Homo Sapien vs Arachnid

I do have an important blog planned to write. It just needs to be edited and I haven't gotten around to it. In the meantime, I feel the need to record a few events of the day.

I started my job at MBS yesterday and have since been eating too much junk food, sweets and drinking too much coffee. I also have gotten the hang of answering calls for dumb people, computer illiterate people, confused people, and the occasional person who actually has a technical problem. Its somewhat entertaining during calls, if not stressful, and sometimes I have time to read or fold paper animals so it isn't bad. Today after I got home from work I bummed around a bit and skipped kickboxing because I was feeling kind of ill. I'm not sick, it was just the typical grumbles that make kicking and such unpleasant. Because yesterday was my bestie's birthday I decided I would just bum around until she wanted to hang out so at about seven or eight I gathered up my stuff and brought her birthday present - it was a pink and white golf umbrella with a span of 62". We decided it could fit up to six people underneath, and it was very well built. She appreciated it because her last umbrella was stolen a while ago, and I know she really likes umbrellas so when one goes missing, it is extremely upsetting.

Anyway, we played ping-pong for a while, and I discovered that I had magically improved somehow (I never play ping-pong). When I came back, I returned to my lair in the Donelson family's basement only to discover that it was the perfect model for my future dream cabin. With a few slight modifications, it is a wonderful layout. The kitchen, dining room and living room are all basically one conjoined gathering place with no separating walls at all. This leaves it feeling rather open and inviting. It is also simple to navigate. The rest of the house consists of a small garage, two bathrooms and two or three bedrooms. One of them is larger than the other two as the master, and it would be connected to one of the restrooms.

(SKIP TO HERE FOR SPIDER STORY ONLY)

I was guestimating the lengths of the walls in the main room, when I spotted a large spider - about three or four centimeters in diameter if its legs were sprawled out. It was hiding behind a blockish beige piece of electronic equipment, which usually beeps quickly at a high frequency so as to be annoying only when the room is completely silent. Using my stealth ninja abilities, which I had practiced earlier at Ashley's with ping-pong, I used the remote control to joust the equimpent. My goal was to smash the spider behind it, but instead only the box stopped beeping as enthusiastically (which I didn't mind, and the blinking red light on the front continued, so I was not worried). Seeing as this had done nothing, I jabbed it several more times at different angles. Unfortunately, the spider was clearly at a tactical advantage due to its small stature and superior speed. It therefore dodged each of my attacks by either cramming itself in the corner between the fluffy carpet and the baseboard, or dashing out at the last moment.

Eventually I realized my wrath was futile, and I gave up the crusade. I turned off the lights and returned to my room, no longer enticed to create further drafts of my dream cabin. Still, a small fear is left inside me that it will enter my bedroom at night and it will be creeping in the corners, prepared to strike vengeance. As it had been hiding along the opposite side of my bedroom, it may be a possibility, but I am hoping that it will catch the scent of my presence and associate it with fear because of said near-death experience. After all, fear is everywhere... but so are spiders... -_-

Creationism vs. Science

I apologize for not making my last anime blog yet, but I'll get to it when I get to it. But for now, I feel prompting on the topic of Genesis and a few passages near the very, very beginning that used to worry me.

I had been reading Genesis chapter one, and although I had read it before, I noticed something that irritated me. In verse three God creates light and separates it from the dark. At first, you're assuming the stars and the sun and all that, because it says he called the light "day" and the dark "night". Then, in verse fourteen you are suddenly left shocked and confused because it says that God divided the day and night - implying that they weren't before - and says that he created the sun and the moon (of which they correctly accredited the science of the four seasons to by the way). You're left in the dark, right? He created all these things like the planet and its shape and the water and all that, but apparently the sun wasn't there yet.

