Sunday Sermonette: The wages of sin are delayed
Ch. 14 tells essentially parallel stories about Jeroboam in Israel and Rehoboam in Judah. Both kingdoms start putting up shrines to other Gods Yahweh gets mad. However, in the case of Jeroboam his vengeance is for some reason delayed. He kills one of Jeroboam ' s babies but another son does succeed Jeroboam, and the kingdom otherwise goes along just fine for the time being. (Yahweh will get around to clobbering them later.) As for Rehoboam and Judah, the consequences aren ' t really all that bad. Pharaoh comes and takes some treasures, and Rehoboam has to replace Solomon ' s gold shields with bronze ones, but that ' s abou...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 1, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: New wine into old bottles
For some reason, the wine industry adopted Jeroboam and Rehoboam as the names for large-size bottles. You can look it up. Anyway, while the division of the Israelites (defined presumably by the Hebrew language) into two kingdoms is probably historically real, the similarity of the names points to the likely fictitious nature of this story about how it happened. We learned in the previous chapter that Yahweh wanted it to happen because Solomon ' s wives seduced him into promoting the worship of other Gods. Yahweh somehow induces Rehoboam to say exactly what will cause the people to rebel against him, although exa...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 24, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Losing the plot
In Chapter 11 Solomon, supposedly the wisest man who ever lived, is seduced by some of his 700 wives into worshiping Gods other than Yahweh. God doesn ' t like this, obviously, but instead of the usual military defeats and plague and famine and all that, we just get the kingdom divided after Solomon dies peacefully of old age. By the way, Solomon ' s 700 wives and 300 concubines produced only three children: his son Rehoboam and daughters Taphaph and Basmaph. There are hints that he faces rebellions of some kind but we learn nothing about them. First there is the story of Haddad, who was purportedly the sole escapee f...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 20, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: International Trade
The visit of the Queen of Sheba is well known and no doubt features in the Bible stories for children genre. However, the legends that have grown up around her in the Jewish, Christian and Moslem traditions are all built from very sparse material. In this telling, we never learn her name, where the heck Sheba is, or what any of the profound wisdom was with which Solomon dazzled her. Not that it particularly matters, but scholars believe that Sheba may be based on Saba, a people of the southern Arabian peninsula. It is interesting that Solomon, along with the narrator, take the idea of a polity ruled by a woman completely i...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 17, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: Fantasyland
Chapter 9 starts with yet another repetition of the motif that has appeared maybe a hundred times since Exodus: God tells Solomon that if the people stay faithful to him, he ' ll reward them with great power and riches, but if they stray, he ' ll destroy them. Yeah, we got that.Then we get more absurd claims about Solomon ' s wealth and power. Hiram had given Solmon 120 talents of gold, which would be four metric tons. Sure. (That happens to be what the Queen of Sheba will give him in the next chapter.) This is despite Hiram, for some reason, not liking the cities Solomon had given him. Solomon then enslaves the Amor...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 13, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
God moves in
Chapter 8 is very long, possibly the longest chapter so far though I haven ' t been keeping track of that. The writers obviously see these events as extremely important, and indeed, this symbolism as resonated through history to the present day. The narrative strongly ties the Israelite religion to a place, a specific spot on earth. In the story from the beginning, they were first a decentralized tribal people without a clearly defined territory, then they were exiled and enslaved, then they were wanderers who carried the main symbol of their religious devotion with them, then they were conquerors but only gradually develo...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 10, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: Design specifications
Chapter 6 is just a detailed description of the temple. I don ' t know why we ' re supposed to care about all these architectural and decorative details, and I don ' t really have anything to say about it. Two points, however. In the following chapters Solomon builds his own palace, and it ' s more than 4 times as big (5,000 square cubits vs. 1,200 square cubits, i.e. 1,040 square meters vs. 250 square meters). Also, the calculation of the years since the exodus is wrong. I ' ll just quote SAB:After the Israelites left Egypt, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years. When they arrived in Israel, they were ruled b...
