Author Archives: randomraindrops

Avoiding Health Cliffs

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Dr Peter Attia shares guidance on exercise, nutrition, relationships and more
Longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia says most people experience a steep decline in their 70s — but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

“At 75, both men and women fall off a cliff,” the Stanford-trained physician, who runs a medical practice in Austin, Texas, said in a recent interview with “60 Minutes.”

During the interview, Attia shared some of his top strategies for not only living longer, but also remaining strong, healthy and engaged, so the last decade is as enjoyable and independent as possible.

This is what experts refer to as “healthspan” — the period of life when one is free from “age-associated maladies,” according to Douglas E. Vaughan, M.D., director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago.

“There are certainly things that people can stop doing to extend healthspan,” he told Fox News Digital. Some examples include stopping smoking, drinking less, maintaining a healthy weight, getting regular exercise, avoiding processed foods and having good sleep habits.

Below are the five strategies that Attia shared with “60 Minutes.”

No. 1: Train like life is a sport

Attia recommends approaching life — particularly in advanced age — like an athlete would approach a sport.

As people age, their level of fitness, strength and mobility matters more than many traditional markers, he noted.

The longevity expert said he logs about 10 hours per week of exercise — a mix of fat-burning cardio, high-intensity intervals (to boost VO₂ max), and strength training to maintain muscle.

Attia said he alternates between “zone two” exercise, which entails steady cardio activity that allows you to maintain a conversation, and higher-intensity “zone four” training.

No. 2: Use meaningful tests — not just standard bloodwork

Attia recommends closely tracking VO₂ max, which measures the maximum amount of oxygen the body uses during strenuous exercise. 

VO₂ max is usually measured in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute (ml/kg/min).

“Your VO2 max is more strongly correlated with your lifespan than any other metric I can measure,” Attia said. “It predicts your risk of death from any cause, even more than your blood pressure, cholesterol or smoking status.”

“I think this is the neglected part of medical testing, is how fit are you, how strong are you, how well do you move?” he said. “And in many ways, these tests are even more predictive of how long you’re going to live than what I might get out of your bloodwork.”

Attia also uses scans like DEXA (short for dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry), which measures bone density, muscle mass and body fat.

“When you look at things like cardiorespiratory fitness, when you look at muscle mass, when you look at strength, they have a much higher association than things like even cholesterol and blood pressure,” he added.

Attia also is a proponent of full-body MRI scans, which can detect cancers and other conditions earlier for better outcomes, although he warns of the potential for false positives. 

He also recommends getting tested for APOE, the gene that indicates an elevated risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Having one copy of the gene roughly doubles or triples the chances of developing the common dementia, while two copies raises the risk by 10 times and lowers the average age of onset by five to 10 years, data shows.

No. 3: Eat more protein than standard guidelines suggest

Boosting protein intake has been linked to increased muscle mass and strength, stronger immune function and reduced disease burden, studies show.

Attia recommends consuming more than twice the protein recommended in current nutritional guidelines.

The recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for protein is 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, which would be 55 grams for a 150-pound person or 73 grams for a 200-pound person.

No. 4: Prioritize emotional, mental and relational health

Emotional and mental health are just as important as physical health, according to Attia.

“It’s as much a practice as what I put into exercise, blood work and cancer screening,” he said.

“By working hard on our physical health, we can reduce the rate of decline,” Attia went on. “But if we’re being deliberate and active on our emotional health, it can actually improve.”
The expert credits his wife of more than two decades for enabling his progress.

“Just like the exercise data, I don’t think this is just a correlation,” Attia said in the interview. “I really think that there is also some causality that flows from the end of having great relationships to living a longer life.” 

Vaughan echoed that the common denominator in “super agers” involves a supportive community, a healthy social environment and regular contact with people who care for one another.  

No. 5: Optimize the ‘marginal decade’

While decline is inevitable, Attia said his goal is to make what he calls the “marginal decade” as enjoyable as possible.

“The marginal decade’s not going anywhere. We will all have a final decade of life,” he said. 

CLICK HERE FOR MORE HEALTH STORIES

“The way I explain it to my patients is, that last 10 to 15 of your years — if you don’t do anything about it, you will fall to a level of about 50% of your total capacity, cognitively [and] physically.”



Sean Carroll and Materialism

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I saw an interesting discussion written by Michael Egnor in 2023 about Sean Carroll’s view of the immaterial mind here: https://mindmatters.ai

Who is Michael Egnor?

