Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution: Letters to an Atheist

Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution: Letters to an Atheist by Ray Comfort

After a somewhat lively and candid discussion regarding my own atheism, a friend dropped by with this book asking if I’d give it a look see and we could discuss.

Before I even begin reading this book I must note that I’m starting from the point of view that the two areas being debated are not even within the same realm. Intelligent Design (ID) is not a science, it is rather a poorly cloaked version of creationism. It is a faith-based approach to explaining the origin of man and the world and universe around us. It presumes a designer, usually due to the logical fallacy that the proponent of ID is incapable of conceiving that the wonders that we observe could come about by selective pressures that are neither sentient nor singularly directed.

Evolution is a science-based approach to explaining, not the “why” of man and our environment but rather the “How” and “What”. Evolution does not encompass the “Origin of the Universe”, that is the purview of cosmology. But, once the universe exists, evolution deals with how something as wondrous as a bug, not to mention a man would come into being.

Someone having faith in a higher being is not an issue to me. But I do take issue with extending that faith to making claims about the real world. Faith, as meant in the “I believe in a higher power that exists outside of space and time and it gives me comfort” has no place in science by definition it is untestable and subjective. Once you fall back on “because of X then Y happens, but you don’t have to worry why X happens because God made it so”, then you put the brakes on research and can smugly assert you now have all the answers. It is simply a conversation stopper.

A great quote that I heard recently was meant to disparage evolution, instead it turns out to be a keenly insightful expression of exactly what evolution is all about. I’m sorry I cannot attribute it, if you can tell me the author I’ll gladly update this entry, but he said “Helium is an odorless, colorless gas that, if given enough time, turns into people”.

If you can wrap your head around what that implies, then you are on your way towards understanding evolution.

Our brains evolved to deal with time scales that are on the order of generations. 25 years is a pretty significant amount of time for us. Enough to be born, educated, marry and start a family of your own. 50 Years will get you grandchildren, put you on the brink of your autumn years and set you in your ways. 75 years will put you well into retirement, surround you with great-grandchildren and have you marvelling at the incredible changes that you’ve seen in your lifetime. Most people do not make it to 100 years.

I don’t know how old you are but I do know that, regardless of your age, you can cite examples of significant change that’s occurred within your own lifetime. Be it that your favorite computer game has seen several great new sequels released or maybe you’ve witnessed several world wars, seen the advent of Penicillin and witnessed the fall of the U.S.S.R. arguably one of the most powerful nations that the earth has ever seen. Nearly all of us can probably name species of animals that have gone extinct. Change happens. A lot of it. And it’s happening all of the time and it happens very rapidly.

We do not live in any special time. There are events going on right now that will shape this planet economically, socially and even geologically for generations to come. There have *always* been events going on with similar impacts. Talk to people in cold-war or mid-depression America or the U.K. at its colonizing peak or in Rome as Nero came to power or in Egypt as the they were laying one of their Pharaohs in his tomb and all would tell you that events of incredible magnitude were taking place at that moment and they would all be right. We still feel the effects of many of these events rippling through our world, be it in the spacing of train tracks (ever wonder why the rails are that far apart?), the currency that we use, or the nuclear arsenal that the United States of America houses.

All of human history, every iota of it is encompassed in a period spanning perhaps 30,000 to 60,000 years (maybe 200,000 years depending how you define mankind). RECORDED history, where we actually have human-recorded records of events that happened, span only a fraction of that time. Beginning with the first cave-man drawings and culminating so far with the latest mash-up videos on YouTube.

This familiar map humorously highlights our propensity to see our immediate environment in detail and to compress everything else into the background.

Darwin’s Finches took scant years to differentiate into distinct species. What do you think could happen over one thousand years? Ten Thousand? One Hundred Thousand? One Million? And at one million years, we’re *still* only talking about vastly less than one four thousandth of the time the planet earth has existed.

We routinely reject all this and demand a simple, pat answer that we can get our head around. The irony is that this answer often comes in the form of a supernatural being that is responsible for everything that exists but must itself be so awesome and terribly powerful that we cannot even consider it without recoiling.

Why do we need the middleman? The difference between such a being, whose thoughts are so meta that they are unknowable to us, and a universe where we have an incomplete understanding (and that’s putting it mildly) is… none. If you do not understand all the variables in an equation, you cannot predict the outcome, if you cannot know the mind of God then you also cannot predict the outcome.

But back to the book. I must say I found it a difficult read. The writing style was exactly what you would expect from hastily crafted emails cobbled together into a book. The arguments are not well reasoned and the tone is, at times, belligerent on both sides. There is a lot of context missing (presumably previous emails that were not included to save space or were deemed not relevant or obvious). This is especially obvious when they accuse each other of misinterpreting earlier statements to which we have no access.