Source: Stayin' Alive - April 3, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Sunday Sermonette: The magnificence of Dear Leader
The first part of chapter four is basically an administrative directory -- the names of Solomon ' s cabinet officers and provincial governors. Since these events purportedly happened centuries before this was written, I have no idea why anybody is supposed to care about this list of names. The second part is like North Korean propaganda. Kim Jong Un bowled 300 five times in a row, wrote a symphony when he was five years old, that sort of thing. Just a reminder, which shoudn ' t be necessary by now, but according to the archaeological and historical evidence, Israel at this time was at most a collection of small ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 27, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: What are you, a wise guy?
Ch. 3 ends with a famous little story, but if you bother to think about it for a second it ' s completely ridiculous. The first thing that happens is that Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, gives his daughter to Solomon Riiiiiigggght. I happened to read an article in the new Scientific American about archaeology in Jerusalem. It ' s a problem because originally, actually until fairly recently, diggers set out to prove the foregone conclusion that the Bible stories are true. Another problem is that it ' s hard to dig anywhere without offending somebody. Anyway, the current scholarly consensus is that at the time t...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 23, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Last Words -- Not
Ch. 23 first purports to give us David ' s last words, but they aren ' t. David ' s actual last words are given in 1 Kings 2, three chapters and some considerable time later. This chapter then goes on to list David ' s captains and their incredible feats of slaughter, in some cases killing hundreds of Philistines single-handed. Why this list of names and associated mass killings is of interest I cannot say, especially since they were supposedly long dead and forgotten at the time this was written. (Most likely none of them existed at all.) Make of this what you will. Also, since I ' m sure you won ' t count, I ' ll do it f...
Source: Stayin' Alive - March 9, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Smithy Fen Birding
Over the last year or more, a patch of farmland known, as Bullock’s Haste, which lies on the outskirts of our village has been perpetually flooded. Incredibly, over two winters it has attracted a greater and greater diversity of bird species who have spent time there feeding, preening, and roosting.
Two friends dedicated to the citizen science cause of birding (Brendan Doe and Ian Ellis) have observed and catalogued (on eBird) more than 150 species there in that time. I cannot claim to have seen even a fraction of that number there, although I have seen a good many of the “ticked” species in various othe...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - March 7, 2022 Category: Science Authors: David Bradley Tags: Birds Source Type: blogs
Case of the Week 669
Here ' s another fun parasite histopathology case for you: a full-thickness section of bladder wall from an Egyptian man with invasive bladder cancer (not shown here):ClickHERE for the whole digital slide. Diagnosis? (Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites)
Source: Creepy Dreadful Wonderful Parasites - January 17, 2022 Category: Parasitology Source Type: blogs
Wednesday Bible Study: False prophecy
Chapter 7 is usually titled God ' s Covenant with David. For some reason God can ' t talk to David directly, even though he often does. Instead he comes up with this character Nathan and has him relay the message. God seems to ask David to build the temple, but then implies that David ' s son will build it, which is indeed what happens. (The temple will be built during the reign of Solomon.) However, God ends up saying "16 And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established for ever. ’” Sadly, no. The kingdom will be destroyed 400 years after Solomon ' s rei...
Source: Stayin' Alive - January 12, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Enhancement of old colour photographs using Generative Adversarial Networks
It’s almost Christmas, I haven’t posted anything in a while and I see that WordPress has an Image Compare feature, so let’s have some colourful fun.
When I’m not at the computer writing R code, I can often be found at the computer processing photographs. Or at the computer browsing Twitter, which is how I came across Stuart Humphryes, a digital artist who enhances autochromes. Autochromes are early colour photographs, generated using a process patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903. You can find and download many examples of them online. Stuart uses a variety of software tools to clean, enhanc...
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - December 23, 2021 Category: Bioinformatics Authors: nsaunders Tags: multimedia enhancement gan image photography processing python Source Type: blogs
Freedom in Decline for 83% of the World ’s Population: New Human Freedom Index
Ian V ásquezThe vast majority of the world ’s population (83%) has seen a decline in freedom since 2008. That includes decreases in freedom in the ten most populous countries of the world—China, India, United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, and Mexico.So finds theHuman Freedom Index 2021(HFI) co ‐published today by the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute in Canada. The index uses 82 distinct indicators of economic, personal, and civil freedoms to rate 165 jurisdictions from 2008 to 2019, the most recent year for which internationally comparable data is available.The decline ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 16, 2021 Category: American Health Authors: Ian V ásquez Source Type: blogs
