Gen Eds LC4: How to Learn a Language

1. I have dabbled in a number of languages over the years. I consider English the only language I am really fluent in. My spoken German is not horrible. Mi Español es horible. Perhaps I could order a meal in French.

As far as written languages are concerned, with enough time I can read German, French, and Spanish, as far as living languages are considered. I am good at biblical Greek. I can make my way well enough in Latin and Hebrew. Aramaic is close enough to Hebrew that I could take a shot.

As far as languages I have studied but remain fully incompetent at, there is Akkadian and Sanskrit. I have started Arabic, Coptic, and Ethiopic. I know a few phrases in several other languages.

So I have some experience at least at starting to learn languages (I have colleagues that far surpass me). How would I recommend going about learning a language?

Learning Style
2. A question you will want to ask early on is, "What kind of a learner am I?" For example, do I remember best by hearing? Do I remember best by seeing? Do I learn best by speaking? Do I remember best when I understand why? How do I best learn stuff?

Frankly, you're pretty much going to need to do all of these if you're going to learn a language. There is the question of writing or speaking. Why am I learning this language? To go on vacation? To become a spy or work for the NSA? Am I just wanting to read scholarship in other languages?

Google Translate leaves me speechless. Yes, it often comes up with weird stuff from the perspective of native speakers. But, dang, if this stuff had existed when my brain was young.

If you are visiting a country that speaks another language, it makes sense to get some basic pleasantries down. It's really common courtesy and you will get a lot more cooperation if you can say "Please" and "Thank you." The arrogance of many an American overseas who expect everyone to speak English and conform to their expectations is embarrassing. No, we don't put ketchup on our "fries" here. Go home if you can't deal with it. You're the foreigner here.

I personally do not learn well merely by sound. You can tell me verbally a hundred times and it means nothing. In one ear and out the other. I have to see the words written down and hear them. Then I need to speak it. And my rate of learning increases exponentially if I understand the structure of the language.

The best learning software these days has you listen, repeat back, read, and write. That gets you to a certain point in learning the language. Beyond that, you need to engage the real stuff. You need to engage people who really speak the language. In the end, you really need an immersion experience in a country where that language is the language.

3. Not everyone will be able to learn another language proficiently, although everyone can try. I've known of missionaries who struggled with a sense of defeat because they were not able to master the language of the people. In the future, a person probably should not go as a missionary to a country whose language they cannot learn. Never say never, of course.

There is a strong temptation not to immerse oneself even when you are in a country that speaks a foreign language. If you are there with family, the temptation is to speak English at home and only speak the other language when you have to in public. This is death to language learning.

Being on an English speaking military base or being in a business context where you have a translator is almost like not even being in the country. Certainly forget about really learning the language. This is not immersion.

I spent two months in Germany in 95. I was alone and so had no native English speakers to speak to. My German friends would only speak English to me if I broke down, which I did very often. I had learned German for reading and no doubt they wondered if I knew any German at all. (By the way, I believe some Asian countries used to teach English in this way, which is why I suspect some Asians in the past used to receive the same reaction as my German friends to me).

But at some point in those two months I reached some sort of critical mass so that more and more of the conversation was in German. A highlight of one stay in Germany was when I gave a ride to a Dutch hitchhiker and it took a few minutes for us both to realize that neither of us was actually German.

It is my personal opinion--to which I welcome correction from experts--that having an ear for music is a great help in language learning.

A Basic Learning Sequence
4. Let me set out a basic sequence for learning a language to speak:

• Learn the alphabet
• Learn the basic conversation phrases
• Understand the type of language--how does it work?
• Learn 1000 words.
• Go through a basic software package on it.
• Start going through a grammar.
• Start listening to native speakers on radio and/or internet. 
• Read the Bible in that language.
• Start having immersion experiences in a relevant country.

More on these in a moment.

5. For the academy, most languages are taught for reading and they are taught in a compressed, grammatical manner. I learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in order to read texts. Accordingly, I did not learn conversational tidbits. My learning of German and French was similarly first to be able to read scholarly books. So there was no conversational German or French in my graduate, one semester courses in these languages. It was memorizing grammatical tables.

You sometimes hear people mock this approach to learning ancient Greek or another language. "If I could only learn it like I learned English or some other language," I have heard. I actually think this response itself lacks understanding. How many years did it take you to learn English--sixteen to get to the English level that the Greek New Testament is at? And the child's brain is far more spongy than our brains the older we get. I hate my 50 year old brain more every day.

The fact of the matter is, the way dead languages and languages for scholarship are traditionally taught is the fastest way to cram in those languages for reading. If someone ever comes up with a conversational way to learn ancient Greek, let's see how many years it takes you to get as far as a concentrated grammar class can get in two semesters. It's called grammar, baby.

1. Alphabets
6. So let's say you really want to learn a language. You want to speak and read it.

The first step I would take in learning a language is the alphabet. For most European languages, this step is a cinch. I was surprised when I first learned that Spanish and German have letters that are not in the English alphabet. At the beginning, I naively thought that all languages have the same letters and sounds and that it's just that some languages write them differently.

Not so!

• Spanish has the ñ (enye), which is pronounced with an "ny" sound. Spanish and French also have letters with accents on top. Some English speakers get annoyed, "What's the difference, it's an e?" Well, él means "he" in Spanish, while el means "the." Just because you don't know enough to tell the difference doesn't mean they don't.
• German has the umlaut letters (ä, ö, ü). We have difficulty hearing these sounds that are completely obvious to a native speaker. My wife had a prolonged exchange with a bus driver in Tübingen, Germany, trying to get to Bühl. "Bool?" she said. "Was?" he said. "Bool?" she said? "Was?" he said. "Bool?" she said. "Ah, Bühl," he said. "Ja, wir fahren nach Bühl."

 7. Of course the further away on the branches of Indo-European languages you get, the more likely that the "script" will be different.

• The Greek alphabet is not too difficult because many of the letters look similar. Others we learned in math and science: α, β, γ, δ, ε, ζ, η, θ, ι, κ, λ, μ, ν, ξ, ο, π, ρ, σ, τ, υ, φ, χ, ψ, ω.
• The Russian alphabet was based in part on the Greek alphabet: а, б, в, г, д, е, ё, ж, з, и, й, к, л, м, н, о, п, р, с, т, у, ф, х, ц, ч, ш, щ, ъ, ы, ь, э, ю, я.
• The Hindi alphabet hangs its letters from a line: क, ख, ग, घ, ङ, च, छ, ज, झ, ञ, ट, ठ, ड, ढ, ण, त, थ, द, ध, ऩ, प, फ, ब, भ, म, य, र, ऱ, ल, ळ, ऴ, व, श, ष, स, ह

The Semitic languages get a little more complicated because they sometimes have one form of a letter for the beginning of a word, another for the middle of a word, and yet another for the end of a word.

• The Hebrew alphabet is: א,ב,ג,ד,ה,ו,ז,ח,ט,י,כ,ל,מ,נ,ס,ע,פ,צ,ק,ר,ש,ת. Hebrew is different from the other languages above in that it reads from right to left and, in a book, from back to front (by English reckoning).
• The Arabic alphabet is:
    ا ,ب ,ت ,ث ,ج ,ح ,خ ,د ,ذ ,ر ,ز ,س ,ش ,ص ,ض ,ط ,ظ ع , غ ,ف ,ق ,ك ,ل ,م ,ن ,ه ,و ,ى Like the Hebrew alphabet, you read from right to left.

8. One of the challenges of Chinese is that it does not really have an alphabet. Rather, as an analytic language, it puts together individual bits of meaning. There are over 100,000 variations of its characters, but if you know about 2600 of them, you know over 98% of what you would need in everyday language.

Interestingly, different Chinese languages pronounce the characters differently. So someone who speaks Mandarin and someone who speaks Cantonese would not be able to understand each other's spoken language, but they might be able to understand each other if they wrote down what they were saying.

2. Basic Phrases
9. As I go through the various languages and cultures in this series, here are the conversational phrases we will learn:

• Hello and Goodbye
• Good morning, afternoon, evening, and night
• Yes and no
• How are you?
• Please, thank you, sorry, excuse me, you're welcome
• My name is... Pleased to meet you.
• I don't speak ____. Do you speak English?
• I do not understand.
• I would like...
• Where is...
• How much?
• I am ...

