::que Star Wars theme::

I got in line early for the digital showing of Revenge of the Sith at
Century 22. Big, bold and almost brilliant. I had a lot of fun at the
theater before and during the movie. I really enjoyed it. I felt the
handling of the Emperor and yoda was a little cartoonish, but the movie was
good over all. There was a lot of plot in this movie...kinda feels Lucas
should have made the prequel trilogy on the story of episode 3 alone.

___
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What a mess

The Bible has many authors, the majority of whom are completely unacknowledged by traditional theology. Modern biblical scholarship widely recognizes that the first five books, the Torah, were compiled from at least four distinct source documents known as J (Yahwist), E (Elohist), D (Deuteronomist), and P (Priestly). While the final text is presented as a singular, harmonious narrative of world history and the Israelite people, it is actually a patchwork of competing documents stitched together long after the events occurred. When you closely track these individual sources, the seams show. The text is filled with direct contradictions, frequently clashing within the exact same story.

Stories of Kingdom of Israel

Each individual tribe within the ancient Israelite alliance likely maintained its own localized oral traditions. These stories functioned as political metaphors, granting divine legitimacy to each group's territory and status. They were never originally intended to be read as literal, chronological history. The push to assemble a unified narrative came later, born of political catastrophe. When the Northern Kingdom of Israel fell to Assyria, and the Southern Kingdom of Judah was subsequently exiled to Babylon, the surviving priestly elites faced an existential crisis. To survive as a conquered people, they merged their disparate traditions into a single history. Because the northern tribes had already been scattered, the final collection heavily favors the perspective of the surviving southern kingdom and its priestly hierarchy.

This composition implies that the grand "United Monarchy" of biblical lore is fundamentally a myth. Modern archaeology indicates that Israel was never a monolithic empire from its inception, but rather a fluid confederation of distinct clans. The historical David was not the ruler of a sweeping superpower; physical evidence suggests he was a regional chieftain ruling a modest, tribal hill-country polity in the south. The Bible itself betrays this fragmented reality by preserving several radically different lists of the tribes across various books. The concept of a vast, centralized nation spanning both the north and the south was an anachronistic fiction, invented centuries later by Judean scribes to give their local tribal lineage a glorious, unifying backstory.  

Reality of Kingdom of Israel

The further, more radical implication is that the early Israelite clans were originally polytheistic. Each tribe aligned with its own protective deities, and a fierce theological civil war ensued. The bitter struggle between the worshipers of Baal and Yahweh survives in the text simply because the Yahwists won the conflict and wrote the history. They framed the defeat of Baal as divine judgment to legitimize their own monopoly on power. Yahweh himself appears to be a composite deity, absorbing the attributes of other regional gods to unify the tribes and expand the authority of the central priesthood.

Traces of this suppressed polytheism still break through the surface of the text. Consider the bizarre narrative of the Nehushtan: Moses crafts a bronze serpent on a pole to heal the people, a relic that the biblical text admits Israelites worshiped for centuries until King Hezekiah destroyed it during a monotheistic purge. This story was almost certainly an editorial attempt to rewrite history, retroactively explaining away evidence of ancestral serpent worship.

Ultimately, both gods and alternative histories vanished at the hands of the victorious scribes. Later generations mistook these highly political, edited anthologies for literal fact, eventually attributing the entire work to Moses. Over centuries of tradition, political propaganda solidified into undeniable divine truth, forming the fragile foundation upon which three major world religions stand today.

References: 101 Myths of the Bible (Book); Kingdom of Israel (Wikipedia); The Primacy of Genesis: Part 10 (Article)

Fighting the Future, One Square Root at a time

Find the square root for Y
Stage One:
1. Determine the largest squared whole number less than Y.
2. Use the square root of the largest squared whole number to be the first part of the answer. Place this number to the left of the decimal place within the answer.
3. Find the difference of Y and the squared whole number.

