Airports of the Future

At work, I am often forwarded articles related to developments within the aviation and airport world. One of these articles was distributed by the American Association of Airport Executives (AAAE), with the title, "Students help design the airport of the future". The description was as follows:

Students from North Carolina State University's College of Design worked alongside architect Curtis Fentress to design several concept airport terminals of the future. The students focused on five major global destinations, and the project lasted five to six years.

The article in which these five airport terminal concepts are presented is here. As an airport planner, I had a lot to say about these. The conclusion that I came to is that most of these students, who are architecture students, do not understand that an airport is a purpose-driven facility, and consequently, one cannot simply design whatever interesting concept is in mind and call it an airport. It disappoints me that these students spent so long on concepts that would absolutely be futile, when the problems with their concepts could have been fixed if they had consulted anyone who knew anything about aviation. It further disappoints me that AAAE endorsed these concepts by distributing the article to their mailing list.

0. Overall website presentation.

Neither sentence beginnings nor proper nouns have capitalization. I get that architects tend to do "artsy" things like that. Still strange to me.

1. Shiraz, Iran

It's not clear whether the students who created this concept intended for this airport to be a commercial service airport or a city-center corporate/general aviation airport. If the former, providing sufficient vertical circulation capacity for passengers would be an immense challenge. If the latter, the facility would only be accessed by a select elite, which seems like an unfair use of what would have to be a gargantuan infrastructure investment. In addition to the enormous upfront costs required to elevate an entire airfield, any facility expansion would require expansion of the elevated airfield, which would also be immensely expensive.

Operationally, a 300' foot runway is not adequate for any aircraft type in existence. No consideration was given to the jet blast from departing aircraft; this is one reason why terminals are generally not right behind runways. Also, how in the world do aircraft land at this airport?

The terminal itself seems to contain most of the necessary functional areas...in order to serve maybe 300 peak-hour passengers. Not very impressive.

2. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

 

The description provided for this concept includes this: "Runway is large enough for 8 aircraft to line up side-by-side. This improves take-off time." This is so wrong I don't even know where to begin.

The footprint of this entire facility is enormous and requires tons of flat land. Did the students identify a location in Rio where such a facility could even be built? Also, the passenger walking times would be absurdly high. The overhead images show the airport's expanse, and the interior renderings show a sweeping terminal with high ceilings and large windows. The terminal may have an abundance of "walkable surfaces", but passengers would likely not be willing to walk for miles through it.

Three of the five concepts do not seem to understand that a passenger terminal consists of more than just boarding gates, concessions, and decor/landscaping; that is, that a terminal requires many passenger processing areas and back-of-house systems. This is the first of the three.

3. Wellington, New Zealand

In my opinion, this concept is the closest to viable because it has considered the inclusion of the essentials of a passenger terminal in its design. That is, this concept explicitly depicts areas such as security, check-in, baggage claim, automated people mover (APM) system, etc. That being said, there are a few items that need refining:
- The APM is definitely within the taxiway object free area.
- Why bother having the security checkpoint after people exit the APM? That makes the APM publicly accessible (or, on the landside), so this system may need to be built to provide capacity for non-passengers. Alternatively, the security checkpoint might be located off-site before passengers board the APM.
- If the APM is deliberately intended to be on the landside in order to draw the public to the facility, then why are all the concessions post-security? The non-traveling public cannot access these concessions.

I don't really understand the under-the-building aircraft circulation. Especially in this concept, it looks very much like a free-for-all. It's also not clear to me what the advantage is over the traditional lead-in and back-out aircraft parking system. In fact, with this under-the-building flow, the passenger enplaning/deplaning capacity is actually decreased because you negate the option of having a double-loaded concourse.

I found some of the choices of concessionaires to be amusing. Ducati, for instance. It seems unlikely to me that passengers would decide to purchase a motorcycle shortly after clearing security. To the gate agent, "Yes, hi, I'd like to check this, please." (More realistically, this Ducati shop would be a showroom. A passenger purchasing a Ducati here would give a down-payment and then have it shipped to them or pick it up later at another location.)

And, finally: RIP Pan Am. RIP Concorde.

4. Nanjing, China

This is the second of the three concepts that does not grasp that a passenger terminal consists of more than just boarding gates, concessions, and decor/landscaping. 

The parallel runway centerlines are definitely spaced closer together than 700 feet, so they could not be operated simultaneously under any conditions. Just build one runway.

This concept also has the aircraft-circulation-under-the-building thing. The aircraft flow in this concept appears much more controlled than in Wellington because of the presence of centerlines/lead-in lines. However, in this concept, gate delays could wreak havoc on this flow. If an aircraft is held at a gate, other aircraft taxiing behind it may blocked from reaching their parking positions.

The flower-petal concourse design is interesting, but passenger walking distances would be nightmarish and infuriating. A passenger might spatially be 30 feet from their destination (e.g., one level higher/lower), but they might have to walk the entire length of a "petal" to travel that 30 feet. This frustration would become amplified for connecting passengers, or for passengers whose flights have gate changes, who could walk up to half of the entire length of the facility to reach their next gate.

The third image from the left depicts the interior design of the building. To be sure, it's interesting, but it is a non-sequitur when compared to the rest of the facility renderings. There is no apparent connection between the building interior and exterior. How does the viewer know this interior design concept even belonged to the same airport project?

5. Toamasina, Madagascar 

This is the third of the three concepts that does not grasp that a passenger terminal consists of more than just boarding gates, concessions, and decor/landscaping.

The foundation for this concept is ill-conceived and almost laughable. The image on the left explains the premise. The ocean and the land lie on the "nature axis" and...a flight and a flight... (?) lie on the "flight axis". The intersection of these two axes is where the "garden of flight" exists, which I guess is the passenger terminal. The significance of these axes is unclear, as is the rationale for why a "garden of flight" is what arises from the intersection of the two axes.

