World's oldest person dies at 115

An American woman who was recognised as the world's oldest person for a year has died at the age of 115.

Edna Parker died at a nursing home in Indiana, her family said.

Mrs Parker had been a widow since 1939 and had lived alone in her farmhouse until she was 100. She outlived her two sons, and had 31 other descendants.

With Mrs Parker's death, Maria de Jesus of Portugal, born in 1893, is the world's oldest person, according to the Gerontology Research Group.

Stephen Coles, who maintains the centre's list of centenarians, said Mrs Parker's great-nephew told him she died on Wednesday.

She did not drink alcohol or smoke, and led an active life.

Mrs Parker, a teacher before she became a farmer's wife in 1913, advised people to get "more education," the Associated Press news agency reported.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7753764.stm, 28 Nov 2008

Chest pain again started from 20 Nov 2008 - Pneumothorax

I could not remember this was my 4th of 5th time already in having this chest pain.
20 Nov 2008 (Thursday) - I felt the pain as soon as I woke up. I was very anxious and nervous in terms of my heartbeats because I was about to ba late to college for the 8am's lecture.

From 20 Nov to 27 Nov - The paining was on and off. But I am not sure when the pain actually recovered.


Pneumothorax
- Accumulation of air or gas in the pleural cavity, occurring as a result of disease or Injury, or sometimes induced to collapse the lung in the treatment of tuberculosis and other lung diseases.
- Abnormal presence of air in the pleural cavity resulting in the collapse of the lung; may be spontaneous (due to injury to the chest) or induced (as a treatment for tuberculosis)
- Accumulation of a gas, such as air, in the space between the pleurae of the lungs and the pleurae lining the chest wall (called the pleural cavity), occurring as a result of disease or injury or induced to collapse the lung in the treatment of tuberculosis and other lung diseases. A large pneumothorax is treated by inserting a syringe or a tube into the pleural cavity to aspirate air, which helps the collapsed lung to expand.


As far as i can recall, the last 2 times (including this time) of chest pain were at the same place.

An accurate way of diagnosis is by doing a chest X-ray. From the X-ray, it clearly shows that one side of the lung has collapsed (the area with more white colour).

My signs and symtoms were pain felt in the chest and the small sound of air flowing can be heard.
I do not think I have injured my chest, so i guess maybe it was coused by my tention and my nervousness.
I think mine is non-tention Pneumothorax which is the less serious one. A non-tension pneumothorax by contrast is a less severe pathology because the air in the pneumothorax is able to escape.

I get well without treatment where my chest pain recovered spontaneously or naturally. I remember the time I was hospitalised I was only given the a tube in my nose which provide the fresh oxygen and my chest pain just recovered like that.

WHO suggests universal HIV tests

Universal testing for HIV, followed by immediate treatment could cut the number of people developing full-blown Aids by up to 95%, a new study says.

The World Health Organization (WHO) also found that such a strategy could virtually eliminate HIV transmission.

The study used computer modelling to project what would happen if everyone over 15 was tested every year.

But the WHO said that weak health care systems meant that universal testing was not a realistic idea.

Anti-retrovirals

At first sight, the results of the WHO study are a clear argument for universal HIV testing - it could become a run-of-the-mill medical check like those for high blood pressure or cholesterol.

Diagnosis and immediate treatment with anti-retroviral drugs could, researchers say, reduce cases of Aids in a generalised epidemic from 20 in 1,000 people to just one in 1,000 within 10 years.

Furthermore, the study continues, the strategy could virtually eliminate HIV transmission and new infection.

At the moment HIV testing and treatment are patchy, and while around three million people are receiving anti-retrovirals, a further 6.7 million need them.

But the WHO, while welcoming the study, warns that the feasibility of universal testing is challenged by weak health systems.

It adds that giving treatment to patients who are not yet sick may increase drug resistance, while the side effects of taking Aids treatment drugs for very long periods are as yet unknown but could be severe.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7749437.stm, 26 Nov 2008

5 Human Wonders....worth seeing

THE MILLAU VIADU CT is part of the new E11 expressway connecting 'urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags' /> Paris and Barcelona and
features the highest bridge piers ever constructed.
The tallest is 240 meters high and the overall height will be an impressive 336 meters,
making this the highest bridge in the world.


