Sustainable living

Random thought of the day:

Neal A. Maxwell said, "To those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, it is clear that the Father and the Son are giving away the secrets of the universe!"

When I first read that, I wondered what it meant.

Now I'm realizing that, at least in part, he's saying that God is teaching us how to live the way that he lives: sustainably. Eternally. To build relationships and communities instead of destroying them, and to improve our environment instead of neglecting it.

Also, to care for our own bodies instead of abusing them.

Over the last few years, my wife and I have served a handful of people who have brought most of their health problems onto themselves--

These people seemed to have an antagonistic relationship with their bodies. They'd punish their bodies, and soon their bodies would punish them back. They'd dump various stimulants/chemicals into their stomachs and lungs and eyes, all for a temporary rise, somehow blind to the fact that they were simply building their own torture chamber. Lung/throat cancer, liver disease, nerve damage, insomnia, heart problems, kidney failure, obesity, loneliness, anxiety ...

In exchange for a few short years of exhilaration, their body soon became a torture device. Their diagnosis revealed the instrument, and also the duration, often interminable. And they can't escape. Worse, their only relief is so often more of the very thing that caused the problem in the first place.

Human bodies are prone enough to illness and disease even with careful living, why would someone bring it on through their own choices? It's insanity.

It's so sad to watch them -- we can sit 2 feet from them, but we can't free them -- we've watched as their bodies torture them day after day. Early onset issues are the worst, the rest of the young body is so resilient.

Granted, we all do it to some degree (looking at you, sugar...). But there's a big difference between carelessly stubbing your toe, and intentionally knife-stabbing yourself in the gut.

For my part, I'm going to try a little harder to see my body as a cherished friend, worthy of care: better food, a little more activity, better sleep.

Shattered Backboard Glass and the Cat's Eye

"Dad, the basketball backboard is broken."

My 8-year-old son was looking out the back window. I was talking to a friend in our family room, and basketball was the last thing I was thinking about.

"No it's not," I thought as I stood up to investigate. This was August 2019. The backboard was only 2 years old. And that glass is 1/2-inch thick tempered-glass — and crazy heavy! The basketball stand was a splurge purchase when we bought the house in 2017 — over $2000 for a heavy-duty stand with a dunk-ready hoop (since I do so much dunking! haha) plus a net, and light. It's beautiful, really — kind-of a centerpiece in our back yard.

But at that price and age, there's no way it could be broken. Nobody had even been out there playing.

But I was wrong.

Wow, not just a little broken — shattered.

We immediately noticed that the break seemed to radiate out from a single point:

Another view:

Looks like something must've hit it.

(But what?)

---

I emailed the company. They were sympathetic, but they said it was clear that something had struck it, and the warranty didn't apply. They offered a replacement at a small discount.

Something was bothering the engineer in me, though.

I had looked around under the hoop for a rock or some other kind of projectile, and I hadn't found anything.

If the backboard had been struck by something small, like a bullet or a bb or a rock or something, I expected it would have shattered the impact site to powder, even if at a very small point. There was nothing like that.

If it had been struck by something large — a bird? hard throw with a basketball? a softball? — then I would've expected to find some marks on the surface of the glass, or the item itself. There was nothing.

I couldn't let it go.

---

A few Google searches, nothing useful.

I wrote a pretty long and piqued email to the company, trying to lay out the possible causes and how likely how unlikely it was that it had been struck based on the evidence, and how terrible an experience it would end up being if I had to replace it under those conditions...

But I didn't send that email. It just didn't sit right.

So I went back to Google.

This time, I found something — Nickel Sulfide in Tempered Glass Causes Spontaneous Fracture, by Thomas L. Pane, PE. Ah ha! Mr. Pane describes a case study of my *exact* situation, a pane of tempered glass shatters for no apparent reason.

Here's a comparison of the images, one from his site, and one from my backboard. Notice the distinctive "cat's eyes" pattern at the center of the fracture, two adjacent 6-sided shards.

A closer look shows the defect:

Turns out, it's a known issue in tempered glass manufacturing.* It's rare, and very hard to prevent or detect. Nickel sulfide is uniquely similar to water in that it's more dense when it is very hot, but as it cools, it wants to convert to a crystal form that is larger/less-dense. A tiny fleck of nickel sulfide in the glass is all it takes.

Tempered glass uses alternating layers of tension and compression to create huge internal pressures which makes the glass very strong. When the glass is first created the nickel sulfide has a hard time forming a crystal due to the high temperatures, and as the glass cools the nickel sulfide can't crystallize due to the high pressures. But once the glass is out in the sun, it can heat up enough to sometimes allow a corner of the nickel sulfide to crystallize. More hot/cold cycles allow the crystal to grow, until the internal pressures on the surrounding glass from the crystal are too high and the glass shatters.

