"Demonic in nature.": "

A Michigan appellate court in Howard v. Family Independence Agency has ruled that a state agency did not violate a social worker's First Amendment rights when it fired her for trying to perform an exorcism instead of calling 911 after a client had a seizure. While visiting a client, the client had a seizure, which Michelle Howard, a religious woman, decided was 'demonic in nature.' She prayed over the client and anointed her with water. The court ruled that she 'was not terminated for merely praying at the office,' but for violating agency rules."

(Via jwz.)

God is Great, by which I mean, Very Very Large: "

I've been thinking about transubstantiation, the belief of many branches of Christianity that when you take communion, the bread and wine transform physically into the flesh and blood of Christ. According to the Catholic Church as late as 1965, this is literally true, not just symbolism: the flesh is present, the bread is gone.

So let's run some numbers.

1. The Roman Catholic Church says that there are around 1.1 billion baptised Catholics in the world today.

2. The current world population is 6.3 billion (17% Catholic.)

3. The world population in A.D. 1930 was around 1 billion.

4. The world population in A.D. 1 was around 300 million.

5. If we assume an average lifespan of 50 years (which is probably low, since the curve is so steep at the modern end) that gives us 40 non-overlapping 'generations'. So if we put 1, 2, and 6 in the last three buckets, and .4 in every previous bucket, that gives 23 billion as a guess at how many people have been alive during the last two thousand years. (I'm not sure this is a valid generalization to make; do you have a better guess?)

6. I'm not sure how quickly Christianity grew, but let's guess that 12% of all those people were Christian, of a variety that believed in transubstantiation. (I think this is probably a reasonable guess because Christianity was very widespread by the 10th century or so, and by the numbers above, 83% of the population came after that.)

7. How often do these folks take the Eucharist, on average? Hard to guess, let's say once a year.

8. By my measure, one 'sip' is 1/4 fl. oz.

9. One serving of Ritz crackers is 5 crackers at 100 grams, or 20 grams per cracker.

10. An adult male contains about six quarts of blood.

11. The current average weight for an American male is 180 pounds, but Americans are fatties and people used to be smaller, so let's call the two-millenium average 120 pounds.

Which gives us:

	23,000,000,000	people
x	12	%
x	1	communion
x	2000	years
=	5,520,000,000,000	servings
x	0.25	fl. oz.
=	10,781,250,000	gallons of blood
x	20	grams
=	243,390,340,000	pounds of flesh
=	121,695,170	tons of flesh

So how big is Jesus?

If you conservatively assume that these are the End Times and that Jesus will soon be completely consumed (a detail that I do not believe is a part of mainstream Christian dogma), then he weighs two billion times more than you, and contains fourteen billion times as much blood. (2,028,252,833x and 14,375,000,000x).

By comparison, the largest living animal on Earth is the Blue Whale, at a paltry 150 tons (a mere 2,500× bigger than you). It is believed that the largest dinosaur, the Argentinosaurus, weighed only 90 tons.

However, perhaps Jesus, like Wolverine, has amazing regenerative powers (in which case, it's surprising it took him three days to return from the dead. But maybe he was just taking a little time-out.)

I wish I could find figures on how much skin people shed. I've heard that most household dust is made of people, but I haven't found any numbers. He would be very much larger indeed if we were to assume that all this consumed flesh and blood was non-essential.

"

(Via jwz.)

Soylent Rice is People: "

Human gene in rice:

Japanese researchers have inserted a gene from the human liver into rice to enable it to digest pesticides and industrial chemicals. The gene makes an enzyme, code-named CPY2B6, which is particularly good at breaking down harmful chemicals in the body.

Present GM crops are modified with genes from bacteria to make them tolerate herbicides, so that they are not harmed when fields are sprayed to kill weeds. But most of them are only able to deal with a single herbicide, which means that it has to be used over and over again, allowing weeds to build up resistance to it.

But the researchers at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, have found that adding the human touch gave the rice immunity to 13 different herbicides. This would mean that weeds could be kept down by constantly changing the chemicals used.

"

(Via jwz.)

The Warren Variations.