natural theology

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Notes

Sunday 26 December 2021 - Saturday 1 January 2022

[Notebook: DB 87: Cognitive Cosmology]

[page 142]

Sunday 26 December 2021

JHN page 2; We are all children of god, given that the universe is divine and that we were all created by the universe. All of us who have died for freedom, murdered by oppressive regimes, have made the same sacrifice as Jesus of Nazareth. To some this might be blasphemy but they are wrong [since we are all just as much literally children of God as Jesus is]. The weak and violent killers of the world are swimming against the tide of creation. A sermon. The website is to be a series of sermons. What is a sermon? An exegesis of a text, from the Book of Darwin, from the Book of Cantor, from the Books of Planck, Einstein, Hilbert, Turing, Gödel, etc. I joined the Order of Preachers and found them wanting, the military side of conversion. Now 50 years later (as I keep saying) I now have something preachable [, that I can honestly preach, not a false tale of sin and redemption].

. . .

[page 143]

. . .

. . .

The mind controls the world. How we think about one another is the software that determines how we treat one another and theology and religion have a very significant input into how we think about one another, guiding our politics and everything else [from the Crusading mentality which says kill unbelievers to the practical love which says lets have children together].

Monday 27 December 2021

I am beginning to think that 2022 might be a good year for my theological enterprise. I feel that I am beginning to get a grip on the creation of the universe and my story is becoming 'preachable' so that I feel that it is a safe hypothesis to propagate: in the words of the Sacred Congregation of Studies tutae normae directivae: AAS 8 (1916) 157. Caietanum Card. Bisleti, Praefectus

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Lady Nicholson Vita & Virginia (2018, film) - Wikipedia

Orlando: Ease off a bit from logical continuity and let a bit of passion in.

Tuesday 28 December 2021

Taking the best part of the day in bed with some sort of gastric upset whose cause escapes me. Also feeling a bit like Aquinas, who [allegedly] saw a vision that made all his work look like so much straw. I have worked for a long time on revizing theology, but have I got anywhere? The real problem with this day is that I have not had any inspiring new idea that lures me on. It is probably too much to expect as much, but tomorrow the stock market opens again and maybe I will make ±1000 which is exciting enough to keep me moving. Now a walk, maybe a trip to the beach. My parents bequeathed me a heart of gold, but even that goes up and down, a cyclic mood swing.

[page 144]

Fast all day and maybe my new too short belt will fit better, and I wish [my friend] would write.

Synopsis in jeffreynicholls.net will be a 40 part summary of e35_path_2_toe_Feb2022 [forthcoming].

Wednesday 29 December 2021

Home from the blood bank and feeling a little weak. . . . I feel confident now that two years back at work will bring me to the conclusion I want, a divine cognitive universe, the mind of god, a theory of everything with all my problems of physics and theology solved, my version of Aristotle's wonderful work which rebuilt Christianity in the hands of Aquinas so now I can rebuild it again with my own hands.

I've come to a worrisome insight that Yahweh is a killer god and it has floated to the top of my critique of the institutional side of Christianity. The omniscient and omnipotent spirit responsible for Mary's pregnancy would have known (in terms of the myth) exactly what was in store for the child - to preach compassion and to be cruelly murdered for their pains as part of the New Testament story / plot of salvation. This seems to have come clear to me in the past few weeks even though I have been saying it about Moses invocation of the divine right of kings at Sinai on the instruction of the Lord. This means that at the heart of Christianity is the contradiction built into the career of every warlord and it negates the value of the Christian myth. The truth has to be distilled out of this and the only approach is the fact that the universe grew from nothing rather than from an omniscient and omnipotent killer. Exodus 32: Moses slaughters the worshippers of the Golden Calf, Jack Miles (1996): God: A Biography

[page 145]

My basic political point is that human rights and democracy are built into the foundation of the universe and all those that oppose it are in the long run [after much pain] doomed to failure.

