Monday, June 25, 2007
Why Isn't Your Brain in Your Foot?
Taken from Dandy Designs
March/April 1996
by John N. Clayton
March/April 1996
by John N. Clayton
In Psalm 139:14, the writer praises God by noting the design in the human body. "I am fearfully and wonderfully made," the writer says as he goes on to praise God's wisdom in all he produces. I once had a student who argued against the existence of God by noting all the injuries and problems people have because their heads are located five or six feet up in the air. "If God designed us, why isn't your brain in your foot?" he asked. "Then there would be a much lower risk of injury and it would be much easier to protect the brain."
The answer to this question comes out of the area of physics that deals with fluids. We all know that, when you dive deep into a lake, the pressure gets larger the deeper you go. In fact, the pressure increases in fresh water at the rate of 62.4 pounds per square foot for each one foot in depth you go--so 10 feet down in a lake, the pressure is 624 pounds per square foot larger than at the surface. This is also true of blood.
At the very top of a six foot tall person's head, the pressure is at a minimum. In that person's feet, the pressure of the blood is nearly 400 pounds per square foot higher. For this reason, it is much more likely that a blood vessel may break in your foot than it is in your head. As a person gets older, it is sometimes possible to see places where blood vessels have broken in ankles or feet. This may cause some pain and may produce some aesthetic problems, but it is not life threatening. What would happen, however, if the rupturing blood vessels were in the person's brain? The reason your brain is not in your foot is very obvious when you look at the fluid pressures and other dynamics involved.
Not only is the positioning of organs carefully designed to conform to the physics of fluids, but the system as a whole works because of it. In order to get enough blood to the brain to allow it to work, a law of physics called Pascal's law is used. Pascal's law says "pressure exerted on a fluid is distributed uniformly throughout the fluid." When the heart puts pressure on the blood, that pressure is distributed uniformly throughout the blood. This means the brain gets enough blood to function while the lower part of the body gets blood that has additional pressure on it by the blood column's height being added to the heart's function
When medical scientists look at each organ in the body, they find that every part of the body maximizes the use of the physical forces made available to it. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, with a complexity that still challenges the best scientific minds among us.
Read more in www.dandydesigns.org
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
www.cgtrent.com
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
How Do You Touch?
Taken from Dandy Designs
September/October, 2000
by John N. Clayton
September/October, 2000
by John N. Clayton
In a recent article on haptics (the Greek-derived word for the study of touch) in Smithsonian, June, 2000, page 38, MIT’s “touch lab” is mentioned. This is a laboratory run by Mandayam Srinivasan that is especially concerned with how the human hand perceives touch. The sensitivity of the human hand is incredible. Each fingertip has about 2,000 receptors just for touch. These receptors are so sensitive that they can detect a dot just three microns high. To get a feeling for how small this is, a human hair is more than 50 microns in diameter. If you had a surface that had a rough spot on it that was .000000075 meters high, your finger could detect it. Visible light is slightly less than 10 times smaller than that, so our fingers are not too far away from being able to detect the presence or absence of different colors of light.
Trying to understand how all this is possible has gotten researchers into an area so complex that there is still no answer as to how it works. It appears that the fingerprint ridges on the bottom of your outer skin layer act as amplifiers. These ridges are much like the ridges you see when you look at your fingerprint. Not only are there several kinds of nerve receptors that give us the sensation of touch, but there are also receptors for other sensations. Some receptors detect heat and a completely different set of receptors detect cold–both calibrated against normal body temperature so they only work if the temperature goes above or below 98.6 degrees F. There are three kinds of pain receptors–one for mechanical pain, one for thermal pain, and one for chemical pain. There is a separate set of receptors for itch. Some of these sensors sense the stretch of your skin around joints as you move, providing information about how your body is moving. These stretches can be understood even with your eyes closed. Srinivasan says “We have no idea how these electrical impulses translate into perceptions and feelings.”
Trying to explain all of this on the basis of mechanistic chance that favors survival is a difficult task. Many things we use our hands for have nothing to do with survival (like playing a musical instrument or painting a picture or being folded in prayer). Some of the sensory abilities we have might even interfere with survival. A claw might be a better defense against a carnivore than a nerve-filled finger. We would suggest that our sense of touch is another example that we “. . . are fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy works and that my soul knoweth right well” (Psalm 139:14).
