Notes
Sunday 5 April 2020 - Saturday 11 April 2020
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 256]
Sunday 5 April 2020
[page 257]
The germ of the network is the mapping of Turing machines onto the natural numbers which is made possible that the fact that a Turing machine may be considered as a finite ordered set of symbols like a decimal number. The essence of decimal, octal, hexadecimal etc numbers is position significance. Although only two symbols, maybe 0 and, 1 are used to represent a binary number of any countable size, the meaning of each symbol is a function of its position in the string. We may [say the] same for the set of fundamental particles which form something like a base 60 number (as used by the Babylonians) to form the universe, the actual meaning of each fundamental particle being a function of its own form and its position in the string. The concatenation of binary digits to form the symbols for hexadecimal (base 16), base 32, base 64, etc numbers encourages us to think that the current set of circa 64 fundamental particles might be constructed from the initial dichotomy, the immediate successor of the initial singularity. Babylonian cuneiform numerals - Wikipedia
The periodic attack of hopelessness, one of the forms of near death experiences that lead us to postulate an omnipotent being that is benevolently looking after us, a pious hope where most manifestations of benevolent divine manifestation (or its opposite) are in human relations. Here the general paradigm may be expressed in terms of zero sum, negative sum and positive sum games, aka politics, and events such as the current viral epidemic bring out the various faces of the human expression of divinity. The hope to be offered by natural religion backed by natural theology is that individual lots will improve if we all cooperate, a difficult ask among animals that have evolved in the zero sum evolutionary game imposed by environments in which resources are limited. The basic key to salvation is in effect algorithmic, winning more spiritual benefit from less material consumption. Our reliance on other people for benevolence lies behind the great disappointment we feel when erstwhile friends turn against us.
[page 258]
Reading through the Synopsis, volume II of this site [navigation above]. Some seems inspired, some dull, yet to explode into the dream I dream, my own big bang. How long did it take before time began? On the one hand it seems that I should be able to completely understand myself and my world; on the other I see little hope of going beyond what we already know, but as I say here every few pages, press on. My theory of emergence is that pure activity tries everything and the self sustaining consistent bits last. This is what I am doing here, trying everything and going back every now and then to see if I have done something good. And making fresh starts every now and then to see if I can distill the good bits out of everything I have thought and written.
It is inconsistent not to create. Consistency, integrity is the potential driving creation, the motivation of the so called 'big bang' which in its own context is just business as usual, nothing too violent.
Monday 6 April 2020
How damaged was I by the Catholic Church? Why was I so naive as to believe all that stuff for so long? Late life questions, errors that motivate me toward correction. I would like to create a consistent spiritual milieu for myself. I pick up Teilhard de Chardin's Milieu Divin and find it so hard to read because he was an intelligent and scientifically oriented man, even more deluded than I was, and it looks as though he took it to his death, all that rot about faith, salvation and
[page 259]
and sacrifice which continues to make the human world an almost impossible place to live in, a world of prayer, fantasy, denial of reality and murder, subtle or violent, of unbelievers. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the US, half scientific, half fundamentalist Christian and tearing itself apart for that reason. Why? We must each fit into our spiritual milieu to survive and this motivation is so strong that we are prepared to kill the others, the unbelievers, to maintain our own apparent integrity, the spiritual error that sows the seed of military dictatorship so efficiently exploited by Constantine and all his imperial ilk. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu, Constantine the Great and Christianity - Wikipedia, Christopher Tyerman; The World of the Crusades
Truth is the enemy of power (as seen by power). Louisa Loveluck, Robyn Dixon & Adam Taylor: Journalists threatened and detained as countries on multiple continents restrict coronavirus coverage
As I evaluate my own reactions I wonder how often I am evincing Catholic irrationality and scientific optimality.
Oh to be an Einstein instead of a cloud of rather big, inconsistent and ramshackle ideas. The story of my life. Near enough has to be good enough because I must move on, skimming the surface as I head into the sunset. Time to visit the Western beach again.
Tuesday 7 April 2020
The Catholic church killed my childhood and my first 40 years really. Now I am grasping at straws trying to find a way to get even, to kill the Catholic Church. This is the motivation behind my rather ill starred effort to establish natural theology and natural religion [which will be infinitely better once realized in century or two].