Stage Two:
1. Multiple the difference by 100, designated as A.
2. Multiple the answer so far by 2 (without the decimal point), designated as B.
3. Multiple B by 10.
4. Give C one of the following values: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9
5. Find D where (B+C)*C equals the greatest value less than A.
6. C becomes the next digit right of the decimal in the answer.
7. Find the difference between of A and D.
8. Repeat Stage Two until the answer reaches the desired number of digits after the decimal.

Example:

PDF File: Example to find the square root of 3

(Sorry, I had to make it a PDF file because html isn't good at showing math equations and I didn't want to scan in my chicken scratch writing. Free Acrobat Reader is a must, but if you don't already have it, go here to get it: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html)

Now, is anyone ever going to use this? Hey, if anyone has seen this method in print, please let me know.

Preface to Square Root

Back when I was in high school, I learned something that isn’t known by very many people. I learned the method to manually find a square root in a way that is similar to long division. This method allows you to find each decimal place with certainty. You can solve to as many places after the decimal point as you want.
I've never found this long method in print anywhere. I’ve found other simpler methods to finding a square root, but they usually involve closing in on the square root by continuously rerunning the same method. You are never left with a perfect answer because you can never be sure if the successive decimal places are correct. I’m also not sure which method is used by calculators (on which we all depend for square roots these days, which is the beginning of Asimov’s vision for our world coming true, but that’s a future blog entry).
I have no clue why this long method works. But, in a very small effort to fight the future, I’m going to show the method here, soon.

UPDATE: Here's the link to the long method of finding square roots: http://fcsuper.blogspot.com/2005/05/fighting-future-one-square-root-at.html#comments

We're returning to where we were.

More than a few years ago, I noticed something weird about how I speak. I realized that I use the word them as a nongender singular objective pronoun instead of him/her (which over specifies gender, when gender either didn't matter or wasn't known to me. Even more weird, I actually often use the contraction 'em to differentiate it from the common plural use of the word them.
At first I thought I was a bit weird. Then I noticed other people use the word them in this way. It's not overly common, but it's out there. Like, "if a stranger comes up next to you in a car, don't get in the car with them no matter what." An english major might tell you that statement is mixing up the subject, but it really is an attempt to apply them in the singular form.
The nice thing about the word 'em is that it is much quicker and easier to say than the artificial sounding P.C. term him/her. I also use themself as the nongender version of him/herself.
Since my realization about this word 'em, I use it intentional instead of him/her except in formal documents. Another thing I've noticed is that I do not use any replacement of he/she. Maybe it's be sounds ignorant to say "They is walking this way." :)
Ok, so is there any takers on helping me start the revolution to get rid of the word him/her? :)

Ok, so thinking about this got me thinking about the complexity of the English language. When I was younger, I used to think that French was strange, with it's unpronounced letters and odd contractions. Of course, English gets many of its habits from French, but it took me a long time to put two and two together. Then one day, I realized that English has just as strange unpronounced letters and even more weird contractions. I'm mean, trying telling a nonenglish speaker that thorough is pronounced "thir-o". Or worse, the same letters that are silence in thorough make the F sound in rough. What the hell? LOL
Along this thought, a phrase popped into my head that I thought would be particularly hard for nonenglish speakers, both in spelling and pronunciation. "We're returning to where we were." We're, where and were. They look pretty much the same, and sound pretty similar, but still distinct. Imagine a french speaker trying to say that three times fast. I think we're, where and were is worse than they're, their and there because at least these have the same pronunciation.

Crenelatory Critique

I’ve noticed that fantasy movies tend to have crenellations with way too many merlons and embrasures. In fact, I’ve seen merlons placed at the tip of a king’s donjon! Now how are a king's men supposed handle that? This display of diminutive crenels has got to stop! If this continues, I just know we’ll soon see exposed penetralias, and draughty keeps in the open streets! And then where will we be?

crenellation, merlon, embrasure, donjon, penetralia, draughty, & keep