Before I go about answering this question, there is the matter of time which trips people up quite a bit. It does indicate in the Bible many times that God doesn't care about time. Humans who claim that God actually created the universe in six days don't really seem to get that God doesn't care about our days. Sure, six days I suppose, but they're six days in God's time, and according to 2 Peter 3:8 "With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." That's God's time for you. When he says "soon", it might mean next year. In thirty years, you might agree with him, but at the time it seems quite lengthy and that is because he lives in the past, present and future all at once. This minute isn't even this minute for him. Kind of mind blowing, right? Anyway, I just wanted to point that out because I think science could have taken as long as God wanted it to take for things to happen.

Back to the original question, the difference between the creation of light and dark versus the sun and the night must be made clear. Oddly enough, I was watching an episode of charlieissocoollike, a popular youtuber who I enjoy from time to time. Charlie is actually an atheist (and for those of you who judge, he's a normal and wholesome individual, for lack of a better term). However, he likes doing these short little vlogs about science, where he briefly and simply explains some smaller scientific concepts so they are fun and easy to understand. Perhaps it is childish that I watch them, but I think they're fun and interesting, even though I generally already know the information. This last one was about stars and he mentioned something I hadn't really thought much about, even though I had heard of it. He dipped into the surface of the fact that we are technically made out of stars, just like everything else on the planet.

If God made the light, and we are made from stars, who is to say God did not create the stars first or something like them, and then when they "died", they became the planet, which is where we could have been truly made from the dust? No human in the days of Moses would understand that we were particles from a ball of gas like the sun, but now we do know that information, and we should also be intelligent enough to interpret the words send in the times. It says he made the light, so perhaps he made the stars. After that, he formed the earth and the waters - everything but the living creatures. So after the light is spread out among other stars and celestial things, we have the dust, and rocks of the earth. This is when we joined our solar system as a planet rotating around the sun, creating our four seasons etc. So now we are a blank planet made from a star, rotating around a star, and with a moon.

Wonderfully enough, there is no woeful tale in Genesis about how creation had to survive in the darkness or anything stupid. Instead, a very scientific and straightforward approach is taken, and it says that next came all of the plants, and then all of the animals. If God created man from the dust of the earth, then we are still made of the same star material which we had before. He may have then just created all life from the dust. We were just made special, and after all of the other animals. Because we were some of the latest creatures to have "evolved" into actual homo-sapiens as opposed to older humanoids, I think its quite possible that Adam and Eve were just the first of our real race, or of one of the much closer races. It is possible that older humans were just not capable of possessing a human soul, or the Holy Spirit and so they could not comprehend enough of God to be considered in his image. We do know that Adam and Eve were not the only people on the planet after all, so what exactly made them so special? The only thing I can think of is that although they may have been the first homo-sapiens or something of the like, they were not the only human-type creatures around.

Of course, this entire blog is speculation, but hopefully it brought you some interesting thoughts and answered a few questions. That's my analysis of Genesis versus Science because I usually find that God and Science fit together nicely. He did create it after all. We just have to figure it out.

Here is the link to Charlie's vlog if you would like to see it. Its about five minutes long, and quite enjoyable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pag1NdPKcYM

Narwhals 2: The Super Tooth

Today or yesterday my mom sent me a link in my email with an article about narwhals, so of course I had to click on it.

In my recent blog, simply titled "Narwhals" I mentioned that science has so far not found any use for the narwhal tusk, and no one could figure out why its there. Well, this article from 2005 actually explains that we have actually found a possible purpose. I'm going to sum up the article, and leave a link at the bottom.

I hope that everyone here knows that a tusk is a tooth, but the narwhals have slightly odd ones. While elephants and warthogs have curved tusks, the narwhal is the only animal known to have a straight one, and their tusk actually spirals around, if you noticed in the pictures. The spiral could serve to provide more rigidity so it will not break, or to help it grow straight. It isn't certain. Anyway, while the tooth is straight, it can actually bend in any direction! Furthermore, it is actually very strong and is hard to break.