Wow. That was awesome — such a thrill to have such a compelling explanation with hard evidence!

Armed with this info, I went back to the company and they offered to replace the backboard for free if I paid for shipping, which I agreed to, though a little reluctantly since shipping was over $100. Also, the backboard they sent was probably one that failed quality control, it had some discoloration on the lines, so I wasn't thrilled about that either. But I was happy to have my hoop back up and working.

I've kept the cat's eyes on my desk as a reminder of the experience:

Since then, I bought a digital microscope, and took a few pictures of the impurity:

Here's the top piece, zoomed to 1000x:

Here's the bottom piece at 40x:

And the bottom piece at 1000x:

It's interesting that both halves of the cat's eyes ended up with parts of the crystal.

Hope that helps someone out there.

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* See also The Achille Heel of a Wonderful Material: Toughened Glass, an nice dive into the science, sources of nickel in the manufacturing process, etc.

What I learned from a sprained ankle

I sprained my ankle back in July 2017 showing off for some teenagers (wait, how old was I??).

It felt ok for a bit, I could still sort-of walk on it, but it hurt. And after a few hours it *really* hurt. Pretty soon I couldn't even touch my foot to the ground, it hurt so bad. I had to crawl out of bed and into the bathroom.

I read lots of opinions, professional and otherwise on the internet on how to handle it, and I learned a couple things that made it heal much faster than I expected.

(1) The first stage is inflammation -- this is where the body sends in "macrophages" to come in and devour the damaged tissue and carry it away -- for me, this translated into swelling and pain. But the swelling is good -- my body had to remove the bad tissue before it could start adding good tissue, and ice and anti-inflammatories would hinder that process. I took Tylenol instead of NSAIDs like aspirin or ibuprofen.

(2) The second stage is reconstruction -- muscle movement encourages blood flow, which is really useful for moving macrophages in and damaged-tissue out. I quickly realized that just laying in bed doesn't help that. But movement really hurt! So instead of creating my own forms of torture, I would try to move my foot and ankle around so that the pain level stayed below a ~3 on the 1-10 hospital pain scale. That way, it wasn't unbearable, but it kept the blood flowing to those areas. I started drawing the shapes of the letters of the alphabet with my big toe in the air, as often as I could reasonably stand.

Doing this, I felt like I recovered very quickly -- I injured it on Friday night, Saturday I couldn't put a single ounce of weight on it without excruciating pain -- but Sunday I was back on it, and Monday I couldn't feel the injury anymore and it was fine after that.

Obviously I'm not a doctor and your case may be different, but hopefully that helps someone out there.

Why is "kernel_task" taking so much CPU?

Sometimes the fans on my Mac will ramp up, and after a minute I'll go into Activity Monitor and see "kernel_task" occupying a large portion of the CPU. What's going on?

Thanks to Howard Oakley, we have an answer.

Long-story-short, the kernel does this when your CPU or GPU gets too hot. It starts pretending to run heavy jobs to keep the fans running high, which cools the machine down.

Let's ignore the fact that-that solution seems weird and is misleading to a lot of users and trust that Apple's engineers chose the best solution they had. (You can't do anything about it anyway.)

The question to ask yourself is, why is my computer running hot if it's not the kernel_task process? Two options:

1. Some other heavy process is running hot (like photoanalysisd, the tool that scans your photos for faces)
2. The ventilation grates on your Mac are covered or plugged, preventing the fans from being able to effectively cool the processor or GPU

My advice: don't download software to limit the fan speed, and don't try to quit the kernel_task (which you won't be able to do anyway). Just clean the ventilation ports with a little bit of compressed air.

If that doesn't work, sleep your computer for awhile to let it cool back down, then wake it back up and watch Activity Monitor to see what processes are running hot while the machine is still cool, and google those process names to see what they are and what you can do about it.

Sometimes a reboot will help at this point for runaway jobs, especially on a new OS release.

HTH.

The Diamond in the Field

A young man once long ago claimed he had found a large diamond in his field as he was ploughing. He put the stone on display to the public free of charge, and everyone took sides. A psychologist showed, by citing some famous case studies, that the young man was suffering from a well-known form of delusion. An historian showed that other men have also claimed to have found diamonds in fields and been deceived. A geologist proved that there were no diamonds in the area but only quartz: the young man had been fooled by a quartz. When asked to inspect the stone itself, the geologist declined with a weary, tolerant smile and a kindly shake of the head. An English professor showed that the young man in describing his stone used the very same language that others had used in describing uncut diamonds: he was, therefore, simply speaking the common language of his time. A sociologist showed that only three out of 177 florists’ assistants in four major cities believed the stone was genuine. A clergyman wrote a book to show that it was not the young man but someone else who had found the stone.