Michael Egnor

Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics, State University of New York, Stony BrookMichael R. Egnor, MD, is a Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook, has served as the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery, and is an award-winning brain surgeon. He was named one of New York’s best doctors by the New York Magazine in 2005. His book, The Immortal Mind: A neurosurgeon’s case for the existence of the soul, co-authored by Denyse O’Leary, was published by Worthy on June 3, 2025.

Now this article is talking about the human mind and and effects on the physical world or physical body:

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University who takes an atheist and materialist philosophical perspective on nature and on science. I have disagreed with him often — I’m in no position to judge his scientific acumen, but his philosophical acumen leaves a lot to be desired. An example of this is a question he asks in a recent documentary about free will (which I haven’t watched yet). In the trailer for the movie, Carroll asks, How in the world does the immaterial mind affect the physical body? Carroll’s denial of libertarian free will is based on this question, and of course, he believes that the immaterial mind does not exist and, if it did exist, could not affect the physical body. Thus, he believes that libertarian free will is nonsense.

Well that is an interesting comment about Carroll’s philosophical acumen. My interest is on the immaterial mind of a transcendent being such as God. Can that mind affect the human mind? Or matter? If miracles are possible then the answer would be yes.

Carroll, however, seems to be a reductionist. Lets leave that until a bit later. Meanwhile, let’s learn some aspects of causation theory. Egnor uses a statue as an example.

1. Material cause is the matter (marble) that the statue is made of. The matter of what something is made is one of the causes of the thing – without the marble, the statue could not exist.

2. Efficient cause is the agent that gives rise to the effect – in the case of the sculpture, the efficient cause is a sculptor.

3. Formal cause is the design principle that underlies the effect – in the case of the sculpture, the formal cause is the idea in the mind of the sculptor of what the sculpture will look like. The formal cause is quite real and is indispensable to an understanding of causation – after all if the form of the sculpture did not exist in the mind of the sculptor as he was working, there would be no sculpture.

4. Final cause is the ultimate goal, purpose, or final state of the causal chain. The final cause for the sculpture might be the sculptor’s desire to express himself artistically or it might be the sculptor’s desire to be paid for his work.

Egnor comments, “In the Aristotelian paradigm, a complete understanding of cause must entail an understanding of all four causes in nature. In causation without a visible efficient agent, formal and final causes are often the same. The formal cause of an acorn growing into an oak tree is the design principle of the oak tree, which is also (in the Aristotelian perspective) the final cause of the acorn growing into the oak tree. The ultimate final cause, according to Aristotle, is God.”

PATTERNS AND PURPOSES IN NATURE

Egnor argues, “Aristotle was right – material and efficient causes alone are inadequate to understand nature because there are patterns and purposes built into nature that we can’t deny.”

He goes on to criticise Carroll, “So, Carroll’s implicit assertion that the immaterial mind could not affect the physical body is predicated on his belief that the only kinds of causes that exist in the physical world are material and efficient causes.“

To me this assumption of Carroll’s is Philosophical Naturalism, which itself is an a priori metaphysical assumption and is not part of science. So I think Egnor is right. My observation is Egnor is Augustinian and Neo-Platonist in his thinking here, whereas Carroll is neither.

MATHEMATICS?

 Egnor says, “Ironically, Carroll’s own scientific discipline – quantum mechanics – is a prime example of the importance of formal causes in nature. The scientific description of quantum processes is entirely mathematical, which is a description of formal causes. Matter and individuation disappear at the quantum level. What remains are the mathematical descriptions of quantum particles and dynamics. Contrary to Carroll’s implicit insistence that only material and efficient causes act in nature, quantum mechanics shows that formal (immaterial) causes are fundamental to nature.”

Hmmm.

BIOCHEMISTRY

Egnor makes a point about drugs and biochemistry, “Thus a mental (formal) state can cause a physical state in a way that is currently understood in physics. A particularly striking example of the importance of formal causes in science is the phenomenon of chirality. Chirality is a property of mirror image molecules in which the molecules contain exactly the same number and kinds of atoms connected in exactly the same kind of way except that one is a mirror image of the other. In other words, the matter comprising chiral molecules is exactly the same although the form of the molecules can be radically different. For example, all biological amino acids that make up proteins are L enantiomers (one mirror image). Amino acids that are identical materially but are R enantiomers (mirror images) play no role in protein manufacture. The difference between L and R enantiomers can be a matter of great medical importance and even life and death – Darvon is an analgesic but its enantiomer Novrad is an anti-cough agent. Penicillamine is used in the treatment of arthritis, but its enantiomer is very toxic.“

PHILOSOPHICALLY VACUOUS?


