It's the DATA, Stupid! - The Fourth Paradigm

This is a shorthand way of describing the life-work of a visionary Microsoft research scientist named Jim Gray. A few weeks after he gave a talk on the subject in 2007, he was lost at sea off the coast of California.

Gray was proposing the Fourth Paradigm: a quasi-new scientific approach that says insight can be gathered from manipulating large amounts of data. Manipulating, sorting, and graphically expressing relationships in very large data sets: new stuff pops out. You can apply statistics to very large data sets and have far greater confidence in the results.

The First Paradigm is sometimes called empirical science - observational or descriptive science. This is the science carried out by interested folk like you and me over the past several thousand years. That, for instance, is Drosophila Melanogaster... what you've been calling the Fruit Fly. You named it, classified it as a fly of the fruit-eating variety.

The Second Paradigm is analytic science: analysis of scientific observations that leads to an understanding of electricity and magnetism, for example. By careful experiment and observation, Michael Faraday was able to connect electricity with magnetism. From this work, James Clerk Maxwell developed... yep, the famous Maxwell's Equations. I'm not making this up: Maxwell built on the scientific experiments and papers of Faraday to develop a working theory of electromagnetism, complete with an elegant mathematical formalism that haunts undergrad physics students to this day.  Actually, these guys are heroes to physicists as much as Fermi, Bohr, and Einstein are.

An Example: In 1994 I was working in northern Saudi Arabia on a phosphate project.  A monster sandstorm beginning in the Sahara far to the west engulfed us, and for a day it was very hard to work. For the next several days the dust haze hung in the air and I realized that each afternoon I could look directly at the Sun without a filter - with my naked eyes and without injury. I noticed a huge Sunspot cluster in the upper left quadrant, and was so impressed that I could actually see this without instrumentation that I sketched it into my field notebook. The next day I could see it again... and it had migrated downward and right. By the fourth day I had a complete sketch of the movement of this Sunspot cluster.  That is an example of First Paradigm science: observation. FROM those observations, I could deduce (a) that the Sun rotated, (b) where the axis of that rotation was (upper right of the observed disk), and (c) how FAST it rotated (I figured roughly 10 days would bring that cluster if it still existed to the same initial point). That part is the Second Paradigm: I analyzed the data and drew some conclusions from them. (PS: Data are always plural - there is always more than one number).

The Third Paradigm is sometimes called computational science; sometimes it's called simulation science. Think ever larger computers, calculating results from ever finer grids of models of the galaxy, models of a complex earth being deformed by stress leading to an earthquake, giant models used to predict weather.  More or less.

An Example of this is my use of a powerful software package called Geosoft Oasis Montaj: this software allows me to bring in vast amounts of data from any source and process the entire mess. It's generally known among geophysicists that you can only "see" about 15% of the content of magnetic data by hand-contouring many measurements on paper. If I pass frequency filters through the data, I can separate the deep sources from the shallow sources. If I pass derivative filters through it I can find the edges of those sources of magnetic anomalies. If I then do two-dimensional (or higher dimensional) modeling, I can obtain a probable shape of the source(s) of the anomaly(s). Say, an electric pig in a magnetic bathtub. This is computational or simulation science.

The Fourth Paradigm is a step beyond this. Grey's point was that hey!*  We are collecting vast amounts of data - more data in seconds now than in all previous history before 1950. There MUST be some relationships, connections, new things in all that mess. If we don't DO something with all these numbers, then what is the point in COLLECTING them?

Data mining is an obvious outcome of this sort of work. Clever digital types can use many different sources of data, search for links - relationships or connections - and from all this can pretty much tell some company what you are going to buy this Christmas, where, and how much money you will spend. That is valuable to a company - it allows the company to save money on inventory and helps them set up displays that will get even MORE money out of you. That's a good thing, right? Maybe.

It's already well-established that corporate recruiters need little training in data mining to find out how you party, what you really do, who your friends are, and how honest you are... no matter what your resume may say. A good thing for the HR people, a bad thing for the careless and dishonest job-hunter.

This same data mining can have unequivocally terrible consequences: people supporting the revolutions in Iran and Syria using Twitter, Facebook, and Anonymizer have died because regime agents have connected different sources of data and figured out who was trashing their regimes... and people have been found, arrested, and have died as a consequence of this kind of data mining.