Finally an indigent jeweler named Snite pointed out that since the stone was still available for examination the answer to the question of whether it was a diamond or not had absolutely nothing to do with who found it, or whether the finder was honest or sane, or who believed him, or whether he would know a diamond from a brick, or whether diamonds had ever been found in fields, or whether people had ever been fooled by quartz or glass, but was to be answered simply and solely by putting the stone to certain well-known tests for diamonds. Experts on diamonds were called in. Some of them declared it genuine. The others made nervous jokes about it and declared that they could not very well jeopardize their dignity and reputations by appearing to take the thing too seriously. To hide the bad impression thus made, someone came out with the theory that the stone was really a synthetic diamond, very skilfully made, but a fake just the same. The objection to this is that the production of a good synthetic diamond 120 years ago would have been an even more remarkable feat than the finding of a real one.

- Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert, 121–22.

This is what we have with The Book of Mormon. The young man is Joseph Smith, and the year is 1830. Most of the world rejects it without examination, relying on the rejection of others they presently trust, but who also have not seriously examined it.

It's perhaps easy to dismiss The Book of Mormon as the fabrication of one unusually gifted man. Except for two things: (1) nobody thought he was unusually gifted at the time -- quite the opposite; and (2) the pesky issue of 11 other men who signed testimony that they were shown the original metal plates, the ancient record the book was translated from.

Re. #1, maybe he had an amazing talent for narrative and ancient culture that he developed on a farm in rural New York that he kept hidden from his brothers, parents, and wife? And that he never used again? Maybe.

But #2? Some might suppose these men were friends of Joseph Smith -- they were. However, most of them later left the church and were angry with Joseph Smith for problems in Missouri, and many of them never returned. That would've been the perfect time for them to come clean with an exposé of the whole affair -- yet not a one did, despite many opportunities, and many people prodding them to do so.

Other explanations? All the remotely credible ones are documented in this recent BYU talk by Todd Callister, which is what prompted this post.

I love The Book of Mormon -- the many-years story of Nephi (Lehi's son) and his family that is a wonderful allegory for man's journey out of darkness, Isaiah's description of God's people and their interactions with those around them and what to expect from the Messiah, the sons of Mosiah's missionary experiences and the effect that a few good people can have on those around them, the "war" chapters that serve as an analogy of Satan's various strategies of attack on us, Nephi (Helaman's son) and his experience with miraculous events reminding us that they don't create faith, the visit of the Savior to other people as he promised and the types of interactions we can expect, and stunning rate and extent and mechanism of which evil overtakes a people when they stop trying to stay close to the Spirit of the Lord.

I wish sincere truth seekers would ignore the florists' opinions and just read it and see for themselves.

"I Have No Doubt God Sent You Here"

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards recently attended a special sacrament meeting (Church service) to thank the Mormons for their service in helping with the flood-ravaged areas in the southern parts of the state.

The church members sang, "I Am a Child of God", with the next phrase being, "And He has sent me here." Governor Edwards told those in attendance, "I Have No Doubt God Sent You Here."

I always thought of that phrase referring to earth itself, but it was a thoughtful and clever turn of the phrase. Maybe God sent him there too.

That aside, I know a few people who will wonder to themselves: "Uh, that's nice that you think God sent you guys there, but couldn't he have just *not* sent the rains/floods? So much loss and suffering! And what a colossal waste!"

I think everyone should have an answer to this question in case it gets asked.

For those who don't have one yet, you're welcome to borrow mine till you do. =)

1. A wise man* once told me, "If you wonder whether God sends the storms, or simply allows them to pass -- read the book of Job." Spoiler: God doesn't send the storms, they are part of living in a fallen world. God can, and sometimes does intervene, if the faith and prayers of the people qualify them for miracles, and they align with his purposes. But sometimes he has even greater things in store for us...
2. We exist so we can have joy. (2 Ne 2:25) We think joy comes from ease, comfort, and pleasure -- but God knows joy comes from strength, and from being loved, trusted, understood and feeling that their work is appreciated. And how do we get that? From work, which often looks like service. Why catastrophes? So people can become strong, and have opportunities to serve others, "that the works of God should be made manifest" (John 9:3).

People who served in the Hurricane Katrina cleanup still talk about it as one of the greatest things they ever did.

Maybe this will be one of those experiences for the next generation of people.

