An agnostic case for not summoning demons

Let's assume for the sake of argument that I don't believe in G-d. (That much shouldn't be a difficult assumption for my longtime readers.) Let us further assume that the barrier between this our Universe and the Warp is impermeable. (This much, for sake of argument only.)

The Jezebel coven last month called into the Warp anyway, against Charles James Kirk. Said coven received what they requested. The Cernovich side of the Right, like Megyn Kelly, are crying foul.

We Catholics are told, constantly, that prayer works. If you are an agnostic, the case for prayer - even if you don't do it sincerely, or can't - is that the object of your prayer might feel that he's getting a powerful Patron on his side. Also it might inspire you, yourself, to do something concrete to help, because there's something tugging at you that "thoughts and prayers" are empty. Maybe even especially if you are bad at praying.

It happens that Catholics believe in a god of mercy and justice. It is not in us to pray for evil deeds, or it shouldn't be. Jezebel have appealed to different gods.

If prayer works for agnostic reasons, then prayer works no matter your motives and no matter your request - for those same reasons. A prayer to the Dark Powers hardens your own heart, and it makes unstable people ponder if the Dark Powers might give them aid. That aid would, of course, be towards doing fell deeds.

In short, Kelly is right. Jezebel engaged in a dehumanising discourse and raised the cause of evil against that of good. No good could come of it.

The Getting Started math subs

So we got a TRS-80 Color Computer and it came with manuals. At the age of nine I got interested in the Getting Started With Color Basic subroutines out back; in the 1982 edition anyway. These were for cosines and other functions not offered in the baseline 4-16K versions. We had a 32K Extended CoCo, so a lot of these were in fact offered in this manual's sequel. So why bother with the original?

My interest then was in how come there wasn't a SQR(-1). The "SWR" algo in the first manual seemed like it might allow it; when I duly typed this in I saw the numbers never coming to a stop. Later on of course Gleick would be mooting the Imaginary Number, which opened up plenty of other angles, but we certainly weren't taught those in the third grade.

It occurs to be that the BASIC square root function might retain some interest otherwise. There exists also a function for exponentation. Why not just... ^.5?

In the manual, what happens is iteration. It starts by setting up a value Y, which is just the input halved. Then comes the incrementor W: (x/y - y) * .5. Repeat until W=0. There is also a Z to remember the previous value of W.

This is, clearly, Newton's iterator. Why we need Z I dunno. I also get the feeling that initial Y doesn't need to be the input halved. Can we not bithack the input like q_rsqrt? That'd start with VARPTR in this tongue. Although maybe that would require we do all this in assembler.

On topic of assembler one Walter Zydhek in 1999 wrote Extended Basic Unravelled which - I trust - does what its cover promises. Behind the scenes, the CoCo was running Taylor (12) Series for the ATN function. Which looks much like what the manual's ATN was doing. The EXP also uses Taylor (8).

We find the SQR in assembler was not Newton. It just sets the exponent to .5 and then slips into the power (^) operator. Which then does the same LOG-then-EXP calc as the manual was doing.

John Brown's body of literature

Since everyone's talking about some body in the grave, here's Mark Tapscott. Tapscott in the 1970s hoped to be an authority on the topic; both he and Brown are/were Republicans, after all. Tapscott says he'd done a few draughts before slipping out of college into partisan politics and whatever-it-is he's doing now.

Tapscott's contribution is that he uncovers that John Brown actually had a political programme of his own beyond 1856 Frémont north-state freesoilism. It's little known, but the North abolitionists under William Garrison considered the US Constitution a "pact with Hell". From the abolitionist faction, against Frémont (who'd lost, so'd slithered away), Brown in 1858 cooked up a "Chatham Convention". Brown would be a Commander In Chief, a stronger Executive. The Confederate Constitution, on the funhouse side, had more states' rights, excepting slavery which was close to a Honduran forever-clause.

Brown also had an immanent blood-atonement theology, around Hebrews 9:22, to read same as a Mormon or Gazurtoid should read it. We who appreciate René Girard read this passage rather differently.

Brown hoped for a Mutazilite Caliphate against the South's Hanbalite Caliphate, we might say. I think Brown at least kept the judiciary apart like the Deuteronomist proposed, so wasn't quite abolishing ol' Montesquieu. Tapscott would argue this judiciary would be toothless.

That said: AI is holding Tapscott up to task. Brown presented his document as provisional, and may have meant it; a true Garrison might not do so. We would call it a wartime-constitution. If Brown was going to rule Southern States, would he expect to rule them long? I doubt Brown expected to live that long. He assuredly thought he could submit his crown to the Union having won the Civil War for them, after wringing some concessions, like the 13th Amendment we actually got. I mean, Lord-Protector Brown was going to be dealing with a majority-Republican North. We can compare the 1830s negotiations between the Texian Republic and the earlier Union.

