Sunspots 844

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to others*:

Health: (and politics) Gizmodo reports that people who rely on Facebook for news are more likely to resist vaccination for COVID than people who rely on Fox News for their news.

Science:  A Gizmodo panel asks if we will ever be able to delete or alter memories. Not for a long time, if ever.\

Gizmodo on ink that is really black. Really.

Sports: (and Politics) FiveThirtyEight reports that the Cold War in Olympic gymnastics is over.

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

*I try not to include items that require a password or fee to view.

Thanks for reading.

 

Sunspots 790

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to

someone else:

Christianity: National Public Radio reports that multi-racial congregations don't really bridge the gaps between the cultures of races.

Christianity Today has an article saying that white churches don't really deal with racism.

Computing: Gizmodo tells us about a single web page that lets you click on a variety of non-keyboard symbols, and then copy them into a document. I tried a few: ∛ ⊗ ↘ π ♫. This works in Word, as well as in my HTML editor.

Education: Gizmo's Freeware tells us about the online etymology dictionary.


Environment: Gizmodo reports that Morgan Stanley has begun keeping track of their investments in fossil fuel development projects.

Health: Gizmodo reports on a government study that recommends no more than one drink (whatever that means) of alcohol per day for all adults.

Politics: Leonard Pitts blames her church, her parents, and a lot of other entities, including traditional news media, for the death of Carsyn Leigh Davis, after she attended a mask-free celebration for teens at her church.

FiveThirtyEight analyzes the data, and finds that Trump has a problem with voter enthusiasm, as does Biden.

FiveThirtyEight also finds that most Republican governors are getting low polling marks for their handling of COVID-19, and most Democratic governors are getting good marks.

Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength looks back at the George Floyd story.


Science: Gizmodo reports on evidence, from preserved dung, that humans came to North America about 14,000 years ago.

Inverse reports that some deep-sea fish have extremely black materials as part of their skin.

Gizmodo reports on a material that can't be cut.


The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

Thanks for looking!

Sunspots 669

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


Christianity: He Lives has a brief post on the importance of the resurrection.

Computing: ZDNet reports that Microsoft claims that its artificially intelligent language translators have become as good as expert human translators, in changing sentences in news reports from Chinese to English.

Gizmodo on how to use Facebook, but make as little information as possible available to others while doing so.

Health: Gizmodo reports on a study of how a virus spreads between passengers in an airplane.

History: Sojourners tells us some interesting facts (or not) about St. Patrick.

Politics: A Relevant writer says that some white evangelicals seem to have a double standard on Presidential morality.

An annotated list of people and things that President Trump has insulted on Twitter, as of January 3, 2018. (It's a long list!)

Science: Scientific American reports on experiments that suggest that people are less likely to return favors, as time increases since the first favor.

Gizmodo on why our faces change shape as we get older.

Gizmodo reports on really black, and really white materials, including paint.

Gizmodo also reports on the bone structure, and possible flight behavior, of Archaeopteryx.

Scientific American reports on a study that showed that having tigers around farms in Bhutan increased farm profitability. Reason: the tigers kept some other predators away.


Thanks for looking!

Image source (public domain)

Gray versus Black and White

Gray versus Black and White

Christians disagree over many things, such as:
1) Whether women should be pastors.
2) Whether or not there will be a rapture, and, if so, whether it will be before, during, or after the tribulation.
3) Whether a person who is truly a redeemed believer can lose their salvation or not.
4) Whether or not Christians should expect to speak in tongues, and, if so, whether such utterance is or is not really a language.
5) Whether the days of Genesis 1 were literal consecutive 24-hour days or not.
Some of us like to see things in black and white. We want to know the answers -- the right answers. Some of us don't feel this need, or don't think there is enough evidence to make up our minds. We see things in gray. Generally, that would be me.

There are real dangers in being a black and white person.
1) Most obviously, you might be wrong.* The main reason being wrong is a problem is that if you are hard-nosed enough about your wrong belief, you may turn non-believers away from Christ.**
2) Vehement disagreements between believers will turn away non-believers.
3) God never commanded that we understand exactly what the book of Revelation predicts, for example. We can spend more of our time on such issues than we should, just as we can spend too much time watching TV. Christ has other plans for us.
4) You might disrespect a gray fellow Christian, because she hasn't made up her mind on something that you have. You might disrespect a black and white believer, because he doesn't agree with you. You might be proud of your own firmness.
There are also dangers in being gray:
1) You may be ignoring things that God wants you to know and act on, or you may doubt things that you should believe.
2) God commands that we take the scripture seriously.
3) You may not be spending enough of your thought life on God, lazily saying about whatever issue, "Well, we can't know, so why think about it?"
4) If we don't take our beliefs seriously enough, unbelievers will not consider believing as we do.5) You might disrespect a black and white believer as simple-minded, or be proud of the fact that you haven't made up your mind.

