Jude Seal's Notebook

C/W: Contains description of surgery and amputation.  The story of prosthetics is one of human ingenuity.  Based on the existing evidence the earliest entry in this story is of an individual who would eventually be buried near the ancient city of Thebes some time between 950 and 710 BC.  This individual at some point found themselves in need of a replacement big toe, and a prosthetic was made.  Their mummified remains, complete with their prosthetic toe, were discovered in AD 2000, and ten years later a team of biomechanical engineers would discover that the design of the prosthetic was such that it did not require the individual to wear any kind of specialist shoe to hold it in place - they could walk barefoot or in normal Egyptian sandals.  The previous earliest prosthetic we have (or rather had) physical evidence for dated from 300 BC - known as the Capua leg, named for the site of its discovery - it was held by the Royal College of Surgeons, but was destroye...

Attempts to free the Ever Given, March 2021 The blocking of the Suez Canal by the running aground of the freighter Ever Given has brought much attention to the importance of the Suez Canal as an international shipping lane.   News reports have noted that the other route – around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope – contains added risks of severe weather and piracy.   This is not the first time that the operations of the Suez Canal have been halted – and past incidents include the unusual story of what became known as the Yellow Fleet.   The 1967 Arab-Israeli War, sometimes referred to as the Six Day War, led to Egypt blocking both ends of the canal.   Debris, sunken ships, and explosives trapped ships from the UK, the USA, France, West Germany, Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.   Caught in the desert winds, sand soon began to cover the ships, clinging to the metal, turning the ships to a dusty shade of yellow and giving the ships were colloquial nam...

Four important perspectives on the theology of miracles - Augustine of Hippo, Caesarius of Heisterbach, Thomas Aquinas, and Fredericus Mercurius (known in vernacular literature as Freddie Mercury) In the 1989 single ‘The Miracle’ from the album of the same name, Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the legendary rock band Queen sings - “Every drop of rain that falls In Sahara Desert says it all It's a miracle All God's creations great and small The Golden Gate and the Taj Mahal That's a miracle…” - Queen, The Miracle . While there’s no precise record of his taste in music, it is a sentiment that Augustine of Hippo could quite possibly have approved of.  As Benedicta Ward explains in Miracles and the Medieval Mind for Augustine the only miracle was the miracle of Creation – in that it was a revelation of the mysterious creative power of God (Ward, p. 3).  Natural everyday occurrences from rainfall to child birth were all miracles contained within this singular miracle...