3. Type of Language
10. At some point, if you are going to get serious about learning the language, you will need to know how it works. This relates to the previous post. Is it basically a matter of learning words and putting them in the right order (analytic)? Great. Then learning vocabulary is going to be the big deal.

Is it an inflected language that changes the endings? Oh boy, you're probably going to need to memorize some charts. Is it an agglutinating language? Then you'll need to learn a lot of meaning bits that get stuck inside words.

Vocabulary
11. I hate to say it but you're just going to have to learn some words to get a language. This is where I am at with several languages. If you don't have a critical mass of words, you're not going to understand much. I wish I could say I was the master.

There are no end of flash cards, ranging from apps you can download to your phone to the old traditional box of 1000 that I have tried to use. A word a day seems puny, as it would take three years to get through the stack, but it's better than nothing. Sometimes I take these flash cards on long car trips. Barron's AP Test study tools have boxes more along the lines of 500 words.

When I'm in a foreign country, I usually learn vocabulary intensively. As I encounter words or want to use a word, I write it down and then review my vocabulary for the day in the evenings. A journey of a 1000 words begins with the first flashcard. In theory, you could have a "Spanish day" here where you try to think of the Spanish words you would say.

Software
12. There are tons of free apps you can download. Then there are the conversational CDs you can buy. If you are going to a country for a week's vacation, why not listen through one of the conversational series in preparation?

If you are more serious, there is Rosetta Stone and other tools like Babbel. I find Rosetta annoyingly repetitive. But it will reward the plodder.

Grammar
13. At some point you will want to buy a serious grammar of the language. How do you make a past tense? How do you make a future tense? This is when you are getting serious about learning the language.

Immersion
14. Start reading a book like the Bible in the language you are learning. Your familiarity with the content will help accelerate your understanding. I have found that I can more easily understand a sermon in a foreign language than I can the radio. This is because of the common church language I share with the preacher. You can probably find sermons online in your language of choice.

My friend Norm Wilson listens for hours on end to French and Spanish radio. With the internet, we can listen to all the real speakers of a target language that we want.

Of course you will eventually want to go there. Try not to speak English while you're there. Try to think in the new language. A moment of crowning significance will be when you dream in the new language!

Next Week: Cultures 5: Spanish and Spanish Cultures
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This is the fourth post in a series called, "World Language and Culture." This is the fourth series in an overall project called Gen Eds in a Nutshell. The other series so far include 1) philosophy, 2) world history, and 3) a math and science series, which is a little over half-way.

Thus far in the Language and Culture series are:

• World Language and Culture Overview
• Culture Classification
• The Languages of the World

Paul Novel 4.5: Peter in Antioch

continued from last week
_____________
For Paul it was a great victory. The leaders of Jerusalem had accepted his mission to the Gentiles. They agreed that Titus would be saved even if he did not fully convert to Judaism. For Paul it was a green light to go forward full steam with the mission. He could tell anyone that opposed them that they had the approval of the pillars.

For James it was a great worry. It was one thing for the Gentiles not to keep the Law, but what if Jews began to think that they did not need to keep the Law? It was a slippery slope he greatly feared. In Paul he saw someone who had over-reacted to his past. To James, Paul was in danger of swinging from one extreme to the other, from caring too much about the Law to not caring hardly at all for it.

When Barnabas and Paul returned to Antioch with Titus, it was a time of great fellowship. Paul began to spend time in the marketplace of Antioch sharing the good news to any Gentile who would listen. Where Gentile conversions before had only happened by chance, Paul was now very intentional about sharing the good news with them, and the more Gentile believers there were, the more the gospel spread to non-Jews.

Within just a couple weeks of Paul's return to Antioch, Peter arrived from Jerusalem. At first Paul was suspicious. "He has come to spy on us," Paul remarked privately to Barnabas. And although Barnabas had announced to the churches of Antioch what James had decided in Jerusalem, there were still a number who balked at full Gentile fellowship with the Jewish believers.

There was one house church in particular that was very opposed to the increasing number of Gentiles in the community. They certainly would not admit any Gentiles into their house fellowship unless they were serious enough about God to convert fully and be circumcised.

"I bet they eat pork," they would gossip. "Even when they eat lamb or goat," they would say, "I bet they don't drain the blood first." "And you know how sexually immoral Gentiles are." "I wouldn't be surprised if Titus visits prostitutes like all the other Gentiles."

Paul was pleased to see that Peter didn't give much time to these voices. For the first week or so that Peter was in the city, he went with Paul and observed the love feast at the home of Titus and the church that met in his father's house. Paul was pleasantly surprised. He could see that these debates were really of little interest to Peter himself...

Adam and the Genome 6: Intelligent Design

In chapter 4, the last of Dennis Venema's chapters, Venema addresses intelligent design. I'm reading Venema and Scot McKnight's book, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books
3. Adam's Last Stand?

Chapter 4
1. Chapter 4 is titled, "What About Intelligent Design?" The first part of the chapter recounts the arguments for intelligent design advanced most powerfully by Michael Behe. Behe's fundamental idea is that of "irreducible complexity." There are aspects to biological systems that seem to involve a set of complex interrelationships, all of which have to be in place for it to work.

I think the best illustration of this idea that Venema gives is that of a stone arch. You can't build an arch by adding stones to the side one by one. They would fall over. The keystone has to be in place before they will stay in place. But you can't put the keystone in until the other stones are in place.

Bottom line is that an intelligent designer has to come alongside with scaffolding to build the thing. Human biochemistry, Behe argues, is exactly like that.

2. I lament Venema's tone a little in a few places. Most of the time he is completely under control. But clearly he has been engaged in an ongoing argument with Michael Behe and others like Stephen Meyer in the Intelligent Design community. What makes it worse is that Venema was in their camp not too long ago, so there may be a tendency to be impatient, as it were, with his former self. These are all familiar dynamics for me on other issues.

What I think I've found is that, if you have any hope of winning over those who are disposed against your position for ideological reasons, you almost have to behave perfectly for a long time while they process your arguments. You have to be a saint, and even then the odds are stacked against you. You can know you know more about the subject. You even can know that arguments against you don't hold any water and see obvious flaws in them. Your faith and character can be impugned,

But if you get cocky or lose your cool, the opposition simply says, "See, this person has a moral problem or see, this person is not behaving like a Christian, which reinforces that their ideas aren't Christian. What need of further evidence have we?"

So I probably would have written these chapters with a tiny bit more of an exploratory tone. Every once and a while, it feels like a tiny bit of sarcasm and condescension creeps in, which probably is not ultimately helpful.

3. So what I would say is that what he shows in the rest of the chapter is not a proof that Behe and Meyer are wrong, but some reason to believe that their arguments are not nearly as strong as they might appear if you do not have extended training in genetics, biochemistry, microbiology, and cell biology.

Behe argues that for new "irreducibly complex" biochemical structures to form, there would need to be new "binding sites" for them to bind to. This suggests to him that multiple mutations would need to happen all at the same time, which he considers so improbable as to be mathematically impossible.

So Venema shows evidence that these sorts of things likely happen all the time. In fruit flies, for example, it looks as if one gene has been randomly duplicated in one species (called a paralog), while not in others. All it took was then four mutations--not at once but one at a time--for this paralog to take on an essential function for the particular kind of fruit fly.

In short, an irreducibly complex, essential protein seems to be explicable as a result of six seemingly random events, each of which was unnecessary and initially non-essential to the fly: 1) the initial duplication of the gene, 2) the addition of mutation 1, 3) the addition of mutation 2, 4) the addition of mutation 3, 5) the addition of mutation 4, and 6) the ensuing dependence on the way these mutations came to function collectively.

4. A much rarer event that the current "look" of the vertebrate genome has is what is called a "whole genome duplication." Venema suggests that this sort of event has only happened twice in the history of evolution, one of which introduced the backbone. Unlike the paralog of the previous example, this sort of event would involve a move from two to four chromosomes, doubling the length of the genome, in effect.

Computers have compared non-vertebrate genomes with vertebrate ones and certainly this looks to be true. That is where the rub is. The genome looks the way we would expect it to look if it developed in this way. Indeed, it is the theory that has led the geneticists to look for these things that they have found.

