nobody goes to church because they're perfect. If you've got it all together, you don't need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning. Every time you go to church, you're confessing to yourself, to your family, to the people you pass on their way there, to the people who will greet you there, that you don't have it all together. And that you need their support. You need their direction. You need some accountability, you need some help."

Church people are just people. We need God and we need other people.

Pearl Harbor

Two days ago was the 74th anniversary of the attack that shocked America into entering World War II. Japan's bombing of the military base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was a complete surprise to Americans because we were not at war with Japan or its ally, Germany.

Amazingly, an army colonel had predicted 18 years earlier, in 1923, that this very thing would happen some Sunday at 7:30 a.m. It actually did happen on December 7, 1941, on a Sunday morning at 7:55 a.m.

About 2400 people were killed that day at Pearl Harbor, and nearly 1200 were injured. "As of two years ago, 2000 - 2500 Pearl Harbor survivors were believed to be still alive . ."

Bike lock DNA

(cont'd)

So DNA contains the instructions on how to build a living thing, right down to the chemistry within the cell.

If you wanted a computer to perform a new task, what would it need? You would have to give it instructions, information, code. In the same way, life forms carry their self-replicating information within the DNA in all of their cells. But where did the original set of instructions come from for each life form?



Biologists are well aware that information was essential for the origin of each life form. The puzzle this situation puts to them is called the "information enigma."

Materialists and atheists must explain the existence of information by random chance alone. The video above demonstrates the the overwhelming odds against such an explanation, and suggests that intelligent agency is the only thing we have ever seen which can produce information.

That bike lock analogy? Watch the video to see how it illustrates the incredibly remote chance that life and species developed entirely by random chance.

For every good protein (string of amino acids in correct sequence), there are *10 to the 77th power* combinations of amino proteins that do not yield a good protein. The odds against random chance producing just one good protein are the same as hacking the right combination on a bike lock with 77 dials, with 10 possible digits in each dial.

DNA Code

You know what DNA is, that immensely complicated and big molecule at the center of all the cells in your body - and all the cells in every living thing. Segments of DNA are genes that code for how the cell must build a perfect, working protein .

There are thousands of proteins. Each protein is a string of amino acids, and a short protein is 150 amino acids long in a specific order. If one of these proteins (string of amino acids) is incorrectly assembled, it is destroyed by a quality control mechanism because they must be perfect.

So what are the odds that a code could develop by accident - randomly - to instruct a living body to build the thousands of proteins necessary for life?  The odds are small, like trying to hack a bike lock.

More on the bike lock analogy tomorrow.
(cont'd tomorrow)

Low Line

Last August my niece and I visited the High Line in NYC. It's a park with shops and a path above the streets, following an old elevated train track.

Now I find out there's also a Low Line park located in "lower east Manhattan" that will grow trees and plants below the streets. The site is an abandoned trolley terminal, unused since trolley service ended in 1948.

It won't actually be up and running until maybe 2020, but a "lab" has been constructed to demonstrate the technology and prove that this will, indeed, work. More on this demo next week.

Need nuclear

Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and investor, authored an opinion piece in the NY Times last Friday entitled, "The New Atomic Age We Need,"

He says that clean energy goals will not be achieved unless nuclear energy returns to a major role, that America  " . .  already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. . . [O]ur power grid could have been carbon-free years ago."

Science writer Ronald Bailey at reason.com agrees that "Environmentalists Need to Get Real" at the big climate conference in Paris. "Anyone who claims to be worried about future man-made climate change and who still opposes modern nuclear power is not serious and should be ignored."

Army runs

Nigeria's suffering citizens in its northeast quadrant are still the target of Boko Haram. (Click on Nigeria under Labels for stories of these attacks.)

Dozens of girls were taken and hundreds of buildings set on fire over the weekend. A local newspaper reports that the military base was destroyed while soldiers and their commanding officer ran for their lives. After a battle on November 19, 107 soldiers were missing. Equipment was stolen including a tank, trucks, guns, and uniforms.

Civilian fighters held off attackers in Gulak until military reinforcements came to help save the town.

Not lettuce

Maybe you have heard that humans share about 98% of our genes with apes. This fact is sometimes claimed as evidence by those who deny a transcendent difference between humans and animals, who prefer that we see ourselves as a variety of ape.

But author Wesley J. Smith has a counter-argument:

"We share many genes with lettuce, but that doesn't make us part salad." The actual percentage of our genome that we share with lettuce is about 50%. What that tells you is that you can be hugely different from another life form while having a lot of the same genetic code.

Activists who tout the 98% figure may have "an ax to grind", that is, a cause - human equivalence to animals, the subverting of traditional values or faith, something that rejects the intrinsic dignity of human lives.

"Time will tell whether society chooses to accept this radical equation. We just shouldn't be fooled into thinking that the idea is compelled by "the science." It's about ideology."