vol VII: Notes

2015

Notes

[Sunday 29 March 2015 - Saturday 4 April 2015]

[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]

[page 117]

Sunday 29 March 2015

To preach requires confidence in the message. The Order of Preachers cannot afford to [not] have confidence in their message because it is their raison d'etre and if it is shown to be false and misleading they will die unless they an revise their message to be consistent with reality. The message that females are the underclass relative to males is not consistent with the reality agreed in declarations of human rights. Human Rights Watch

[page 118]

Coming out of my shell because I can see an opposition building up [to the Church] which I can join. Not the prof but the prophet.

My contribution to the social revolution: rebuild theology.

Social statistics: boson / fermion / Boltzmann / Cantor: ways of counting to estimate entropy.

It needs academic testing, through me or others. Am I better value as a boffin or a politician? Answer: superposition of both, politics motivated by vision.

Go for the 30% Amazon royalty and keep books in the website, but publish ebooks as each chapter becomes finalized?

The perennial question: what it is best for me to do now? Cybernetics is the dimension of a normally complex human life.

Monday 30 March 2015

Comment to Eureka Street: [not published]

Is the Pope infallible if he can make a blunder like this?

On Friday [27 March] Karen Fryar, a magistrate with 15 years experience in a court specializing in domestic violence said:

'. . . to classify the root cause of the defendant's aberrant behaviour towards the victim as being because of alcohol or drug misuse, or because of an issue with anger management, is simply wrong.'

'He may in fact have those problems, but family violence is a pernicious evil – unfortunately prevalent in our society – that stems directly from the perpetrator's attitude to women, and from his attempt and desire to exert power and control over his partner.

We may consider many explanations for this state of affairs, but my guess is that it all stems from the fact that males are on the whole bigger, stronger and more aggressive than females. We might measure the process of civilization by the gradual exclusion of violence from human negotiations in favour of diplomacy between equals or peers.

There is more to violence than physical violence however. The old saying that sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me is no longer credible. Persistent bullying can drive people to self harm and ultimately suicide, and so civilization must also declare psychological violence as unacceptable.

This leads us to the biggest bully of all: the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church claims that women are not entitled to become priests. Pope John Paull II went into the matter in detail in his Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis. He wrote

4. . . . Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful. John Paul II: On the ordination of priests

He seems to be telling us, without any reasoning except historical inertia, that treating women as equals is outside his power, ultra vires. Yet we read in Scripture that '. . . you are Peter . . . and what you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on Earth shall be loosed in Heaven . . . '. (Matthew 16:18-19)

This power is enshrined in Canon law:

The bishop of the Roman Church. . . By virtue of his office . . . possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely'. Canon 331 Code of Canon Law 331

The Canon lawyers can no doubt find a way around this paragraph, but it seems to me that the Pope could easily treat women as fully human if he so chose. The lawyers also appear to overlooked another point of Catholic doctrine that contradicts the Papal position.

The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not 'produced' by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection. Catholic Catechism 366

In traditional Catholic theology, spiritual beings have no gender. If our spiritual souls have no gender after death, do they have gender in this life? The answer, I think, is no.

A spiritual entity it is not gendered, since spirits (as understood by the Church) are eternal and have no need to reproduce by any process, including human mammalian methods. Further, this soul is believed to be the essence of its owner. The notion that male and female humans are in different classes thus falls down and the Church can have no grounds for excluding women from the priesthood. From the point of view of human occupants of the priestly role, gender differences are invisible.

Until it reverses the doctrine that women are an underclass, unfitted to exercise the higher spiritual roles, the Roman Catholic Church will remain a major source of the problem pinpointed by Magistrate Fryar. Christopher Knaus: Magistrate condemns 'pernicious evil' of domestic violence while sentencing drunk wife-basher

Statistical mechanics tells us how to relate the measurable behaviour of macroscopic systems to the behaviour of their components. Maxwell and Boltzmann computed a number of properties of simple ('quasi monoatomic') substances on the assumption that classical statistics of identical but identifiable particles applies. Quantum mechanics introduced two new methods of counting, bosons and fermions. Using our principle of invariance with respect to complexity, we assume that these methods of counting apply to all sets of symmetrical objects, including people, giving us the statistical

[page 119]

foundations of theology and religion.

