Chinese researchers say they have made major improvements in the efficiency of incandescent light bulbs, enough that they are similar to LEDs in their energy consumption.
Speeded-up video shows a boat trip from Rotterdam to Amsterdam in 10 minutes. An amazing maze of waterways, and a remarkable number of drawbridges. I wonder if there are boat lovers who watch videos like this at normal speed, like train fanciers and their "cab rides."
The old town of Dunwich on the coast of Suffolk, England, eroded into the sea over the whole period from 1600 to 1922. Many, many English painters and writers fell in love with the place and with the idea of old towns disappearing beneath the waves.
Weird bit of research concerning how bacteria communicate, and whether unrelated types of bacteria can communicate "cross culturally."
If you wind up bedridden due to illness or injury, you are at risk from blood clots that form in your legs but can travel to your brain and kill you. But if you are paralyzed, this risk eventually goes away; it is an acute problem that fades over time. Plus, why don't animals that hibernate get blood clots? Researchers in Germany have found a possible explanation involving proteins in the blood.
Technical paper arguing that Neolithic agriculture in the Middle East was more complex and involved many more crops than the usual picture.
Florida woman drives over Damien Hirst sculpture with her Rolls Royce.
Here's a very negative essay on the biomedical job market, with far more Ph.D. students than academic jobs and some people spending 20-years as grant-funded post-docs, hoping that an academic position may one day materialize.
Twenty-five things found frozen in Europe's mountain ice. Some have already been featured here, but not all.
Snippet of the Gospel of Matthew in Syriac found under two other texts in a parchment in the Vatican library. Where the usual modern text has, "at that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; and his disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat," this text says the apostles "began to pick the heads of grain, rub them in their hands, and eat them." The detail about rubbing grain in their hands appears in at least one other old text of this Gospel, and nobody seems to know what it means. Is it a religious act, or just a way to make the grain easier to chew?
A glimpse of the future, with world population set to decline: Japan has more than 10 million empty houses or akiya. (NY Times) Part of the Times story focuses on Jaya Thursfield and his Japanese-born wife Chihiro, who moved to Japan from Australia and have a Youtube channel about restoring the empty house they bought in 2018.
Some octopi start acting in self-destructive ways after they reproduce, and even eat pieces of themselves; researchers think they have some biochemical insight into what is happening.
Restoration of a "secret" staircase in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, supposed to be a clandestine route from the lord and lady's apartments to the street, has revealed grotesque 16th-century frescoes.
Something else to blame on the Romans: smush-faced dogs.
And a lavish Roman villa with a wine fountain uncovered near Rome.
“We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa. . . . Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did.” Some projections now show Africa's population peaking around 2060 and then beginning to fall; the UN recently revised its prediction for the population of Nigeria in 2100 downward by 150 million. (Economist)
Just wanted to mention here the pronatalist tech power couple who named their baby girl Titan Invictus.
Did you know there was a world record for the largest GPS drawing by bicyclists?
But here's an even better art gimmick: painting on ice floes.
This week's random past post: Lucy, Yard Sale, Satan, and Roofless, 2010
6 comments:
Florida woman drives over Damien Hirst sculpture with her Rolls Royce.
A pity that this wasn't intentional, and that the "sculpture" not only survived, but doesn't even seem to have been meaningfully damaged.
The interesting wrinkle is the police claiming the driver "didn't appear to be intoxicated", despite not being able to recall the hours before the crash. Either that's some kind of fugue state, which is rather rare (and yet in my experience still entirely plausible for a Floridian woman driving a Rolls Royce), or the woman was actually utterly out of her gourd on some sort of intoxicant and the police had reason to politely hush it up for her (which is, in all honesty, substantially more likely).
The fact that they don't name the driver is actually unusual when it comes to Florida news like this, and makes me lean even more toward it being some rich woman who mixed her psych meds with a few too many mimosas, but her husband is a major contributor to political or police funds of some kind, and thus it all got smoothed over...
"The detail about rubbing grain in their hands appears in at least one other old text of this Gospel, and nobody seems to know what it means. Is it a religious act, or just a way to make the grain easier to chew?"
"Nobody"? Seriously? Maybe no office-dwelling suburbanite academics, but good golly, is the meaning obvious to anyone who has handled actual growing wheat in a field. This is a common, everyday thing constantly being done by people all around the world in the present day! It's just a way of separating the non-proverbial wheat from the non-proverbial chaff!
That said, the briefest of poking around online reveals Biblical precedent in the Old Testament, which the New Testament is notorious for frequently referencing and alluding to.
If you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbor’s standing grain. (Deuteronomy 23:25 ESV)
This makes perfect sense, of course, since in all three of the gospels where the story of the Disciples passing through the grainfields on the Sabbath are present, it is a story whose entire message revolves around the interpretation of old Mosaic Law; with the Pharisees trying to claim Jesus and his followers are blaspheming by "working" on the Sabbath; whereas Jesus argues that not only was the Sabbath made to serve man (rather than man to serve the Sabbath), but also that even if it wasn't, rolling the grain in their hands doesn't qualify as work anyway, as the verse from Deuteronomy above clearly states it is permissible.
If anything, I'd argue that the versions of the text which specifically mention rolling the wheat in the hand do so PRECISELY in order to drive home that they are not violating the Sabbath. Why else would someone even bother to mention something that would have been so utterly unremarkable and ordinary as rolling grain in your hand to separate the wheat and the chaff?
Just wanted to mention here the pronatalist tech power couple who named their baby girl Titan Invictus.
That poor child already is going to have so many problems because of her parents, and then they had to go and add one more layer of insult and abuse by naming her that. She's either going to end up just as crazy as them and keep the name, or legally change it the very day she reaches age of majority, before moving as far away from them as possible.
Well done, Verloren! I thought the wheat from the chaff thing was pretty obvious, too, but I had forgotten the surrounding parable and the clear halakhic context.
But, of course, separating the wheat from the chaff is also a phrase with a religous meaning. So the obvious meaning doesn't have to be the point of having the passage in scripture.
The point was in the halakhic content, and the statement that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. It seems to be pretty straightforwardly part of his ongoing debate with the Pharisees, as Verloren said. The question would be, is separating the wheat from the chaff by hand "work" in the same way that doing it with a tool is. In Jewish law, anything done on the Sabbath that might be "work" becomes religiously significant.
It's true the scholar in the article said it wasn't clear if this was a religious act. I'm not sure what that's about, although scholars do tend to be cautious when on the record (and rightly so when talking about biblical discoveries to journalists). One can imagine the journalist worded the question in a provocative way, like, "was this phrase taken out because it had religious significance?" ("Was it a gnostic or feminist act? Was Mary Magdalen Jesus' wife?" Etc.)
The scholar would probably want to check with colleagues who specialize in the text, and others who specialize in 1st-century pharisaic legal argument, and probably those in several subfields beyond, before saying anything on the record.
Maybe they should have said, "I don't know, I just work with palimpsests."
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