Jamie123

The footnote in Revelation actually points to Ezikiel 3:3 - "He said to me, 'Son of man, feed your stomach and fill your body with this scroll which I am giving you.' Then I ate it, and it was sweet as honey in my mouth." - so that's clearly where the idea of "eating a book" came from. But nothing there about it turning sour.
I'm not all that familiar with Ezekiel - I've only ever read it cover-to-cover once in my life. "So little time, so much to know!"

That worked - yay Dailymotion!
I miss Carl Sagan.  And Vangelis, who did the music for his Cosmos series.  
Billyun!

For some reason, I was never a huge Carl Sagan fan. Since his death I have found several things that I really admire about him. For example, I think he was honest with himself, always an attractive trait. Another example: Though he was a confirmed atheist, I didn't see that he bore particular ill will toward religious people, a refreshing change from today's in-your-face, hateful, openly insulting atheists that have become so common.

Oh we have gallons too! It's just that they're bigger and better than yours!
Try this instead
 

Revelation 10 link, for convenience.
That is an interesting connection. I suspect that this may have been a common metaphor in the culture(s) in question.  And it seems used in two very different ways here - John is not spending time savoring evil, and then experiencing the painful consequences that always come from evil....  He is obeying the Lord, and (as far as I can determine) taking into himself the word of God (the things he must prophesy per verse 11). You wouldn't think that would be bitter, especially for the translated John, but I suppose the amount of rejection and wickedness he would have to experience and witness would be bitter, while testifying of the Lord would be sweet...
D&C 77
Jeremiah 15:16 may also interest you - another instance of "eating" the Lord's words, though no bitterness here.  It might be interesting to find all the instances wherein a prophet "eats" the word of God in some form.
PS: That D&C 77 bit makes me wonder just how involved the translated John is in the current efforts to gather Israel, and how openly (to our current prophet).

A slime mold is actually quite an impressive organism.

The footnote in Revelation actually points to Ezikiel 3:3 - "He said to me, 'Son of man, feed your stomach and fill your body with this scroll which I am giving you.' Then I ate it, and it was sweet as honey in my mouth." - so that's clearly where the idea of "eating a book" came from. But nothing there about it turning sour.
I'm not all that familiar with Ezekiel - I've only ever read it cover-to-cover once in my life. "So little time, so much to know!"

A slime mold is actually quite an impressive organism.

Well, it seems like in both cases they are describing heartburn and using it metaphorically.  I don’t know that Revelation had to have been intentionally borrowing from Job . .   

A slime mold is actually quite an impressive organism.

Sure. Everyone knows that the Drake equation is simply brain candy. Well, not actually everyone, but mostly everyone over the age of about 30 who actually cares about such things.

No one ever seems to question the Drake equation or where it came from, or what assumptions lie behind it. Though I've never seen a derivation, it must be something like this: if R is the rate of star formation and n the number of civilizations per star (which includes that great string of fractions that most people think is all the Drake equation amounts to), then civilizations must appear at a rate Rn. But if they last on average L years then the rate of disappearance per civilization must be 1/L. Therefore we get the differential equation dN/dt=Rn-N/L, where N is the number of civilizations and t is the age of the galaxy. Now we see the Drake equation N=RnL is only true if dN/dt is zero (i.e. the system is in equilibrium). If N is still building up from zero then the more general solution is N=RnL(1-e^t/L), or if we are still very close to the start, N=Rnt. Perhaps there are good reasons for thinking N has stabilized, but what if civilizations last a long time so L is very large (L>>t)? The Drake equation then only gives an upper limit, and the actual value could be anywhere between 1 (just us) and RnL.
 
 

I wonder though, if there are aliens flying around us, would we necessarily know it? Perhaps when we look up at the clouds, we're actually looking at alien beings - much the way fish in the aquarium are looking uncomprehendingly through the glass at us.

I don't actually know many physicists any more, but surprisingly, I would say that many physicists do believe in extraterrestrial life. Of course, so do we, but believing that life exists outside of the earth is a far cry from believing that aliens from outer space are flying their UFOs around us. And I have known quite a few bona fide physicists who seemed to believe exactly that.

