Jesus Haploid Christ!

We had an experiment in Bio today. Big surprise. It involved measuring the rate of diffusion of a salt water solution with these nifty little gadgets that could graph the rate of diffusion over time. I swear, the only difference between those devices and iPhones is the fact that they lack a place to plug in earbuds.

So we have to set up our salt water solution in a piece of dialysis tubing. The drawback is that the dialysis tubing is devilishly stubborn and refuses to cooperate. Only by some miracle was I able to open it for Sample A. While tackling the dialysis for Sample B, which gave me particular trouble and grief, I exclaimed aloud in frustration, "JESUS H. CHRIST!" Of course most of my friends had heard this expression before, except for one. This lead to the question of why the "H" was necessary at all. I guessed it was "Holy," while another hypothesized it was "Hosanna." Thankfully, I had my iPhone at my side (what kind of blogger would I be without it?), and we asked the wisdom of the Mighty Google concerning this issue while waiting for our salt solution to diffuse.

Turns out, the "H" has several possible origins. It's part of the lettering in Jesus's name in Greek, or it comes from a mispronunciation of "hallowed be thy name," as in "Harold be thy name" (Hardy har har). We settled on a different answer. The "H" stands for "Haploid" as in the sex cells, like eggs. Seeing as Jesus was conceived immaculately, his cells only contain half of the normal amount of DNA, as it only came from his mother, Mary. This seemed very fitting considering we were in IB Biology at the time. Normally, Science and Jesus don't really mix (despite our call for His divine intervention in our solution), but you've got to admit, a slip of the tongue can lead to some pretty interesting knowledge.