For better or worse, we have all reached - and fallen into - the ocean of data lying at the end of our continent of former human interaction. Our lives will never be the same again. The Internet is self-healing and in effect self-replicating.


Big Brother is Skynet, and it has found us. 
You may run, but you cannot hide.

~~~~~

* No pun intended, but a book has been published online by T.S. Hey and others (2009) that assembles all the ideas Jim Gray was promoting.

~~~~~

Euro Crisis

Here we go again. Our own banks nearly destroyed our economy in 2007 with their unregulated greed and risk-taking. Now that we are just barely starting to recover the 10+ million jobs lost in the Great Recession, the Greeks are threatening to send us spinning back into a double-dip recession. Or is it the Italians?  Or the Germans?

Several times weekly, I get a newsletter from www.stratfor.com - mostly these are teasers to get me to sign up for their full newsletters for ~$360 per year, but one teaser brought a lot of things out in a succinct way - why Greece could upend the entire world (including the American) economy. 

From Strafor:
"Whichever actions Germany takes, three things are all but inevitable: an Italian bailout, a European banking crisis, and a Greek default. Any one outcome will likely trigger the other two. 


This may look like a "damned if I do, damned if I don't" type of situation, but how Berlin handles the crisis could be the difference between a weakened euro and nonexistent euro. "

As Stratfor views it, the Germans gave up their beloved Deutchmark in the last Century to join the Euro. In the heady days following the collapse of the Soviet Block, they bought into the dream of a United States of Europe that would be even bigger and more influential than the United States of America. Now they see their Germanic save-and-work-hard habits being destroyed by the relax-and-take-long-vacations culture of what they sometimes call "Southern Europe." Of course, it's much more complicated than this - a lot of the problem (and it's a real problem) is due to some countries adapting to the modern economic world slower than others.

And for this, Greece is the poster child.

Greece has basically been doing what the US has been doing: spending more than it takes in taxes.  However, it has managed to get even deeper into debt from a long tradition of evading taxes and hiring huge numbers of public sector workers with thick benefits. Italy and France are not far behind - and they are BIG economies - while Spain (now shuddering under 20% unemployment), Portugal, and Ireland are close behind, and lag only in relative size.

It's not just Europe. Here is a hint of the future of Venezuela if oil stays at $85/bbl: catastrophe, possibly even civil war. Venezuela is a classic example of the inevitable consequences of  nepotism and criminal mismanagement. Venezuela's public sector now represents about 30% of the population. For the United states this would mean bringing the ~2 million (and declining) Federal employees and the ~10 million (and declining) state and local government employee rolls up to ~100 million. How in the world could Venezuela possibly sustain this? With unlimited oil reserves. Do certain profligate countries in the Middle East immediately come to your mind?

Unfortunately for Venezuela - where we lived as a family for three years - the "unlimited" part of the equation is falling apart. Literally. Venezuela has huge sweet crude reserves (sweet crude = drill-shallow-and-it-just-flows) in the Lake Maracaibo region, and a far greater resource of heavy crude that absolutely dwarfs this in its central plains (Los Llanos). The reserves numbers would make just about anyone arrogant. The heavy crude, however, is solid at room temperature. Imagine pushing that through any pipeline. It can be economically extracted with great difficulty - and only if the price of oil rises to, and remains at something like $100/bbl.

However, Venezuela is now rapidly going tubular with an ill-maintained and therefore rapidly-collapsing infrastructure. Consider this proposition: imagine putting your uneducated drinking buddies and ne'er-do-well brothers in charge of a country. Hugo Chavez has actually done this, and the consequences already include rolling blackouts in Caracas, oil production that is steadily falling, and economic growth has been negative for several years now ( = loss of private sector jobs).  Real unemployment in Venezuela is now estimated to be 50%. Another consequence: the murder rate in Caracas is at *least* 10 times greater than Baghdad according to El Nacional, the Caracas newspaper that published full-page color photos of bloody corpses piled up on the floors of the city morgue. (The government in 2008 made it a crime to publish crime statistics).

Why is Venezuela important? Keep in mind that more oil powering the American economy comes from America-hating Venezuela than comes from the entire Middle East. Why? It's closer by 10,000 kilometers.