A few years ago, there was a guy on YouTube who called himself "Hannibal the Victor". You've probably never heard of him - he was a minor figure with only a small following - but he had a lot to say in the feminism vs. men's rights debate. This was long before the feminists became the "bad guys" and the trans-activists took over the "good guys" mantle. Hannibal was very much on the side of feminism, and supported the "reclaim the night" thing - when women were encouraged to go wandering around dangerous areas at night on the grounds that they had the "moral right" to do so, and if they were attacked it was the fault of their attackers - not the women themselves. Hannibal used to go on and on and on ad nausiam about how these women were "doing nothing wrong", and no blame should ever be attached to them whatever happened.
Now there was another much more prominent YouTuber called "Thunderf00t" - you probably have heard of him. I believe he's still going, though I long lost interest in following him. His real name is Phil Mason, and he's a British food scientist. Thunderf00t was behind the "draw Mohammed day" - where he encouraged his subscribers to draw pictures of the prophet Mohammed and post them online. Now this, under Islamic law, is blasphemy and can easily get you the Charlie Hebdoed. Nevertheless, Thunderf00t encouraged his followers to do just that, on the grounds that it was "doing nothing wrong", and that if any harm came to you it was the fault of the Islamic extremists - not the "draw Mohammed-ists".
I defy anyone to argue that Thunderf00t and Hannibal the Victor are not two peas in a pod.
Nevertheless they argued bitterly against each other on both issues, each using the same counter-arguments as the other. Thunderf00t took this in his stride, but Hannibal got angrier and angrier, and eventually filmed himself attacking a cornfield with a sword, while shouting "I hate you, Phil Mason!" (Thunderf00t thereafter referred to Hannibal as "Captain Stabby.)
Neither of them seemed to understand the difference between "immorality-blame" and "stupidity-blame". (I'm sure there are more scholarly words for these things, if anyone wants to tell me what they are.) Each switched the two of them around to support his own position, and neither saw the contradiction in this.
Hannibal the Victor has long gone - he fell out with his fellow feminists, particularly an individual called "Bewildered Ape" - who he long supported but eventually decided was an idiot. Ape by the way tried to get Thunderf00t fired from his day job, by writing to his employers about his "unacceptable opinions" - an act which earned him the epithet "Snitch Ape" in certain quarters. He failed (miserably) but that didn't stop a bunch of copycats bombarding Mason's bosses with "I think you ought to know..." type letters.
(I could write for hours on this topic...but I'll force myself to stop.)

I believe you're older than me, Vort, but I don't think by much, and it's a sobering thought. Inside I still think I'm a boy. Maybe that's another appeal of TBBT. The characters (the male ones at least) are holding onto childhood despite pushing early middle age. Admittedly Sheldon is a professor, but you never see him weighed down by departmental meetings or marking hundreds of student assignments. The rest are all carefree postdocs with nothing to worry about but research, eating Chinese take-out and wetting themselves over the new Star Wars movie. For most of us this is wish-fulfillment.

Yes - our "arrest" would include  what you call "detained". Sometimes people are even arrested "by appointment". They come to the police station at an appointed time, wait in a waiting room. When their turn comes they are invited into an interview room, "arrested" (no question of handcuffs!), give a statement and are then free to go (though maybe with some nominal bail conditions). It is very common for a suspect to be arrested, questioned, and then released. (There is certainly no expectation of charges). Some murder inquiries involve multiple arrests before anyone is charged.

With no LOL or laugh emoji or anything but sincerity, I mourn at the weakening and apparent impending demise of this core root of Americanism. I am an American exceptionalist, not in believing that Americans were better than other peoples, or even that America was better than other nations, but in that the United States of America had been given a divine gift of liberty and therefore had the responsibility to spread that gift around the world. I think that, for all their mistakes and foolishness, previous generations of Americans had a surprising amount of success in doing this. But starting from some time after WWII, the rising generations of the time really lost their way. And here we are. Not sure how to move forward from here, except just to keep on plugging away, don't give up, don't let anything affect your joy in God and your fellow man. That last thing has proven hard for me, especially as I move into late middle age and the beginnings of actually being old, but I do believe it's the way to go.

I said "some" validity - you can at least see how offence *could* be taken. But banning something because "someone, somewhere could possibly be offended" is the thin end of a very long wedge.
(For the record I grew up with Michael Bates and his disgusting throat-clearing, and found him hilarious. Ditto Peter Sellers and *his* funny Indian - if you've never seen it, try watching "The Party". You'll be saying "birdy num-num" in an Indian accent for weeks!)
But don't be so sure that common sense will prevail. Remember the incident at Silly-Man College* at Yale, where the Master was verbally abused and eventually forced to resign, for telling the students to use their own common sense when choosing what to wear for Halloween (rather than following University guidelines, which forbade anything Native American). Once he was gone, they abolished the title of "Master" since it was clearly evoked some kind of white male plantation owner, and despite the fact that the heads of Oxford and Cambridge colleges have been called "Master" for centuries. Those students will now be skyrocketing Yale graduates, on their way to the top jobs.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
*Yes, I know that's not how it's really spelled.