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Monday, June 18, 2007
The Incredible Bat
Taken from Dandy Designs
May/June 1997
by John N. Clayton
May/June 1997
by John N. Clayton
Most of us have had an unpleasant experience at one time or another in our lives with bats. There have been several times in my public school teaching experience when a bat got loose in my classroom scattering screaming students as it swooped around the room trying to find a way out. These negative experiences tend to make us have a negative attitude toward this most interesting and useful creature.
Bats are incredible creatures. Radar screens sometimes find them covering as much as 10,000 square miles in their search for food. Insect eating bats will eat nearly their body weight in bugs in a single night. One study of the bats in Bracken Cave in Texas found that their digestive systems and fruit are designed so the seeds of the fruit are not damaged by digestion. The result is the bats plant all kinds of fruit-bearing trees and bushes sustaining beneficial plant populations. This is especially true in desert and rain forest areas.
Almost all of the negative stories and fears about bats are untrue. When someone says "blind as a bat" they are way off base. Some bats can see a bug the size of a rice grain by starlight. Our best military night scopes are needed for man to see that well. Fear of rabies is an overstated problem. Only 24 people are believed to have contracted rabies from a bite in the whole history of the United States, and the common brown bat has never given rabies to anyone even though it is our most common bat. There are no vampire bats north of Mexico, and vampires do not suck blood--they lap up blood from a wound. Bats do not get snarled in women's hair and will avoid contact with a human if they possibly can.
Bats are incredibly designed. They can fly 80 miles per hour, can share a cave with 8.7 million other bats and and get along, and with 8.7 million bats in a cave a mother bat can find her baby every time recognizing its vocal pattern. Even the location device to find insects is incredible. High frequency sounds are emitted through the bat's nose or mouth. The ultrasonic sounds bounce back to the bat which tells the bat where the bug is, its size, shape, and direction of motion. Fruit bats have delicate senses of smell and sight and do not use echolocation methods. The bat is designed to help man by controlling insects, pollinating flowers, or planting beneficial plants. The sophistication of the highly complex animal speaks of design that could only be accomplished by a talented engineer--not by blind chance.
Data Sources: Popular Science, November, 1996, pages 53, 58: International Wildlife, May/June, 1992, pages 4-10.
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Bats are incredible creatures. Radar screens sometimes find them covering as much as 10,000 square miles in their search for food. Insect eating bats will eat nearly their body weight in bugs in a single night. One study of the bats in Bracken Cave in Texas found that their digestive systems and fruit are designed so the seeds of the fruit are not damaged by digestion. The result is the bats plant all kinds of fruit-bearing trees and bushes sustaining beneficial plant populations. This is especially true in desert and rain forest areas.
Almost all of the negative stories and fears about bats are untrue. When someone says "blind as a bat" they are way off base. Some bats can see a bug the size of a rice grain by starlight. Our best military night scopes are needed for man to see that well. Fear of rabies is an overstated problem. Only 24 people are believed to have contracted rabies from a bite in the whole history of the United States, and the common brown bat has never given rabies to anyone even though it is our most common bat. There are no vampire bats north of Mexico, and vampires do not suck blood--they lap up blood from a wound. Bats do not get snarled in women's hair and will avoid contact with a human if they possibly can.
Bats are incredibly designed. They can fly 80 miles per hour, can share a cave with 8.7 million other bats and and get along, and with 8.7 million bats in a cave a mother bat can find her baby every time recognizing its vocal pattern. Even the location device to find insects is incredible. High frequency sounds are emitted through the bat's nose or mouth. The ultrasonic sounds bounce back to the bat which tells the bat where the bug is, its size, shape, and direction of motion. Fruit bats have delicate senses of smell and sight and do not use echolocation methods. The bat is designed to help man by controlling insects, pollinating flowers, or planting beneficial plants. The sophistication of the highly complex animal speaks of design that could only be accomplished by a talented engineer--not by blind chance.