This does not prove it happened that way. Perhaps we could say that either God created it to look this way or it happened this way.

5. An experiment with E. coli has provided another example of the kind of thing Behe considers irreducible complexity developing by chance. Researchers created a population of E. coli bacteria that largely did not have a binding site for a particular virus. Yet significant amounts of that virus were introduced to the environment.

Within four random mutations, a new binding site had developed to which the bacteria could bind.

6. Stephen Meyer has argued that what are called protein folds are extremely rare and irreducibly complex such that the mathematical probability of them developing by chance is an impossibility. He draws especially on a study by Douglas Axe to support this claim experimentally.

Venema finds numerous flaws in their line of argument, so much so that he believes Meyer must not fully understand the genetics (note 38). First, Venema has already suggested a number of mechanisms by which new functions come into being by chance--gene duplication, mutation, whole gene duplication. According to Venema, it is wrong in the first place to think that anything comes de novo in evolution. It is about descent with modification. Genes split, fuse, stick extra stuff in or accidentally shift the sequence.

One example is a bacteria found in Japan that "eats" nylon, which has only existed since the 1930s. This new bacteria popped into existence in a moment when a single mutation shifted all the codons after it by one place. By coincidence, this shift created a bacteria that could weakly draw carbon and nitrogen from nylon for its "food."

Since other bacteria cannot do this, we know this bacterium has only existed for some time since the 1930s. And this bacterium has a number of the protein folds that Meyer says cannot happen mathematically by chance. Certainly God could have decided to mutate this bacteria for the good of Japan right before they bombed Pearl Harbor. Or it could be random. :-)

7. Venema also points out a number of problems with extending Axe's study beyond its original limits. Axe started with a barely functional bacterium with a specific enzyme that performed a specific function. He comes up with a mathematical impossibility that this bacterium would produce that enzyme to do that function by chance.

But Venema argues it doesn't work this way. Most bacteria have multiple back-up systems that were intentionally kept out of this study so that the study would be able to show failure. And evolution is not about the likelihood of a specific chain of events but the likelihood that some random chain of events will unfold.

As Venema's chapters close, here is his sense of design: "Evolution may be God's chosen design to bring about biodiversity on earth" (89). "I view evolution as God's grand design for creating life" (90).

I look forward to what McKnight has to say about these things theologically, starting next week.

Jamestown 3

From last post
____________
The Second Supply of 1608 mentions that there were "some others" on the trip. Could Thomas Shelburne have been one of these others? A Welsh boy of 13 as cabin boy to the Welsh Captain Peter Wynne? Wynne would die the next year.

The first women at Jamestown came on that Second Supply trip as well. The wife of Thomas Forrest and her maid, Anne Burras, made their way on that third installment. Anne would be the first of the English to marry in the New World--to John Laydon. And she would be the first to give birth in Jamestown, although the first English baby born was Virginia Dare in the Roanoke Colony. Born in 1587, her eventual fate is unknown.

Those first few years of the Jamestown settlement were brutal. Because of the poor conditions, someone died almost every day. The swampy water around the peninsula where they built their fort was arguably part of the problem. It was unsuitable for drinking. The immediately surrounding land was unsuitable for farming. Almost two thirds of the first group to arrive would be dead less than five months after their first landing.

They arrived in one of the worst droughts the region had seen in seven hundred years. They had run out of supplies and it was too late for planting. In part that was why the Native Americans had not used it. Facing drought themselves, the surrounding peoples had less to give than they might have in another decade.

Within days of settling on the peninsula, they would be attacked for a couple months by some of the surrounding tribes, although they were initially greeted by the Powhatan Nation. The interaction of the settlement with the Native Americans must have been puzzling. At times some were friendly enough and traded for food. At other times some attacked.

Most of those who came were not prone to work. They were gentlemen who had little practical knowledge and expected others to work for them. The first President of the settlement was Edward Wingfield, but when the First Supply returned, he was in the brig for hoarding food.  He was sent back to England with Captain Newport.

The second President was John Ratcliffe. He also was ousted, leaving Captain John Smith as the third president of the colony. John was a hard man for hard times. His motto was based on 2 Thessalonians 3:10: "He who does not work, shall not eat." Smith was the one in charge when Newport arrived with the Second Supply...

Parsing Organizational Confusion

Hidden Cultures in the Academy

I recently worked through Erin Meyer's The Culture Map. While this book is about working across cultures primarily in the area of business, it occurred to me that I may have observed some of these cultural differences even within my own university.

Because we are talking about assumptions, it occurred to me that one reason why various professors and administrators may talk past each other, not to mention past potential students and stakeholders, may be a reflection of cultural differences. And as universities aim for greater diversity, these sorts of underlying tensions are only bound to increase.

Here is a list of contrasting priorities that may underlie some organizational conflicts:

1. Explicit versus implicit communicators
Some people are wired to spell out things clearly and in detail. I have experienced times when my repetition has crossed a line of annoyance. After reading this book I realized that some cultures consider it insulting when you spell things out too explicitly. "What, do you think I'm stupid?"

2. Why versus how people
America at large is wired to the "how." As I read this contrast, I remembered times when one set of faculty were thinking, "Just tell me what to do," while someone else felt it was essential to explain the why and give extensive background.

Similarly, there are many professors who think if you do not give extensive theoretical background, you are not yet ready to talk about relevance or concrete implications. Suffice it to say, as prevalent as this "culture" is for academicians, it rubs against the broader culture of the majority of students, who want to know what to do with what is being taught.

3. Egalitarian vs Hierarchical
I have observed within the academy varied assumptions about hierarchy. So I have known some leaders who are very hierarchical. For them, you communicate through the hierarchy. A professor should not contact the president and a division chair should not contact a Dean from another school. Same level communicates with same level.

But others have a much more "egalitarian" sense of communication. We used to call one of the presidents at Asbury Seminary the "open door" president. One president at IWU used to say, anyone can contact me but I will respond through the established channels. Suffice it to say, there is great potential for conflict if everyone is not on the same page about these things.

4. Who makes decisions?
Another cultural difference has to do with who makes decisions and how set they are once they are made. Some faculty bodies are very consensual. They want to reach a consensus before a decision is made. In other situations, a leader gets input from everyone but it is understood that the leader will make the final decision.

The German-Dutch-North European model is a consensus model. You do lots of ground work, the team (including the leader) reach a consensus, then you stick with the decision. I have observed faculty following this sort of a pattern in recent years. "Shared governance" seems to mean, we collectively make all decisions rather than, we have authority in some areas and the administration has authority in others.

The adaptability of decisions is another area where people differ. For some a decision made is done. Others view decisions more as adaptable if new information or factors arise.

Again, a lack of clarity on such matters is bound to lead to confusion and unnecessary conflict.

5. In-your-face conflict?
Many academic cultures are very conflictual. This gets at another cultural variation--how much negativity is considered appropriate and how damaging is such negativity. For some personalities, in your face conflict is perfectly normal. For others, it is deeply alienating.

6. Relationships vs. Tasks
Some people want to build relationships. It's important to eat together and like each other. How can you work together if you do not ever go to lunch with each other? Others are about getting the job done. You do your job and I'll do mine.

People may assume it's one or the other. Which is it for your team?

7. Keeping the Schedule
It is possible as universities get more diverse that we will see conflict over the question of schedule. How important are deadlines? How important is it to be on time?

At the top is a chart that may capture some of these often unexamined assumptions.

Gen Eds LC3: The Languages of the World

By Erkumbulant - Own work
CC BY-SA 4.0

This is the third post in a series called, "World Language and Culture." This is the fourth series in an overall project called Gen Eds in a Nutshell. The other series so far include 1) philosophy, 2) world history, and 3) a math and science series, which is a little over half-way.

Thus far in the Language and Culture series are:

• World Language and Culture Overview
• Culture Classification

1. Linguistics is the study of how language works. One fascinating area within linguistics is "comparative" linguistics, where we compare languages to each other. In fact, languages cluster together like various species belong together in families and have a common history.

There are three predominant types of language: analytic, inflected, and agglutinative. English is mostly an analytic language, which is a language where each word gives you a single bit of meaning and the letters of each word are not changed. [1] The order in which the words come is very important for the meaning. For example, "Ken hit the ball" means something quite different from "The ball hit Ken," even though the words are exactly the same.