Thursday 20 December 2021

Institutional Christianity, like all procrustean symmetries, represents a victory of violence over entropy. The one size fits all software of the mind tends to deceive us all into the same falsehoods. There is a subtle balance between violence and truth, violence winning in zero sum situations where rape and pillage have selective advantage versus those creative situations arising from truth where shortages are overcome so sharing and cooperation are logical optimal behaviour.

Quid est hoc quad est esse? A question of mood. Energy leads us on because action leads us on, every heartbeat, every breath, every one of the 10 ≈60 acts happening within me every second: mc2 / h. Energy = potential + kinetic is conserved. Action = kinetic - potential is extremalized

What did Einstein do to be able to describe the large scale structure of God? Many are keen to incorporate relatvity into quantum mechanics but the belief seems to be that all the action takes place at the Planck scale which is invisible to us because of the well established belief that very high energies are required to resolve activities at a very small scale so that from a practical point of view whatever goes on at the Planck scale is continuous and so it is feasible to represent it with a four dimensional differentiable manifold.

For simplicity and clarity we represent this four dimensional manifold with a logical network, that is a computer network, a setup like the internet which is a mass of hardware driven by the softwares protocols implemented in the interface between people and machines. So let us assume for a while that we cannot resolve the Planck regime

[page 146]

and so have to do a bit of guessing.

The key to the general theory is gaussian coordinates. Gaussian coordinates do not measure distance, when measure order, and order is the source of the distances [by enabling the development of covariant and contravariant vectors], the metric embodied at each point in spacetime whose overall effect is the large scale structure of the universe. Albert Einstein (2005): Relativity: The Special and General Theory, page 123

We begin from the initial singularity which has a number of incarnations. The simplest perhaps is a point in space . . . We may represent such a point as an empty set, a entity without content.

Riemann's differential geometry is a representation of the empty set in 4-space. It represents the empty set because in accord with the Gaussian coordinates, its structures are a combination of orthogonal dimensions and serial order so that one can follow a path by moving from coordinate to coordinate with no actual knowledge of distance [because it is continuous, it has no observable structure other than the four dimensions].

Friday 31 December 2021
Paradise Road Felicia Marian, Thoka Ndlozi & Anneline Malebo: Joy - Paradise Road

New Year resolution: get realer, in two dimensions: scientific / rational and the halo of possibility surrounding it, the headroom.

Headroom and compassion

Some things can be controlled. Some cannot. It is important

[page 147]

to now the difference Automatic control began when the makers of steam engines began to devise automatic means to make them operate at constant speed under varying load, a quality that capitalists praise in any worker, government.

Real energy versus complex (quantum) energy. The quantum world is the imagination of the universe which needs to be realized before it becomes an observable imputable to physics. Here we have two worlds which we might call spiritual (Hilbert) and mechanical (Minkowski, Einstein). Here we see how the independence of Hilbert space solves the cosmological constant problem.

Saturday 1 January 2022

The size of imagination is measured by Cantor's transfinite numbers but the realties that imagination permutes are measured by the natural numbers which correspond to all possible Turing machines and all possible rays in Hilbert space.

Conclusion of cover story on jhn.net: "The Old Testament God and their New Testament reincarnation are both unreconstructed ancient warlords. The Roman Catholic Church has used the reputation of Jesus to sanitize their God, but the whole operation is a violent and continuing fraud on the population of the world, promising heaven and offering nothing but slavery to a ludicrously false "history of salvation". Posner's book on the Vatican bank is an account of the imperial majesty with which the Vatican including the current pope, lie to the world.* Gerard Posner (2015): God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican

[insert from p 148]

*The indictment of the Old God is meaningless unless we contrast it with a picture of the universe which is the new god. To do this we have to go back to the beginning and study the birth and childhood of this god as we know it and to provide a scientific basis for behavioural advice to the fellow members of my species about how, it seems to me, we can have peace and harmony by controlling a minimal set of parameters. Physically these parameters relate to energy. Psychologically they relate to mood and value as they are represented in human space by the movement of money. Our control of energy is governed by two parameters [power] and entropy. The control of money is similar, but needs to be given a scientific foundation analogous to thermodynamics. We may think of religion in its most abstract form as social thermodynamics.

