Sexual Sin and Christians (repost)

I originally wrote this for a usenet group as an undergrad back in 1993. This is the edited, cleaned up version. The original can probably be found floating around cyberspace somewhere, but it has more typos, so I prefer this version:

It is a well known phenomenon that Christians, particularly dogmatic, fundamentalist Christians, have a disturbing tendency towards homophobia. There have been many suggestions as to why this is, including direct quotes from scripture, statements by powerful theological figures, and other such religious ideas, but in order for a non-Christian to really understand the nature of this deep-seated prejudice, a non-religious model must be constructed to show exactly why it is that traditional Christian beliefs often seem to conflict with homosexual activity. The following model, which is principally based on traditional Newtonian physics, should do much to explain this phenomenon. Unfortunately, while it may bring understanding to the agnostic physicist or computer scientist, its physical nature will probably enlighten the godless historian or other liberal artist no more than the traditional explanations. However, since such folk are usually excellent at coming up with dubious explanations of variable credibility (abbreviated by biologists as B.S.), we are confident that they can create their own creative explanations, and thus have no use for this one.

We will consider God is a point mass, centered at the origin of our xyz space. Christ, we will assume, is at the right hand of God, or about 100 centimeters away. His mass is probably around 75 kilograms. Since God has a very large mass (a bit less than infinity), Christ, who we will assume is in a circular orbit around God, has a very large momentum, and hence has a very small wavelength. This means that Christ's uncertainty is quite small, so we can therefore conclude that He is fairly certain in all that He does. Now let us consider a sinner. We shall place him at a large distance from God, say one inch and 45 million light-years. He, also being in a circular orbit, will be traveling significantly slower than Christ, and will therefore be more uncertain about it. One should also consider, however, that since Christ's orbit could fit in a kiddie pool, while the sinner's would encompass not only our galaxy, but a few of the nearby ones as well, that the sinner gets around more, sees more, and is generally a more knowledgeable guy than the Savior. This fits in with traditional wisdom. From this situation we can draw a few conclusions. The first is that Mary, the mother of Christ, being a fairly pure person is close to God. This means that she must be a fast woman. The second conclusion that can be drawn is that sinners have a lot more potential than saints, since less of their energy is stored as kinetic energy. Further insights can be gained when we look at the situation of the heathen.

A heathen is someone who is not affected by God. This means that they are at least a infinite distance from Him. Now, assuming that one of these folk starts to travel towards God, he will convert his potential energy to kinetic energy during the approach, or descent. Since he started out an infinite distance away, but with some kinetic energy of his own, he will approach God on a hyperbolic trajectory and then disappear into space again, never to be seen again. If his approach is such that it brings him inside the orbit of the Son of God, then right after his closest approach, the sinner's velocity will be greater than Jesus', which means that he will be more sure of himself in his escape than Christ is in orbit. This is an interesting notion, but some of the side ramifications are even more intriguing.

Without any orbiters, therefore, God would not be able to attract anyone - all approaching bodies would have either parabolic or hyperbolic trajectories. However, once God has an orbiter, the two of them could collaborate to capture other bodies. This means that heathens that get too close to believers in their approaches might get trapped, and by the same token, believers who are buzzed by heathens could be ejected. And what, the reader asks at this point, does any of this have to do with sex? It is after all, that, and not Newtonian physics that gets Christians so agitated. Well, the answer is this: Sex, as we all know, is the union of two or more people. This, in our analogy, would be represented as a collision. Now, in Christianity, almost all of the holy figures are male. For God, a collision between any of these close-in folk would be disastrous, because, even if we assume they are indestructible, such a high energy collision would

eject one of the men in it,
cause one of them to fall into God, or
give them highly irregular elliptical orbits.
All of these would be bad for God, because in the first two He would lose orbiters, making His chance at capturing new ones less, and in the third case He would have a much greater chance of more collisions, as the elliptical orbiters would cross many of the unaffected circular orbits. Therefore, God probably disapproves of these collisions.

Unfortunately, this theory is far from robust. It does not, for example, contain a method for experimentation whereby one can determine its validity. It also assumes that religious figures are sufficiently slow that they do not obtain relativistic speeds. Considering the large mass of God, this seems improbable. In fact, if God is as large as we suggest, the orbit of Christ would probably lie inside of His Schwartzchild radius. This would make figuring out what those two are doing very difficult, since none of the rest of us in the outside universe would be able to see beyond that limit, but because the bond between Them would be incredibly powerful, the evidence all points towards something that the Bible is not in favor of. On the other hand, it is the opinion of this author that whatever one does inside of one's personal black hole is one's own business, and therefore, I shall turn my attention to other matters.

