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March 06, 2008
Don't Drink the Water
Seriously. If you're in the State College area, officials are recommending (because they're required to by law) that everyone boil their water before using it for drinking, food preparation, washing dishes or brushing your teeth, for at least the next day or two. It seems that after the heavy rains on Tuesday and Tuesday night, the water supply had "high turbidity" levels by Wednesday midday. Basically, that just means that there were lots of particles suspended in the water, making it cloudy. Now, turbid water in and of itself isn't unsafe, but turbid water is apparently harder to treat, so bacteria can grow much more readily in high turbidity levels. So yeah, the substandard water supply is just one more reason that we joke that Walker Building is like a third-world country -- to go along with the intermittent electricity, intermittent heating-A/C systems, intermittently working elevators (you never know when they're gonna trap you between floors or take you on a random ride down to the basement). And now that this is the second time in just over a week that the drinking water in Walker Building has been bad (one day last week the water was rather discolored because OPP was doing work on the pipes in the basement -- it just would've been nice had they warned us not to drink the water), it seems that we have intermittent drinkable water too!
Last weekend (back when we had drinkable water) was a good time, with trivia on leap day (even though we fell from 1st place to out of the money on the final question), the Penn State-Michigan basketball game on Saturday night with Ethan, Dan, Kent and Jeff [Grabon] (and the first time I ever witnessed Penn State win a Big Ten game in person, believe it or not, defeating scUM 69-61), and then my first-ever game of "Diplomacy" on Sunday afternoon, scheming with (and against) Walter, Moyer, Petters, Jacob, Anke & Dave. And while we didn't get to finish the entire game, I managed to get France quite a number of military victories. More than in real life, at any rate. ;-)
Last Thursday night there was a really cool Science & Religion Discussion at my church, and Nat and Tracy both came along to check it out too. It's a once-monthly thing that I've checked out a couple times in the past when I haven't been swamped with thesis or candidacy exam stuff, where a small group of people get together and try to hash out what the interface is between science and religion, and hear each other out on what each other believes. It's an interesting dialogue, for sure. At any rate, for this discussion there was a viewing of the movie "The Star of Bethlehem." Now, I'd never heard of the movie before and had no idea what its premise was, but I definitely came into it with a whole lot of skepticism. I've heard and read of many attempts at naturalistic explanations for the Star of Bethlehem (comet, supernova, etc.), but none have been even remotely convincing to me. But this guy who made the presentation on the DVD laid out a very convincing case for just what it was that the Wise Men saw (seriously, check out the link for yourself), causing them to strike out from Babylon to Jerusalem and then Bethlehem in search of a Jewish King. He lays out an entire "celestial poem" of sorts around the time of Jesus' birth and his death that's absolutely jaw-droppingly fascinating and awe-inspiring. Our God is a most awesome God!
Posted by Jared at March 6, 2008 12:28 AM