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!
Gone!
Well, even if it isn’t gone entirely, it is going …, and going …. Soon to be gone!
I’m talking about the internet. It is disappearing.
So saith a study from the Pew Center published recently, “When Online Content Disappears.”
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes
Giddy-up!
A strange thing happened the other day in London. All the King’s horses ran amok! (And in reaction, so did all the King’s men!)
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, several of the animals (and some subordinates) of King Charles III caused chaos on the streets of ye olde capital city, when members of the Household Cavalry lost their mounts, allowing the animals to gallop through rush-hour traffic, careening into cabs and double-decker buses while being pursued
Sight?
In a recent issue of Conversation, Andrew Herbert, Professor of Psychology, Visual Perception, Rochester Institute of Technology, wrote about the epidemic of nearsightedness. And it begins in childhood, apparently.
Nearsightedness is when a somewhat elongated eyeball causes the lens to focus light at a point slightly in front of the retina than on it. Optometry researchers estimate that about half of the global population will need corrective lenses to offset myopia by
Treat?
An orangutan named Rakus had a tough time in 2022. So claimed reserarchers from Germany and Indonesia, in “Active Self Treatment of a Facial Wound with a Biologically Active Plant by a Male Sumatran Orangutan,” published in Nature: Scientific Reports, recently.
Two of these primates, both male, had a fight in the treetops of a rainforest in Sumatra, Indonesia. Rakus, one of the belligerents, was spotted the next day sporting a pink wound below his right eyelid, with
Mars?
We all know it: Astrology has no scientific foundation. Planets and moons may move and sway but your life and mine do not, at least not because of the aforementioned entities moving and swaying.
But, switching for a moment to the domain of astronomy and astrophysics, planets do influence other bodies in space. By ye olde Newton’s laws, the larger the planet, the greater their gravitational influence.
It appears, now, that Mars may “literally be stirring tides within
Hands!
They say the human hand is a marvel of nature. No other creature on earth, not even our closest primate relatives, has hands structured quite like ours, capable of such precise grasping and manipulation.
But there’s not a whole lot of precise grasping and manipulation going on with our hands these days. It’s all mostly tapping screens, swiping phones, thumbing alphabets, and pushing buttons. And, said The New York Times the other day, some experts believe our
Voice?
Recently the British tabloid, The Sun, ran a report on voice clones created by artificial intelligence (AI).
Say you have audio uploaded on social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Or YouTube. (Oh, dear, my sermons!) Well, it’s no difficult matter for AI tools to rip off your voice and clone it.
(The one doing this devious deed need have hardly any technical prowess. It is simply and automatically accomplished by advanced tools easily available.)
What
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.