First Air Conditioned Bus Station-Dubai!!

World's Fastest Elevator Installed In World's Tallest Building
Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corp announced the
installation of the world's fastest passenger elevator just exactly where it is needed - in Taipei 101, the world's tallest building. The elevator runs at a top speed of 1,010 meters per minute when ascending (600 meters per minute on the way down), which works out to 60.6 kilometers per hour.
The Elevator can go from the 5th floor to the 89th floor in 39 seconds.
The world's fastest elevator offers the following new technologies:
* The world's first pressure control system, which adjusts the atmospheric pressure inside a car by using suction and discharge blowers, preventing those riding inside the car experiencing 'ear popping'

The World's First
All-glass Undersea Restaurant Opens
15th April marks the day that the first ever all-glass undersea restaurant in the world opens its doors for business at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa. It will sit five meters below the waves of the Indian Ocean , surrounded by a vibrant coral reef and encased in clear acrylic offering diners 270-degrees of panoramic underwater views.

Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?
Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?


2. YOU ARE NOT THE PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE
Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.


3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?
What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.
Are things always as they seem? The Muller-Lyer illusion indicates not

But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, it's readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."


4. YOU DID NOT FREELY AND RESPONSIBLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE
Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."


IN CONCLUSION
Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it's a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

"…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time."

David Bain is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7739493.stm, 21 Nov 2008

History of Quarantine

Source : The Sun, 14 Nov 2008

DISC Personality Test (性格测验)

行为组成表

性格测验


性格分析表


For Englsih version: http://danny.quantumspark.net/tsurvey/
Source : 与豪猪共舞-建立和谐的人际关系(The Delicate Art of Dancing with Porcupines)

Bone marrow 'cures Aids patient'

Doctors in Germany say a patient appears to have been cured of Aids by a bone marrow transplant from a donor who had a genetic resistance to HIV.

The researchers in Berlin said the man, who suffered from leukaemia and Aids, had shown no sign of either disease since the transplant two years ago.

The result is expected to encourage further interest in gene therapy as a treatment for Aids.

So far all efforts to find a cure have been unsuccessful.

Genetic mutation

Berlin's Charite hospital said the 42-year-old patient was an American living in Berlin who has not been identified.

He had been infected with the human immunodeficiency virus that causes Aids for more than a decade and also had leukaemia.

The clinic said since the transplant, tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues have all been clean.

"More than 20 months after the successful transplant, no HIV can be detected in the patient," the clinic said in a statement.

But leading HIV researcher, Dr Andrew Badley, of the Mayo Clinic in the American state of Minnesota, has warned a lot more tests are needed to prove the man is clear of HIV.

Roughly one in 1,000 Europeans and Americans have an inherited genetic mutation, which prevents HIV from attaching itself to cells.

Two million people die of Aids every year and the virus is estimated to have infected 33 million people worldwide.

Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7726118.stm

How companies cope in this flat world?

8 Rules

1) When the world goes flat – and you are feeling flattened – reach for a shovel and dig inside yourself. Don’t try to build walls.
- Have to offer something totally unique.

2) And the small shall act big – One way small companies flourish in the flat world is by learning to act really big. And the key to being small and acting big is being quick to take advantage of all the new tools for collaboration to reach farther, faster, wider, and deeper

3) And the big shall act small – One way that big companies learn to flourish in the flat world is by learning how to act really small by enabling their customers to act really big.

4) The best companies are the best collaborators. In the flat world, more and more business will be done through collaborations within and between companies, for a very small reason: The next layers of value creation – whether in technology, marketing, biomedicine, or manufacturing – are becoming so complex that no single firm or department is going to be able to master them alone.

5) In a flat world, the best companies stay healthy by getting regular chest X-rays and then selling the results to their clients.
- Indentify problems – Solving problems – Solution as a product (business)

6) The best companies outsource to win, not to shrink. They outsource to innovate faster and more cheaply in order to grow, gain market share, and hire more and different specialists – not to save money by firing more people.