Back to Europe, which has an even bigger pending crisis. However this Euro crisis plays out, the Swiss won't be able to sell anything (because everyone is piling into Swiss Francs), and the potential impact on its economy is nearly incalculable. The French banks will be touch-and-go in the next few months due to their huge exposure to Greek debt. "Restructuring" the Greek debt is now actively being discussed. This means a haircut for investors. This means devastated pension funds. All of THAT will get back to Canada, the US, Asia, and eventually even Australia.

Consequences will propagate around the world.

Ah. Banks again. Corporate boards approving dodgy accounting that depletes their pension funds while granting huge golden parachutes to executives. Sound familiar? Everyone except "purchased" Republicans inside the Beltway see this. Everyone knows it's a rigged game, and the Supreme Court's 2009 Citizens United (classic Orwellian Duck-Speak: the case was brought by Goldman-Sachs and others like them) decision to give corporations and wealthy individuals unlimited "contribution" limits in political races cements the loaded-dice system in concrete.

As Mitt Romney famously said, "Corporations are people, too, my friend."

Not in a sane world. There is a reason the Occupy Wall Street protests are not stagnating, but instead expanding all around the United States, and now even the world. They've already gotten violent in Italy. A huge unknown is how long can China maintain its 9% annual economic growth? The Chinese Communist Party recognizes that there is a 100% correlation between high growth and political stability. THAT economy is now greater than the US, and a collapse there will drag everyone down with it.

Bottom line: as Mark Twain said, "history doesn't repeat itself - but it does rhyme."

My school-biased recall of history keeps coming back. In that recollection, the years 1932 and 1964 come to mind for different reasons, but both were characterized by huge historical transitions. There WILL be changes coming.

How do we prepare for these? We all need to make ourselves indispensable - and have a backup ready. A Years Supply means more than food. We must build our savings as much as possible - and plan for worst-case scenarios including unemployment and furloughs. A good start would be to avoid hidden-fee operations like Bank of America who pay their executives 10's of millions of dollars (and where does that money come from do you suppose?). We also need to become more active politically - that means badgering my local congresswoman, who apparently signed onto subservience to a policy-suite that doesn't help her district or the country (only the people who buy her vote). If we don't take our voting seriously, those who do will walk away with the bank. Literally.

~~~~~

Shape-Shifting Reptilian Humanoids

Against my will, I watched bits of the Republican debates, and watching some of these people talk reminded me scarily of the following cartoon:

Christian vs. christian

What exactly constitutes being a Christian? In 1982 the "Christian" Phalange militia in Lebanon massacred every man, woman, and child in the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Christian?


When I was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, my Jewish-atheist roommate at Berkeley expressed disbelief and surprise. "There's something to this, you know. You ought to investigate it yourself," I replied. He turned on me and for the only time I ever remember, I saw anger in his face:

"Do you have any idea how many of my ancestors were KILLED in the name of Christ?!??"

I have had various reactions, ranging from polite curiosity to dislike, suspicion, and even contempt aimed at me for being a Mormon (world's term) or LDS (preferred term). This has been brought to my awareness almost daily through most of my adult life since I stopped being an atheist and chose to be baptized.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry's pastor is the current source of anti-Mormon hate, but just one of many. Polls suggest that fully 25% of this country will never vote for a "Mormon" for president. I suspect that this is in the same ballpark as anti-Semites, but likely quite a bit higher than the percentage of the population who are skin-color racist types.

The other night I went with my Bishop to visit a friend in our ward whose son had been found dead of acute Oxycontin poisoning. He had been living with back pain; a doctor prescribed Oxycontin, he got hooked, and had been fighting addiction for years since then. That young man's wife had just given birth three weeks earlier to a baby daughter. It is incredibly sad. However, the wife will not have anything to do with any "Mormons" - something she learned from her dad. This has estranged her husband from his parents, and has made the funeral arrangements even harder on my friend. It was made even worse by a former band-member of the deceased asking people on his Facebook page to come to the funeral and try to "save" the parents - my LDS friend and his wife. Ken told me this was like the knife in his heart was now being twisted.

A scientist in my research team in the USGS National Center in Northern Virginia was constantly making fun of me when I was still resident there, typically making snarky comments about me at the group table in the cafeteria. He is from a narrow Protestant group in the upper Midwest. He told me when I asked him about it that there are about 200,000 of them, and they are the only ones that will "make it into Heaven" - the rest of us all being "damned to Hell".  I was amazed; he's a senior scientist with a PhD, which at least implies some thoughtfulness. I quietly took this abuse at lunch and in the hallways for a long time. Finally one day, as I was helping him with his desktop computer, he did it again - only half-jokingly told me I would be damned to Hell. I asked him why he was being so overtly offensive? He told me that my particular LDS belief was "not Christian", and was particularly anathema to him and his small sect, worse even than if I were a Moslem. I told him (very mildly I think) that his behavior struck me as startlingly un-Christlike, and asked him if he had read the New Testament recently? He stared at me. I pointed out that I was the only person in the team who would help him when he had computer problems, that despite the rude and contemptuous treatment leveled at me, I felt it was expected of me as a follower of Christ. He didn't say a word, just stared, so after fixing his problem I went back to my office. About 10am the following morning, he leaned into my office doorway and said, very awkwardly, that he had been thinking all night about what I had said, and had concluded that I was right. He said that he was not acting like a follower of Christ, and that he would stop saying things that caused me discomfort. I believe he still did so behind my back, but I thanked him anyway.

My perception of MY responsibilities, as a follower of Christ, includes being patient with abuse like this. If an opportunity avails itself, I believe I'm allowed to raise the obvious contrary-to-Christ's-teachings behavior.

How many times must you turn the other cheek to this sort of abuse? Probably forever ("seven times seven" said Christ). Where do you draw the line between abuse and deadly threat? Is it Christ-like to defend yourself against almost certain physical damage or death? The head of our local YWCA is wheel-chair-bound, a devout pacifist, and took exception to me and my family teaching women how to defend themselves against physical assault. I never had an opportunity to talk with her about this - she just made it clear that we were not welcome to teach there again.  Every one of the students, however, thanked us - some with hugs.

No one can honestly deny that there is evil in this world. 


And everyone has the right to choose if they want to return home to their families from wherever they may be. I do not believe the Christ requires of us to permit others to stomp our brains out in a drunken rage on a parking lot, or to submit to a brutal sexual assault with life-long consequences. On the contrary, I feel strongly that everyone deserves the opportunity to live their life on this Earth to its fullest, and that violation of this right puts the attacker at immeasurable, eternal risk.  The attacker is also a child of the same God - and I think God would prefer the attack be stopped before irreversible consequences happen - for BOTH of His children's sake. We teach our students that a proportional response to an attack is for their own and the attacker's long-term benefit. We just give them the tools to have a say in the matter.

Back to the self-styled "Christians" out there: did any of these people read the New Testament? Really read it? Why do they assume that they are uniquely God's chosen? Especially: why do they assume that God only loves a few of His children?

