Weekly Meanderings, 4 October 2014

Gotta love the (Bohemian?) Waxwing grabbing some breakfast.

Wine as a source of good bacteria and probiotics by Agata Blaszczak Boxe (Source):

There are bacteria in wine that may be beneficial for people’s health, new research finds.

In the study, researchers in Spain isolated 11 strains of bacteria from wine, including strains of Lactobacillus, which are also found in yogurt, as well as Oenococcus and Pediococcus bacteria, which are associated with the wine-making process.

“Up to now, many studies have reported that the best [foods] to deliver probiotics are dairy fermented products, so that the probiotic properties of wine-related [Lactobacillus] were hardly studied,” said study author Dolores González de Llano of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain.

But “nowadays, there is a need for novel and nondairy probiotics, from the increasing number of lactose-intolerance cases occurring in the world population, coupled with the unfavorable effect of cholesterol contained in fermented dairy products,” González de Llano told Live Science.

David Lamb contends not even God could kill Moses. Why? The women were protecting him:

Everyone wanted to kill Moses. 

In Exodus 1-2 Pharaoh tried multiple times. He told the midwives to kill all Hebrew baby boys, and when that didn’t work he told his people to throw the Hebrew boys in the Nile. When Moses grew up, he killed an Egyptian taskmaster who was beating up a Hebrew slave, and when Pharaoh found out, he wanted to kill Moses yet again….

The midwives.
Jochebed.
Miriam.
Pharaoh’s daughter.
Jethro’s daughters.
Zipporah.

I’m not sure how hard he was trying, but this time not even God could kill him. Although, God does eventually succeed, preventing Moses from entering the Promised Land for striking, not speaking to, the water-rock (Num. 20:12; Deut. 34:5).

Thank God for women who deliver and protect men. 

Julie Zauzmer on the favorite foods by state:

Five researchers at the University of Arizona have food on the brain.

They sifted through about 3.5 million tweets from October 2013 through May 2014, all of which used a hashtag indicating that the tweet had something to do with eating — #breakfast, #brunch, #dinner, #lunch, #meal, #snack and #supper.

Then they sorted those tweets by the state they were written in, and looked at how frequently more than 800 foods were mentioned in each state.

Comparing the frequency with which a food was mentioned in one state with the average frequency with with that food is mentioned nationwide, they came up with this map of the country’s particular tastes.

William Wood on IBE (inference to the best explanation), comparing science and theology:

To return to the central question, I still don’t think that we can increase theological knowledge and discoveries “in the same way” that we increase scientific knowledge and discoveries.  In my view, theology is more like metaphysics than physics.  (I pause to note that this claim does not commit me to the view that it is very much like metaphysics…)  Properly theological claims are rarely open to empirical falsification. But if it is a mistake to treat theology and natural science as too similar, it is also a mistake to treat them as utterly different.  They are both forms of rational inquiry, and so they share certain features of rationality as such, features that are common to any form of rational inquiry.  Inference to the best explanation is one such feature.

One way to make progress—or, at least, avoid regress—in theology is to continue to think carefully about how theological claims differ from, and are similar to, scientific claims.  We should not conflate the two, but nor should we consign them to utterly separate spheres.  In particular, we should think more carefully about what distinguishes IBE from God-of-the-gaps reasoning, so that we will have a better idea of how to employ the former while avoiding the latter.  Some theists would deny that theological claims can ever be explanatory, even in principle, and they would resist all talk of “theological data” or “theological hypotheses.”  But of course theology offers explanations, at least sometimes, and we need not subsume theology into science to admit that it can have its own data and its own hypotheses. We should worry about appeals to a “God of the gaps” because the track-record for such appeals is so poor.  But we ought not take the further step of insisting that divine action can never be the best explanation of anything ever.  That step not only cuts theology off from science, but also from our ordinary practices of reasoning.  That step would make it seem as though theology is not really a form of rational inquiry at all.

Those Terms and Conditions “agree” boxes we click … :

In an experiment sponsored by security firm F-Secure, an open Wi-Fi network was set up in a busy public area. When people connected, they were presented with lengthy terms and conditions.

But to see just how little attention we pay when checking that agreement box, F-Secure included a “Herod clause” — one that offered up free Wi-Fi in exchange for the company’s permanent ownership of the user’s firstborn child….

A company would probably have trouble getting you to hand over your pride and joy (even if you were technically contractually obligated), so don’t panic. But this hapless agreement to terms is pretty common: A 2011 survey  found that 58 percent of adults would rather read an instruction manual or credit card bill than go through online terms and conditions. Even the phone book was a more palatable read for 12 percent of those surveyed.

And we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that people basically never read the things they agree to online — because if we did, we’d spend about 76 days a year doing it.

My friend and colleague, Claude Mariottini, on suicide of pastors and in the Bible — a new series begins:

A few years ago, when I was a pastor of a church in Chicago, I received a call from one of our deacons who said that the son of a church leader had committed suicide. I called the grieving family immediately and made arrangements to go to their house and offer words of comfort and assurance. After all, these are the things that pastors do.

But, what happens when it is the pastor who commits suicide? Who comforts his family? And who will offer words of assurance to a grieving church?

The topic of suicide of pastors came when my niece told me about a pastor who committed suicide. According to the news report, the pastor committed suicide by hanging himself inside the house in which he and his two children lived. The pastor and his wife had just returned home from a prayer meeting and a few minutes later he was dead. According to his wife, the pastor was going through a time of severe depression.

This report brought to mind three cases of suicides involving pastors of local churches. In each case, the three pastors were facing problems which led them to conclude that the only way to solve their problems was by taking their own lives.

World trends in snacks (yougottareadthisone):

Americans snack on potato chips, Europeans munch on candy, and Latin Americans love cookies.

A new comprehensive study released today by Nielsen, which looks at snacking habits around the world, illuminates quite a few quirks about how, when, and what the world snacks on.

There are overarching trends at play. For instance: the fact that snacking is not only big, but growing. All around the globe people are eating more snacks, and more often, each year. The global snacking market, which grossed nearly $400 billion in the 12 months ending this past March, grew by another 2 percent from the year prior, and is projected to continue growing for the foreseeable future.

Much of that growth will come from developing regions, where snacking is still in its infancy, at least in part because most of the developed world has already acquired an obsession with snacking. Europeans, which spend nearly $170 billion annually on snacks, gobble up more snacks than anyone else. But North Americans, who buy more than $120 billion in snacks each year, aren’t too far behind. Asia-Pacific, for which snacking purchases fall just short of $50 billion, and Latin America, where they are roughly $30 billion, are a distant third and fourth.