Scooping the thrust sheet

A while back, Highly Allochthonous promised us some juicy field photos of South Africa. Since he has yet to produce the goods, I thought I'd whet y'all's appetite with this picture of the Drakensberg. The Drakensberg mountains are the 2 km wall formed by the eastern edge of the Karoo flood basalts. That's them to the left, and some of the underlying sandstone outcrops in the valleys below.

OHS and pregnancy

Sciencewoman recently blogged about reasons women leave science, and one of her commenters brought up the issue of pregnancy and laboratory safety requirements. The way I see it, there are three basic approaches to this issue. I will lay them out as dispassionately and factually as scientifically possible.

1. The Victorian chauvinist approach. This approach assumes that womenfolk are vital to the health of the country as bearers of young men who we desperately need to send into the trenches against the Germans. As such, it is vital to protect the childbearing resource at all costs, and any pesky activity like earning a living could endanger the ability of society to breed a new generation of pig-headed, antediluvian assholes.

2. The lawyerphillic approach. This approach assumes that any risk, however minute, must be avoided in order to protect the university gold. Instead of resources to protect, pregnant women are liabilities to minimize. Other than that distinction, this approach is identical to the Victorian chauvinist approach.

3. The sensible scientific approach. Under this system, pregnant research staff are informed of potential risks, they have those risks compared to more familiar, out-of-lab dangers in order to make them comprehensible. The lab then makes arrangements so that if the pregnant researcher chooses not to take a risk, it does not impact on her work. She then makes an informed choice about how to proceed.

Here’s an example of how the third way works, taken from a long time ago in a university far far away…

Dr. XX, a pregnant post-doc, wanted to know if exposure to her ²³³U spike would constitute a radiological hazard risk to her unborn child. The lab supervisor, Dr. XY, showed Dr. XX the math to determine what the decay rate was. He then pulled out a Geiger counter, put it next to her spike (tick tick tick….) to demonstrate. In order to compare this with the radiological risk from real-life items, he them put the counter next to a cement wall (tictictictictic…) Dr. XY then reminded Dr. XX what the biological effects of ionizing radiation were, and told her that if she chose not to spike her own samples, he or someone else would be happy to do it for her. Dr. XX then made her informed decision.

Note to Dr. XY wannabes. If you are looking for a slightly radioactive everyday item to compare a low level radiohazard to, DO NOT USE the woman’s bump! While it may seem perfectly logical to point out, “Look, your baby’s already way more radioactive than your sample,” in practice this approach is asking for trouble. So unless you want your Geiger counter forcibly inserted into your low photon environment, find something else.

Isotope dilution

Sciencewoman has an interesting article enumerating the barriers to people in general, and women in particular, who wish to be professional researchers. There has been some interesting discussion on this issue. I would like to contribute. Unfortunately, before I can do so, I need to explain isotope dilution.

Isotope dilution is a way of getting very accurate concentration numbers from mass spectrometers. One of the problems with mass spectrometry is that you generally don’t know what proportion of the total sample you introduce actually gets to the detector. This depends on a number of different things, including the ionization efficiency and transmission efficiency of the instrument. In general, the relative efficiencies of different elements are not equal and not constant. As a result, tricks must be employed to account for this.

Isotope dilution is one of these tricks. In isotope dilution, you add a known amount of a single isotope of the element you wish to measure to the sample. The isotope you add is called the spike. The action of adding it is called spiking. Since you know how much spike you added (this is measured very carefully), the ratio of spike sampled to spike detected gives the detection efficiency of the instrument, and the ratio of spike to natural isotope gives the concentration of that isotope.

Spikes are often, but no always, short-lived radioactive isotopes not found in nature. For example, ²³³U is commonly used to spike U solutions for measuring U concentrations. Because separating and/or creating spikes via nucleosynthesis is difficult, they are often expensive, and the radioactive ones can be a potential radiation hazard.

Obviously there are all sorts of further improvements on the process- double spiking to determine mass bias, changing dilutions to determine detector linearity, etc. But the basic idea is the same. You add a known amount of something unique to account for the screwy processes that occur inside the machine.

A dark day for science blogging

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

Frink tank has gone dark, no doubt frozen in carbonite by the evil minions of taste and respectability.

The blogosphere has lost its most sophisticated, precise voice.

I will try to lower the level of discourse here at the lounge, as a sign of respect. It is the least I can do.

Gender representation of my blogroll

My blogroll got mangled when I upgraded to the new format, so I’ve been putting off fixing it. One method of procrastination was to break down the links that haven’t disappeared, in order to look for inadvertent bias. It appears that I have 11 men, 10 women, and one robot linked. Interestingly, the two “et al.” blogs on there are written by either all women (inkycircus) or all men (realclimate). I have no idea what the gender breakdown of the blogosphere is, or whether it is desirable or even sensible to have a target. I thought I might just float this little observation out there without any means to evaluate it.