Data Sources: Popular Science, November, 1996, pages 53, 58: International Wildlife, May/June, 1992, pages 4-10.
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Lesson from Geese
Quotes from Dandy Designs
by John N. Clayton
March/April, 1994
by John N. Clayton
March/April, 1994
When you see geese flying along in a V formation, you might be interested in knowing what scientists have discovered about why they fly that way. As each bird flaps its wings, the wind currents it creates produce an uplift for the bird immediately following.
By flying in a V formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own. Lesson 1: People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on each other's thrust.
Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front. Lesson 2: If we take a tip from the geese, we will stay in formation with those who are headed the same way we are going and stay with the task at hand.
When the lead goose gets tired, he drops to the back and another goose flies the point position. Lesson 3: It pays to take turns when doing hard jobs.
Geese honking encourage those up front. Lesson 4: We respond to encouragement from others.
Finally, when a goose gets sick, or is wounded and falls out of formation, two geese fall out with him and follow him down to help and protect him. They stay with him until he is either able to fly or until he is dead. They then launch out on their own or with another formation to continue their journey. Final lesson: If we follow the example of geese, we will stand by each other in the same way.
Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.--Galationa 6:2
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
By flying in a V formation, the whole flock adds at least 71 percent greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own. Lesson 1: People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on each other's thrust.
Whenever a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front. Lesson 2: If we take a tip from the geese, we will stay in formation with those who are headed the same way we are going and stay with the task at hand.
When the lead goose gets tired, he drops to the back and another goose flies the point position. Lesson 3: It pays to take turns when doing hard jobs.
Geese honking encourage those up front. Lesson 4: We respond to encouragement from others.
Finally, when a goose gets sick, or is wounded and falls out of formation, two geese fall out with him and follow him down to help and protect him. They stay with him until he is either able to fly or until he is dead. They then launch out on their own or with another formation to continue their journey. Final lesson: If we follow the example of geese, we will stand by each other in the same way.
Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.--Galationa 6:2
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Active Retirement
When Molly and Tony brought me the fancy two-wheeled cart to replace the old red wheelbarrow, I thought it would have a well deserved retirement, maybe sit in a special spot and serve as a container for flowers. Then, as I prepared to paint the house and discovered I had left my paint roller tray at Jay and Tammy's, I lined the wheelbarrow with plastic attached with duct tape and discovered it was far better than the store-bought version. After a long day of strowing paint, the plastic was rolled up and thrown into the dumpster, quick and easy clean-up.
Some days I feel like the rock-dented wheelbarrow, past my prime and ready to give up. My three-score-and-ten has been varied and interesting, and the beckoning rocking chair hardly ever rests my bones for long. Another project, a new adventure, a needy neighbor seem to be the impetus necessary to get me out of bed every morning. Maybe I would earn more respect if I would act my age, but that possibility is unlikely in the near future.
Today, with the help of the old wheelbarrow, I painted a bathroom bright pink and decorated the walls with colorful pictures of outhouses collected from outdated calendars that I just couldn't throw away. Next I plan to use chicken feed sacks to make a poke bonnet like Mama always wore in the cotton patch, and maybe an apron, to display on my wall of memories from the farm. That is, whenever there is time between basketball practice for the Senior Olympics, hauling rocks and keeping my half acre in good shape. It's really Molly and Tony's half acre, but they told me to treat it as though it were mine, and I surprise them now and then by being obedient. Thus far, old age is a constant adventure.
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net
Some days I feel like the rock-dented wheelbarrow, past my prime and ready to give up. My three-score-and-ten has been varied and interesting, and the beckoning rocking chair hardly ever rests my bones for long. Another project, a new adventure, a needy neighbor seem to be the impetus necessary to get me out of bed every morning. Maybe I would earn more respect if I would act my age, but that possibility is unlikely in the near future.
Today, with the help of the old wheelbarrow, I painted a bathroom bright pink and decorated the walls with colorful pictures of outhouses collected from outdated calendars that I just couldn't throw away. Next I plan to use chicken feed sacks to make a poke bonnet like Mama always wore in the cotton patch, and maybe an apron, to display on my wall of memories from the farm. That is, whenever there is time between basketball practice for the Senior Olympics, hauling rocks and keeping my half acre in good shape. It's really Molly and Tony's half acre, but they told me to treat it as though it were mine, and I surprise them now and then by being obedient. Thus far, old age is a constant adventure.