In this concept, aircraft are nowhere to be seen, except for in the third image, when airborne aircraft are literally visible inside the terminal. Apparently these aircraft can conduct "vertical takeoffs", but they look an awful lot like regional jets. These aircraft appear to have the capacity to carry maybe twelve passengers each, and the scale of these aircraft in the rendering appears off when compared to the walking passengers.

It appears that after waiting in the boarding gate areas, passengers board suspended APM cars that take them to their aircraft to board. However, it is not clear where the passengers actually exit the boarding gate areas to get on the APM vehicles. In addition, each APM vehicle appears to have the capacity to carry about five to eight passengers.

Such an APM system would be extremely inefficient, as each departing flight would require a fleet of APM vehicles to transport all the passengers. A 170-seat aircraft (e.g., approximately a Boeing 737-800) at 85% load factor, for instance, would likely require between 20 and 30 APM vehicles. A 300-seat aircraft (e.g., approximately an Airbus A350-900) at 85% load factor might require between 30 and 50 APM vehicles. Multiply this by the number of simultaneous departing flights, and the number of vehicles required would be enormous.

* * *

Not to rag on architects, but this is why we don't let them plan airports solo. Airport planning is interdisciplinary, requiring a balance of perspectives, and it is more than just designing an aesthetically pleasing or structurally adventurous building.

Why I Stopped Going to Church

It happened during college. Oddly enough, it was not because I stopped believing. I kept believing for some time.

* * *

I suppose the story begins on Sunday, June 12, 2011. That was graduation Sunday at Fair Oaks Church, the place I had been almost every Sunday from the week of my birth. I stood in front of the church body in my graduation cap and gown and told the congregation that I had just graduated from Berean Christian High School and would be attending UC Berkeley in the fall. What I did not tell them is that I would not be returning to Fair Oaks out of my own volition. That afternoon, I posted a status on Facebook saying, "Sayonara, Fair Oaks."

Of course, that was not the day that I left "the church", meaning the institution. That day did, however, represent a departure from what had characterized the entirety my life until that point. For the first time, I felt the freedom to look directly at a community, a building, a set of doctrine, and say, "This place isn't for me." And indeed it was not. I had outgrown Fair Oaks' ideology. Steeped in it for eighteen years, I knew that flavor of Christianity intimately, and I knew that it would not be able to address some of the thoughts and ideas I had. I had begun considering the idea of the compatibility of evolution with biblical creationism, for instance, and I could already provide myself with the answers that Fair Oaks would give me. Needless to say, I was curious to see what other flavors of Christianity were out there. Closing the Fair Oaks chapter of my life seemed like a logical step to reach that goal.

On the recommendation of a friend, I decided to attend First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley the second Sunday after I moved into my dorm. In the midst of the madness that was moving out of my childhood home, attempting to make new connections, and adjusting to life as a modestly independent adult, Sunday church was the one familiar and comforting thing to me. I couldn't tell you what occurred during that service, other than that my eyes were wet because it felt good to be home, so to speak. And so I continued attending First Pres on Sunday evenings and their Wednesday weeknight college group, Fellowship of College and University Students (FoCUS).

* * *
Reason 1: I was jaded about the music.

Alpha Gamma Omega, the Christian fraternity, hosted what they called "Refuge" on Tuesday evenings, which was a worship night at the fraternity house. During my first semester of college, I attended two or three weeks of Refuge and then never came back. It may have been because no one talked to me, but more likely it was the music itself that drove me away. I distinctly remember leaving after the final time I attended feeling completely frustrated at the music. Maybe it was that I had finally had enough of the worship nights led by one person with a guitar and an accompanist on a cajón. Maybe it was that we were singing the same goddamn songs we had been singing for years. Maybe it was the vacuity of the song lyrics. Maybe it was that singing at such events is basically compulsory. (If you don't sing, people assume something is wrong with you. To avoid this inference, you parrot the words back, devoid of emotion.)

This distaste for church music only grew as time passed. I found myself spending less time singing and more time journaling during the music portions of the First Pres services and FoCUS gatherings. Of course, journaling (or some other diverting activity) was only possible when I had my notebook and pen with me. During Spring Break of my freshman year at Berkeley, some high school friends and I got together, and it turned into an impromptu worship music session. I had expected us to actually hang out like normal people, so, naturally, I was not carrying my journal with me. I had no other option but to sing the lyrics to songs I hated. By the end of it, I was furious. Is this really the best way for us to be spending our limited time together? I thought.

Perhaps I should take a step back: how did I come to hate worship music as early as my freshman year of college? Just two years earlier, I was an aspiring worship leader at my Christian high school and at my church. What happened?

As far as I can tell, there was not a single triggering event. Perhaps it began with my constant critiquing of multiple worship leaders' song selection and musical styles in the latter years of high school: Eric in front of the Fair Oaks congregation, Jonathan in front of the high school student body, and both Cory and Brent in front of the Fair Oaks youth group. These four worship leaders and the worship bands they assembled all had something in common: mediocrity. Perhaps I primed myself to look for shortcomings in future worship leaders, which I continued to do at First Pres and FoCUS. The fact is that I have never in my life heard a worship band that actually produced good music.¹

Why does it seem that no worship band can produce good music? I have a few theories based on my experiences:

1. The songs are generally lacking in artistic merit and technical depth. Anyone who knows the basic chords on a guitar can play nearly any worship song. Vocal harmonies are rarely penned and are left to the backup singers' interpretations, which, given the elementary chord structure, usually turn out to be a third-interval deviation from the melody. All the songs are generally written for the same basic instrumentation (see point #4 below). And finally: the lyrics. Rarely will worship song lyrics contain hallmarks of good songwriting: wit, allegory, catchiness, emotion, to name a few.  Examples:

"Oh Christ
Be the center of our lives
Be the place we fix our eyes
Be the center of our lives
You're the center of the universe
Everything was made in you
Jesus
Breath of every living thing
Everyone was made for you
You hold everything together
You hold everything together"

"You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us
All this pain
I wonder if I'll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change
At all"

Barf.

