91–100 of 202 posts
Just imagine, you could have been born as one of quadrillion of these guys, but instead you are a human, that’s more than lottery luck we all got, if you can read this.
> These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter. Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. It’s hard to avoid these relatives of shrimp and lobster—Walter has studied them all over the wor…
Guidance from rabbis varies (no central source of authority in Judaism). Some orthodox rabbis will view the copepods as not kosher and suggest filtering the water. Less orthodox rabbis will say the water is fine because the copepods are not visible to the naked eye.
Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what…
https://www.canadiannaturephotographer.com/epifluorescencemi...
These techniques also revealed the sheer scale of microbial life, as even the clearest ocean water from the most remote, nutrient-limited tropical seas will contain as many as 100,000 cells per mL. Below that there are the various viruses that infect or cohabit with these bacteria and small plants and animals, which are invisible to light microscopy.
Just imagine, you could have been born as one of quadrillion of these guys, but instead you are a human, that’s more than lottery luck we all got, if you can read this.
Also we think being human is the best because we are humans. Right between the start and the end of time in the centre of the universe.
Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what…
Without going into religion, it’s also mildly interesting for the defining veganism.
Beautiful and interesting stuff! I have never heard of copepods before, but have now and will have to do some more reading. > Walter once got a call from an Orthodox Jewish organization wanting to know if there were pieces of non-kosher creatures floating in the New York City tap water. The answer was yes. Not to pick on them, but I found this illuminating on how religions present such a myopic view of life and what…
Unless he has considerable rabbinic training, Walter is not competent to judge whether the (invisible) copepods are kosher or not. The categories in the religious laws have some connection to biology but are not determined solely by physical conditions either. At the risk of over-simplifying, these laws are meant to be possible to follow. Nobody is going to decide that, henceforth, all strictly observant Jews must fi…
One day, two or three of the young rabbis came to me and said, "We realize that we can't study to be rabbis in the modern world without knowing something about science, so we'd like to ask you some questions."
Of course there are thousands of places to find out about science, and Columbia University was right near there, but I wanted to know what kinds of questions they were interest in.
They said, "Well, for instance, is electricity fire?"
"No," I said, "but... what is the problem?"
They said, "In the Talmud it says that you're not supposed to make fire on a Saturday, so our question is, can we use electrical things on Saturdays?"
I was shocked. They weren't interested in science at all! The only way science was influencing their lives was so they might be able to interpret better the Talmud! They weren’t' interested in the world outside, in natural phenomena; they were only interested in resolving some question brought up in the Talmud.
https://rabbisedley.blogspot.com/2012/08/richard-feynman-mee...