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
The Miraculous Light Spectrum
Another Page From Dandy Designs
by
John N. Clayton
by
John N. Clayton
Anyone who examines the human eye carefully and investigates how we see has to be impressed with the incredible design of the eye. Many people fail to realize that the light that the eye sees is also an incredibly designed physical creation. Just explaining what light is and how it can have both wave properties and particle properties fills a lot of pages in most physics books. Light has frequency which lets it do things waves do such as diffraction and interference. It also has mass when it travels which disappears when it stops, allowing light to produce electricity from certain crystals and travel through a vacuum.
The thing that is miraculous about light is that it has all of these properties which allow it to do things that would not seem possible to most of us. Photons of light have different energies which allow light to do different things. The different colors that we see are because light has different energies--red light being lower energy than blue. Our eyes have special structures called cones which allow us to see colors--something most animals do not possess (just birds, some insects, and apes). The beauty of our world can be seen because of the different energies of light that surround us. The rainbow is caused by different energies of light interacting in different ways with drops of water in the atmosphere.
Our eyes only see a very small percentage of the light that is around us. Radio waves have a much lower energy than what our eyes see. The lower energy means that radio waves can pass through things like the walls of our homes which visible light cannot do. This means that we can turn on a radio inside our home and receive the radio waves that operate our televisions and radios. Microwaves are also light--again outside of our ability to see. These waves can cause water molecules to pick up energy without changing anything else in the material the water is in, and this allows us to cook our food. X-rays are higher in energy than what our eyes can see, and their energy allows them to pass through our bodies and show things we cannot see with our naked eyes alone. Gamma rays are even higher energy than X-rays and can be used to treat cancer and make measurements. Infrared heats us, ultraviolet tans us, and special very long waves can be used for communications.
If our eyes could receive all of the light around is, it would do little good to close our eyes. Even with our eyes closed, we would see a jumble of light waves, including radio, TV, X-rays, microwaves, et. Some animals can see in these other parts of the light spectrum. Rattlesnakes can see in the infrared so, on a totally dark night, the snake can see a rat because of the heat which the rat's body emits. The way animals use light is incredible, but it is even more remarkable to consider the nature of light itself and what it has to be like to allow all of these uses to be made. When the Creator said, "Let there be light," there was a statement of the start of a truly remarkable creation which sustains the entire physical cosmos in which we live.
(This subject is available in one of our children's books Why Is the Sky Blue? Why Are Trees Green?) --July/August 1998
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
The thing that is miraculous about light is that it has all of these properties which allow it to do things that would not seem possible to most of us. Photons of light have different energies which allow light to do different things. The different colors that we see are because light has different energies--red light being lower energy than blue. Our eyes have special structures called cones which allow us to see colors--something most animals do not possess (just birds, some insects, and apes). The beauty of our world can be seen because of the different energies of light that surround us. The rainbow is caused by different energies of light interacting in different ways with drops of water in the atmosphere.
Our eyes only see a very small percentage of the light that is around us. Radio waves have a much lower energy than what our eyes see. The lower energy means that radio waves can pass through things like the walls of our homes which visible light cannot do. This means that we can turn on a radio inside our home and receive the radio waves that operate our televisions and radios. Microwaves are also light--again outside of our ability to see. These waves can cause water molecules to pick up energy without changing anything else in the material the water is in, and this allows us to cook our food. X-rays are higher in energy than what our eyes can see, and their energy allows them to pass through our bodies and show things we cannot see with our naked eyes alone. Gamma rays are even higher energy than X-rays and can be used to treat cancer and make measurements. Infrared heats us, ultraviolet tans us, and special very long waves can be used for communications.
