KellanStec.com

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to let you all know that recently there was a speaker at Wayne State College. He was speaking about creationism. Kellan has some write-ups about some of the points he made. Its good. KellanStec.com (Bookmark it and Subribe to the feed.)

Thanks for the recap of everything, Kellan, I wanted to go down and watch it with ya'.

Good Bye.

The other day I was listening to Coffee Break French from Radio Lingua. (If you have ever wanted to learn or practice French or Spanish, their podcasts are pretty amazing.) The lesson I was learning was how to say hello and goodbye. Now you wouldn't think anything amazing would come from learning the basics of a langauge, but one of the ways to say goodbye in French is to say 'adieu'. This is a lot like the Spanish 'adiós.'

Before I go on, I want to remind you of the post about SHIT. It was a nice story but wasn't true. I was then informed I was being a wet blanket for ruining the fun story of whence a word came. So I thought I would make it up to you.

Broken down, both the words adiós and adieu mean "To God." The teacher on the the podcast kept saying, "To God, just like we do when we say good bye." This seemed really strange. We all know what good means and when to use it: good day, good night, good bye. But the bye is the word that I never thought about. Turns out bye is short for "Be with ye."

This is a what Bartleby, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language gives:

No doubt more than one reader has wondered exactly how goodbye is derived from the phrase “God be with you.” To understand this, it is helpful to see earlier forms of the expression, such as God be wy you, god b'w'y, godbwye, god buy' ye, and good-b'wy. The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. A letter of 1573 written by Gabriel Harvey contains the first recorded use of goodbye: “To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes,” recalling another contraction that is still used.

It's also in the Online Etymology Dictionary.
So there you have it, something both interesting and not made up.

Aspartame is still okay to drink. Stop it hippies.
Also, make sure you check out Radio Lingua. It's very good, that and some flashcards. They have a ton of languages in the ONE MINUTE.... I haven't listened to much of those, but Coffee Break French and Spanish, and Show Time Spanish are awesome.

Maybe not so Intriguing.

We are well into that certain time of year again. The TV has been over taken. By basketball. For the next few months we have to deal with maybe the belief that bothers me the most, Slam Dunks are cool.

They're not. Several times a day I drop garbage of some sort into a trash barrel. Sometimes it is a small trash can. Maybe a little smaller than a basketball hoop. I know, not impressive, but what if I had to jump maybe a foot? No. What If I was running? No? One handed? Maybe I stole the trash from some one? Yeah, lame.









Youtube is weird.

In-State Tuition for Illegal Immigrants

On my bus ride home from campus I heard a couple guys behind me talking about the elction results, and I heard their enthusiasm for Tim Clare. The reason they were most excited was that he didn't want to give in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. They were pretty sure it would raise their own tuition money. This just supports the idea that I've been coming up with, you know, in my philosophical, Lord of the Flies kind of way. People are pretty much selfish douchebags.

I used to work with a guy named William. We unloaded trucks at Wal-mart, and he said the most absolutly true idea ever said to describe people. William is from the Sudan, and moved to the U.S. because of the wars going on. One day three of us white truck unloaders were walking with William, and on the other side of the aisle, three walmart workers from Africa. We asked him why he wasn't walking with his brothers, and without missing a beat he said, "You are my brothers too. People are just people. We just look different."

That is a quote I will never ever forget, and that I wish more people understood. Here's the deal, if your parents are illegal immigrants, or if you are, you probably weren't loaded with money to be able to pay out-of-state tuition. My family isn't close to trying to just make it by like some of these families, and we couldn't afford out-of-state tuition. But everyone who wants to, should be able to get an education and try to make their lives better. Maybe you don't want your tuition to sky rocket, maybe immigrants will start "stealing" even better jobs from us, maybe you are jsut a racist asshole who can't see the world from other people's perspective. People are people, and we all deserve the same chances.

The video below is from July 16, 2007. It's about making English the native language. Basically some day we may all have to learn Spanish, languages evolve and spread, and it's going to happen, and it's just one of those things you just need to get over. Go with the flow. O, Vaya con el flujo!

Girl, 13, stoned to death in Somalia as 1,000 watch; charged

Here is another one of those just mind blowing stories, that seem like they happened back in the biblical days. But it isn't.A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped was stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants, a human rights group said.

read more | digg story

Crazy Sprinkler Lady

I don't know if anyone has seen this yet, it's been around for a while. Just thought It should be one more place.

read more | digg story

A friend full of "shit."

The other day as I was over at a friends house I heard a nice little story about the origen of a word which we are all very familiar with. The word that was heard all over Nebraska in the overtime of the Husker game with Texas Tech. (That is just poor writing, no one wants to see that typed.) The word is shit, that is all the build up I can manage. Here's a nice email I found saying basically the same thing as my friend.

Subject: Fabulous bit of historical knowledge

Ever wonder where the word "shit" comes from. Well here it is:

Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then) by ship. In dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea) hit it. It not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by-product is methane gas.

As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen; methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern. BOOOOM!

Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was discovered what was happening.