~~~~~

Skewed History, False History

This will be old hat to professional historians out there, but the old saying goes that “history is written by the victors.” Truth is rather often not the truth in verbal form, but often not the truth even in the written format - at least the complete truth.  It’s simply the opinion of the most articulate (or loudest) person on the block... and they ALL have an agenda. That's close to saying that all truth is subjective - but not quite.

Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death-March were held up to me as a child in school as examples of Japanese war-time evil and perfidy. The Allies were the Good Guys - the saviors of civilization. However, my uncle was a personal witness to the Dresden fire-bombing of February 1945, where virtually all of the victims were civilians, deliberately massacred to demoralize a combatant nation. THAT was not discussed in MY history classes.

Ramesses The Great (Ramesses II) lost the battle of Kadesh-Barnea to Hittite forces that cleverly baited him and the Egyptian army he “led” into attacking a small Hittite force, thereby exposing him and his army to a devastating ambush. He suffered a tactical and strategic defeat that he barely survived - by abandoning his personal "Ra" Division troops to the mercies of the Hittites. You would never know this from the victory monuments that Ramesses later erected in Egypt, however. According to those monuments, Ramesses was the great victor, the father of over 100 children... and the one who wrote HIS version of history into monumental stone.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is another example.  These hideous documents have been proven repeatedly to be fraudulent - a clumsy anti-Semitic propaganda effort put to rest and then later resurrected and propagated by Nazi Germany.  With each new generation of anti-Semites, this thing has taken on a multi-generational life of its own. As Josef Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief famously said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. ”  

The full Goebbels quote is even more appalling.

Depending on who you listen to, Joseph Smith was a charlatan and a conjuror - or he was a prophet. He dictated the Book of Mormon by staring at two stones in the bottom of a hat, or he actually did translate ~30 kg of golden, minutely-inscribed plates seen and hefted by 13 people. Which version of history is correct?

