john legend makes me fall in love

he loves her.

he calls every night,

and she falls asleep to the gentle rhythm of his voice.

she gets grumpy

because he's having fun in town

while she has to hit the books and study,

cooped up at home.

she gets upset because he doesn't call

she makes him stay up to chat even when he's tired

he does it for love.

she picks fights

uses words she shouldn't

when really, he's done no wrong.

he takes the blame,

takes the pain,

but his love is still the same.

she cries

to apologise

she is thankful

he loves her.


sometimes,

the time he spends driving to see her

is longer than the time they share together.

that's how you know

he loves her.

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Now playing: John Legend - Stereo

the religious scientist

I don't actually have much comment on the article below, apart from the fact that I continue to be a little mystified by persons such as Newton, who must have been so scientifically brilliant, and yet despite his deep involvement in science he was also a devout Christian. Such people seem to shatter the concept of a conflict between science and religion.

The article is certainly an interesting read. Will the world really end in 2060, I wonder.. actually no, let's not wonder about that, I don't particularly like the thought of the world ending.
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Newton's Clockwork Universe

A rare exhibit of Isaac Newton's religious writing, on display at Israel's National Library in Jerusalem, has treated viewers to his interpretation of the Book of Daniel, a prediction that the world will end in 2060, and other biblical notations.

But nowhere in these manuscripts, or his other writings, does Newton speak of a "clockwork" universe, with which he is often associated.

The exhibit sheds light on two misinterpretations of Newton, who died 280 years ago and is considered the greatest scientist in history for his work in physics, astronomy, math, and optics.

The exhibit, for example, shows that Newton was not only a severe-minded scientist, but also an avid speculator in biblical religion. Other scholarship has recently suggested that, although he discovered the laws of motion and gravity, Newton never took the religious view that universe was like a clock set in motion by a distant "clockmaker."

"These documents show a scientist guided by religious fervor, by a desire to see God's actions in the world," curator Yemima Ben-Menahem told reporters at the exhibit's opening this summer. When Einstein saw these documents, he wrote that Newton's speculations "give us a most interesting look into the mental laboratory of this unique thinker," according to a 1940 letter in the Hebrew University archives.

The Jerusalem manuscripts, bought by a Jewish scholar in the 1930s and then housed in the museum, are being shown to the public for the first time. They show that, as a mathematician, Newton was not only interested in calculating Bible prophesy, but also hidden secrets in the dimensions of the ancient temple of Jerusalem.

"He believed there was wisdom in the world that got lost," said Ben-Menahem. "He thought it was coded, and that by studying things like the dimensions of the temple, he could decode it."

After the scientific revolution sparked by Newton, many historians argued that his machine-like universe presented a persuasive argument for the God of Deism, or a God who wound up the clock and then left the scene. The laws of gravity and motion by themselves operated the universe, an idea later applied to biological life. Newton's most famous biographer, the late Richard Westfall, called him a Deist.

But the Newton writings and more recent scholarship argue that Newton still believed that God operated in the details of the world, both in nature and in history.

"Newton's God was not the absentee clockmaker typical of the Enlightenment," says Edward B. Davis, a former student of Westfall who teaches the history of science at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. "Newton believed God was free to make the world, and alter it at times, in any way he pleased. Newton was serious about his belief in an active God who governs nature at all times."

The idea that Newton embraced the clockwork image, according to Davis and others, originated with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, his rival in claiming to have been first to invent calculus. During Leibniz's debate with a friend of Newton, the philosopher Samuel Clarke, he said that Newton had discredited God's perfection by saying the deity adjusted the orbits of planets occasionally.

Leibniz said Newton had introduced a God that had "to wind up his watch from time to time" and lacked "sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion." This sort of God was cleaning and mending the universe "as a clockmaker mends his work," said Leibniz. The clock image became attached to Newton, even though Clarke emphatically rejected the idea on Newton's authority. The clock universe, Clarke wrote, "is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends ... to exclude providence."

The Jerusalem documents suggest Newton saw God as governing providential history and even hiding spiritual truths in the biblical commandments on the dimensions of the temple.