Cercignani page 56: Laplace 1814: 'Thus we must consider the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state, and as the cause of the following one. An intelligence which could know as a given instant, the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situations of the beings which compose it—and was also sufficiently vast to submit the data to analysis—would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it nothing would be uncertain and the future, like the past, would be present before its eyes.' Cercignani: Ludwig Boltzmann, Aquinas 92: Does God know future contingent things?

C page 57: Rene Descartes introduced momentum and momentum conservation

The log(N!) ≈ N thing has been in my mind for a long time as a coupling between the transfinite numbers and Boltzmann's formula S = k log W. Now the idea is beginning to gain energy / mass / momentum in my mind, ie its fraction of the traffic on the network is increasing [I think of it more often].

Tuesday 31 March 2015

Trade under my own name of anonymous: The New Theologian

New energy source = new god = the Sun. Our god to be a small g god identified with the small u universe.

Theology —> Heliology —> Entropy and heat engines.

Lost it. John Ashton John Ashton: Open letter to Shell's Ben van Beurden from John Ashton

[page 120]

Its not solar energy we need but solar entropy which is good because it is low.

Entropy and transfinite counting.

An Essay on Entropy — the mathematical foundation of theology.

Lagrangian invariance: = optimum entropy, not too hot, not too cold, just right. This is possible because the space of choices (entropy) is so large that there is a good probability that an asymptotically perfect solution is in there waiting to be found, an action or set of actions.

The morning joint seems to have worked again after nearly a year off. What we look for now is the transfinite extension of Boltzmann.

C page 73: 'Since [the continuous and atomic] descriptions frequently yield the same results, we must explain the fact that regular physical processes, described by continuous variables, emerge at the macroscopic level of everyday life from the extremely complex motions of an enormous number of particles and to the fact that the passage to a continuous description is accompanied by a break in the time symmetry and leads from reversible microscopic motion to irreversible macroscopic phenomena.

'This problem is the main theme of Boltzmann's scientific work, and we shall develop it in this and subsequent chapters.'

page 81: 'Twenty five year after Carnot's paper, William Thompson was still amazed to see this result and commented that "nothing in the whole range of Natural Philosophy is more remarkable than the establishment of general laws by such a process of reasoning.

[page 121]

Cercignani page 82: 'Essentially [Carnot] saw that something was conserved in reversible processes; this was not caloric, however, but what was later named entropy.

page 84: Maxwell: 'In other words the second law expresses the imitations on the possibility of acting on these tiny objects, atoms, with our usual macroscopic tools.' We need quantum tools.

page 86: '[The] assumption according to which the coordinates and the velocities take on, in an equilibrium state, all the values compatible with the assigned total energy of the gas, became later familiar as the ergodic hypothesis. [very improbably, all the energy could be in one particle - absolute monarchy]

'the possibility of expressing the entropy in terms of the distribution function . . . does not cease to stand as a remarkable fact that must have produced a deep impression on Boltzmann's contemporaries.

I've never failed, I just haven't succeeded yet [ie 'gone viral']

Phase space / state space / function space. The information specifying a particular state of the whole space is represented by a point in the state space. So (said before) a novel is a point in novel-space, which is a subset of some n-space of symbols (eg all 1 000 000 character strings) that can be mapped to a 1 000 000 dimensional space, each dimension parametrized by [the set of glyphs used in novel writing].

Wednesday 1 April 2015

Start An Essay on Entropy

Add to the Portrait of an Abstract Man

Andrew Koppelman: 'We know religion when we see it and when

[page 122]

we see it we treat it as something good.' Andrew Koppelman: Nonexistent & Irreplaceable: Keep the Religion in Religious Freedom

Thursday 2 April 2015

Meaning increases entropy. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, 676 2 letter words, 17536 3 letter words . . . How do we couple this to creation? Where do the large numbers of particles (states) come from in the early Universe? Cantor?

From CARNOT to CANTOR

Everything involves politics (statistics) and science (determinism, computation). We can be scientific about statistics, the science of continua (indeterminates).

The formal world is embedded in the dynamic world by being the fixed points of the dynamics.

Logic assumes that it exists at a single point so that an argument or structure that leads to contradiction cannot exist. On the other hand, reality exists in an extended space so that different things can exist side by side consistent with the logical fact that one is not the other. Space grows by 'notting''.

The ultimate aim, of course, is to have a business the size of the Roman Catholic Church rendering spiritual services directly or indirectly to the whole world. Mostly indirectly, through theological research that provides a sound theoretical and engineering foundation for anybody who wants to start a Church; So You Want To Start a Church?