Worship music songwriters tend to selectively understand that lyrics should not follow normal speech patterns. That songs repeat so many lines demonstrates at least some understanding of this concept (but why are the most inane lines always the ones chosen to be repeated?); the rampant plebeian language and absence of precise vocabulary demonstrate a lack of understanding of this concept.

2. The performers are almost never the songwriters. A successful singer-songwriter usually believes the words that he or she writes and sings, and that manifests in their performance. There are also many successful singers who do not write their songs but owe their success to their ability to internalize, reinterpret, apply to themselves, and then deliver the lyrics they are given. In my experience, members of worship bands rarely subject the words they sing to this level of attention. As a result, the songs are rarely delivered with conviction, or even energy. Worship bands merely parrot the words and expect their congregations to do the same.

3. Worship bands practice together maybe once a week in advance of their performances. Worship bands are usually comprised of middle-aged adults who only have time to devote one evening per week to practice. They are not compensated for their participation, and their livelihoods do not depend on the performance given. For these people, playing in the worship band is usually a hobby. In short, the performers face no risk of consequences, regardless of the quality of the performance. (This is further amplified by the fact that the focus is supposed to be on "the message" of the songs, and congregation members who critique the musicianship of the worship band are accused of having an inappropriate attitude. Sometimes these critics' faiths are called into question.) By contrast, professional musicians devote substantially more time practicing both on their own and with the rest of the group because music is their career. Unsurprisingly, more practice time and internalization of the performance risk tend to be correlated with better performance.

4. The instrumentation structure is almost always the same. The focus is always on the vocals and the acoustic guitar, as if worship songs were designed to be sung by white guys with guitars^TM. The next addition to a worship band is percussion, which, before the addition of a bass guitar, is usually a cajón or a djembe.² Add in the following order: female backup singer, bass guitar, second female backup singer, second guitar (sometimes electric), piano/keyboard, third guitar (if the second was not electric, this one definitely is), third female backup singer. Exceedingly rare, but not unprecedented, are the appearances of a violin, a cello, a flute, or even a mandolin. But the effect of this predictable band composition is that all songs performed will cultivate the same sound. Never will a heavier song feature additional percussion such as timpani; never will a horn section provide a fuller sound; and, most tragic of all, never will a harp be heard.³

5. They desecrate Christmas carols. I'm sorry, but "Joy to the World" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" were never EVER meant to be performed by a musical group containing an electric guitar, an electric bass guitar, and a drum set.

I think once I became aware of these characteristics of worship bands, I could no longer ignore them. Worship sessions frequently became internal brooding sessions for me as I critiqued the shortcomings of whichever band stood in front of me. Needless to say, the prospect of avoiding worship music certainly made the decision to stop going to church easier. The music was not missed after I stopped attending.

* * *
Reason 2: My interpretations of the Bible were too wayward.

During my second semester of college, I wrestled with three major issues: the realization of my non-heterosexuality, the trauma experienced while pledging my fraternity, and the concept of "trusting God". Over the course of this entire semester, none of the messages that I heard at church were relevant to any of these topics; instead, I was left to figure these issues out on my own.

So that is what I did. I spent hours poring over the six Bible passages that allude to homosexuality--the "clobber passages"--to seek their true meaning and their relevance to me. I learned that the texts are not as straightforward as they might appear. I discovered that with appropriate contextualization, conditioning, and examination of the original Greek, I could arrive at an interpretation of the texts that did not negate the compatibility of Christianity with same-sex relationships. What, I thought, might this mean for the rest of the Bible?

It meant, for instance, that my notions from high school about the concept of God-ordained evolution might be possible.⁴ It meant that the recommendation against women holding church leadership positions was not applicable. It meant that sex before marriage might not actually be forbidden.

Gradually I became a deconstructionist with respect to biblical text. Sermons that did not provide context behind the passage in question--such as the original audience of the passage, the contemporary cultural significance of the passage, the author's motivations for writing, and the original language of the text--were suddenly incomplete and inadequate.

In high school, I had first heard of extra-biblical writings such as the Apocrypha and the Gnostic gospels. In my second and third years of college, I began considering these texts again: why were these not included in the Bible? I no longer accepted the answer that "God, in all his infinite wisdom and power, ensured that the appropriate texts were placed in the Bible." No--as I came to learn, the canonization of the Bible happened gradually throughout the first millennium, and included those texts which were commonly in circulation at the time and which presented a (relatively) consistent message. In other words, random dudes decided what comprised and did not comprise "the Bible". The discovery of the haphazardness of the Biblical text selection process shook my trust in the Bible.

I let myself conduct more thought experiments: How do we know that even the canonized texts were not doctored? The earliest New Testament manuscripts available, for instance, are dated approximately 90 AD, decades after the reported events were supposed to have occurred. And how do we know the Catholic Church in the 1400's did not alter the text just as commoners were learning to read for themselves? Such questions further destabilized the Bible's authority for me.

While I wrestled with these questions of Biblical exegesis, the church continued on with "business-as-usual". The themes, content, and style of the sermons remained relatively unchanged; at First Pres, the sermons were unbelievably academic and dry. They certainly were not meeting me where I was at the time, and I couldn't help but wonder if they were instructive to anyone at all. I could no longer accept a sermon as true if the basics of the explicated biblical text were not made clear--and they were not. I felt as though the church could not keep up with me and the questions I was asking.