I note some points of interest below but I’m not really intent on debating the issue as I don’t believe there is any issue at all. You believe in God, you’re spiritual, that’s great. You believe in science, you’re rational, that’s great too. You’re both, that can work and that’s great. But don’t pull out a bible or any other holy book and wave it in the air as authoritative proof for anything physically manifest in the world. Tangible reality is within the realm of science and subject to proof by the scientific method.

I am not finding Mr. Franz’s defense of Evolution very cogent. The fact that Ray Comfort chose to debate Evolution with someone who is also a lay person rather than someone with a solid grounding in science does little to raise the argument beyond that of an uninformed barroom discussion.

It’s pretty obvious from the outset that this is not a “debate” in any sense of the word. Franz sends wordy protestations to Comfort hoping for something that he can use against ID, Comfort coyly refuses to rise to the bait and pithily makes related but only mildly relevant statements in response.

The very first paragraph of the book looms large in its ignorance of the evidence in support of evolution. In addition to the fossil record (which has gone beyond those early, stupid hoaxes) there is the much more comprehensive evidence in the molecular biology realm which is not even mentioned.

I suppose it’s redundant of me to point out the use of other “theories” such as that of “Entropy” used in support of ID are, after all, just theories :). Yet Mr. Comfort has no problem using them as fact in his arguments.

Further, misuse of “Entropy” as an argument against evolution is a common misconception. Just like lay people misinterpret “Global Warming” to mean “every spot on the planet is going to be warmer” so it is with “Entropy”. Within a system, “the universe”, entropy can carry on completely undiminished by localized regions of increasing order. The increasing order is always accompanied by the input of energy. Thus a leaf producing sugars from less ordered materials could be argued to violate the principals represented by entropy if you discount or ignore the larger picture of that enormous fusion reactor hanging over our heads driving the process forward. In the cold depths of interstellar space you may see the effects of uniform entropy, but that is certainly not the case here within our little nuclear powered solar system.

I do have to say I *did* like Franz’s dare to Comfort to test his faith through cyanide…

Footnote 10 – logical fallacy of argument from final consequences.. The sun’s just far enough and just close enough for us to exist. Therefore it was put there for the purpose of creating life here.

Footnote 21 – Cute, but for the atheist the bullets in this Russian roulette analogy are also imaginary.

A lot of interesting logic in rationalizing why a benevolent God would condemn non-believers to hell. My favorite one is the analogy of the law of gravity and failure to believe in a parachute being akin to the law of God and failure to believe… well Ray doesn’t say in what exactly… nor does he indicate where this law of God comes from (God…). He is absolving God of the responsibility for creating a system that punishes folks who do not abide by it. To me this is fine, God gets to set the rules. Don’t be inconsistent about who is ultimately responsible for them. Your “crimes” are not the cause of you going to jail, rather it is the laws that define your actions as crimes and, let’s face it, actually getting caught, that get you sentenced. Similarly, God creates the laws and defines what is and is not acceptable. He’s all seeing and all powerful so you don’t really stand a hope of getting away with anything (amazes me that devout Christians try) and so you are condemned at your final reckoning. By God.

Footnote 32 – Dr. Hovind appears to be a pretty muddled thinker. His $250,000 challenge is riddled with inaccuracies from the get-go. Most glaring of this is that he doesn’t seem to realize that the science of evolution has nothing to do with the creation of the universe.

OK, I’ve got to stop commenting on the footnotes now. The statements are so completely ludicrous it would take me hours to refute them all, once I saw the classic “Chicken or the Egg” argument in Footnote 39 I realized there was really no hope of keeping up. As with most ID debates / arguments – the most effective strategy is to pepper the argument with so many known bad arguments that there is positively no hope to address them all. The audience and the debater become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of time it would take to scrutinize and dismiss each invalid point. It comes down to, not a lack of evidence, but a lack of bladder size (for anybody who’s ever attended a meeting after having too much soda at lunch…).

We keep falling into the trap of believing that we must have all the answers RIGHT NOW. And if we cannot explain all the details about something then we must make the leap out of the realm of tangible science into the supernatural. Many years ago, before germ theory was understood, God punished the wicked by visiting plagues upon them. I’m pretty thankful that we didn’t just give up and pray at that point but rather figured out what we didn’t know and then developed antibiotics and vaccines. The egocentricity of mankind to believe that, just because we happen to be alive at this point in time means that this is the be all and end all and all answers must be available to us is simply astounding. We are a tiny chapter on a vast continuum that stretches immeasurably into the distant past and will stretch into the promising, hope-filled future. Let’s stop stifling that growth and wonder by arrogantly claiming that we are at the very pinnacle of knowledge and participate in the process to ensure that the riches visited upon future generations will be at least as glorious as those that have been visited upon our own by the scientific giants that preceded us.