7) Oursourcing isn’t just for Benedict Arnolds. It’s also for idealists.
- Social responsible – creating better livers for some of the poor citizens of the world.

Source : THE WORLD IS FLAT, Thomas L. Friedman, 2005

無哩頭掌門人智力測驗答案 Super Funny

1. 小明自己做暑期作業，第二日，佢死左，點解？
Ans：因為'自作業，不可活 '。

2. 麥兜自己沖涼，估一近代文學作家名。
Ans：朱自清

3. 話說有間名牌鋪頭一折大減價，有個女人走左入去掃貨，但佢買完出黎之後就死左佢究竟點死？
Ans：抵死

4. 鍵盤入面邊個掣最靚仔？
Ans：F4

5. 咩毛最普通？
Ans：Normal

6. 隆胸兩邊隆哂要一萬，但隆一邊只需三千。估一四字成語。
Ans：一波三折

7. 拉乜野可以學到野？
Ans：Library

8. 英文有廿六個英文字母，當E同T走左之後，會剩低幾多個英文字母？
Ans：21 個，因為ET搭UFO走左。

9. 大口仔搽紅唇膏，估一英文生字。
Ans：Direction（大red唇）

10.恭喜發財，估一國家名。
Ans：比利時（俾利是）

11.點解呢個世界上有東京、南京、北京但無西京？
Ans：因為西經比唐三藏取左。

12.阿明同阿珊去打劫銀行，事敗逃亡，但D警員追捕果時唔追阿明，淨係死追阿珊, 點解呢? 估一山脉名。
Ans：因為'喜瑪拉雅山 '（起碼拉阿珊）

13.如何用三盞燈同一張凳營造一個緊張氣氛?
Ans：燈燈燈凳

(Newspaper) 8 toes on each foot

Source : The Star, 10 Nov 2008

Global Education Nerwork (GEN)

Website: www.gen-education.com
Email: info@gen-education.com

Can you listen as well as you read?

A top judge has warned that today's young, online generation may have trouble acting as jurors because they can't listen for long stretches. But is it easier to pick up information from a written passage or a spoken version? Try this unscientific test.


The influence of the internet is threatening one of the cornerstones of British justice - the jury trial, according to the most senior judge in England and Wales. Lord Judge of Draycote, the Lord Chief Justice, says when it comes to information gathering, the net promotes reading at the expense of listening.

We've decided to put his theory to the test by inviting readers to try our reading v listening test. At the heart of it is a short piece of testimony by the infamous murderer Dr Crippen from his trial in 1910.

Click on the audio console below to hear it being read
Then answer five questions about what you've just heard
Then read the same passage in text and answer five different questions
The whole thing should take no more than 10 minutes.


LISTENING TEST

How much do you remember? Find out yourself by answering the five questions in this, first quiz.

Once you've taken the quiz, note down your score and proceed directly to the written transcript and the second quiz.




READING TEST
I am 48 years of age: I am an American, and a doctor of medicine of the Cleveland Homoeopathic Hospital in America; I have not been through a practical course of surgery but a theoretical course. I have never performed a post-mortem examination in my life. I have made certain organs of the body my special study, the eye especially, and also the nose.

I have been married twice. I met my second wife in New York: Cora Turner was the name she gave me, but her real name was Clara Mackamotski. Our first apartments were in South Crescent, just off Tottenham Court Road. In 1905 we went to live at Hilldrop Crescent. I paid a visit to America while I was living in Guilford Street; I left my wife at a boarding house in Guilford Street; I was away from November to the middle of April or 1 May. Up to that visit to America I had lived on friendly terms with my wife, but she was always rather hasty in her temper. When I came back I did not notice any change in her manner at first, but very soon after that I began to notice it; she was always finding fault with me, and every night took the opportunity of quarrelling with me. A little later on, and she apparently did not wish to be familiar with me, I asked her what the matter was, and she told me that she had met Bruce Miller and that she had got very fond of him and did not care for me any more.

