Sotho

“The American scientist at the center of a media storm over comments suggesting that black people were not as intelligent as whites said Thursday he never meant to imply that the African continent was genetically inferior, adding that he was mortified over the attention his words had drawn.”
[source]

Mr Watson, who should be whacked on the head, has reportedly said that:

1. “tests showed Africans did not have the same level of intelligence as whites.”
2. “he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really’.”
3. “he was ‘mortified by what had happened’.”
4. he couldn’t “understand how [he] could have said what [he is] quoted as having said.”
5. “to all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”
6. “there are many people of color who are very talented.”
7. while he hopes that everyone is equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
8. “a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.”
9. there is a link between skin colour and sex drive: black people have higher libidos

He should be whacked on the head because a scientist who’s famous for his work on genetics, who’s credited with working out the double-helixed genetic information, should know better. Or perhaps he’s already fallen and knocked his head.

Read more:

1. telegraph.co.uk
2. gnxp.com/blog
3. dailymail.co.uk
4. huffingtonpost.com
5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki

Probable look of Jesus

“There’s a reference in Paul which says it’s disgraceful for a man to wear long hair, so it looks pretty sure that people of that period had to have reasonably short hair. The traditional depictions of Jesus with long flowing golden hair are probably inaccurate.”

Deciding on skin colour was more difficult, though. But the earliest depictions of Jews, which date from the 3rd Century, are - as far as can be determined - dark-skinned.

“We do seem to have a relatively dark skinned Jesus. In contemporary parlance I think the safest thing is to talk about Jesus as ‘a man of colour’.” This probably means olive-coloured, he says. [source]
…………………………

No one took time to tell me that the picture of the blue eyed, blond haired ‘Jesus’ hanging from the wall in my parent’s living room was actually the family member of some European artist from the 16th century who was commissioned by the leaders of the white church to paint the Son of God in the image of a white man in order to enslave and dominate the original people of the scriptures. So I grew up thinking that I was God’s little nappy headed step child. [source]
…………………………

“. . . Jesus and his family spent more than a fleeting moment in Egypt. It is not inconceivable, for example, that Jesus might well have learned to walk and talk right here in Africa. Further, Jesus and his Jewish family, being Afro-Asiatic in colour and culture, would have appeared more chocolate-brown than Caucasian in complexion — more like a typically miscegenated African American, Kenyan Kikuyu or South African ‘coloured’.” (Gosnell L. Yorke, “Biblical hermeneutics: an Afrocentric perspective”, Religion and Theology 2/2 (1995), pp. 145-158; reproduced on-line at http://www.unisa.ac.za/dept/press/rt/22/theol2w.html)
…………………………

In the December 2002 edition of Popular Mechanics, Jesus was shown as looking like a typical Galilean Semite. Among the points made was that the Bible records that Jesus’ disciple, Judas had to point him out to those arresting him. The implied argument being that if Jesus’ physical appearance differed that markedly from his disciples, then he would have been relatively easy to identify. [source]

The image in question is the one shown here.
~Ed.
…………………………

Conservative Christians generally believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. They accept the statements in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. That is, Jesus’ conception did not involve male sperm, This would imply that God either:

• Created an living embryo with a unique human DNA in one of Mary’s fallopian tubes.
• Created special DNA which fertilized an ovum produced by Mary’s body.

Thus, Jesus would have had DNA that was either 50% or 100% created uniquely by God. If so, then Jesus could have had any height, hair color, eye color, skin hue, style of nose, etc. He may or may not have resembled a typical Palestinian from 1st Century CE. [source]
…………………………

Rethabile’s editorial:
So this is what folks have been saying about the race and colour of Jesus of Nazareth. Will we ever know for sure? Do we care? I’d venture to say we probably don’t. The deal, as far as I’m concerned, is that many of you out there will readily consider close to the truth this image, and not this one. Why is that, considering the region Jesus came from?

Science and computer programs say Jesus probably looked more like the image at the top of this post, than a blue-eyed, blond-haired man. So why is the world flooded with images of the latter and very few of the former? You tell me.