*groan* more proof that Mr. Franz is completely out of his element. When he begins to talk about “trillions” of years – even though just in a hypothetical sense – he’s doing a disservice to the magnitude (and reality) of the universe’s age being only in the tens of billions of years. This also highlights our inability to deal with such big numbers. You would never confuse “ten” years with “one hundred” years when describing when an event took place and that’s merely one order of magnitude of difference. “Billions” to “Trillions” represented THREE orders of magnitude. Or the difference between your birthday last year and the birth of Christ 2,000 years ago…

Of course Mr. Comfort’s response at this point does nothing to promote the idea that these two are even arguing two sides of the same coin when he responds “I believe that the chances of life simply occurring are nil. Zilch. Non-existent. Zip.”. That pretty much ends the argument as far as I can see. You have science on the one hand with evidence and theories and faith on the other hand with belief and feeling. If neither acknowledges the other, then you are certainly not going to be able to sway the other side much less come to middle ground.

Mr. Comfort later tries to confuse the definition of faith (page 49) by equating it with having faith in one’s computer. I would suggest that having faith in something because you’ve seen it work before and can consistently get the same results to occur for the same actions is different than having the kind of faith where one believes something in the absence of tangible proof. The latter is very often touted as being “real” faith that a “true” believer exhibits and is considered more noble. Again, in the spiritual realm that’s fine. But having faith in something that is demonstrably false is not something I can laud.

On page 53 Mr. Comfort, while relating the story of how he became a religious person, muses “I remember wondering why I instinctively said “My God…””. I think it should be clear to most people that our epithets are derived primarily from our environment. Hurling the Shakespearean “I bite my thumb at thee” insult would, today, bring peals of laughter from the intended victim. “My God” or similar invectives have meaning, not because they are significant in their own right, but rather because they are understood by all involved to have a particular meaning. An Egyptian slave yelling “Jesus Christ!” when upset about something would have received a remarkably different response than would someone in Roman Catholic Quebec in the 1800’s or again even today.

Later Mr. Comfort uses a classic argument from incredulity with his statement “It made no sense at all that everything I held dear to me was going to be ripped from my hands by something much greater than me-death”. He goes on to lament that science is spending so much effort on pursuits other than resolving the problem of death. It is pretty clear that Mr. Comfort does not appreciate a) the wondrous diversity of life on this planet (regardless of its origin) would naturally lead to folks exploring mysteries for which he has no appreciation and b) that there is a tremendous amount of progress that can be made in narrow areas of science by applying knowledge gained in any number of disparate areas.

Frankly, I enjoyed the description of how Mr. Comfort came to Christianity and what it meant for him. I have personally flirted with such experience when I was in University and will agree that it is definitely something that our psyche is built to crave. It is the extension of this spirituality into the real world in the form of terrible restrictions based on 2000 year old ideas of the universe that is very repugnant to me. Also, any institution that is based on human honesty and character MUST have checks and balances to protect against those of bad character and those with lapses in their normally good character. Ordinary, fallible folks raising themselves up to be God’s righteous representative here on earth are simply begging for corruption.

Footnote 84 is so egregious that I simply have to point out that the very “flaw” in science that Mr. Comfort highlights – the fact that theories can change as new evidence is determined – is, in fact, its greatest asset. By not assuming we have all the answers and by integrating new information into theories as it becomes available scientists can get closer and closer to describing and understanding reality. Conversely (and perversely), simply stating that something is so because it is in a two thousand year-old book and refusing to acknowledge new understanding and new discoveries is exactly what a theocratic approach to “science” is all about. It is an argument from authority making statements that are demonstrably incorrect and ends up castigating those that dare question the “science” as god has stated it.

Overall the book is an OK read if you already have a grounding in science. It certainly adds nothing to the argument for intelligent design (ID). ID can generously be called an “opinion” but has nothing more credible than that standing behind it. Filtering through the morass of arguments on both sides one may be able to gain some insight into why folks may choose to be religious or not. But, as that was not the book’s point, I felt it did not achieve its goal.

USB Gun Turret Demo

This reminds me of that hysterically odd idea that was once proffered where folks could hunt big game by remote control. I forget whether it was actually an African Safari type of thing or whether it was just “shoot at yer local wildlife” but the notion of hunting from your computer desk was certainly a novel and sorry one.

Going a step further, I suppose you could now hunt deer or whatever using your mobile phone while commuting to work. “Gee officer, I didn’t see that car in front of me, I was lining up on a 10 pointer…”

This little invention does bring up a good point. There are a lot of security systems that will let you know something is wrong at home but then the best you can do is log in and watch the place burn down or be robbed.

Imagine coupling this with a hose.

