RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Scent!
Your scent. (And mine, too). Combined with the perfumes and deodorants we employ, our scent has a great deal of influence in our lives, particularly with those we associate with. Or so affirmeth scientists from Middle Tennessee State University, Sabanci University (Turkey), and Cornell U., in “The Interactive Role of Odor Associations in Friendship Preferences,” published in Scientific Reports.
Of course, friendship decisions stem from a number of personal preferences
Unique?
You thought you were unique? Probably not, they say.
“They,” meaning computer scientists at Columbia University in New York and from SUNY Buffalo. And “they” said so in “Unveiling Intra-person Fingerprint Similarity via Deep Contrastive Learning,” published in Science Advances. Of course, as you can tell, they only claim that different fingers of the same person (“intra-person fingerprints”), thought to be uniquely different, are not so. So …
Battery!
Uh-oh! Phone battery at 38%!
That, apparently, is a magic number, according to a private research organization, Talker Research.
Americans typically start to worry about their phone’s battery when it hits 38%—the ‘panic percentage.’ (This is before any warning signs; iPhone batteries turn red only when they drop below 20%.)”
Yup, this survey has pinpointed exactly when this panic kicks in for Americans.
The surveyors did a nationwide study of 2,000 Americans on how
Rescued!
A rather strange thing happened recently in Japan. A guy was rescued off Mt. Fuji, the tallest mountain in the nation (12,400 feet). And people are mad.
Not because of the rescue, of course. But the fact that it happened … twice. To the same person! In the same week!
According to the Associated Press, a 27-year-old Chinese student trying to ascend Fuji-san developed altitude sickness (what the body suffers due to lack of oxygen at higher altitudes before it has
Heartbeats!
For a long time we thought heartbeats would save our identities. How, you ask?
Cybersecurity experts thought they had deepfake videos all figured out. You see, there are subtle color changes to our skins caused by the pulsation of blood through our vascular system, timed with our heartbeats. But AI wasn’t explicitly programmed to mimic these nuanced changes caused by blood flow, so fake videos would lack these physiological signals.
Deepfakes have become ubiquitous in
Haunted?
Hannah-Ireland Durando, 24, a costume designer and actress from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, woke up one morning, having lost her “zest for life.” Tortured by headaches and struggling with forgetfulness. Particularly unable to recall the lyrics to her favorite Taylor Swift song, “Haunted.”
You and I walk a fragile line,
I have known it all this time;
But I never thought I’d live to see it break,
Nicknames?
There was an interesting piece by Mark Oppenheimer in The Wall Street Journal the other day: “Where Have All the Nicknames Gone?”
Nicknames used to abound, reflecting belongingness in a family, echoing a bond between the caller and the named, expressing the warmth of informality. For the longest time, I was “AK,” which then turned to “Abe” when I got to the shores of this nation (that had a famous “Abe” in its history).
Generally such appellations are affirming,
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.