In one manuscript Newton uses the Book of Daniel to suggest the world would end no earlier than 2060. "It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner," he wrote. "This I mention not to assert when the time of the end shall be, but to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophesies into discredit as often as their predictions fail."

Davis says that Newton's massive writings on alchemy, or the use of chemistry to seek spiritual knowledge, also illustrated that Newton was trying to find the "intermediate agents" and "active principles" of God's action in the world. As Newton wrote, "God doth nothing by himself which he can do by others."

Davis says that other leading figures, such as chemist Robert Boyle and philosopher John Locke, were also interested in alchemy. "For all the talk about magic and making gold," says Davis, "alchemy was ultimately about matter itself and how God governed it. It's fair to say that alchemy was the scientific theory of matter at that time. We need to look at science in its real context."

things that make me happy

mint choc chip ice cream

mango and banana nectar

music that makes me move, or sway, or tap my foot incessantly

friendly animals

young animals

old animals

animals

slices of juicy sweet watermelon

being within arm's reach of a kookaburra or a cockatoo (but not actually touching them)

the first dive into the middle lane of a still pool, and the instant cool it brings

running like a kamikaze down the beach into the water and diving into the waves

diving deep down as a HUGE wave rolls close, being peacefully submerged in a watery stillness as the wave sweeps over the top of me to the shore

fruitiness

fully understanding my homework

fully understanding my work

unusual pieces of clothing that actually look good on me

good hair days

skirts

making friends feel blissfully happy

big strong bear hugs

sitting close together outside and staring at nothing on a lazy afternoon or morning with friends

feeling good about myself and my body image

feelgood movies

the first hint of a summer breeze

beautiful blue skies and being in a park

classic picnics

holidays away

running around like a crazy nut

singing in perfect harmony with other musical minds

wicked impromptu jams

discovering that your feelings were mutual after all

week 9 discussion post #4

To put things in context, Ariella wrote:

The thought strikes me, that the thing about miracles is that they are rare. This is why they are miracles. So what happens then if something is so rare that it has only ever happened once, and it happened to occur a long time ago, and this doesn't give scientists the chance to study it...?

How are people then to know about the scientific possibility or impossibility of this thing...? Could it not be that it is scientifically possible, but everyone thinks it is scientifically impossible, and only a myth, because it hasn't happened again, and so doesn't seem feasible or provable...?

I hope this made sense. I am not sure that it does :)


My repsonse (Slightly edited for the purposes of this blog):

I think I can see where Ariella is coming from with this suggestion, and I like the idea.

It makes sense to me that a scientist would have difficulty understanding an event that occurs, say every 1-in-50 years, because scientific experiments (to me) are all about repetition and comparing against a 'control' of some sort.. so anything that can't be reperformed and tested is classed into the 'miracles' group, simply because scientists don't have the ability to gather additional information about such an event..

a lifetime of secrets

What secret would you share with the world, if you knew that nobody would know the secret was yours?

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/





Makes me want to send in my own secrets..

intensely fascinating

You gotta see this.

African evolution

Article: Out of Africa, But Into What?

The "out of Africa" theory for human origins dominates modern science, beating out a competing theory that modern humans may have evolved in a few locations. But that does not mean the Africa-first theorists are sitting on their laurels.

Anthropologists and geneticists who study African origins are making the theory as robust as possible. They also are trying to answer a few contested questions: After Africa, where did early humans go first, and how does that explain the seeming anomaly that humans fossils at times suggest more than one origin?

This summer, two researchers at Cambridge University, the geneticist William Amos and biologist Andrea Manica, presented what they believe is a definitive answer: The evolution of skulls match up with previously found genetic evidence that pinpoint human origins to central or southern Africa before their rapid migration around the world.

The researchers analyzed the shapes of 4,666 male skulls from 105 places around the world, all of them less than 2,000 years old. As expected, they found that skulls nearer to Africa showed a higher degree of difference, reflecting the early evolutionary branching of modern humans. Human skulls found at great distances from Africa showed less change within their own groups, reflecting a loss of genetic diversity.

"What you find is a very nice linear decline of variability as you move farther away from Africa," Amos said. This pattern in the skulls also matched research in genetics showing more diversity in older African populations, and less at greater distances, the team reported in July in the journal Nature. "We failed to find evidence of a second origin," they said. Discoveries of skulls that suggest second origins are anomalies, since the preponderance of data show an out-of-Africa pattern.