On 31 January Mr and Mrs Martinetti came to dinner. While they were there she picked a quarrel with me upon a most trivial incident. During the evening Mr Martinetti wanted to go upstairs; when he came down he seemed to have caught a chill. When the Martinettis had left, my wife got into a great rage about this. She abused me; she said that if I could not be a gentleman she had had enough of it and could not stand it any longer and she was going to leave. That was similar to her former threats, but she said besides something she had not said before; she said that after she had gone it would be necessary for me to cover up any scandal there might be by her leaving me, and I might do it in the very best way I could.

On the early morning of 1 February I was left alone in my house with my wife, then alive and well; I know of no person in the world who has seen her alive since, no person who has ever had a letter from her since, no person who can prove any fact to show that she ever left that house alive. The last I saw of her would be between two and three in the morning. When I went home between five and six pm, I found she had gone. As she had always been talking to me about Bruce Miller, I thought she had gone to him in America. I did not take any steps to find out where she had gone, because she had so often threatened to go.

Up to that time I had not thought about what charge would be made against me. Dew said, "Good morning, Dr Crippen, I am Inspector Dew". If he then said, "You will be arrested for the murder and mutilation of your wife, Cora Crippen, in London on or about 2 February," I did not pay much attention to what he said, because I was in such a confusion; I was so very much surprised and confused that I did not quite have my right senses. I realised that I was being arrested for the murder of my wife; I remember hearing that.


How much do you remember? Find out yourself by answering the five questions in this, second quiz.

Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7715868.stm

Women's hands 'harbour more bugs'

Women have a greater range of different types of bacteria on the palms of their hands than men, US research suggests.

The study also found that human hands harbour far higher numbers of bacteria species than previously thought.

Using powerful gene sequencing techniques, researchers found a typical hand had roughly 150 different species of bacteria living on it.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study found bacteria types varied greatly between individuals.

The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise

Dr Noah Fierer
Universithy of Colorado at Boulder

The researchers, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, hope their work will help scientists to establish a "healthy baseline" of bacteria species on the human hand.

This could potentially help them to identify which species are linked to specific diseases.

Lead researcher Dr Noah Fierer said: "The sheer number of bacteria species detected on the hands of the study participants was a big surprise, and so was the greater diversity of bacteria we found on the hands of women."

The study detected and identified more than 4,700 different bacteria species across 102 human hands in the study.

However, only five species were shared among all 51 participants.

Even the right and left palms of the same individual shared an average of only 17% of the same bacteria types.

Acidic skin

Dr Fierer said that the higher bacterial diversity on women's hands may be due to the fact that men tend to have more acidic skin, which provides a more harsh living environment for the microscopic bugs.

Alternatively, differences in sweat, oil gland or hormone production may be key - or the fact that women and men tend to make different use of cosmetics such as moisturisers.

Dr Fierer said the study also found hand washing had little impact on the diversity of bacteria found on an individual's hands.

While some groups of bacteria were less abundant following hand washing, others were more abundant.

However, the researchers said that washing with anti-bacterial cleansers was still an effective way to minimise the risk of disease.

The vast majority of bacteria are harmless and some even protect against the spread of disease.

The diversity of bacteria types on the palm was three times higher than that found on the forearm and elbow and appeared to outstrip that found in the mouth and lower intestine.

Source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7705608.stm

World's Longest Noodles - 420.4m

Sorce : The Star, 03 November 2008

Malaysians are getting harder to study/work in UK

Source : The Star & The Sun, 03 November 2008

(Newspaper) Malaysia's Export Outlook

Source: The Star, 03 November 2008

Christians' View on MONEY

Sermon by Rev Yeo - 02 November 2008

The fundamental cause of today's financial crisis is - GREED!

Hebrews 13
5Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,
"Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you."

Ephesians 5
5For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a man is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Reasons for Cleanness or Uncleanness

God never tells Israel why something is clean or unclean. He never gives a reason for the definition of clean or unclean. For centuries, men have tried to give reasons for these definitions of clean and unclean, and Wenham’s commentary outlines four, which I think are worthy of mentioning. Why is one kind of food clean and another kind of food unclean?

