jack

A little while ago I was reminded that in the Jesus-sponsored version of the afterlife people "die, wait for judgement day, be sent to eternal life or to eternal fire" (despite the common expectation of going to heaven or hell immediately).

I thought I had understood that (with some variation like whether "eternal life" is heaven or messiah-perfected-earth or something else, or whether eternal fire is eternal punishment or not). And separating out what Jesus' listeners would have thought from how people interpret Jesus nowadays.

But this week I was suddenly reminded of the harrowing of hell. If you believe in that, and Jesus descended into the underworld and released some of the people there, where did they GO after getting released? Did they get fast tracked to heaven but everyone else still has to wait for the end of time? Did they go straight to heaven but heaven exists outside time so everyone who goes to heaven ever have always been up there?

Wikipedia thinks that it was common for Jesus' contemporaries to believe in a greek-underworld-like afterlife (Sheol) which is mentioned in the torah but wasn't the official belief of priests or rabbis at the time. If so the story may be, "Jesus let good people out of Sheol and into heaven". And that Jesus was describing an end-of-time judgement, but that belief about where people were in the meantime was ambiguous, perhaps previously assumed to be sheol, but now more interpretations like "nothing" and "purgatory" were starting to occur and be debated in Christianity?

Finally put some of my bashrc and git aliases in a private GitHub repo.

Most recent tweaks:

"g a" for "git add ." and "g a xxxx yyyy" for "git add xxxx yyyy"

"g s" shows staged changes and unstaged changes, in git diff --stat format. (Green/red for changes and blue/magenta for staged! :))

I just now twigged that I could write a "git-a" script to get that effect, without merging bash aliases and got aliases so much.

I did some experimenting with rust macros. The idea is to make a rich assert that displays the values of any variables and expressions used in the assert condition (with some useful default omitting redundant ones).

It looks like writing this in the source:


    ...
    rsst!( two.pow(2+3+5)+1 == 1025 ); // Passes. Execution continues.
    rsst!( two.pow(2+3+5)+1 == 1023 ); // Panics. See below.

And getting this output:


$ cargo run
...
Assertion failed: two.pow(2+3+5)+1 == 1023
  two.pow(2 + 3 + 5) + 1: 1025
  two.pow(2 + 3 + 5): 1024
  two: 2
  2 + 3 + 5: 10

There's more info including functioning examples at https://github.com/CartesianDaemon/assrt

It was interesting to learn what was possible. As people intimated, rust macros were very powerful and flexible, but very hard to write.

I know this will probably never go anywhere from here, but I wanted to try what it looked like. I assume the same functionality exists, although I didn't find it immediately. I didn't try to publish the crate yet because it's not really functional, although I'll see if it works in my projects.

I am curious how much people think that's cool, how much people think that's pointless, and how much people think that's horrific. I always thought Catch.hpp which includes a similar thing in C++ using macros with horrific class magic hidden inside was really useful because it's presumably horrific to write the library, but perfectly seamless to use the library.

I followed tradition and hesitated a lot over choosing any names. I wanted something that looked like "assert" but wasn't taken. Knowing people may take objection I seriously considered "asst" or something else with "ass" centrally. For now it's "assrt" for the crate and "rsst" or "csst" for the macros.

I wanted to learn some rust and started using it for a small hobby project, a tile-based computer game.

My natural inclination is very much towards what C++ and rust are trying to do, of creating a language which has good abstractions, but which compiles to something that runs efficiently and detects broken code at compile time, so I was interested to see what was the same and what was different.

These are my random impressions based on a short dive:

SPECIFIC OBSERVATIONS: ERROR PROPAGATION

( Read more... )

A Passover Seder is a ceremony built around a meal to commemorate the exodus from Egypt. It's traditionally the time of year for a big family gathering. Religious jews usually also have a community Seder on the second night of passover. I've only really been to seders with Rachel in a generally observant-reform-ashkenazi tradition so this won't be the same in all families.

In our family, there's typically an hour or two of ceremony, a large meal, some more ceremony, and fun singing (with animal noises). A bit longer at Rachel's birth family, a bit shorter at polycule Seder. The tone is a little bit serious but also gregarious and fun. Many families have smaller or token amount of service.

A big purpose of a seder is to show traditions to children and to guests, and guests invited and children running around is actively good, not an imposition. People will explain lots of things but but, everyone will muddle through following whatever they can manage, there's almost nothing where it matters to get it right, you just move on anyway.