Chinese would be an even better example of an analytic language, because English still has traces of changing the letters at the end of its words.

Most languages in the European stream are inflected (also called "fusional") languages. An inflected language changes the endings and forms of words to tell you the specifics of what the word is doing. [2] These endings usually reflect more than one implication for meaning. They also make it such that the order the words come in is less important.

Take the following sentence in Latin: amo manducare panem, "I love to eat bread." While the word amo means "I love," the ending o is what tells you it is I love. If it were amas, it would mean "You (singular) love. The ending tells you both that the subject of love is singular and "I." Similarly with the other words, a change of the ending changes the meaning.

Meanwhile, you could put the words in any other order and the sentence would still be "I love to eat bread." manducare amo panem, panem manducare amo, amo panem manducare, manducare panem amo, panem amo manducare--all of these orderings translate as "I love to eat bread," although the word that is emphasized in each case varies a little.

The final major type of language is agglutinative. [3] Like inflected languages, they vary the letters within a word to change the meaning. The difference is that each change only reflects on bit of meaning. Words in Turkish are thus like a string of beads, with each bead in the word telling you one bit of meaning.

2. By one reckoning, the ten most spoken languages in the world are:

• Chinese
• Spanish
• English
• Hindi
• Arabic
• Portuguese
• Bengali
• Russian
• Japanese
• Punjabi

See also this article. In terms of the number of countries where a particular language is spoken, the top five are: 1) English, 2) Arabic, 3) French, 4) Chinese, and 5) Spanish. It seems to me that if you could learn seven languages and wanted to be able to cover as much of the globe as possible, these are the ones to learn:

• English is spoken in 101 countries. It is the third most native language in the world. It will open the door to you in North America, India and Pakistan, and in much of Africa. It seems to me that, from a strategic perspective, it is the most valuable language to know currently in the world.
• I would secondly suggest Chinese. It is the language spoken by the greatest number of people in the world and knowing Chinese opens the most doors in east Asia.
• Thirdly I suggest Spanish, the second most spoken language in the world. Spanish directly opens up almost all of South America and Latin America. Since I am not putting Portuguese on my list of top six, Spanish is close enough at least to help in Brazil and Portugal.
• Next I suggest Arabic. It is the fifth most spoken language, spoken in 60 countries, and will open up the Middle East and to some extent countries like Turkey and parts of north Africa.
• I feel like Russian needs to be on this list because of the sheer geographical area that it covers, even though it is eighth on the most spoken list. 
• Strategically speaking, French would be on this list. It's not because most people speak French as a primary language. It is because French opens up to you the rest of Africa.
• Hindi really deserves to be much higher up on this list because it is not less than the fourth most spoken language, perhaps even the second. It is related to other languages that are also in the top 10: Bengali and Punjabi. The only reason I have put it seventh is because English is the official language of India and Pakistan, so it is less important if the goal is to be able to cover the most territory with the fewest languages.

There are over 7100 languages in the world currently, half of which will die out by the end of the century. Globalization has taken once isolated peoples and connected people in ways that make smaller languages less spoken.

Indo-European Languages
3. If you look at the chart at the top, over 46% of the world's speakers speak an "Indo-European" language. This is a family of languages that originated around 3400BC in the area around present day Ukraine. Some of this traveling band headed southeast to the region of India. Some went southwest into Greece and Italy. Others stayed put or headed east into Russia. Still others went west into Germany.

One of the earliest known branches of this happy family were the Hittites, who lived in Anatolia (Turkey) around 1800BC. They are mentioned in Genesis 23.

Eastern
In India, Sanskrit is the oldest known representative of this group of language. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Punjabi, some of the most spoken languages in the world by population, are direct descendants of Sanskrit.

Persian languages are also descendant from this western branch of Indo-European. Today, descendants of this branch include Farsi, Kurdish, and Pashto.

A more recent descendant of this western branch are the Slavic languages. These include Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbo-Croatian.

Western
4. The oldest branch in the west was ancient Greek, which of course is the ancestor of modern Greek. In Italy, Latin is another ancient descendant. From Latin come the five Romance languages: Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Romanian.

The Celtic tribes made their way from Galatia in Turkey before the New Testament to Gaul of Roman fame, to the British Isles. Scottish, Welsh, and Irish are all descendants.

Lastly, there are the Germanic languages that occupied central and northern Europe. The northern Teutonic languages spread to what is now Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian lands. The western Germanic tribes became German, Dutch, Frisian, and of course English.

When the French Normans took over England in 1066, The Germanic Anglo-Saxon base of the language was invaded by French.

Semitic Languages
5. Because of my knowledge base, I'll turn to the Semitic languages next. These are primarily Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Aramaic.

The oldest versions of these language was the East Semitic Akkadian, which was the business language of the oldest Babylonian and Assyrian empires. At the time of Israel's captivity, however, Aramaic had become the "lingua franca."

In the West, there was Hebrew, Canaanite, and Phoenician. An older northwest Semitic language was Ugaritic. In the South, Ethiopic would eventually become Amharic and Tigrinya today.

Arabic, another southern Semitic language, is by far the most spoken Semitic language today. Aramaic is barely spoken and dying, but is still known in Iraq and Syria. Hebrew was reinvented as a language when Israel was refounded in 1948.

Sino-Tibetan Languages

6. After the Indo-European languages, more people speak a language from this group than any other. However, Chinese is the primary example. Other languages include Tibetan and Burmese.

Altaic and Isolated Languages
7. Perhaps most of the languages of the world are spoken by a small group of people without clear relationship to others. Japanese, for example, seems to stand mostly on its own, although Chinese has influenced it. Some suggest it may be part of an "Altaic" family, but this is far from agreed.

On the other hand, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Mongolian are thought to relate to this family of agglutinative languages. This group of languages lies across a horizontal line in the middle of Asia, with one branch stretching up eastern Europe.

Next Week: Cultures 4: How to Learn a Language

[1] English does change some letters. "Book" is different from "books." "Walk" is a little different from "walks." In that sense it is really a mixed type rather than a purely analytic type.

[2] In general, languages that have more than one bit of meaning per word are called "synthetic" as opposed to "analytic."

[3] Another type is "polysynthetic," where words can be quite long because they incorporate many meaning bits, including diverse parts of speech.

20. Hitler's Systematic Coup

In the space of seventy days, Hitler deconstructs Germany before the helpless eyes of the insightful. "Coup D'Etat by Installments" is the title of chapter 23 of Konrad Heiden's 1944 book, Der Fuehrer.  See the bottom for previous posts.

1. On the afternoon of March 23, 1933, Hitler is elected dictator by the Reichstag, "created by democracy and appointed by parliament" (579). In theory, he was bound by the cabinet, but the changes he would create in Germany would make the cabinet his slaves as well. Even Hindenburg now could scarcely lift a finger against him.

Immediately, Hitler had one of Hindenburg's favorites arrested, the Commissioner for Re-Employment. When everyone is guilty, all those in power need do is stop overlooking the reasons for your arrest. The man arrested, one Gereke, was perhaps a proxy for Hindenburg himself, a sign that no one was untouchable from the one who now had the power of arrest.

Sounds like how a certain large Slavic speaking country in the world is currently alleged to operate under its leader. The question in such times is not who is guilty but who has the power to use the law selectively to indict those who have fallen out of favor.

A striking point Heiden makes is that on January 30 the protections of the German constitution and state seemed built for eternity. A paper with protections is only as powerful as the power to enforce it.

2. There was a strong minority throughout Germany with the will to seize the reins of society and to do so with great violence, the SA and SS. Thankfully, I do not perceive this to be the situation at present in America. I did worry that if Hillary Clinton was elected, there would be a sizeable group of alt-right who would resort to widespread violence. I think it is absurd to think that the response would not have been more violent with the opposite outcome to the election. After all, the side currently protesting is the one that tends to be in favor of gun laws.

There will always be a handful that resort to violence. But it is clear which side is more in favor of war and violence in general. Nevertheless, it is the stuff of the demagogue to make the exception the rule and the rule the exception.

By contrast, the SA was organized and ready throughout Germany and immediately commenced an intimidating violence throughout. A large mass of unemployed, university trained individuals--"those hopeless masses of the so-called middle class" marched into the universities and took the posts of Jewish professors and lawyers.

