The House of the Lord

Disclaimer: This post is about LDS (Mormon) temples.  As such, this post will be geared toward an LDS audience.  If you're not a Latter-day Saint, feel free to read it. There's nothing secret here, but be prepared to be bored out of your mind.

Over the years, I've had a somewhat complicated relationship with the temple of the Lord.

When I was baptized and received the Aaronic priesthood, I was able to go to the temple to do baptisms and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.  I felt like I really had a connection to those who had passed on and like I was doing something that was good and right in the eyes of God.  That experience was also the topic on which I gave my first sacrament talk.

The Denver Colorado Temple

I went on another couple of trips to the temple to do baptisms and I felt equally awesome about those.  However, as they always do, things changed.  When I was called to not serve, it also meant that I would not be taking out my own endowments when I was 19, as most young men do.  I would have to wait.  I went to BYU in the fall, and went to do baptisms a couple of times at the Provo temple.  As much as the workers in that temple tried, they just couldn't make me feel welcome.  Each time I went, I had to explain, in gross detail, why I wasn't going on a mission to like seven different ancient dudes who couldn't hear.  I felt sad and demoralized in a place where I was supposed to feel the greatest joy.  The last time I went to do baptisms for the dead was in about March of 2008, over 4 years ago.

Would I tell you a story if it didn't have a happy resolution?  The answer is yes, but that isn't the case this time around.

A few weeks ago, my bishop realized that I hadn't actually been through the temple, despite being the ward clerk.  That's not a rule, it's just a generally accepted practice.  Unendowed men are chosen to be ward clerks about as often as women are chosen to be ward mission leaders, but that's a total tangent.  The next week, my bishop had the executive secretary set up an appointment with me.  I figured that we'd start the long road to preparing for me to go the temple, but when I walked in, my bishop talked a little about the temple ceremonies, asked me the interview questions, and filled out a living ordinance recommend for me.  It took a little effort, but I got the stake president's signature as well and I was ready to go.

This last Wednesday, I went through the temple for the first time to take out my own endowments.  I went with my dad and my best friend during my time in Provo, Hyrum, who flew out especially for the occasion.  After many years of living with and being around the endowed, I was very well-prepared for the ordinances that took place in the temple.  Several people told me that it would be weird and/or slightly difficult to do it the first time, but it all came very intuitively to me and I enjoyed the whole thing.  Despite not trying particularly hard to remember the elements of the ceremony, I have a great memory at this time in my life, and I felt like I remember quite a bit.  While I was there I recaptured some of that zeal that I'd had when I was a new convert and was able to go do baptisms for the first time.  I feel like the temple changed my life a little bit that day, and that it will change my life a lot as I continue to go back.  I look forward to going to the temple again many times in the future and trying to dissect and glean all the elements of the ceremonies.  I also look forward to being sealed to an eternal companion in that holy house, whenever that might come.

At the temple with Hyrum... and his gold medal.

The temple is the house of God here upon the earth.  It has taken me years longer to get there than I ever thought it would, but now that I've seen it, I know that it was worth the wait.  In fact the blessings of the temple are worth whatever sacrifice must be made.  The sacrifices of time and money are often concerns, but these are often small, especially for saints in North America.  The sacrifice of sin may be one that is much more difficult to make.  The Lord has asked us to give up certain behaviors in exchange for those that will bring us greater happiness.  If we are like King Lamoni and are willing to give away all our sins so that we can come to know God, we will greatly blessed and will be able to find this happiness eventually.  We must give up our sins in order to enter the temple and participate in the sacred ordinances that take place therein.  I testify that the blessings of the temple are worth it and will bring you to a state of everlasting happiness.

I know that this is the case for me.

The Marriage Relationship

I should probably start this post with the disclaimer that I've never been married and will undoubtedly not be married within the next year.  However, I've gathered some things from eternal truth revealed from God, the observation of other people's marriages, and the wisdom that I've accumulated over the last 23+ years of life on this Earth, so I think I have a pretty good basis to make the commentary that I'm about to.  Also, if this doesn't reflect the reality of things as they are, I will gladly live a life of celibacy and never think about any woman ever again.

