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!
Virtuous?
Stanley Milgram (1933–1984), American social psychologist, is best known for analyzing connectedness—the “six degrees of separation” that links all humans. But while teaching at Yale in the 1960s, he also conducted some notorious experiments on obedience. Jewish, himself, he was perturbed by how lower level Nazis, during the Holocaust, could perform acts of great cruelty and inhumanity in blind obedience to orders from above.
Students in his experiments were ordered
Leptodermis?
Leptos = thin
Dermis = skin
Scientists at the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technology at Saarland University, in Germany, used high-resolution skin imaging tomography to study the skins of astronauts before and after their space journeys. The technology uses lasers: apparently the resolution is a thousand times better than that produced by any other device.
Said Professor Karsten Koenig of Saarland:
So now you get the information without taking biopsies; normally
Immortality!
You’ve got everything. A fancy Ferrari or two. A mansion or more. The personal yacht, helicopter, jet, and spaceship. Dresses and diamonds to your delight. Suits and savings to last forever.
But what’s the use of all of this … if you won’t last forever?
The mind fades. The body faints. The spirit flags. And time takes its toll. You age and you die.
So these folks who have everything—the “ultrarich”— are now looking to crack the last frontier: stalling their
Colander!
In some states you can’t even smile when posing for your driver’s license photo. But things are different in ye olde commonwealth of Massachusetts.
You can wear a colander on your head while getting your mug shot. You read right: a colander.
Lindsay Miller cited religious reasons for doing so and the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles complied. (They first refused, but when the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center intervened, the MA
Dish!
They say that it begins when you sink into his arms and after that you’re stuck with your arms in the sink.
That may not be a bad thing after all, if researchers are to be believed. (And better than using your dishwasher, too.)
“Washing Dishes to Wash the Dishes: Brief Instruction in an Informal Mindfulness Practice” is the title of their article in Mindfulness. Authors—from Florida State University and affiliated with the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt
Double?
A strange story hit the news the other day.
Here she was: a 38-year-old successful physician (a dermatologist), blonde, photogenic, married to another doctor (also a dermatologist), mother of three. Well-loved, well-traveled. Enough to induce envy in anyone.
Her online presence (on Facebook) shows her celebrating a birthday in the Turks and Caicos. Another photo has her dressed formally with her husband, to which someone commented: “Wow! What a good-looking couple!”
Punch!
We were born to be violent, saith the good doctors Horns, Jung, and Carrier.
Well, not exactly.
These scientists from the University of Utah determined that human hands evolved to—among other actions—punch!
“In vitro strain in human metacarpal bones during striking: testing the pugilism hypothesis of hominin hand evolution,” in the Journal of Experimental Biology, asserts that, compared with other primates, chimps et al., hominins (bipedal apes)
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.