Of course I don’t have any issues with using it as the inventor has designed it. Shooing off some bored teenagers who have broken into your house would be awfully satisfying. Even better if you could shoot them with a paintball gun loaded with some kind of indelible ink so that the perpetrators could be marked in the same way as banks mark robbers with those exploding dye packs.

Whatever your opinion of this, you have to agree it’s pretty sophisticated.

Renovations – Overall update 2

Continuing with the renovations pictures.

We also added 5 new can lights to the living room along with 3 accent lights

In process:

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And when the job was done:

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And we added a couple of can lights to the kitchen to fill in some dim spots from our initial foray into can lighting there. I had them sectioned off so we can control those over the computer desk, the island and the sink separately.

In process:

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Done:

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and if you recall the square hole that’s been in the ceiling over the sink for the past year, that’s gone now!

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And here are Wayne and his assistant from Precision Electric Co. who did the lighting as well as the wiring for the master bathroom and for the tankless water heater area.

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Here is the new bathtub roughed in:

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and the commode area:

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Note the extra support that’s being incorporated for safety rails on the back wall.

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And a few days later

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and progressing, these pictures were taken at the end of each day. You have no idea of the amount of thought and planning that went in to placing the soap dishes such that the pattern lined up properly with them:

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Here are some gratuitous pictures of the medicine cabinets as they are roughed in:

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And a shot of the “before” version of our master bedroom window:

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Finally, here are some shots of the laundry room progress. If you’ll recall we removed the hot water tank from there so we could then remove the little separating wall that hid it.

It cost me $1,530 to route the plumbing from the nearby aquarium up through the attic and into the laundry room to replace the plastic pipes that used to lead from the old water tank.

Here is with the sheetrock gone and the plumbing roughed in.

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Now the sheetrock has been put in place ready for painting.

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Mostly done, just need to replace the floor and do a final paint job. It’s not obvious in this picture but the utility sink we added is positioned between the washer and the dryer. Mostly so you wouldn’t be able to see it from the dining area / kitchen.

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Tommy won’t be doing any work tomorrow so I’ll be posting the work from the past two days tomorrow or Saturday and then I’ll just post the progress as we go forward.

Our replacement windows are supposed to arrive on Monday. I expect that will be fairly exciting, we’re really looking forward to the much wider master bedroom window. It’s one of the very few South facing windows in our home

I should point out that we’re *very* happy with the work so far. It’s certainly not cheap, but both Tommy and Larry are thoughtful, careful craftsmen who know their trade(s). They clean up after themselves each day which Michelle especially appreciates, and they work with a professionalism that is pretty hard to find nowadays.

Another great thing is that *they* actually do the work. It’s not like they price the work and then send a bunch of low-payed, low skilled folks in to do the job. They are the ones you see each day and they know what they’re doing.

If you’re wondering that’s Turner General Contracting that’s doing this work. Again they are not cheap, but then I do believe we are getting what we pay for. This renovation has been far less painful than many of the horror stories that I’ve heard of from others. Much of that no doubt has to do with the approach and philosophy of your contractor. It really helps when you trust and are confident in the folks doing the work.

Renovations – Overall update

I had originally intended to post a sequence of pictures that depicted each “piece” of our renovations once they had been completed. But so many parts are being done simultaneously, I thought it would be more productive to switch tacks and just show daily progress instead.

This is the design we saw in “Floor & Décor” which originally inspired our final plan. 2175

So we decided on a tile that we liked – here is the display board

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Here is the water closet – showing the “before” picture of shower doors and tiles

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and the commode

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Then we have the master vanity showing the old counter, mirror, medicine cabinets, window and lighting

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And now the work begins. All the sheetrock, including the ceiling, was removed from the water closet. We had to remove the ceiling of the vanity area as well. The flourescent fixture was not too kind on it and it had failed and cracked due to the heat.

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Here’s where the commode used to be

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The old bathtub was porcelain over cast iron. I was amazed that the best way to remove this was to shatter it with a mallet. A friend I know had removed his own and went to the pain of removing and carrying it out of his house intact. Unless you need it for some other purpose that’s a whole lot of work. He said he’d just shatter it if he had to do it again.

Here is the tile design for inside the bathtub area as it is laid out on our bedroom floor

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Left is top and right is bottom. From the bottom to the rope on top of the first pair of green tile “stripes” is supposed to go around the entire water closet. The rest is supposed to be inside the bath area only.

To keep the cats safe we’ve limited them to the gym / Mich’s office area. Suffice it to say that they were not happy with the restriction on their freedom

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Here is the new water closet ceiling with the new fan, light and heat lamp fixtures installed. What you can’t see here is that we’ve installed a water tight fixture for over the shower area as well.