There are two things that I absolutely hate to hear from married people.  The first is almost irrelevant and the second is of dire importance, such that I believe that the eternal life of man and woman rides upon it.

First, I really hate it when married people say, "Oh my gosh, I married the (wo)man of my dreams."  All I can think is, "Really?  You had the entirety of your imagination at your disposal, and *that's* what you came up with?  I'm disappointed."  If you married the person of your dreams, I applaud you on keeping your expectations low, but I have to wonder about your sense of creativity and imagination (and I'm an engineer).  Like I said, this is almost irrelevant, but I felt like I should share as long as we're on the topic of things I hate hearing married people say.

The second is far more common and far more important.  I really hate hearing married people say, "My [spouse] made me do [insert activity name here]," or "My [spouse] doesn't let me [insert activity here]."  I hear this most often from men speaking of their wives.  I assume it's usually in jest, but sometimes I have to wonder if the speaker actually believes it.

I find this to be patently false the vast majority of the time.  I don't think I've ever seen a person being physically forced to do something by their spouse.  I'm positive that it happens in certain situations, but that's the topic for another post (yeah right, not on this blag).  I think that, in the vast majority of cases, the true reasoning can actually be boiled down to two possibilities.  A better way of saying this would be either, "I fear the natural and/or contrived consequences that would be imposed if I (don't) [insert activity here],"  or "I am (refraining from) [insert activity here] because I love my [spouse] and am willing to make that sacrifice."

While the first statement is sufficient to keep a marriage relationship together and both members reasonably happy, it should be made clear that the second statement is the higher law.  For example, it's good for a man to say, "I'm not going to go out on a boat with a pair of hookers and a briefcase full of blow because I'm afraid that my wife would shoot me in the junk and take half my stuff."  That will, indeed, keep a marriage together and keep both members relatively happy.  However, it's much better if that man was to say, "I'm not going out on a boat with hookers and blow because I sincerely love my wife and it would break her heart. (And I don't want to give her herpes!)"  I use such an extreme example because "I'm not allowed to go out on a boat with hookers and blow," just sounds ludicrous.  Feel free to substitute a more appropriate example to your life.

The gospel of Jesus Christ teaches men and women that personal sacrifice is an essential part of happiness in this life and vital to the life hereafter.  To love someone is essentially to willingly make sacrifices for their benefit.  Christ performed the ultimate act of love when he laid down his life so that we could live eternally.  We should do the same in our lives and our marriages.  I believe that it is by small and simple sacrifices each day that we show love for one another and that we should not frame these sacrifices as acts of compulsion in our speech.  If you're doing something because you love your spouse, you should say it that way. In reality, no one can force their spouse, or anyone else, to do something contrary to their own will.  If you're doing or refraining from doing something, it's because you are making a choice to do so; and hopefully this choice is motivated by love rather than fear of consequences, though both are sufficient.

If and when I get married, this will be my approach to marriage.  I refuse to approach it any other way, and I will ask my wife to strive to approach our marriage the same way.  And, as I stated before, if I'm totally off base on this, I will gladly join a monastery.  That's just how I roll.

A Secret Combination

A few weeks ago, I received an email from someone associated with the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) about joining the Order of the Engineer.  This organization is a group of engineers who take an oath to be ethical in their designs, and to generally do what is right and best for the profession.  All who have graduated with at least a bachelor's degree in engineering are welcome to join.  The members of this organization wear a stainless steel (or wrought iron in Canada) ring on the pinky finger of their dominant hand to remind them of the oath they've made.

The Engineer's Ring

I thought it was a good idea in principle, but something felt just slightly off about it (in addition to the fact that I'm allergic to Chromium (II) Oxide).  I then read the Order of the Engineer website about the engineer's ring itself:

"In Canada, the Engineer’s Ring is a wrought iron ring accepted by engineers inducted into the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer in a secret ceremony."

And it struck me that this order was basically a group who had covenanted to do good, but not in the name of the Lord.  Though this group is almost entirely harmless in both the temporal and eternal scheme of things, it still qualifies as a secret combination.