But I digress. I wanted to say that the deal for me is the fact that many use this ubiquitous image to fortify their personal beliefs about race: If even the Son of God is Caucasian, … (please add the rest). As more and more “evidence” piles up about the probable appearance of Jesus, perhaps more than a few racists may look at other races differently, and perhaps with a little more respect.

We shouldn’t really care what Jesus looked like; but now, all of us shouldn’t care. And nobody should use whatever physical image of Jesus is floating around in art galleries to further their beliefs about mankind.

A picture is a strong message, and one that is easily registered and remembered (it speaks a thousand words). Given what we’ve been shown over the ages, does what scientists suggest as Jesus’s image surprise you, shock you, revile you? Or none of the above? Care to tell us something about it?

UPDATE:
I urge you to try a meme that I’ve put up on my other blog. The result may just stun you. Here’s the link: Christ! Another meme.

Some of my family members shun the microwave oven, and insist that preparing food with it is tantamount to nuking ourselves, albeit gradually. But what exactly are microwaves? Why did we start using them? Are they, or are they not, dangerous? What does the scientific world think of them? What does the consumer world think of them?

Frequency is the number of complete cycles per second in alternating current direction. The standard unit of frequency is the hertz, abbreviated Hz. If a current completes one cycle per second, then the frequency is 1 Hz; 60 cycles per second (cps) equals 60 Hz.

A microwave is a magnetic field caused by an electric current (electromagnetic energy) with a frequency above 1 000 000 000 cps (or 1 000 000 000 hertz, or 1 gigahertz), corresponding to a wavelength shorter than 300 millimeters.

Okay, so a microwave is electromagnetic energy that oscillates more than 1 billion times a second, and whose waves or cycles are not longer than 3 centimetres. Think of ocean waves. They move through water and transport energy, and have cycles of 200 centimetres or more (when one wave is 200 centimetres away another one comes in). Perhaps ocean waves have a frequency of 2 hertz, depending on the calmness or anger of the ocean. When two ocean waves bash against the shore, 1 billion microwaves in the oven sear through your food.

Why did we start using microwaves to cook?
Like most things we do today, we started cooking with microwaves because it’s easier than with conventional methods, and it’s much faster, too. Progress, if you will. I think the question is equivalent to asking why we started using the gas-stove and not the wood-fire. Microwave ovens also heat or cook only the food, and nothing else, which implies that they save energy.

Cooking food with microwaves was discovered by Percy Spencer while building magnetrons for radar sets at Raytheon. He was working on an active radar set when he noticed a strange sensation, and saw that a peanut candy bar he had in his pocket started to melt. Although he was not the first to notice this phenomenon, as the holder of 120 patents, Spencer was no stranger to discovery and experiment, and realized what was happening. The radar had melted his candy bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with microwaves was popcorn, and the second was an egg (which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters) Wikipedia.org.

How do they cook food?
All liquids and foods are made up of molecules, as are most other things under the sun and beyond. These molecules have positive and negative particles, so they usually behave like microscopic magnets, for magnets also have polarity (a +ve side and a -ve side). Microwaves, too, have a positive and a negative half cycle. Imagine the ocean wave again, and imagine that what is above sea-level, the peak, is +ve and what is below, the trough, is -ve.  When the peak (+ve) of the microwave reaches your chicken, the negative particles of the chicken molecules are attracted (opposites attract) and attempt to align themselves with this +ve field of energy. But when the microwave alternates to the trough (-ve) half cycle, the opposite occurs: the -ve chicken particles are repelled and the +ve chicken particles are attracted. This causes a back and forth motion and allows the molecules to rub against each other to cause friction, which produces heat, the heat that cooks your chicken.

In other words, the microwave energy shakes the water molecules in food hard enough to get them to brush against one another; this brushing against each other produces heat, just like rubbing palms together when we’re cold; this heat cooks the food. 

This means that heat is produced inside the food, as opposed to conventional cooking where heat comes from outside and enters the food. That’s why microwaves just warm or cook the food without heating the container or the oven itself. Since the waves that hit the chicken are instantly converted to heat energy inside the chicken, there can be no question of radioactive contamination. In other words, when you switch your oven off and remove your chicken, it has absolutely no radiation on it. Bon appetit.