* * *
Reason 3: The church does not have a patent on social justice.

Berkeley was the first time in five years that I had substantially interacted with non-Christians. It surprised me to discover that there existed plenty of secular people who were good people with good intentions. There were secular people volunteering with community organizations and serving food to the homeless without the prompting of religious conviction (or compulsion, perhaps more accurately). The narrative I had been fed and had repeated was that non-Christians who performed philanthropic work harbored some insincere ulterior motive. I slowly began to realize that the church did not hold a monopoly on charity, that the church was not essential to inspire acting like a decent human being. This realization later evolved into the thought: What impact does the church have on the world that normal, civilized society does not? What do I need the church for?

* * *
Reason 4: I let myself have autonomy.

Another item that began fraying my ties with the church was the therapy I underwent during the latter half of my sophomore year. Although I was seeing a Christian therapist, the techniques I practiced uprooted some of the fundamental beliefs I had about myself. For the first time in my life, I asked for help without fear of being perceived as selfish;⁵ I credited myself for my accomplishments instead of rerouting all praise to God; I granted myself grace for my mistakes rather than accepting all the responsibility.⁶ These changes in behavior were at odds with what I had been taught growing up in the church. The church neither supported nor disapproved of my changing thought patterns; it was entirely silent on the issue. Once again, the church did not come alongside me and left me alone in this endeavor.

* * *

All of these simultaneous factors converged at some point during my sophomore or junior year of college, after which I stopped attending church on Sunday. Strangely enough, I did not miss it. And, as an added bonus, I discovered why people value weekends so much--you get to sleep in for two days. That life change alone was so substantial that I knew returning to church would be a tough sell.

Even though I no longer attended Sunday church services, I continued to attend FoCUS on Wednesdays until my senior year. The sermons there were at least halfway relevant because they were targeted toward ambitious Berkeley students. But at the beginning of my senior year, the FoCUS pastor left, leaving the intern and a student leadership team to run FoCUS. Although I had been involved with FoCUS for three years, I was not asked to join the student leadership team, which was instead comprised of sophomores. In addition, as I glanced around the meeting room during that first week of FoCUS my senior year, I could count on only one hand the faces that I knew. I did not feel part of the FoCUS community any longer. That day reminded me of what I had always known deep down: that the primary reason for my FoCUS attendance was the people rather than the spiritual content. If I no longer belonged to the community, I had little reason to attend. Consequently, I never went back to FoCUS after that first week of my senior year.

* * *

I still believed for a while after I stopped going to church. However, "still believing" can encompass a wide range of ideology. What was spiritually important to me had shifted so much that my conversations with other Christians became difficult. We were no longer speaking the same language because our priorities were so different, especially when it came to topics related to the Bible.

As an example, I was part of a "triplet" prayer group in my fraternity my senior year. Each week we met and shared items for which we wanted prayer. One week, I shared that I had been experiencing high anxiety over my desire for a relationship. It was difficult for me to talk to them about it because we did not hold the same basic values--the other two guys both believed that homosexuality is a sin. How could I bring someone into my world to share in my struggles when we disagreed on my humanity?

To this day, whenever anyone mentions that they do not approve of the "homosexual lifestyle" because of the Bible, my reaction is approximately this:

* * *

I tried church again a few times near the end of my Berkeley stint. During the fall of my senior year, I went to a Catholic mass for the first time with a fraternity brother. And at the beginning of my final semester of grad school, a friend of mine from high school and his fiancée invited me to attend an Episcopal church with them. While the music at these two churches was not so infuriating (standard liturgy that has withstood the test of centuries certainly helps), the homilies were once again scarcely relevant to the questions I wanted to explore. In addition, the Scriptures preached seemed to be accepted at face value, with insufficient screen time given to exploring the contexts of the texts.

But, fundamentally, it was still church. By this point, that in itself had become enough of a disqualifying factor. The doctrine and the music may have been different, but it was still too closely related to the church I had purposely left.

The church as an institution had become obsolete for me.

* * *

Sometimes I found myself thinking about the future of my church attendance: would I ever go back? What would it take to get me to go back? I kept checking as my years of church absenteeism added up, and my feelings about each of the aforementioned topics remained static. Would I ever make peace with these issues? What would I do if I raised kids and wanted them to have a Christian upbringing? Would I have to attend church alongside them in spite of these issues?










¹It's worth asking myself: Had I been worship leader at Berean or at Fair Oaks, would I have been an exception? Answer: Absolutely not. Perhaps I was saved from disgrace by not being selected for worship leader.

²Why do smaller-scale worship sessions' percussion instruments have to be foreign or "exotic"?

³Okay, so maybe I think worship bands should aspire to sound like Florence + the Machine's first three albums. Sue me.

⁴That the creation stories in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 differ led me to begin exploring this question my senior year of high school. Seriously, look them up. It's laughable that people present the Biblical creation story as history when two conflicting accounts are separated in the text by only one chapter.

⁵This was an especially toxic mindset that still plagues me to this day. I frequently used Philippians 2:3-4 to defend my own abasement.

⁶That was the flavor of Christianity I grew up with. You could not take any credit for your accomplishments, since God was the one who endowed you with the enabling ability. Meanwhile, you were required to accept responsibility for all the mistakes you committed. In other words, you absorbed all the negative and none of the positive.