Although the Cambridge team of skull experts confirmed their findings with previous genetic evidence, a debate has raged for a few decades on which is the best test of evolutionary branching: fossils or genetic samples from modern creatures?

The Cambridge researchers said the skulls often have the best advantage in the study of human origins. "There are so many of them and they come from populations that are not very well represented genetically," said Amos. Although genetic samples for aboriginal Americans and Australians are rare, for example, skulls are in abundance. The global skull data can "open up lots of nice testable hypotheses" on which routes early humans took when they left Africa, Amos said.

Many geneticists have argued that genetic samples are the best proof of migrations, and they are hard at work trying to trace human migrations as well. Since last year, the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., has led this research. "Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes," said Spencer Wells, a population geneticist. Wells is lead scientist in National Geographic's five-year project to analyze approximately 100,000 DNA samples from people across the globe.

Anthropologists and geneticists tend to agree that modern humans left Africa between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, but a number of mysteries remain. Scientists are not sure which are the oldest populations in Africa, for example. They also wonder about the role a 5,000-mile network of trade routes called the Silk Road played in dispersing genetic diversity across the Middle East, India, and Asia. The number of times that humans migrated to the Americas is also up for debate, as is the time when they first arrived in the arctic regions.

Despite these mysteries, few experts doubt the out-of-Africa scenario in broad terms, said Erik Trinkaus, a physical anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. "The issue is how much modern humans spreading out of Africa after 50,000 years ago interbred with regional groups of archaic humans, where and when," he said. The new studies "reinforce the idea of a special isolation of modern humanity from anything less 'pure,'" meaning an avoidance of mating with other archaic humans.

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This work is so fascinating - I remember watching a National Geographic documentary titled "The Journey of Man" when I was in high school - unfortunately I don't remember much of it because I was really tired and fell asleep on the couch watching it. But just the idea that we all come from Africa.. it's really exciting.

And with evidence like this, I can't help but wonder how people don't believe in the concept of human evolution. Or perhaps we've got the wrong story, i.e. the Bible is more limited than we think. Maybe, because it wasn't until we developed as homo sapiens that we were able to read and write, our documentation of religion and God is missing the hundreds or thousands or millions of years when God also existed in the earlier humans' presence, when they didn't understand who He was, nor have any means of recording their experiences for future generations to comprehend.

Were Adam and Eve actually a pair of early, early humans, living in a lush Garden of Eden in Africa? Hmmm..!


A response to the article "Out of Africa, But Into What?"

(maybe) it's the end of the male as we know it

Article: The End of 'Man'

The segment of human genes that defines maleness—the Y chromosome—is so meager that some scientists predict it will evolve out of existence in 125,000 years. The ninety genes that determine who is born a boy are so vulnerable, some scientists say, that they deserve labels like DNA "graveyard" or "Adam's curse."

No one has yet predicted the end of the male species, although it could theoretically happen. Males generally carry one Y chromosome, with its few genes, and one X, which has more than a thousand. The Y, lacking a matched genetic partner, exchanges little genetic material with the X. Women, on the other hand, have two X chromosomes that exchange vastly more genes.

Since the Y lacks this high rate of recombination, the scientific mystery has been how the "male" genetic code survives generation after generation. Scientists wonder why maleness, with its lack of genetic resources, has not simply withered away.

The answer, according to new research, may be that the Y has found a way to keep replenishing itself.

During fertilization, when the mother and father exchange their unique genetic blueprints, the mother and father's DNA exchange places with each other at random points. This "crossing over," or mixing, of genetic material is believed to ensure the health of the human genome by adding diversity it its genes. The process weeds out the weak genes and perpetuates the strong ones.

This crossing over is extensive between two X chromosomes. But the Y chromosome lacks a full partner and is denied full genetic "sex," or recombination. The Y only exchanges genetic material at its ends, where it matches the X chromosome. All the other genes on the Y apparently receive no upgrading and repair by the swapping of genetic material.

Nevertheless, genetic "man" has survived for 300 million years, but scientists disagree on how much longer he can last.