[end of insert]

A new year's observation; The death of my mother on 25 May 2016 was followed by . . . the death of my father on 7 July 2018 and of my sister Pam on 19 July 2020. During this time I was able to retreat from the tasks of my role in

[page 148]

Elands society by moving to Adelaide . . . to enrol in Adelaide U Philosophy in February 2018. Now, 5 years later on 1 January 2022 I can feel my energy coming back and with it the need to revise my writing from what are essentially research reports (including these notes) to calls for action by contrasting the current mythological status of theology and religion to a science based account of its application to the establishment of peace and prosperity on a model that can be sustained for five billion years until the solar system becomes uninhabitable.

[see above]

Even the New Testament did not [thoroughly] refine the image of the Old God. [It] gave him a compassionate Son and a Mother who reprsents the spirit of humanity and the guidance of a religion [of love] mirroring the compassion of . . . Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was nevertheless the victim of the old God's final tone deaf act of violence, the torture and death of his "Beloved" Son to gain satisfaction from

[page 149]

and ancient imagined slight. The Old God is gone now, but their spirit remains embedded in many of their religious followers [who say] : "if they are not members of our church, we are entitled to kill them".

Saying thoughts does not make them true but it is true that they have been said and they may therefore take on an existence in the public domain, open to science, criticism and action.

Th first quantum step of the creator is to create a concrete example of Hilbert space by the action of action under the constraint of no-cloning so that we have a space of independent orthogonal rays whose rate of creation is a measurement of energy.

Our true divinity is revealed by our ability to act. Speaking is a form of acting, perhaps more complex than the blink of an eye, but both may carry meaning.

The universe talks to us and I must learn to take cognitive cosmology seriously in order to understand the implications of my hypothesis, which will in turn add or subtract from its credibility.

The 40 little essays on jhn-synopsis will be my latest attempt to express my model of the world succinctly and logically, and I really hope that I can pull it off toward obtaining a doctorate by publication. A problem for me is the imposter syndrome, but I argue [to myself] that I have reached a certain age successfully so that I must be to some extent real and must trust myself with the faith tht the universe instilled in me by bringing me into existence. To this degree I trust in my god because I am a real part of it.

So I must be patient wth myself because I am a quality product although I have yet to find anybody to engage in detail with my ideas and understand them enough to provide helpful critique, but I continue to put things out and may begin to spend money on promotion soon to

[page 150]

increase my chances of a hearing. . . .

It is easy to make a story out of detailed failures of the Church like child sexual abuse and providing money laundering services to criminals and politicians, but it is much harder to overturn the whole structure of falsehood upon which it is built and I feel that my gradual development of a large corpus of criticism will eventually give me the power to make that move, but not, as I imagine, in my lifetime. The vehicle must be the Theology Company. The first step on the path must be funding, and 2021 has made me about 70k richer, which is enough to employ one person for a year, but it will take millions. Eventually I will need angels . . . [since I am reluctant to try to recruit volunteers for a rather personal project: I want capital and management from sources that appreciate the risks].

All this stuff is just pep talk / motivation, unnecessary really because the real progress lies in discovering new expressions that imitate reality and can be used to model it. I feel I have got something there on the union of gravitation and quantum mechanics in the initial singularity through the lens of cybernetics, ie communication and control. This looks like good work with a future.

My big struggle is to understand what I have got, and that really means saying it in a million different ways. A bit like Feynman and the mathematics of quantum mechanics but mathematics is a bit limited for me, I need the full creative power of natural language which goes well beyond mathematics into the meta-Gödel domain. Richard P. Feynman: Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics

One can make progress by creatively misunderstanding what has gone before. In my care the notion that Minkowski space is the domain of Hilbert space.

