I'd Tell You, Kid, But You Wouldn't Believe Me

Even before he can talk, my little boy has started to hum back the lullabies we sing routinely.  One of his favorites is "Twinkle, twinkle little star. How i wonder what you are."  As comforting as it is to hear a child singing, to lay on your back in the grass and point out tiny diamonds in the sky, a part of me wants to explain.  Because of course we know what that little star is.  Far out in space, immense nuclear furnaces drive the workhorses of the visible universe.  A tiny fraction of the power from one star drives nearly every process on Earth, but ultimately even the stuff we are made of was created in stars, the last stages of giant stars that blasted heavy elements into the vicinity of the proto-Sun in some of the biggest explosions anywhere ever.  How cool is that?  Bizarrely, though we think of stars as nuclear powered, nuclear fusion actually holds the more energetic gravitational collapse in check; the most powerful force in existence barely restrains the weakest.  Even more amazingly, all but one of those stars is so far away that a glowing ball bigger than a million Earths is reduced to a dot.  Most are farther away than that.  You need advanced optics to even see collections of billions of stars spinning around each other.  The scale of the Universe is beyond even the numbers children make up to be ridiculous.  A billion trillion miles barely gets you out of our local cluster of galaxies.  It may be that there is nothing new under the Sun, but there's an awful lot that we haven't explored yet.

"Why are there so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side?

Rainbows are visions, but only illusions.  Rainbows have nothing to hide.

So we've been told and some choose to believe it.  I know they're wrong wait and see.

Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me."

As much as we love Kermit the Frog in this house, he's really flubbed this one.  First, rainbows aren't technically illusions. They are exactly what they appear to be, its just that you're seeing different images from many microscopic objects to form the complete picture.  That's why rainbows are so amazing!  They have nothing to hide because they are themselves a revelation!  They are proof that every beam of sunlight is made up of all the colors you can imagine, but its only when refracted through a cloud of tiny water drops that those colors split out so you can see them.  But it gets better.  Sometimes a color is missing, or sometimes there is more of one color than there ought to be.  The things that add or remove colors here in our backyards are the same things that add or remove colors in the sky or on distant stars and planets.  By splitting the light coming from far-off places into rainbows, we can tell what they're made of, how far away they are and sometimes where they're going.  Closer to home, spectroscopy lets us look into the hearts of molecules and even date fossils.  The dreamers have found the rainbow connection.  They dreamed of knowledge pouring out from every ray of light and then clothed their dreams in metal and glass.  Now they're using it to reach for the stars.

Someday i will explain all this.  I hope my son develops the expertise to find wonder far beyond what his eyes can see.  I hope he learns to fill his mind beyond capacity with the awesomeness of the world around him.  But to every thing there is a season.  Tonight, we're using non-equilibrium dynamics to solve the "kicking a ball without falling over" problem and finding diamonds in the sky.  For tonight, i couldn't ask for more.

Refined Like Silver, Tested Like Gold

The Bible makes a number of references to God refining us.  Here are a few examples:

• And I will put this third into the fire, and refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested. They will call upon my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘They are my people’; and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.’” (Zechariah 13:9)
• See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction. (Isaiah 48:10)
• But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold. (Job 23:10)
• The crucible is for silver and the furnace is for gold, and the Lord tests hearts. (Proverbs 17:3)

The people for whom the Old Testament was written are assumed to know how gold and silver are refined.  Maybe in a world dominated by gold and silver coins that shouldn't be too surprising.  At any rate, most readers from the age of fiat currencies probably gloss over these passages.  Below is a brief primer ramble in metallurgy aimed at illuminating the above metaphors.

Refining refers to the process of drawing impurities out of a material without inducing a chemical change.  For metals with fairly high initial purity, this is usually done in the liquid phase.  When heavy metals like gold or silver are refined, some impurities burn away, while others float to the surface and must be scraped off.

Silver melts at 962 C (1763 F) which is hot, but not an extraordinary temperature for handling metals.  We don't normally think of metals as 'burning', but molten silver will rapidly oxidize if raised much above its melting point under normal atmosphere.  This process is irreversible and effectively destroys the melt.  For this reason, silversmiths watch their crucibles very carefully, adjusting the heat and skimming off slag over a long period.  To say that something is 'refined like silver' implies that, yes, the subject is pushed to an extreme until it loses its old form, but the Refiner is paying very close attention, making sure that the heat never becomes too much and periodically working with the subject to remove undesirable things which have come to the surface.  This can be a long process, which is completed when the silver takes on its characteristic mirror finish.  When the Refiner can see Himself reflected in the melt, the refining is complete.

