The Tyger by William Blake

Reprint
{This entry was about two years old, the date of February, 2012 may be confusing to some readers}

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
…….

…….

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?
…….
------- William Blake (1757 – 1827)

I was a high school student in Shanghai some 70 years ago when this work was selected for our English class. I could still remember the first four lines of this great poem, but had forgotten the two lines which I’m quoting as the subject of today’s discussion. In these days of instant internet access, old master’s pieces can be recalled with ease, which is a blessing.

The question raised by Blake represents a serious and basic challenge to religious thinking. If a Creator had created all life forms on Earth, it is unavoidable that he made both the tiger and the lamb. Much more, he also made the disease-causing viruses which modern human societies are struggling to destroy, or control, at prohibitive costs.

When I was writing my book, I did not have Blake’s “Tyger” at my disposal. But I did raise the same question with an accounting of the locusts plague in China. In historic records extending over 27 centuries, the occurrences of the plague more or less follow the growth of population. I explained in my book the plus side of these events: the crops are re-distributed as food for nature’s numerous life forms, thinning the human lifeline and fattening the lifelines of many other species through the mechanism of migratory locusts. The introduction of pesticides has diminished the effectiveness of this type of population control. Our over-populated world is still encouraged by government and religion leadership to seek growth in numbers. Are we making sense?

In the 200 years since Blake wrote his work, the world has seen vast changes. New knowledge forces new interpretation of God and creation. My God can be quite different from Blake’s God in that justice triumph over love, not the other way around.

Blake’s observation of the symmetry in animal design is interesting and worthy of praise. All animal possess the ability to move in a direction, which is best accomplished by a left-right symmetry about the plane of motion. This will be talked about in another day.

The Gates Foundation and Fossil Fuel Plundering

Today's WSJ carried a news article concerning Bill Gates pledging nearly $800 million to combat tropical diseases. I want to link this effort to my singular and penny pinching endeavor to try to stop the world from plundering planet Earth's non-renewable resources, especially the fossil fuels.

My theme has been to utilize mankind's knowledge explosion of the last 200 years to finally realize that God's one-time-only gift of fossil fuel is meant also to test the sanity of Homo sapiens by observing the rate of consumption we actually decide on. The G & R (government and religion) leadership has not addressed the problem of rate control---we're free to use it up at the highest possible rate that technology will allow! This is insane.

I must also point out that the bacteria or parasites that cause the diseases were also created by God. It was an effort to control a population explosion in Africa, perhaps. Are we challenging or declining God's help to a better world? Let us follow through what Bill's $800 million will do. About half of the total has been spent for delivery of the drugs to the stricken people. But every activity, from drug development to delivery, depends on using down non-renewable energy resources. The world is already in economic crisis because mankind is still trying to increase energy supply to meet the galloping increases in demand of out of control life style and population growth. (The correct conduct is to determine the total available energy resources we are reasonably allowed to use, and cut demand to that number. More on this later...)

Political Misstep Can Lead to Commercial Success

Today's headlines pay homage to Apple's past CEO Steve Jobs. The global sales of iPhone and iPad has set historic success in terms of revenue and profit. I would like to point out that these products are no more than expensive toys for the struggling adults of the middle class. These people need temporary escape from the stresses of a collapsing financial world, and these products are just cheap enough (through Taiwan and PRC labor cooperation) to become affordable. What is ironic is that all this is made possible by the engineering breakthroughs of the USA space programs which got a huge boost in funding because of a political failure by JFK.

President Kennedy received faulty information from the CIA concerning an invasion of Cuba by its immigrants in Florida. When the Bay-of-Pigs operation failed, JFK sought to divert attention of the people by announcing an ambitious moon-landing program. Although he did not live to see the fruits of his decision, it was his program that enabled live broadcast of the astrounauts stepping on the moon. Later on a network of synchronous satellites orbiting the Earth was established to facilitate the IT revolution. Jobs was a smart business man who realized this global network could be utilized at very little cost to Apple to sell his toys.