I automatically discount anything written by people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, as they have a transparent agenda to uphold - and have shown no qualms about writing things about the LDS Church that I know from personal experience have long since been disproved. Other things they have each written about other people and other issues are contested by scholars as dishonest at best, fraudulent at worst.

So: what history can you trust?

I've thought a lot about this. I finally concluded that only something I could see supporting (first- or second-hand) evidence for could be considered reasonably reliable. My Uncle James’ account of Dresden is one: I know him personally to be an individual of very high personal integrity. What about supportive evidence for Joseph Smith? Journals of individuals who viewed the Gold Plates describe leafing through the pages; at least one journal describes the 8" (cubed) block of plates as weighing 60 lbs. With slight variations they all agree on details.  Besides never recanting their affidavit, there is one ancillary piece of logic we could apply. Could YOU get 11 people to sign affidavits that they saw and held gold plates - and never reneged from those statements - from your own neighborhood? We could also append to this the rapid and steady growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; it would be hard for that to happen if the premise was based on a string of lies. There are a rather high percentage of Latter-Day Saints with advanced degrees - the faith actively encourages advanced education, something inconsistent with a structure based on lies and deceit. Some people would count this, others perhaps not.

I’ve also considered my own personal experiences. As a physical scientist, I have accumulated in my personal journals a rather large series of small but cumulative evidences that ALL tell me that I’m not following a lie.  There are others that are somewhat harder to easily document, such as the strong internal self-consistency, and the utterly pragmatic doctrinal-philosophical framework underlying my faith. I still am astounded with its consistency in explaining personally-observed phenomena and the broader life-experiences of the human species. When I want answers to specific things - in Church history or in my own research efforts - I can always get them, though sometimes the answers arrive in full only years after I began searching. 

Years ago I had a friend who was troubled by certain anti-LDS writings (there seems to be a very small but focused sub-culture of people who accumulate and publish these sorts of things). He would bring one to my attention and challenge me. I would dutifully research the issue, and after a significant amount of effort I would satisfy myself that someone - for whatever suspect personal reasons - was simply out to cause damage, creating their own small Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

After awhile I concluded that this debunking effort was a huge waste of time. I suppose everyone should go through this at some time just to satisfy themselves. However, I finally concluded that from the accumulated evidence that I can see, particularly in my own life, that I need not bother anymore to even pursue these ugly things. I'm too busy cataloging my own supportive personal experiences.

I’m satisfied that I've found the truth, and am happy to just follow it. The plan now is just to endure to the end.

~~~~~

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

This sentence is attributed to the brilliant philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951).

I had seen this before and commented on the un-measurable and un-testable theory of a Multiverse (many parallel universes, of which ours is the lucky one with physical parameters finely-tuned enough to allow it to host thinking life).

I encountered the Wittgenstein quote again in a fascinating (and very nearly complete) summary of current cosmological knowledge assembled by UCLA Astronomer Ned Wright (which I highly recommend - it's short, readable, and largely non-technical).

The point that Wright was making was that if you can't ever test a theory to see if it's even true (like the Multiverse), then wisdom would suggest you don't talk about it.

Makes sense: don't talk about something you know nothing about.

I could suggest that to a number of outspoken opinionaivers who think they "know Mormonism" (sic).

Back to Wright's FAQ: it's refreshing to see this level of humility and honesty in a scientist (yes, despite what science is supposed to seek, the level of honesty among scientists is about the same as found in the general population).

However, it is just basic human nature - perhaps it's a distinguishing characteristic of human nature - to want to know more.

And actually, there IS a way to know more, much more.  Dallin H. Oaks, in an article titled "Knowledge encourages obedience, and obedience enhances knowledge." points out (a bit indirectly) that scientific testing and analysis will only work in a fairly narrow sphere of Knowledge (capital K).  He reminds us that there are other pathways to gain information over a wide range of things important to me - important to you. (Mor 10:5 and D&C 8:1-2 come to mind). The secular (narrowly-focused) world would call this sort of approach "inspiration" - such as the famous "Eureka moment" of the philosopher-scientist Archimedes.  People who have lots of these inspirations (or a few that shift paradigms significantly) are sometimes called geniuses. It does NOT mean that they are smarter than their peers - I am myself proof of that lack of correlation (I just have an unfair advantage over my secular peers). In the official story, Watson and Crick earned the Nobel Prize when they came up with the structure of DNA in 1953. Truth is, they had a lot of unacknowledged help from Rosalind Franklin. Without making a moral judgement here - the full story is probably not known to anyone living - I will just say that there are many avenues to knowledge, some more acknowledged than others (pun intended).

I have garnered an immense amount of knowledge in my life, both in my search for things of personal interest, and in my professional scientific career. The "secret" has helped me avoid years mining scientific dead ends, and has guided me past numerous research blocks. An example: I was able to finally get a marine induced polarization system operational - and earn two patents for it - by developing optical isolation and a floating ground, among other things.

The "secret"? Live your life in such a way as to open the door to these understandings coming to you. Even purely secular scientists understand most of these principles. This means being obedient to a number of "rules": (a) live a life of honesty and service to others, and (b) conduct your physical life wisely, availing yourself of existing scientific knowledge. A cynic would say that (a) is why others will often offer to help you with figuring out certain things, making certain types of necessary measurements, etc., while (b) is now established as fundamental requirements for the full functioning of the human brain. Incidentally, this particular knowledge-set was available to Latter-Day Saints in 1835, about 130 years before the Surgeon General's famous 1964 report.

There are other, even more direct sources of understanding and knowledge.

The take-home here: you can get an answer to whatever is important to you - if you are patient enough, if you are obedient enough - and if you are humble enough. For starters, do not ever consider the science you now understand as the final answer. The history of science itself will immediately paint you the fool.

