Chris Orban

The American Dream!

2008-03-12T19:54:16Z

misterwizard @ 2008-03-03T15:02:00

2008-03-03T20:18:54Z

Ok, maybe I don't suck at life.

Something to write home about

2008-02-22T09:49:46Z

I suck at life.

Lesson of the day

2008-01-11T01:11:43Z

If you see Thomas Merton, kill him.

misterwizard @ 2007-12-08T22:41:00

2007-12-09T03:46:22Z

Oh, and I'll be in Champaign, IL from the 14th-16th too, by the way.

misterwizard @ 2007-12-08T19:30:00

2007-12-09T01:38:28Z

Hi everybody. I'm going to be coming back home to Bradenton from December 19th to 29th. (Sorry, Daniel for missing your birthday!) I look forward to seeing many of you- sorry I don't do more to keep in touch these days. By the way, I'll be in Bradenton the entire time, in contrast to last year when I was in Homosassa visiting my dad for a couple days. (He'll be visiting Daniel and I in Bradenton. I didn't get completely disowned just yet.)

P.S. Stay tuned for a theology of evolution post coming soon!

misterwizard @ 2007-11-30T00:05:00

2007-11-30T05:09:34Z

"So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war."

-Thomas Merton, an excerpt from "Seeds of Contemplation"

misterwizard @ 2007-10-31T17:00:00

2007-10-31T22:49:55Z

Well, there's a new lady in my life. Her name is Julie (or Julia, depending the day) and she's a very sweet, well-intentioned girl - a recovering missionary kid, as a matter of fact - who, at the moment, happens to be the victim of a fairly comprehensive survey course in nihilistic philosophy. She's also a hospital nurse which fits her character, somehow, of being supremely empathetic while firmly aware of her own mortality through the mirror of others. But she's very friendly, too, and outgoing. All my friends in Columbus adore her.

We met - of all places - picking apples at one of those family fun farms with a big corn maze on a outing with the graduate fellowship. (Luke actually caught some photos of her and I talking then and pasted it together with the magic of autostich.) She grew up in Africa, her dad a missionary doctor, until the age of 14. She speaks French and Songo, a tribal language of the Central African Republic.

I guess I like Julie because she's honest and for all the philosophy she reads she really is convinced that there's a point to being down here- not that she always knows what it is. Her reaction to the spiritual insanity of our times is not despair but, like me, a response of orthodoxy. The fact that most everyone else in the American church appears to be blissfully unaware of such orthodoxy is only an ancillary point to living. Somehow she misses Africa and she loves her friends and her sisters. She wonders if she should be a nun- well, at least until she met me she did.

So, she's probably going to kill me for saying all that on the web, but there it is. Techincally we're (only?) dating- though, in the language of the Caldwell residence we're apparently "intentional friends" in order to shield the children from that insidious word which begins with the letters d - a. In any case we're taking it slow. As card-carrying 25-year-olds we don't need this year to be any more dramatic than the last.

misterwizard @ 2007-09-03T06:14:00

2007-09-03T11:23:31Z

Well, I've been living in Weinland Park, one of Columbus' quaint little ghettos, for over a year now, and attending the same African-American church for more than that. It's definitely been a learning experience to say the least. At the civic association meetings I've gone to from time to time, touchy race relations often find their expression. I now recognize just about every homeless guy I run into on the street and know two of them by name, Dana and Todd. (Dana I see pretty often, but the last time I saw Todd he was rummaging through the dumpster behind the house. That was a couple months ago.) And there's now been two shootings within a block of my house, one of them fatal.

That being said, I'm not trying to earn any sort of urban-community merit badge, or anything like that. Weinland Park has turned out to be Weinland Park. (And how can I forget- the neighbor kids' lemonade stand was robbed on wednesday. Thankfully the 6th-grade proprietors were only mildly bruised.) In any case, it's been more awkward living here than I typically admit, over and above the culture shock of being a grad student in the land of the alert and enjoying themselves.

Much of my frustration, were I to be honest with myself, is from the whole disintegration at church. The abbreviated story is that my church split in late May, half of the congregation following our departing pastor of two years and the other half staying at the church and siding with the deacons who voted to ask the pastor to leave.

First of all I should probably say that, as far as I know, the pastor didn't do anything so scandalous that would have automatically gotten him kicked out. As the story goes he registered the church for a credit card and used it to bankroll a couple nights on the town at expensive bars in Columbus using church funds. Perhaps more notably he never actually apologized for doing this and in the end it was both the credit card and the verbal abuse he gave to the deacons when they brought it up - which, knowing the deacons, was probably returned - that got him kicked out.

