Sunspots 590

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: A Florida State football player ate lunch with an autistic boy who was eating alone in his school cafeteria, says Relevant.

A blogger has posted some stupid phrases, or good phrases used stupidly, for people in crisis.

Benjamin L. Corey says that Christian parents should be celebrating Colin Kaepernick's refusal to stand during the National Anthem.


Computing: Bloomberg warns us that our new refrigerators may be watching us (and sending information to others.)

Education: National Public Radio reports on a study that indicates that when a child in school is exposed to violence in the home, it affects the entire class.

Health: Wired says that too many of us still aren't wearing seat belts.

Scientific American, and many other news outlets, on why the ingredients in many antibacterial soaps have been banned. (Regular soap is just as good!)

History: ListVerse on 10 people who rescued others, who were on the other side, during World War II.

Politics: FiveThirtyEight discusses facts about immigration, based on real data. (Example: Hispanic immigrants learn English as well as, or better than, German immigrants did in the past.)

Science: Wired has posted a graphic, showing how rapidly climate has changed over the past 160 years or so.

FiveThirtyEight discusses what starlight tells us about the universe. As the post says, pretty much everything we know.

Scientific American discusses the matter of calling family members by some other family member's name.

Scientific American also discusses the subject of communicating with aliens -- how could we learn their language (or the reverse)? (There's a movie about that coming out soon.)

NPR reports that some lizards are starving to death, because it is too hot for them to forage during most of the day.



Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 452

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to

someone else:

Philosophy: A post on The Skeptical Zone, by an atheist, claims that science cannot disprove that there was an Intelligent Designer. My own opinion is that this is correct, and that science can't prove that there was, either. Hebrews 11:3.
Science: Fox News reports that dogs try to align their bodies with the earth's magnetic field when they relieve themselves. What!
Fox News also reports that Saturn's rings are billions of years old.
Space.com has a fine gallery of photos of Saturn.
National Public Radio reports that the language we speak influences the way we think about the world in unexpected ways.
Wired reports on the pink fairy armadillo.


Image source (public domain)

I'm thankful for language

I’m thankful for language. With it we can think, as well as speak (although sometimes we don’t do enough thinking before we speak). Thinking includes imagining things as they might have been, as they might become, and even impossible things. We couldn’t do that without language. We can read and write. God chose to communicate the truth to us mostly through language. There are other species that can communicate, but none come close to the complexity and sophistication of human language. It’s not only complex and sophisticated, but ambiguous, and that makes for interesting puns, and, sometimes, miscommunication.

Thanks for reading this short essay, which used language.

Sunspots 446

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Computing: Gizmo's Freeware tells us that there is a free Merriam-Webster Dictionary app. I tried it on my Android tablet, and it works. It can even look up spoken words, so you don't have to know how to spell it to find it.
Philosophy: The BioLogos Forum has a two-part post on "Questions on Time and Eternity." A subject with lasting interest. Here's Part 1, and Part 2.
Politics (and Sports): An article on Dean Smith, super-successful coach of the University of North Carolina men's basketball team for many years, who was also a pioneer in race relations, and against the death penalty. Unfortunately, Smith is a victim of dementia.
Science: The sun is losing about 5,000,000 tons of mass to Hydrogen every second. But fear not. At that rate, it won't stop emitting significant amounts of energy for about 5 billion years, and by that time, it will have lost only a tiny fraction of its mass.
From the Greenville (SC) News, an article on a dog which is said to have an amazing vocabulary, and can understand parts of speech.
Sports: (And Christianity!) An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, no less, about the evangelical Christianity that is part of the Clemson University football team.


Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 397

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Humor: (Not exactly, but I don't have a "Food" category.) A small Georgia town has two fruitcake companies, according to a National Public Radio report on fruitcake, and what is in it, and what it's good for. 

Science:  A study of porcupine quills may help produce better injection needles and surgical wound repair, according to National Public Radio.

The Arts: The World has a report on languages created for works of fantasy literature. You can hear Ursula K. Le Guin, discussing her splendid The Dispossessed, and see a weather report in one of Tolkien's elvish languages.

A fine blog post, with photographs, giving a biography of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Christianity: Kerry i am took a walk with a Haitian man, with no common language, with amazing consequences.

Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 336

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Humor: (sort of) A curry eating contest put two contestants in the hospital, according to National Public Radio.

Science: Wired reports that scientists have found that meerkats can recognize other meerkat individuals by the sound of their "voice."

Carl Zimmer discusses a recent finding -- the largest known virus.

A video from TED on how babies learn languages.
 

The Arts: (sort of) The New York Times has discovered books written by robots.

Image source (public domain)

Baby parrots have unique "names" which function like human names

I was amazed to read some reports on research by a Karl Berg, and his group, from Cornell University, that indicates that baby parrots are given names by their parents, and modify these slightly, so that each parrot has a unique sound sequence that identifies the animal, much like "John Jones, Jr." might identify a human individual.

Here is the report in Science Now, and here in Nature News blog. The reports are readable, and interesting, and both of them include a short video. Science and Nature are the two most important scientific periodicals in English.

Thanks for reading!