Hitler said less than twenty people had died in this "national awakening." The foreign press knew better. From the German newspapers alone you could count 160 opponents to National Socialism who had died, many "shot while trying to escape," "jumping out the window," and "hanging themselves in prison." Many murders simply weren't reported.

3. At first it was mostly political enemies. Hitler couldn't control the fury he had unleashed. He had unleashed "a human type that demanded economic security and had learned that this was his right at the expense of an inferior and hostile race" (581).

Hitler would have been far more powerful if he had not alienated the Jews of Germany. At first he tried to boycott all Jewish business. This was a mistake, although it did show Hitler that the supposed "Jewish world power" wasn't very powerful. Hitler probably didn't see the contradiction. To him there was a Jewish world conspiracy that he was responding to. But the Jews of the world were hardly powerful enough to stop him in Germany.

But Hitler realized the entire boycott would not work. There was too much opposition to it at home and abroad. So he adjusted his tactic to something they would accept. He would abolish Jews from public life in 1933. First he abolished the Jew from government administration and practice of law. Jews were not allowed to teach at the universities or be lawyers. They could not be doctors or work for insurance companies. Only 1.5% of students at universe could be Jews.

Jews couldn't be journalists, writers, actors, painters. Overnight they were excluded from all spheres of intellectual and artistic life on the pretext that they were the fleas of humanity, defiling the Aryan race. Even one Jewish grandparent made you Jewish.

4. At the same time, National Socialism effectively took over the world of skilled workers. May 1 becomes the day of the worker, a holiday for the millennium. There were already "workshop councils" that had been set up twenty years earlier with a goal of leading the mass of workers. Hitler's people systematically take over the reins of these with the threatening SA in the background.

The day after the first May 1 celebration, with Hitler finally broadcast to the whole nation, they took over the trade unions. He had no firm promises. He changed his message so often and lied so consistently that it didn't matter that there was no clear plan. What he did was create a common, forced identity. He did have at least one project in mind, the construction of giant motor highways through the length of Germany, the Autobahn.

"In the long run, only those can be coerced who really want to be, and this was the secret of Hitler's whole policy of successful coercion" (599), of "coordination." The worker needed a job, so when it came to a choice between their "employers" and Hitler, they chose the winning team. There was a "cynical lack of resistance--'they have won out, that makes them right'" (598).

5. Finally the official "metal helmet," the Stahlheim that thought itself the future army of Germany, was taken under Hitler's wing. Opposition was arrested. And a key figure saw the writing on the wall and switched to Hitler's side.

National Socialists were put in as leaders of every "gau" or regional center of power. The cabinet continued to exist, but now had no vote. Hitler brought his decisions to them.

Take Aways:

• The law is only as effective as those who have the power to implement or avert it.
• A Constitution is only as protective as those with power choose to enforce it.
• A democracy can unravel with immense rapidity under certain conditions.
• The majority of people will simply go along with whoever is in power, no matter how devilish, even though they would much rather it be someone else.
• The pride of being in the winning group--or just the group that isn't being oppressed--often leads people to overlook other groups who are being murdered.
• It is the nature of a demagogue to make the more peaceful appear the more violent and to make the violent look as though they are merely defending the peace.

Previously on Hitler:

• How to Take Over the World
• Bands of Restless Men
• Hitler was a Loser
• Rallies with the Rabid
• Waging War against His People
• The Art of Propaganda
• His Brand Is Crisis
• Big Words for a Coward
• Prophecies of the Antichrist
• Germany's Return from Despair
• Fatherland Security
• Hitler's Philosophy
• Destroying Democracy with Democracy
• He's Horrible to Work With
• Putting on a Show
• Maneuvering Toward Power
• Narrow Misses With Hitler
• Hitler Becomes Chancellor (chap 21)
• The Reichstag Fire (chap 22)

Paul Novel 4.4: Interviewing Titus

continued from last week
_______________
"You say that several of these Gentiles who believed had already been attending the synagogue?" James finally asked.

"Yes," Barnabas said. "Many had already believed in the God of Israel, but had not become circumcised and fully converted."

"And even after they believed, they did not want to convert?" John added.

There was a pause.

"No," Paul finally added. "They have converted in their heart, I believe, even though they have not converted outwardly."

"Take the young man Titus who is just outside the door," Paul continued. "He is not circumcised. But his faith is far stronger than all the Jews who have not believed in Jerusalem. I venture to say it is stronger than half of the church of God in Judea."

Barnabas cast a quick glance at Paul as if to say, "Don't get too adversarial."

"I encourage you to ask him questions about his faith," Paul continued.

"I would like to meet the young man," Peter finally said. "You know the strange experience I had at Caesarea with some Gentile soldiers. They seemed full of the Holy Spirit without fully converting to Judaism."

Barnabas then interjected. "He has been observing kosher law in his diet with us for some time and has never had sexual relations." This seemed to allay the troubled look on James' face.

"Very well," James said. "Bring in the boy."

After a brief greeting, mostly James and John began to ask him questions. "So you have come to believe in the one true God, the God of Israel?"

"Yes," Titus said in Greek. James, Peter, and John spoke enough Greek to conduct business in Galilee, but would need a little help if Titus' Greek got too advanced. "In fact, there has never been a point in my life when I did not attend the synagogue of Antioch with my family."

"And you have come to believe that Jesus is our king, our Lord, the Anointed One of Israel?" James continued.

"Yes. I believe he will come again soon to rule the whole world as my king. Every knee will bow before him and every tongue confess that he is the Lord. God has raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavens."

James was impressed. Paul was right. Oh that the Jews of Jerusalem would come to such faith!

"And you do not feel the need to become circumcised and join the people of Israel?" John finally added.

"Were there not strangers in the land of Israel who lived among them?" Titus responded. He had been carefully coached by Barnabas. "God asked Israel to treat them with kindness even though they were never circumcised?"

"I would say that his heart is circumcised," Paul interjected, "even though his flesh is not. It is like the opposite of what the prophet Jeremiah said to Israel of old. Their hearts were uncircumcised even though their flesh was circumcised. The hearts of Titus and others like him are circumcised, even though their flesh is uncircumcised."

You could see that this idea troubled James. He could see a slippery slope he had feared with his brother Jesus as well, who had focused on the lost sheep of Israel in Galilee. There were enough Jews who did not take the covenant seriously enough, James thought. Surely if these Gentiles had as much faith as Paul said they did, they would be willing to go the whole way and fully convert.

But Titus' faith was undeniable. In the end, James did not believe God would destroy Gentiles like Titus who gave their allegiance to Jesus. They would escape the judgment. They would be saved. And that was a good thing, even if it was not as much as James thought was ideal.

In the end, James, Peter, and John agreed that Gentiles could be saved without full conversion. They gave their blessing to their mission. "Only be sure that you and Saul are faithful yourselves to keep the Law."

"And in your mission, never forget the many poor among the people of God," John added. "God has blessed many of these Gentiles with much, such as the Roman governor you mentioned. Part of coming to faith is a willingness to give back to God. There are many poor here in Jerusalem who have believed, as you know from a few years back. A test of the Gentiles' faith may be their willingness to give from their abundance to those who have need."

Of course not all Gentile converts were wealthy, but John and others had a certain stereotype of them. Indeed, he even thought of Paul and Barnabas as wealthy Greek-speaking Jews.

"This is an important truth to me as well," Paul quickly jumped in. "Perhaps in our mission we will see the fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah when he said that the wealth of the nations would flow to Jerusalem."

This idea seemed to resonate with the others as well.

Seminary CM7: A Culture Map

This is the seventh post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
___________________
1. In this post I largely want to summarize the ideas of a book by Erin Meyer called The Culture Map. Although the book was written for businesses, it gives some helpful models by which to categorize and understand various cultures around the world.

There have been some in the past who have reacted negatively to terms like "cultural relativity" and "contextualization." Some of this reaction is based in an "all or nothing" mentality. The fact that some aspects of Christian faith are contextual does not mean that all are. That is to say, relativity on some things does not mean relativity on all things!

Romans 14 makes the point. In this chapter, Paul is basically saying that different Christians have different convictions on some issues, and that is okay as long as they hold their convictions with faith. In other words, Paul is saying that--on some issues--right and wrong is relative to the convictions of the individual. Obviously this is not true of murder or adultery!