So, my friends, I submit to you that, generally, we should be intermediate between black and whiteness and grayness. I don't know what color that is.
*As Henry Neufeld recently said, there is a sort of unacknowledged doctrine that you have to be doctrinally correct to be eternally saved, but that is one thing we should be black and white about -- you don't have to have all your theological jots and tittles in a row to be redeemed, thanks be to God! (Neufeld's entire essay is splendid.)That's no excuse for not listening to pastors, not studying Sunday School lessons or the equivalent, not reading the Bible, or for ignoring other sources of light.

**For instance, if you say that the Bible says that Christ is returning before you die, and He doesn't, people who don't know much about the Bible, except what you say, will come to the conclusion that they can ignore it.
For another instance, non believing geologists are not likely to respond, if you tell them that the Bible says that they need to repent and believe, if you have also told them that the Bible teaches unequivocally that almost all geological phenomena are the result of Noah's flood.
I thank my wife for constructive criticism. Thanks for reading.

This essay was subject to serious editing on November 22, 2008, without changing the meaning significantly from that posted on the original date.

Boo!

Garrison Keillor, at the Writer's Almanac, has a couple of paragraphs about today's holiday/celebration/abomination/whatever it is. As always, Keillor is worth reading or listening to.

Pumpkins are members of the Cucurbitae family of flowering plants, along with squash, cucumbers, melons, and others.

Here's my post on the color orange, and here's my post on the color black, both from over a year ago.

Thanks for reading!

* * * * * *

Addendum: A couple of hours later:

I should have pointed out that, on this date in 1517, Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses, which were, I guess, the beginning of Protestantism.

Colors: Black

Black is the most common color word in English. According to Wordcount, it is the 356th most common word, between "care" and "book," which is the 357th most common word.

There are only 18 verses in the Bible that have this word, considerably less than for some of the color words in previous posts. These include references to the sky when stormy, or when God is angry, to human and horse hair, and to human skin when exposed to the sun.

Easton's Bible Dictionary: "Colour"

The subject of colours holds an important place in the Scriptures. . . .

Black, applied to the hair ( Lev 13:31; Sgs 5:11), the complexion ( Sgs 1:5), and to horses ( Zec 6:2,6). The word rendered "brown" in Gen 30:32 ( R.V., "black") means properly "scorched", i.e., the colour produced by the influence of the sun's rays. "Black" in Job 30:30 means dirty, blackened by sorrow and disease. The word is applied to a mourner's robes ( Jer 8:21; 14:2), to a clouded sky ( 1Ki 18:45), to night ( Mic 3:6; Jer 4:28), and to a brook rendered turbid by melted snow ( Job 6:16). It is used as symbolical of evil in Zec 6:2, 6 and Rev 6:5. It was the emblem of mourning, affliction, calamity ( Jer 14:2; Lam 4:8; 5:10).

A couple of items on color that I haven't gotten in in previous posts:
The Astronomy Picture of the Day for Feb 27, 2005, is a spectrum of the sun, spread out more than we are used to seing.

More on color and fantastic literature:
Jack Vance is one of the great writers of fantastic fiction. He has won two Hugo awards, and has written for over four decades. He is distinguished by his baroque use of words, and by his imagination. Some of his magical realms have colors that human eyes don't normally see. (Of course Vance can't describe them!) One of his novels, Alastor: Marune, is set on a planet with four suns, orange, blue, red and green. Vance wrote that the citizens' moods and behavior changed, depending on which combination of suns were in the sky. A Vance fan, Eric Halsey, has created a free downloadable software program that shows the 16 color combinations of these four suns. (Warning: file is several megabytes in size. The link is to a page that describes the program. It has a link to download it.) (The previous parenthesis, and the sentence preceding it, were modified on Jan 10, 2007, because of a comment by tap (see below). I thank him.)

My post on Indigo mentioned Whitelaw as a word about as common as Indigo (which isn't very common). Turns out Whitelaw is the name of a town in the UK.

Back to black
Black isn't exactly a color, even though there are black crayons, and black paint. Black is the absence of other colors. If all light is absorbed, the result is black. A black hole is a dense space object that has gravity so strong that the resulting bending of space prevents light from escaping. We can't see a black hole with a telescope, because no light comes from it.

No humans, or any other objects we can see, are pure black. They may be dark, but if they were black, we couldn't see them, because they wouldn't reflect any light. Fantastic writer Gene Wolfe invented a fabric, fuligin, used in his Torturer series, that could not be seen. (Note added Jan 9, 2007: Wolfe says that he didn't invent any words in his Torturer series, more commonly known as the Book of the New Sun.)

Black is often used to symbolize death, despair, or sin. I am posting this on the anniversary of a black day for the disciples. Black has quite a few unhappy connotations. (Think Black Death, for example.) In Tolkien's Ring books, the bad characters often were black, or wore black. (Black breath was a sickness produced by the ringwraiths, and Mordor was referred to as the black land. Sauron was the dark lord.) It is unfortunate that some of these negative connotations have been associated with dark-skinned people.

Sin is sometimes described as black, needing the crimson blood of Christ to cleanse, and make us white.

This, so far as I know, ends my series on colors, which began February 14th of 2005, with a post on red. Thanks to anyone who has read this one, or any or all of the others!

Modifications, noted above, were made to this post on January 9th and 10th, 2007. No other changes have been made to the original post, hence I have kept the original date.