How do you like my new format?

On Dying

No one can claim to be an experienced "dyer", because death happens only once to each person. I want to make this a topic of today's blog, to explain why I'm trying to change my format of making entries to my postings. Being a perfectionist, I waste far too much of my precious remaining moments of life on trival presentation details. As I watch my mind rapidly declining in its ability to analyze and pinpoint the blundering mistakes of human leadership, I am alarmed by the passage of time---will the human race lose my considerable yet-not-understood point of view to procrastination of old age?

I still have flashes of inspirational perception. Sometimes I jot it down on a piece of paper (my notebook was filled to the last page about 6 months ago), but when I opened my computer to the "new posting" page, composing became difficult---ending in nothingness. So today I must resolve to kill the perfectionist, and let my ideas be recorded, in pigeon English if necessary, on the internet.

This is the end of my first "desparate" entry. See you tomorrow, if I'm lucky.

Delayed posting

Nov 15, 2011

Mankind has failed the test of responding logically to the Creator’s gift of fossil fuel.
The consequences of this failure will consist of a mass extinction of the population count and severe cutback in lifestyle of the human species.
Before the appearance of Homo sapiens God had taken on the task of energy management himself. In the broadest sense, it is the optimum allocation of resources and the creation of checks and balances among all life forms, vegetable and animal, which allow an harmonious flow of millions of different living lifelines in parallel.
The preparation for the creation of human beings was conceived at the beginning of life creation. The Creator had always intended to transfer the management of energy flow and checks and balances on Earth to humans who were created in His likeness in the power of the mind, not physiological similarity. Mankind has no clue yet as to the nature and numerical count of God. This is not important, and we may picture God as a single human-like being, a group of three personalities, or an infinite collection of viruses, or EIP (External Intelligence Phenomenon) as I have proposed. It is important to realize the pictured image of God is only for the ease of communications, not in fact.

Getting To The Root Cause

   The fossil fuel experiment, which is a one-time-only affair,  challenges human judgement in what is possible and what is impossible.  There had been much folly in attempts to build a perpetual motion machine, an anti-gravity device, and communicating with the dead, etc.  At the highest level, Clausius' statement of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is about an impossibility.
 
  In today's crisis-ridden world, human behavior can become sane and rational again by stating the impossible in explicit and understandable terms.

• Eternal life for human individuals, either in the Christian afterlife format or the Buddhism previous life format is impossible.  But God's design is eternal (up to the burn out of the sun in our solar system) by extending life in new genetic combinations of the DNA  from parents.  Isn't His scheme better?
• The bubble economy of the last two decades in the world is caused by people trying to do the impossible--increasing energy supply to meet the demand of the boundless appetite in lifestyle and population count.  The correct conduct is to live within the energy supply that the Jehovah Cycle can produce.

Nature's Laws vs Man-made Laws (II)

In creational science the most important laws of nature are the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.  The First Law defines quantitatively the equivalence between units of heat and units of work.  But this is incomplete.  We must distinguish between high intensive heat whose work equivalence is destructive, and the weak units of heat used by God in the design of water-based life which is constructive and capable of self-propagation.  The Jehovah Cycle which I flow-charted in this blog (July/2010) uses sunlight 8 light-minutes away, not at the sun's surface.  Thus life must proceed at its own leisurely pace.  In my book, I pointed out that the Creator probably made a feasibility study such that the time required to create Homo sapiens on planet Earth could occur before the burn-out of the sun.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be stated in many ways.  I choose the following by Clausius:  It is impossible for a self acting machine working in a cycle process without any external force, to transfer heat from a body at a lower temperature to a body at a higher temperature.  The important point that demands notice is that this basic law is stated in a negative sense, to define what is outside of the domain of desirable result by whatever action a designer may have dreamed up.  It is a limit, or constraint in the real physical world.  In the next installment, I want to point out that mankind's response to the discovery of fossil fuels, while highly beneficial in numerous aspects, also contains doubly impossible pursuits of greed and selfishness.