The Times Are A'Changin'

Starting immediately, the format of this blog is not restricted to religious studies. I've decided to turn Sacred Heart of Odin into a locus of everything that I think is interesting. Narcissism and endless jabber of personal issues/events are still strictly off limits. I welcome your comments--if indeed I have an audience...shit, man, you post comments on what interests you too.

Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus—
MRSA has been in the news recently, and it is a very interesting bug—and killing more Americans than HIV/AIDS.

What makes MRSA so resistant against the penicillin family is that all penicillin-like antibiotics contain a ring called a β-lactam ring which is enables hydrolysis of such antibiotics by producing an enzyme called penicillinase. Without the β-lactam ring, the drugs are ineffective.




Yummy!

Natural Philosophy and the Renaissance Man—
It seems that Renaissance men are hard to come by these days. From this space in time, it seems that the intellectual giants of yesteryear (meaning pre-Renaissance) were versatile individuals, not interested in any one single subject but rather the totality of the world.

I wonder if perhaps the disappearance of the Renaissance Man is related to the Enlightenment and the subsequent development of the scientific method. (By the by, why did it take human beings so long to come up with the method anyway?) As scientific knowledge increased, specialization was a necessity. One of the cool things about natural philosophy was that it was friendly with conjecture—think Pliny's Natural History. Bummer.