Raising Boys

First starlight November 8, 2005

Billions of years after they’ve died, we may be seeing their light for the very first time.

Scientists say they may have detected light from the very first stars, back when the universe first came alive after millions of years of pervasive darkness that followed the theorized Bing Bang, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The stars were thought to be a hundred times more massive than our sun, extremely hot, bright, and short-lived. They disappeared billions of years ago but their light is still traveling across the universe. The image below shows what might be the glow of the first stars of the universe after all the existing stars, galaxies and other objects were masked out.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/A. Kashlinsky (GSFC)
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What’s your ‘brain sex’ ID? October 31, 2005

My Sex ID test result says I may have a balanced female-male brain. Balanced. That seems the safest thing to be. I would have preferred falling in the category of women who “think more like men” as opposed to men with “women’s brains”.

The test, “series of visual challenges and questions used by psychologists in the BBC One television series”, has six categories and each must be answered within a specific time period. A ruler comes in handy because a portion of the test requires measuring the length of the ring and index fingers.

Know your age in dog years October 30, 2005

Want to know what the moon’s phase was when you were born? Try this birthday calculator. You just enter your birthdate and it will tell what day you were born, how many days, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds old you are, your birthstone, your birth tree and of course the shape of the moon on that day.

The moon was waxing crescent on the day of my birth, according to the calculator, which also said I am 4.89706457925636 dog years old as of 12:35 p.m. today.

171 languages spoken in the Philippines

While searching for answers to 20 questions in an Internet scavenger hunt that my online journalism teacher Dr. Elliot King assigned to the class two or three weeks ago, I found this Wikipedia entry about the Philippines.

A total of 171 native languages are spoken in the country. Except for English, Spanish, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Chabacano, all of the languages belong to the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family.

There are 12 native languages with at least one million native speakers: Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Hiligaynon, Bikol, Waray-Waray, Kapampangan, Pangasinan, Kinaray-a, Maranao, Maguindanao, and Tausug. These are spoken natively by more than 90% of the population.

The entry cited as its source ethnologue.com, a website owned by SIL International, which “studies, documents, and assists in developing the world’s lesser-known languages.” The entry on the Philippines in ethnologue.com was based on a 2000 study conducted by the organization.
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Fine dining at the Waterfront September 20, 2005

I was at the Waterfront Hotel in Cebu City last night for a “fine dining” experience. The dinner was in line with the Cebu Press Freedom Week Celebration and was “by invitation only”. I did not have any invitation–I’m a journalist in a medium that has still to gain acceptance in a third world country like the Philippines–but my husband, a newspaperman, had one and he gave it to me because he was busy with work and was unsure if he could make it.

So off I went. What was I thinking? I almost starved in the midst of all that food. My taste buds, so used to the uncomplicated taste of the bland and ordinary, protested at the riot of sensations from the night’s six-course haute cuisine.

For salad, we had spiced beef tenderloin marinated in lemon juice, shoyu sauce, olive oil and made into rolls with ripe mango, celery, oven dried tomatoes, mushrooms, and green peas as filling. One ingredient at a time, please, I almost begged. The only thing complicated I ever had to eat before this was pizza.
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Addicted to boggle August 25, 2005

Playing weboggle and getting very bad at it. Is it just me or are the words getting harder to find? Sigh. WEBoggle is the online version of the classic word game Boggle.