Egnor’s conclusion: “Formal causation is ubiquitous in biology and Carroll’s argument that we cannot have libertarian free will because the immaterial (formal) mind cannot affect matter is philosophically vacuous.”

Fascinating!

I knew Carroll and one other person debated Dinesh D’Souza in 2014, and his debate partner (whose name I do not recall) was a reductionist. It seems Carroll is as well. Now, what does this mean for quantum mechanics? To me there are two questions and they may be the same question.

1. Who is the observer?
2. What is measurement?

As you know, when you take a measurement in the quantum world you perturb the wave function and cause quantum collapse. So a wave suddenly localizes into a particle-like phenomenon. Can a mind function as the observer? How would we ever know?

If God is in the universe (ie, immanent) can his mind perform a measurement (or observation?). What kind of observations are possible? We do not know. But ignorance is not proof of non-existence. So, I am still pondering these questions. I am looking for input on these subjects from a variety of sources. This includes Sean Carroll’s lectures on quantum mechanics. I really enjoy listening to him. I think one just has to be aware of his presuppositions.

If you want to be more aware of issues related to the soul you might check out his new book The Immortal Mind .

Now, it may be worth considering the following definition: Naturalistic evolution, or evolutionary naturalism, is the philosophical concept that all of life, including the human condition and morality, arose through natural processes, rather than supernatural or intentional design.  (This is an AI summary.)

I am not happy with AI summaries. The problem is the definitions are taken from websites that are reactions to chatter, are not real propositions, and are mere hyped up opinion. There is no substance underneath. The concepts are fabricated and imaginary.

Note, I can only find one book written on the subject in 1922. Everything else I have found is propaganda from creationist websites where the terms are re-defined to support the war between science and God. ( a political viewpoint, not a scientific one). The book itself is a philosopher’s response to other philosophers in order to find a better naturalism. This is because naturalism was considered to be broken or inadequate.

BTW, this linkage with natural processes would fit neatly with Sean Carroll’s view that there is no free will. It also is congruent with nihilism – the view that human values and maybe even human minds themselves are mere illusions – all in the imagination and not real at all.

I will contend that what scientists do is based on methodological naturalism (MN), not philosophical naturalism (PN). MN produces science. PN produces scientism. PN, being metaphysical, is not a statement about either science or reality. MN is a statement about science, is not metaphysical, and is a statement about an approximation of reality, or a part of reality, but not all of reality. Just the physical part of reality in which humans live.


What I have noticed is the biologos people are adamantly against PN. The young earthers totally ignore PN as if it does not exist. Old earthers and ID people are somewhere in between.

DISTORTIONS – WHY I DONT TRUST MANY CHRISTIANS

Speaking of which … another interesting article: https://www.str.org/w/if-naturalistic-evolution-is-true-people-are-not-equal. I disagree with this person’s definitions of naturalism. The STR people are concordists and distort both philosophy and science.

Then there is another voice: Masters U. These are horrible statements about naturalism at Masters University, which seems to be associated with John MacArthur. https://www.masters.edu/thinking_blog/creation-believe-it-or-not-part-1/. Masters miscontrues and distorts the meaning of almost all of these concepts.

I have come to think that Christians are either terribly dumb or they are terrible liars.

TRANSCENDENCE

The real problem I see in Christianity is somebody in history philosophized that God is “transcendent only.” Yes, God is transcendent. But He is also immanent. I.E., In the world. Affecting the world. Affecting physical reality. He is not entirely outside the physical reality. This is difficult to understand – indeed, no human really grasps it just like no human really grasps the trinity. But the bible and Christianity do not teach that God is purely transcendant (purely supernatural). That is a lie held to by atheists.


Young earth creationists (and concordists?) teach that God can only “create” from outside the physical universe by overturning the physical laws of the universe. To me that is *not* a Christian belief. It is not what the bible teaches. I think the bible teaches that the laws of the physical universe are held fixed by God, and God often creates by using these laws. Can create by using these laws. That is not, BTW, naturalism.