Frantz Frantz (film) - Wikipedia
[page 260]
Wednesday 8 April 2020
Thursday 9 April 2020
Coronavirus has got John Prine: Linda Goes to Mars John Prine: Linda Goes to Mars
The tears begin when the disaster is over, and I am coming out into the light again, remembering when I was an energetic curious and generous child buying present for all in my family when I went for a holiday in the city. I am not the evil and ignorant person that I have been painted and my mind will begin to flow again inspired to some degree by the insights and contradictions of Wilczek's book. I have spent most of my life skimming over my problems at high altitude trying to get perspective but now I feel able to come down and deal with what I see in detail, taking up serious study of the mathematics involved with a view to transforming into logic, pivoting round a quantum of action seen not so much as an uncertainty principle but a certainty principle, the pixellation of the universe that couples it to logic and mind. The aim is to add weight to the slogan 'cognitive cosmology' by taking on the details of life in a baryon. Here lies the emotional mass of the divine universe. Frank Wilczek: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
We can learn almost everything about quantum mechanics by listening to music. One of the most interesting features of music with many voices and instruments is that although it comes in a single serial stream, or stereo in real life, we can pick out all the voiced and instruments as though they
[page 261]
are orthogonal in the complex waveform that we are hearing. All the different frequencies have frequencies of change, producing layer after layer so that a whole piece of music can be represented as a point in a suitably complex Hilbert space.
One of the advantages of discrete logic is that it has much more variety than continua, as Ashby points out. It requires much more trickery to design a complex mechanism with periodic waves than with logical functions. See how we can apply this to physics - do the Wilczek thing with logic rather than huge computations modelling complex continua.
John Prine sang until he died and I will write till I die, looking for the way to my dream.
Friday 10 April 2020
William's birthday [my brother, died 2000]. He would be 73 years old.
Einstein's problems with coordinates are repeated on a broader scale with human beliefs. The Catholic Church, through the first VaticanCouncil took a very Newtonian / Euclidean view by
[page 262]
trying to use papal infallibility to establish an absolute human cognitive space based on a magisterial fiat. At least Newton's coordinate system, like modern astronomical coordinate systems, was based on the Earth's axis and equator and the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun so that it is sufficiently fixed to allow for quite precise descriptions of the orbits of the planets and moons, needing slight adjustments for the . . . Earth's [axial] precession. To get out beyond the Solar system into the Universe as a whole Einstein had to adopt Gaussian coordinates and Riemann differentiable manifold. What is the analogue of this expansion in human cognitive space? In a way it is post modernism, where we remove the author (in the Church's mind, God) from the scene and in a Gaussian sort of way each reader is free to interpret the text before them in their own way, bringing it into their own local ("inertial") space, following their own geodesics as they fall freely through the local cultural field. Infallibility - First Vatican Council: The English text of the definition, Axial precession - Wikipedia, Gaussian curvature - Wikipedia, Riemannian geometry - Wikipedia, Postmodernism - Wikipedia
The idea of cognitive cosmology is to extend general relativity into human cognitive space and use it as a tool to combat the murderous absolutism of the warlords and business people who see people as simply tools for amplifying their wealth and power, a mentality that has dominated human politics as long as might is right and has reached its apogee in the Christian military capitalism of the United States. One is hoping that Piketty has a lot to say about this when I have time to read him. As in the cosmos, we are all freely falling with respect to one another, following politically defined geodesics
[page 263]
which are shaped by accumulations of mass / energy such as tribes, nations, religions and empires. The notion of a generalised geodesic first struck me when I began to read Misner, Thorne and Wheeler in the 80s. Thomas Piketty: Capital et Idéologie, Misner, Thorne & Wheeler; Gravitation
Next task: update scientific-theology and then tout it to publishers as a web based as a web based imprint, a booklike object all of whose foundational references are easily accessible on the web. My honours thesis, which grew out of this work, can contribute to this update. The next step is to solidify the contact between the model of god within it and our scientific knowledge of the word. Develop a pitch to market to publishers, contrasting it to McGrath's Scientific Theology which is really just a rerun of Christianity based on the hypothesis that the Nicene Creed and the beliefs of the Christian Churches can be understood as scientific evidence. Alister McGrath: A Scientific Theology volume I: Nature; II: Reality; III: Theory, Jeffrey Nicholls: Prolegomenon to Scientific Theology
A stylistic convention: refer to god as them rather than he or it. Singular they - Wikipedia
Spooky action at a distance - tossing a coin on a glass table. The person on top tossing the coil cannot decide which face will land up, but whatever it is the person under the table will see the other face, so that after the fact the upper and lower observer are exactly (anti) correlated.