~~~~~

7 June 1995

That's a very important date to me and to my family.

But first, some history. I grew up during the height of the Cold War. I still remember crouching under my desk during bomb drills in elementary school (as if...). With this terrifying threat drummed in your mind long enough - not a day seemed to go by without a short film clip of a nuclear test - it's not surprising that many people of my generation worried a lot about a nuclear holocaust. When the US and the USSR between them (mid 1970's) had sufficient nuclear devices to turn this entire planet into a cinder many times over, well, it can color your thinking.

I mostly got over it, but it started worrying me a lot again after my children were born. Should we even have children? While pondering and praying about this in 1979, a startling understanding burst into my mind. I can't articulate it better than this, but the understanding was instantaneous, and it was not in English. I had to convert it to English to share it with my wife. In short: "Don't worry. There will not be a nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR. There will be a nuclear exchange in the future, but in another, narrower venue." I was told where that other venue would be, but can only share it with my family for reasons that I need not explain to a Latter-Day Saint.

Fast forward to 1989: the USSR crumbled almost overnight after being one pole of a bipolar world (pun intended) for over 70 years. The START treaty and START II led to (by comparison, at least) dramatic reductions in nuclear stockpiles.

Fast Forward to 2004: evil incarnate, in the form of A.Q. Khan of Pakistan, stole the hardest part of nuclear weapons development - isotopic separation technology - from the Netherlands. He then shared it for huge personal bribes with Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Until they perish from this, the Pakistani people will continue to revere Khan as the Father of the Islamic Bomb. Indeed. However make no mistake about it: Khan couldn't do any of this by himself - he had nowhere near enough jets to swing it. He received nearly unlimited money for bribes and purchases from the Pakistani military, used outright theft, and voila, we have another nuclear Sword of Damocles - this time in South Asia... and in the Gulf and Eastern Mediterranean... and the South China Sea.

Flash backward to 1995: For a long time I have tried to disentangle myself from my position as deputy chief of the USGS Saudi Arabian mission. For over 30 years the Saudis have paid the USGS to map their country and do a mineral resource assessment.  For the previous four years I have been living in Jeddah, on the Red Sea, while my children have been attending boarding school in Switzerland or college in Spain and Montreal. My wife, however, has seen a steady drop in her physical health. If we go to Ireland for 10 days to do the diplomatic-passport-required annual R&R trip out of the country, her health pops back to normal. Return to the Magic Kingdom and it starts rapidly spiraling downward. I research the water supply: reverse-osmosis filtered. I check the house for mold - humidity is too low. We restrict the food to only what the US military provides through their imports at the PX in Arabian Homes - no change. I talk repeatedly to the USGS mission chief: "Jeff, we can't do without you. You are the deputy chief for science, the chief geophysicist, and head of the remote sensing section - it will take three people to replace you."