First, the cultic explanation says that certain kinds of creatures were used in pagan ritual and worship. Because of those animal’s association with paganism, God could not allow them to be brought into the Israelite’s worship of the True God. For example, pig bones were found all over the Near East, and they were involved in pagan sacrificial rituals. Apparently, this was true in Egypt also. But we have to remember that among the pagans, the sacrifice of a bull was prominent too. God had no problem in saying to Israel that they ought to sacrifice a bull. In other words, it just does not seem to play out that the creatures God proclaimed were unclean were all creatures that were involved in pagan worship, and the creatures God said were clean were not.

The second explanation is called the hygienic explanation. This is the one Christians love so much today. The basic theory is found in a number of books, one of which is None of These Diseases. The basic theory is that God prohibited the eating of certain animals because it was unhealthy to eat them in those days. They didn’t have refrigerators or microwaves, or all the things that kill germs. Now that sounds like a reasonable thing, and I would go so far as to say that there may be some creatures that God called unclean that were not healthy to eat. But that distinction doesn’t hold water either, because our Lord declared all of those to be clean. He did that at a time when there were still no refrigerators or ranges, and when all of the dangers that would have been present before would have been present after his definition, “All things now are clean.” Therefore it doesn’t seem that health is the issue concerning cleanness or uncleanness.

The third view that Wenham suggests is the symbolic interpretation. In those things man eats, or does not eat, he is an imitator of God—that is, there are only certain things which God allows to be offered up as burnt offerings to Him. Interestingly, the sacrificial terminology is used, but it is offered up as food to God. Now obviously God does not eat the food, but it is the symbolism employed. So if God is selective about what He eats, that is, what is sacrificed to Him, the Israelites ought to also be choosy about what they eat.

It seems to be partly true, if not universally true, that many of the creatures that are unclean are those creatures which may live on meat and may therefore be blood-shedders. For instance, in the category of those animals which prowl on the face of the earth, the cat family, as an illustration, does not have a split hoof; it has paws. Neither does it have those kinds of teeth that look like cow teeth that are for chewing up grass. They have claws, and they have sharp teeth because they kill other animals; they shed blood in order to eat. It would seem that often, though not always, the animals that are unclean are blood shedders, or they are those that eat off dead prey, as vultures of some sort or another. So there is some similarity there between what Israelites are to eat. They are not to eat of animals that of themselves sacrifice the life or come into contact with other animals. So man only eats creatures which are themselves free from contamination by death, by not shedding blood in a sacrificial way. It is possible that there is a great deal of symbolic information that ought to be seen here.

I lean most heavily toward the fourth answer, and that is the arbitrary definition. Why did God call the pig unclean and a cow clean? God never explains this, and by looking at all the commentaries, we find that nobody has figured it out either. It may be that there isn’t any reason at all other than that God said “clean” or “unclean.” Think about God’s choice of Israel as a nation. Is there some reason why God chose Israel as opposed to the Canaanites? Did he choose the Israelites because they were so spiritually pure? They weren’t! The prophets remind Israel that they served foreign gods when they were in Egypt, and they brought those foreign gods with them when they came out of Egypt. Was it because they were powerful and numerous and looked promising, and God wanted to go with a winning team? No, they were nobody! Why did God choose Israel and not some other nation? It was just God’s sovereign choice. That’s all! There was nothing intrinsically good about them or intrinsically more evil about anybody else. God just made a choice. It seems to me, therefore, that the arbitrary explanation, while it may not fully explain all of it, at least gives meaning and fits when nothing else does. It was just God’s choice. God said He chose Jacob, and He rejected Esau. Why? Because sovereign choices are sovereign choices, and they don’t have reasons. Election is the point we see in the clean and the unclean, as well as in the salvation of Israel.

