I Did Not Lose Weight (on the Fast)
Oct. 10th, 2011 08:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tanarillThings that have happened since I last posted:
1. My birthday
2. Science!
3. Yom Kippur
Thankfully, numbers 1 and 3 were not on the same day, or I would have had to fast on my birthday.
All in all, it was pretty good. I spent a vast majority of it in lab, doing Things to make lipid-encapsulated DNA-balls. It turns out that in order to turn the hydrated lipids into nanoscale things, you have to use a sonicator. A sonicator is sort of like a hand blender except much smaller and it moves at supersonic speeds. It makes a horrible noise as it vibrates the water. It also makes a horrible noise if it is vibrating in air, which only I can hear. Dr. S kept giving me this look like: for srs? You can hear that? So we set the sonicator and walked away.
Then we made a DNA solution by taking solid DNA and adding water. Actually solid DNA looks like someone combed a plastic bag until it fell apart into stretched-out plastic shreds, no joke. But once you add water it turns into something that looks like cotton candy, and then it dissolves entirely into a viscous liquid.
At this point, it was time to put water + DNA + lipids in little tube and mix them up. Then we did a thing called DLS to them, which I will talk about on another day, as a form of size measuring. They are in the correct range of 60-200 nm in diameter. Pretty good for a first try :D
The fact that I was super-stoked about doing this on my birthday should tell you something XD
Anyway. Then there was Yom Kippur, also known as That One Jewish Holiday When Nobody Eats. So we fasted. We got a rabbi to be our rabbi just for the holiday, and he gave an interesting speech. I will relate it, more or less.
People use the word scapegoat wrong. In the modern sense, it means "when a blameless group is blamed for something that is entirely not their fault," but in fact in the Biblical sense, it's Tashlikh. To explain: Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement for the sins that you have done without being aware of them. (There's a different way to atone for a sin you were aware of but did anyway, and Yom Kippur will not do a thing about the state of our soul as regards to those.) The reason is because we're not perfect, so we can be pretty sure that at some point in the year, we made a mistake. This is for cleansing.
The actual ceremony was as follows. Two goats were then brought forward, before the high priest. One was for a sacrifice and the other was the scapegoat, but no one knew which until they had a lottery at the ceremony to determine that. The sacrificial goat was sacrificed, and the its blood was used to clean all of the metalware in the tabernacle. The scapegoat was taken to edge of the camp, and the priest pronounced the sins that Israel as a whole had committed in the past year, and they released the goat into the wilderness. Then they went back into camp and continued with the Yom Kippur rituals.
At no point in the ceremony does anyone think the goat is guilty. The goat is a goat. The priest metaphorically transferred the sins of the community* to the goat, and then they set it free. Of course, being a domestic goat it would probably be eaten in the wilderness, but the point is that it, like the sins, were no longer Israel's. They'd been absolved. That is what a scapegoat is supposed to be, rather than exercise in finger-pointing. It is to say, "We made mistakes, and we acknowledge that, but the past is the past and unchangeable. In the future, we will do better."
I think the world would be a much happier place if more people remembered that last bit.
*The sins that could only be committed by a whole community. The sacrificial goat was for individuals' sins. The scapegoat was for, as an example, the young man who committed suicide after being bullied and bullied by his peers. It take a lot of people putting a lot of effort into not paying attention for that kind of thing to happen.
1. My birthday
2. Science!
3. Yom Kippur
Thankfully, numbers 1 and 3 were not on the same day, or I would have had to fast on my birthday.
All in all, it was pretty good. I spent a vast majority of it in lab, doing Things to make lipid-encapsulated DNA-balls. It turns out that in order to turn the hydrated lipids into nanoscale things, you have to use a sonicator. A sonicator is sort of like a hand blender except much smaller and it moves at supersonic speeds. It makes a horrible noise as it vibrates the water. It also makes a horrible noise if it is vibrating in air, which only I can hear. Dr. S kept giving me this look like: for srs? You can hear that? So we set the sonicator and walked away.
Then we made a DNA solution by taking solid DNA and adding water. Actually solid DNA looks like someone combed a plastic bag until it fell apart into stretched-out plastic shreds, no joke. But once you add water it turns into something that looks like cotton candy, and then it dissolves entirely into a viscous liquid.
At this point, it was time to put water + DNA + lipids in little tube and mix them up. Then we did a thing called DLS to them, which I will talk about on another day, as a form of size measuring. They are in the correct range of 60-200 nm in diameter. Pretty good for a first try :D
The fact that I was super-stoked about doing this on my birthday should tell you something XD
Anyway. Then there was Yom Kippur, also known as That One Jewish Holiday When Nobody Eats. So we fasted. We got a rabbi to be our rabbi just for the holiday, and he gave an interesting speech. I will relate it, more or less.
People use the word scapegoat wrong. In the modern sense, it means "when a blameless group is blamed for something that is entirely not their fault," but in fact in the Biblical sense, it's Tashlikh. To explain: Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement for the sins that you have done without being aware of them. (There's a different way to atone for a sin you were aware of but did anyway, and Yom Kippur will not do a thing about the state of our soul as regards to those.) The reason is because we're not perfect, so we can be pretty sure that at some point in the year, we made a mistake. This is for cleansing.
The actual ceremony was as follows. Two goats were then brought forward, before the high priest. One was for a sacrifice and the other was the scapegoat, but no one knew which until they had a lottery at the ceremony to determine that. The sacrificial goat was sacrificed, and the its blood was used to clean all of the metalware in the tabernacle. The scapegoat was taken to edge of the camp, and the priest pronounced the sins that Israel as a whole had committed in the past year, and they released the goat into the wilderness. Then they went back into camp and continued with the Yom Kippur rituals.
At no point in the ceremony does anyone think the goat is guilty. The goat is a goat. The priest metaphorically transferred the sins of the community* to the goat, and then they set it free. Of course, being a domestic goat it would probably be eaten in the wilderness, but the point is that it, like the sins, were no longer Israel's. They'd been absolved. That is what a scapegoat is supposed to be, rather than exercise in finger-pointing. It is to say, "We made mistakes, and we acknowledge that, but the past is the past and unchangeable. In the future, we will do better."
I think the world would be a much happier place if more people remembered that last bit.
*The sins that could only be committed by a whole community. The sacrificial goat was for individuals' sins. The scapegoat was for, as an example, the young man who committed suicide after being bullied and bullied by his peers. It take a lot of people putting a lot of effort into not paying attention for that kind of thing to happen.