After that, the bundles of manure where always stamped with the term "S.H.I.T" on them which meant to the sailors to "Ship High In Transit." In other words, high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.

Bet you didn't know that one.

Here I always thought it was a golf term.

I found an etymology dictionary here.

I had heard in my language classes, that any exciting story about a word origin is probably wrong. Most of our words are going to be traced back to Old English, Latin, Greek, et cetra.

When I first heard the story I thought the word would have been much older than English sea trading. Or at least older than the Modern English language. The oldest use I saw of it was,

Lues animalium, quæ Anglice Scitta vocatur, Latine autem fluxus interaneorum dici potest.

Scitta is the word of interest. The sentence is something about cattle having diarrhea.

It is used again in the 14th century as a verb.

þey wolde ... make hem a pitte ... whan þey wolde schite ...; and whanne þey hadde i-schete þey wolde fille þe pitte agen."

I have no idea what that says, but again you can easyily choose the words, schite and schete. The combitnation of letter "sc" from Anglo-Saxon would later become "sh" in Modern english. It also stays very similar in other languages.

German Scheiss,
Dutch schijt,
Old Norse skita,
Lithuanian sikti,

The second problem I found with the story after doing some research is that acronyms were not really used untilthe 1900's. The first acronyms were made popular by the military(A.S.A.P., POW) Son of a bitch has been a phase since the 1700's but never used as SOB until 1918.

And the third reason that came to to raise a red flag off the bat was methane. Sure it hangs around shit. Here is what a physics teacher had to say about it.

M]ethane gas would not 'build up' in the hold of a ship. It is lighter than air and in any unsealed space would dissipate upward fast enough that an explosive mixture would not accumulate.

So I am just going to some it up with the bulleted list I stole from Douglas Harper and his entry about the topic.

the word itself is a good 1,000 years older than the common use of acronyms;

the original form of the word (Anglo-Saxon sc-, which regularly evolved into M.E. sh-) does not correspond to the supposed acronym;

the verb is the original form, the noun derives from it; the acronym supposes the noun came first;

no one has produced a single instance of this supposed acronym from any old mercantile record or ship's manifest;

in fact, no one has ever established that there was a custom of shipping manure;
the word has cognates in many other languages, including ones outside Germanic, for which no acronym theory of origin makes sense;

We Must Stop Daylight Savings!

read more | digg story

Here is maybe the saddest thing I have seen for a while. I feel really bad for him. He has no idea he sounds ridiculous.

Science at it's Finest

This is just a funny video from the Onion.


Study: Nearly 80 Percent Of Roommates Got So Drunk Last Night

Looking Over Old Controversies

So way back when I started writing I typed up a post about why I was an atheists, so hopefully people would stop hassling me about it. The post was made when I first became an atheists, and since then I have done a lot more with science (at the time I was a business major). I went back to read it today, and I noticed some things a few comments that I just let go without commenting on. Probably cause I didn't know the answer. I wanted to go ahead and finally give a response to them because I have answers.


This comment starts with Joe quoting me, then following up with his comment:

"For us it is that we can look at what science has figured out, everything from the big bang, to how the earth formed, and evolution (and yes I mean macroevolution). If all of these are the known and proven facts, that takes away the three big things you would need a God to do. You don't need him to create the universe, create the Earth, or create life."
For ME, the only reason I'm NOT an atheist is because of what science has figured out.
The big bang--ok, the universe is expanding, and that has been scientifically proven via the Doppler effect. So, science did it's job there. Now for my logic of that fact: something can theoretically expand for an infinite amount of time, but nothing can negatively expand for an infinite amount of time. everything that is expanding HAD to have started from a single point. It's like a ball in space. if you throw it, it can go on in motion forever. so, if you see a ball in space that is moving, you know that it had to have been thrown at some point in time. that's the way i see the universe....because it is presently expanding, somebody had to have thrown it in the beginning.
Macroevolution--evolution w/n a species has been proven and even observed. more resistant strains of bacteria and viruses (whether living or not....that's another argument) present themselves regularly. That's what makes MRSA so dangerous. however, macroevolution just doesn't make sense to me. It has never been scientifically proven, nor has it been deemed plausible by many scientists who have objectively investigated it. one of the best examples I can give is the mule....it's a crossbreed, but it's sterile. "

I'm am so excited that I came back onto this. First things first, just a typo, but a major one. Microevolution is change within a species, like the beak of the finch. Macroevolution comes about after thousands of years of microevolution, not from to different species mating, like a horse and donkey. Donkeys and horses are actually a great example of two closely related species that have grown apart just enough that they cannot breed together. The reason for this is that the way the the genes have been arranged on chromosome. A horse has 64 chromosomes, and a donkey has 62, so when they mate they can make a mule, it has all the information. When the mule is ready to go through meiosis to create sex cells, eggs or sperm, the difference in the number of chromosomes keeps the chromosome pairs from lining up correctly. This puts too many or to few chromosomes into the attempted offspring and it can't grow. (BTW the same thing is the cause of seedless watermelon)

everything that is expanding HAD to have started from a single point. It's like a ball in space. if you throw it, it can go on in motion forever. so, if you see a ball in space that is moving, you know that it had to have been thrown at some point in time.

