My IGNITE NM 13 - Lessons Learned from a Cheap Lightweight BBQ Grill

Earlier in the fall I gave a presentation at Ignite New Mexico 13 on intuitive concepts for structural engineering.  This is kind of a unique presentation format.  You have 5 min to give a presentation using 20 slides and the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.  These guys want alot of ideas and they want them quick.  You have to be a bit nimble.  This 5 min presentation is actually what inspired my series of videos on a previous post.  I had been wanting to do this for awhile so I was glad I finally got around to it.

Basically this is some of the important concepts concerning building stiff structures that you learn in mechanical engineering school.  I hope you like it!

Intuitive structural engineering concepts for artists and fabricators

For the past couple of years I have been wanting to make a presentation that discusses how a person can learn alot about structural engineering techniques from a cheap, lightweight BBQ grill.  I finally got around to it.  You can see the whole six of 6 videos on my youtube channel "BezalelExodus"

Here is the first one.  I hope you enjoy it. 

Maybe the age of the hospital is over.

We Catholics have been pretty worried about the HSS mandate. Bad no doubt but there might be another way to look at it. For all intended purposes Catholics inspired by a spirit of mercy invented the hospital. That isn't gone. Maybe the hospital as we know it today has run its course. Maybe God is sending us a message. Maybe it's time for us to be open to promptings and inspiration of the spirit of mercy to develop a new framework to dispense mercy. Something that can better deal with the problems we face in the modern and emerging world.

God never closes one door without opening another :-)

Prologue: messages for Liam

About 2 years ago one of my college friends died suddenly and unexpectedly from a meningitis outbreak.  At the time his wife was 2 months pregnant with their first child, "Liam."

I knew Nick because we were mechanical engineering students together.  We worked on the same senior project team.  We built a small racecar.  That was one the toughest things I ever did.  It really pushed me to the limit and then a little further.  Sleeplessness was the norm.  One week I logged 122 hours of work.  You really had to be on top of your game through it all too.  Steel doesn't forgive.  If you get careless when you are working things go wrong quick.  A week's worth or work can go out the window in an instant because of a careless adding mistake.  There is no one who can make it all better either.  All you can do is suck it up and fix it.  I learned alot from that year and I really regreted that Nick would not be there to tell Liam the tale.  I told Nick's wife I would document it in case Liam ever wanted to know how this year played out.  It was pretty dramatic.

Some people have a stereotypical view that engineering is kind of a dry, soulless field...  I beg to differ.  At the end of the day if there is one thing I learned from this it is to never give up hope.  Things can look broken beyond all repair.  Challenges can sometimes seem completely insurmountable.  That is where Hope needs to take over.  Never, never, never, give up.  As long as you still have breath in your body it isn't over. 
I really like telling stories and this is one of my most favorite.  This will probably be a mix of the human element of engineering school mixed up with the engineering tricks we picked up "off the street."  I hope you will follow along. 

Proposed supernatural personality functions.

By symmetry I postulate there may be 4 supernatural personality functions:

Proposed perceiving supernatural functions:
Extroverted Faith,
Introverted Faith

Proposed judging supernatural functions:
Extroverted Hope,
Introverted Hope.

Here is something I came up with to remember how it works:

When the senses can't observe and intuition yields no clue there is still Faith...
When emotional fervour runs dry and reason fails to convince, do it for Hope's sake.


I postulate that when taking on the supernatural life you might start using these to replace, augment, or elevate your natural personality functions. I suspect your introverted/extroverted (attitude) function order would remain the same. So, I being an ENTJ if I were to to take on the supernatural personality traits would have a function order that changes as follows:

Part of the inspiration for this idea came from the 1907 Catholic dystopia novel "Lord of the World."   by the priest Robert Hugh Benson.  You can read it online here since it is in the public domain:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14021 

  It is a really interesting book and I highly recommend it.  The author has some interesting insights on human nature.  Also,he creates a world where psychology and science have made faith irrelevant for most people.  The few remaining Catholics (including the pope) deal with situations where both reason and emotion for Faith are not effective.  I think a similar situation occurs with people very very far advanced in the spiritual life.  I suspect something like this would proceed the "Dark Night of the Spirit," as described by John of the Cross.  Mother Teresa reported a similar phenomenon.  It would see to me that faithful people deprived of the ordinary perceiving and judging functions would need to use supernatural virtues.  Faith, Hope and Love.  Faith seems more perceptive and hope seems to me more on the judging side.  Love is an act of the will and orientation of the heart.  I would think it would be a different kind of entity than faith and hope.  We won't need faith and hope in paradise but we will still have love.  

