The electric fence gate handle. Insulator, or conductor?

I earned my B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Magna Cum Laude. That essentially means I know almost nothing about electricity or engineering.

NONETHELESS, I had to set up a simple circuit to keep my cows inside a paddock I made for them. I bought the portable electric fencing materials: a solar powered charger with battery, the electrical wire (polywire), and the posts.

The circuit is made by hooking up the charger’s positive terminal to the single fence wire, and the charger’s ground to a metal rod I hammered into the dirt. The circuit is “open” until a cow touches the wire, then the electrons travel through the cow to the ground and back to the ground rod. That’s the theory.

But I set it all up and the volt meter measured zero volts. I touched the wire and nothing happened. It was not conducting.

EITHER the ground was too dry and sandy, and my thick work boots too insulated, for the electricity to flow through me into the ground, or I was shorting the hot wire into the ground somewhere. For instance, the hot wire could be touching a metal wire on the permanent fence, or touching vegetation.

I checked the wire, and nothing was grounding it, or so I thought. But then I looked at the “gate handle” I had hooked onto the hot wire and to hook it onto the permanent fence. These have a rubber handle so you can grab it, and I thought they were made of two pieces of metal, such that it insulated the hot wire from the permanent fencing.

On a lark, I removed that gate handle and touched the wire. Zap! Ten thousand volts surged from my finger down to my toes and into the ground. It stung something sharp. Turns out those “insuli-grip” gate handles conduct electricity through the insulated grip. Now I know.

I dunno. My parents will probably be disappointed to know I spent four years in college learning differential equations, Maxwell’s equations, digital signal processing, and advanced analog circuits, only to shock myself with an electric fence after ignorantly shorting it. In college, I learned a ton of theory but almost no practice, and certainly no practice on something as low-tech and blue-collar as farming or ranching with electric fences.

Mark it up as just another practical lesson learned on the homestead.

All Your Base

As a software developer, I am not overly concerned that the NSA is watching everything I do. Because, I can tell you directly, software developers are incompetent, and creating even a small program that does something useful takes a long time.

I don’t know how the NSA gets data from the various companies (Google, Facebook et. al.), but I am sure it’s not through some direct feed. The amount of data would be overwhelming and the gov’t goons wouldn’t know how to process it anyway. It is all Facebook and Google can do to process their own data, knowing the algorithms and data structures and paying thousands of skilled people at their company to make sense of it. Third-party people outside the company wouldn’t stand a chance of processing even a millionth of it.

Instead, it must be as others have surmised: these big tech companies are told by the gov’t to give them X records/metadata and then they fork it over in a digestible lump. Disturbing? Yes. Real-time, direct access to your emails–as you type them!–not so much.

Now, what is still scary is something Snowden mentioned: your email or phone call metadata triggers an alert: you used some keywords or called a number that at one time was questionable in some way. Now there is “reasonable cause”–perhaps–to begin tracking your communications more closely. The gov’t doesn’t have the chops to intensely scrutinize 400 million people, but five or ten thousand? Sure. And if you get on that list, whether because the IRS detected the word “tea party” or “pro-life” in your email or because you called a wrong number that happened to be a bad dude of some kind, now you are being watched closely, and perhaps that information will be useful against you one day.

It’s clear that what began under Bush has metastasized under Obama. In this regard, he is in fact worse than Bush, as difficult as that fact is for his supporters to admit. He promised that he wouldn’t spy on Americans, and now that we know he has been, he stands up there and blandly defends his hypocrisy with the usual rhetorical garbage that his opponents saw through six years ago. Obama is not principled: whether on pro-life, or on the Constitution, or on war.

Make no mistake though: as much as I think Obama’s actions have been and are awful, if a Republican president is elected next, unless we the people loudly oppose these intrusions by the gov’t, a Republican will take the baton from Obama and run with it. All of them think that they will only use this power for good, but like the One Ring, it corrupts anyone. Gandalf knew that and refused the Ring. Obama did not, nor will the next Republican president, unless we stand up against this today.

For now, take hope in software developer incompetence, and security through obscurity. There are hundreds of millions of Americans. Shuffle in a single-file along with us other drones and you *probably* won’t be singled out for further “observation.”

As a postscript, I interviewed in college with the CIA and I think with the NSA. I almost went to work for them. Glad that I didn’t, now.

St. Jerome

Dr. Michael Kruger, a Reformed Protestant scholar, wrote a post debunking the alleged myth that the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea (AD 325) said anything about what books belonged in the Bible (aka the canon of Scripture).