The distinction of clean and unclean animals

神为什么要以色列人分别洁净与不洁净？
1)保全全族的健康。神不准他们吃的鸟兽类，通常是吃腐尸的，很容易传染疾病。
2) 使他们与他各族有别。例如异教徒经常以猪献祭。
3) 提醒以色列人住在他们中间的神是圣洁的。

When we come to chapter 11, we find first the land creatures, the animals that roam about through the earth (vv. 1-8); then we find in verses 9-12 the water creatures, those that live under water or in the water, and finally we have the flying creatures. So we have the same three basic distinctions found back in Genesis 1 where God created all life that is in the heavens, on earth, and under the waters. Those three categories are all dealt with, and creatures that are in those categories are defined as being either clean or unclean, according to the formula that God lays down.

First, there are the land animals. There are two basic stipulations which must be met before an animal that dwells on the land can be considered clean and therefore can be eaten by the Israelite. It must be split-hoofed, and it must be a cud-chewer. It cannot be just one of those; it must be both of those. So a non-cud chewing split-hoofer isn’t good enough. It has to be both, and the text makes it very clear. A rabbit, for example, is called a cud-chewer (I think you and I understand that rabbits do not chew their cud like a cow does). But if we watched a rabbit eat, we would observe that as the rabbit ate his food, he chewed it up very carefully.

cud [kad]
(of cows etc) to bring food from the stomach back into the mouth and chew it again
We have two dogs and they are not cud-chewers. We throw a piece of food on the floor, and they don’t chew AT ALL! One animal is so fearful that the other animal is going to get it that they just inhale the food. They don’t chew their cud. But when we look at a rabbit, we see that a rabbit sort of works on that food, and works on it, just like mothers tell their children they ought to chew up their meat and other things. So a cud-chewer does not technically have to be cow-like in having multiple stomachs, but one that chews its food well. I think we could say it is that which chews its non-meat food well. So cud-chewers are vegetarians. It is to be split-hoofed and cud-chewing if it is clean, and therefore the Israelites may partake of it.

Second, the sea creatures. When we come to the creatures that dwell in the sea, they must meet two qualifications as well—they must have fins and scales. Now that is certainly the norm. Those of us who are fishermen and hope to catch something when we throw our lines in expect that it will have fins and scales. It must have both of those in order to qualify. That would mean that creatures that live in the sea, like shrimp, lobster, and those kinds of creatures, would not fit. Only those that have fins and scales—only those that are fishy—would be clean.

Third, those creatures that are in the air. It seems as though, essentially, no qualifications are given. That is, it doesn’t have to have two wings, but rather it seems as though those creatures in the air are creatures that are non-vulture like. That is, they are not sitting around waiting for something to die so they can go pick it up and eat it. It doesn’t look as though these are meat eaters or those that feed off of the dead carcasses of other creatures. Then we have flying insects that are described. Here all flying insects are called unclean, with the exception of those that have a set of jumper legs which propel them so they can leap through the air and thus propel themselves through the air. Jumping, flying insects are edible; all the rest are not.

Fourth, there is the category of dead animals which are unclean. Essentially, any dead animal other than an animal which has been killed through the sacrificial process in the front of the door of the tent of meeting is unclean. There are unclean animals that will defile in their death, and there are clean animals that will defile man in their death, if their death is not a sacrificial death. The carcasses are that which can contaminate, therefore if a person eats a cow which has just been killed by a wolf, that person would be ceremonially unclean even though he could eat the meat if it were sacrificed to God.

Fifth, swarming animals. These are a bit of a puzzle, but this category includes things like mice, lizards, and most all of those things that I can readily pass up, so I can easily and readily identify them. I don’t know how many of you saw the movie “Cry Wolf” but I’ve seen it a couple of times and giggled my way through that scene where the fellow eats the mice. He studies the wolves, and he can’t understand what they live on during the winter when the things they normally feed on are gone. Then all of a sudden one day hordes of mice appear all over, and the man must decide how the wolves could live on the protein of the mice, so he cooks up a batch of mouse stew. I can remember when he popped that first mouthful in and crunched its bones. I say to myself “Unclean! Unclean!” I can agree with that—I understand! But apparently they are called swarming because they go about together in groups, and they seem to have an erratic, unpredictable manner of movement.