Bob's and Kristy's Retirement

A few weeks ago, I attended a retirement party for a man named Bob Nass and his wife Kristy Nass. Bob was the director of Sequoia Brigade Camp (SBC), whose programming I attended every summer from 1999 to 2011.*

The event was held at Fair Oaks Church in Concord, CA—Bob’s and Kristy’s church; the church that I attended almost weekly from birth until I graduated from high school; and the church that hosted our chapter of Christian Service Brigade (CSB), 953.**

I pulled into the church parking lot for the first time since December 24, 2014. I exited my car and walked toward the brick plaza abutting the main sanctuary and the Adult Learning Center (ALC) building, where dozens of chairs and circular tables were laid out in the shade of the massive 350-year-old oak tree—the focal point of the brick plaza. I gave my name at the registration table, wondering if any of the volunteers at the table would recognize my name or my family’s name given our heavy involvement with SBC and CSB over the past two decades. But to them, I was just another pre-registered guest. I had no idea who the volunteers were; why would they know who I was?

Seeking a bathroom, I opened one of the ALC doors that led to the hallway connecting the kitchen, the meeting rooms, and the bathrooms. I walked down the tiled hallway that I had swept and mopped so many times as a custodial employee of the church between 2009 and 2011. I opened the bathroom door to reveal the same porcelain fixtures that had been there as long as I could remember. So this urinal still doesn’t flush, I thought as the yellow liquid did not recede after I had pulled the handle.

Upon my return to the plaza, I was torn between two options for my next actions: do I keep to myself, or do I attempt to socialize with people that I haven’t seen in six or more years? What would we talk about? Almost certainly the majority of these people still believe in the missions of CSB and SBC, not to mention the deity of Jesus and even the existence of God.

As people circulated about the plaza, I identified faces of people whom I had known years ago. A few of them had put on weight, so to be crass, it was not the shape of their faces that I recognized. Some passers-by recognized me, and they initiated conversation. (Does small talk count as a legitimate conversation?)

How does one sum up his life over the previous seven years in order to respond to the question, “How have you been?” It always seems that the easiest way to combat this issue is to highlight the accomplishments from the time period in question. I told everyone that I had been “well”, and provided as supporting evidence my graduation with two degrees from Berkeley, my San Francisco residency, and my employment in airport planning consulting. My conversation partners followed suit, although an item often included in their lists was a marriage.

I know this crowd. It was safer for me to remain at a high level rather than share other equally monumental details from the last seven years of my life, such as my triumph-in-progress over anxiety and depression, my acceptance of my sexual identity, my about-face toward Christianity, and my cohabitation with my partner. It wasn’t just my mood that I was attempting to keep safe; I wanted to keep safe the reputation that these people had attached to me years ago. God knows Christians are good at tarnishing their memories of you if you later become a person whose “lifestyle” they don’t support.

Let’s make a deal—you can approach me and converse with me, and I’ll keep you at an arm’s length. If that’s what it will take to ensure you still think of me as a good person, then sure, I can be the same Max you knew years ago.

That is, until the National Director of CSB addresses the attendees. During his speech, the focus of which was an update of the status of CSB as an organization, he stressed the importance of CSB’s mission of developing godly men at a time when “gender confusion” is rampant. Without taking another breath, in his next sentence, he aggressively dismissed the concept of “toxic masculinity”. “Excuse me,” I said to the others at my table, and I stood up and walked toward the ALC.

Frankly, I wasn’t upset. As I said earlier, I know this crowd. I did not excuse myself because I had been “triggered” or because I needed a “safe space”. I excused myself to demonstrate that I am unwilling to listen to someone who clearly would not offer me the same courtesy. “Man, it only took them five minutes to make it political,” my older brother remarked to me a few minutes later.

I returned to the table after about ten minutes. Various other middle-aged white men spoke, emphasizing the mission of CSB to build, and I quote: “man-on-man discipleship”. I chuckled.

Near the end of the ceremony, Bob was presented an honorary “Herald of Christ” award—the highest distinction within Christian Service Brigade (think Eagle Scout). Kristy was also presented an award, which was symbolized by an engraved heart necklace. However, the legitimacy of her award was strangely discounted. The current CSB regional director who had replaced Bob emphasized that no such award had existed before and it was created especially for her; because, as he put it, “that [ministering to women] is not our calling”.

There is a fundamental difference between the awards that Bob and Kristy received. Bob’s award represented an achievement which was meaningful within the entire CSB organization; Kristy’s award represented the inability of the organization to recognize any contributions made by an entire gender. Bob’s award was institutionalized; Kristy’s was ad-hoc. In presenting Kristy’s award, the CSB regional director was asserting that the organization had no way to thank her for her years of service, and it would not even try to find a way. Instead, a makeshift thank-you was created by the decisions of a few.

Kristy is a true gem, and that is an offensive understatement. She is among the top of the list of the most generous, gracious, hard-working, and kind people I have ever known. She worked tirelessly supporting Bob’s ministry—whether that took the form of driving vans hitched with trailers for hundreds of miles; directing, leading, and participating in similar camps for girls; or, most notably, cooking delicious meal after delicious meal for what must have been tens of thousands of mouths over the years. (Her homemade apple butter is to die for.) She never showed anything but positivity and devotion, and she welcomed with open arms anyone that came into her home, kitchen, or dining room. That woman gave us all so much over the years, and we gave her a necklace in response?

I do not mean to discount the good intentions behind recognizing Kristy. Additionally, I know she is a modest woman who never seeks recognition for her work, and she will treasure the necklace because of what it represents. I just think she deserved more.

As the event reached its close, a campfire was lit in the church parking lot.*** The mingling resumed. Slowly, a cohort of alumni from the 953 CSB chapter accumulated at our table. We began recounting stories from the past of 953. Names that had been outside of our consciousnesses for years were resurrected; memories were jogged; laughter erupted.

