Ignosticism or igtheism is the theological position that every other theological position (including agnosticism and atheism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological concepts.
It can be defined as encompassing two related views about the existence of God:
(1) The view that a coherent definition of God must be presented before the question of the existence of God can be meaningfully discussed. Furthermore, if that definition is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless. In this case, the concept of God is not considered meaningless; the term “God” is considered meaningless.
(2) The second view is synonymous with theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first asking “What is meant by ‘God’?” before proclaiming the original question “Does God exist?” as meaningless.

– Source: Wikipedia

Some what I consider to be interesting facts about lactose intolerance.

• Mammals digest sugars in mother’s milk until weaning.
• The intestinal enzyme for digestion is lactase. Lactase production in humans usually drops by 90% after the age of four. A mutation on chromosome 2 results in keeping lactase production active in some humans.
• It is not clear When this adaptation occurred, and whether it occurred only once and then was inherited or whether evolution “came up with it” several times. However, there seems to be quite some research on it.
• There is large cultural variation when it comes to lactose intolerance. In Northern Europe, about 2% of the population is intolerant. In Africa the range is between 20 and 80%. China 93%, Thailand 98%, American Indians 100%. The Navajos used the milk powder lavishly bestowed upon them by the government to … color their adobes.
• Cats in Europa are not lactose intolerant (although some individuals very well might be), cats in Asia are. My explanation for this would be co-evolution: Europeans fed their cats milk, thinking they were doing something good. That introduced a high selection pressure (the same selection pressure that was imposed on humans when the mutation occurred and was adaptive), so cats with the mutation did better. In Asia, people wouldn’t even come up with the idea of feeding grown-up mammals milk.

Source: lecture about evolution & public health by Gilbert S. Omenn

I’ll write down some impressions of my time in Cape Town and South Africa, and follow this up with photographs in another post. I find text pretty difficult to read if intertwined with pictures too much, and there are quite some photographs I’d like to put online, therefor the separation.
Here we go.

Introduction & some random things
Cape Town is in the Southwest of South Africa, has over 3 million citizens, and is a very diverse city. The history (Dutch/English colonialization, Apartheid, etc.) is omnipresent, obviously. It has only been 20 years. There are still many townships, segregated by skin color. It’s impossible for a colored person to enter a black township, or for a white person to enter a colored township, and so forth. It’s a city full of tourism, but also full of crime (compared to European standards … compared to Johannesburg it’s as safe as it gets!).
Read the rest of this entry »

• All ants together have around the same biomass as all humans together.
• Only two per cent of insect species are eusocial, but account for about eighty per cent of all insect biomass.

I have always wanted to know what the true background of non-capitalizing “ee cummings” is – the usual story is that “he preferred it like that”.
It turns out, the internet (all hail!) doesn’t help, for once.

Cummings’s publishers and others have sometimes echoed the unconventional orthography in his poetry by writing his name in lowercase and without periods, but usual orthography (uppercase and periods) is supported by scholarship, preferred by publishers today. Cummings himself used both the lowercase and capitalized versions, though he most often signed his name with capitals.

The use of lowercase for his initials was popularized in part by the title of some books, particularly in the 1960s, writing his name in lower case on the cover and spine. In the preface to E. E. Cummings: the growth of a writer critic Harry T. Moore notes ” He [Cummings] had his name put legally into lower case, and in his later books the titles and his name were always in lower case.” According to his widow, this is incorrect, She wrote of Friedman “you should not have allowed H. Moore to make such a stupid & childish statement about Cummings & his signature.” On 27 February 1951, Cummings wrote to his French translator D. Jon Grossman that he preferred the use of upper case for the particular edition they were working on. One Cummings scholar believes that on the rare occasions that Cummings signed his name in all lowercase, he may have intended it as a gesture of humility, not as an indication that it was the preferred orthography for others to use.

Critic Edmund Wilson commented “Mr. Cummings’s eccentric punctuation is, also, I believe, a symptom of his immaturity as an artist. It is not merely a question of an unconventional usage: unconventional punctuation may very well gain its effect… the really serious case against Mr. Cummings’s punctuation is that the results which it yields are ugly. His poems on the page are hideous.”

– Wikipedia

I received a message by Open University to remove this video here. I wonder if it is illegal to imbed youtube videos? It doesn’t matter, since the youtube video has been taken down as well:

“HOW THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE …”
This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Open University.

I’ll google this in a few days and hope I can find a “legal” source for this wonderful video.

A wonderful 10 minute video about the development of the English language. The best chapters for me were the chapters about science (“Acid” 1626, “Gravity” 1641, “Electricity” 1646, “Pendulum” 1660, “Penis” 1693, “Vagina” 1682, “Cardiac” 1601, “Sternum” 1667, “Tonsil” 1601) and words from other languages (Carribbean: BQQ, canoe, cannibal; India: stairs, bungalow; Africa: voodoo, zombie; Australia: walkaround, nugget; Holland: cookies).

lat. plagiarius = Menschenraub, Seelenverkäufer (kidnapping, soulseller)

kipepeo ~ butterfly (Kiswahili)

Good luck in Tansania, guys.

“Mit dem Gerundivum [des Verbs propagare] wurde von Papst Gregor XV. im Jahre 1622 eine kirchliche Kongregation namens Sancta congregatio de propaganda fide geschaffen, deren Zweck es war, dem Protestantismus entgegen zu treten sowie die Neue Welt zu missionieren. Abgeleitet von der Bezeichnung dieser Organisation wurde der Ausdruck Propaganda in die meisten Sprachen übernommen.
Der Club de la propagande, eine Geheimgesellschaft der Jakobiner im Frankreich des 18. Jahrhunderts, wollte die Verbreitung revolutionärer Ideen fördern.”
—
“The English term [propaganda] is an 18th century coinage, from the Latin feminine gerund of propagare “to propagate”, originally in Congregatio de Propaganda Fide “Congregation for Propagating the Faith”, a committee of cardinals established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV.”
– Wikipedia