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!
Mind!
The latest is an AI called Centaur. And it can read your mind! So reported researchers, collaborating across several institutions in Germany, the UK, and the USA, in an article published recently in Nature: “A Foundation Model to Predict and Capture Human Cognition.” I.e., it can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language.
The human mind is remarkably general. Not only do we routinely make mundane decisions, such as choosing
Music-making
Hundreds of millions of us engage with music each day.
Writes Daniel Bowling, Director of the Music and Brain Health Lab at Stanford School of Medicine, in Translational Psychiatry:
As far as we know, music has been with humans since our earliest existence. The first known evidence of human preoccupation with music comes from Stone Age flutes, carefully carved in wing bones and mammoth ivory some 40,000 years ago.”
In the modern day, these values that we place on music
Deaf?
Our ears are connected to our hearts? Maybe, say scientists from Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong (China) in “Hearing Impairment, Psychological Distress, and Incident Heart Failure,” published in Heart recently.
Hearing loss raises the risk of heart failure by nearly a third, they assert. Apparently vascular problems may be affecting both ear and heart:
The rich distribution of capillaries in the cochlea and the high metabolic demand of the inner ear
Birds!
Crows can do geometry! Yup!
Claimeth scientists from the Institute of Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, in Science Advances: “Crows Recognize Geometric Regularity.” These intelligent avians can look at a handful of four-sided shapes and correctly distinguish those that exhibit geometric regularity from those that don’t, they say.
Crows were trained to detect a visually distinct intruder shape among six concurrent arbitrary shapes. The crows were able to immediately
Mouth!
Our mouths are connected to our hearts? Yup!
A growing body of research reveals a significant link between poor dental hygiene and cardiovascular disease. Gum disease and oral infections can trigger inflammation, allow harmful bacteria into the bloodstream, and, in severe cases, even lead to direct infection of heart tissue. Together, these effects can contribute to serious, sometimes life-threatening, cardiovascular conditions.
Said BioMed Central: Oral Health
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 …
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. 