Brown was, nonetheless, living a delusion. This is certainly a take Tapscott could have taken. He's turned into a lazy thinker and it's quite possible he had constructed a lazily-founded thesis. Probably why the college didn't let it through the door.

The Hilbert mapping

In the 1980s, computers got good enough to display fractal patterns to the home audience. James Gleick put out Chaos at about the right time, for the PC-Jr. In mid 1990 I figured out how to render some of these for the school Nimbus (remember that?). We're here to talk the Hilbert tasselation.

Hilbert rendered your 1D array into a 2D spacefilling curve. It is, or maybe was, considered superior to the usual x + y*maxx mapping since proximity in the array would approximate proximity in the mapped plane, also. Hilbert himself used the square grid; Gosper's flowsnake does it for the hexagonal beehive.

In 1984 Antonin Guttman invented the R-tree, which indexes multidimensional objects: "find bookstores within two miles". Hilbert gained a real lease on life here. To be noted, I think technically Gosper is better out of doors, as a wilderness map.

Hilbert's classic square, rather, has use in human-visualising the nature of 1D data. It also compresses images and/or dithers them.

BACKDATE 9.26

Baruch in Syriac

I got into one of those Biblical rabbitholes and pondered, hey: what's up with Baruch?

In the Masoretic / Protestant tradition, Baruch is an apocryphal book that doesn't belong in the Bible. In the Greek tradition, it's part of Jeremiah. Jeremiah, by the way, is itself different in both; the Greek tradition ends in Egypt and allows that Baruch is about equal to Jeremiah, thus making that whole text a Jeremiah-Baruch cowriting exercise. Presently scholarship agrees that the Greek Jeremiah accurately translates a text, from which the Masoretic has reassembled. Perhaps, exactly to exclude the Baruch parts.

In the Dead Sea is no Baruch, excepting the "Epistle of Jeremiah"... in Greek (7Q). On the other hand, the Hebrew behind Greek Jeremiah famously survives. So maybe they did have Baruch like they had Nehemiah, except not preserving the copies. Ehh. Qumran quotes Nehemiah where it doesn't seem to quote Baruch.

Anyway, off these merry texts went outside the Hellenistic world. Jerome didn't translate Baruch to Latin, since he didn't have the Hebrew; but somebody did, since its in the Vulgate now. Meanwhile it also went to the Syrians.

In modern scholarship, all those Baruch/periJeremiah "apocrypha" went fairly ignored in Syriac studies - until the late 2010s, at the latest. That's when (Atlanta, I think) a total amateur like myself stumbled into a session on "2 Baruch". 2 Baruch seems to have been very popular as an apocalyptic text out East, on par with the Revelation in North Africa. You'd think the other Baruch books, being lost in Hebrew and preserved in Greek, would be simply ignored in the East, like Jerome was hoping to ignore them West. Ah but then there's Paul of Tella (re)translating all the Greek stuff for his colinguists.

You can read about Liv Ingeborg Lied 2022 free of charge, thankfully. The Baruch corpus seems complex to me, like the "Nehemiah" book and Ezra corpus. The "Second Epistle" of Baruch in the East, is what Catholics refer as just "Baruch" and, before us, the Greeks had appended to Jeremiah and treated as part of that book. And yes: iggerta not kitaba (Arabic may well be "risala").

Seems that the "2 Baruch" apocalypse did indeed come to Syria first. In Syriac the letter is to Babylon, where the Greek after en had the dative forcing "in". Dr Lied, engaged with paratext, sees that as evidence that indeed the "second epistle" came after 2 Baruch which was for Babylon, thus forcing this translation. I don't think Lied takes seriously that the mistranslation inspired 2 Baruch's authorship; I wouldn't either.

BACKDATE 9/25

When science is put to the vote

In 2009, some geologists met to decide upon the consensus for the disputed Silverpit Crater in the North Sea. Impact was a popular second choice.

So much for that. Now we know it is an impact. Not one of the impacts anyone should care about, it having little, uh, impact beyond making waves.

The real takeaway is on why they held the vote in the first place. This is some Jesus-Seminar nonsense. Something is probably right, or wrong, or "don't know yet". If you have to hold the vote then you don't know.

Cleon Skousen

Dr Benjamin Carson, an antiestablishment figure who lost to Trump in the 2015 primary, is still touting [W.] Cleon Skousen. Skousen in the 1950s was a LDS thinker. He is best known for The Naked Communist. Today Communists like David Corn don't like it.

But when Mitt Romney was mounting his own run, in 2007: Hemingway over in National Review noted that Mitt Romney was citing Skousen too (disclosure: I never voted for him). So also Glenn Beck (disco 2 boogaloo: he's nuts).

Skousen's ideas were terrible. Hemingway notes that Skousen's exegesis of LDS scripture is in the modern LDS mainstream (probably why Skousen didn't want blacks in there); also his analysis of Constitutional Law tends to be well regarded. But Carson wasn't citing those parts. He was citing the anti-Communist parts.

Luckily I don't think Kirk cited Skousen, himself, anywhere.