A guy named Cody joined our circle, sitting just outside the right boundary of my 180-degree peripheral field. Cody and I had been the same year in school, so we had been in the same 953 and SBC “class” for at least six years. He had been homeschooled in an aggressively Christian family, so perhaps consequently, I could never really make sense of him. At times, he was rambunctious and invigorated; other times, he was awkward and uptight. I had removed him as a Facebook friend about five years earlier because his posts got way too strange and Christian for me. Therefore, it wasn’t clear to me what the social rules were with respect to our interaction at this event. Should I acknowledge him, or do I not need to?

I chose the latter. I don’t know if we even made eye contact. Which was probably fine because he didn’t contribute to the conversation, so there was never a moment when we should have given him our attention.

Some younger guys—current members of 953—joined our group. Their energy was insatiable; they soaked up every story we told, and then they asked for more. Even though most of us alumni had never met the current 953 guys, none of our stories required explanation of background. The core operation had not changed, so these younger guys knew all the institutions, structures, and rituals that framed our stories. We could in turn ask them about the most recent Junior Leadership Conference (JLC), Nor-Cal Camporal, and Pre-Camp Training. Our experiences had provided a common language that transcended the years of our respective stints in 953.

“953 is thriving,” one of the current members beamed. “953 has had such an impact on my life,” another shared. In a hushed tone, a third implied the existence of a 953 tattoo on multiple members’ bodies.

It gave me joy to hear the enthusiasm of these guys. I think the joy came from realizing that the organization to which I dedicated so much time had not been in vain. But what does that mean when you no longer believe in the ideals underpinning the organization in question?

There’s something deeper to organizations like 953 than just the ideology. It is the formation of a community. I think an indication of a healthy organization is whether the value of community detaches itself from and exists independent of the institution, at which point the institution is just a vessel to bring the community together. What this means is that the members would still have formed a community if their uniting organization had been dedicated to, say, torching historical monuments. The common ideology is a good starting point to bring people together, but a successful community would continue to exist if the institution dissolved.

I believe 953 successfully achieved this separation between community and institution. I saw it during my own membership; there were six of us in my “class” who all regularly participated in and engaged with SBC and CSB events. I saw it in a younger cohort as I was on the brink of graduation; Josh Slivinski, Josh Jones, Nick Jones, and my younger brother formed an even stronger, more magnetic culture than the one I had. And I saw it in today’s 953; evidently, several of them had recently taken a trip in which they drove from the Bay Area to New Orleans, had lunch, and then drove home. They repeated such a trip with Portland, Oregon as the destination. Absurd things such as those trips only happen in strong communities.

Perhaps this is why in my fraternity interviews, SBC and CSB were never specifically mentioned as formative items in my life. These organizations, their curriculum, and their ideologues were not what had the greatest effect on shaping me. Rather, the first person whom I told about my habit of watching gay pornography was another counselor from SBC. (A female counselor, but the principle still stands.)

As the round tables were folded up and the chairs stacked, we were cued to clear the oak tree patio. The mingling following the event’s official programming was implicitly encouraged to continue off-site, so the group of 953 alumni decided to go out for beers at Mike Hess Brewing Company in Walnut Creek. The invitation to consume alcohol with other alumni seemed to represent a boundary crossing. Since we had been underage while active in the organizations, we couldn’t drink together; so this was uncharted territory for us. I wonder what Bob would have thought of it.

We piled into cars and caravanned from the church. On the way, my older brother remarked to me, “It seems like 953 has become a cult, but I’m kind of okay with that.”

The brewery was a new establishment, part of a sparkling shopping center that occupied a former vast field at the corner of Oak Grove Road and Ygnacio Valley Road. We circled the parking lot attempting to find the brewery, passing a host of vacant storefronts with “For Lease” signs in the windows. Did they really build this much of this shopping center on speculation? I wondered. Who was willing to cough up the cash to shoulder that risk?

Even though we were crossing a boundary by drinking together, I still felt the need to keep the other alumni at an arm’s length, especially after I overheard many of them talking about their churches. It was clear that if personal issues such as faith were to come up, we would not be able to speak the same language. There was again the desire to preserve the reputation that this crowd might have perceived of me, which was based on Christian-me from seven-plus years ago. In fact, the only person to whom I revealed that I no longer attend church was Shannon, Isaac Svensson’s girlfriend. I had only just met her for the first time that night, but I could tell that she was safe. In addition, she held no previous reputation attached to me in her head (except that which Isaac might have told her). With her, I had freedom to be who I was now rather than who I was years ago.

Our time at the brewery was abruptly cut short when staff came around at 10 PM, asked us to stop consuming, and took the glasses back. Evidently, some restriction did not permit them to serve alcohol after 10:00. I have never heard of such a restriction before. Was it a cheaper version of a standard liquor license, perhaps? Was there neighborhood opposition that prompted a perpetual early business closure?

Then we drove to a karaoke bar down the street. Where the hell is there a karaoke bar around here? I thought. I followed another car, and I was surprised to find our destination was in the same parking lot as the Trader Joe’s that we frequented after Sunday night CSB meetings growing up. It’s amazing the world that opens up to you after you turn 21; how spaces that you thought you knew gain another layer of depth. Of course, it’s questionable whether the karaoke bar we went to adds “depth” to that plaza—the bar was pretty divey.

In my periphery, I noticed two young guys sitting together. My gaydar started going off. I’m not sure why—perhaps it was their subtle mannerisms that I instinctively picked up on. Perhaps it was the way they looked at each other. Perhaps it was the noticeable effort put into their appearances over the other men in the bar. Or perhaps it was wishful thinking that there might be other gay boys to bring the rainbow to the heteronormative wasteland of Walnut Creek. But my gaydar has also been dead wrong many times, so I kept an eye on them in an attempt to find any telltale sign.

