While I am generally apolitical in all things, my default philosophies lean me toward one party. However, I’ve been less than impressed with their campaign and candidates this time around. My wife is firmly voting for the other party down the ballot. Is it better to stay with my personal and historical traditions despite my distaste for the specific candidate in this election, or to maintain marital unity with my wife and vote against my default inclinations?

You are a Mystic, known for your imaginative, intuitive spirituality. You value peace, harmony, and inner silence. Mystics are nurtured by walking alone in the woods or sitting quietly with a trusted friend. You may also enjoy poetry, meditation, wordless prayer, candles, art, books, and anything else that helps you connect with God.

Mystics experience God best through rich images and symbols. You are contemplative, introspective, intuitive, and focused on an inner world as real to you as the exterior one. Hearing from God is more important to you than speaking to God. Others may attribute human characteristics to God, but you see God as ineffable, unnamable, and more vast than any known category. You are intrigued by God’s mystery.

Mystics want to inspire and persuade others, and need to live lives of significance. At times you push the envelope of spirituality, helping the rest of us imagine who we might become if we followed your lead.

Sometimes you may feel a bit guilty about your need for solitude and silence. If so, you probably have bought into the American myth that says being alone and doing nothing is lazy, antisocial, and unproductive. Stop it — now. Give yourself permission to retreat and be alone. It’s essential for your well-being.

On the other hand, don’t get so carried away retreating that you become a recluse. That only deprives the world of your gifts and deprives you of the lessons that come from being with others. Some Mystics may have a true vocation for solitary prayer, but the rest of you need to alternate retreat time with involvement and interaction.

I’ve emphasized the bits that resonated more with me - obviously a boilerplate description won’t match any one individual, but it’s interesting to read nonetheless.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health studied the histories of 125,000 men and women who reported how much coffee they drank between 1980 and 2004. The more coffee they drank, the less likely they were to die from a heart attack or cardiovascular disease. That was especially true for women. Compared to those who didn’t drink coffee, those who drank 5 to 7 cups per week had 7 percent lower risk for death. The real coffee addicts who drink 4 to 5 cups per day had a 26 percent lower risk of death. The lower risk was mostly related to heart disease, but cancer deaths in women were lower, too, the researchers found.

It’s not the caffeine that does it because they found a similar pattern in the people who drank decaffeinated coffee.

So what’s going on? Antioxidants, they think. Like blue berries, green tea and chocolate, coffee contains antioxidants. Those are the chemicals that bond snag the free-floating molecules in our bodies called free radicals. Free radicals, created by the body’s natural metabolic processes like breathing and digesting food, are culprits in aging and disease. In particular, they are related to the inflammatory process that causes plaque to build up in our arteries, causing cardiovascular disease.

Read the full article here, though I didn’t care for the commenter who noted that “anything more than 2 cups of coffee is linked to brain deterioration“. My wife doesn’t need any more ammunition…

As tedious as footnotes can be to read, they can be even more so to produce. For high school students and undergraduates, footnotes seem less a test of research skills or academic honesty than a trial of one’s endurance and equanimity. In the heyday of the typewriter, footnotes could easily turn a five-hour assign-ment into a 10-hour labor. First, you had to figure out the math: How many lines do I type before I start inlaying the footnotes? Then you had to handle the Latin: Do I mean op. cit. or loc. cit., ibid. or id., q.v. or cf.? Finally, you had to roll the platen just so–no more, no less, exactement–to get the superscript numbers to sit correctly above the line.

I remember renting a typewriter from the local library to type out my high school science fair paper on the relative speed of corrosion of various metals in marine saltwater. We did not have a word processing program or a printer for our new personal computer (Commodore 64) and hand-written reports were not accepted. I remember rolling the platen…

Today’s students miss out on these joys…

Give strong drink to the hapless
And wine to the embittered.
Let them drink and forget their poverty,
And put their troubles out of mind.

Proverbs 31:6-7 (Tanakh Translation, JPS)

These verses are bookended by the admonishments for a king not to drink, “lest they forget what has been ordained, and infringe on the rights of the poor.” (31:5) and to “speak up for the dumb [mute], for the rights of all the unfortunate.” (31:8) Both of which sound like reasonable advice for a benevolent leader, but what about those middle verses?

The HCSB (among others) translates 31:6b as “And wine to one whose life is bitter.“† In the wording there is a faint echo of Naomi’s statements in Ruth 1 that her life has become bitter:

“No, my daughters, my life is much too bitter for you to share, because the Lord’s hand has turned against me.” (1:13b, HCSB)

“Don’t call me Naomi. Call me Mara,” she answered, “for the Almighty has made me very bitter. I left full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has pronounced judgment on me, and the Almighty has afflicted me?” (1:20-21, HCSB)

Especially interesting to me (and this blog) is that it is the latter verse where the Septuagint translators used the Greek word hikanos for the Hebrew Shaddai instead of the more common pantokrator. Hikanos, in this context, can mean “the Sufficient One” (see NETS). So Shaddai has withheld from the storehouses of his sufficiency to make Naomi’s life bitter… and what cure is suggested in Proverbs? Wine and strong drink. Perhaps this is the true reason that Naomi encouraged Ruth to glean some more barley!

The Jewish Study Bible claims that “this advice is unparalleled” in scripture and I would tend to agree. What do you think?

My photos are below; what I’m actively reading is documented on the “bookshelf” tab of this blog.

A little bit of overlap between shots, but you get the picture… for details on any title, see my LibraryThing page.

(Yes, volume 1 of Barclay’s The Gospel of John is missing from the middle photo, but rest assured that it was returned to its rightful place.)

I’ve only entered the theological and Bible titles so far; I’ll add my academic music studies shelf when I have time, as well as notable fiction titles (highlighted by a massive edition of “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” comic strips).

Wally Wallington has demonstrated that he can lift a Stonehenge-sized pillar weighing 22,000 lbs and moved a barn over 300 ft. What makes this so special is that he does it using only himself, gravity, and his incredible ingenuity.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0]

HT: J-Walk Blog

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers said on Tuesday they have made the darkest material on Earth, a substance so black it absorbs more than 99.9 percent of light.

Made from tiny tubes of carbon standing on end, this material is almost 30 times darker than a carbon substance used by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as the current benchmark of blackness.

And the material is close to the long-sought ideal black, which could absorb all colors of light and reflect none.

“All the light that goes in is basically absorbed,” Pulickel Ajayan, who led the research team at Rice University in Houston, said in a telephone interview. “It is almost pushing the limit of how much light can be absorbed into one material.”

The substance has a total reflective index of 0.045 percent — which is more than three times darker than the nickel-phosphorous alloy that now holds the record as the world’s darkest material.

Click here for the full article and photos.