These two cases of Masters and of STR may be the subject of future posts just on them.

Summing Up

So we started with Sean Carroll’s issues with free will. But the real issue is far larger. Free will is really just a side topic.











Indesign Images.

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Putting everything in Creative Cloud raises issues. I found the following article that may affect design approaches.



InDesign Secrets: Embedding your images so they don’t go missing

Anne-Marie Concepcion

Authored byAnne-Marie Concepcion

Digital publishing workflow trainer, consultant, and therapist for InDesign-using designers and the editors who love them. LinkedIn Learning instructor 25+ courses. amarie@senecadesign.com Ask me anything!

October 5, 2012

This article addresses the dreaded lost image phenomenon, which occurs when Adobe InDesign can’t find your linked images and lets you know with glaring red question marks.

The presence of glaring red question marks in your actual layout (and not just your Links panel) is courtesy of InDesign CS6, but the lost images phenomenon is familiar to users of earlier versions of InDesign as well.

Anne-Marie’s solution is simple: embed your images. That way they can’t get lost if you move the image folder or send the document off to a client without a separate file full of graphics. An embedded Photoshop file even retains its layers.

The first step is to find the original image and relink it (you’ll have to solve that challenge on your own). Then right-click on the image in the Links panel and choose Embed Link.

Your image is now permanently part of your file.

As easy as this is, you should be aware of two potential disadvantages to embedding your file. First, when you embed your images you no longer have the benefit of automatically updating links, but if your graphic is stable and not going to change (like a logo), then it’s really not a an issue. Second, embedding images makes your InDesign file significantly larger. But as Anne-Marie notes, it’s not 1993, and while you may not want to embed hundreds of images, the increased file size you’ll see from embedding a handful of images for an in-house document is not the obstacle it used to be.

One other note: you can’t embed a video file or another InDesign file.

What I find particularly fascinating is if you embed a graphic file within your InDesign document, the encompassing InDesign file behaves in some ways like a zipped archive. If you wish to unembed the graphic later, you can create a new “original” right from InDesign. For certain scenarios, this is an elegantly simple solution to the lost image syndrome.

Weak Hebrew

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Someone writes:


“Genesis 7:20 says the floodwaters were 15 cubits high, and they covered the mountains. To me, that says the whole eretz (earth or land) which is in the scope of the narrative is an extremely flat place where the mountains are less than about 22-25 feet. This describes Sumer very well. Eden, Noah, and Babel all have overt Sumerian contexts, and versions of each story exist in Sumerian literature as well.

Every modern translation makes an interpretationally driven edit to the syntax of that verse to turn it into “the flood waters rose fifteen cubits [above the tops of the] mountains” and I have never run into anyone who can suggest a Hebrew rule or a parallel passage that might suggest that this is a possible reading. It’s just Second Temple and post-Second Temple doctrine being injected back into the text.”

OK, I do not know Hebrew. But some YEC’s have told me after the flood the mountains rose over 7000 feet in some places, including the Rockies and including Flagstaff Arizona and the western north american continent. According to this hypothesis humungous geological upheaval was required to preserve the global flood myth. Based on weak Hebrew interpretation.


My sarcastic conclusion might be: “Sure it is. Next they will be telling me I get to have 70 wives if I decide to become a martyr.” In other words, I think the credibility of the global flood story is incredibly low.

I am more concerned about these ideas being based on weak arguments, weak evidences, and weak interpretations of ancient languages. I fail to understand the headlong plunge into premature commitment to poorly supported ideas. And the demand that all of humanity must join in that headlong plunge. I would very much prefer a very solid case be made for biblical ideas. Why do people insist on making a weak case instead of a strong case?

Book Review of Believing Is Seeing

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Book Review of Believing is Seeing

or

https://medium.com/@pkajjohnson/book-review-believing-is-seeing-a-physicist-explains-how-science-shattered-his-atheism-and-4b5f5a60d812

My thoughts: If Seeing isn’t believing and believing isn’t seeing then what you get is a sort of a form of voodoo like what the Catholic Church adhered to in the time of Copernicus. If that is Christian then I am a monkey’s uncle. Seems to me it is anti-Christian. It is toxic to Christian faith. But there are organizations that tell humanity that science and bible are at war with each other.

View at Medium.com

Bible and Science, Two Views.

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There are two main views Christians seem to have about science.