Here is one of the more interesting excerpts from the book on progress in the spiritual life that I think sheds light on what I am trying to say.

"

He expressed it to himself by saying 

that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
the image and mind of Christ.

" 

So for clarity, here are the natural, more or less commonly accepted contemporary Jungian/Meyers Briggs function orders.

And here are the resulting new supernatural personality function orders:

One interesting observation, is that 4 new major subgroups of personalities emerge. You also go from 16 different types of personalities, to only 4 different types of supernatural personalities.  These four groups are the same in the sense that they all have the same supernatural personality function order.  My working names for these groups are seen in the chart: scholars, mystics, charismatics/inspirers, and the implementers/organizers. I suspect that people common to a subgroup would potentially understand each other very well and would have similar priorities.  Not that people from different subgroups wouldn't get along. If everyone did this in theory we would all get along very well.

Interestingly this would suggest the ordinarily gentle, sweet and nice ENFJ would look very similar to the ordinarily rough and demanding ENTJ.  Many types that would ordinarily be very different look similar when using the supernatural personality functions.  Also, people that once looked very similiar are not very different.  All the NTs and NFs are now in totally different groups and not similiar to their prior peers at all. 


Very open problems and questions. -

I only have very rough ideas of what the characteristics of these four new supernatural functions might be.  For instance I suspect the people with Extroverted Hope high on their function order might tend to display a focus on works. Whereas people with Extroverted Faith might be very open to grace that might inspire works.  This is all very rough.  If these supernatural personality functions exist in any sense, I do not totally know what they would look like.

I am not really sure that the names of the 4 subgroups are appropriate or even what their emergent characteristics might be. For instance I suspect that the Introverted Faith, Extroverted Hope (IxxJ) group and the Introverted Hope, Extroverted Faith (IxxP) might be flipped.  In our normal life IxxP's are often somewhat mystical, but is people were actually using these funciton orders the IxxJs might actually be more mystical caused by their primary interest in introverted faith. 

There are many more that I do not have time to write. 

 

Time to Midnight... Countdown until drones are legal in U.S. civil airspace

Not too long ago the FAA was tasked with generating regulations that would allow drones to fly in U.S. civil airspace for commercial applications.  These regulations should be set in place by Sept 15, 2015.  Drones are on their way for better or worse.  There will be economic payouts and their will be problems.  Privacy issues will be big as will security.  At the end of the day I suspect this will be a huge business opportunity much like the internet was back around 2000.  In my spare moments I like to think of ways I might cash in.  Well actually I do more than just think...  I made this timer to mark the occasion and keep me motivated to move forward.  Enjoy!

Nuclear Weapons and Morality: A view from Los Alamos

 In the early 1980's of the Cold War Rev. John Conway at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Los Alamos, NM, brought together a group of weapons scientists and engineers in his parish to write a report on the morality of nuclear weapons work.

When I first came to Los Alamos I inquired of the local priest what his opinion of the primary work of the town was.  He directed me to this document.  I found it very interesting.  I may not agree with everything that is in here, but I feel it is a very personally honest document.  I actually lived at the home of one of the contributors a number of years ago.  For the last three decades a copy of this document has been sitting on the selves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church library.  I do not believe many people outside of Los Alamos have seen it.  In the last couple year's I got the permission of the parish priest to make an electronic copy of the document and freely distribute it.  You can download the book here.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B29ZDwwo2r_KSUd1X2hhbEZramc

I have made this copy for people who are generally in the morality of nuclear weapons, and war in general.  I believe this is a very interesting document from a historical point of view as well.  I think it is a shame it is not more well known since it is a first hand account of Catholic nuclear weapons scientists and engineers at Los Alamos.

I have been meaning to do this for quite some time but I finally got around to making the electronic copy today.  Unfortunately I do not have a scanner so I had to make do by making my own "book scanner" using some scrap steel and my digital camera.  Sorry but I cannot help but share a photo.  I welded the camera fixture you can see in the picture above this morning.  I like the way it turned out.

I hope you enjoy reading this document.