As a latter-day saint, I believe that I've made a set of covenants of a higher order that includes not only ethical design behavior, but a strict moral code to go along with it.  My hesitance to join the Order of the Engineer was inspired by my oath to do good not only in the sight of society, but also in the eyes of God.  I've been called not only to honestly design things to the best of my ability, but also to abstain from substance abuse and sensuality, to help those who cannot help themselves, and to do all that the Lord asks of me.  The covenants of the Gospel of Christ are inclusive of those made by the Order of the Engineer and include many others.

Even though the Order of the Engineer is a secret combination, I still liked the idea of wearing a ring on one's dominant hand to remind him or her of their obligation to society and/or to God.  Then I was hit with a stroke of genius inspiration.  Mormons have a very similar thing called a CTR ring, (for Choose The Right, a popular hymn that almost all members know by heart) which are often made of silver.  Though it is not directly associated with the covenants made, it can be worn to remind one to do what it right.  So, I bought one and and now wear it on my right pinky finger.

A CTR ring.  Not quite the same as the one I got.

And, as a disclaimer, despite the abominable label I've given to Order of the Engineer, I actually think it's a great organization that encourages engineering ethics, particularly for those who aren't necessarily religious.  You should join if you're interested... and have at least a bachelor's degree in engineering... and aren't allergic to Chromium (II) Oxide.

A Child's Game

When people first meet me, they are often led to the conclusion that my favorite sport is football.  During the fall, I eat, sleep and breathe college football and my emotions for the next weeks are directly impacted by the results of the BYU Cougars football game the previous weekend.  I can also throw and catch a football like nobody's business and at 6'2" and a hair over 250 lbs, I look the part.

However, football is not the sport with which I feel the strongest connection, though it's a close second.  That distinction belongs to the quintessential American child's game, baseball.  Though most people find it boring and there's something of a lack of athletic prowess to the game, it's captivated my heart since I was very young.

I still remember the first professional baseball game that I ever went to.  Our neighbors had come across several tickets to a game between the Colorado Rockies and the visiting Kansas City Royals.  They weren't going to be able to go, so they gave them to my dad, who accepted and took me down to downtown Denver to see the game.  I don't remember many of the circumstances of the game, but I remember that I got to see Larry Walker and that the Rockies won 13-3.  Clearly they hit well and pitched decently... which is pretty much their M.O. most of the time.  Since then, I've been to many more games and have seen the Rockies win the majority of them.

Many of my fondest birthday memories were in Coors Field watching the Rockies take on various opponents.  I've been to numerous games either on my birthday or in close temporal proximity to it.  Last year, my mom even spotted me and one of my best friends tickets to the MLB All Star game in Arizona, which was the day after my birthday.  I feel fairly confident that this will remain one of my most cherished birthday memories throughout my life. Let's just say it'll take a lot to unseat it from the #1 slot.

One of the biggest reasons I like baseball more than any other sport is that I played it for several years.  I still remember Mrs. McGriff handing out flyers for Northern Lights Little League to her 3rd grade class.  It took a little bit of persuasion to get my mother on board, but she eventually came around.  Sometimes I played better than others... and I was in right field more than a few times, but I see the whole as a positive experience.

Though I'm a big fan of football, hockey, rugby, and lacrosse, there will always be an extra-special place in my heart for the sport of baseball.  I love watching the game and I probably love playing it even more. It captivated me when I was young and it will continue to captivate me well into the future. 

Go Rockies!  :)

Grad School Lessons, Take 2

As I finish up the winter quarter at Oregon State University, I've been able to pause an look back on the things that I've learned over the last 3 months.

