Sharpening the Saw

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have lived before the Internet. Yeah, I was alive before it was really widespread, but it’s been around for most of my life. I just feel like people would know so much less without it. It makes so much knowledge so widely available, it’s really just an awesome thing. The Internet was throwing all sorts of things at me today, almost overwhelming the two hours I have between classes.

Weird things have been happening all over the place. First, Rome. Or en route to Africa. Whatever. The Pope said stuff here. He was right, then he was wrong. First he said, correctly, that simply distributing condoms in Africa wouldn’t fix the AIDS crisis over there. It would be a good place to start, but he’s right, it’s not some panacea, there will still be AIDS. But then the Pope said something that, had I not been accustomed to the crazy that spews from his mouth, would have made my head explode. He said that distributing condoms would make things worse. He didn’t say how this would happen, probably because the only rationale for such a crazy stance would be that Jesus would come down from heaven wearing a flaming suit of armor to duel a fourteen foot tall AIDS monster on the moon, but all the condoms in Africa would weaken him (they’re his kryptonite), and the AIDS monster would win. I think that’s the only way that distributing condoms would make AIDS a bigger problem.

Buried within that same article was another asinine statement from the Pope. Speaking about the global economic crisis, Benedict has called for international solidarity with Africa, but has no specific solutions. Maybe he could give some of the trillions of dollars that the Church has squirreled away in art and crap throughout Europe to poor people. Jesus told the tax collector to give all his possessions to the poor, remember it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to Heaven, so maybe the Church, and I recognize that this is crazy, should do what Jesus was saying.

Shifting gears, the BBC has done some pretty sketchy research, and they’re saying that Cleopatra may have been at least part African. They came to this conclusion by looking at the remains of someone who may have been her sister Arsinoe. Of course, these bones could just as likely, if not more likely, belong to someone else entirely. But the skull that they’ve been looking at has a lot in common with Egyptians and Africans, instead of the Greeks from whom Cleopatra was originally thought to have been descended. There isn’t enough here to make me believe that Cleopatra was anything other than Greek. But it wouldn’t surprise me if this did turn out to be true. Cleopatra was the first Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt to actually know Egyptian, and a bunch of other languages as well, so it would be kinda cool if she were part African as well.

Ok, dinosaurs. I’m going to start with the less cool one to build things up. Researchers in Alberta have found a small dinosaur, the smallest carnivore in the United States, which is basically a miniature raptor. It’s less than two feet tall, with claws and teeth, and strikes me as being just a little ball of hatred. This is another dinosaur that I wish were still around, as there are all sorts of possibilities for amusement. First, of course, Michael Vick would probably own like 80 of these things. And it would be crazy to watch them fight. Maybe others could be domesticated, and people could have these little dinosaurs as pets. I just think that would be pretty cool.

But the much crazier find is some sort of giant sea monster that people have found in the arctic. Referred to as Predator X, a type of pliosaur, this thing must have been the apex predator of its time, pretty much just invincible under water, as long as it wasn’t fighting a Megalodon (and it wouldn’t because they lived in different areas). Predator X, as I’m going to keep referring to it, was fifty feet long, more than ten feet of which were devoted to its skull. And mouth. Hell, its teeth were each about a foot long. But the best part about it is its jaw strength. Predator X could snap its jaw shut with 33,000 psi of force. For the sake of comparison, the average PSI of an alligator, pretty much the modern gold standard, is 3,200 psi. Humans can muster about 150 psi, and lions and tigers can top 1,000 psi. Hell, scientists estimate that the average T Rex could only bite with around 8,000 psi. Predator X was just animalistic. It would still probably get wrecked by a Megalodon, but it still must have been a pretty cool animal