A slightly longer story is that last December I started attending those civic association meetings I mentioned and began to twist the arm of the administrative secretary at church to do the same. She eventually did and, on occasion, managed to bring the pastor along too. For about ten years prior my church had been sitting on the corner of 7th and High St. without much of a clue as to what was going on in the community, much less, knowing the community leaders. Each Sunday the pews would be filled with black middle class imported from all around Columbus and each Sunday afternoon they'd drive back satisfied that God is able and that for about two hours they'd made the parking situation considerably worse at the grocery store across the street. Needless to say having Michelle, the church secretary, come to the meetings was somewhat of a breakthrough. Then, around March I think, and through those meetings, it was decided to have our church be host to "Neighborhood Pride Week", which, among other things, was a town hall meeting featuring our mayor, Michael Coleman.

But when was pride week to take place? Late May, and the same late May that the church split. At the pinnacle of a whole week of community programs the deacons were on such bad terms with the pastor that most of them didn't actually attend the event with the Mayor at the church. The following saturday- and probably delayed by pride week- the deacons sent pastor the notification that if he were to show up on sunday he would be arrested for trespassing on the premises.

Of course the ultimate testament to the fact that by no stretch of the imagination am I actually a part of my church community is the related fact that I had absolutely no idea anything was amiss when I showed up to church sunday morning and, wouldn't you know it, the pastor showed up too. Right as the offeratory began the cops showed up and escorted Pastor from the stage. Sadly, they were some of the same officers that had been there just days before shaking hands with the Mayor and pledging to keep the neighborhood safe.

But he wasn't dragged, no, though a scene it was. As best as I can reason, in the pastor's mind, it was all part of a show where the desperate act of bringing in the cops to force an obstinant pastor from the pulpit would become the definitive proof that the deacons were hungry for power and willing to bring in the secular authorities to get it. Half the congregation, citing African-American baptist church tradition that the pastor can only be deposed by a vote from the congregation, left with the pastor to start a new church. There were now two groups of "true believers" each half the size of the original group of "true believers". A remnant will remain, my ass.

The story, and the analysis, is slightly longer than that. Part of what undergirded the problem was a model of hyper-masculine, expensive car-driving, unable-to-say-"I'm sorry" black male leadership to respond to otherwise extraordinarily weak black male leadership. And then there's the story of Salena sitting on my stairwell back at my house to hug me after the service was over that day. And the story of running into Curtis, my neighbor and once-fellow churchgoer who left with the pastor.

For all that could be said about the whole thing- of the pastor being forced to choose between stepping down and losing his job or splitting a church and staying a pastor- or even of the deacons and their mismanagement of the whole situation, there just isn't Christ in any of it. Sadly, though the church is finally back at the table on being a part of the community programs in the neighborhood, I find myself wondering if the black church hasn't done more harm to African-American communities than good. That the sad state of urban neighborhoods isn't in spite of the church, but is rather a run-away cycle where the fatalism of the street is amplified by a false hope of deliverance perpetuated by the church.

So I'm obviously still a bit pissed off by the whole thing. I wish I could just suck it up and smile when the deacons make their half-assed attempts at opening the church doors to the surrounding community like it's never occurred to them to do so before. But, for now at least, I'm still needed and playing trumpet for them is still almost enough entertainment to warrant still being there. My church split and I've chosen neither side.

Nerds! Lend me your ears!

2007-08-20T15:27:42Z

For those of you in Columbus who'd be interested, I'm going to be giving a 15-minute talk about my research on Wednesday at 11:45am in M2015 in the Physics Research Building. It's meant to be a trial run for reporting my results at the Globular Clusters - Dwarf Galaxies Connection conference at the University of Michigan next week.

TITLE: Modeling Star Formation Histories of Local Group Dwarfs

ABSTRACT: We compare the results of N-body simulations with an analytic model for star formation to the observed star formation history of local group dwarfs as determined from recent Hubble observations. Including the star formation histories in the analysis is an important step since studies in the past have focused on other observables (e.g. reproducing the observed radial distribution of LG dwarfs). With the added constraints from the new data a whole range of physics is potentially addressed here- the effect of reionization on star formation, star formation in very low mass galaxies, and whether the "missing dwarf problem" can be resolved by appealing to non-exotic astrophysical mechanisms. Our results can be a guide to understanding which physical effects are most relevant to dwarf galaxy formation.