The same goes with culture. There is no culture were is it okay to murder innocent people from a Christian perspective. The kingdom core of an earlier post applies to all cultures.

But there are also aspects of morality that play out differently in different places. In fact, all morality has to play out in a cultural context because, as we have seen, all humans live in culture. So the gospel always involved contextualization. It is sheer ignorance that some American Christians of the past have unthinkingly assumed that their Christianity was not incarnated in culture just like everyone else's.

"When you are in and of a culture--as fish are in and of water--it is often difficult or even impossible to see that culture" (25).

On the 8 scales that follow, there is no right or wrong. There is just different from my culture.

2. Communicating--High vs. Low Context
The United States is the most "low context" culture on the planet currently. This means that we assume those with whom we are speaking have no context against which to understand our meaning. "Say what you mean and mean what you say." "Tell us what you're going to say. Say it. Then tell us what you've said."

Accordingly, all other cultures in the world are more indirect in their information. You have to read between the lines. In Japanese culture, this is called "reading the air." There will be an assumption that you mean more than you say and a Japanese person will expect you to be able to read between the lines, so to speak. In China there is intentional beating around the bush. In French there is the "underneath understanding."

I find the description "explicit versus implicit communication" a clearer way of expressing this dynamic of different cultures.

3. Evaluating--Direct Negative Feedback vs. Indirect Negative Feedback
Interestingly, how explicit a culture is about information does not correlate exactly with how you give negative feedback. French culture, for example, is not very explicit in general when communicating, except when it comes to negative feedback (see also #8 below). The French, German, Dutch, Russian, etc. are very direct when it comes to sharing negative feedback.

However, United States culture is much more hesitant to give negative feedback bluntly. When it reaches that point, a person tends to be in serious trouble. A French person may not realize how serious the situation is, because negative feedback is readily given in French culture, while positive feedback is rarely given. By contrast, it is customary to say something nice in the United States before giving negative feedback.

4. Persuading--Principles First vs. Applications First
Those from the US tend to be practical and pragmatic--we are perhaps the most pragmatic culture in the whole world. We are most convinced by "how" arguments and inductive arguments. By contrast, many parts of the world (France, Russia, Germany) are "why" cultures in which you give the principles and the background first, then deduce from there.

This section was interesting for me in terms of the academy. For example, Wesley Seminary was founded to be an inductive, problem based learning, pragmatic style learning culture. But professors are almost always trained to be principles first, "why" thinkers. Let's just say the original vision is not likely to last.

If you want to convince someone from Germany, you have to give them the philosophical basis before going for the throat. But in US business, we want you to "cut to the chase." We want to know the bottom line. I've wondered if this gives us an advantage in war.

Meyer puts Asian cultures in a different category she calls "holistic" thinking. This approach sees the interconnectedness of everything. This approach needs the big picture before understanding the specifics.

I experienced some inner conflict in some of these sections because of intra-American debates that reflect these cultural differences. Analytical versus phenomenological approaches to philosophy map to the difference between British and continental cultures. In American theology, there are the presuppositionalists of the Reformed tradition and the Charles Finney types that tend to be more "American" in their approach to evangelism.

I take sides on these issues, but this book is suggesting we are in part talking cultural conflict here.

5. Leading--Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical
Some cultures clearly pay more attention to hierarchy than others. For example, can you skip lines on the organizational chart? Can a janitor have lunch with the president? Do you contact the person on the same level as you?

Again, I've seen some of these issues in the university where I work. Some bosses I've had have been very open to skipping people on the org chart. If you need information from a certain person, you contact that person directly.

Others have been insistent on following the chain of command. If you need information from x but you are on the same level as y, you contact y and he or she contacts x for you. It would seem that there is no absolute answer here but it is a matter of culture and personality.

It does seem to me--a matter of some inner conflict as I worked through this book--that some models accomplish certain goals better (and I realize my American task orientation is at work here). I thus had values in conflict as I read. On the one hand, I want to affirm that there generally aren't right and wrong cultures. Yet it seems that certain cultural approaches are more effective in certain areas than others.

6. Deciding--Consensual vs. Top-Down
Interestingly, even though some cultures like the Dutch or Scandinavian are very egalitarian--the boss is one of the gang, referred to by first name, rides a bike to work like everyone else--how decisions are made can be a quite different thing. While US businesses tend to be more egalitarian, for example, bosses tend to make decisions.

In Germany, by contrast, the team makes the decisions and consensus is important. In the US, the boss may make an unpopular decision, but everyone knows she is the boss. That's what bosses do. This is experienced as very heavy-handed in other cultures. By contrast, while Japanese culture is very hierarchical, decisions tend to be made by consensus.

So hierarchy and decision-making do not always map directly to each other, although they often do.

[More inner conflict. I prefer to be a consensus leader, but recognize that sometimes a leader has to make a decision or at least should. Otherwise you can languish on forever in indecision, which can do more damage than simply making a decision and moving on.]

Another element is how easily a decision is changed once it is made. This relates to the principles-first versus applications-first distinction. In Germany, once a decision is made it is made. But in the US, if new information surfaces, the decision can be altered. Meyer distinguishes between "big D" decision making and "small d" decision making.

Again, this gets at some of my pet-peeves even in US organizational culture. The principles-first approach seems to me philosophically inferior and, in our current climate, just as likely to run your organization out of business in changing times. It certainly seems likely to lose you a war.

7. Trusting--Task-Based vs. Relationship Based
This is the distinction between "peach" and "coconut" cultures. Americans tend to share a lot of information with complete strangers until you get to a certain point, the peach seed. We tend to be task-based in our business relationships. This relates to the principles-first versus applications-first issue.

Other cultures are more like a coconut. A gruff exterior means nothing. It takes relational work to get beneath the shell. Once you are there, however, there is deep relationship. If you want to make a business deal, you had better build a relationship. Spending time together eating is not a waste of time but an essential part of the process in these cultures.

8. Disagreeing--Confrontational vs. Avoids Confrontation
If I were writing this book, I might have put this section right after the one on negative feedback. Some cultures are very aggressive when it comes to confrontation, but it does not mean what it means in US culture. Two French individuals may be very negative and confrontational toward each other and yet hold hands walking out of the room.

For the US, however, this level of confrontation tends to break relationships. In Asian culture, there is also a strong need to "save face" in public. In the US, we confront individuals in private.

9. Scheduling--Linear-Time vs. Flexible Time
Many of us will know the stereotypes of hot versus cold cultures and how time in some cultures is much less of a thing than it is in others. In US military and business culture, "on time is late." But when my sister was a missionary to the Philippines, we used to talk about "by and by" time. "We'll get there when we get there."

There's a tendency to put a moral judgment on such things. "Being on time is a sign of virtue." But this is not true in many cultures.

10. A very interesting book. Very eye-opening, yet also difficult. It seems to me that there are some betters and worse to achieving certain goals in certain contexts (that is my American task-orientation speaking) yet I also want to affirm that these are not moral evaluations. Different cultures are just different.

What I had attributed to personality differences in an organization now face the complication of possibly being cultural level differences.

Next Sunday: Culture 8: Two-Thirds World Christianity

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture

9.4 Inductive Reactance

This is the fourth week of Module 9, "Relationships of Current, Counter EMF, and Voltage in LR Circuits." These modules are part of the Navy Basic Electricity and Electronics series from the 1970s. The fourth section of this module is titled, "Inductive Reactance."

9.1 Rise and Decay of Current and Voltage
9.2 LR Time Constant
9.3 Universal Time Constant Chart

1. The book thus far has only considered counter-EMF with a direct current (DC) source and a coil. With such a source, opposition to a change in current stopped once five time constants passed and the current reached a maximum or zeroed out.

But when the current has an AC (alternating current) source, the situation is different. A counter-EMF will constantly be in play from a coil and there will always be an opposition to the current, known as reactance. Reactance is symbolized by the letter X and with an inductive cause, X_L.

Because reactance is opposition to current flow, it is measured in ohms (Ω) just like resistance is. But while resistance is a permanent feature to a circuit based on its physical features, reactance changes based on the frequency of AC or the inductance of the circuit.