1. The Unified View. Science and the bible portray one unified truth.
2. The Conflict View. Science and bible are in conflict and are at war.

Young earth creationism (YEC) promotes the Conflict View as the only way to understand the bible.

Reasons To Believe (RTB) goes with the unified view. They make way more sense to me that the conflcit view.

YEC’s consistently tell me the conflict view is the only view because for science and bible to not be in conflict means the bible is not credible. I think they fabricated that and it is a lie.

Mark 13:32 states that no one, not even the angels in heaven or the Son, knows the day or hour of the end times, only the Father. This verse emphasizes that Jesus in his incarnation, while fully human and fully divine, did not have full access to the knowledge of the father and the holy spirit. So YEC’s overclaim about what jesus knew about Genesis. His knowledge came from the Septuagint.



Family Genetics, Genealogy, and YEC.

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Unbelievable that I have to explain this.

In America we pass property to blood relatives. What is a blood relative? They came from your parents. Or your grandparents. Or your great grandparents. Or your great great grandparents. Etc. Until you go back so far you A) have no legal paperwork trail or B) have no indentifiable DNA patterns in common. You have to have one of those to have blood relatives. That is what genetic FAMILY is.

Every child you have gets about 1/2 your DNA. Their children get 1/4. The next generation get 1/8th. And so on. Until autosomal DNA is so diluted it is at noise level. So when we compare individuals we cannot tell if they are genetic blood relatives. You cannot be a blood relative of everybody on earth.

But there is an exception. Y-DNA passes intact from father to son. And so on. All the way back to the first man. Adam.

We can measure the SNPs. We see mutations and they accumulate. Sometimes living people will have the same Y chromosome where the common grandfather is back 10 generations. Or 50 generations.

We can also dig up bones and match them. Even if they are 10,000 years old they will contain the same SNP sequence minus the recent mutations.

The point is, we can trace where our patrilineal blood relatives died. And their ancestors too!

I know where my ancestors were all the way back to pre-history. And I know where my brother in law’s ancestors were too. So no, we are not blood relatives, our ancestors never went anywhere near each other. But, pontificating Answers in Genesis YECs (Young Earth Creationists) at church want to tell the whole church that I am related to my brother in law. Its kind of like saying I am Chinese. This claim of theirs is completely baseless.

Science people will claim that celts came from the eastern Ukraine. Science deniers claim no no no, they came from Noah’s Ark. Which is true? If they came from Noah’s Ark then they would be buried down the road from the Ark, and the next few generations would be buried a bit further down the road, until they got to western Europe. That trail is completely missing. I mean, the skeletons aren’t there.

What I see is that YECs do not evaluate the evidence.

Why Look At This?

Why did I start talking about this? Because of the YEC claim that I am related to my brother in law. No, it didn’t mean “we are all children of Adam”. People tell me “oh, we all have DNA, we must all be family”. No, that is not what they are talking about. They are talking about Moral Obligation to Family. Meaning blood relationships. In the context they used it it meant I have a moral and Christian obligation to let my in-laws continue to abuse me. Because I am related. So I therefore am obligated. And I am a sinner if I by chance just want to get away from it. Move to another state, don’t look back. However, that is not acceptable. Because? Because, as they claim, I am related to my inlaws. WHAT THE HELL? They are talking about blood relatives, not strangers on the street. Not sons of Adam due t all sons of Adam possess DNA. No. It was a statement about close family.

Now, how do I know I am not related to my in-law family? The above explanation on DNA. That’s how. And I had told this to a 12 step group at church. I study the family’s genealogy and DNA. But there is another reason. It is because the leader is a self entitled fundamentalist YEC asshole. So he instantly overrode me and took a vote. He got the group to vote! WHY? Because he says so. Thats it! I thought I would die of a heart attack. I didnt go back to church for months after that. Here I had been deciding to be free of the abuser and they could not live with this. They think their job is to fix people! But we know really only God can fix people.

I put these folks in the category of RAPIST. Fundamentalist rapists. They live in a fantasy world and use the bible to justify themselves. I am not the only victim of the fundamentalists. I saw a lot of victims at that church. People who endure a lot of false religious shaming from fundamentalists.

They had made it very clear they are fundamentalists and follow young earth creationism and believe in a world-wide global flood. And are against Christians studying modern science. Or reading books. You see, books, even Christian books, might make you think, and thinking will lead you astray to the point where you wont take the word of fundamentalists just because “they say so.”