Although gold is right below silver on the periodic table, it is handled very differently.  It melts at a slightly higher temperature (1064 C, 1947 F), but never oxidizes under normal atmosphere.  This means gold can be processed in a blast furnace or (nowadays) an arc furnace.  Unlike the carefully regulated flames under the silversmiths crucible, these technologies are designed to spend fuel (coal or electricity, respectively) as quickly and thoroughly as possible with minimal attempt at control.  The goldsmith doesn't fiddle around with surface skimming either.  Anything that isn't gold in a blast furnace burns or separates.  If something is to be 'refined like gold', it should expect intense heat with little or no regard for its safety (hence Jobs' comment).  The Refiner is trying to remove contaminants rapidly and really doesn't care what happens to them or whether the subject is highly attached to them.  He is only interested in the indestructible essence which gives the subject such immense value and warrants such an extravagant expenditure of wrath...er, fuel.

How are gold and silver tested?  Today, silver is tested by dissolving it in nitric acid.  In Biblical times, you tested silver by attempting to refine it.  This squares with the interchangeable use of 'testing' and 'refining' in different translations of the above passages.  As Proverbs 17:3 implies, gold can also be tested in a furnace, but there are several countertop methods which might be referred to in Zechariah 13:9.  First, gold was by far the densest material known to the ancient world.*  Even gold alloyed with lead would be considerably lighter than a pure gold object of the same size.  So if someone claimed to have a 1 uncia** gold coin, you could check its density against a reference gold uncia to determine its authenticity.  Second, pure gold is a good resonator.  It makes a clear, rich tone when struck.  Heavily alloyed or plated gold usually makes a dull thunk.  If something is 'tested like gold', it might be measured against an external standard to see if foreign inclusions have made it less substantial than expected.  It might also be perturbed sharply to see if it naturally responds like the thing it is claimed to be.

*Modern scam artists will plate gold around a tungsten core to fake the weight.  Tungsten was discovered as a pure element in 1781, so that wasn't a risk Biblical readers would consider.

**A Roman talent (weight) was 32.3 kg.  1 talent = 100 libra = 1200 uncia, so 1 uncia = 27 g.  A Roman talent (monetary) meant a talent of silver (or, rarely, gold), about $21,000 (or $1,300,000) at current prices.  So Jesus' parable of the servant who owed 10,000 talents in Matthew 18:24 was clearly intended to be a non-physical value, an incalculable debt.  But the wealthy man in Matthew 25:14 might have distributed eight talents of silver to trusted servants for investment.  His annoyance that $20,000 was buried instead of deposited is understandable.

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What might God be doing with all this silver and gold?  The obvious metaphor is their coinage property; they have worth because the King finds them inherently valuable.  But precious metals are used for all sorts of things besides coinage.  In labs, silver and gold are routinely used for their very high conductance and reflectivity.  For example, a common problem in cryogenics is the desire to keep two geometrically-isolated objects at the same temperature, which is equivalent to bringing them very close together on a thermal map.  To do this, you need to run a thin wire between them which carries a lot of power very easily.  If you can afford it, the best material for this application is ultra-high purity, annealed silver.  If God refers to you, who make contact with both Heaven and Earth, as 'refined like silver', it is possible that He wants you to bring together two things which can't be physically co-located by transferring power from one to the other.

To prepare silver for use as a thermal tie, you must first make it into the right shape.  This usually means extruding it into rods or sheets and bending those into the desired geometry.  Such cold working causes the normally malleable silver to stiffen, pulling sheets of atoms against each other.  Internal stress makes it less workable and less conductive, so the silver should be annealed in its final shape before use.  Annealing requires heating the piece back to nearly its melting point in a specially prepared atmosphere.  The goal is for the silver to let go of its internal strain fields (to fully accept its current shape on a microscopic level) and to chemically alter any trace impurities so they don't impede conduction.  Annealing is a shape-specific treatment, so bending the piece through use gradually reduces its effect.  Where flexible thermal ties are absolutely necessary, they ought to be removed and re-annealed occasionally.  This is generally avoided because it is extraordinarily tedious to extract the part, create an annealing atmosphere, slowly ramp up the power and monitor the anneal so that the part is restored but not damaged.