[page 123]

Friday 3 April 2015

Anderson.Overall management structure of large organizations must be free of moral hazards because wherever there is a potential for secret personal gail, we can expect some people to take advantage of it. Mark Anderson: World Bank . . .

Money is a public means of anonymous communication of value. The anonymity of financial transactions is broken when we know the sources of the money. The money system needs to be run more like the public road networks, with continual studies into design and building, law enforcement and salvation for those in trouble at all scales from flat tyres and ran out of fuel to major accidents. Ie, the properties of God, atomic oversight and unlimited salvation: 'though your sins be as red as blood'. Isaiah 1:18

Good Friday: God murders his Son to recover his honour. Ancient approach to human relations to be deprecated in modern communities. Human sacrifice - Wikipedia

We understand the electron to be an algorithm (Turing machine = single purpose computer) in the overal system, a subroutieg that is called every time we want electron-like behaviour in a certain relationship between the space of inputs (independent variables) and outputs (dependent variables). So when we feed an atomic electron with a photon the electron moves to a higher potential energy level. When it drops to a lower level is emits a photon (local gauge invariance). We understand (or try to understand) this in terms of an energy network where we see pure energy transfers as bosons and the storage of potential energy in fixed points as something to do with fermions.

[page 124]

The stationary points in quantum mechanics are represented by the nodes which correspond to the completion of one cycle. Bohr first saw this when he realized that the hydrogen [electron] orbits are quantized in terms of Planck's constant of action which appears in physics as analogous to angular momentum. So we must think of an electron stepping around its orbit, each stationary orbit containing an integral number of steps. Quantization. Bohr model - Wikipedia

Physics: Introduction to the study of God's body, the physical layer of the divine universal network.

Language maps events [to words]. The complexity of events is reflected in the complexity of the descriptive language, and the 'span' of the language is a measure of the class of events of interest to the users of the language. Users could be people, atoms or kookaburras. Kookaburra - Wikipedia

The theology thing is becoming more important in my life and I find it easy to write about it. It is becoming an active project and I feel pressure to complete a first run through the documentation before I begin to promote and market it. I feel relaxed and happy when the project is going ahead, tense and grumpy when it comes to a standstill. These feelings serve as positive and negative feedback to keep the project on course. [The ancient question: is it right to be guided by feeling? Church says mainly no.]

My greatest pleasure is seeing or feeling or sensing in general that things have come out good. A good meeting, a good structure, a good sentence. And I can agree with the scholastics, bonum ex integro, malum ex quacumque causa. [good from the whole, bad from whatever fault.]

Saturday 4 April 2015

Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Alexandroff, P S, and (translated by Hazel Perfect and G M Petersen, An Introduction to the Theory of Groups, Blackie and Son Limited 1959-1963 back

Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica (translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province), Tabor Publishing 1981 'Brother Thomas raised new problems in his teaching, invented a new method, used new systems of proof. To hear him teach a new doctrine, with new arguments, one could not doubt that God, by the irradiation of this new light and by the novelty of this inspiration, gave him the power to teach, by the spoken and written word, new opinions and new knowledge.' (William of Tocco, T's first biographer)  Amazon   back

Cercignani, Carlo, Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms, Oxford University Press, USA 2006 'Cercignani provides a stimulating biography of a great scientist. Boltzmann's greatness is difficult to state, but the fact that the author is still actively engaged in research into some of the finer, as yet unresolved issues provoked by Boltzmann's work is a measure of just how far ahead of his time Boltzmann was. It is also tragic to read of Boltzmann's persecution by his contemporaries, the energeticists, who regarded atoms as a convenient hypothesis, but not as having a definite existence. Boltzmann felt that atoms were real and this motivated much of his research. How Boltzmann would have laughed if he could have seen present-day scanning tunnelling microscopy images, which resolve the atomic structure at surfaces! If only all scientists would learn from Boltzmann's life story that it is bad for science to persecute someone whose views you do not share but cannot disprove. One surprising fact I learned from this book was how research into thermodynamics and statistical mechanics led to the beginnings of quantum theory (such as Planck's distribution law, and Einstein's theory of specific heat). Lecture notes by Boltzmann also seem to have influenced Einstein's construction of special relativity. Cercignani's familiarity with Boltzmann's work at the research level will probably set this above other biographies of Boltzmann for a very long time to come.' Dr David J Bottomley   Amazon   back