Back to the science. There is a conscept called admixture. It means what percent Scottish are you? Irish? French? African? Etc. Compared to current living populations. I myself don’t put much stock in it, but most people want to know if they are 45% Scottish, for example. That is based on autosomal DNA.

My inlaws come from a patrilinial viking line where we share a grandfather in 44000 BC. So we are cousins that are so far apart that we may as well be Japanese and Black. If you think Japanese and Black people are the same family you are nuts. Stark raving mad. They are not the same family lines. What cousins are we? 400th cousins 400 times removed? The point is IT WAS CAVE MAN DAYS. It doesn’t matter.

OK, OK, I can call my brother in law a cave man, I guess, have it your way. The real point they were making was science denial. That really is the whole point of YEC. Science is at war with God. Why? Because they say it is. And they use morality arguments as a weapon for brainwashing. Which is ministerial abuse.

This is part of why my presbyterian elder neighbor tells me Answers in Genesis is a satanic conspiracy.













Do the Laws of Physics Change Over Time?

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Hugh Ross writes: “The biblical principle of unchanging and pervasive physics launched the scientific revolution.”

Before that happened Galileo told the cardinals that because of the established laws of heaven and earth when you find the laws in contradiction to your understand of scripture then your understanding is flawed. The church eventually agreed with him. Why?

Fixed Naturals Laws and the Christ.

https://www.bible.com/bible/111/JER.33.NIV

19The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: 20“This is what the Lord says: ‘If you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night no longer come at their appointed time, 21then my covenant with David my servant—and my covenant with the Levites who are priests ministering before me—can be broken and David will no longer have a descendant to reign on his throne. 22I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars in the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore.’ ”

23The word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: 24“Have you not noticed that these people are saying, ‘The Lord has rejected the two kingdoms he chose’? So they despise my people and no longer regard them as a nation. 25This is what the Lord says: ‘If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth, 26then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his sons to rule over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For I will restore their fortunes and have compassion on them.’ ”


What got me to thinking about this? Answers in Genesis claims that the laws of physics have been different in the past. Drastically different physical constants. Physical constants that vary. Such as the speed of light.

Hugh Ross writes about physical constants and physical laws remaining constant. he references the above scriptures.

New Evidence Further Affirms Biblical Prediction of Unchanging Physics
by Hugh Ross

August 9, 2021

(from reasons.org)

It may be surprising for some readers to learn that the Bible declared millennia ago that the fundamental physics of the universe has not and does not change. In Jeremiah 33, for example, God avows that he is not like humans, who habitually change their minds, their convictions, and their loyalties. God uses the physics of the universe as an analogy for his immutable nature. As God “established the fixed laws of heaven and earth” (Jeremiah 33:25), so, too, his character attributes, convictions, and commitments are unchanging.

Another biblical example is found in Romans 8:20–22. Here, Paul states that “the whole creation has been groaning” as a result of its “bondage to decay” (NIV 1984). This passage summarizes the long discourses in Ecclesiastes, especially chapters 1–3, 10–12, declaring that the law of decay, known today as the second law of thermodynamics, applies ubiquitously throughout the universe.

Foundation of Modern Science
The biblical principle of unchanging and pervasive physics launched the scientific revolution. During the Renaissance, students of the Bible began to recognize that if the laws of physics are the same for all times and places throughout the universe, then experiments and observations about natural phenomena will reveal reliable and trustworthy knowledge and understanding about the natural realm. Such understanding would not only satisfy our curiosity about nature but also yield economic and technological advances. During the Reformation, the recognition of unchanging and pervasive physics became widespread throughout Europe and gave birth to the scientific revolution.

It is no accident that the scientific revolution was birthed in Reformation Europe. Biblical literacy, for the first time, flourished in Reformation Europe and led to the widespread acceptance that the laws of physics could be trusted to reveal truth about nature.