2. Reactance in a circuit caused by inductance is called, "inductive reactance." Its value is X_L = 2πfL, where f is the frequency in Hertz (cycles per second) and L is the inductance in henrys (volts per 1 amp change of current per second) .

Increased frequency means a greater rate of change and therefore a greater reactance.

Similarly, if the inductance is increased by increasing the number of turns in the coil, the size of the cross-section, or the permeability of the core, then the reactance to changing current increases as well.

So when inductance goes up, the reactance goes up.

Friday Science: Adam and the Genome 5

On to chapter 3 of a book by Dennis Venema and Scot McKnight called, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books

Chapter 3
1. Chapter 3 is titled, "Adam's Last Stand?" In it, Dennis Venema presents the genetic arguments for the claim that humanity as we know descended from a pool of some 10,000 individuals. That is to say, humanity does not descend from two individuals but from a population of several thousand.

McKnight will process this claim theologically in the second half of the book. Venema's purpose is to get the current understanding of genetics on the page. His assessment of the creationist response is worded very strongly: "There does not appear to be anyone in the antievolutionary camp at present with the necessary training to properly understand the evidence, much less offer a compelling case against it" (65).

2. The gist of the arguments relate to the fact that the number of variants present in a population seems to connect to the size of the population. Venema uses the example of the Tasmanian Devil as an example. The TD has a profound lack of genetic variability because at some point in the recent past it experienced a genetic bottleneck.

At some point in the last few hundred years, the population was so drastically reduced, that most TDs have exactly the same alleles (genetic options). This now includes a fatal cancer that TD immune systems do not recognize as harmful. In humans, an organ from another human is inevitably genetically different enough that it provokes a strong immune reaction. In Devils, the genetic material is so similar that a cancer does not.

3. So I counted five separate arguments from genetics in the chapter that all independently point to the same conclusion. "We descend from a population that has never dipped below about 10,000 individuals" (48).

• First, if you take the human mutation rate. Then take the mathematical probability of new mutations spreading in a population or being lost. Then look at how many alleles (genetic variations) are currently present. This calculation suggests that at least 10,000 humans would be necessary to generate that many alleles at a particular point in the past.
• linkage disequilibrium - When two genes are located close to each other on the same chromosome, the alleles present at both locations tend to be inherited together. It takes some time for "cross-overs" to happen in a population in relation to closely located genes. After crunching the data, it suggests a parent population of about 10,000 individuals.
• A snapshot of genes not near each other at a point in the past can suggest a minimum population at that point in the past. If we choose around 200,000BC (when homo sapiens is alleged to have emerged), the pool is about 7,000 in Sub-Saharan Africa and about 3000 human ancestors elsewhere, which adds to 10,000.
• Another approach using mutation frequency and many pairs of genes suggests a human bottleneck of about 1,200 between 40,000 and 20,000 years outside of sub-Saharan Africa, with a bottleneck in Africa of about 5,700 some 50,000 years ago. This adds up to about 6,900 in our total human ancestral pool.
• Looking at more distant ancestors between humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, we see that humans and gorillas can share some variants that did not survive in chimpanzees. This is called "incomplete lineage sorting" (ILS). The data suggests that about 50,000 common ancestors would be necessary to account for the genetic material of current humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas.

He concludes: "To date, every genetic analysis estimating ancestral population sizes has agreed that we descend from a population of thousands, not a single ancestral couple" (55).

Venema is basically arguing that if we assume that Adam and Eve are meant to be taken literally rather than literary expressions of the human condition, they were part of a larger population rather than the sole parents of humanity.

4. Much of the rest of the chapter is given to the current state of fossil research. Perhaps I have not yet conveyed Venema's correction of the idea that evolution happens in a straight line. Rather, he would say, you have a collection of variations in a population. Over time the average genetic characteristics of the population change in a certain direction, which is not a straight line.

Similarly, it is not likely that we have fossils that are in a direct line. Instead, we find distant cousins from other branches.

So the current composite theory is that homo sapiens arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago. About 50,000 years ago, significant numbers of humans left Africa (at least 1200). As they left, they encountered other "hominin" species like Neanderthals in Europe and Denisovans in Asia (who themselves may have earlier encountered homo erectus there).

Those descended directly from Africa have none of these other hominins in their genes. Those descended from Europeans have 1-4 percent Neanderthal in their genes. Those in Asia have some Neanderthal and 3-5 percent Denisovan. The Denisovan genome may incorporate some homo erectus genetics as well. All these hominins share a common ancestry that goes back to about 800,000 years ago in Africa.

5. One last thing of interest in the chapter is his explanation of "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y Chromosome Adam." The Y gene is only passed down through males. If a man has only female offspring, then no genetics unique to the father's Y gene is passed down. Similarly, mitochondrial genes are only passed down through eggs. If a mother only has sons, her unique mitochondrial genes come to an end.

So all living beings are said to descend from a common "mitochondrial Eve" who lived in Africa somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. Similarly, all men are said to descend from a common male who lived in Africa somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. These two individuals are just two separate genetic lines for different aspects of human genetics. They are unrelated to each other (that is, they were not a couple), and they are different from the population from which our regular chromosomal DNA is said to emerge.

In short, "all humans can descend from one Mitochondrial Eve for our mitochondrial DNA, one Y-Chromosome Adam for our Y chromosomes, and 10,000 other ancestors for our regular chromosomal DNA" (64).

Very interested to see what McKnight does with all this!

Gen Eds LC2: Culture Classification

This is the second post in a series called, "World Language and Culture." This is the fourth series in an overall project called Gen Eds in a Nutshell. The other series so far include 1) philosophy, 2) world history, and 3) a math and science series, which is a little over half-way.

Thus far in this current series are:

• World Language and Culture Overview

1. Today's goal is to provide a framework for describing the various cultures of the world. The series on world history was primarily "diachronic." That is to say, it looked back in time and focused on cause-effect relationships over time. This series is primarily "synchronic." It aims to look at the current languages and cultures of the world at this present moment. [1]

Meaning is a function of minds. The world knows matter and energy, cause and effect. But significance is for God and humanity.

We share many things in common as humans, which suggests that there will be some matters of common significance among all people across time. Some of these include love, justice, loyalty, ambition, pleasure, and family. Christians believe that God has assigned a significance to these for all the universe.

On the other end of the spectrum is individual personality. Among us are extroverts and introverts. There are those who act more on their intuitions or on what they can see. There are some who act more on what makes sense to them and others who do more what they feel. Finally, there are those who like to leave things open-ended and those who delight in finishing what they start.

There is no right and wrong when it comes to these personality preferences. A person is not better because they prefer to be around other people, versus those who need time along. Each personality has its strengths and weaknesses.

2. Culture is like the personality of a group of people as a whole in a particular place and time. Again, there is no right or wrong culture, although no doubt each has its strengths and weaknesses. To say this is not at all to say that there is no right and wrong. It is to say that there are a lot of variations among cultures that are not a matter of right and wrong. [2]

In this series I propose to use seven categories in order to categorize the different cultures of the world. These categories are:

1. Language--what are the dominant languages of a particular culture 
2. Identifying stories, symbols, and rituals, and beliefs. N. T. Wright calls these the four components of a worldview.
3. Social structure--I am going to pack into this category a number of features, such as ethics and/or racial composition, class systems, and whether a culture tends to be more hierarchical or egalitarian.
4. Group structure--In this category I will cover family structure, as well as whether a culture tends to be more individualistic or collectivist. Also, how is gender and age treated?
5. Economic structure--how does a culture handle money and resources
6. Communication--Is a culture more implicit or explicit in its communication? Does it tend to give principles or the big picture first or the details and concrete specifics?
7. Operating mode--This gets at some of the hot versus cold culture dynamics. Is a culture more relationship or task oriented? Is it more linear and time-conscious or flexible and laid back? Is it focused more on being or doing?
8. Moral focus--Here I am applying Jonathan Haidt's six moral categories in The Righteous Mind. These include a) care/harm, b) fairness/injustice, c) loyalty/betrayal, d) authority/subversion, e) sanctity/defilement, and f) liberty/oppression. [3]

3. It is important to recognize that the meaning of many actions and words is completely cultural. To raise a middle finger is quite significant in the United States, and we have exported this action around the world. However, there are still places in the world where this action has no meaning whatsoever.