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And here is the bath area with the tub removed

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I’ll post another batch of pictures tomorrow

Picture Gallery reorganized

I’ve gone ahead and reorganized the picture gallery so that the initial page is not so confusing. I *think* what you will see is that, whenever I add a new sub-album to any of the albums on the main page, you will see a little “updated” label on the main album for 7 days.

I now have main albums for “Parties and Events”, “Vacations”, etc. Within the albums, newest items are supposed to show at the top – so new sub albums will show up right where you can see them and they’ll have a little “New” label on them for 7 days. Albums and Sub-albums to which I just add new pictures (miscellaneous is like this) will have the new pictures at the top and will show an “Updated” label.

For those of you who are following the semi-explosive growth of Carl’s new family, the album is available to folks who are registered and logged into this site.

iRobot Roomba Discovery 4296

*Update 4/29/2007* In case you’re wondering how the cats are dealing with the Roomba. Maverick just watches it from a distance, preferably from a higher vantage point such as a couch or an ottoman. If the Roomba approaches him when he’s on the ground, he waits until it gets a little too close and then prances out of the way. Phoebe seems to regard the Roomba as her next great conquest. She follows it around looking for weakness. She often will crouch down and when the Roomba is retreating she’ll pounce. So for her this is just another great toy. She follows it around from room to room.

Roomba Discovery 4296.jpgA few days ago I wooted a remanufactured iRobot Roomba Discovery. I’ve had my eye on these robots for a while now. It arrived on Friday and I put it through its paces.

The technology is not perfect yet but it is now impressively close. Its NiMH batteries are MUCH better than the old NiCd ones (as anybody who ever owned an early generation video camera can attest). But not as good as the newer Li-ion batteries in terms of power density and recharge cycles.

I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. It won’t replace the need to do a thorough occasional vacuuming, but it sure looks like it’s going to do a good job at keeping the dust bunnies at bay. This model is schedulable, it will activate itself at some time that you determine (a different time each day if you choose), do its business and then dock itself when it starts to run low on power so that it can recharge. The default cleaning cycle is an hour and the battery in this remanufactured model is quite up to that task.

The description on Amazon indicates that 4 “AA” batteries are required but you really need 2 “AA” batteries (for the remote) and 4 “D” Cells (2 for each of the 2 virtual walls). After the initial charge (they say it will take 16 hours but the unit indicated it was ready to go after only a couple of hours) I manually initiated a “clean” cycle to watch it and see what, if any, problems it would encounter. I used the virtual walls to keep it away from the one area rug that we have out (while in the midst of our renovations) so that the unit would not get tangled up on tassels. This is something I see folks warning about in all the Internet postings that I’ve seen. I let the unit travel across our linoleum laundry room floor, our ceramic tile dining room and kitchen and then down the carpeted (low pile) hallway to the gym. The unit transitions between all of these surfaces surprisingly well.

The only three things that it has issues with are:

  • Area Rugs – as long as the Roomba hits these at some kind of angle (which it eventually will) it can cross the edge of these just fine. If it hits the edge at 90 degrees it will catch the carpet and temporarily jam. The Roomba is very good at figuring this out and shifting itself around to unstick itself. It will even go so far as to turn off its brushes and move away from the problem object if necessary. So this isn’t really an issue per se but it is disconcerting to hear it struggle when it does get caught on the carpet edge.
  • Power cords – I have a power cord for my treadmill that I haven’t yet neatly tucked away yet. It is bunched up and then rises off the floor a couple of inches to disappear into a cord-hider that I have mounted on the gym wall. The Roomba can get itself raised up on the coil of cord and then stuck where the cord rises. I suspect that, if I left it long enough, the unit might even figure its way off of that little trap but I didn’t like watching it struggle and picked it off of the coil after about 45 seconds of struggling. The solution here is simple, I need to just properly stow the cable. It looks bad where it is anyway. Again not a really “normal” issue.
  • Shoelaces – This is a real issue. One of the laces of a pair of shoes that I normally leave on the floor in our laundry room got caught up in the brushes and, for some reason, did not jam them. The Roomba is more than strong enough to drag the shoe around behind it and that’s exactly what it did. New rule – pick up shoes and put them in closet. Ah well…

The unit is about as effective as a good floor sweeper (if you remember those little units from the 20th century). Meaning it does a great job on floors and a good job on carpets. Those bits of yard debris and pet hair are picked up very well. It even picks up a goodly amount of pollen which we, in the South, have in spades in early April. When I inspect the debris bin I see that dust bunnies will rue the day that iRobot invaded the house.

My home is about 2,500 square feet, I think it’s realistic that the Roomba can handle about a third of that. This translates to roughly 3 or 4 rooms. More than that and there simply isn’t enough time in a cleaning cycle for it to cover the area enough to be effective. Depending on how this unit fares, I may consider at least one more unit for another part of my house.