Tests of Unchanging Physics
Even though the biblical principle of constant and pervasive laws of physics forms the foundation of the scientific method and scientific research, scientists continue to subject the principle to rigorous and exhaustive testing. They have two reasons for doing so. First, affirming the fundamental assumption undergirding the scientific method and scientific research to a greater degree of precision and to a greater extent of space and time builds confidence in the value and successes of the scientific enterprise. Second, searching for very tiny departures from the constancy of known laws of physics might reveal the existence of new, as yet undiscovered, laws of physics. For example, what appeared to astronomers at the end of the nineteenth century as a tiny departure from Newton’s laws of motion in their observations of Mercury’s orbit1 led to the discovery of another nonvarying law of physics, the theory of general relativity.2

Christians also have a vested interest in subjecting the biblical principle of constant and pervasive laws of physics to more rigorous and exhaustive testing. Millennia before scientists had any hint that the laws of physics are constant and that they apply ubiquitously to the entire universe, the Bible stood alone in making such claims. These tests present an opportunity to demonstrate the Bible’s unique power to accurately predict future scientific discoveries. Such a demonstration provides strong evidence for the existence of an all-knowing, all-truthful God and that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant revelation from that God.

Past Tests
I have written many Today’s New Reason to Believe articles documenting the most rigorous observations and experiments that establish that the laws of physics are constant and pervasive.3 The most stringent tests achieved to date, with years over which measurements have been made, are as follows:

Physical law test Measurements’ Span of YearsVariation
fine-structure constant variation  4 years4<2.0 x 10-16/year
fine-structure constant variation  12.9 billion years5<6.2 x 10-16/year
electron-to-proton mass ratio variation  4 years6<2.3 x 10-14/year 
electron-to-proton mass ratio variation  12.9 billion years7<1.6 x 10-17/year 
gravitational constant variation  24 years8<5.2 x 10-14/year  
gravitational constant variation   11.0 billion years9<7.9 x 10-12/year

The two tests performed over 4–year spans were achieved in laboratories. Helioseismic observations of the Sun were responsible for the test over a 24-year span. Observations of the spectral lines of galaxies and quasars over a broad range of light-travel times yielded the three tests over billions of years. To less precision, tests show no sign of variation in the values of the fundamental constants of physics with respect to regional location in the universe.10

Latest Test
The past tests establish to high precision that no change has occurred in the fundamental constants of physics from 11.0–12.9 billion years ago until the present. That’s 93.5% of cosmic history. Until the James Webb Space Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope become operational, it will not be possible for observations of galaxy and quasar spectral lines to push the time range earlier than 12.9 billion years ago. However, two British astronomers, Luke Hart and Jens Chluba, analyzed data from the Planck 2018 map of the cosmic microwave background radiation to determine values for the fine-structure constant and the electron-to-proton mass ratio when the universe was only 370,000 years old, or 13.79 billion years before the present.11

Hart and Chluba determined that just 370,000 years after the cosmic creation event the value of the fine-structure constant compared to its value measured in present-day laboratories = 1.0005 +/- 0.0024. The value of the electron-to-proton mass ratio 370,000 years after the cosmic creation event compared to the present-day value = 1.0005 +/- 0.0099. Though Hart and Chluba’s measurements are not as accurate as the past tests, they extend the demonstration that the fundamental constants of physics remain unchanged over the past 93.5% to now 99.9973% of cosmic history.

Philosophical Implications
Observations now show that the laws of physics that govern the universe indeed are unchanged to high precision over (what for all practical purposes is) the entire history of the universe. The accurate forecasting of this scientific discovery thousands of years ago in the writings of the Bible establishes that the One who inspired the Bible authors to write what they did must be superintelligent, superknowledgeable, superpowerful, trustworthy, and truthful. These observations show, too, that the study of nature is a worthwhile endeavor that can be trusted to reveal truth not only about the natural realm but also about the attributes of the One who brought it all into existence.