Hazewinkel, Michiel, and (managing editor), Encyclopaedia of Mathematics (6 volumes), Kluwer Academic and Toppan 1995 'The Encyclopaedia of mathematics aims to be a reference work for all parts of mathematics. It is a translation with updates and editorial comments of the Soviet Mathematical Encyclopaedia published by 'Soviet Encyclopaedia Publishing House' in five volumes in 1977-85.'  Amazon   back

Hazewinkel, Michiel, and (managing editor), Encyclopaedia of Mathematics (6 volumes), Kluwer Academic and Toppan 1995 'The Encyclopaedia of mathematics aims to be a reference work for all parts of mathematics. It is a translation with updates and editorial comments of the Soviet Mathematical Encyclopaedia published by 'Soviet Encyclopaedia Publishing House' in five volumes in 1977-85.'  Amazon   back

Huang, Kerson, Statistical Mechanics, John Wiley 1987 'Preface: ... The purpose of this book is to teach statistical mechanics as an integral part of theoretical phyiscs, a discipline that aims to describe all natural phenomena on the basis of a single unifying theory. This theory, at present, is quantum mechanics. ... Before the subject of statistical mechanics proper is presented, a brief but self contained discussion of thermodynamics and the classical kinetic theory of gases is given. The order of this devlopment is imperative, from a pedagogical point of view, for two reasons. First, thermodynamics has successfully described a large part of macroscopic experience, which is the concern of statistical mechanics. It has done so not on the basis of molecular dynamics but on the basis of a few simple and intuitive postulates stated in everyday terms. If we first falimiarize ourselves with thermodynamics, the task of statistical mechanics reduces to the explanation of thermodynamics. Second, the classical kinetic theory of gases is the only known special case in which thermodynics can be derived nearly from first principles, ie, molecular dynamics. A study of this special case will help us to understand why statstical mecahnics sorks.'  Amazon   back

Peskin, Michael E, and Dan V Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Westview Press 1995 Amazon Product Description 'This book is a clear and comprehensive introduction to quantum field theory, one that develops the subject systematically from its beginnings. The book builds on calculation techniques toward an explanation of the physics of renormalization.'   Amazon   back

Streater, Raymond F, and Arthur S Wightman, PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That, Princeton University Press 2005 Amazon product description: ' PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That is the classic summary of and introduction to the achievements of Axiomatic Quantum Field Theory. This theory gives precise mathematical responses to questions like: What is a quantized field? What are the physically indispensable attributes of a quantized field? Furthermore, Axiomatic Field Theory shows that a number of physically important predictions of quantum field theory are mathematical consequences of the axioms. Here Raymond Streater and Arthur Wightman treat only results that can be rigorously proved, and these are presented in an elegant style that makes them available to a broad range of physics and theoretical mathematics.'  Amazon   back

The Trinity, Saint, and Edmond Hill (Introduction, translation and notes), and John E Rotelle (editor), The Trinity, New City Press 1991 Written 399 - 419: De Trinitate is a radical restatement, defence and development of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Augistine's book has served as a foundation for most subsequent work, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas.   Amazon   back

Papers

Shannon, Claude E, "The mathematical theory of communication", Bell System Technical Journal, 27, , July and October, 1948, page 379-423, 623-656. 'A Note on the Edition Claude Shannon's ``A mathematical theory of communication'' was first published in two parts in the July and October 1948 editions of the Bell System Technical Journal [1]. The paper has appeared in a number of republications since: • The original 1948 version was reproduced in the collection Key Papers in the Development of Information Theory [2]. The paper also appears in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers [3]. The text of the latter is a reproduction from the Bell Telephone System Technical Publications, a series of monographs by engineers and scientists of the Bell System published in the BSTJ and elsewhere. This version has correct section numbering (the BSTJ version has two sections numbered 21), and as far as we can tell, this is the only difference from the BSTJ version. • Prefaced by Warren Weaver's introduction, ``Recent contributions to the mathematical theory of communication,'' the paper was included in The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1949 [4]. The text in this book differs from the original mainly in the following points: • the title is changed to ``The mathematical theory of communication'' and some sections have new headings, • Appendix 4 is rewritten, • the references to unpublished material have been updated to refer to the published material. The text we present here is based on the BSTJ version with a number of corrections.. back