Essay writing: 1. Work the subject up to the point of orgasm 2. Have a sleep. 3. On waking, the solution will come.
[page 264]
Fxqi: Is entanglement the source of gravitational potential?
Logical self reference avoids the infinities associated with zero-size particles like electrons and by being very simple, may be weak enough to be gravitation. It is no respecter of particular natures, we will say, somehow seeing only energy so that the rate of self reference is simply a function of energy = mass = frequency.
Networks are the natural inhabitants / creators of 4D space-time. A key to the story is to make communication theory equivalent to gauge theory which seems dead easy ‐ each force corresponds to a codec and the strong force has a mob of coloured codecs.
4D orthogonality is real and immediately macroscopically observable, whereas it seems that quantum observables have for higher cardinality, but this might be an artefact of permutations and combinations. We see orthogonal dimensions of quantum mechanics one at a time using measurement operators, ie any contact whatsoever.
Spooky action at a distance cannot send any messages because the sender has no control. How does control enter quantum mechanics? By preparation of states. How does that happen? . . . preparation of states in general like measurement means any interaction of systems once not communicating.
Gravitation is a bit like 'spooky action at a distance' Messages pass but no information, no coding, no meaning. So one can move on an inertial geodesic in a gravitational field and
[page 265]
feel no force but being guided by the curvature of space like the moon sailing weightlessly in its orbit. This is gorgeous stuff, orgasmic knowledge in the space of cognitive cosmology. So exciting, like falling in love, the ultimate cognitive pleasure seeing the vision of god in the orbit of the moon.
The mystics of old went on a lot about the vision of god but surrounded it with a lot of sadistic and masochistic rubbish about self-abegnation, vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, crucifixion, martyrdom and torture when it is really just a normal intercourse with the world in all sorts of ways from making love to roller coasters and laying bricks or doing housework all day. Desert Fathers - Wikipedia
Saturday 11 April 2020
War is a matter of irreconcilable differences (real or imagined) between parties competing in a zero sum game about a (real or imagined) resource more important than life and death, usually, in the long run, money. The US endured a civil war about a real issue, slavery, and is now gearing up over more of an imagined issue, the right of the rich to rip off the poor. I say imagined since at least for the wealthy who make their money by providing honest goods, a large wealthy cohort of customers is good for business and the economy is not a zero sum game because well managed economies have a tendency to grow whereas the oligarchy of wealth tends to destroy wealth at all levels of society.
The most effective way to have an influence is to talk to people but I know I have not got my story yet. Hopefully
[page 265]
I will know it when I see it. I am still looking for the Einstein effect — to make a radical breakthrough in physics that will give me global recognition, but that is far off, and I do not want to proceed by pure cult of personality as that puts me in with a lot of bad company. This gives me an impossible target to shoot for, the odds of success are in the same range as winning a lottery, but I still have a long time to achieve it and I sort of feel as though I am closing in on something that is still hidden in the misty future. I am driving through a fog hoping for something new and powerful in the space of cognitive cosmology to materialize.
Einstein's big problem was to get his head around the idea that a coordinate did not need to have an immediate metrical meaning. It is just a name for a point. The network is a generalization of this idea, all the sources having names that can be used to address packets to show packets where to go, with nothing about distance. Logically a network exists outside space-time, a postal system with no underlying geometry [/ geography].
We begin, via entanglement, with a network that carries no information, that is a network identical to a continuum that fits the definition of a differentiable manifold without a metric, yielding we what we might see as a shapeless network whose connections are logical, like the connections that we see in action at a distance, logically connected [correlated] but carrying no [useful] information [from source to source] rather like the coin toss on the glass table described above.
