Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

Increase Your Albedo!

Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.

Here’s the scoop: The earth’s albedo (i.e., the amount of light it reflects) is increasing. It had been doing down. Now it’s going up. Scientists don’t know why.

Since a higher albedo means a cooler planet, maybe it’s a sign that global warming ain’t gonna warm. Maybe it’s all a big cycle.

Or maybe not.

Was refreshing to see the scientists in the story saying that their findings neither confirm nor disconfirm the greenhouse effect and that more study is needed. A little scholarly caution does the soul a world of good.

A Nice BMI Calculator

Here’s a handy online tool for calculating your exact BMI or Body Mass Index. This is the standard figure used for reckoning overweight and obesity.

The system is open to some criticism in that it doesn’t take into account all the relevant factors (e.g., is the person a body builder who has extra muscle in his weight, or a person who has suffered muscle wasting and has less muscle than normal inhis weight, or a person who is large or small boned), but it’s still nice to be able to calculate your exact BMI and see how you stack up against the idealized numbers in common use.

And Speaking of Slow Internet Problems . . .

I’ve been having slow server response times on the blog the last couple of days. This appears to be a temporary problem that the service is addressing. They have a server upgrade scheduled for Saturday, at which point things should (hopefully) return to normal.

Sorry for the problem. It’s been frustrating for me, too, but at least they seem to be addressing it.

Here’s the notice they put up:

Scheduled Downtime May 28, 2004

We apologize for the intermittent slow performance of TypePad web sites over the past 2-3 days. We’re having some problems with our storage servers, so we’re scheduling a hardware upgrade for the early morning of Saturday, May 28, 2004, from 12:00am to 2:00am Pacific time. During that time, TypePad-powered sites and TypePad itself will be down for maintenance. Thanks for your patience!

I’ll still be blogging in the interim, though.

When the Internet Was Really SLOOOOOW

One of the cool parts of The Return of the King is when Gandalf and Pippin light the beacons of Minas Tirith. Cool visuals. Majestic music. Neat suff!

Thing is, a bunch of folks probably thought “What a cool idea Tolkien (or maybe Jackson) had here.” But the idea wasn’t original.

Beacons (fires set on hilltops or other high places as a means of communication) were used in antiquity. The Greeks and Romans had beacons linked in relay that were used to rapidly transmit information across long distances. Homer mentions them in The Illiad (which is what that Troy movie is loosely based on). They served as a low-tech form of Internet, though with severe limitations about what kind of information could be sent.

To get around the problem of only being able to send a limited number of messages, the ancients would also use flags, smoke signals, and other means that could transmit a more data-rich message.

As cool as the beacons of Minas Tirith sequence is in The Return of the King, I do have one criticism of it: Peter Jackson shows the beacons taking way too much time. The sequence shows them being lit for part of a day, all of a night, and part of another day in order to get the “Help!” message from Gondor to Rohan, which the film tells us are only a few days’ ride apart. That’s too much time.

The Roman beacon system was much faster, speed being the whole point of the beacon network. As soon as the guys at one beacon see another catch fire, they start lighting their own, and so the message is communicated from beacon station to beacon station much faster than a horse could carry a rider. A basic message could be sent across Europe by the real-world system in less time than it took the message to travel in the film.

The Doctor's Death Knot?

necktiebolo tieI don’t like ties.

Never have.

(Except, I do like bolo ties, of which I have quite a collection.)

Thus I am natively sympathetic to this story, which suggests that doctors shouldn’t wear ties on the grounds that they might spread diseases to patients.

Trouble is, if there is one thing I like even less than ties, it’s junk science. This article is qualifies as either junk science or at least junk reporting of science.

The article discusses a study that found that “Clinicians were eight times more likely to wear a tie carrying bacteria than by hospital security staff.”

If that’s the only finding of the study then it’s junk science. For this to constitute a real reason for doctors not to wear ties, one needs more than that. In particular, one would want some direct evidence that ties pass diseases (e.g., a finding that doctors who regularly wore ties had a higher rate of cross-patient infections than doctors who did not wear ties).

However, even in the absence of that one would want an indication that the amount of bacteria on the ties had been controlled against the amount of bacteria on the people. In other words, maybe doctors have more bacteria on their ties than security guards because doctors have more bacteria on them in general than security guards. In this case, leaving the tie at home wouldn’t really help unless the doctor left all his other clothes and his person at home as well when treating patients–unless there was, again, evidence that ties spread disease more than other parts of the doctor (such as his hands) or his clothing.

Now, maybe the original study accounted for factors such as these. If so, the study wouldn’t be an example of junk science but the story would be an example of junk reporting of science.

For more info on junk science, see JunkScience.Com

Oh yeah, did I mention that this entry was about junk science?