5. januar 2003

Nuns sexually abused The recent paedophilia scandals in the Roman Catholic Church has lead to the mainstream press getting back to a report about sexual abuse of nuns originally published in 1996. The survey conducted by St. Louis University on behalf of several orders of Catholic nuns, revealed that about 40 % of all nuns had suffered from some form of sexual trauma. Many of them suffered from shame and depression after the incidents. Priests and other nuns were frequently perpetrators in varying degrees of abuse. The findings were published in two religious journals, but obviously at the time the mainstream press did not dare to touch the topic. One caveat: I have not seen the report, and I know from many other examples that some research involving sexual abuse tend to grossly overstate the statistics. That said, it is obvious there has been tremendous suffering among dedicated women in the high halls of Christian patriarchies. The churches have done little or nothing to uncover or easen the problem. 11:30:31 PM    comment []

Coke, water or another urban legend? A cute text comparing the benefits of water with the alleged dangers of Coca-Cola has been passed around the net for some time now. It has been posted on lots of message boards, it has been sent in email, and it's been put on countless web sites. Water is good for you. Coke is not that good for you. Neither is it particularly bad, except the high concentration of sugar gives you far more carbohydrates than most people need, and that will make you fat and seriously mess up your metabolism. Coke is not too good for your teeth either. This is stuff people know. There are also lots of stories around about how you can dissolve teeth and nails in Coke, many of which listed in the above mentioned list of so-called "facts." I guess most people have heard such stories, and probably believed them. These claims are false. You can not dissolve a nail in coke. You can definately not dissolve a tooth. And highway patrolmen does not wash away blood stains with coke. I suspect lots of them drink coke, though. The concentration of acids in coka cola is no higher than other carbonated water soft drinks, not to mention the concentration of citric acid in orange juice being much higher than that in Coke. No significant ill health effects are known from these. Countless such bogus claims are flowing around the net, and it would be nice if people bothered to do a simple google to verify the claims before passing on misinformation.  While drinking water is certainly much better, misinformation is hardly the way to make people more healthy. 10:03:51 PM    comment []

The ultra early universe A fascinating article by Martin Rees at The Edge, about how physicists are examining the very start of time, when our universe got its fundamental properties. The new physics is attempting to understand why it's expanding the way it is, and why it ended up with the content it has. We can trace its history back to about a micro-second after the putative 'big bang' that started it off, but what happened in that first, formative microsecond? Indeed. The problem with modern natural science is, besides that you have to study math for a decade to understand it, that it's so large it is impossible to keep up with everything. Yet, such webplaces like Edge provide very good articles readable by laypeople, and written by experts who are themselves very much on top of their subject. Cutting out the middleman, the science journalist. 7:31:33 PM    comment []

German hijacker threatened to crash into building A man stole a small plane and threatened to crash it into the European Central Bank building in Frankfurt. The plane landed after being intercepted by first a helicopter and then two F16 jets. Several skyscrapers, streets and bridges were evacuated while the drama developed. Widely reported crimes always get copycats, especially among the mentally disturbed. 5:34:14 PM    comment []

Imagine, I have always known that to be true "Two would-be Canadian thieves learned the hard way on New Year's Day that knowing how to drive a car is a prerequisite for stealing one." (Yahoo News)  4:35:29 PM    comment []

This will have you go ROTFL Tim at For Whom the Blogs Toll has just posted a classic he wrote some time back: Increased use of acronyms worries online boyfriend. You'll never look at IM acronyms the same way again. 4:21:58 PM    comment []

Patrick Süskind's sense of smell In Last Chance to See, Douglas Adam tries to explain, and imagine, how it is in the life of a rhinoceros (more specifically, the not even remotely white northern white rhinoceros, but I digress), whose sense of sight is poor, and smell correspondingly better. When us humans hear or smell something, we immediately turn around to look at it. It is the eyes that are our final confirmation of reality. For a rhino, it apparently is the other way around. If it sees something, it has to rely on its nose to confirm what it is all about. If it smells nothing, it tends to discount the visual input. Now, imagine a human born with an extraordinary sense of smell. If you are somewhat perverse, imagine such a child being born in the stinking slums of pre-French revolution Paris. If this is too much a stretch for your imagination, don't worry. Patrick Süskind has already done it, in his classical novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. It is indeed mind-boggling how the same reality could be warped when another sense takes precendence over our eyes. I will have to take Süskind's word for it, of course. Add a great story about a murder, and you have one of the best novels written in the 20th century. Whether it will improve your appreciation of this lesser of our senses is another story entirely. 3:43:08 PM    comment []