Another thing to note, if you have allergies you may not wish to hang around while the little guy does its job. While it does sport a little filter for the exhaust air it will not be mistaken for a HEPA filter. When I use my Dyson 07, which has such a filter, the air is almost fresh coming out of it. The Roomba cannot make this claim. But this is a minor point – the scheduler means that the unit has done its job and any dust has settled long before I get home from work.

Here’s a link to it on Amazon if you’re interested, the reviews are generally positive. Remanufactured iRobot Roomba Vacuum Cleaning Robot with Scheduler, Case/Color May Vary

Wine and Chocolate Pairing Gathering

Thanks in no small part to Bob Cochran who led our event, this tasting was an unqualified success.

The idea this time was to pair up various chocolates with wines and then explore how they interacted with one another.

You can also do standalone chocolate tastings but we liked the idea of the combination.

We had to iterate a bit to decide which chocolates and wines to pair together but we started with a vague idea of the chocolates that we were interested in. Essentially a milk chocolate, a mildly bittersweet and a bittersweet chocolate.

Bob did some great research and guided us to the wines appropriate to our chocolate choices. He also found a very helpful article in the March or April Wine Spectator – a pull-out actually- that had a lot of useful tips.

In the end we went with Hershey’s Cacao Reserve chocolates and created some custom place-mats at cacaoreserve.com .

We supplied wine aroma wheels that we picked up from Sherlocks – nice laminated plastic ones that can withstand a few spills if necessary and supplied tasting charts and glass place-mats courtesy of Recognose’s Wine aroma dictionary site . Specifically, head to the Wine Education Resources link at the bottom of the page for these and other very useful PDF files. Everybody got a copy of the PDF Wine aroma wheel to take with them in case they wanted to experiment on their own.

Here is how the tasting setup looked:

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The tasting seemed to be well received. Bob, Kim, Bonnie, Denise, Don and Nathalie were there to enjoy the experience.

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Denise *did* learn the hard way that wearing white to a wine tasting may be hazardous to your clothes.

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Here, in the order we sampled them, are the wines and paired chocolates:

First was a wonderful Cabernet Sauvignon from Sonoma County called Sebastiani 2003:

2280 This was paired with Hershey’s Santo Domingo Cacao Reserve which has 67% cacao. The wine on its own was a delight but paired with this chocolate it took on some wonderful nuances as each element pulled aspects out of the other. I think this wine by far was the most popular of those we tried.

Next we sampled a dessert wine from Campbells called Rutherglen Tokay:

2284This was paired with Hershey’s Arriba Cacao Reserve which has 50% cacao. The wine was fairly sweet, not as sweet as the ice wines that I’ve tried but pretty strong on its own. When your palate is exposed to the paired chocolate they complemented each other very nicely. When I tried the stronger chocolate with this wine the two were quite discordant with one another.

Finally, for the “official” wines, we actually sampled a port. Dow’s Fine Tawny Porto.

2286This was paired with Hershey’s Java Cacao Reserve which has 37% cacao. I find port quite potent and this was no exception. But again, it drew some of the wonderful milk chocolate flavors out of our chocolate and the chocolate likewise complemented the wine. Also again, trying the other two chocolates with this particular wine was not at all as satisfying as was the sweeter milk chocolate that we’d chosen to go with it.

As a post tasting treat, we elected to try a sparkling wine, Banfi’s Rosa Regale 2005. This wine claims to enhance the flavor of chocolate on the label, but did not not seem too satisfying with any of the pure chocolates that we used with the other wines.

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We did, however, have a great dessert that we had picked up from Douceur de France called “Chocolate Lovers”. This excellent, complex chocolate pastry worked very well with the Rosa Regale and they worked together superbly to round out the evening of wine and sweets.

Overall we learned an awful lot about the similarities between both chocolate and wine tasting and experienced some of the synergy that can be attained by proper pairing of these two most wonderful creations.

The Water Heater

** Update 6/19/2007 ***

I was just asked how much, if any, noise the water heater makes and realized that I hadn’t mentioned this practical tid-bit.

“Noise” is a relative term – as any parent arguing with a teen about music selections will know – but by my definition it’s anything that stands out from the native environment.

For the tankless water heater there are two sources of noise, neither of which I find objectionable, but both are new/different from what you experience with a conventional tank water heater.

First is the sound of the selenoid(s) adjusting the water flow to assure a consistent temperature. You can hear them doing their thing as a distinct muted hum. This is very brief and is usually only when the unit first comes on when it’s trying to get the water up to the initial operating temprature. This would be on par with the sound of the burner starting in a conventional heater.