The maintenance program for the Body of Christ calls for each piece to be routinely pulled out of its working role, isolated from its usual atmosphere and, often, treated to power way beyond its usual load which nevertheless has no external effect.  It might seem strange or even offensive to an outsider that mature Christians claim to experience God's power most in their quiet times.  This isn't about purification, though that may occur as well.  Instead its about reorganizing internal structures, bringing out the stresses incurred with use and letting God reshape us according to our changing place in the whole structure that is the Church.  This isn't the sort of treatment you give to bullion coins, however valuable.  Its a regimen more suited for flexible parts that need to constantly respond to a changing environment.  It implies that God wants to teach us to fully accept the shape He has given us and that we should be prepared to carry His power on a regular basis.

If we can stretch an ancient metaphor to cover modern applications, this says something about how we should expect God's power to work in our lives.  The perfect thermal tie is one that is very well anchored at both ends and offers no impedance to power flowing through it.  They are valuable because they are compliant, but they don't do anything besides gradually spread out to contact as much of the two endpoints as possible.  To be effective, we need to maintain our purity and really accept the configuration we've been given.  Both of these tasks require an external power source.  We also need to let ourselves flow outward to make as much contact with Heaven and Earth as possible.  This means cultivating deep prayer and deep friendships, speaking in tongues and speaking in lecture halls.  Then we need not worry about "accessing" God's power.  When you bridge a state imbalance with a conductor, power just flows.  Until we achieve a state of 'On Earth as it is in Heaven', anybody who touches both carries power all the time.  If configured properly it shouldn't be obvious.  It ought to manifest as healthy relationships, effective ministry and other distributed effects in the same way that a good heat strap looks completely inert until you check your thermometers.  In this model, things that we think of as "displays of God's power" are the equivalent of local welding.  It means you encountered something so broken it needed to be melted.  This world is broken enough that we should be prepared for this, but we don't need to work to make it happen.  It is enough to become the kind of people through whom power flows.  The rest will take care of itself.

Does This Make Sense?

Its the end of the school year.  Ordinarily this doesn't mean much to grad students, but for the past few years i have been tutoring two of the most amazing high school students in whatever math or physics they were assigned or could imagine.  They were both seniors this year, so i'm dipping back into the pool of sophomores and juniors to cover the gap between stipend and rent.  The place where i work is good at attracting good kids, but i'm struck once again by how infrequently high school students are made to answer the question "Does this answer make sense?".  I know students enter the college physics sequence with the (dis)ability to grind through an algorithm, get a ridiculous answer and circle it without blinking.  They must be picking that up in high school, but it is sufficiently dis-incentivized that it usually doesn't last long.  My previous students learned to anticipate the question long ago, so it caught me off guard last week when a new student wrote down a completely nonsensical answer and then waited calmly for my evaluation of his work.  This amazes me every time i encounter it because the question "Does this make sense?" is at the heart of the process that turns students into scientists.

At first, when intuition is a pretty good guide to reality, the question forces a check on math skills which are too often subpar or merely misguided.  If you calculate the speed of any ball to be in excess of Mach 1, you should realize immediately that you are wrong.  This provides a good opportunity to re-examine your work before submitting it for a grade.  On the flip side, routine reality-checking helps students anchor the numbers and units they are working with onto familiar things.  Humans are 1-2 meters in size and 50-100 kg in weight.  Less obviously, 10 seconds is too long for a ball to be in the air, humans can't fall faster than about 50 m/s (120 mph) and "1 g" of horizontal acceleration would take a car from 0 to 60 (mph) in 2.7 seconds, which is only achievable in a road car if you have quite a lot of money.  These are the sorts of things students can find out by doing simple problems at home and using them to calibrate their reality-checker.  They do what no amount of class time can achieve, pull the world of numbers and formulae down into the real world where they can be used in day-to-day life.  Only then will they get into your head and change who you are.

As some point intuition runs out.  For some students, magnetism is a completely foreign land.  For others, its relativity.  Routine, in-class questioning "Does this answer make sense?" is the only way to build up a feel for subjects with which the students can't possibly have any direct experience.  They go from using intuition to check their math to building a sense of what reality ought to be using math.  This process carries students straight through from the time physics starts to get confusing to the day they ask a question, realize that no one in the world knows the answer and use some combination of intuition, observation and math to push the boundary of knowledge a little bit further.  And not just in physics.  The whole of science education is based around the question "Does this make sense?".