What is considered modest is extremely cultural and sometimes even subcultural. A woman without a veil would be immodest in a number of Arab countries, while a woman without a top might not be considered immodest in some parts of the world. It is hard for us to imagine that such values could differ because they are so fundamental to our culture, but these are learned values, not innate.

Living in another person's shoes is one path on the road to enlightenment. This is true both of people in our own culture and people in other cultures. Hopefully this series will help us on this journey to see ourselves more clearly because we can see ourselves as we appear to others outside our context.

Next Week: The Languages of the World

[1] See another attempt to present how culture works here.

[2] Most of the rhetoric on absolutism and relativism is very superficial. On the one hand, people often blur epistemological absolutes (which have to do with truth) and moral absolutes (which have to do with ethics). Additionally, a false alternative is typically posed between either believing in truth (absolutes) or not believing in truth (relativism).

Absolutism, properly defined, means no exceptions. By contrast, most moral norms are universal with exceptions, which is neither relativism nor absolutism. All people consider some matters of morality relative (we used to call them "convictions"). Nihilism is the proper term for a disbelief in morality altogether.

All that is to say is that most of the tired rhetoric you hear on this subject is overly simplistic and generally a mess of bad thinking.

[3] This last one actually is distributed among the others, but I thought it was worth singling out.

19. The Reichstag Fire

Once Hitler became Chancellor, it begins to unravel. Democracy is dead in the name of the people and the nation.This week is chapter 22 of Konrad Heiden's 1944 book, Der Fuehrer.  See the bottom for previous posts.

1. I post this on July 4, making today's post a stern warning of the unraveling of democracy in the supposed name of the good of the people and the nation. There are some significant differences of course. Hitler had stormtroopers, the SA, scattered throughout Germany. They were at hand to immediately "supplement" the legitimate police. The democracy in Germany at that time was much shorter lived and very fragile.

The decisive moment was the setting of the Reichstag on fire. Looking back, it seems to have been part of Hitler's plan to take control. Although Hitler and his men talked of communist conspiracies and discovering documents (which they never produced), they established their alibis well enough on the night of the fire, seeming to be completely uninterested in the event until it was definitively over and a stooge arrested to blame.

Now Hitler has the pretext. The Communists must be stopped because they are plotting against us. This is the tactic. Accuse some fall-guy of heinous crimes and then use it as an excuse to exert oppression on your enemies. Use it as an excuse to gain emergency powers.

Did most Germans believe him? Probably not. But Hitler had a dedicated minority. Some 44% voted for him in the election he had set. "The majority did not want Hitler, but it wanted nothing else" (564).

2. Of course by this point the SA had arrested, beat, and killed a mass of the Nazi's enemies. "Crime was openly ruling Germany; none of these men [leaders in the Reichstag] believed that the Communists had set the fire" (562).

The SA begin a reign of terror. Göring is not even the head of the police in Germany, but he had already armed them prior to the fire. "This was the decisive revolutionary act of the National Socialists" (549). The SA arrested whoever they wanted for whatever reason they wanted. "From now on the police was almost uncontested master over the German people" (561).

3. Ironically, the Communists had thought Hitler was the path to a classless society. They thought the forces of history would bring about their ideal stateless state. They were essential to Hitler's rise to power, and then Hitler immediately disposed of them. When the Communists did not rise up on their own, Hitler framed them.

They clung to a preposterous ideology to its demoralizing end. From Hindenburg, Hitler received the power to curb free speech and a free press. Meanwhile, the publications of the crazy were given free reign. The intelligent, free press became the fake news, and the stupids were given free rein to propagandize. Because of the SA and SS, most who were not put in concentration camps (the beginning of such) became really careful about what they said.

"This was the beginning of an artificial intellectual tornado" (572).

The power was still within the hands of the Center (catholic) and the Social Democrats to stop Hitler from getting dictator powers. No longer were they talking of a year but of four years. Hitler promised the Center assurances, said they were written down. "Oh I forgot them, but they are signed." Lie, lie, lie and everyone knows it deep down, but still they vote for him to have dictatorial power.

Hitler renounces his salary. Then when it is clear he needs to take it, he donates it. What a generous fellow.

"To destroy Communism, the Nazis had to smash democracy" (561), but of course this is all just a game. Most know it is. His supporters know it is but do not care. "When the Communist danger is eliminated, the normal order of things will return" (562). Right.

"The will of an imprisoned mass must first be broken by the most loathsome cruelty" (565). In these concentration camps for communists and opponents to Hitler, "many who may have been good-natured human beings when they began their service in the concentration camps were gradually turned into torturers and murderers by the routine" (565).

Many were "shot while trying to escape." Others "committed suicide" by jumping out of windows. An English newspaper wrote, "The habit of jumping out of the window in an unguarded moment has cost many political prisoners in Germany their lives in the past weeks" (565).

4. Meanwhile, "it is strange how little the old routine politicians on both sides understood the hour" (567). "Men who had hitherto regarded themselves as powerful began to fear the new masters" (571). The constitution was forgotten.

Hitler spoke of the importance of Christianity in Germany. "It was the compliment of an atheist who admits the usefulness of Christianity" (577).

And here was equality before the law for Hitler: "Theoretical equality before the law cannot lead us to tolerate those who despise the law as a matter of principle... Equality before the law will be granted to all those who stand behind the nation and do not deny the government their support. But those who deny the government their support have... no rights whatsoever" (578).

Take Aways

• Those seeking to suspend the rule of law may create a fake crisis, blame it on their enemies, and then try to take emergency autocratic powers on that pretext. Autocrats try to gain power in the name of protection and nationalism.
• Don't ever think you will get power back from a dictator. Once he has it, he will burn everything to the ground before he gives it up. Autocrats cannot be controlled once their power is secured.
• Autocrats require a police or military force to hold control, which is why presidents and their cabinets are not supposed to be recently active in the military.
• Freedom of speech and the press are essential to democracy. Expect an autocrat to try to suppress them. Rounding up enemies, keeping them from voting, these are all the tactics of a dictator want-to-be.

Previously on Hitler:

• How to Take Over the World
• Bands of Restless Men
• Hitler was a Loser
• Rallies with the Rabid
• Waging War against His People
• The Art of Propaganda
• His Brand Is Crisis
• Big Words for a Coward
• Prophecies of the Antichrist
• Germany's Return from Despair
• Fatherland Security
• Hitler's Philosophy
• Destroying Democracy with Democracy
• He's Horrible to Work With
• Putting on a Show
• Maneuvering Toward Power
• Narrow Misses With Hitler
• Hitler Becomes Chancellor (chap 21)

Paul Novel 4:3: Private Meeting Jerusalem

continued from last time
______________________
Barnabas arranged for a time to meet with the "pillars" of the Jerusalem church. Since they believed the temple had been defiled by corrupt leadership, the earliest church had come to think of four Jerusalem leaders as the four pillars in the new temple. Until such time as the physical temple was cleansed, they represented the true dwelling of God in the land.

Peter was the first pillar, the first of the disciples to whom Jesus appeared. James the brother of Jesus was the second, the leader of the Jerusalem church. Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee were the third and fourth pillar. Of course James of Zebedee had been killed by Herod Agrippa I by this time, leaving only three of the pillars.

At first Barnabas suggested they eat a meal with Paul, Titus, and him. Peter was happy to do it but James clearly wasn't excited about the idea. Barnabas didn't ask why because he knew it was the idea of eating with a Gentile--and maybe even Paul himself. Barnabas wouldn't tell Paul about that part of the conversation.

So at the appropriate time, Barnabas and Paul met with them, with Titus nearby. Paul knew well enough to let Barnabas do most of the talking. Barnabas first told of their visit to Cyprus and how surprised they were for the Roman governor himself to believe.

"He will find it difficult to follow the Way in such a position of wealth and power," James said. "As my brother said while he was with us, 'It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.'"

"Perhaps so," Paul finally said. "But our God can do all things through Christ who strengthens us."

"I hope the Gentiles can be saved, Barnabas," John chimed in. "But it is still very important for you and Paul to keep the Law, since you are Israelites."

"We are diligent to do so," Barnabas said. Paul kept silent. He basically still kept the Law. But if it ever seemed like the Law might stand in the way of the mission, the mission pretty much came first...