If our eyes could receive all of the light around is, it would do little good to close our eyes. Even with our eyes closed, we would see a jumble of light waves, including radio, TV, X-rays, microwaves, et. Some animals can see in these other parts of the light spectrum. Rattlesnakes can see in the infrared so, on a totally dark night, the snake can see a rat because of the heat which the rat's body emits. The way animals use light is incredible, but it is even more remarkable to consider the nature of light itself and what it has to be like to allow all of these uses to be made. When the Creator said, "Let there be light," there was a statement of the start of a truly remarkable creation which sustains the entire physical cosmos in which we live.
(This subject is available in one of our children's books Why Is the Sky Blue? Why Are Trees Green?) --July/August 1998
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Monday, June 04, 2007
In Praise of Wood
From Dandy Designs
March/April, 1995
by John N. Clayton
March/April, 1995
by John N. Clayton
Many of us have a fascination with wood. We admire wood tables and furniture and see wood as a renewable fuel and building material. Our love affair with wood has not been just aesthetic. Wood is less damaging to the blades of knives or carving tools than either plastic or glass.
Over recent years, wood has been criticized by many, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as a source of bacteria–the claim being that non-porous surfaces like plastic are less likely to allow bacteria to escape cleaning and, being synthetic, would kill more bacteria. The newest research shows, in the words of Science News, February 6, 1993, pages 84-85, “pathogens prefer plastic.”
University of Wisconsin–Madison microbiologists Dean Cliver and Nese AK were trying to find decontamination techniques that would make wood as safe as plastic. What they found was that, if they innoculated wood boards with either Salmonella, Listeria, or Escherichia coli (all food poisoning agents), 99% of the bacteria died. When put on plastic, none of them died. Left overnight, the plastic bacteria multiplied and none were found on the wood. Innoculating plastic and wood on three consecutive days and leaving them unwashed and at room temperature, the wood had 99.9% fewer bacteria than had been placed on them. In the words of the experimenter, “the plastic boards were downright disgusting.” Wood has anti-bacterial properties that are not found in any man-made material. The researchers have tested maple, birch, beech, black cherry, basswood, butternut, and American black walnut with the same results. Whether it is old or new does not seem to matter.
The U.S.D.A. says that their recommendation of acrylic or other non-porous material was based on common sense and no scientific data. It would appear that, like a lot of other things, the government’s refusal to recognize God and His wisdom and design has gotten them into trouble. God designed wood not just for the beauty and functionality it brings into mankind’s existence, but also to improve our health and well being. One finds a biblical reference in Leviticus 15:12 that indicates the ancients knew of wood’s superiority in cleansing. (Thanks to Linda Ellson for the lead on this article.)
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Tourist Trap
Madrid (pronounced Mad rid), New Mexico is a tiny tourist town on Highway 14, once a coal mining community, and these days often a movie set. A new diner was erected for “Wild Hogs”, and now sits idle except for the sign in the window listing the stars of the show.
Shops along the highway sell everything from clothing to jewelry to oriental rugs. Yesterday Dyan and I enjoyed delicious Cuban cuisine in an outdoor restaurant next door to a shop displaying Cuban art.
Java Junction’s sign on the gate advertised itself as the MADrid HATTER, but hats were only a small part of their varied merchandise.
After visiting the last gallery which displayed, among other works of art, unique chandeliers that sell for as much as $24,000 each, we walked across a platform that I recognized as a scale, like the ones that weighed our cotton trailers at the gin. I suppose this one was used for weighing coal to be loaded onto railroad cars.
This was my second visit to Madrid but probably not the last, a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Thanks, Dyan!
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net
Shops along the highway sell everything from clothing to jewelry to oriental rugs. Yesterday Dyan and I enjoyed delicious Cuban cuisine in an outdoor restaurant next door to a shop displaying Cuban art.
Java Junction’s sign on the gate advertised itself as the MADrid HATTER, but hats were only a small part of their varied merchandise.
After visiting the last gallery which displayed, among other works of art, unique chandeliers that sell for as much as $24,000 each, we walked across a platform that I recognized as a scale, like the ones that weighed our cotton trailers at the gin. I suppose this one was used for weighing coal to be loaded onto railroad cars.
This was my second visit to Madrid but probably not the last, a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon. Thanks, Dyan!
Cora Gail Trent
www.cgtrent.com
cgtrent@att.net