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* Thx Bro. Beard!

General Conference Trends: 2000-2016

Something I've been curious about the past year or so are the trends of focus of LDS General Authorities in General Conference -- what topics are they focused on now, and how does that compare to the focus in those areas from years past?

So, I downloaded all the General Conference transcripts for the past 16 years, then took all the topics from the True to the Faith book, added a few of my own, and wrote a script to count the use of those keywords in each conference. You can see a list of the terms at the bottom of this post. Below are some of the interesting findings.

Caveat -- I'm just doing word-scans here, trying to catch synonyms and plurals, but I haven't done a detailed review of the texts. Take this for what it's worth.

Click on a graph to see it full size.

1. What are the most common terms from this last conference?

   The top 10: I like that the data confirms that we focus a lot on families, love, the Priesthood and on our Savior.

2. What topic saw the biggest jump in focus from past conferences?

   You see the biggest jump in the plot above -- "councils". This doesn't surprise me much, given the focus on Teacher and Family Councils.

   

   What else do we see here? Increased focus on family, ordinances, baptism, and temples. That means that this last conference saw more mentions of those terms than any previous conference.

   (Sidenote -- do you see "Birth Control" on there? Turns, out, that term has not been mentioned once in General Conference in the last 16 years -- not once. So its "increase" was -zero-, which landed it a spot at number 9.)

3. Anything surprising?

   

   I thought I hadn't heard much about gardens lately, but it seems pretty steady.

   Given the magnitude of problem that pornography is in our society, it's surprising to see that reference to it in General Conference peaked in 2005 and, stunningly, was not mentioned even once this past conference. I wonder if this reflects the guidance to "resist not evil" (don't focus on fighting evil...), but to keep "an eye single to the glory of God" (focus on our Savior and doing good).

   Seems like I heard a lot about journals growing up, but not much lately.

4. Which topics have been the strongest over the years?

   

   Not too different from number 1 above -- but as always, I'm proud to be a member of a church where "Love" and "Jesus Christ", "Faith" and "Family" are at the top of our list.

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Here's the list of keywords I used (converted from regexes): Adversity, Agency, Alcohol, Apostasy, Apostle, Area Authority, Articles of Faith, Atonement, Baptism, Bible, Birth Control, Bishop, Body Piercing, Book of Mormon, Born Again, Celestial Kingdom, Charity, Chastity, Church Administration, Comforter, Confirmation, Conscience, Contributions, Conversion, Council, Covenant, Creation, Cross, Crucifixion, Deacon, Debt, Devil, Disciplinary or Discipline, Divorce, Doctrine and Covenants, Drugs, Education, Elder, Endowment, Eternal Life, Exaltation, Faith, Fall, Family, Family History, Family Home Evening, Family Prayer, Fast Offerings, Fasting, First Presidency, Foreordination, Forgiveness, Fornication, Gambling, Gardens, Garments, Genealogy, General Authorities, Gifts of the Holy Ghost, Gifts of the Spirit, God the Father, Godhead, Gospel, Government, Grace, Gratitude, Happiness, Heaven, Heavenly Father, Hell, Holy Ghost, Home Teaching, Honesty, Hope, Hot Drinks, Coffee, Tea, Humility, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, Journals, Judging Others, Justice, Keys of the Priesthood, Kingdoms of Glory, Laying On of Hands, Light of Christ, Love, Marriage, Melchizedek Priesthood, Mercy, Millennium or millenial, Missionary Work, Modesty, Obedience, Ordinances, Original Sin, Paradise, Patriarchal Blessings, Peace, Pearl of Great Price, Personal Revelation, Physical Death, Plan of Salvation, Pornography, Prayer, Premortal Existence, Priest, Priesthood, Profanity, Prophecy, Prophets, Quorum, Quorum of the Twelve, Quorums of the Seventy, Relief Society, Repentance, Restoration, Resurrection, Revelation, Reverence, Sabbath, Sacrament, Sacrament Meeting, Sacrifice, Salvation, Same-sex, homosexuality, Satan, Saved, Scriptures, Second Coming, Service, Seventy, Sex, Sexual Immorality, Signs, Sin, Soul, Spirit, Spirit Prison, Spirit of Truth, Spirit of the Lord, Spiritual Death, Spiritual Gifts, Stake, Standard Works, Sunday, Swearing, Tattoo, Teaching the Gospel, Telestial Kingdom, Temples, Temptation, Ten Commandments, Terrestrial Kingdom, Testimony, Tithing, Tobacco, Unity, Visiting Teaching, War, Ward, Welfare, Word of Wisdom, Worship, Zion