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Further reading

Books

Anonymous, and Juan Mascaro (translator), The Upanishads, Penguin Classics 1965 Amazon.com Review 'The poetic backbone of Hinduism, the millennia-old Upanishads transcend time. The selections offered here illuminate a path that is as "narrow as the edge of a razor" but pregnant with freedom and bliss. Through vivid metaphors and timeless prose, learn how the path of yoga leads beyond the treacherous web of karma to the final, blissful union of the personal soul, atman, with the universal soul, Brahman.' 
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Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1956, 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics.' 
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Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1895, 1897, 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.' 
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Davis, Martin, Computability and Unsolvability, Dover 1982 Preface: 'This book is an introduction to the theory of computability and non-computability ususally referred to as the theory of recursive functions. The subject is concerned with the existence of purely mechanical procedures for solving problems. . . . The existence of absolutely unsolvable problems and the Goedel incompleteness theorem are among the results in the theory of computability that have philosophical significance.' 
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de Soto, Hernando, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else, Basic Books 2000 'The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph is its hour of crisis. The fall of the Berlin Wall ended more than a century of political competition between communism and capitalism. Capitalism stands alone as the only feasible way to rationally organise a modern economy. . . . As a result, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Third World and former communist nations have balanced their budgets, cut subsidies, welcomed foreign investment, and dropped their tariff barriers. Their efforts have been repaid with bitter disappointment. . . . In this book I intend to demonstrate that the major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. . . . The poor . . . do have things, but they lack the process to represent their property and create capital. The have houses but not titles, crops but not deeds, businesses but not statutes of incorporation. It is the unavailability of these essential representations that explains why people who have adapted every other Western invention, from paper clips to nuclear reactors, have not been able to produce sufficient capital to make their domestic captialism work.' pages 1-7 
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Descartes, Rene, Rules for the direction of the mind: Discourse on the method, Encyclopaedia BritannicaB0006AU8ZG 1955  
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Einstein (2005), Albert, and Robert W Lawson (translator) Roger Penrose (Introduction), Robert Geroch (Commentary), David C Cassidy (Historical Essay), Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Pi Press 1916, 2005 Preface: 'The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. ... The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavour to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.' page 3  
Amazon
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Galilei, Galileo, and Stillman Drake (translator), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo: Including the Starry Messenger (1610 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina), Doubleday Anchor 1957 Amazon: 'Although the introductory sections are a bit dated, this book contains some of the best translations available of Galileo's works in English. It includes a broad range of his theories (both those we recognize as "correct" and those in which he was "in error"). Both types indicate his creativity. The reproductions of his sketches of the moons of Jupiter (in "The Starry Messenger") are accurate enough to match to modern computer programs which show the positions of the moons for any date in history. The appendix with a chronological summary of Galileo's life is very useful in placing the readings in context.' A Reader. 
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Gibson, William, Idoru, 2011 'Tokyo, post-event: After an attack of scruples, Colin Laney's skipped out on his former employer Slitscan - avoiding the rash of media lawyers sent his way - and taken a job for the outfit managing Japanese rock duo, Lo/Rez. Rez has announced he's going to marry an 'idoru' by the name of Rei Toi - she exists only in virtual reality - and this creates complications that Laney, a net runner, is supposed to sort out. But when Chai, part of Lo/Rez's fan club, turns up unaware that she's carrying illegal nanoware for the Russian Kombinat, Laney's scruples nudge him towards trouble all over again. And this time lawyers'll be the least of his worries . . .' 
Amazon
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Jech, Thomas, Set Theory, Springer 1997 Jacket: 'This book covers major areas of modern set theory: cardinal arithmetic, constructible sets, forcing and Boolean-valued models, large cardinals and descriptive set theory. . . . It can be used as a textbook for a graduate course in set theory and can serve as a reference book.' 
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Joachim, Howard H, and Errol E Harris, Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Thoemmes Press: New Ed edition 1997 Product Description: Taken from the original manuscripts of Joachim's lectures on the Regulae of Descartes, this volume was reconstructed after his death from notes taken by his pupils Errol Harris and John Austin. A critical examination of the main rules for the direction of the mind and the expositions by which Descartes explains them, the work contains commentary on five main topics: the power of knowing, the nature of the intellect, Descartes's account of induction and deduction, Descartes's method of analysis and synthesis, and the notice of vera mathesis. Joachim then goes on to criticize Descartes's method and to expound his own doctrine of philosophical analysis. The last chapter offers his own concrete organic unities in opposition to the Cartesian complex natures.' Amazon 
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Lifton, Robert Jay, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a study of 'brainwashing' in China, 1989 Jacket: 'Brainwashing has often been described in sensational terms; but Dr Lifton's painstaking investigation of Thought Reform is based on psychological studies (with follow up interviews) of Western civilians and Chinese intellectuals who underwent the process in a variety of prisons, universities and other settings."  
Amazon
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Mascaro, Juan, and (translator), The Bhagavad Gita, Penguin Books 1962-1968  
Amazon
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Miles (1996), Jack, God: A Biography, Vintage Books 1996 Jacket: 'Jack Miles's remarkable work examines the hero of the Old Testament . . . from his first appearance as Creator to his last as Ancient of Days. . . . We see God torn by conflicting urges. To his own sorrow, he is by turns destructive and creative, vain and modest, subtle and naive, ruthless and tender, lawful and lawless, powerful yet powerless, omniscient and blind.' 
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Posner (2015), 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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Robins, R H, A Short History of Linguistics, Routledge 1997 'This complete revision and updating of Professor Robins' classic text offers a comprehensive account of the history of linguistic thought from its European origins some 2500 years ago to the present day. It examines the independent development of linguistic science in China and Medieval Islam, and especially in India, which was to have a profound effect on European and American linguistics from the end of the eighteenth century.' 
Amazon
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Thiering, Barbara, Jesus of the Apocalypse: The life of Jesus after the crucifixion, Doubleday 1996 Introduction: 'It is now possible to show that ... the bizarre images of the [Book of Revelation] were deliberately constructed ... to read like fantastic images but to convey through this form actual historical information. ... Above all the Book of Revelation contains evidence, supplied by the early Christians themselves, that Jesus survived the crucifixion and remained active for many years afterwards. ... " vi 
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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 . 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 . The paper also appears in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers. 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. 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