Random background: ( Read more... )

( Major spoilers for all the books but especially the first )

( Major spoilers for everything )

Continued recap. Last time covered ancient events about the resurrection, and status quo of the empire in the 10,000 years since. This time covers the events from the last generation or so leading up to the books. Next time will discuss events during Gideon's lifetime.

I think the two bits I wished were book series in their own right were the swashbuckling emotional drama of John and the lyctors flirting and feuding with each other during their immortality, and Gideon and Harrowhark's emotionally charged feuding as teens. I guess being of Tumblr, Tamsin Muir knows that everyone can fill in those parts, and skipped to writing the "ok, after the necromancer relationship anime got SERIOUS" part :)

( Massive spoilers for everything )

As always I probably got some parts wrong. There's probably a few things which the books gestured towards which don't fit together perfectly too, which always makes it hard to be sure when you've read too much into it and when not.

If you're interested in other summaries, it's worth checking out someone's timeline: https://darkveracity.tumblr.com/post/638331299048849408/presenting-the-complete-locked-tomb-timeline and reading the fandom wiki for some of the most notable characters https://thelockedtomb.fandom.com/wiki/John_Gaius. I didn't find anywhere with a good list of "Unanswered questions and most likely answers" like there used to be for Wheel and Time and Name of the Wind, but browsing the entries reminded me of most of the confusing clues.

The actual plot is really really cool but impossible to understand at first. I got sucked into trying to summarise the most important or cool points as they happened rather than as they were told in obscure hints and flashbacks. Part one of um several.

( Massive spoilers for everything )

I tried to stick with what was fairly clearly implied but I've probably remembered a few points completely wrongly, do check me on anything which doesn't sound right.

Question 1

You have a graph on an even number P people where each node has E=3 edges connected to it. You colour in one edge. Then you colour in another edge such that each person has at most one coloured edge, aka not touching a previous coloured edge (without planning ahead). You keep doing this as long as you can.

I think for some graphs (e.g. 4 people, or 6 people each connected to the adjacent people and the opposite person) you are guaranteed to be able to colour P/2 edges so that each person touches exactly one coloured edge, whatever your early choices were. Whereas for other graphs (e.g. the corners of a triangular prism?) you can end up in a "dead end" where you've coloured two edges and then the two people left over with no coloured edge have no edge between them to colour.

Is there a description of which graphs guarantee and which don't? What about if E=2 (probably usually not guaranteed?). Or E=4?

Question 2

You have a graph with even P nodes each with E=3 edges. There are A=3 acts. In the first, you colour P/2 non-touching edges. In the second you colour P/2 non-touching edges, not colouring edges that were coloured in act 1 (without planning ahead to act 3). In the third act, you also try to colour P/2 non-touching edges that weren't coloured in acts 1 or 2. Are there graphs where if you colour the edges one at a time you're guaranteed to fill in all the edges without discovering you need to backtrack?

What about for different values of E and A? If E is greater than A? If E is ALL the possible edges then it's always possible, but for values less than that?

Question 3

You have a graph with even P nodes each with E=3 edges. There are A=3 acts. In the first, you colour P/2 non-touching edges with +1, 0 or -1. In the second you colour P/2 non-touching edges, not colouring edges that were coloured in act 1, with +1, 0 or -1 (without planning ahead to act 3). In the third act, you also try to colour P/2 non-touching edges that weren't coloured in acts 1 or 2, also with +1, 0 or -1, but try to ensure that three values each node touches sum to 0. Are there graphs that guarantee that's possible in act 3, regardless of what you did in acts 1 and 2?

What if you had E=4 and coloured +1 or -1?

Changed fuse in car for first time ever. It was surprisingly straightforward!

As with the last half a dozen Decembers I'm writing a story for yuletide fanfiction exchange. I got something I really quite like, with a little iteration on the original ideas the original author's characters started springing to life. I've got a story of about 4000 words, but then I got distracted and still need to go back and punch it up throughout to make everything fit well and make sure the characters HAVE all the awesome moments I wanted. And make sure that I actually have enough of the characters it's supposed to be about.

I have also very much enjoyed going to friends' writing evenings.

I managed parkrun in sub-zero temperatures. The run itself was fine, cycling there was a bit difficult, my gloves were not good enough, but I was glad I tried.

I ended up setting off late and not being very consistent, and having an atrocious result, but I was mainly glad I kept it up.