Followup on the anthropic principle I have written extensively about the so-called anthropic argument for theism earlier, but today I heard a good one-sentence summary of why it is flawed: Humans have no better reason to believe that the unverse was designed for them than refrigerator mold has for believing that the refrigerator was designed for it. So there! 2:52:52 PM    comment []

While you were sleeping... Once in a while, even the relentless Secular Blasphemer has to realise that fatigue catches up with him, and he crawls into his coffin and gets a few hours of sleep. And then, of course, he wakes up finding he has a lot of great writings on Salon Blogs to catch up with. What better way to start the day than visiting Susan McNerney's blog Pesky the Rat. Susan makes the most difficult kind of blog imaginable: the satire. It's much easier to be serious. When you write something serious, and your writing sucks, people can still concentrate on the topics. If you try to be funny, and fail, it just gets very embarrassing. So all kudos to Susan for even trying, and wild acclaim for succeeding, and doing it consistently. Best laugh of the morning was Bush's accusation against his critics of instigating class warfare, or as Bush in Pesky's world puts it, "those of you with class have no right to make fun of those of us who have none." Speaking of Bush, the realian spokescreature Mush the Squid (what else can be a spokesperson for a sect?) alleges "that North Korea’s undeniably weird leader, Kim Jong Il, is in fact a clone of President Bush." Hmmm. Satirists and stand-up comedians all over the US probably vote Republican for job security reasons. Eat your heart out, Dan "potatoe" Quale. You've been bested. Moving on to Kriselda on Different Strings, I find my own metablogging of Occoquan's frozen blog, well, metablogged. So I hereby metablog it back, not stopping for a second to try to count metalevels. She says: "Of course, I'm one of those who might disagree as to whether Lutefish would actually be considered a food or not, but it's an interesting piece nonetheless." Thank you. There is a saying you shouldn't diss it if you haven't tried it, Kriselda. Seriously, Lutefisk (picture) is not that bad. Of course, when the best thing you can say about a food item is "it doesn't taste as bad as it smells", you can't fault people for passing. Filchyboy's chronotope blog raises some serious questions. conservative vs liberal. One Bruce Barlett argued that the Beatles' "Revolution 1" popsong (yes, it is one of my favourites too) is conservative, since it denounces violent revolution. Surely, in the 60s revolution was one of the keywords for many radicals (the word 'liberal' is a strange American misnomer for radicalism, but that is a lost philological battle, I'm afraid). Contrary to this straw man, many on the left always, consistently, opposed revolutionary and marxist ideas. If conservatives don't want to be lumped in with Hitler, they should not try to team up liberals with Stalin. Speaking of which, what is happening to the myth of the liberal media, Rayne asks. With the house cleaning and subsequent foxification of CNN, the old myth is getting even further away from the truth. Speaking from Europe, I have to note that the left-right axis in the US is seriously skewed right. A party representing the dividing opinions of the Republicans (centrists perhaps excempted) simply does not exist here, if you don't want to count dysfunctional young men with shaved heads and boot fetishes. So, you realise that Europeans aren't exactly thrilled by the idea of their superpower friend pushing rightwards. We are covering several continents here today. Not bad for an early morning metablogging. Miguel's The Devil's Excrement is our brilliant on-the-spot blog from Venezuela. Today he tells us more about the increasingly violent confrontation between president Chavez, who appears to be more crazy the more I read about him. A shooting incident has the police attacked by Chavez controlled state media, and you realise that it is true that the first causalty of war is truth. Official truth, anyway, thanks to the Net outlet from on-the-spot 'dissidents.' 11:11:22 AM    comment []

Occoquan - The Lutefisk edition A new edition of The Occoquan Inquirer is on the virtual stands, and the main theme (but by no means the only theme) this time is food. And for what must be the first and only time in history, the Secular Blasphemer has contributed a piece on food, more precisely on Lutefisk. 9:06:21 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.02.03; 00:36:28.