Between quasar and quark, between angel and animal

Florida State University offers a nice animation of
“Powers of Ten,” a variation of the animated film that Charles and Ray Eames made in conjunction with their
book Powers of Ten.

There we find our place evenly distant between quasars and quarks–between the gigantic and the minute. (At least logarithmically, which is the point of the book’s title.)

My pastor’s sermon this morning was on Psalm 90:12Psalm 90:12
English: World English Bible - WEB
12?So teach us to number our days, That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

, “Teach us to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” The number of my days is a couple of gigaseconds, somewhere between a terasecond and a picosecond

Psalm 8 puts humans in the middle too. “What is man that Thou art mindful of him? … Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor. … Thou made him to have dominion over … the beasts.” We are neither angel nor animal.

I think about being in the middle a lot. My September alumni magazine, Technology Review, had two article that reminded me of that. One article mentioned how hard parallel programming is for humans. But programming in zeros and ones is hard too! We talk to machines best in the middle distance between very high-level concepts and very low level concepts.

Another article mentioned that we fare best psychologically in the middle distance between boredom and anxiety, called “the flow” by the psychologist with the unpronouncable name Mihály Csikszentmihályi. (Here you go, with X as in German ach or Scottish loch: mi XALE ee tshick shent mi XALE ee.)

His diagram summarizes his book.

I became a teacher to stand in the middle. “To teach” is a ditransitive verb: I teach a student a subject. I bridge the gap between the subject and the student.

Jesus is the Man in the middle, my Mediator. I think of that a lot.