Second, the exhaust fan. I mention below that it will run for a minute or so after the unit turns off and it runs the entire time the unit is in use. This is somewhat louder than the sound of a conventional unit’s burner operation. Again, not objectionally so but you will hear it. I think I can safely say it’s about as loud as a common bathroom exhaust fan.

** end Update **

As I mentioned in my earlier post on our renovation plan, we elected to invest in a tankless water heater, not so much for the fuel economy – our gas bill for heating water was never terrible – but rather for the promise of infinite quantities of hot water. Our new bathtub will be able to hold up to 74 gallons. It would be a real shame if/when we decided to take advantage of that we ran out of hot water.

Moving the heater back to the center of the house where it would be at the originally intended beginning of the household hot water plumbing means that all the faucets should receive hot water as quickly as possible. Being on a slab we don’t have a lot of inexpensive options for re-routing the plumbing so it wasn’t really practical to consider leaving the heater in the laundry room and trying to re-route the pipes.

We ended up with a Rinnai R85i unit which, practically, I think we can expect to achieve about a 6.5 gallon per minute (gpm) flow rate (for a 50 degree farenheit temperature rise).

The technology for this tank is amazing. It uses a double walled vent (chimney in our case) where the middle section is used for exhaust and the gap between the two walls is used to draw in fresh air. This serves the double purpose of cooling the exhaust as well as ensuring that you are not drawing on your internal, household air for combustion. This prevents the possibility of Carbon Monoxide gas being drawn into the home should a vacuum condition exist (maybe you’re using your fireplace or you’ve got exhaust fans or are similarly actively venting air out of your house). So your home interior is never exposed to the flame or gas.

When you set a temperature, so far I’ve tried 125 degrees and 130 degrees, the unit will make sure that the water exiting is at that temperature. A low flow, such as from a sink faucet, will cause only some of the burners to activate while a greater flow, such as a shower or tub, will cause more burners to activate and burn at a higher rate. There is also a valve on the outgoing pipe so if the water is not being completely heated because it’s flowing through too fast, it will choke down and reduce the flow. This can translate to lower pressure at the faucets, but everybody using the water will have consistent heat. Combined with a Thermo-balance faucet (which we are installing in the master bathroom shower) this should ensure that you have a consistent temperature no matter what happens.

Given that a generous shower flow is rated at about 2.5 gpm we should easily have enough capacity for a couple of showers and a sink or two before any choking is required. I imagine two people taking a bath at one time might be a challenge, but the worst that can happen there is that both tubs will take a little longer to fill. Since you won’t run out of hot water, I don’t really see that as a problem.

2270Here is the closet (top half anyway) before we did anything to it. Note the valves that were already in there from when the original heater was moved to the laundry room.

2272Here we have the shelf and drywall removed. That yellow hose is the gas line. These tankless water heaters don’t use as much gas as a regular tank but when they use gas, they need a lot of it. They don’t have the luxury of spending an hour or so heating a tank of water, the water needs to be up to the desired temperature in the time it takes to pass through the unit. We needed a 3/4 inch feed which we fortunately had easily accessible in the attic.

 

 

2250Here the unit is mostly installed. Even though I was aware of the measurements beforehand it is still much more compact than I was picturing it to be.

 

2258And here we have the last part of the old piping removed (note that the valves are gone) and the condensate pump is installed. That’s the little white over black box to the right. The double-walled vent can be prone to condensation forming and if you have a greater than 5 foot rise (ours is going almost straight out the roof) then you need to have a collector and a way to get rid of the condensation that forms. It’s kind of like a tiny sump pump for the heater. We’re pumping the condensate back up to the attic and then over and out to the old hole in the wall that the water tank used for the pressure-relief pipe.

 

Still left to do is to dress up the pipes and the wall with some sheetrock to make it a little more attractive. I’ll post a picture when that piece is done.

The door to that closet is a louvered door (all those little slats) . It was like that to allow the original water heater unrestricted air flow. That is not necessary with this technology and there is an active fan that runs for a minute or two after the unit has finished burning to clear any remaining exhaust away. It’s not that loud but I think a solid door would make sense now to completely muffle the sound.

I was very excited when we got this installed and played with almost every faucet in the house. I say “almost” because everybody forgot to check the clothes washing machine. It turns out that this was not hooked into the original plumbing, but rather was hooked directly into the pipes feeding our old hot water tank. Inside the walls where nobody could see. What a surprise when we tried to wash some clothes and got absolutely no water! Ah well, we’re trying to determine whether or not there are any pipes left behind from an original setup for the washing machine or if perhaps it was located in this room concomitantly with the original hot water tank relocation.

I’m rather hoping that we can find the pipes and that this hookup was done to get the hot water to the washing machine as fast as possible. It would be quite the round trip for the hot water otherwise. The washing machine would be mostly full before the water would even begin to warm up, having to travel to the middle of the house and then back again if the original piping was used.

