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!
Read!
Last year, on National Book Lovers Day (August 9), there was some encouraging news: “A chapter a day doth keep the Grim Reaper away.”
That surprising bit of news was based on a study by researchers from Yale’s School of Public Health, published in Social Science and Medicine titled “A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity.”
The French novelist, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) once said:
The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in
Robot!
Robots may soon become “electronic persons”! Or so saith a European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs that has voted (17 votes to 2; with 2 abstentions) to approve a draft report that seeks to grant legal status to robots!
The most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause.”
It was Luxembourg MEP Mady Delvaux’s idea.
Machiavellian!
Bird brains? Nope! Not chickens. They, apparently, take after Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469–1527), the Florentine renaissance politician and writer who has lent his name to unscrupulous and deceitful behavior.
Or so says the author of “Thinking Chickens: A Review of Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior in the Domestic Chicken.”
The solo researcher from The Someone Project [!] at The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, published this in the peer-reviewed
Remembrance!
Susie and Eric’s home in a suburb of Olympia, Washington, is filled with trinkets and tokens from their extensive cruising experiences: Cayman Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, Bermuda, Mazatlán, ….
But there is one problem. Susie, in her 50s, has no memory of those cruises, or of any vacation she has ever taken. Indeed, she cannot recall a single moment in her marriage to Eric or before it. And, no, it is isn’t dementia or neurological disease of any known sort.
Susie
Surprise!
A strange thing happened last Christmas. A suspicious US customs official opened a parcel mailed across the Atlantic. It turned up in Newark in a FedEx shipment labeled as “art craft/toy.” Claimed value? $37. Oh, and it also had a message: Joyeux Noel (“Happy Christmas”)! Apparently it was posted by a “Robert” to a climate-controlled warehouse in Long Island, NY.
The alert official discovered—to his surprise—a painting, instead of an “art craft/toy.”
Miracle!
Robots can do it now—walk on water.
So reported scientists from Seoul National University and Harvard, in “Jumping on Water: Surface Tension–Dominated Jumping of Water Striders and Robotic Insects,” published in Science. They created this ultralight leaping gadget/robot that mimics the way pond-skimming insects negotiate water.
Jumping robots have been around for a while. The new thing here was to learn how to make the robot jump off the surface of water. But water-striders
Aging!
It is inevitable. You age. And things begin to fall apart. Your mind and your body. They crumble. Till you die. (Nice thought, huh?)
But there is something called the “paradox of aging.” An upside to the downturn. And that is that your mood, sense of well-being, and your ability to tackle stress actually keep improving till your last day! A paradox, indeed.
Researchers noted all this in “Paradoxical Trend for Improvement in Mental Health With Aging: A Community-Based
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. 