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Further readingBooks
Creutz, Michael , Quarks Gluons and Lattices, Cambridge UP 1983 Jacket: 'This book introduces the lattice approach to quantum field theory. The spectacular successes of this technique include compelling evidence that exchange of gauge gluons can confine the quarks within subnuclear matter. . . .
The treatment begins with the lattice definition of the path integral method and ends on Monte Carlo simulation methods.'
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Huang, Kerson, Statistical Mechanics, John Wiley 1987 'Preface: ... The purpose of this book is to teach statistical mechanics as an integral part of theoretical physics, 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 development 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 familiarize 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 thermodynamics can be derived nearly from first principles, ie, molecular dynamics. A study of this special case will help us to understand why statistical mechanics works.'
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McGrath, Alister E, A Scientific Theology volume I: Nature, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, Michigan 2002 Amazon product description: 'This groundbreaking three-volume work by one of the world's best-known theologians is the most extended and systematic exploration of the relation between theology and science ever undertaken. Drawing on both his firsthand experience of scientific research and his vast knowledge of the Christian tradition, Alister McGrath explores how the natural sciences can be used by the Christian faith.
This first volume sets out a vision for a "scientific theology" in which the working assumptions of the natural sciences are critically appropriated as a theological resource. It then deals at length with the important status of nature, a concept that has rarely been given the serious consideration it deserves. Responding to the view that the term "nature" is merely a social construct, McGrath gives the concept a proper grounding in the Christian doctrine of creation, exploring in the process the use of natural theology in contemporary Christian thought.
A Scientific Theology is certain to become one of the most controversial and exciting theological publications of the decade.
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Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . '
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Nielsen, Michael A, and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2000 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002.
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Piketty, Thomas, Capital et Idéologie, Le Seuil 2019 'Toutes les sociétés humaines ont besoin de justifier leurs inégalités : il faut leur trouver des raisons, faute de quoi c'est l'ensemble de l'édifice politique et social qui menace de s'effondrer. Les idéologies du passé, si on les étudie de près, ne sont à cet égard pas toujours plus folles que celles du présent. C'est en montrant la multiplicité des trajectoires et des bifurcations possibles que l'on peut interroger les fondements de nos propres institutions et envisager les conditions de leur transformation.
À partir de données comparatives d'une ampleur et d'une profondeur inédites, ce livre retrace dans une perspective tout à la fois économique, sociale, intellectuelle et politique l'histoire et le devenir des régimes inégalitaires, depuis les sociétés trifonctionnelles et esclavagistes anciennes jusqu'aux sociétés postcoloniales et hypercapitalistes modernes, en passant par les sociétés propriétaristes, coloniales, communistes et sociales-démocrates. À l'encontre du récit hyperinégalitaire qui s'est imposé depuis les années 1980-1990, il montre que c'est le combat pour l'égalité et l'éducation, et non pas la sacralisation de la propriété, qui a permis le développement économique et le progrès humain.
En s'appuyant sur les leçons de l'histoire globale, il est possible de rompre avec le fatalisme qui nourrit les dérives identitaires actuelles et d'imaginer un socialisme participatif pour le XXIe siècle : un nouvel horizon égalitaire à visée universelle, une nouvelle idéologie de l'égalité, de la propriété sociale, de l'éducation et du partage des savoirs et des pouvoirs.
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Posner, Gerald, God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican, Simon & Schuster 2015 'From a master chronicler of legal and financial misconduct, a magnificent investigation nine years in the making, this book traces the political intrigue and inner workings of the Catholic Church. Decidedly not about faith, belief in God, or religious doctrine, this book is about the church’s accumulation of wealth and its byzantine entanglements with financial markets across the world. Told through 200 years of prelates, bishops, cardinals, and the Popes who oversee it all, Gerald Posner uncovers an eyebrow-raising account of money and power in perhaps the most influential organization in the history of the world.'