• Sometimes you have to throw out style points and just grind through it.  Because I've already blagged twice about structural dynamics, I won't go into too much detail.  Suffice it to say that it wasn't pretty, but I managed to get through it by little more than pure tenacity.  And I'd even say that I learned a thing or two in the process.
• Only trust people to do your work as far as you can throw them.  This term, I had one class for which the homework was too be done in pairs.  My partner was a not-too-bright structural major (see previous post) who was in his last term and had already mostly moved to Portland.  Needless to say, I didn't trust him too much with the workload.  I let him spin his wheels on certain parts of the assignments, but in the end, I fixed everything that he did wrong and made sure that it was all up to my standards before turning it in.
• You'll probably adjust to your surroundings, eventually.  I already felt pretty comfortable at Oregon State when I walked through the doors, but it still took some adjustment from life at home and at BYU.  After six months, Corvallis pretty much feels like home (minus the spatially convenient Wal-Mart) and I've even gotten used to smell of coffee that penetrates the entire OSU campus.
• Sometimes, self motivation is hard to find.  Before I started grad school, I read most of the archive of Ph.D. comics and chronicled the pronounced theme of procrastination and not working all that urgently on research.  When you've got over a year (or several if you're a Ph.D. candidate,) to complete your research, there's a tendency in most people to put it off and read the College Football Nation blog on ESPN instead.  I'll finish the rest of this point later...
• Calling in sick isn't always an option.  I was sick for like the last quarter of this quarter (a sixteenth, if you will).  It wasn't anything out of the ordinary; just a common cold and/or upper respiratory infection.  However, it was quite miserable.  My throat burned and I was tired all the time as my immune system tried valiantly to stave off the illness. Then it somehow managed to skip right past my sinuses and go straight to my ears, causing swelling and mucus buildup that left me all but deaf for the last 2 weeks.  In a 10-week quarter, it's not possible to just take a week or two off.  I just had to suck it up, take lots of cough syrup, and ask people to speak up so that I could hear them.

Overall, this term wasn't too bad.  My first grade has even been posted; I got an A in my advisor's class.  Spring term holds Earth Structures (Seepage and Consolidation), Earth Retention, and Bridge Design, but I'm not going to think about that too much until after Spring break.  

Straining at a Gnat

Near the beginning of my undergraduate soil mechanics class, the instructor taught us the mnemonic device "Structural Engineers are Weird Guys" to help us remember the equation S*e = w*Gs.  It was hilarious and it will help me to remember that equation until my dying day.  (It was also ironic, considering that this guy was like the alpha nerd, but that's a story for another day.)  In my experience with structural engineers, there is a very bimodal distribution of capability in engineering among them.  They're all either really bright and capable engineers, or quite engineering challenged.  There are almost no average engineers (so to speak) in the mix.

Yesterday, I felt like I got to experience both ends of this distribution simultaneously.  In my structural dynamics class, the professor showed us the computer model of a 12-story reinforced concrete building in Berkeley, California that he had been working on for several months.  He had gone to great ends to carefully model all of the columns, slabs, and shear walls in this building.  He built a 3-dimensional computer model that had thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lines of code to carefully track all of the components of the response of this fairly complex building to an earthquake that actually happened in the area in 1989.  On an ordinary personal computer, the analysis of the response of this structure to maybe 20 seconds of earthquake motion took the better part of a month to complete.  The instructor of my class then wrote probably another couple thousand lines of code to make a graphical presentation of the numbers he was coming up with.  This presentation was slick, too.  He had a model of the skeletal structure of the building in both 2D and 3D moving according to the model outputs along with graphs of the accelerations, displacement, forces, and moments in the building all varying simultaneously as the model time progressed.  I've included a low-quality (i.e. one that won't have the sponsors of this research seeking out my name to put on the cease and desist order) picture of this graphical representation.  It took not only a good bit of intelligent thought, but quite a bit of dedication to make this high-quality of model.

Crazy-complicated model with rigid base.

So what's wrong with it that I say it's both smart and dumb at the same time?  Like many other analyses that structural engineers perform, the instructor of my class used a rigid base on this model.  Basically, he assumed that the soil on which the structure sits is much stiffer than the materials used in the building.  Indeed, he assumed that something commonly referred to as "Bay Mud" is significantly stiffer than concrete and steel.  I'd think this next part would be pretty intuitive, but I'll spell it out anyway: that's a terrible assumption.

Yes, I am a geotechnical engineer, and, like most geotechnical engineers, I think that the soil on which a structure sits deserves much more attention than it often gets.  And yes, soil-structure interaction is the topic of my research and I am a little biased in that sense, but hear me out.