That story begins with the apparent history of the X and Y chromosomes. They are believed to have been identical in mammals 300 million years ago. After a major mutation occurred, a male-determining gene appeared on the Y chromosome. The gene is now called the SRY gene for "Sex-determining Region of the Y." This mutation had historical significance because it marked the birth of "sex" and the distinctive journeys of the Y and the X.

Although the Y chromosome has few genes, they are very active in producing sperm for reproduction. But because of this activity, and because they are switched "on" so often, the Y genes are particularly susceptible to mutation.

The Oxford geneticist Brian Sykes, who describes the Y chromosome as a "graveyard of rotting genes," calculates that this high mutation rate will destroy the fertility of the Y in 125,000 years. That means that the Y chromosome will no longer have the genetic power to make males, and the natural reproduction of "man" will end.

Other scientists give the Y a better chance. Biologists Jennifer Graves of the Australian National University calculates that the Y chromosome, and thus males, will last perhaps 14 million more years. Her estimate is based on a more gradual gene decay.

A new theory, however, not only rejects such pessimism, but tries to explain why the weakling Y chromosome has lasted so long. In 2003, David Page, head of the Whitehead Institute and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), presented his discovery that a major part of the Y chromosome self-corrects its mutations. He studied the region of genes that produced the most sperm and found eight extra gene sequences—mirror images of the genes called palindromes—that allow the Y to recombine with itself.

A genetic palindrome is a DNA sequence with letters that read the same in either direction (such as the word "tenet" or phrase "Madam, in Eden I'm Adam"). Page argues that the Y chromosome makes a hairpin loop (see diagram) to recombine its genes, keeping them healthy after millions of years of genetic reproduction. This process of "gene conversion," Page says, can occur up to six hundred times per pairing.

He and his colleagues compared the DNA in the Y chromosome of chimpanzees and humans and found that even the genes that do not participate in palindrome conversion change very little over six million years—the point at which chimp and human lines diverged. Although the Y has lost genes, Page says, it has also gained them and become very specialized and efficient.

Graves, the Australian geneticist, is not convinced. She doubts that the palindrome effect really recombines genes,and says it may further erode them. Sykes adds in his book, Adam's Curse, "The Y chromosome is just as lonely as ever—though we now know that it talks to itself as it spirals towards oblivion."

But even if this means the end of natural male reproduction, Graves says, other genes might mutate and take over the SRY's role. A new species of humans might result. The Y has disappeared from two rodent species, for example, but males are still being born. At MIT, Page puts his money on the Y as we know it. He sees it not as a graveyard but as a lean, efficient reproduction machine—here to stay.

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Now this is a slightly bizarre article. I never thought I'd read about the possibility of the extinction of the male human species. I mean, really. Who'da thunk?

What's amusing is how the article notes that the genes that ultimately determine a boy are "vulnerable" - that's the last word I'd use to describe males as a whole, considering the largely male-dominated society we live in. Yes, gender equality has come a long way, but I think it still has a ways to go.

The reason why I feel compelled to include this article in my journal is because I don't think this sits well with a Judaeo-Christian belief of God and the creation of humans. Surely God wouldn't have created Adam and Eve in such a way that the male species would eventually die out before the female race (which incidentally is the total opposite of the movie Children of Men, where there is only one female left on Earth and she is pregnant and it's so-and-so's duty to protect her from everybody else who is trying to kill her, etc). Especially considering that it was Eve who supposedly sinned by eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Nor would He, in my opinion, create humans in such a way that we would evolve into a new method of breeding.

Admittedly, the end of the article notes that perhaps a new species of human will be born from the disappearance or deterioration of the Y chromosome.. thus ending 'natural male reproduction' as mentioned in the article, and creating a new form of human reproduction which would, in time, become 'natural' reproduction.

Genetic mutation - the phrase sounds like such an unnatural activity, but I'm sure it happens all the time. It's like the concept of 'normal'. There can hardly be such a thing as normal in my opinion; one is merely making a huge generalisation over the population when describing something as having normal or usual attributes.

But back to the article. Of course, this is all scientific speculation. Nobody knows what will actually happen.. but the theories put forward in the article are rather intriguing to say the least!


A response to the article "The End of 'Man'"