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Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Divine Milieu, Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2001 ' "The volume includes a scholarly and most helpful Foreword by Jesuit scholar Thomas M. King, who outlines the life of Teilhard de Chardin and helps the reader to understand the context in which The Divine Milieu was written. He writes of a Jesuit priest whose work did not sit easily with the Roman Catholic hierarchy of the early twentieth century. He portrays a man in some spiritual turmoil, living through events of great magnitude, who is seeking to make sense of all that is around him and of his own reaction to those events. The Divine Milieu was not written for those who were comfortable in their Catholic faith, but for the doubters and waverers – those for whom classical expressions of religious faith had long lost their meaning. I commend this volume.” —Rev. Adrian Burdon, Religion and Theology'
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Tyerman, Christopher, The World of the Crusades, Yale UP 2019 ' Throughout the Middle Ages crusading was justified by religious ideology, but the resulting military campaigns were fueled by concrete objectives: land, resources, power, reputation. Crusaders amassed possessions of all sorts, from castles to reliquaries. Campaigns required material funds and equipment, while conquests produced bureaucracies, taxation, economic exploitation, and commercial regulation. Wealth sustained the Crusades while material objects, from weaponry and military technology to carpentry and shipping, conditioned them.
This lavishly illustrated volume considers the material trappings of crusading wars and the objects that memorialized them, in architecture, sculpture, jewelry, painting, and manuscripts. Christopher Tyerman's incorporation of the physical and visual remains of crusading enriches our understanding of how the crusaders themselves articulated their mission, how they viewed their place in the world, and how they related to the cultures they derived from and preyed upon..'
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...'
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Wilczek, Frank, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, Basic Books 2008 ' In this excursion to the outer limits of particle physics, Wilczek explores what quarks and gluons, which compose protons and neutrons, reveal about the manifestation of mass and gravity. A corecipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, Wilczek knows what he’s writing about; the question is, will general science readers? Happily, they know what the strong interaction is (the forces that bind the nucleus), and in Wilczek, they have a jovial guide who adheres to trade publishing’s belief that a successful physics title will not include too many equations. Despite this injunction (against which he lightly protests), Wilczek delivers an approachable verbal picture of what quarks and gluons are doing inside a proton that gives rise to mass and, hence, gravity. Casting the light-speed lives of quarks against “the Grid,” Wilczek’s term for the vacuum that theoretically seethes with quantum activity, Wilczek exudes a contagious excitement for discovery. A near-obligatory acquisition for circulating physics collections.' --Gilbert Taylor
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Links
Axial precession - Wikipedia, Axial precession - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow, and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body's rotational axis. In particular, it can refer to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth's axis of rotation in a cycle of approximately 25,772 years.' back |
Babylonian cuneiform numerals - Wikipedia, Babylonian cuneiform numerals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Babylonian cuneiform numerals were written in cuneiform, using a wedge-tipped reed stylus to make a mark on a soft clay tablet which would be exposed in the sun to harden to create a permanent record.
The Babylonians, who were famous for their astronomical observations, as well as their calculations (aided by their invention of the abacus), used a sexagesimal (base-60) positional numeral system inherited from either the Sumerian or the Eblaite civilizations. . . .
The Babylonian system is credited as being the first known positional numeral system, in which the value of a particular digit depends both on the digit itself and its position within the number. This was an extremely important development because non-place-value systems require unique symbols to represent each power of a base (ten, one hundred, one thousand, and so forth), which can make calculations more difficult.' back |
Constantine the Great and Christianity - Wikipedia, Constantine the Great and Christianity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' During the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (AD 306–337), Christianity began to transition to the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. Historians remain uncertain about Constantine's reasons for favoring Christianity, and theologians and historians have often argued about which form of early Christianity he subscribed to. . . . Constantine's decision to cease the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire was a turning point for early Christianity, sometimes referred to as the Triumph of the Church, the Peace of the Church or the Constantinian shift. In 313, Constantine and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan decriminalizing Christian worship. The emperor became a great patron of the Church and set a precedent for the position of the Christian emperor within the Church and raised the notions of orthodoxy, Christendom, ecumenical councils, and the state church of the Roman Empire declared by edict in 380. He is revered as a saint and is apostolos in the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church, and various Eastern Catholic Churches for his example as a "Christian monarch”.' back |
Desert Fathers - Wikipedia, Desert Fathers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Desert Fathers (along with Desert Mothers) were early Christian hermits, ascetics, and monks who lived mainly in the Scetes desert of Egypt beginning around the third century AD. The Apophthegmata Patrum is a collection of the wisdom of some of the early desert monks and nuns, still in print as Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The most well known was Anthony the Great, who moved to the desert in 270–271 AD and became known as both the father and founder of desert monasticism.' back |
Francis X. Rocca, As Coronavirus Halts Masses, Conservative Catholic Push Back, ' Over the past month, Catholic dioceses across the U.S., as in most countries around the world, have stopped offering public Masses to limit the spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Most churchgoing Catholics have accepted the policy as a necessary public health measure, many turning instead to watching the liturgy on TV or over the internet as Easter approaches.
