Some Saturday Stuff- June 22nd.
A picture I took of the Delaware Memorial Bridge on Wednesday night.
Happy Saturday, peeps. It’s been a ridiculously crazy week for me, including what felt like a two second (was actually a one day) trip out of state and back. I also had another bad IVIG treatment and had to have a second nurse come out to administer it (that time went smoothly). Add in my mother’s admittance to the hospital and my own plans for some more plasmapheresis in the next couple of weeks, and yeah, I’m not even sure what happened the last five days. So I needed to do this Some Saturday Stuff just to be able to catch up! Here we go!
First up, this interview from Christianity Today with Jim Daly of Focus on The Family and U2’s Bono:
1) On both losing their mothers while they were still children:
Bono: I don’t have a lot of memories of her, which is [an] unfortunately situation. … I look forward to meeting her again. But the loss of that is significant for [a child], and for me, I filled it with music and … and it deepened my faith, I suppose.
Daly: That Scripture in Psalms that talks about God being close to the brokenhearted and saving those crushed in spirit—does that mean something to you?
Bono: First of all, David’s a musician, so I’m gonna like him. … And what’s so powerful about the Psalms are, as well as their being Gospel and songs of praise, they are also the Blues. It’s very important for Christians to be honest with God, which often, you know, God is much more interested in who you are than who you want to be.
3) On Jesus as the Messiah:
Daly: So often those that struggle with accepting Jesus Christ as their savior … it’s the idea that he’s the Messiah. … How did you respond to that?
Bono: Jesus isn’t lettin’ you off the hook. The Scriptures don’t let you off the hook so easily. … When people say, you know, “Good teacher”, “Prophet”, “Really nice guy” … this is not how Jesus thought of Himself. So you’re left with a challenge in that, which is either Jesus was who he said he was or a complete and utter nut case. … You have to make a choice on that.
And I believe that Jesus was, you know, the Son of God. And I understand that … we need to be really, really respectful to people who find that ridiculous and … preposterous.
Do you know that every night, you lose a pound as you sleep? Really. I tried to guess why and couldn’t. Then when I read this, I thought, “Duh!”. From NPR:
Here’s a simple question: Why do you weigh more when you go to sleep than when you wake up? Because you do. In the video below, you’ll see the evidence. You can check this yourself. Somehow, while doing absolutely nothing all night but sleep, you will wake up lighter.
This is not about bathroom stuff. If you awaken and weigh yourself even before going to the toilet, you will still be lighter than when you went to bed. Why?
Where Does The Weight Go?
My first thought was “sweat.” Maybe you sweat when you sleep, so some of your water weight disappears as water vapor. Turns out, that’s true. That’s part of the explanation — but not the fascinating part.
Derek Muller, a physics teacher in Perth, Australia, and host of one of my favorite science blogs, , came up with the full answer, and it’s so surprising, so simple, it feels like one of those No Fuss, No Muss, Miracle Cures they talk about on late night television.
This is like the Sting song, “Every breath you take … ” All night long, every time you breathe out, a bunch of carbon atoms, formerly inside your body, leave your insides and take off into the night air. You breathe in oxygen, O2. You breathe out carbon dioxide, (two oxygen atoms with a carbon atom attached), so there’s an extra carbon atom leaving in every round trip.
Each of those carbon atoms weighs almost nothing, a fraction of a fraction of a gram. But every breath expels roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or ten billion trillion atoms, so add up all the atoms coming from all the breaths you take all night long … and — could it be this simple? — you wake up carbon-depleted, more than a pound lighter.
Amazing.
Indeed! Ha ha ha! Now, this weirdly disturbing article from The Atlantic Wire:
During a House Rules Committee debate on Monday, which was spotted by Adele Stan at RH Reality Check, regarding the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act — the restrictive abortion bill for which debate begins today and which would ban procedures nationwide after 20 weeks of pregnancy and effectively dissolve the 23-24 week abortion window provided by Roe v. Wade — Burgess unleashed the following (video below):
This is a subject I know something about … Watch a sonogram of a 15-week baby, and they have movements that are purposeful. They stroke their face. If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs. If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?
So, this member of the U.S. Congress has now said, on the Congressional record, that male fetuses at 15 weeks into development are consciously touching their tiny fetal penises to give themselves pleasure. And Burgess is stating, on the Congressional record, that we should trust him because of his experience as a doctor. According to the GOP Doctors Caucus website, he has practiced as an OB/GYN for 25 years — 25 years of tiny masturbating fetuses.
So is he right? Well, sorta … but not really. In the blurry, ultrasonographic world of masturbating fetuses, the most conclusive finding was in 1996, when two Italian doctors witnessed what they believed was a female fetus purportedly masturbating for 20 minutes and logged their discovery in a letter to The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. That abstract isn’t available online, but their finding has been cited, and previews of the study exist:
But that fetus was at 32 weeks, not 15 weeks, as Burgess cited. And at 32 weeks, fetuses are usually around 3.5 pounds. At 15 weeks, fetuses are around 4 inches long and weigh just a few ounces. Presuming the 1996 finding is the norm (and represents a big jump in itself), the research still doesn’t give any credence to Burgess’s already shocking don’t abort fetuses because they’re masturbating logic, because the fetus witnessed in 1996 was twice the age Burgess cited. Basically, the masturbating fetus argument does not help anything — and it may undermine Burgess’s insistence that fetuses feel pain and pleasure at 15 weeks.
Uh… yeah. I don’t even know what to say. Oh yeah, Kimye had their baby, and named her North (why?), and Paula Deen has depositioned herself right out of a contract and into multiple apologetic videos. Good luck with that.
This week, James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano for six wonderful seasons, passed away in Italy. I was a fan, and being that he was from Dirty Jerz, I’m going to include this in memoriam. May his soul rest in peace and prayers to his wife and two kids.
Finally, the song for today, “Runnin” by The Pharcyde, because I’ve been on high speed all week. Have a great day!