Why is the single most important question needed to create scientists apparently never asked in the high schools of a nation which prides itself on its scientific excellence?  I have to admit i have paid almost no attention to secondary education since i was its recipient.  As much as i love teaching smart, motivated teenagers with supportive families as a side job, teaching mandatory classes every day for a career is something else entirely; and i have great respect for people who can do it well.  That said, it strikes me as odd and mildly alarming that students coming from very good school systems make it into adulthood without ever coupling mathematics to reality.  Maybe there is something about meeting a new tutor which causes students' common sense to shut down, so that i'm seeing a bunch of false negatives?  Maybe my standards for common sense are unreasonably high?  Normally these posts end with some sort of conclusion, but i am honestly stumped here.  Anyone in high school want to comment?

Why Does Your Light Shine?

This post goes out to my Chi Alpha pastor, who a few years ago at the end of a weekend conference said "The difference between a flashlight and a laser is focus.  Right now, i need you to focus."  Although his words had the desired effect, this is strictly speaking not true.  A flashlight focused down to a millimeter spot is still a flashlight, and a laser diffused to a meter spot is still a laser.  But it did get me thinking about modern humanity's various light sources and what kinds of qualities our Light in the world might have.

1. Incandescents: Here i include traditional filament light bulbs and well as other thermally stimulated light sources, such as candles.  The point of an incandescent bulb is to dump so much heat into a small space that the normal infrared emission of all warm objects shifts up into the visible spectrum.  Although they can be made quite intense with the right lenses and reflectors, incandescent bulbs are primarily a heat source.  This model describes every youth group i have ever encountered.  An enormous amount of energy goes in and the atmosphere inside is 'on fire'.  This can sometimes be highly visible in the immediate environment but the effect is essentially random.  Mostly what is apparent is excitement; the emitted light conveys very little about the bulb or the power source.

2. Fluorescents: Fluorescent bulbs contain a vapor (often mercury) which is electrically excited to emit ultraviolet light.  This strikes a phosphorescent compound on the walls of the bulb to produce visible light.  This isn't the most efficient process in the world; the activation current is quite large and the two-step process still generates a lot of heat.  This mostly characterizes my adult, evangelical experience.  The fluorescent understands that it is primarily a light bulb, not a self-heater, but it generally takes a decent kick to get the light going and the flickering can get pretty bad at times.  The emitted light is more a function of what the bulb can make than what the bulb-maker wanted.  Its only because the creator of the bulb knew how to absorb and re-emit that light that the bulb is effective at all.

3. Light-Emitting Diodes: LEDs are made from semiconductors with a gradient of impurities along their length.  Impurities of different charge set up an internal electric field.  When enough current is applied, this field collapses, letting electrons combine with empty electron sites, emitting light.  LEDs are brighter and more consistent than fluorescents.  They can also be switched on and off much faster and with less over-charging.  Simple LEDs emit a single frequency of light; while this frequency is fixed for a given LED, it can be altered in the creation process.  More sophisticated LEDs have a fluorescent material built in which spreads out the emitted spectrum to produce 'white' light.  Many Christians i know strive to be more like LEDs, quick to respond when called, bright, effective and durable.

4. Lasers: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.  To make a laser, place a light-emitting material ('gain medium') between two mirrors and add power.  The gain medium will try to emit light in all sorts of frequencies and directions.  But rather than emit directly to the outside world, this light is bounced around internally.  At first almost all of the emitted light is re-absorbed, feeding back into the power source, but light that is of the right frequency is amplified on each pass.  Over time the light bouncing around the laser cavity becomes more and more what it was designed to emit, all the same wavelength, direction and phase.  One of the mirrors is usually partially transparent, letting the intense beam of coherent light out into the world.  While it is true that lasers are supremely focusable, their defining characteristic is coherence, which is achieved by letting the laser cavity prune away photons that don't match the mission of the laser.  The difference between a flashlight and a laser is not focus, but submission to the power source.

Do You Fear Death or the Dentist?

I recently took a survey aimed at assessing the impact of my personal beliefs about God.  Among other things, it asked about my emotions and attitudes toward death.  Part of the study was trying to see if reminding people about their religion changed those attitudes, but in either case i honestly don't fear death.  I know i will die someday and in the time before then i need to become the person who will joyfully enter Heaven.  I know people who have dodged certain death by God's grace, so it just doesn't scare me.

