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Weekly Meanderings, 24 January 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 24 January 2015

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:58 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 24 January 2015 2015-03-13T21:58:26-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Fun news story by Rachel Feltman:

When temperatures drop and frost hits, only the heartiest of veggies are equipped to survive. And for many of them, the adaptation that keeps them from dying in the cold also makes them sweet and delicious.

In the above video, UCLA biochemist Liz Roth-Johnson explains how this works for the crunchy carrot: When it gets cold out, carrots (and parsnips) convert some of their starch stores into sugar. They do this to keep the water in their cells from freezing, and it works in the same way that putting salt on a road keeps it from freezing over. When a foreign substance mixes with cold water, it makes it harder for enough water molecules to reach the surface and freeze there — so the freezing point gets lower. The cells inside a carrot might have icy-cold water, but that water won’t turn into ice.

And that’s a good thing. The formation of ice crystals within and around a cell can destroy it.

But the best part? The crunchy, sweet taste of a post-frost carrot. Relish their survival skills, rendered futile by your ability to yank them out of the ground (or, you know, buy them at the store.)

Good news for Rhonda Baker and Jayne Post, and Sin City Church:

But Las Vegas, aka “Sin City”? Come on in, all ye you-know-what-ers.

“When you come to Sin City, you don’t have to convince someone they’re a sinner,” says Jayne Post, co-founder and co-pastor of Sin City Church — technically in Henderson, but there’s more than enough Sin City cachet to go around. “They’re praying to win those jackpots, so you’ve already got a praying group that knows they’re sinners — and God is ready.”

Such a philosophy embodies that old business maxim: “You do your best business on Main Street.” Still, that doesn’t suggest that our city’s nickname gives us a corner on the market of sinners seeking the redemptive power of prayer.

“We prayed over the name,” co-founder and co-pastor Rhonda Baker says. “We are not perfect people. Even though we are inside the church, we still have a ways to go. Knowing that, there could be a Sin City Church on every street, in every alley, in every town in every nation.”

Yet it’s this nondenominational Christian church that double-dips on defying tradition. “Women do lead churches, but we found out we’re the only two women, together, who have planted a church in America in its entirety, that we know of,” Post says. (Tossing in a third novelty: In her off-pastoral time, the statuesque Post is co-creator and co-star, with her husband, Eric, of “Marriage Can Be Murder” at the D Las Vegas, playing the ditzy platinum blond hostess with a double-entendre tongue in the interactive comedy/mystery dinner show.)

Addiction and connection, an important read. (HT: TG)

Might be worth knowing, by Rosalind S. Helderman and Philip Rucker:

Mitt Romney will charge Mississippi State University $50,000 to deliver a lecture on campus next week, most of which will go to charity — a dramatically lower fee than the $250,000 to $300,000 Hillary Rodham Clinton requires for her university lectures.

Romney — the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who is weighing a third run for the White House — will speak as part of the university’s Global Lecture Series, a speaking series administered by the student government, a university official said.

Romney has directed that most of his $50,000 fee go to Charity Vision, a nonprofit organization that partners with doctors to provide free eye surgeries that is led by one of Romney’s sons, according to a contract obtained Monday by The Washington Post under a public records request to the university. The remaining portion of the amount will be set aside to cover Romney’s travel, according to the contract.

A significant critique of Oxfam’s agenda, from Fraser Nelson:

We are, right now, living through the golden age of poverty reduction. Anyone serious about tackling global poverty (and I’m afraid we have to exclude Oxfam from this category) has to accept that whatever we’re doing now, it’s working – so we should keep doing it. We are on the road to an incredible goal: the abolition of poverty as we know it, within our lifetime.

Those who care more about helping the poor than hurting the rich will celebrate the fact – and urge leaders to make sure that free trade and global capitalism keep spreading. It’s the only true way to make poverty history….

BBC Radio earlier had someone on from Oxfam saying that the shocking wealth of the 1pc stood alongside the fact that ‘one in nine’ go to bed hungry. Oxfam wants you to believe that the two are somehow linked. There is a link between wealth and global poverty – the more of the former, the less of the latter.