Aha! A hand caress. They’re homos. Are they on a date? Why are they at this bar?

Two SBC alumni had previously put their names in the karaoke queue and were called to the microphone. I watched the text on the karaoke screen change colors, noticing the instances when the singers’ enunciation did not align with the words. I wondered if the guys were drunk—whether they were that kind of Christians.

The song's conclusion seemed as good a time as any to bid my adieus.

My westward drive on CA-24 to San Francisco may as well have been a portal through time, transporting me away from the people and places of my past. I wonder if this portal was one-way without an option to return. Bob Nass was the common denominator that brought all of us to the event. Perhaps his retirement meant that this was the last time this particular group of people would gather. Perhaps Sequoia Brigade Camp and the relationships contained therein will henceforth only be in my past.

I don’t know if that’s good, bad, or just a thing.







* From 1999 to 2002, I attended Father-Son Camp with my dad and older brother (and younger brother in 2002). In 2003 and 2004, I attended Stockade Camp (now called NorCal Boys’ Adventure Camp), which was essentially a camp version of the Sunday evening program I attended during the school year, Christian Service Brigade. In 2005, I again attended Father-Son Camp with my dad and younger brother. In 2006, I attended Aviation Camp, during which I co-piloted Cessna aircraft local flights (i.e., not itinerant) out of Columbia Airport. From 2007 to 2010, I served as a junior counselor for 3 ½ weeks of camps, including the camp I had attended years earlier, Boys’ Adventure Camp. In 2008, I attended Surf Camp and quickly learned that I do not enjoy surfing or swimming in the ocean. In 2011, I attended the three-day junior counselor “pre-camp training” as a mentor.


** Sequoia Brigade Camp (SBC) was branded as the “camping arm” of Christian Service Brigade (CSB), an organization for which the only apt and sufficiently concise description is “Christian Boy Scouts”. In addition to the programs listed above, SBC offered a whole host of (usually) weeklong camps: Base Camp, SoCal Boys’ Adventure Camp, Father-Daughter Camp, SoCal Girls’ Adventure Camp, Father-Daughter Canoe Trip, White Water Canoe Trip, Wilderness Adventure Camp (“the WAC”), Canadian Canoe Trip, Scuba Camp, Three-Peak Adventure, and even Glacier Climbing School one year. It’s actually quite an impressive catalogue.


*** At most camps, each day concluded with a campfire program produced largely by the junior counselors. These campfires consisted of “fun songs”, a skit, “transition songs”, a junior counselor’s testimony, “slow songs”, an allegorical story, and a closing message with a silent altar-call. The campfire was an institution, and its format was sacred; it had been carefully crafted to gently settle campers down from the adventures of the day and to whet their receptivity to the gospel.

Does my "feminist" card get revoked because of this post?

Today in my Facebook news feed, a friend posted this article:

His caption expressed how this action was so stupid, as this is how males naturally sit. I commented on the post with the following:

There is something to be said for the differing socialization of men and women regarding sitting. "Proper ladies" have historically always been instructed to keep their legs closed, whereas men have never been subject to such an admonition. A comical yet fictional example of how men and women are (or at least were) socialized to sit in different ways is told in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck dresses as a girl, and the woman whose house he visits can sniff him out based on how he sits and uses his legs while wearing a dress.

Littlemermaid Disney GIF from Littlemermaid GIFs

[Note: This gif wasn't actually included in the comment.]

The point is, men can sit however is comfortable for them without retribution, which is not necessarily the case for women. I get that the woman in this video is pointing this out--she's creating consequences for a behavior for which women already experience consequences. In other words, her thesis is that sitting with spread legs comes with consequences, regardless of gender. However, it's unclear whether she's asserting that this is how it ought to be.

All that being said, pouring bleach on a man's pants in a public space in order to make such a point is just asinine.

My relatively thoughtful analysis (if I do say so myself) went unnoticed, as the poster's response was, "I love your explanation! I didn't know where you were going with this, but I like the conclusion!"

Eyeroll.


* * *


Today was also the day that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. As an introductory comment, I don't know if I've seen another picture that more accurately sums up the USA in 2018:

Look at the expressions of every single woman in this photo.

This half of the post is the why the post's title is what it is. Brace yourselves...

The allegations against Kavanaugh seem a lot like grasping at straws to me. People--myself included--desperately do not want to see him appointed to the Supreme Court because of his horrifyingly regressive stances. People want to find some dirt, ANY dirt, on Kavanaugh to block his nomination. So what happens? Dr. Christine Ford comes forward and states that he assaulted her at a drunken house party...in high school. Three-and-a-half decades ago.

Before I say anything else, it must be said that I believe Dr. Ford. Traumatic experiences such as sexual assault stay with you for your entire life, even if they are remembered in incomplete narratives. Asking her to recall details of the evening of the assault such as the address of the house or what she had had to drink is utterly absurd and irrelevant. I can only imagine the pain she feels seeing the perpetrator of the crime against her being considered for one of the most esteemed positions in the country.

With that said, I'm left with a feeling of, "so what?"

I am not attempting to minimizes Ford's pain. Rather, I find it unlikely that a single action that a horny, drunk, teenage male did decades ago is indicative of his character now.

I don't think it's even a question of "did he do it?" It's more of a question of "does it matter?" On the one hand, I absolutely believe that it does matter. People should have to live with the consequences of their actions. Additionally, the concept implanted into men's (and women's) heads from birth that men are entitled to women's bodies is shameful, to say the least.

But on the other hand, are we so closed-minded that we believe people cannot change? Do we really think that how a horny 17-year-old acted in high school is how he will act decades later? God knows I'm a vastly different person now than I was when I was 17; and such is the story with most sensible adults. Now, this would have been a very different issue if the allegation were from an incident five years ago or ten years ago. But this allegation is from an incident decades ago. It begs the question: where does one draw the line? How far back must one go in order for it to be acceptable to say, "That is no longer who I am"?