At the end of the study they explained that they were trying to assess the impact of reminding people about their religion and also of making them work through a difficult emotional problem before being asked a series of 'react to this situation' questions.  They said half of the participants were asked about difficult subjects like death and the other half were asked about a routine experience like going to the dentist...

At the mere mention of the dentist, i immediately started to feel anxious even though the study was over and i wasn't asked to recount any specific experiences.  I don't have a phobia or anything extreme, but the prospect of cavities and fillings makes me nervous.  I fear not being able to understand my research.  I fear having to uproot my family.  And i am always nervous around traffic cops.  But i don't fear death and i don't experience any of the feelings of aimlessness or helplessness that the survey was trying to elicit.  In the moment, that struck me as odd.

There are certain types of knowledge that are easier to apply to big, universal things than small, everyday things.  For example, the principles of mechanics are laughably simple, a few conservation laws and some formalism for counting energy.  Their study reveals some profounds insights into the sorts of thing which can and can't happen in a classical Universe.  And yet, it is very easy for a novice to write a specific classical mechanics problem that an expert finds difficult to solve (e.g. a pendulum hanging from another pendulum, a top-heavy top).  This is a well-known phenomenon in physics, but for some reason it was very strange to encounter it in a spiritual setting.  We don't think of our gut reactions as something we have to "work through".  They are, by definition, instantaneous.  But as i've mentioned before, becoming the kind of person who reacts instantaneously in a godly way is a process we will spend the rest of our lives "working out with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12).  At least for me, its a process that has worked from the top down.  Getting from the existence of an almighty, loving God to enough faith to confront death turned out to be comparatively simple.  Getting to enough peace to confront the dentist has proven somewhat more challenging.

Exploring The Earned Income Credit

Well, its that time of year again.  Time to round up W2s and 1099-everythings.  Someday i hope to fill out a 1040 form by copying the one from last year, but every year as we do more grown-up things it seems there's a new mystery waiting for me.  Last year, after the birth of our son, i was expecting an extra deduction on taxable income.  That was easy.  I calculated our fairly modest bill and was almost at the bottom of the page when i hit this thing called Earned Income Credit.  Apparently, if you have a job that pays you, but doesn't pay very well, the government chips in some extra cash.  I'm thinking, great, we'll save a few hundred bucks.  Well...not exactly.  If you have children, the EIC can give back several thousand dollars.  When i finally found our entry in the lookup table, the EIC returned more than our tax burden.  Now i'm really excited.  I almost skipped the rest of the form and entered -0- in the Tax line.  Good thing i didn't, because the EIC is apparently the one place on the 1040 form where negative numbers don't round up to zero.

That's great and all, but now i'm really confused.  Grad student stipends are low, but they're not that low.  Lots of people make less than my family.  Are they all paying negative taxes?  Apparently they are.  I wrote a quick chart to calculate tax burden for the various family types recognized by the EIC (single/married, 0/1/2/3+ kids). In this, i assume the family takes only standard deductions and the EIC, if applicable.  Here is what i found.  (All data are for 2011).

If there are three or more people in your household, you're making more than $30k before you start paying positive taxes.  That describes 30% of the population!  Medium to large families are making $45k-50k before the credit runs out, a statistic which describes most such families.

Growing up, i always thought the goal of taxation was to raise enough money to run the government without causing undue hardship to any one citizen.  It seems Uncle Sam has taken a more pro-active approach.  The above graph makes a little more sense if converted into units of poverty threshold for each family type.  According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the household poverty threshold in 2011 was ($7070 + $3820/person)/year.

If you exclude childless households (who perhaps are less affected by shortages of food and shelter?), positive taxation cuts in at incomes of 1.5-1.9 times the poverty line.  We shouldn't tax people who are truly living in poverty, but i'm a bit puzzled that the IRS thinks one third of the wealthiest nation on earth is too poor to support their own government.  As someone living near that zero-taxes line i'm doing okay.  I can imagine how an illness in the family or some other catastrophe could put a family like mine over the edge.  But even so, i would think positive taxation should cut in at 1.0 times the poverty line.  Doesn't 'poverty line' mean 'barely able to afford the essentials'?  Once you have the essentials covered, shouldn't you be contributing something to the common good?

