May 12, 2013: One Interesting Thing - Some Mother's Day Holy Humour

Just for the sake of having a bit of fun tonight, this went over really well when I told the story in church this morning, so it's worth sharing again to bring a smile to a few faces!


A little girl went to her mother and asked "Mommy, where do you think people came from?" Her mother said, "Well, honey, God created people. And God created people in his image, and he loves us and that's why we're able to love each other so deeply." And then the little girl went to her father and asked the same question, "Daddy, where do you think people came from?" And her father explained to her the theory of evolution, telling her that people are descended from apes, which is why we still sometimes act like animals and can be like brutes." And the little girl went back to her mother and explained what her father had said and asked, "So mommy, which one of you is right?" And her mother smiled at her and said, "Well, sweetheart, actually we're both right. I was talking about my side of the family, and your father was talking about his side of the family!"

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!

May 11, 2013: One Interesting Thing - A Wall Of Ice

Nature is impressive. Impressive enough, actually, that when something significant happens, it's usually referred to as an "act of God." I don't know about that, except to the extent that God created it all, but I don't doubt that the power of nature can be both impressive and terrifying. An example of that happened in Manitoba last night. Strong winds pushed ice on Dauphin Lake onto homes and cottages in the community of Ochre Beach, about 200 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg. On a beautiful day, with people barbecuing, the wind suddenly started blowing with gusts of up to 90 kilometres/hour without any warning. The ice that was still on the surface of the lake was still about a meter thick, and there was no open water, so no one was especially concerned about it. Somehow, though, when that wind started blowing, the ice got picked up by the wind and forced ashore, so that in less than 10 minutes there was a huge wall of ice (9 metres high in some places) smashing into cottages and tearing apart decks. The most miraculous thing about this particular "act of God" is that no one was actually hurt. People who were there described the sound as being like a freight train going by. Some homes were totally destroyed; others were just filled to the ceiling with ice, as the ice forced its way through doors and windows. As Clayton Watts, the deputy reeve of the community said, "There’s no stopping ice once it gets moving. It’ll take out everything in its path." The whole event only took about ten minutes - but it's 10 minutes that will never be forgotten by the people who experienced it.

May 10, 2013: One Interesting Thing - Nova Scotia Cicadas

Cicadas are large, winged insects, about 2-5 cm long when fully-grown, that most people have probably heard more than they've seen. This is because they usually sit up in trees, out of sight, but the males emit a loud buzzing/hissing 'song', which sounds a bit like a 'white-noise' machine, when they are trying to attract a mate. We hear them around here a fair bit in the spring and summer, although they're actually native to the eastern United States, and are typically seen from Connecticut to North Carolina. This year, though, it appears as though regions of Nova Scotia may see them as well. Cicadas have a 13- to 17-year life cycle, and each year, another batch of these emerges from the ground, and each batch is called a 'brood'. The brood that will hit Nova Scotia is Brood II - one of 15 recognized broods of cicadas in North America. The last time Brood II was seen was in 1996, when they burrowed out of the ground, spent the next few weeks mating, and then died. The eggs they laid took a few months to hatch, after which the 'newborns' burrowed under the ground, and then stayed there, feeding off of roots until it was their turn to emerge. And when they do emerge, it will be by the billions. Current estimates put their numbers at around 30 billion, but some believe it could be closer to 1 trillion. Even though these insects may seem pretty creepy, they're harmless to people and animals. There have, apparently, been a few rare cases when a cicada has mistaken someone's arm for a tree branch and stuck its proboscis in to try and get sap, but although it's painful, it isn't dangerous.

May 9, 2013: One Interesting Thing - The Moon's Water

It was once believed that the moon was completely dry and dusty. Then, in 2009, NASA crashed a rocket into the moon's Cabeus crater and measured the amount of water in the resulting plume of debris. It turned out that there were 155 litres of ice and vapour as a result of the rocket impact. That was considered a surprising amount of water on the moon. Since then, significant amounts of water have been found - both on and under the moon's surface. The accepted explanation for that, until now, has been that the water was probably brought to the moon by a comet long after the moon was formed. Now, that's coming into question. The popular theory is that moon was formed from debris left behind 4.5 billion years ago when a huge object - probably a Mars-sized planet-like rock - crashed into what's known as the "proto-Earth," the object that gave rise to our planet. According to theory, that impact would have generated so much heat that water and elements such as hydrogen needed to form water would all have boiled off into space, leaving the young Moon completely dry. But now, as simple as it sounds, the theory is that there was enough water on the "proto-Earth" that not all of it would have evaporated, but would rather have ended up on the moon. Recent studies of moon rocks brought back by Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 lend credence to this theory. There's water and gases trapped inside glass bubbles in some of the rocks, and they can be analyzed. Water from comets has a different chemical signature than water from earth - and the water in the moon rocks almost certainly came from earth.