Zurek, Wojciech Hubert, "Quantum origin of quantum jumps: Breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer in the transition from quantum to classical", Physical Review A, 76, 5, 16 November 2007, page . Abstract: 'Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus and then, further on, to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide a framework for 'wave-packet collapse', designating terminal points of quantum jumps and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates. In quantum Darwinism, they are the progenitors of multiple copies spread throughout the environment &mdash the fittest quantum states that not only survive decoherence, but subvert the environment into carrying information about them &mdash into becoming a witness.'. back

Links

Action (physics) - Wikipedia, Action (physics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In physics, action is an attribute of the dynamics of a physical system. It is a mathematical functional which takes the trajectory, also called path or history, of the system as its argument and has a real number as its result. Action has the dimension of energy × time, and its unit is joule-seconds in the International System of Units (SI). Generally, the action takes different values for different paths. Classical mechanics postulates that the path actually followed by a physical system is that for which the action is minimized, or, more strictly, is stationary. The classical equations of motion of a system can be derived from this principle of least action. The stationary action formulation of classical mechanics extends to quantum mechanics in the Feynman path integral formulation, where a physical system follows simultaneously all possible paths with amplitudes determined by the action.' back

Andrew Koppelman, Nonexistent & Irreplaceable: Keep the Religion in Religious Freedom, 'The singling out of religion for special legal treatment, I will argue here in response, is appropriate, and precisely because religion doesn’t correspond to any narrow category of morally salient thought or conduct; as such it is a concept flexible enough to be accommodated legally while keeping the state neutral about theological questions. Other, more specific categories are either too sectarian to be politically usable, too underinclusive, or too vague to be administrable.' back

Aquinas 160, Summa: I 27 1 Is there procession in God?, 'Our Lord says, "From God I proceeded" (Jn. 8:42).' back

Aquinas 92, I, 14, 13: Does God know futre contingent things/, 'I answer that, Since as was shown above (Article 9), God knows all things; not only things actual but also things possible to Him and creature; and since some of these are future contingent to us, it follows that God knows future contingent things.' back

Australian Magpie - Wikipedia, Australian Magpie - Wikipedia, 'The Australian Magpie (Cracticus tibicen) is a medium-sized black and white passerine bird of the family Artamidae native to Australia and southern New Guinea.' back

Bohr model - Wikipedia, Bohr model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In atomic physics, the Rutherford–Bohr model or Bohr model, introduced by Niels Bohr in 1913, depicts the atom as a small, positively charged nucleus surrounded by electrons that travel in circular orbits around the nucleus—similar in structure to the solar system, but with attraction provided by electrostatic forces rather than gravity' back

Catholic Catechism 366, Body and Soul, but truly one, '366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.' back

Cayley's theorem - Wikipedia, Cayley's theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In group theory, Cayley's theorem, named in honor of Arthur Cayley, states that every group G is isomorphic to a subgroup of the symmetric group on G. This can be understood as an example of the group action of G on the elements of G. A permutation of a set G is any bijective function taking G onto G; and the set of all such functions forms a group under function composition, called the symmetric group on G, and written as Sym(G). Cayley's theorem puts all groups on the same footing, by considering any group (including infinite groups such as (R,+)) as a permutation group of some underlying set. Thus, theorems which are true for permutation groups are true for groups in general.' back

Christopher Knaus, Magistrate condemns 'pernicious evil' of domestic violence while sentencing drunk wife-basher, '"That is, to classify the root cause of the defendant's aberrant behaviour towards the victim as being because of alcohol or drug misuse, or because of an issue with anger management, is simply wrong," she said. "He may in fact have those problems, but family violence is a pernicious evil – unfortunately prevalent in our society – that stems directly from the perpetrator's attitude to women, and from his attempt and desire to exert power and control over his partner.' back

Code of Canon Law 331, The Roman Pontiff, 'Can. 331 The bishop of the Roman Church, in whom continues the office given by the Lord uniquely to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and to be transmitted to his successors, is the head of the college of bishops, the Vicar of Christ, and the pastor of the universal Church on earth. By virtue of his office he possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.' back