As weird as negative taxation is, it doesn't bother me too much at a gut level.  What did bother me was the change in my tax bill check when i declared a small amount of extra tutoring income.  Take a look at the $20k-$50k income range in the first graph.  Once a family starts making enough to support itself, the EIC starts to phase out at a rate of 16% (1 kid) or 21% (>1 kid).  This happens after incomes have reached the 10% or 15% tax bracket.  So even though their average tax rate is fairly low, about 30% of American families with kids have a marginal  tax rate above 30% due to this weird quirk of a disappearing gift.  I understand why the EIC should ramp up at low incomes; we want to encourage earning your own money.  If i can go by the income distribution chart on Wikipedia, only 15% of Americans experience the ramp up, while twice as many experience this bizarre ramp down.  Creating an artificial incentive for the lower middle class to under-report their income seems like a bad idea.  Policing that income bracket must be a nightmare for the IRS; high infraction rate combined with small gains per infraction caught must lead to lots of thankless poring over trivial 1040s.

Maybe i'm missing the point here.  The federal minimum wage in 2011 was $7.25/hr.  A full-time minimum-wage job (40 hrs/wk, 50 wks/yr) would pay $14,500/yr.  At that wage, the EIC is maxed out for everyone except the childless, who are already losing it.  So the part of this law that makes sense is aimed at people who only have a part-time job.  But you can't survive on a single part-time job and you certainly can't raise a family on one.  So the target audience of the EIC is on welfare?  Apparently there are 4.3 million people on welfare in this country and you can make up to $12,000/yr and still receive benefits.  Since welfare pays substantially more than minimum wage in most states, perhaps the EIC is needed to encourage welfare recipients with children to at least get a part-time job?  Again, this seems like a weird incentive structure to me.  If someone can't hold down a full-time job, they should be on disability.  If they can, then they don't need welfare beyond the safety net of unemployment insurance.  As is, we're encouraging companies to offer part-time jobs at low wages in the knowledge that the government will chip in an extra 35-45%.  This leaves otherwise full-time workers in a stable part-time limbo where adding hours results in a pay cut.

Am i missing something here?  Selfishly, raising a family in grad school is difficult and i'm glad to have the money, but this policy seems really strange to me.  What is it trying to accomplish?

Intercessors, Crusaders and Time-of-Flight

This is a random bit of ad hoc theology that came out of a prayer session several years ago.  It was helpful at the time.  Maybe it will be helpful to someone else...

Christ's followers are called to pray in all things.  Usually, prayer requests are immediate and personal.  Help me get through this test, heal my injury, watch over my family, convince my roommate you're real.  Perhaps to balance this tendency, God sometimes calls people to 'intercede' for communities.  If you get asked to join a prayer meeting for a country, school, denomination, etc, you are talking to an intercessor.  As someone who is much more comfortable praying for immediate needs (and preferably face-to-face), i have always thought of intercessors as God's artillery division.  They get a sudden call to pray for some group and they'll dedicate weeks or months to it, single-mindedly pouring prayer onto a recipient they may have never met.  And then all of a sudden the call stops.  If they've organized prayer groups those might continue for a couple weeks, but they tend to peter out pretty quickly, as far as i can tell because the Spirit is suddenly not in it anymore.

I understand waking up in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to pray for a person who is in dire straights.  And i understand prophesying over communities and then immediately praying about that.  But these calls aren't preceded by community-wide difficulty, they go on for a long time and often end without noticeable effect.  I'm pretty sure this is a frequent source of frustration to intercessors.  I've talked to people who are ready to give up on prayer because "I prayed and prayed for [noun] and nothing happened and i'm too tired to pray anymore.  I was so sure God was calling me to pray."  Its all very well to say "Don't give up" but why should they continue if they're tired and all they've done has accomplished nothing?

Here are some things we know about prayer:
1) "The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." (James 5:16)
2) "The joy of the Lord is your strength." (Nehemiah 8:10, as the people cry out for their wayward nation)
3) "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing." (John 5:19)
4) "I urge then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people - for kings and all those in authority." (1 Timothy 2:1-2)

It appears that broad-scale intercession is commanded in the Bible, it is expected to be effective, we should expect to receive calls to intercession and it is supposed to be joyful.  So what gives?