Links

Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron - Wikipedia, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (7 December 1731-17 January 1805) was the first professional French scholar of Indian culture. He conceived the institutional framework for the new profession. He inspired the founding of the Ecole francaise d'extreme orient a century after his death and, later still, the founding of the Institut francais de Pondichery.' back

Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 'The “computable” numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expression: s as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates, and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique.' back

Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 'The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by some finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable of a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. . . . ' back

Alex Lo, Diplomatic disputes hide pettiness and savagery, ' The United Nations and various human rights groups have repeatedly criticised the US-led sanctions and their inhumane effects on the general Venezuelan populace. Washington, however, is determined to toughen the stranglehold, including extraditing Maduro’s go-to troubleshooter Alex Saab, who had been working around the sanctions to supply food, fuel and medicine to the country. The sanctions have been sheer vindictive savagery. back

Alexandra Petri, Opinion: Some Things That Didn’t Go Wrong in 2021, back

Ann Telnaes, Opinion: The best Ann Telnaes cartoons of 2021, ' Editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes drew her takes on all of 2021′s biggest stories. Here are her favorites. back

Belen Fernandez, Elon Musk and all that was wrong with 2021, ' Might it not be more charming, then, to select a Person of the Year who is actually concerned with alleviating human misery – as opposed to someone chasing a dystopian vision of an exclusive future universe run by and for Elon Musk? Granted, this is the same magazine that named Adolf Hitler “Man of the Year” in 1938.' back