But some have protested the decision, arguing that the ability to worship together and receive the sacraments is essential for Catholics.
“Just as we are able to purchase food and medicine, while taking care not to spread the coronavirus in the process, so also we must be able to pray in our churches and chapels, receive the sacraments, and engage in acts of public prayer and devotion,” U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke, who now lives in Rome, wrote last month. back |
Frantz (film) - Wikipedia, Frantz (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Frantz is a 2016 drama film directed and co-written by François Ozon and starring Paula Beer and Pierre Niney. It is about a young German woman whose fiancé has been killed in World War I and the remorse of the French soldier who killed him. . . . Édouard Manet's painting Le Suicidé is referenced and shown several times in the story.[5] Frantz is a loose adaptation of the 1932 Ernst Lubitsch film Broken Lullaby,[6] which in turn was based on Maurice Rostand's 1930 French play L'homme que j'ai tué.' back |
Gaussian curvature - Wikipedia, Gaussian curvature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In differential geometry, the Gaussian curvature or Gauss curvature of a point on a surface is the product of the principal curvatures, κ1 and κ2, of the given point. It is an intrinsic measure of curvature, i.e., its value depends only on how distances are measured on the surface, not on the way it is isometrically embedded in space. This result is the content of Gauss's Theorema egregium.' back |
Infallibility - First Vatican Council, The English Text of Definition of Infallibility, 'we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.
So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.' back |
Jeffrey Nicholls, Prolegomenon to Scientific Theology, ' This thesis is an attempt to carry speculative theology beyond the apogee it reached in the medieval work of Thomas Aquinas into the world of empirical science (Aquinas 2019). Since the time of Aquinas, our understanding of the Universe has increased enormously. The ancient theologians not only conceived a perfect
God, but they also saw the world as a very imperfect place. Their reaction was to place God outside the world.
I will argue that we live in a Universe which approaches infinity in size and complexity, is as perfect as can be, and fulfils all the roles traditionally attributed to God, creator, lawmaker and judge.' back |
John Prine, Linda Goes to Mars, ' John Prine singing "Linda Goes to Mars" from his 1986 album, "German Afternoons" '
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John Prine, The Tree of Forgiveness, Summer's end's around the bend just flyin'
The swimmin' suits are on the line just dryin'
I'll meet you there for our conversation
I hope I didn't ruin your whole vacation
Well you never know how far from home you're feelin'
Until you've watched the shadows cross the ceilin'
Well I don't know, but I can see it snowin'
In your car the windows are wide open
Just come on home
Come on home
No you don't have to
Be alone
Just come on home
Valentines break hearts and minds at random
That ol' Easter egg ain't got a leg to stand on
Well I can see that you can't win for tryin'
And New Year's Eve is bound to leave you cryin'
Come on home
Come on home
No you don't have to
Be alone
Just come on home
The moon and stars hang out in bars just talkin'
I still love that picture of us walkin'
Just like that ol' house we thought was haunted
Summer's end came faster than we wanted
Come on home
Come on home
No you don't have to
Be alone
Come on home
Come on home
You don’t have to
Be alone
Just come on home
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Louisa Loveluck, Robyn Dixon & Adam Taylor, Journalists threatened and detained as countries on multiple continents restrict coronavirus coverage, ' From Latin America to Russia, governments have tried to shape coverage so it avoids criticism or information that authorities deem harmful to public order. Questioning of official accounts has drawn fines, police investigations and the expulsion of foreign correspondents. In some countries, the virus has provided a pretext for governments to pass emergency legislation that is likely to curb freedoms long after the contagion has been extinguished.' back |
Matt Schudel, John Prine, Grammy-bard of 'broken heart and dirty windows,' dies at 73 of coronavirus, back |
Maxwell Gomera, How to prevent outbreaks of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19, ' However, as the World Health Organization notes, the threat continues and history will repeat itself. To prevent future pandemics, we need to stop two far more pervasive human practices: the relentless destruction and conversion of wildlife habitats to croplands and the uncontrolled harvesting of wild species.