The mission chief retires in early 1995. The Saudis reject PhD scientist after PhD scientist offered by the USGS, and insist instead that the mission's finance officer - with a BA in accounting - become the next USGS mission chief. The USGS meekly complies - the Saudis have poured over $10 Billion into the US Treasury over the previous 30 years as "overhead" for the mission. George's selection may have a lot to to do with the fact that the Saudis can count on anything they ask for from him. This includes up to six pink Cadillacs (I'm not making this up) per year from him, which then disappear from both the USGS and the host agency car-pool lots. Our French counterparts are even more open about the corruption: they have hired an architect whose sole job is to design the 2nd and 3rd villas for the Assistant Deputy Minister and the Deputy Minister, so they can acquire their 2nd and 3rd co-wives respectively.

This stinks. I begin to worry that just be being a deputy mission chief, I am somehow becoming an accessory to a huge criminal enterprise. And my best friend's health is going down the tubes.

At 10:30am on 7 June 1995, I am sitting in on a nasty bureaucratic fight in the Ministry building in Jeddah. The Saudis, ever paranoid, have decided that the USGS and the BRGM are HOARDING SAUDI DATA. This first cropped up several days earlier. Understanding immediately what is happening, I call in one of the several spies assigned to my geophysics section. How do I know they are spies? They speak excellent English, have no other apparent skill set - and want to talk all the time and ask me questions. I ask Hani to go through my computer with me, and then go through every other computer in the section. I instruct him to extract all the geophysical data he can find onto floppy disks and deliver the stack to the Ministry. My French BRGM counterparts, however, are very western and are being stubbornly rational: "What?!?? Archiving IBM PC 8-bit data onto obsolete DEC-10 computer tapes, with a different OS, will jumble the bit-order and will be forever unusable. This is an exercise in stupidity!" "But Jeff Wynn did it in less than a day! What is YOUR problem?" yell back the angry Saudis.

As I tilt my chair back, bemused at this spectacle, a thought enters my mind - and it does so instantaneously. It is so clear and strong that I nearly fall out of my chair.  It is not in English - it is a crisp, diamond-hard, pure understanding : "The time to depart with your family is October. Don't worry. This is in answer to your prayers and worries over the past 18 months." Click, it ends within a microsecond of starting. This did not come from my mind, and I am astounded, shocked. It makes no sense.

90 minutes later I head home for lunch, and share this astounding experience with my wife. What could this mean? The logical time to leave - even if the USGS lets me - is in August, when the kids can start the Fall semester in school. I have another 3 hours to ponder this when the phone in my office rings. George asks if I could come downstairs to his office in the huge USGS complex.

"Jeff, I have a big problem, and don't know what to do."

Tell me. 

"I got a call at noon today from Khabiri, the Deputy Minister - that means I miss my lunch and it is done deliberately to punish me.. I got to his office and he said 'Tell Jeff Wynn to stop practicing his religion.' "I ask him what he meant? Khabiri gestured to his desk and said 'I have report after report from the Mukhabarrat (the Saudi Secret Police) that Jeff Wynn attends Christian meetings at different houses every Friday. Tell him to stop this.' "

My skin runs cold: this means I've been followed. It also means that the Assistant Deputy Minister, who covets the Deputy Minister's job, is about to use me once again with some trumped-up issue, to force the Deputy Minister down to his office during yet another weekend. The Deputy Minister is a lawyer and smart enough to know what is probably coming next. More seriously, it means that the local police are about to raid our LDS Church meeting. The local police are not told that Latter-Day Saints have authorization from Higher Up to meet with up to 35 people per house at one time. No, this is the land of the Haramain - the Two Holy Mosques - a land where theaters or other social/political gatherings of three and more people are absolutely forbidden. I have a diplomatic passport and speak sufficient Arabic to walk away from this, but the German, British, and Filipino guys will all be thrown in jail for up to several months. Their wives if present will be put in a women's prison, and any children will be put into a Saudi orphanage. It will take months to sort out, because the Saudis will not bother to call or notify anyone. The Filipinos will almost certainly be beaten repeatedly and eventually deported - at a huge economic loss to them and to their families. This is how it always happens, at least - I've searched for and found several of them among the seven jails (that we know about) in Jeddah. We routinely go searching to get them out of jail when they don't show up at Church. Usually they haven't eaten for up to 6 days by then, so I would always bring food with me.