That is only one discovery, however. I read about a few more. One that I'm going to cover really quick is that the narwhal tusk is a tooth, but a tooth that is inside out. You know how your teeth are very sensitive to especially cold foods? Narwhal teeth sense this even more strongly, but probably for the purpose of sensing environmental changes around them. I would assume it doesn't actually hurt them, seeing as they are constantly exposed to it. They might be able to sense ice forming miles away. They have also been known to dive as deep as 3000 feet when avoiding danger or hunting for food. There is also another theory that narwhals might use their tusks to communicate with each other, generally with tapping. Obviously, it isn't their only form of communication, but it is possible to be a way. As far as the inside-out stuff goes, there aren't any other teeth in the world like it. That is super awesome.

Another thing I don't know if I mentioned, but I had the impression of was that only male narwhals had tusks. Actually, this is not true. Apparently, most males have one tusk, some have two, a few don't have any, and oddly enough there are females who do have one. So it sounds like it is all very awkward and who knows how that works. If I were a narwhal, I would feel gypped if I didn't get a tusk and some other guy got two, but oh well. All I can do is stand by and feel sorry for them. Then again, they have an excuse to tell the ones who do have tusks what to do and cling to them so they can be lazy.

So the link is right HERE, and I feel like some of you might be sad if I don't include the narwhal video that I didn't include the first time, so I'll add that HERE.

Narwhals

Earlier I was passively watching as my wallpapers faded in and out for my screen saver, and an image of a narwhal jumping over a cloud appeared. I stared at it for some time before noticing the tusk. I didn't realize that it is more in a nose-like position, rather than on the forehead. This discovery led me to google search images of narwhals to find out the truth, and I found far more discoveries than I had intended.

Before I go any further with this informative blog, if you don't know what a narwhal is, then you have lived a sad life. These are narwhals:

And this is the wikipedia article explaining that it is a whale with a horn that lives in the arctic.

For a bit of history, apparently in the Dark Ages of Europe the tusks of narwhals were thought to be horns from the mythical Unicorn. Probably due to this legend, they were thought to cure ailments with their magic. In the 1600s, someone discovered that the narwhal was the true source of the strange spiral tooth, and that rather than being as short and weathered as they would find them there, they were actually around nine or ten feet long - two-thirds the length of the actual whale. Some narwhals even have two tusks, so as soon as they were discovered, they became something prized and worth hunting, though currently I believe the inuits make up most of the hunters involved and they already knew about it.

Although the population is small, it is stable. It only has three predators: men, orcas and polar bears. The greatest thing for our unicorns of the sea, is that they can dive deeper than any other marine mammal, which is probably a fantastic way to escape from all three of its predators. Also, if you think about it, how many people live as far north as the Inuits? Other than the Inuits themselves, not many. Of course, when they were considered a magical beast, Vikings would hunt them, because the horn supposedly had magical powers that could heal melancholia and help with poisoning. I have no idea if there is any scientific evidence that narwhal tusks are good for any such thing, but I do think it would be cool to have a tusk-cup nonetheless. These were used for upper class people who thought that the horn of a unicorn would keep them from being poisoned.

Currently, I am really jealous of Queen Elizabeth. She had her own narwhal tusk set with jewels and all. Someday, I would like a tusk. Or better yet, an oceanfront home and a narwhal friend that would let me ride upon its back. Then we could rule the seven seas together! The problem with that is that either the water would be too warm for my special friend, or I would die of hypothermia.

In the mean time, while I await my dream-come-true (in heaven), you and I can dwell upon the following amusing links that I uncovered in my google searches.

Can You Speak Narwhal?

The sound of hunting narwhals

Plush Narwhals

(Why yes, I would love to own a plush narwhal)

Avenging Narwhal Play Set

Spear your own koala

Inuit Tusk Legend with Epic Unicorn/Narwhal artwork - Narwhal Legend

The amazing story of how the narwhal got its tusk

Narwhal As a Weapon

The ferocious beast of the sea has the ultimate Zombie Defense

Narwhal Xing T-Shirt

Link is self-explanatory

This Picture Was Too Big to Put at the End