Xmas

X is for Xmas.  I must admit that I have never liked Xmas as an abbreviation for Christmas.  It just seems a bit flippant and unnecessary. In today's culture where many Christians perceive a war against Christmas, they see the use of Xmas as an attempt to secularize the season by taking Christ out of Christmas.

I must admit that I agreed with those sentiments until I actually looked into the history of the use of Xmas.  Originally, Xmas was an abbreviation where the X represents the Greek letter chi, which is the first letter of Christ's name in Greek, ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ. However, because of the modern interpretations of the letter X, many people are unaware of this and assume that this abbreviation is meant to drop Christ from Christmas.

According to R. C. Sproul in his book, Now That's a Good Question, the idea of X as an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture with no intent to show any disrespect for Jesus. The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it is an acronym. Fish in Greek (ichthus) involved the use of the first letters for the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish. That’s how the symbol of the fish became the universal symbol of Christendom. There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X to symbolize the name of Christ, and from its origin, it has meant no disrespect.

The Greek letter Χ, or Chi, was a common abbreviation for "Christ" in past religious writings. Its usage can be traced as far back as the 4th century in Rome, and to 1021 AD in historic Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Xmas began to be used in English starting in the 1500′s. Webster’s dictionary acknowledges that the abbreviation Xmas was in common use by the middle of the sixteenth century.

In an article on the subject of Xmas written by Dennis Bratcher, he states, "Xmas is not a modern invention to try to convert Christmas into a secular day, nor is it a device to promote the commercialism of the holiday season.  Its origin is thoroughly rooted in the heritage of the Church.  It is simply another way to say Christmas, drawing on a long history of symbolic abbreviations used in the church. In fact, as with other abbreviations used in common speech or writing (such as Mr. or etc.), the abbreviation "Xmas" should be pronounced "Christmas" just as if the word were written out in full, rather than saying "exmas."

Even though we know from history that it isn't offensive to use “Merry Xmas,” do be aware that some still find it so, so use good judgment when using the abbreviation “Xmas.”

Merry Xmas every one from An Arkie's Musings - pronounced properly of course.  :)

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Quadrillion

Q is for Quadrillion.  In the U.S.A. and in most English-speaking countries and Arabic-speaking countries a quadrillion refers to one thousand million million, or 1,000,000,000,000,000.  Some countries use number designations based on the long scale system where every new term greater than million is a million times the previous term.  In the long scale system a quadrillion refers to one million million million million or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  How can we understand the concept of such large numbers.

To try and get an idea of what a quadrillion is take a look at this cube.  It represents 1,000,067,088,384,000; or just over one quadrillion pennies stacked in a cube. To get an idea of the scale we have from right to left, a football field, then the Lincoln Memorial, then the Washington Monument (555 feet tall), then a cube of one trillion pennies, then the Empire State Building (1,250 feet tall), then the Sears Tower (1,450 feet tall).  The cube is roughly a half-mile wide, (2,730 feet) and would weigh an astonishing three billion tons. That's a lot of pennies.

When people think of big numbers it is interesting the things that are used as symbols of big numbers.  Matthew 10:30 in the Bible says, “but the very hairs of your head are all numbered”.  So how big a number is the very hairs of your head.  According to the Harvard university website Bionumbers, the number of hairs on a human head range from 90,000 to 150,000.  Interestingly the number of hairs is different for different hair colors.  Blondes have 150,000 hairs, people with brown hair have 110,000 hairs, those with black hair have 100,000 hairs and redheads have just 90,000 hairs.

Other symbols of a big number in the Bible are found in Genesis 22:17, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore”.  First let’s look at sand which is on the seashore.  Science writer David Blatner, in his new book Spectrums, says,  "a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii, being well-versed in all things beachy, tried to calculate the number of grains of sand.  They said, if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly, and we're speaking very roughly here, 7.5 x 10 to the 18th  grains of sand, or seven thousand five hundred quadrillion grains". That's a lot of grains of sand.

What about the stars of the heavens?  To get an idea of how many stars are in the universe, let’s look at a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope called The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Astronomers picked a seemingly empty spot in the sky. Staring at the spot in the sky for ten days, The Hubble Telescope kept taking pictures one after another for the entire exposure time, accumulating data. Astronomers put the exposures together into one final picture. Each time they added an exposure, the view got deeper, revealing fainter objects. When they were done they had the deepest picture ever taken of the heavens.

The image is of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major. It covers an area 2.5 arc minutes across, one part in a million of the whole sky. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. That would mean that the whole universe contains a million times 10,000 galaxies. Astronomers estimate that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains around 400 billion stars. How many stars are in the universe?  10,000 million times 400 billion or 4 times 10 to the 21st.  That is 4 million quadrillion.  So that makes stars the champion of big numbers, right?  Yes, the number of stars in the heavens is "an unbelievably large number, but you will find the same number of molecules in just ten drops of water.   If you took 10 drops of water (not extra-big drops, just regular drops) and counted the number of H2O molecules in those drops, you'd get a number equal to all the stars in the universe.  I can't imagine how big the number is that describes the number of molecules of water that are in the earth's oceans.

This is amazing to me. For some reason, when someone says million, billion or trillion, quadrillion, I see an enormous pile of something, great sweeps of desert sand, twirling masses of stars. Big things come from lots of stuff; little things from less stuff. That seems intuitive.  But that's wrong. Little things, if they're really little, can pile up just like big things.  So next time I look up at the sky at all those stars, I will be impressed, of course, by the great numbers that are out there. But I will remind myself that at the other end of the scale, in the nooks and crannies of the physical world, in the teeniest of places, there are equally vast numbers of teenier things.

The ABC Wednesday Meme is a fun way to see some great blogs.