 

I was listening to an NPR Politics podcast last night in which the speaker reported that additional allegations against Kavanaugh had been made. These allegations claimed that while in high school, he had attended parties at which drunkenness abounded and several young women were raped. Kavanaugh was not accused of any of these rapes; he merely attended the parties at which they occurred.

Come on.

How is this allegation considered valid? Why should Kavanaugh be held responsible for what these other young men did decades ago? It is completely possible that he was unaware that this was happening at these parties; generally, sexual intercourse, non-consensual or otherwise, is not performed in the middle of a living room.

Am I really defending someone who believes that Roe v. Wade should be overturned? God, I sound like the wrong side of history.

Of course, sexual assaults against individuals tend to come to light in concentrated bursts. So I may have to rescind this entire portion of the post if more compelling evidence and incidents are revealed. But given what has been made public to this point, I do not believe that the allegations are sufficient to block him from the Supreme Court nomination. Goddammit, Republican majority, block him because he would destroy and undo years of progress!

I close with this thought-provoking cartoon.

Exponential Series

[This is a mathy post. Beware.]

I'm sure someone has already reasoned through this somewhere before, but whatever.

Consider the sequence defined by the following exponential function:

where a is a real number. (Of course, in its general form, there could be a constant term in front of a which is unaffected by the exponent. However, the constant term is irrelevant in the forthcoming analysis, so it is ignored for simplicity.) We want to examine the relationship between the n^th term of the sequence and the series formed by the first n-1 terms of the sequence. Specifically, is the following statement true?


Put into English, this inequality asserts the following: the n^th term of an exponential sequence is greater than the sum of all the previous terms in the sequence.

* * *

Proposition:


Proof: by induction on n

Base case: n = 1
The inequality simplifies to a > 1, which is true because a is greater than or equal to 2.

Inductive step:
Assume the hypothesis is true for all integers 1,...,n. Show that it holds for n + 1; that is,

This can alternatively be written as:


The left hand side (LHS) of the inequality is at least double aⁿ, since a is greater than or equal to 2. The right hand side (RHS) of the inequality is strictly less than double aⁿ, since the summation term is strictly less than aⁿ by the inductive hypothesis. Therefore, the LHS of the inequality is strictly greater than the RHS, and the proposition is proved.

* * *

It was essential that our base a be at least 2 for the inequality to be true. To demonstrate why this is so, consider the case where a = 1. The LHS of the inequality will always be the value 1 for any value of n. The RHS will always be n, since it is the summation of n exponential terms with base 1. Thus, the inequality does not hold in this case.

So the inequality is always true when a = 2, and never true when a = 1. However, how does the inequality hold up when 1 < a < 2? The answer is...it depends! Both on what the value of the base a is, as well as what the value of n is!

As an example, suppose a = 1.9.
When n = 1, the LHS is 1.9 and the RHS is 1, and the inequality is true.
When n = 2, the LHS is 3.61 and the RHS is 2.9, and the inequality is true.
When n = 3, the LHS is 6.859 and the RHS is 6.51, and the inequality is true.
When n = 4, the LHS is 13.0321 and the RHS is 13.369, and the inequality is false.

It appears that when 1 < a < 2, the inequality "flips" at a certain value of n. We will call this value of n the "critical n". In fact, the border cases of a = 1 and a = 2 each have a critical n. When a = 1, the critical n is 1, which implies that the inequality flips immediately and is never true; and when a = 2, the critical n is infinity, which implies that the inequality never flips and is always true in its originally presented form.

We want to analytically derive a formula that will reveal for what value of n the inequality no longer holds when 1 < a < 2. We can do this by using the formula for the sum of a geometric series with a finite number of terms:


Substituting this sum for the RHS of the inequality, we are attempting to find the largest integer value of n such that:


Here's a chance to brush up on your algebra skills...


Note that the inequality flips in Step 2. This occurs because the denominator in Step 1 is negative (recall that 1 < a < 2).

The critical n is the smallest integer such that the inequality in Step 7 is no longer true (or one more than the largest integer such that the inequality is still true). So the critical n can be determined by computing the RHS of the inequality in Step 7, and then taking the ceiling of that value (that is, rounding up to the nearest integer).

We see that this formula indeed holds up in the example given above when a = 1.9. The RHS of the inequality in Step 7 is 3.587, which is 4 when rounded up. Indeed, it also holds up when a = 1 and when a = 2, as the numerator is 0 and infinity in each of those cases, respectively. These round up to 1 and infinity, respectively. (Technically the RHS of the inequality in Step 7 is in the indeterminate form 0/0 when a = 1, but for the sake of the argument, we'll ignore this and only consider the numerator value.)

It is also possible to determine the smallest value of the base a for which a given critical n applies (i.e., a fixed n). Unfortunately, there is not a closed-form solution for a as for the critical n; rather, a must be found as a solution to an equation. However, some simple rearrangement reveals that this equation takes on a relatively simple polynomial structure:


We can plot the critical n as a function of a between 1 and 2. It is naturally a step function since n only takes integer values.



As expected, as a approaches 2, the critical n approaches infinity.

* * *

Conclusion: We have found the conditions under which the n^th term of an exponential sequence is greater than the sum of all the previous terms in the sequence. If the base a is 2 or greater, then this is always true. If the base a is 1 or lower, then this is never true. But for bases a between 1 and 2, this is only true for values of n up until a given "critical n". We have found a formula that can determine what this "critical n" is for a given base, as well as an implicit formula that can determine the base a at which a given n is the critical n.