When i was a teenager and paid attention to such things, the U.S. Army had a concept artillery unit called the XM2001 Crusader.  It caught my imagination as a budding physicist for two reasons.  First, it had massive gyroscopic stabilizers.  Its body was so forcefully aligned upward that it could fire its 155 mm cannon at targets 40 km away (over the horizon) without taking time to deploy outriggers.  Instead of several minutes for existing artillery, it would take 45 seconds to stop, orient and fire.  The second feature that blew my mind was the Multiple Round Single Impact (MRSI or 'mercy') ability.  By starting at high trajectory and firing quickly, the Crusader could fire up to eight shells in such a pattern that they impacted the target simultaneously.  The first round would be in the air for nearly three minutes; the last just shy of a minute.  The Crusader could move 15 seconds after firing (no outriggers to pack up), so by the time the enemy realized they'd been hit, the fire cite would be vacant.

Almost uniquely among weapons, you don't fire artillery while looking at the target.  In the old days, a siege engineer would receive fire orders and align the gun and then your job was to put ammunition in the air as fast as possible.  Now the engineer is mostly replaced by a computer, but the same principle applies.  You have to trust that your commander knows what he's doing, that he sent you to a place where the enemy aren't and gave you coordinates for a place where they are.  You don't follow your shells to see where they land; by the time they do, you should already be doing something else.

We know from experience that spiritual warfare is bi-directional.  Prayer upsets Satan and often provokes a counterattack.  Intercessors are often so focused on the horizon that they're ill-prepared to pray for themselves.  I've actually seen global ministries take the precaution of having people with a healing anointing regularly check in on their intercessors.  Given that, i think there's a lot of be learned from the Crusader model.

First, intercession should be aligned upward.  Rather than trying to maintain focus on big prayers by hugging the ground and using the weight of your own piety for support, stability should come by remembering Who you're praying to.  Even a gyroscope takes time to spin up.  Before praying, take some time to align, but don't bother to dig in.

Second, fire orders are at the discretion of your Commander.  Most intercessors are good at starting on command, not so good at stopping.  They want to pray their way to victory, pummeling the target until salvation occurs.  But prayers are powerless outside of God's will.  When the call to pray stops, its time to either switch targets or scoot.  If this call has displaced some of your personal prayer time and small group activity, its probably time to run back to the safety of the Church.  Hopefully by the time your prayers take effect you'll be in a completely different mental place and less susceptible to retaliation.

Finally, don't worry so much about the outcomes of your prayers.  Your prayers are powerful and effective and the Laws of Heaven are as immutable as the laws of physics.  If they don't come back down immediately, that just means they'll be back later going quite fast.  A scattered battalion of Crusaders might all fire in different sequences at different times to drop hundreds of shells simultaneously onto an enemy stronghold just as the ground forces arrive.  This is made possible because Command&Control now has real-time knowledge similar to our Commander's.  You have no idea who else is being called to pray and who is being readied to move in when all those prayers come back to Earth.

The SAT Is Unfair, And Why We Should Keep It

This is a record of my thoughts after helping a friend entering the SAT-prep business.  While there are all sorts of tricks, ultimately students get better at taking the SAT by taking SATs.  Typically when i was doing this free-lance, i would have an initial meeting to check the student's overall preparedness and send them home with a practice SAT and instructions to take it under test conditions.  They would send it back to me and i would grade it and make comments.  Then we'd spend the next two weekly sessions going over their answers.  At the end of Session 3, i'd send them home with another test.  Repeat for three to six tests.  For a typical, committed student getting a 500 on each section at the beginning, i can raise their score to a 650-700 on math over the course of ten 90-minute sessions.  Maybe i'm overqualified as a math tutor, but my wife can achieve similar results on reading and writing in ten two-hour sessions.  In my eyes, she's very, very good at reading, writing and teaching, but her credentials are as an engineer-turned-mother.

On the face of it, the existence of private tutors says bad things about the SAT.  The SAT is supposed to test your preparedness in math, writing and reading.  However, if your parents can afford 30-50 hours of some professional's time, you can increase your score by 450-600 points in one academic quarter.  That's not just new learning in math, reading and writing; that's learning the SAT.  For reference, 600 points takes you from Ohio State (inner-quartile range 1185-2096) to Harvard (2100-2380).  The rest of your application would come into play, but if the SAT can be swayed so much by spending money, isn't it a bit of a charade?