Endnotes

  1. Simon Newcomb, “Discussion of the Observed Transits of Mercury, 1677–1881,” Astronomical Papers Prepared for the Use of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, vol. I (Washington: Bureau of Navigation, Navy Department, 1882), available at http://relativitycalculator.com/pdfs/mercury_perihelion_advance/S.Newcomb.pdf; G. M. Clemence, “The Relativity Effect in Planetary Motions,” Reviews of Modern Physics 19, no. 4 (October 1, 1947): 361–364, doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.19.361.
  2. Albert Einstein, “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,” Annalen Der Physik 354, no. 7 (July 1916): 769–822, doi:10.1002/andp.19163540702; Albert Einstein, translated by Satyendra Nath Bose, “The Foundation of the Generalised Theory of Relativity,” last edited December 30, 2020.
  3. Hugh Ross, “New Fine-Structure Constant Measurement Affirms Cosmic Creation,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), March 1, 2021; Hugh Ross, “More Evidences for Biblical Claim of Unchanging Physics,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), June 22, 2020; Hugh Ross, “Stronger and More Comprehensive Tests Affirm the Universe’s Unchanging Physics,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), July 1, 2013; Hugh Ross, “TNRTB Classic: Testing the Biblical Notion of Unchanging Physics,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), July 4, 2013.
  4. Nathan Leefer et al., “New Limits on Variation of the Fine-Structure Constant Using Atomic Dysprosium,” Physical Review Letters 111, no. 6 (August 6, 2013): id. 060801, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.060801.
  5. S. A. Levshakov et al., “An Upper Limit to the Variation in the Fundamental Constants at Redshift z = 5.2,” Astronomy & Astrophysics: Letters 540 (April 2012): id. L9, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201219042; Franco D. Albareti et al., “Constraint on the Time Variation of the Fine-Structure Constant with the SDSS-III/BOSS DR12 Quasar Sample,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 452, no. 4 (October 1, 2015): 4153–4168, doi:10.1093/mnras/stv1406.
  6. J. Kobayashi, A. Ogino, and S. Inouye, “Measurement of the Variation of Electron-to-Proton Mass Ratio Using Ultracold Molecules Produced from Laser-Cooled Atoms,” Nature Communications 10 (August 21, 2019): id. 3771, doi:10.1038/s41467-019-11761-1.
  7. Levshakov et al., “An Upper Limit.”
  8. Alfio Bonanno and Hans-Erich Fröhlich, “A New Helioseismic Constraint on a Cosmic-Time Variation of G,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 893, no. 2 (April 21, 2020): id. L35, doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ab86b9.
  9. Earl Patrick Bellinger and Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard, “Astroseismic Constraints on the Cosmic-Time Variation of the Gravitational Constant from an Ancient Main-sequence Star,” The Astrophysical Journal Letters 887, no. 1 (December 3, 2019): id. L1, doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ab43e7.
  10. Jon O’Bryan et al., “Constraints on Spatial Variations in the Fine-Structure Constant from Planck,” The Astrophysical Journal 798, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): id. 18, doi:10.1088/0004-637X/798/1/18.
  11. Luke Hart and Jens Chluba, “Updated Fundamental Constant Constraints from Planck 2018 Data and Possible Relations to the Hubble Tension,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 493, no. 3 (April 2020): 3255–3263, doi:10.1093/mnras/staa412.

SMS tip for admins

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What use are DATASETS really?

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A bunch of people are trying to use datasets to implement permissions and ACLS via the GUI.
I use a zsh shell via ssh and give normal debian commands and scripts and automations. You cannot automate hardly anything via a gui. That is the #1 reason I abandoned TERRA-MASTER OS.

However, on TrueNAS there is the dataset dilemma.

Willnx says about datasets on truenas:

If it helps, here’s how my box at home is set up (with the datasets and such):
Vol1
+Berkeley (Unix dataset)
–>So many exports…
+Redmond (CIFS dataset)
–>Two different shares for my only two Windows boxes. Unique permissions for each.
+FTP (Unix dataset)
–>For the crap I always have to re-download when I make a new VM/ build a new PC.

I don’t have any quotas set up on these datasets either. I don’t care how big any of them get, provided it doesn’t fill my NAS 100% and turn it into a big brick.
Instead, I set up a reserve space on Vol1.

To me, the real power/ benefit of multiple datasets are:
More granular snapshots (Clones too)
Different compression preferences
More granular Deduplication control

Using datasets (in my option) for permission control is kind of like using a big wrench to hammer a nail; it works fine, but not it’s intended use.



My thoughts:

So, what I am hearing above is snapshots and clones are a reason to use datasets. Plus, if you have a windows and want SMB (because NFS is hard to do on windows) you do not want files being accessed by NFS and SMB at the same time because SMB does collaborate on file locking.

I use NAS for backup of desktops. But I also want virtual machines and server like Plex and Home Assistant, etc, and I want them in their own dataset space.

Further thoughts: First thing I plan to do when creating the first NAS test bed is to see if the superuser can cp directories in dataset A to directories in dataset B.

I am used to different users having their own private file space in their home directory and see no need for anything else to separate them. Datasets seems like something that comes from non-nix operating systems. Nix has been great for 40+ years and there is no need to overcomplicate it. Debian is debian is debian.