All of this pours through my mind, but I've had more than four hours to think about this. "No problem, George, I will resign immediately and return to the domestic USGS program."

"You can't do that! This place will fall apart! I don't know jack about geology or mineral resources! I DEPEND ON YOU!"

"George, no one is irreplaceable. I will personally help the chief geologist to find the replacements. And George - you know very well that if you don't comply with this instruction, your daughter in college will NOT receive the necessary visa to come and spend the summer with you. She'll be stuck looking for a place to stay in the States."

"Oh God, you're right... you would do this for the mission ( = for me)?"

"Sure, George, I'll have the letter in your hands in 10 minutes."

I return to my office and called my former Branch Chief in the USGS Reston, VA, National Center, and explain this to him.

Klaus' reply is telling: "Wow, Jeff, we'd love to get you back - we are desperately short of people with your skill-sets. But whatever you do, delay your return until 15 October at the earliest."

"What? Why?"

"Because we will be having a RIF - a Reduction in Force - and will lose about 1,000 people from the USGS Geologic Division. You have a guaranteed re-employment clause in your Saudi agreement, but if you came back it would knock someone else off the ladder. The RIF notices will be handed out on August 15, 1995. People will have until October 15 to clear out their offices."

I ponder that.

The next day, George shakily tells me that he explained to Khabiri that I have resigned rather than stop practicing my religion. He reports that Khabiri is enraged: Why?!?? George says that, "Well, Jeff can't go to a Church like you can go to a mosque." As Khabiri stares at him, George then said this:  "Despite the teachings of the Qu'ran, no Christian Church can be built in Saudi Arabia." George reports that Khabiri screamed at him "Don't you presume to tell me what the Qu'ran teaches!" - and threw a copy of the Qu'ran at him! George says could think of nothing better to do than to beat a hasty retreat without saying anything more. He is afraid to return to the Ministry... or to answer his phone.

As the summer proceeds I learn that the full $25,000 fee for Cory's senior year at the boarding school in Laysin, Switzerland, must be paid by mid-August. The mission is more than happy to pay this, so Cory finishes his senior year with friends and has the American School in Laysin on his transcript to get into Virginia Tech. Even though his grades are good, he's an exotic - he adds diversity to the student body and is coveted by admissions officials.

In early October, my Saudi, Palestinian, Sudani, Somali, and Filipino staff put on a lavish farewell party for me. Later I realize that you don't cover an acre in the middle of a giant traffic loop with Persian carpets for ordinary parties. They present me with a gorgeous carpet as a gift, which I later learns is worth $2,600. They are quietly trying to convey a message - to me, but also to the Deputy Minister (who is not among the ~200 invited guests). For years afterward, when one of them comes to the States for training, they go out of their way to visit me.

We departed Saudi Arabia on October 9th, and we both looked around and remarked that the lights in the aircraft got suddenly brighter as we cleared Saudi airspace. We spent a paradisaical week in a Mediterranean sea-front hotel in Gammarth, Tripoli, and visited Carthage. We then spent three days in Lisbon - whose history of ocean navigation and exploration has always fascinated me - then flew on to Paris. Our multi-lingual Cory arrived that same day by Bullet Train from Switzerland to spend much of a fun-filled week with us touring the Musee d'Orsay, Montmartre, the Louvre, and the Hotel des Invalides (another special place for me).

On October 22 Cory returned to Leysin, and we flew on to Dulles Airport, where I kissed the ground, so happy to be an American. There we were met by our 22-yr-old Jared, who had just completed his LDS mission in the Czech and Slovak Republics (and now speaks 6 languages), and our 14-yr-old Don, who had flown out of Jeddah two weeks earlier to camp in our house with his older brother. It was camping, too: no furniture, no utensils, no car - just our friends the Willises providing support.  The next day I showed up at work in Reston,VA, and was given the key to a large but utterly filthy office; the previous owner had had little incentive to clean anything. It took me three days to clean it sufficiently to move my stuff in, during which I struck up a friendship with an LDS painting contractor working there. By an interesting (perhaps foreboding) coincidence, the building walls - previously color-coded to help people navigate in a huge building made up of 8 floors of 12-sided stars - was being repainted battleship gray. Government contract: the lowest bidder wins.

I have never forgotten that Bright and Shining - and instantaneous, non-English - message of 7 June 1995.

~~~~~