May 8, 2013: One Interesting Thing - How To Clean A Baby's Soother

A few days ago I wrote about a theory that when children pick their noses and eat what comes out - it's actually good for them because the germs that are trapped in the mucous actually help to build their immune systems. Gross, but true. Well, here's another gross-out (although perhaps slightly less) story that complements it. The question is how to clean a baby's pacifier. My daughter is adopted. She was already a year old when we adopted her. Pacifiers were never really her thing. So admittedly I have limited experience on this, but I would imagine that if I wanted to clean my baby's pacifier I'd hold it under running water for a few seconds. What else would I do? Well, apparently you could stick it in your own mouth before giving it back to your baby! This is a theory that's come from a Swedish study. It may seem unsanitary, but the study suggests that doing this actually reduces the risk of allergy symptoms in babies as young as 18 months. Children whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them had one third the risk of developing eczema - which is a very early manifestation of allergies - by 18 months. By 36 months, these babies had only half the incidence of allergy symptoms as other children. Dr. Bill Hesselmar is a physician at Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, and he said that “We think [parents’] saliva stimulates the immune system [in babies]." The new research is part of a larger investigation of the hygiene hypothesis – the notion that increased rates of allergies and asthma in children are due to overly clean living environments.

May 7, 2013: One Interesting Thing - Stockholm Syndrome

The news today has been saturated (understandably enough) with the story of 3 young women in Cleveland who were rescued after having been kidnapped ten years ago and held captive all that time, just a few kilometres from their homes. It's a story that is both joyful and horrific. I cannot imagine (nor would I want to imagine) what it would be like to be held captive for 10 years - and never mind the nightmarish conditions these young women must have been held under. The story got me thinking about a condition known as Stockholm Syndrome. It may not even be applicable to this case. It certainly doesn't seem to apply to Amanda Brett - the young woman who got free and was able to attract enough attention to get help from a man who lived in the house next door - but we haven't really heard very much about the other two women held with her. Stockholm Syndrome is named after the robbery of Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden in August of 1973. Several bank employees were held hostage in a vault for five days, and they became emotionally attached to their captors, rejecting assistance from government officials at one point and even defending them after they were freed. According to the FBI, 27% of those who are held as hostages or are kidnapped show signs of Stockholm Syndrome. One explanation of Stockholm syndrome is based on Freudian theory, and suggests that the bonding is the individual’s response to trauma in becoming a victim. Identifying with the aggressor is one way that the ego defends itself. When a victim believes the same values as the aggressor, the aggressor is no longer a threat. I don't know, of course, if any of the three women rescued in Cleveland today suffered from Stockholm Syndrome. I admire their courage, though, just in surviving the ordeal, and I wish them well.

May 6, 2013: One Interesting Thing - 3-D Printers.

Who would ever have thought that such a thing existed. I know I didn't - and yet they've apparently been around for more than a decade. It's a 3-D printer - a computer printer than can actually take a blueprint of something and construct a plastic 3-D image of it. Actually, early prototypes of 3-D printers were around in the 1990's, developed at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. It sounds like something out of science fiction (loosely related, perhaps, to the Star Trek Holodeck idea.)  The technology, though, isn't especially futuristic. It uses something similar to inkjet printing, the differences being that the jets move up and down to cover the same surface with multiple layers, and the jets spray thick waxes and plastic polymers. There are more complex ways of doing 3-D printing, but that seems to be the simplest. This isn't exactly home technology yet. It's still kind of pricey, meaning that it's mostly corporations and industry that use the technology, but as with all technology, I suspect this will become more accessible as time goes on. I noted in the report I saw tonight that it's being used for nefarious purposes by an American anarchist - who's replicating cheap guns that actually work. But basically they can recreate almost anything. Let's hope that, in the end, this technology is used for more productive purposes than weapons manufacturing!