Exhortation to love

The other day I saw fliers being pasted all around the suburb I frequent in Sydney.  They were for someone who had gone missing.  As much as it was sad that someone had indeed gone missing, and the circumstances behind it must be quite unfortunate, it was obvious that the person who had gone missing was loved and missed.

The same cannot be said for everyone though, and I cannot help but reflect that it is possibly the worst thing in the world to be unloved and uncared for, to be shunned by others, to feel alone and isolated.  I think I would rather be that person who had gone missing, than someone whose existence people know of and care little for.

Of course, with my exercise-induced endorphin high, I couldn't help but put a positive spin to the melancholy thought.  I realised then that love really does cover everything.  You can be in the worst situation - suffering, diseased, in dire circumstances, but if you are loved and in a supporting environment, somehow it seems more bearable.  Conversely, you can have everything, yet have not love, and the world becomes an empty and torturous place indeed.

If you believe in God, the benevolent love and wisdom of a creator, can help us through troubling times.  We might possibly comfort ourselves in the knowledge that the shit that happens to us, happens for a purpose.  Perhaps, we may be strengthened by the experience, and some good things are bound to come of the bad.  

But more than this, we creatures of such a creator have in us the capacity to love each other, in a tangible way, for a tangible physical realm.  So every opportunity we get, let us be there for one another, and love one another, so our sorrows might seem that little bit easier to bear.

As an aside, in Christianity, the foremost command after loving God is loving others.  Cognitively, this for me is what makes Christianity such a valid fundamental belief.  Jesus Christ realising God's love for us by dying for us divinely substantiates the Christian dogma.  

Monopolar mania

Once long ago, I sat on my toilet bowl back in Chip Bee Gardens and thought about the greatest things that God created.  I came to the conclusion that two of the greatest things God created were 1) the most basic unit of matter, 2) water.

I continue to be fascinated with these, and as my scientific understanding grows, so does my sense of wonderment.  From atoms to sub-atomic particles, to the gradual melding of our disparate concepts of energy and particle in physics, the recent interesting advancements in physics suggest that the most basic unit of matter is not dots, or atoms, but string.  Our best analogy or understanding of the wave-particle duality of matter is that of a piece of string that indicates the probable positions of a particle's trajectory.  

As for water, as I began to understand the intricacies of hydrogen-bonding, my appreciation of the molecule reached new depths.  The way the specific properties of the elements hydrogen and oxygen result in dipole formation, that results in bonding that leads to water's unique and anomalous properties is nothing short of miraculous in its simple ingenious logic.

Today, I found something that fused my two pet topics (quantum physics and water).  Forget bipolar magnetism, monopoles are the next big thing in physics, and it seems dreadfully exciting.  It's based on the way chaotic way in which certain molecules are organised when in crystal lattice.

Monopoles are found in a substance known as spin ice (holmium titanate), which organises itself in a way that is configurationally similar to ice due to the properties of holomium, titanium and oxygen.  

Holmium ions align their spins more than twice as readily as even iron does, but in holmium titanate, the titanium and oxygen atoms form a tight tetrahedral lattice with holmium ions at the corners (see diagram). Thus corralled, the ions cannot align their spins all in one direction, so plump for the next best thing: two spins pointing inwards to the centre of the tetrahedron, and two pointing out. "

It's an unhappy arrangement. The spins don't know where to go," says Oleg Tchernyshyov of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who studies similar instances of magnetic frustration.

The spin arrangement in holmium titanate mirrors the way that hydrogen ions are arranged in water ice, so Harris and Bramwell coined the term "spin ice" to describe their compound.

 - Newscientist.com

Biblical 32"-24"-32"

Today during bible study we were sharing about our recent quiet time experiences, and I started rambling on about one of the verses that I hold dear to me, the Proverbs 31:10-31. It's one of my impossible ambitions - to become a Proverbs 31 woman. (That, and to be ravishingly beautiful. Yes, I know it's a cliche.)

Anyway, while trying to share why it means so much to me, I realised I couldn't say much. I began to get self-conscious and embarrassed and think about how time was running short and ended up not saying anything at all, really. But coming back, I decided to find out more about what other, more authoritative voices had to say about the verses.

This resource divides the biblical ideal of a woman into the different roles she fulfills for ease of study - her position as a mother, a wife, a neighbour and so on. This one does a line-by-line analysis, as well as an overall situation of its context.

As for the ravishing beauty, well, there's a history to that. I don't mean the earthly Liv Tyler kind of beauty, although I truly wouldn't mind a bit of that, as I really can't say much of my god-given assets. I mean the heavenly Sarah Smith kind of beauty you read about in The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis). Suffice to say that it is and always will be, a distant, misty-eyed dream for the life to come.