The universe did start from a singularity, just a dimensionless something in nothing. Then for one reason or another, there was a giant explosion the the energy and mass combined as energy. When this happened, 3 dimensions where created and TIME started. Time did start, before this there was not time, there was a beginning to time.

From Garrett

different parts of time are not reality, they just are kind of made by us to make sense for us.

This was used for the argument that God is OUTSIDE of time. Time isn't a concept that was just thought up. Time is used in equations just like x, y, and z for position in the three dimensions. As Albert would say, it's a relative.
From Joe

how the earth was formed--dunno

There is very clear evidence of the Earth being formed by space rock early in the life of our solar system. The evidence has to do with the type of isotopes found throughout the solar system, more complicated than I understand, but it is known. It was on "The Universe" on Discovery or National Geo. I think there is an episode of Astronomy cast about it.

Joe also used the word prove a lot. Science isn't progressed by proving hypotheses correct. It is progressed by the disproving of null hypotheses. So science will never be exactly 100% sure about anything, but sure enough to bet about everything on the theories that we know. There are not many scientists walking around not agreeing with evolution. These scientists and professors have trouble holding onto jobs for a reason.

I'm glad I went back over the old comments and checked these out. I think the scariest thing about Joe's comments about evolution is that he plans to be a doctor. Biology is pretty important in medicine. Anyone who knows Joe knows that he is smart. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like a great example of compartmentalizing the brain to make a God make sense.

Seeing the difference stem-cells can make.

This is a hopeful new science article I read. Maybe we will get lucky and it will change some minds.

read more | digg story

The Cancer Myth of Diet Sodas Fizzing Out

The days are starting to get warmer and I'm ready to start drinking soda again, but I need to be watching my figure, so I'm going to be drinking the diet variety of drinks. That is all that I really need to keep hydrated, right! And there are no calories. What could be wrong with that.

Well cancer. That's the answer you will get the most. But is it really true, do I need to be afraid of cancer while drinking my Diet Coke?

Most diet sodas are made diet by replacing the sugar with a low calorie or a zero calorie sweetener such as NutraSweet or Equal. These are just a couple of brand names of the compound aspartame. This is the chemical people talk about as causing the adverse health affects. A quick look on PubMed.com makes it pretty clear that several studies have been done trying to find a connection between aspartame and cancer. In all the articles I looked at I couldn't finding any correlation between the two at all.

The FDA and the European Food Safety Authority says a safe daily allowance is about 40 -50 mg/kg bw/day. A study conducted in dogs, rats, mice, and hamsters showed a safe level of up to 4000 mg/kg bw/day.

The answer to the cancer question, go ahead and drink your diet sodas, you won't get cancer. I also found several studies conducted to determine the neurological effects these studies to give people reason to fear aspartame if the article is not read. These studies have shown that there is no linking between seizures and aspartame.

Like almost everything, some people may have adverse effects to chemicals in the drinks. Simple things like headaches though may just be caused by a carbonated beverage.

If you want to treat yourself to a cold drink filled with caffeine there is nothing wrong with diet soda that do not match problems you may get from drinking a regular soda. If you want to just stay hydrated, drink water.

Pickup Notice

I got a card in the mail today, you may get it too. I googled it to see what it was and this is what I found.

Did you receive a "PICKUP NOTICE" card in your mail today? No, it is not a package waiting for you at the post office.

I was one of the people who received such a notice. It is a scam - feel free to shred it.

We had reported earlier that this seemed to be a problem in the Grand Forks, North Dakota area. It apparently has become a problem nationwide. It seems to be targeting college age students.

Areas affected by the scam:

Grand Forks, North Dakota (UND - University of North Dakota)
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Gainesville, Florida

Ames, Iowa
Sante Fe, New Mexico
Philipsburg, Pennsylvania
Raleigh, North Carolina
Perley, Minnesota,
Columbia, Missouri
Durango, Colorado
Norcross, Georgia
Carbondale, Illinois
Burlington, Iowa
Fishers, Indiana
Hudson, New Hampshire
Corpus Christi, Texas
University Park, Pennsylvania (PSU - Penn State)

Updated:
Tulsa, Oklahoma (ORU)
Tallahassee, Florida (Florida State University)
Muncie, Indiana (Ball State University)
West Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue University)
Lincoln, NE (University of Nebraska)

On the scam notice card it gives the following info:

Frontside

Pickup Notice
PO Box 2349
San Marcos, Tx 78667

Backside




Important - Claim No. ######

And then gives the hours Monday thru Thursday - 9:00 AM - 9:00 PM C.S.T., etc.

And then to...

Please Call within 24 hours of receipt - 1-800-444-7555 (scam phone number) Do Not Lose This card.

Online sources state the following go along with this scam:

It is 45 minute meeting where you are "guaranteed" to get 1 of 7 prizes (or similar) or involves timeshares.

Posted by Matthew at 6:30 PM

Labels: 1-800-444-7555, Pickup Notice, Postal Scam, Scam