It was this thinking that made me seriously consider not taking SAT-prep students, even though they're a very reliable source of income.  After some reflection, i think there's a lot of hubris in the above argument.  To get that 150 point improvement, the student has to really engage with the learning process. They have to take multiple four-hour tests on their own time and carefully follow my instructions to take the tests in a way that may feel very uncomfortable.  I haven't done a controlled study, but i'll bet students would gain 80-100 points per section just by taking five tests over ten weeks and going over the answers themselves.  My involvement might make this more palatable and effective, but the student's willingness to work is at least as important as the money spent on their effort.

I can't speak about the English sections, but the math section of the SAT is a pretty good summary of the math you ought to know before going to college.  I find practice tests very helpful to diagnose gaps in a student's learning and re-teach as needed.  Speaking as a future professor, i want to assume complete SAT math proficiency on day one of my class.  (Actually, i want to assume more than that, but i'll settle.)  Making students go through a remedial diagnostic with a dedicated tutor before college is a good thing.  It saves having to do it as a remedial college course that will permanently delay the student's academic track.

Having a standardized measure of proficiency is helpful to admission departments.  High school GPAs are almost meaningless unless the department happens to know the school.  Since anything that affects college admissions is treated as high-stakes, of course parents will learn to game the system.  That's not a fault of the SAT, its a fault of the culture surrounding college admissions.  (That's a separate rantpost.)  I really like the SAT as a measure of potential success, but i want to abandon the idea that it is purely a measure of math, reading and writing.  It is also a measure of the student's willingness to work and the support structure they can rely on to help them through difficult and unpleasant tasks.  Yes, i want students to arrive in my classes with basic math proficiency.  But when my midterm turns out unexpectedly hard, i also want someone those students can run to who will tell them "Its okay, you're still smart.  Yes he's a mean professor.  Now go back to class."  And i want them to be willing to work.  If they can get through the class without working, they're in the wrong class.  In fact, i want Admissions to populate my classes with students who have all the qualities measured by the SAT, even if its not supposed to measure them.  So as game-able and maligned as it is, i vote we keep it.

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Of course, i'm opening myself up to a charge of elitism here.  My parents were very supportive of my education and a high SAT score got me into a very good school.  What about the kids who can't afford SAT-prep?  Since anyone likely to level such a charge is already offended, i might as well address it here.

What help do we want to provide?  The baseline in the field is Kaplan's 18-hour onsite classes, which will set you back $600.  Its a classroom setting so they can't tailor the instruction to you specifically, but they provide proctoring for exams and their lecture series hits all the fundamentals.  Not a bad deal; they almost always see modest point improvement.  The next level up is local firms who tailor classes to the school system and provide more advanced study strategies.  The company down the street from us is so good they have actually driven the local Kaplan out of business even though they are charging $1000.  Beyond that, you can dump almost limitless money into private tutoring, but a typical bill is $2000-3000.

For college admission to be a useful opportunity, the admitted student must have a decent secondary education.  Sometimes this is provided by the local school district, sometimes not; and there are many wonderful organizations out there trying to fill in the gaps.  Private tutoring is usually overkill if the student is highly motivated, so we're really looking to provide a $600-1000 service to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.  But that money is really buying 20-30 hours of somebody's time, usually at $30-40/hour.  If a disadvantaged student (is the PC term still 'under-served'?) has reached the point where SAT-prep is an issue, someone has already invested hundreds of hours in their education.  An extra 30 hours of volunteer time per student shouldn't be a big deal.  Besides, SAT-prep is a good exercise in its own right.  Before sending kids off to expensive colleges, we should make sure they have the fundamentals down pat.

(Aside: I'm really impressed with efforts i've seen locally to bring good education to communities who can't afford it.  If you are a volunteer who wants help doing SAT-prep, i'd love to talk about that.)

 Okay, i couldn't resist the separate rant: If you're going to push a kid into college, please don't abandon them at the door.  I don't care if you're a parent or an organization, if you provided the support for them to excel, get good grades, build up their resume, etc., i'm going to assume you're still around when its my turn to teach them.  I don't want to be a mean prof, but i have to assume they are as resourceful and resilient as they appear on their applications.  And part of their bank of resources is you.  That's not to encourage helicoptering, but moral support and life guidance is very important for the first couple years.  The SAT, indeed much of the admission process, is partly a measure of support structure.  You do everyone a disservice if your child gets into a good school with your support and then fails out without it.