Archive for March 25th, 2011
Town of Babel: Excellent verbal communication skills
An explorer of the 17th century, known as “Arabia Traveler“, passed by a town, smack in the middle of Europe.
The explorer discovered that the people in the Bourg were lively, healthy, good-humoured, and communicated easily and intensely, supported by intricate gesticulation, complex intonations, and much focus on looking straight in the eyes. The traveler could not place the kind of language that was spoken: It didn’t resemble close to any familiar language of the time.
Surprisingly, the townspeople had no written language: There were no manuscripts around to learn any language. This paused no problems to being highly cultured: The people loved listening to poetry, attending theater, and engaging in heated discussions…
The explorer wrote: “For obscure reasons, I had this impression that the townpeople understood me clearly when I talked in my mother tongue, slowly and precisely.”
This town of Babel spoke a variety of languages and had no common language proper to the community. Fact is, Babel had no language.
A toddler acquired his own unique language, listening, mimicking, and babbling with whoever was talking to him. All words were as good as any others.
There were no trouble communicating with other people and the lack of a written language broke barriers to sensible acceptance of diversity.
This town had suffered greatly for too long from various European territorial expansions, annexations, by all kinds of warring powers, and dealt with all kinds of forms of monarchies and republicanism.
Most power-to-be tried to impose their own brand of language. There came a period, the town was reduced to a simple passage to other territories, regardless to which State the town boundaries belonged to.
In this century of internet and language technology, a freshly graduate linguist landed in Babel. He endeavored to decephere this complex language, never comprehending that there was no language.
Strong with a computer “language program“, the linguist started to translate and interpret the language.
The townspeople learned how to write and read. Many sentences turned out to mean the opposite of how they comprehended them. For example, the response to “I love you” was more accurately meaning “I am not ready to fall in love” or something not satisfactory as a response…
What do you think happened to the town?
Note: This short story is for the Islander author Thorarinn Eldjarn
A natural contraceptive for men: Finally!
Posted by: adonis49 on: March 25, 2011
The sperm has an enzyme “hyaluronidase”.This enzyme has one specific task: Dissolving the external wall of the female ovule in order to enter.
The Indonesian pharmacologist, Bambang Wardojo, observed the ethnic customs of the Papua tribes. The couple can be married but the woman is not to get pregnant until the entire dowry is paid up in full.
In the meantime, the husband was to keep eating leaves of a plant called gendarusse that grows in the low altitude plains of Indonesia and the Philippines. It turned out that gendarusse contains an active ingredient “gendarusine” (so far so good) that inhibits the sperm enzyme; thus, preventing impregnation due to “temporary impotency” to piercing or dissolving the wall of the ready ovule. After the dowry is paid in full, the husband ca stop acting the pachyderm and revert to carnivorous diet, like eating raw meat and drinking blood…the kind of diet a man needs to impregnate his wife..
People in Indonesia and the Philippines consume gendarusse leaves for other ailments such as asthma, headache, migraine, rheumatism…
Bambang discovered in 1983 another contraceptive in the margose or bitter melon, though it possesses temporary inhibition characteristics to the sperm enzyme.
Bambang is waiting to try his pill, manufactured by Indofarma, on 350 volunteered couples, most probably officially married (you don’t want to get entangled in ethnic traditional troubles.)
You have people, economists, planners, and yes, scientists claiming that there are hundred of reasons, many supposedly good reasons, for building “civilian” nuclear power plants.
A single evidence might change your mind: Potable water is contaminated in Japan. What kind of hope can you expect in life if you are unable to drink water safely? When potable water is contaminated, rivers are contaminated, and agricultural products will be contaminated. Imported water bottles will be contaminated as they arrive: Do you think water bottles are covered with a thick layer of lead?
Has Japan to invest in water pipeline coming from Antarctica? Ridiculous, but feasible with a rich country as Japan.
You may say that this catastrophic accident is temporary: How temporary? Anyone is ready to believe politicians or scientists when reality hit so hard?
You say the Japanese people have demonstrated willingness for “resolution”, facing the events with courage or whatever…What do we know about the state of disarray of a people who experienced the most brutal aggression in history: The first two atomic bombs dropped on inhabited cities!
If technologies are useless preventing contamination of water, what is the use of technology?
You hear many scientists, expert and not expert at all, proclaiming that vast improvements in the safety and security of nuclear power plants have been enhanced in the last decades. Where are these chimeric improvements? Why have they not be redesigned in the older power plants? Should private electrical companies be relied upon to invest more on something that was functioning “well”?
Since 1952, the world has witnessed 7 nuclear dangerous accidents of level 5 out of 7; all of them taking place in the rich and developed States of the veto powers in the UN such as USA, France, England, Russia…Fukushima plants are about 6 already and growing. Contamination of radioactive cesium has reached 450 miles in diameter; no, we are not talking about the “benign” contamination of nitrogen or oxygen…with seconds of half-life. A second contamination here, another contamination there, and pretty soon we have a contamination larger and more devastating than US deficit.
Nuclear scientists said and are saying…Are you sure these scientists have mastered the nuclear? Are you sure they know how to manage and control nuclear catastrophes?
How many among you know how many died instantly, two days later, a month later…from the Three Miles Island plant? Is not knowing a good basis to forgetting that “what can happen will happen”?
Are we about to sit tight and wait for the next doomsday? Nuclear scientists said and are saying… This is not a one time catastrophe of a single day: Successive earthquakes have been shaking Japan since the first big one with scales higher than 6. Earthquakes are expanding to Myanmar and heading eastward. Are there more nuclear power plants in India, Iran, Israel, and on? Are scientists in seismic troubles as expert as nuclear scientists in their previsions?
Adonis Diaries 