Special Note: There will be a reference to the Lord of the Rings in the talk and possibly a picture of Gimli the dwarf with his axe lodged in an orc skull. It was too tempting to pass up.

misterwizard @ 2007-08-18T21:22:00

2007-08-19T02:43:30Z

Well, Salena and I broke up and with substantially more finality than usual (though not with a definitive break-up card featuring some sort of dead animal on the front, I'm sorry to inform my audience). It's actually been about a week now since it happened and I'm at least somewhat tentitive about what I can say about it here.

For me, at least, I've realized that there isn't any real reason to conclude I'm unmarryable from the whole affair. In the drama of it all that was an easy deduction to make, especially when one of our break-ups prompted an episode of depression, which I usually get, one way or another, about once-a-year. In theory, of course, just about any two people on planet earth can get married, if the Indians are right, and have a successful and loving marriage. Salena's friend Raja (a very Indian name if anyone was curious) insists that marriage is when you discover the beauty and goodness of another person, in their affection or knack for cooking or writing poetry or what-have-you; everyone has something wonderful about them and ultimately people only want to be loved.

I had my hopes that this would be the way things worked out with Salena- the Indian solution, we called it- but it obviously didn't or hasn't or won't. She insists that it isn't either of our faults and I insist that we both share 150% of the blame, but that's another complicated and touchy topic. A girl as pretty as she can easily go on thinking she hasn't met the right guy yet and a guy as reticent as I can go on thinking I'll never meet another beautiful, intelligent, Christian woman again. If only I had done one thing or another to save the relationship is an easy story to tell myself at times, but it's not quite true. I couldn't have avoided the iceburg in the end, hard as I tried.

So I think I've come to terms with it, more or less, the hardest part now being the reacclimation to singleness- once again having a dog as the most significant other in my life. That's not to say that I don't have friends; actually the house church people across the street (particularly Michelle and Kathrine- both a little younger than my mom but not so old to have forgotten the perils of dating) have been very supportive and helpful.

In fact, today turned out to be a really great day- all the deacons at my church came to a big community festival at the United Way facility in the neighborhood and something like 11 folks from my Christian grad student group came and volunteered most of the day and part of yesterday in giving away school supplies and helping out Free Geek. When it comes to Weinland Park, the day has finally come that I'm no longer encouraging people to get involved in a neighborhood most of which they've never seen, or in buildings they've never stepped inside. It's really a watershed moment for everything I've been trying to do since I've moved here, and an encouraging note against everything that was jepardized by the church split (a story I have admittedly yet to tell here).

So life is going on- probably the understatement of the year for all I have to do in the coming week- but thanks to all you guys for hearing me out and especially to Ryan and Alex who had to put up with a solid weekend of me not shutting-up about Salena. And thanks to my friends who volunteered this weekend, if you're listening; sorry about my knack for disorganization. Things are coming together somehow. It's a nice feeling.

misterwizard @ 2007-08-01T13:18:00

2007-08-01T17:19:18Z

By the way, I'll be in Bradenton this weekend for my mom's graduation. Hope to see some of you there- I should get back from Tallahassee at around 9pm saturday night.

misterwizard @ 2007-07-29T23:13:00

2007-07-30T03:50:50Z

Yeah, I guess I have some explaining to do in light of recent posts.

So, in fact, Salena and I haven't broken up, though we certainly like to give each other scares from time to time. I play the part of the misanthropic physics student with a larger-than-life ego hidden under an introverted facade, and she plays the part of the beautiful, intelligent girl trying frustratingly and vulnerably to find the right man. The result has too often been a relationship seemingly more volatile than either of us thought possible to exist between two human beings.

In any case that post yesterday, which I'll leave up for historical purposes and because I'm kind of amused by Aaron's comment, was definitely one of the lows- in my mind definitely the lowest. I blew it in my first really serious relationship since high school. Salena told me to forget the whole thing ever happened because of something stupid I said, wounded by the previous days fight over something else stupid I said. But, the next day, her seeing how miserable I was and taking an inventory all the many things we have in common (and also because, apparently I'm cute or something and also because there really is a God - no kidding around), she forgave me and even, somewhat sheepishly, began to admit that not all the volatility was my fault.

So that's the abbreviated story. Funnily enough, we joke around trying to figure out when exactly our anniversary should be given all the times we broke it off and got back together (some of you will remember "the card"). We decided today to just celebrate the month of July each year as an awareness month; putting up inspirational posters and the like. But all and all life is good again, and a certain somebody out there loves me still- probably she never stopped.

misterwizard @ 2007-07-28T11:09:00

2007-07-28T15:09:14Z

I suck at life.

misterwizard @ 2007-07-21T08:18:00

2007-07-21T12:19:26Z

And Salena and I aren't dating again.