It’s true that one in nine (about 12 per cent) of the world is undernourished. But what Oxfam does not say is that this rate has plummeted since global capitalism really took (i.e., off after the fall of the Berlin Wall). The United Nations has been keeping tabs on this – below (link: pdf).

Abusive parents, what to do? Emily Yoffe:

What do we owe our tormentors? It’s a question that haunts those who had childhoods marked by years of neglect and deprivation, or of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of one or both parents. Despite this terrible beginning, many people make it out successfully and go on to build satisfying lives. Now their mother or father is old, maybe ailing, possibly broke. With a sense of guilt and dread, these adults are grappling with whether and how to care for those who didn’t care for them.

Justin Taylor has a nice “state of the question” on the so-called fragment of Mark.

If you like the Cubs, here’s your story.

Steve Neumann:

Even as the horrific terror attack in France was unfolding, the spotlight of blame was being placed on the religion of Islam. This blame has been severely misplaced.

As a liberal atheist, I sincerely believe that religion has the ability to bring about personal and societal harm; but if we think we can excavate the entire problem of terrorism into the light of day by blaming it solely on religion, Indiana Jones would tell us that we’re digging in the wrong place.

I’d argue that terrorism — and religious fundamentalism generally — arises primarily out of a preoccupation with power. Not power in the sense of brute physical dominance over others, which acts of terrorism surely are, but power as the basic psychological drive of the human animal. The thwarting of that drive is the root cause of both terrorism and violence generally.

Educators: Problems with the new SAT.

Derek Thompson, no surprise here:

That bolded sentence is hiding a lot of heavy conclusions in plain sight. First, neither the average intelligence of the group nor the smartest person in the group had much to do with the group’s “c” factor. Just as great artists don’t necessarily form great bands when they pool their talents, smart people don’t automatically make smart groups.

Furthermore, the predictable troupe of buzzwords you would expect to correlate with successful groups—”cohesion,” “motivation,” and “satisfaction”—didn’t have much to do with effective teams, either. Instead, the single most important element of smart groups, according to the researchers, was their “average social sensitivity.” That is, the best groups were also the best at reading the non-verbal cues of their teammates. And, since women score higher on this metric of emotional intelligence, teams with more women tended to be better teams.

Question: How do you find those with “social sensitivity”?

Too much pizza? yes.

America has a pizza problem.

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that too many kids are eating too much pizza, and all the excess calories are taking a toll on children’s health.

“There are a bunch of takeaways from the study. But the biggest thing is that parents are serving their kids too much pizza,” said Dr. William Dietz, one of the study’s authors and the director of the Sumner Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University.

Just in case you have an interest in French history.

By the Telegraph Men:

The oft-repeated mantra that men are from Mars and women are from Venus has been lent credence by a major new study, which claims to show that the two genders process emotion differently.

Not only do men rate ’emotional pictures’ as less ’emotionally stimulating’ than women, but they also struggle to remember the images with the same clarity as women afterwards.

The discrepancies can be linked to the different ways that men’s and women’s brains appear to deal with information.

Researchers from the University of Basel showed men and women pictures of positive, negative and neutral emotional content, and asked them to rate their response.

While there was no difference in reaction to the neutral images, the researchers found that women were more likely to be moved by the positive and negative pictures.

Elahe Izadi, and the stripes on those zebras:

We can put a man on the moon, but we don’t know why zebras have stripes.

While you’d think science would have sorted this particular mystery out by now, there isn’t a conclusive answer to explain zebras’ stripes. But a new study suggests that one explanation is stronger than the others: temperature. The researchers with the University of California at Los Angeles published their findings Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

For this study, researchers looked at 16 sites where you can find plains zebras, the common species of zebra that are found from eastern Africa to South Africa. The stripes that plains zebras sport vary by region; some have strong black and white striping all over their bodies, while others have thinner stripes or not as many.

After examining 29 different environmental factors, including prevalence of biting flies, heat and predators, the researchers found that temperature had the strongest correlation with stripe patterns. And while they can’t say for sure why temperature differences account for the patterns, they suggest it may be related to body temperature regulation, with black stripes absorbing heat while the white stripes reflect it.

Non-history’s non-mystery:

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