No. "Duty to retreat" refers to fleeing from an attack in preference to meeting the attack with deadly force. If you don't use force, "duty to retreat" doesn't apply. Even in Massachusetts, you don't actually have the duty to run away from an attacker.

Such people are gifted.

Haha - you don't need to apologise - I didn't write The Big Bang Theory!
It's got me thinking though - this idea that "cool" people don't "do science" - or at least not voluntarily. I'm reminded of a totally bizarre experience I had when I was 17, and an apprentice at a large lighting company. Every now and then the apprentices would be taken on excursions, and on one occasion it was to Jodrell Bank.
Now Jodrell Bank (as you may know) is a large radio observatory. I was (and still am) very interested in astronomy so I was pretty excited. The trip itself was something of an anticlimax - I had imagined we would be touring the telescopes themselves and watching real astronomers at work, but the trip was actually just to the visitor centre. The high point was the planetarium show, but even that was a pale shadow of the one in London. When we were all on the bus again, the supervisor (who was kinda the adult of our group) came storming onto the bus saying "Who's got something that's not theirs?" It transpired that the docent had complained to him that a book was missing from the bookshop and assumed that one of us had taken it. He made us all turn our pockets out, but no astronomy books were forthcoming. The supervisor blustered up and down the aisle of the bus saying stuff like "I don't care who it is!" After about ten minutes of this he stormed off the bus and back into the visitor centre. He was in there for about a minute, after which he returned to the bus looking angrier than ever and told the driver to go. He gave no explanation, and there was much grumbling among the apprentices about "Who would steal a book about astronomy anyway?" The mood of resentment lasted until we reached the nearest pub, whereupon much beer was drunk and tensions eased. (In those days the laws against underage drinking were NEVER actually enforced.)
After that the trip to Jodrell Bank was often cited as the "worst outing ever". I have to confess it was rather poor (even without the stealing accusations) but for everyone else (nearly) it was more a case of " What idiot thought we'd want to learn about astronomy anyway?"
The Big Bang Theory though turns this attitude on its head. The nerds, far from being side characters added for light relief (like Eugene in "Grease" to give you one example), are centre stage. Its set in their world, in which "science is cool". They have character arcs. They learn and change and develop, while essentially staying nerds. Other characters come close to this - Frasier and Niles for example, or Ross from "Friends" but I'm not aware of anything that celebrates the archetypal nerd the way this show does.
What I really don't like though is the assumption that casual sex between dating couples (even on FIRST dates!) is the expected norm - but that's the case in just about every other comedy show. I don't know how true it is in real life - but I suspect less true than the media portrays it. Or at least I hope so.

You're right it's not a deep or sophisticated show. What draws me to it (somewhat) is that its a comedy of the socially awkward and screwed-up, who find refuge in fantasy and in science. There's also a kind of "wish fulfilment" about it. I would love to live in Leonard and Sheldon's apartment (though without Sheldon - he'd drive me nuts) amongst all the whiteboards and books.

You're right it's not a deep or sophisticated show. What draws me to it (somewhat) is that its a comedy of the socially awkward and screwed-up, who find refuge in fantasy and in science. There's also a kind of "wish fulfilment" about it. I would love to live in Leonard and Sheldon's apartment (though without Sheldon - he'd drive me nuts) amongst all the whiteboards and books.

I'm reminded of a case in the uk a few years ago. Some home-invaders invaded a home, overpowering and tying up the householder. Then they decided to have some fun with him. They partially untied him, stripped him naked, put a rope around his neck and walked him around his own house like a dog. During this proceeding, the householder managed to get free. He grabbed a large blunt instrument, chased the invaders out of the house,  caught up with one of them and cracked him over the head. Luckily this "victim" didn't die, so there was no question of murder (or even manslaughter) but the householder did stand trial for causing "grevious bodily harm". I can't remember what the outcome was, but a lot of people said that given the humiliation he'd received, he'd done what any other reasonable person would have done, so to single him out as a "bad person deserving of punishment" was illogical and grossly unfair.
P.S. I've been trying to find the details of this, but the closest I can find is the case of Munir Hussain who in 2008 chased a burglar down and smashed his head in with a cricket bat - for which he was sentenced to 30 months. (Charges were dropped against the burglar, whose brain damage was so severe he was judged "unfit to plead") I can find nothing about the "dog walking" humiliation. I could have sworn I read that in the paper at the time but maybe I dreamed it.