In my somewhat limited experience, a whole lot of politically noisy people from the religious right are simply not used to being around people who read. Once they get surrounded in their comfy echo-chamber bubble, their beliefs don’t get challenged or examined much. It is not a very challenging feat to dismantle the logic of a great many dearly-held beliefs if one merely reads the text.
A buddy of mine became born-again about 15 years ago, and I told him I had no quibble with him, except that I would hold him to it, chapter and verse, and not just the parts he found convenient. That’s actually been a fun arrangement for us both.
For subbies, it is extremely comforting because you can hand off all of the stressful and difficult decision-making, scheduling, and responsibilities to the Dom/Domme. Then you can just relax and play and enjoy life, zero stress, no worries. It’s like being a carefree kid again, or a pet.
I am surprised that the church is doing sermons on BDSM. Things must’ve changed a lot in the decades since I’ve been.
For a brief time when they were quite small, my kids were into Thomas the Tank Engine. I’d never read any of the books, nor seen any of the shows before then, so I was mildly surprised by the messaging. Every episode seems to be about some locomotive that tries to grow out of its assigned role, whether out of an ill-advised urge to be heroic, an excessive dose of ego, too much pride, a desire to be admired, or even just a wish to be more helpful than that assigned role allows them to be, only to be slapped down by circumstance and Sir Topham Hatt for trying to rise above their station.
It’s a remarkably… well, un-American mindset, since out here in the States we have a long history of children’s literature that celebrates pluck, independence, and the underdog. But the Railway Series reinforces a remarkably Anglican emphasis on cooperation and submission to the prescribed order of things. Shouldn’t be surprising, since Rev. W. Awdry, the creator of the series, was an Anglican cleric. But wow, watching that show as an American, it sure feels like indoctrination to submission to the social order, and much creepier than you’d think friendly talking trains with faces should be.
7x “dog”, Maori to English = “dog dog threat is silenced in Sweden”
8x = “do you want a dog to accept Jesus and be saved?”*
16x is the weird doomsday quote from the article
44x dog is 44x dog again.
*not particularly, no. But like any dyslexic agnostic I’m not even sure there is a dog.
12x ag, Somali to English = “by the mouth of the tribes, by the mouth of the tribes by the mouth of each one”
13x = “by the mouth of one weighing at each time”
14x = “And the word of the LORD came to the ages by the gates of the city”
15x = “And its length was one hundred cubits at one end of the mouth”
Etc etc etc
24x = “From Agent to Losses to the Lowers of the City of LOs Ag”
32x = “LOAD LOADING OF SINGUIDO NON - LINGUES OF THE LOAD LOADLU NASA LOUND LOWING AND LEVEL OF LINGUISTIC GAMP”
36 x “ag” = “we will not be able to get all the things we need.”
Remove 1-2 ags and you get "we will not be able to get all the things we need.
Remove about 4 and you get “do not want us to be greedy you will be greedy”
Remove about 5 ags and you get “do not want to be crazy about you”.
Remove 1 more and you’re back to “do not want us to be greedy you will be greedy”, but two more gives “How much more greed will be in the greed!”
12 ags gives “it is very urgent that we will be hungry”.
16 gives “we are very hungry and we are hungry”.
Evidently ags aggravate a world of greed, craziness and hunger, but 4 ags gives “it is read”.
However… in Malayalam, 31 ags gives “aquaculture and ecosystems”, 28 give “aquaculture and ecosystem, with ecosystem”, 20 gives “both in the agro-agro-agro-agro-agence”, 17 gives “both the aged and aged ages”.
Now, Telugu sees 31 ags as “Please stop there and stop.”, 28 as “Please stop or stop and stop, and have to stop”, 20 as “Stop and stops and then stop”, and 17 as “Stop and stoop and then stop”. Now there is a word “ఆగు” (pronounced “agu”) that is on the very odd occasion translated as stop, so the neural net’s behaviour is making a bit of sense. 17 ags in Igbo, however, brings us back into moral and existential crisis: “How much more greedy desire for what we want to be?”
In terms of the human story, this woman, Cohl Furey, is like someone out of a comic book. She’s pursuing 8-dimensional “division algebra” as a means of describing the fundamental forces of physics, despite the entire field having abandoned mathematical modeling in favor of particle accelerators long ago. But Furey’s gotta do her own thing, pursuing her studies in a sculpture garden with her laptop on her yoga mat, in between mixed martial arts and playing the accordion, natch. This woman is the real-life Buckaroo Banzai, it seems.
Hats off.
When her equations are engineered into an oscillation overthruster and the 8th dimension is finally unlocked, Furey’s gonna have to strap on her six-guns and storm Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems with her strike force to keep it secure. Look for the next exciting episode.
John Baez is a physicist who used to spend a lot of time posting online about abstract math that may or may not be fruitful places to look for physical answers. (And yes, he is also cousin to folk singer Joan Baez.) Here’s a couple articles by him about octonions and possible applications to physics, from the 1990’s and 2000’s:
But the Quanta article is fascinating. I wonder; is there a connection between quaternions and octonians, and tensors that describe, say, stress and strain?
She’s looking for a faculty job now, but failing that, there’s always the ski slopes or the accordion. “Accordions are the octonions of the music world,” [Furey] said — “tragically misunderstood.”
Okay, the math raised her to a certain level of awesomeness in my mind, but that quote elevated her several levels above that all by itself.
I’m picturing a many-layered vegetable of the genus Allium, but of a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple that can only be seen by wizards and cats (and, presumably, by Cohl Furey).
And of course, octiron, a curiously dense metal useful for removing mountains, according to a method scribbled in a notebook margin by Leonard of Quirm.