Dirac delta function - Wikipedia, Dirac delta function - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Dirac delta or Dirac's delta is a mathematical construct introduced by theoretical physicist Paul Dirac. Informally, it is a function representing an infinitely sharp peak bounding unit area: a function ?(x) that has the value zero everywhere except at x = 0 where its value is infinitely large in such a way that its total integral is 1. In the context of signal processing it is often referred to as the unit impulse function. Note that the Dirac delta is not strictly a function. While for many purposes it can be manipulated as such, formally it can be defined as a distribution that is also a measure.' back

Felix Klein - Wikipedia, Felix Klein - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Felix Christian Klein (25 April 1849 – 22 June 1925) was a German mathematician, known for his work in group theory, function theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the connections between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen Program, classifying geometries by their underlying symmetry groups, was a hugely influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the day.' back

Human Rights Watch, Home | Human Rights Watch, 'Human Rights Watch is one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. By focusing international attention where human rights are violated, we give voice to the oppressed and hold oppressors accountable for their crimes. Our rigorous, objective investigations and strategic, targeted advocacy build intense pressure for action and raise the cost of human rights abuse. For 30 years, Human Rights Watch has worked tenaciously to lay the legal and moral groundwork for deep-rooted change and has fought to bring greater justice and security to people around the world.' back

Human sacrifice - Wikipedia, Human sacrifice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings, usually as an offering to a deity, as part of a religious ritual. Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals and of religious sacrifice in general.' back

Isaiah 1:18, Isaiah 1:18: Come now let us reason together . . . , 18"Come now, and let us reason together," Says the LORD, "Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool. back

John Ashton, Open letter to Shell's Ben van Beurden from John Ashton, 'It is in truth not your fault that climate change is a hard problem. Though your industry must bear some responsibility for our failure so far to face it, that is not exclusively your fault either. But the choices of your generation of CEOs will be decisive, not only for you as corporations but for the eventual success or failure of our response to climate change. That is why you will be held relentlessly to account for those choices; why what you said in February invites forensic scrutiny.' back

John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 22 May 1994, '4. Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.' back

Kookaburra - Wikipedia, Kookaburra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Kookaburras (genus Dacelo) are terrestrial tree kingfishers native to Australia and New Guinea, which grow to between 28–42 cm (11–17 in) in length. The name is a loanword from Wiradjuri guuguubarra, onomatopoeic of its call. . . . The kookaburra's loud call sounds like echoing human laughter. They are found in habitats ranging from humid forest to arid savanna, as well as in suburban areas with tall trees or near running water.' back

Mark Anderson, World Bank funding 'shrouded in darkness and riddled with abuse', 'The World Bank must “completely overhaul” a funding model built on heavy investment in financial companies that leaves the organisation with little control over where its money ends up, a group of NGOs has warned. The bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), invested $36bn (£24.5bn) in financial companies including hedge funds, private equity firms and commercial banks between 2009 and 2013, according to a report released on Thursday. The study, prepared by NGOs including Oxfam, Global Witness and the Bretton Woods Project, said these funds would be better used to pursue development targets in areas such as education and public health. The report noted that, between 2009 and 2013, the IFC lent three times more to financial intermediaries than education programmes in the developing world. ' back

Niels Hendrik Abel - Wikipedia, Niels Hendrik Abel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "Niels Henrik Abel (August 5, 1802 – April 6, 1829) was a noted Norwegian mathematician[1] who proved the impossibility of solving the quintic equation in radicals.' back

Publication of Darwin's theory - Wikipedia, Publication of Darwin's theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The publication of Darwin's theory brought into the open Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution through natural selection, the culmination of more than twenty years of work.' back

Second law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia, Second law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia - The free encyclopedia, 'The second law of thermodynamics states that in a natural thermodynamic process, there is an increase in the sum of the entropies of the participating systems. The second law is an empirical finding that has been accepted as an axiom of thermodynamic theory. back

Sophus Lie - Wikipedia, Sophus Lie - Wikipedia, 'Marius Sophus Lie (pronounced [liː], as "Lee") (17 December 1842 - 18 February 1899) was a Norwegian-born mathematician. He largely created the theory of continuous symmetry, and applied it to the study of geometry and differential equations. back

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas: The medieval theological classic online : 'Because the doctor of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners (according to the Apostle: As unto little ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not meat -- 1 Cor. 3:1-2), we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners. We have considered that students in this doctrine have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments, partly also because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter, but according as the plan of the book might require, or the occasion of the argument offer, partly, too, because frequent repetition brought weariness and confusion to the minds of readers.' back