Bloomberg, SenseTime IPO lands Chinese professor $3.4bn fortune, ' Just weeks after the U.S. placed a unit of SenseTime Group Inc. on a blacklist for alleged human rights violations, the firm is about to make founder Tang Xiao’ou one of the world’s richest people. China’s largest artificial intelligence company priced its initial public offering at HK$3.85 (49 cents) per share, raising $5.55 billion That was the bottom of the expected range, but a signal that despite increased tensions with the U.S. and Beijing’s crackdown on tech giants, the country, including its vast surveillance machinery, continues to churn out huge fortunes and massive gains for venture capitalists. ' back

Caietanum Card. Bisleti, Praefectus, Acta Apolistice Sedis 8 (1916) 157, ' His dubiis Emi ac Rmi DD. Cardinales huius S. Congregationis, in plenario coetu, habito diebus xxn et xxiv, mense februario huius anni, ita respondendum censuerunt: Ad I. Summa Theologica S. Thomae habenda est uti textus praelectionum quoad partem scholasticam quaestionum; ita scilicet ut, una cum aliquo textu, qui ordinem logicum quaestionum indicet et partem positivam contineat, habeatur prae manibus et explicetur Summa Theologica quoad partem scholasticam. Ad II. Omnes illae viginti quatuor theses philosophicae germanam S. Thomae doctrinam exprimunt, eaeque proponant 'veluti tutae normae directivae.' back

Claude E Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 'The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.' back

Clive Irving, Air France 447 Report: How the Plane Went Down, 'A new report mostly blames pilot error for the tragic 2009 airplane crash. Clive Irving asks why pilots should be faulted for having to cope with serious technical failures.' back

Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiastes 12:12: . . . of makingmany books there is no end, 'King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.) And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.' back

Exodus 32, Moses slaughters the worshippers of the Golden Calf, '27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbour'.” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day”.' back

Felicia Marian, Thoka Ndlozi & Anneline Malebo, Joy - Paradise Road, 1980, ' Come with me down paradise road
This way please, I'll carry your load
This you won't believe.
Come with me to paradise skies
Look outside and open your eyes
This you must believe.

There are better days before us
And a burning bridge behind, fire smokin' the sky is blazing,
There's a woman waiting weeping
And a young man nearly beaten all for love.
Paradise was almost closin' down.

Come with me to paradise days
It'll change your life, it'll shore change your ways
This you won't believe
. Take my hand down paradise lane
Away from heart ache with out any pain
I know 'cause I have been.

There are better days before us
And a burning bridge behind, fire smokin', the sky is blazing,
There's a woman waiting weeping
And a young man nearly beaten all for love.
Paradise was almost closin' down.

There are better days before us
And a burning bridge behind, fire smokin', the sky is blazing,
There's a woman waiting weeping
And a young man nearly beaten all for love

You must believe - you must believe this
You must believe - you must believe this
You must believe - you must believe this...
There are better days...

back

Jordi-Vidal-Robert & Hans-Joachim Voth, Extraordinarily, the effects of the Spanish Inquisition linger to this day, ' From Imperial Rome to the Crusades, to modern North Korea or the treatment of Rohingya in Myanmar, religious persecution has been a tool of state control for millennia. While its immediate violence and human consequences are obvious, less obvious is whether it leaves scars centuries after it ends. In a new study we have attempted to examine the present day consequences of one of the longest-running and most meticulously documented persecutions of them all – the trials of the Spanish Inquisition between 1478 to 1834. The records of 67,521 trials still exist, along with indicators of their locations and places of birth and residence of the people they tried. We find that today – two hundred years after its abolition – the locations in which the inquisition was strong have markedly lower levels of economic activity, trust and educational attainment than those in which it was weak.' back

Justin Romberg, Nyquist Theorem, The Connections Project, Rice University: 'The fundamental theorem of DSP [digital signal processing]' back

King James Bible, Psalms 82:6 I have said . . . , 'Viewing the 1769 King James Version. Click to switch to 1611 King James Version of Psalms 82:6

I have said, Ye [are] gods; and all of you [are] children of the most High.