I say alleged because there is at least one very interesting historical tidbit that we have, which lends strong evidence that indeed 1 Nicaea did say something about the biblical canon. St. Jerome wrote a prologue to the book of Judith–a deuterocanonical book included in the Catholic canon but which Protestants reject–that mentions the “Nicene Council” accepting the book as Scripture:

But because this book is found by the Nicene Council to have been counted among the number of the Sacred Scriptures…

Perhaps Dr. Kruger didn’t know about this fact? Or perhaps there is some strong Protestant answer to this that I am not aware of. I am open to learning always.

The interesting thing is, this comment from St. Jerome is doubly powerful for the Catholic canon, since he personally doubted the canonicity of deuterocanonical books, at least for some part of his life, and also since he reveals that the landmark first Ecumenical Council actually did say something about the canon, and that the bishops of the Church made the discernment to include Judith in the Bible.

That said, I know little more about this episode of history than the prologue (and his other prologues, including to Tobit). If anyone knows more about this, whether helpful to the Catholic argument or supportive of the Protestant one, I would be interested in hearing about it.

The living room, about three weeks ago

I apologize to you, faithful readers, for the long gap in my posts. Here’s the brain dump so you know what’s been going on:

1. Wood stove, flooring, painting, jackhammering of concrete (inside the house!)
2. Added to the farm: Guinea Fowl Keats
3. Soon to add to the farm: Yellow Labrador dog
4. Figuring out well drilling (may or may not hit an aquifer)
5. Figuring out rain water catch systems
6. Digging a pond, building berms
7. Revising a manuscript for an apologetics book
8. Developing a class on Scripture for St. William’s (I’ll teach it this fall)
9. Soon to continue editing of If Protestantism is True
10. Working longer hours at regular job–company profits must go up and to the right!
11. Taking care of family

As Prince Humperdinck says in the Princess Bride: “I’m swamped!”

Thank you for sticking with me through it all! I just looked at the date and realized this blog just passed its Eighth Year Anniversary. Glory to God. May we do all things in and with Him.

Our most recent improvement to our house was installing a woodstove. These are those old-looking cast iron boxes with stovepipe going up to the ceiling that can heat an entire house. I’ve wanted one of these for years, and finally we moved to our farm, where it made sense to get one. My hope is to never use the heater again.

It’s a great feeling of freedom and security to have a woodstove. Suddenly, I have the ability to heat my home and keep my family warm using wood, wood that I can get from our own acreage. If the electricity goes out on a freezing day, we have nothing to worry about. And it is a simple device, unlike the electric heat pump/compressor that is normally used.

I was asked to give a talk up in Minnesota recently, at another FOCUS event. I was honored to be invited, but I declined and gave the missionary a name of a friend who lives up there. I am feeling called to invest myself in the local area, in the Austin diocese and nearby environs. Houston or Dallas or San Antonio is as far as I want to travel. I’ve been invited to be on The Journey Home with Marcus Grodi, but I will only do it if we can make it a family trip.

I want to send roots deep in the place and with the people that surround us. I want to serve at my parish and diocese to help educate my brothers and sisters in their faith. I don’t want (or intend) to be a celebrity of any kind. If God makes me one in certain people’s eyes, that is his business. But, as I sometimes remind myself when I’m tempted to get a big head, I’m going to “leave my eulogy for God.” He alone knows hearts and minds. Rich Mullins said, “we are not as strong as we think we are,” and that is so true. We are, all of us, very small, and can do nothing without God.

The fields are ripe for the harvest around here, both figuratively and literally. Our land has not been managed that well, so the soil and trees and pond are just begging for some TLC. I can see the possibilities with it, beginning with rotational grazing of the cattle already on the property.

But also at our parish, there is great need for conversion (and reconversion), education, good formation, community, and catechesis. God asks for laborers to go out into the vineyard, using the gifts and skills he has given them, to help gather a harvest. I hope to be one of those laborers, along with you.

What does a “culture of life” mean? It means cultivating life at every level and in every way. Our civilization is so far down the path of despair that it will take a deep healing to renew it and forge it upon a solid foundation, that of God. The despair is manifested in women who abort their babies (often due to pressure from boyfriends, husbands, and parents), in families who choose to contracept their marital embrace so they will not have children (or have more children), in our country’s acceptance of torture as a licit practice, in drone attacks that kill innocents, in euthanasia, in same-sex “marriage,” in bullying and rape and brutality that goes on in schools and cities around the nation.

But while passing laws and protesting are good to do, they are striking at the symptoms. People have forgotten, or never learned, what it means to be truly human. Christ reveals man to himself, He shows us what it means to be truly human. On our farm, we hope to be a haven, a sanctuary, where people can learn at the feet of Christ, in the school of love. We don’t know how that will happen exactly, but we believe the Holy Spirit is revealing it to us.

So we are putting out into the deep by sending roots into the soil, where they will tap into the wellspring of water that is God. Then we can send out the shoots of new life, the blossoming flowers which will turn into seeds and bear fruit a thousand-fold over.

Thanks for joining us on this journey.