I will add a few more thoughts to this post, mainly, the hazards of using microwave ovens improperly, and my favourite microwave recipe. I hope my favourite food experts (from both ends of the fork!) Jeanne and Brian won’t mind my veering off tradition too much, if they do mind at all.

Webster’s 1913 Dictionary describes nymphomania as

Nym’pho*ma’ni*a, n. [Gr. ? a bride + ? madness.] (Med.) Morbid and uncontrollable sexual desire in women, constituting a true disease. [Source…]

The word is obviously a combination of nymph and mania, or bride and madness. Female madness. Men again. It is interesting to learn that most medical experts reject the word — or perhaps it is normal, seeing as to how it is an unclear and subjective word. What do you call a "morbid and uncontrollable sexual desire in men, constituting a true disease?" I thought so. I suggest, or rather resuggest, nympholepsy.

Coined in 1775 (by Richard Chandler, in "Travels in Greece") was nympholepsy, on model of epilepsy, with second element from stem of Gk. lambanein "to take;" defined as "a state of rapture supposed to be inspired in men by nymphs; esp. an ecstasy or frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable. [Source…]

The truth is, nymphomania doesn’t really exist, because there is no standard to measure it against. And if it did, it would be a largely masculine pathology. In order to say that something is excessive, we have to have an average value, and in the case of sex, there isn’t one. What is excessive for one is low for another. Somebody has said that a sex drive is considered excessive if it prevents one from living a normal life. Fair enough — but does that extreme really exist? If it does, what is the e-mail address of the woman who has it?

 

The same source also says that "in men the disorder was called satyriasis." Was because together with nymphomania, the condition is no longer considered a pathology. Carol Groneman’s book, Nymphomania: A History, should make for fascinating reading. The CNN.com review of the book is a good start. Ms Groneman says, in part, that

the standards of behavior for women were, of course, much stricter than those for men. And some doctors recognized the role that social strictures played in limiting women’s sexual expression. At an 1869 meeting of the Boston Gynecological Society, a woman diagnosed with nymphomania was brought before the gathered doctors. Typical of these medical presentations, the patient wore a mask, presumably to protect her identity. Even so, we can assume that exposure to a roomful of physicians must have been excruciating for this unnamed Victorian woman. One doctor responded to her in a patronizing, but possibly sympathetic manner: "If this woman could go … to a house of prostitution, and spend every night for a fortnight at sexual labor, it might prove her salvation." He hastily concluded that, of course, no physician could recommend such a course of treatment. [Source…]

So what’s a nymphomaniac? The woman next door, or the one on an advert billboard? The image is certainly used to full effect to sell, with the implicit understanding that if you buy that car you’ll have more sex, or if you buy that perfume men will eye you as a nymphomaniac and will therefore desire you. Notice that my wisecrack in relation with an oversexed woman’s e-mail address would make less sense if it was an oversexed man whose address was being sought. And that’s about where the whole idea of an insatiable woman, a nymphomaniac, peters out, with neither an acceptable social definition nor an accepted medical identification.

 

We’re animals, so we bunch up easily. That’s why we’re always fighting amongst ourselves, whether as gangs, countries or religious cliques. But we’re also human, with an in-built discerning soul, which is why it’s hard to learn that, "When viewing photographs of social out-groups, people respond to them with disgust, not a feeling of fellow humanity."
[http://cognews.com] 

"I’ll have a pint of xanthohumol (C₂₁H₂₂O₅), please!" I just love xanthohumol, not because it protects me against prostate cancer but because it tastes good. The compound is found in hops and, in surface cells of the prostate gland, inhibits a protein that usually switches cancers on, including the prostate kind. So, yes, pass me the xanthohumol calabash, if you don’t mind.

The drawback, and that’s only because my wife would kill me, is I’d have to drink seventeen beers a day to benefit from the lab-observed effect. We’ll have to wait for the molecule to be extracted and sold OTC in pill form.

Lycopene (C₄₀H₅₆), a tomato ingredient, has also been observed to curb the onset of prostate cancer. Imagine, pizza and beer everyday! Unfortunately it would be a tradeoff between reducing the probability of developing prostate cancer on one hand, and becoming an obese alcoholic on the other. [www.sci-tech-today.com]