Electron probes vs ion probes

CJ asked me to explain what this so-called ultraprobe is all about, so here’s a brief rundown on the difference between electron probes and ion probes, and why it might be useful. The ultraprobe is an electron probe.

An electron probe bombards a sample with electrons with energies in the low tens of KeV. At these energies, these electrons can dislodge inner shell electrons in the material being analyzed. When an outer shell electron then decays to fill that vacancy, an Xray is produced, and the energy of that X-ray is characteristic to each element. So by attaching a bunch of X-ray spectrometers to an electron gun, you can determine the elemental composition of the target by analyzing the X-rays produced by electron bombardment. X-ray diffractometers basically use crystals with known lattice parameters to diffract the X-rays according to the X-ray wavelength.

Since X-rays are photons, the wavelength and energy are related by the equation e=k/lambda, where e is energy, lambda is wavelength*, and k is a constant, 1243 eV/nm. This constant can be derived by multiplying the speed of light (in nm) by planks constant (an obscure, extremely small physics number that relates fundamental physics properties to each other), and dividing by the number of joules per eV (not many).

Electron probes are great for determining the major and minor elemental composition of minerals, but they give no information on isotopic composition, since isotopes all have the same electron configurations. Since the only things being moved are electrons, this technique is non-destructive, unless you turn the power up too high and melt your sample by overheating it.

Ion probes are Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometers. They bombard a sample with ions, and those ions then ionize the target. The ions from the target are then accelerated into the mass spectrometer, sorted by mass. The ionization efficiency of ions is different for different elements, but the same for isotopes of the same element. Since the ions are sorted by mass, isotopes can be separated and their rations are easy to determine. Elemental ratios can also be determined if a standardization method to determine relative ionization efficiencies is used.

U/Th/Pb geochronology determines radiometric ages by using one or more of the following decay chains: ²³²Th -> ²⁰⁸Pb, ²³⁵U -> ²⁰⁷Pb, and ²³⁸U -> ²⁰⁶Pb. Comparing the results of two or more of these chains, allows a geochronologist to determine whether or not the geologic material being dated has lost or gained U, Th, or Pb since crystallization, since elemental loss or gain will disturb one or more of these systems. We can also measure ²⁰⁴Pb, which is not a decay product, to estimate how much initial Pb was in the material. Thermochronic may have explained this in more detail.

Because the electron probe cannot measure isotopes, it cannot determine whether or not a sample has lost or gained U, Th, or Pb, and it cannot identify the presence of common Pb. Thus electron probe dating has to assume closed system behavior and low common Pb. It is also limited to minerals with a fairly high U, Th, and Pb content, since the detection limits on the electron probe are generally in the tens of ppm. On the other hand, they are easier to use, more common, and non-destructive. And if you choose your geologic question such that Pb loss and common Pb are unlikely to occur, and high precision is not necessary, you can get useful numbers quickly and easily.

The article mentions a potential snowball earth application, so my guess is that they plan to use this thing for sedimentary survey work. As Brian previously demonstrated, sediments contain datable minerals (e.g. zircon, rutile, or monazite) of various ages, but the sediment cannot be older than the youngest grain it contains.

If some future civilization wanted to determine if the Mississippi delta sediments were Quaternary (that’s our current geologic epoch), they could dig out a whole lot of grains, and analyze them. The youngest monazites in the sediment will be from the Yellowstone Hot Spot, which is a quaternary rhyolitic volcano. Trouble is, the grains from that volcano are only a tiny portion of the total sediment load of the Mississippi, so in order to find them, you need to survey a huge number of grains.

The electron probe can be used to eliminate grains that can’t possibly be the right age- a grain with too much Pb is either too old or contains common Pb, while a grain with not enough Pb has either lost Pb or is too young. Since electron probe work is non-destructive, the grains identified with the electron probe can then be retrieved an analyzed using a more precise method, to get a high-confidence, precise date. So I suspect that is the Neoproterozoic application that this machine will have.

Neither probe technique possesses the precision of isotope-dilution mass-spectrometry, but isotope dilution cannot be performed in-situ.

It’s too late to proofread, so if there are any glaring fuck-ups, comment and I’ll fix them later.

* Usually, lambda is the decay constant, but scientists like to use the same Greek letters for a million different unrelated quantities, just to piss everyone off.

Ten years ago today...

March 14, 1997:
I am now in Australia. It is dry and partly forested, and actually reminds me of central California. I could swear we flew over a normal-fault scarp on the way here, but maybe I'm oversensitized. Everything (cars, toilets, shadows, etc.) goes the wrong way. The stars are amazing- I can see the Milky Way from the suburbs. Orion is upside down, and I saw the Southern Cross. I'm living in a house with three other students- Matthew, Richard, and Shin. A Korean and two Tasmanians. We had a party tonight- met both native and foreign students.