Clarification: She doesn't actually hate dogs; only dog slobber.

An actually funny Chris Orban quote of the day

2007-07-08T20:18:54Z

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread."
-Blaise Pascal, Pensees

"Am I the only one who hears that and thinks: man, that's a great name for an indie rock band?"
-Chris Orban

Chris Orban quote of the day

2007-07-06T06:03:00Z

[Leaving the 4th of July picnic at my grandma's sister's son's house]

Me: "Well, Uncle Raymond, thanks for having me. Hopefully it won't be another 11 years before we see each other again."

misterwizard @ 2007-07-02T11:12:00

2007-07-02T15:12:48Z

The truth comes out: Salena hates dogs.

Chris Orban quote of the day

2007-06-22T18:30:41Z

[in Kenya]

Intern: "So what's the point of a tribe? Like, what does it do? Is there any purpose to it?'

[Our Kenyan-born civil engineer looks at him with incredulity and the American born emigrant to Kenya is stunned.]

Me: "Let's invert the question: what's the point of Western Civilization?"

misterwizard @ 2007-06-22T13:34:00

2007-06-22T17:34:32Z

So I'm back from Kenya and dating Salena again. Life, again, is very interesting.

misterwizard @ 2007-05-30T11:05:00

2007-05-30T15:07:00Z

Um... so my church split and I'm going to Kenya next week. Life is interesting.

misterwizard @ 2007-04-21T14:17:00

2007-04-21T18:21:41Z

Here's a comment of mine on a blog that Luke frequents:

I'm not an expert on [Global Warming Critic Richard] Lindzen but it's very important to note that he does agree that the increased carbon dioxide levels is a cause of the warming, but he differs with just about everyone there is to differ with besides the Wall Street Journal in asserting that we are not the cause of the increased CO2 levels.

Here's his thoughts verbatim from that article you provided the link to:
"There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system."

As a Christian, I think it's important to connect the debate to God's command to subdue the earth and have dominion over it- an idea that was apparently central to the birth of science in a Christianized Europe. That quote of Lindzen is an admission from global warming's harshest critic that climate change really is happening. And even if there is substantive debate over the projected temperature increase; as Christians our response ought to be dictated by the book of Genesis:

"God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Genesis 1:28

In the context of the other creation myths of the day which placed human beings at the periphery of a universe dominated by the disputes between gods this passage God says loud and clear: You are in charge here. Of course, we know in chapter 2 that even in our unfallen state that didn't imply that God wasn't needed or wasn't around while Adam went about his buisness. The point is that we are in some way, if not entirely, responsible for creation, irregardless of the fall. Additionally, God would not have given us this responsibility if he thought we were without the mental capacity and moral responsibility to carry it out. (And it is a widely affirmed Christian tradition that Adam did have tremendous brainpower.)

The alternative view that many an atheist or naturalist has employed in addressing the climate change issue is this: our only recourse is to realize that we are but an animal among animals. We live at the mercy of our environment and if we don't intentionally reach an equilibrium population nature will do it for us. Although there need be an honest discussion of the current ignorance in our understanding of climate change (hopefully Luke will take that up next), I fear that Christians like Dobson and Colson in maintaining that population control and big government are un-Christian policies have themselves fallen into an un-Christian attitude that the human mind is impotent to understand the world around it. This is no improvement on the naturalistic view and carries no more sense of obligation. And to the common criticism of naturalism which asks: why should we be so concerned about climate change when many species have gone extinct in the past, we have no better response.

We are not animals. We have a moral capacity, and we have an incredible mental capacity for understanding our environment. (For example the CFC-induced hole in the ozone layer was predicted more than ten years before it was fully discovered and documented.) In short, we know better. Climate change is happening and, to what extent we know what's going on, we had better do something about it.

misterwizard @ 2007-04-15T21:47:00

2007-04-16T01:48:04Z

Kurt Vonnegut died. So it goes.

Ah, the activist life in Ohio

2007-04-08T02:48:10Z

"Well, I hope it stops snowing for the global warming rally next week."
-Chris

Quote of the week

2007-04-05T03:31:54Z

[On tuesday morning, after Ohio State got more or less humiliated against Florida in the NCAA championship]

An Astronomy Professor: "Finally, a sign that the academics at this school is making a turn for the better!"