For reference (I couldn’t find the original reference page that I used) check out this article to get an idea of the water consumption of various items in your home.

Installing this technology is still a relatively expensive proposition. The cost of the venting pipe is very high as its construction is pretty sophisticated and it’s not very common. You can expect to pay 3-4 times for the actual heater unit as you would for a tank plus you’ll almost definitely have to pay extra in labor to replace your existing vent. In my case I had to pay yet more to relocate and replumb stuff. I think it’s not implausible that my actual break even point vs. just installing a hot water tank will be in about 8 or 9 years. But the absolute dollars are only part of the real equation…

 

Renovations 2007 – The Plan

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to something new and forget how things used to be. So I decided to take pictures of our before situation and the progress as we moved to completion.

We elected to work with Tommy Turner of Turner General Contracting. Tommy and Larry work together and we’ve been very pleased with their work so far.

This project began as a “Let’s update the master bathroom.” deal and quickly grew from there. As with all such projects, as you touch one thing, it becomes obvious that there are three other items that should be dealt with if this one is to be done properly. We did put on our “reasonableness” caps and had to make some tough decisions regarding what to leave out. Besides the fact that we simply cannot afford to do everything at once, there is only so much change you really want to implement at once anyway. So the floors will remain carpeted, most of the windows will remain intact and the ceiling insulation may remain sub-par for a while yet.

To begin with, we wanted a bigger bathtub and new shower doors. Since that would mean ripping up the tile work we decided to go ahead and gut the water closet entirely. Also, the toilet had never really been a stellar performer (if you know what I mean) so we wanted something that would do the job a little bit better.

Additionally, the fan in the water closet is old and sluggish so that will be replaced along with adding a dimmable light in the shower area and a heat lamp

The hot water tank had been relocated by the previous owner to the far end of the house (laundry room) which sounds OK until you realize that we are situated on a slab which meant that nearly all the plumbing is under cement. That means that the hot water intake is being fed from the old location through a pipe running up into the attic and all the way across the house to the heater. Then the hot water is fed back up through the attic to link back up with the original hot water starting point. The long and short is that it takes a very long time for the water to warm up no matter what faucet in the house you are using. We are replacing this scheme with a new tankless gas powered water heater that will be situated in the originally plumbed hot water heater location. This should result in faster water warmup times, an unlimited supply of hot water and hot water energy savings (conservatively) of probably about 15 – 20% per year.

Because the hot water heater will no longer need to occupy its niche in the laundry room, we’ll be removing the little wall that separated it from the washer/dryer units. Then we’ll relocate the dryer to that space to put it closer to the outside vent and put in a real laundry tub (rather than just using the sink in the nearby half bathroom). Since the floor under the washer and dryer is a little chewed up and will have a gap in it from the removed wall, that will be replaced as well. We may just go with linoleum for that. A semi-disposable working floor.

The master bathroom sinks and faucets had been replaced about 6 or 7 years ago but we didn’t use really great pieces for either and Mich wanted to bring in some new ones as part of an overall rejuvenation of the vanity area. Then we decided that the vanity was a little low so we are having it raised to about 36 inches so we can stand more comfortably as we use the sinks. The counter will also be replaced with Corian or similar and the drop ceiling will be raised.

The window on the side of the vanity area was never a favorite, we’ve been thinking of replacing the house’s windows for a while now but that project just never rises high enough for us to actually engage it. So little time, so little money… But we decided to replace this window and the window at the head of our bed in the master bedroom with this project. The sliding vanity window will be replaced with a frosted casement window. The old bedroom window is about 3 feet wide by 2 feet high about 6 feet off the ground. It will be replaced by one that’s still 2 feet high but 12 feet wide (actually three 4 foot awning windows placed side by side). They will both be Andersen windows with “TruScene” screens for the bedroom window.

The guest bathroom will get some of the perks of the master bath area. It will receive a new fan and can lights to replace to fluorescents, including one in the shower/bath area. It also will be the recipient of the better of the master bathroom’s sinks and faucets. Again, the drop ceiling will be removed to make the room more spacious.

In the kitchen, quite a while ago actually, we installed several can lights to replace the fluorescent fixture and had subsequently decided to install a couple more to light some dim areas left by our initial install. So, while getting that addressed, we will get rid of our tired old inadequate fixture in the living room and also replace it with some can lights too. Plus we’ll add some accent lighting for the mantel and the East wall.

The cooktop in the kitchen is quite old now and will be replaced along with our disappointing kitchen counter. The counter had already been replaced with an inexpensive Formica one during our last renovation and is very prone to staining.

Finally, we had a hanging fixture installed over the dining/kitchen table to provide a bit more ambiance and focused lighting there.