Both practices are bringing more people into dangerous contact with wildlife and their pathogens.
A UN report notes that around 60 percent of all known infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic as are 75 percent of all emerging infectious diseases. These include Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the West Nile virus and dengue fever.' back |
Paul Krugman, American Democracy May Be Dying, ' To see how a modern democracy can die, look at events in Europe, especially Hungary, over the past decade.
What happened in Hungary, beginning in 2011, was that Fidesz, the nation’s white nationalist ruling party, took advantage of its position to rig the electoral system, effectively making its rule permanent. Then it further consolidated its control, using political power to reward friendly businesses while punishing critics, and moved to suppress independent news media.' back |
Postmodernism - Wikipedia, Postmodernism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedisa, ' While encompassing a wide variety of approaches and disciplines, postmodernism is generally defined by an attitude of skepticism, irony, or rejection of the grand narratives and ideologies of modernism, often calling into question various assumptions of Enlightenment rationality. Consequently, common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language, and social progress. Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence. back |
Richard Ackland, The court case Australians are not allowed to know about: how national security is being used to bully citizens, ' Can a secret trial, where evidence is suppressed, be a fair trial? It could be that the moment justice Mossop rules that slabs of the proceedings be closed, then the accused would be off to the High Court seeking a ruling that secrecy is an abnegation of fairness.
The attorney general wanted speed and silence; instead, he will get a case that has the potential to run on and on, accompanied by mounting public disgust.' back |
Riemannian geometry - Wikipedia, Riemannian geometry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric, i.e. with an inner product on the tangent space at each point that varies smoothly from point to point. This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length of curves, surface area, and volume. From those some other global quantities can be derived by integrating local contributions. . . . It enabled Einstein's general relativity theory, made profound impact on group theory and representation theory, as well as analysis, and spurred the development of algebraic and differential topology.' back |
Sady Doyle, Before Lena Dunham, there was Anais Non - now patron saint of social media, 'The rehabilitation of Nin is taking place not because her work has changed, but because the world has changed to make room for her work. Like many great and “mercilessly pretentious” experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.' back |
Sally Young, During the Great Depression, many newspapers betrayed their readers. Some are doing it again now, ' Now, we see some news outlets again betraying their readers by prioritising business over public health.
In the Murdoch News Corp/Fox Corporation stable in the US, Fox News downplayed the spread of the virus for as long as it could. Its presenters ridiculed predictions about its impact as coming from “panic pushers” and liberals out to damage Trump, while the Wall Street Journal editorialised that shutdowns might be safeguarding public health but “at the cost of its economic health”. Trump jumped on cue and began spouting the same shameful rhetoric that the cure might be worse than the disease because of its economic impact. He wanted Americans back to work by Easter.' back |
Sam Fleischacker, Economic and the Ordinary Person: Re-reading Adam Smith, ' Far more important to Smith’s work is the belief that ordinary people normally understand their own interests without help from politicians or professional philosophers. The distinctive mark of Smith’s thought is his view of human cognition, not of human motivation: he is far more willing than practically any of his contemporaries to endorse the ability of ordinary people to know what they need to know in life. And it is this view that explains both much of Smith’s philosophy, and the degree to which his politics anticipated modern libertarianism. ' back |
Singular they - Wikipedia, Singular they - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Singular they is the use in English of the pronoun they or its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (or themself), as an epicene (gender-neutral) singular pronoun. . . .
The singular they emerged by the 14th century, about a century after plural they. It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since then and has gained currency in official contexts. . . . Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the change toward gender-neutral language, though many style guides continue to describe it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing.' back |
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Ideas That Won't Survive Coronavirus, ' But if our society looks the same after the defeat of Covid-19, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. We can expect a sequel, and not just one sequel, but many, until we reach the finale: climate catastrophe. If our fumbling of the coronavirus is a preview of how the United States will handle that disaster, then we are doomed.' back |
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