I know that the effects of the soil that supports a structure can often be neglected for simple structures that are subjected to simple loading.  Under these conditions, the effects of soil-structure interaction don't warrant an in-depth geotechnical analysis for the design of the structural members.  (There should still be some investigation for shear strength and settlement, but not necessarily for structural design.)  However, a 12-story reinforced concrete building is not a simple structure, neither is earthquake loading a simple load case.  I really can't justify, in my mind, spending months to build an enormously complicated model that doesn't reflect reality as much as is reasonable because I've omitted a key factor that clearly affects the reality of the situation.  If I'm going to go to all the trouble of building a crazy-complicated structural model, I would at least try to model some flexibility in the soil.  It would make the analysis much more reflective of reality and would probably only add a few hours to an analysis that's already going to take several weeks to run anyway. 

I respect structural engineers.  I think that the work they do in practice and in academia is just as important as the work that other engineers, including geotechnical engineers, to society.  However, they, like other engineers, often make very complicated, precise analyses for structural members while, at the same time, minimizing or totally ignoring important constraints and boundary conditions.  I think it's important for all engineers to take a step back occasionally and look at the entire scope of the system they're designing instead of focusing so intently on the one specialized concept to which they are assigned to attend.  This way, we, as engineers, can avoid straining (pun intended) at a gnat and swallowing a camel in our designs.

A Dynamic Relationship

This term in school, I'm taking a class that has challenged me more than any academic pursuit has in while.  This class is called structural dynamics.

At its core, structural dynamics is simple: it's merely the analysis of structures like buildings and bridges as they move.  However, the devil is in the details.  Even to analyze the response of a structure to a well-behaved loading pattern is fairly complex.  This endeavor involves use of 2nd order differential equations to solve an equation of force equilibrium called the 'equation of motion.'

Earthquake motions are not well-behaved like a sine wave or an impulse.  These involve complex motion with many cusps and various frequencies of vibration.  What it comes down to is that, in order to make even a remotely reasonable approximation of a structure's response to earthquake loading, an engineer must use some sort of mathematical computer program and an approximate numerical model.

Up to this point, the advanced math and numerical models themselves haven't been what's made the class challenging.  It has been laborious trying to remember material that I studied 3 years ago (and never learned that well to being with), but this hasn't been the worst part.  The thing that has made this class challenging is that, even though the equations used are based on physical principles, it's difficult to visualize how changes in one particular parameter will affect the model of the actual, physical structure.  Engineers as a whole, and especially civil engineers, like to be able to visualize what they're working with.  A good civil engineer will be able to conjure a mental picture of an entire physical system, all of its component parts, and how physical changes will modify the system and its components.  This is often very difficult if not outright impossible to do with many of the principles of structural dynamics because they are based on advanced mathematics.

This is also why mathematical proofs and coding were a challenge for me during my undergrad and so far in grad school.  With mathematical proofs, it's also difficult to find motivation, because honestly, who cares?  Coding, on the other hand, is an integral part of life for anyone who doesn't aspire to a career that involves french fries and/or garbage.  Both of these fields are quite ethereal and don't necessarily have any convenient visual representation for many problems.  I've developed some simple visual representations for principles of coding like if statements and loops, but I still find them challenging.  I will never be a l337 coder as much as I will be a good civil engineer, just because coding is, at least somewhat, inherently unvisualizable.

I should also mention that my professor in structural dynamics is new (like received his Ph.D. in December new) this term and is still trying to feel out the landscape.  The homework assignments have been long and the exam was difficult to decipher.  The professor is a good teacher, but he just doesn't have a good idea yet of how much time is takes students to finish assignments when they're new to the concepts.  I think he'll get it, but he's not quite there yet.  Though, he has assured us that we will get at least Bs if we give the appropriate effort, so I think I'm going to make it.  : )

The moral of the story?  Knowing how you learn and how you reason through concepts is important if you want to optimize your learning and become more knowledgeable with minimal effort.  I learn and reason through things by visualizing them.  Things that are difficult to visualize will take slightly more effort to grasp, and I'm planning on being prepared when they come around.