- 1769 Oxford King James Bible 'Authorized Version' back

Laurence Frost & Heather Smith, Air France Crash Criminal Probe Shows Scope of Crew Errors, 'Air France Flight 447’s crew reacted badly to an autopilot shutdown and misread instruments showing the plane’s rapid descent before it plunged into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people aboard, a report shows.' back

P. Pratap Kumar, Archbishop Desmond Tutu: father of South Africa’s ‘rainbow nation’ , ' Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Mpilo Tutu has died at the age of 90. Archbishop Tutu earned the respect and love of millions of South Africans and the world. He carved out a permanent place in their hearts and minds, becoming known affectionately as “The Arch”. . . . With his growing political activism in the 1980s, the Arch became a target of the apartheid government’s full scale victimisation and faced death threats as well as bomb scares. In March 1980 his passport was revoked. After much international outcry and intervention, he was given a “limited travel document” two years later to travel overseas. His work was recognised globally, and he was awarded Nobel Prize for Peace in 1984 for being a unifying leader in the campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid in South Africa. . . . South Africa is blessed to have had such a brave and courageous man as The Arch, who truly symbolised the idea of the country as a “rainbow nation” . South Africa will feel the loss of the moral direction of this brave soldier of God for generations to come. Hamba kahle (go well) Arch.' back

Peter Martin, Like songs, the best graphs tell stories. Here are my 10 favourites from 2021, ' “One of the first things you have to decide on with a musical is why should there be songs.” The person speaking is Stephen Sondheim, the writer of some of the best songs for musicals in the 20th century, who died in November aged 91. You can put songs in any story, but what I think you have to look for is, why are songs necessary to this story? If it’s unnecessary, then the show generally turns out to be not very good. I’m no Sondheim, but as an editor I won’t put a graph into any story unless it is absolutely necessary to tell the story. When I do, the picture can be worth at least the 800 words that accompany it. So here are my 10 favourites from the business and economy stories I edited for The Conversation in 2021. back

Philip Weller, Macbeth Navigator, back

Priscian - Wikipedia, Priscian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia, 'Priscianus Caesariensis (fl. 500 AD), commonly known as Priscian . . . was a Latin grammarian. He wrote the Institutiones grammaticae ("Grammatical Foundations") on the subject. This work was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages and provided the raw material for the field of speculative grammar.' back

Psalm 82, Psalms, chapter 82, 6I declare: “Gods though you be,*d offspring of the Most High all of you, 7Yet like any mortal you shall die; like any prince you shall fall.” back

Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965: We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing. Since winning the prize is a personal thing, I thought I could be excused in this particular situation, if I were to talk personally about my relationship to quantum electrodynamics, rather than to discuss the subject itself in a refined and finished fashion. Furthermore, since there are three people who have won the prize in physics, if they are all going to be talking about quantum electrodynamics itself, one might become bored with the subject. So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.' back

Scholasticism - Wikipedia, Scholasticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics ("scholastics," or "schoolmen") of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100 to 1700, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending dogma in an increasingly pluralistic context. It originated as an outgrowth of, and a departure from, Christian monastic schools at the earliest European universities.' back

Shane Keating, Slip, slop, slurp! The surprising science of sunscreen, sand and ice cream, ' Viscosity is the ability of a fluid to keep its shape when a force is applied. Sunscreen is what’s called a shear-thinning fluid, which means rubbing it makes its viscosity decrease so it flows more freely. . . . The opposite of a shear-thinning fluid is a shear-thickening fluid, a material whose viscosity increases with applied force. . . . Non-Newtonian fluids are found in all sorts of useful substances from biofuels to body armour to blood plasma, and there is still much about them to discover.' back

Vita & Virginia - Wikipedia, Vita & Virginia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Vita & Virginia is a 2018 biographical romantic drama film directed by Chanya Button. The screenplay, written by Button and Eileen Atkins, is adapted from the 1992 play Vita & Virginia by Atkins. The film stars Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debicki, and Isabella Rossellini. Set in the 1920s, Vita & Virginia tells the story of the love affair between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. back

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