A few weeks ago I decided I needed to start running 3x a week again if I was ever going to actually improve. It feels silly that I've been running regularly in different combinations for a very long time, but never having got close to how well I did after the first year, which at the time I'd thought of as a good achievement to reach, but barely sufficient.

I decided it was most realistic to run twice from home. One being parkrun as often as I can, which is helpfully social. And once from the gym where I can thoroughly sauna after. I had been trying to gym twice but it always ended up taking a lot more time.

I think the actual running in many ways I find easier when it's just me and a GPS, but I like having at least one running plus social thing just to help fit in a bit of both.

Fortunately my knees seem to have stayed fine with this plan. I've been trying to do a mix of doing 5k, doing short intervals, and doing something else (usually whichever it felt like I needed more of, but sometimes medium or long intervals. Or if both went well then intervals but more gently.)

I ran 10 miles! Home to Bottisham lock along the river.

That's by far the furthest I've tried to run. It went pretty well. I could have been more consistent, but I kept a reasonable for me running pace. I was completely completely tired out after which I guess makes sense. I was almost staggering a mile home :)

It felt really good. Stretching myself often does!

That makes me think a half marathon wouldn't be that much further, although I don't know how slow the cut offs are for organised races.

Random internet hole of the day. Algol is the head of Medusa in the Perseus constellation, and elsewhere was the head of an ogre.

In arabic that's "Ra's Al Ghul", where the name Algol came from, and also where the name of the batman villain Ra's Al Ghul.

It seems "ghul" in Arabic referred to dangerous desert spirits. In some versions they seem to be more like Jinn, in others they're graveyard dangers.

But it's really hard to find anyone who knows anything and isn't repeating the same two facts as everyone else. When I tried to see how the legend changed I got to jstor and gave up. Where do you look more deeply? Is there a subreddit for this that avoids batman things?

At some some legend was translated into European languages and gave rise to the western concept of ghouls, which seem to vary but seem to always be associated with dead bodies and never with shapeshifting or mysticism. Roleplaying solidified this.

The star was named "Ra's al Ghul". Apparently it's "Head of Satan" in hebrew tradition, although I don't know when that was, I guess it was almost-AD-or-later when Satan had acquired "monster" connotations? Not from earlier when it meant "the tricksy prosecutor angel" not yet "the ultimate antagonist"? The batman villain was named after the arabic name of the star.

What I don't know:
* What was and wasn't in middle eastern ghul legends
* The "head of the ogre" sounds really similar to "the head of medusa". Is this an arabic translation of the greek name "head of the monster", or are they both named after an older legend that diverged in both cultures?
* When they named the batman villain did "Ra's al Ghul" have mystical connotations? Was that based on something or did it just sound mystical to a western writer who only knew the name? What about other fantasy references to "al ghul"?

Why go for medication rather than coaching/therapy to start with? What about feeling squeamish about taking things that might alter your personality?

That's an excellent question, and it is one that is very personal for a lot of people including me, but I'm basically happy to talk about this stuff forever 🙂

Medication mostly fixes hardware problems and counseling mostly fixes software problems. Hardware fixes can help with software problems, eg if someone is depressed for a year initially for a reason and antidepressant gets them back to normal. But software fixes usually can't fix hardware problems. Sometimes they can work around the problem. Sometimes you can grow some brain to compensate for the missing bit. But often you can't, or only can a little bit.

I have the same feeling as you, not wanting an augmentation. But it doesn't feel like that (or look like that to careful consideration). It doesn't feel like it's giving me extra oomph to compensate for not enough oomph. It feels like, I'm doing all the right things that OUGHT to make me able to do things, but the connector is missing, and when I get that fixed physically, then doing those things NOW has an effect.

( Read more... )

Looking over my notes, I've completed the Fitness Rebel Badge a month ago!

It is to do three months of exercise a chosen number of times per week. I've been doing that for years but decided to start counting after the personal trainer session when I felt more sure that I was actually getting exercise from it.

That was in April so I've actually done three months as of July.

First one I can actually cross off!

--

I've also done (a little over) two months with an average of one 5k run every week. (I do two sessions a week but the other one was sometimes elliptical, or often running faster or intervals but not 5k)

That which was the main component of the Runner badge. I still need to run an organised event for a longer distance than my regular run. Some friends suggested a not too intimidating one.

And need to read about nutrition, or something else equivalent.

Another mini-adventure, I swam along Wicken Lode! I cycled to Wicken Fen, swam to Upware for pub lunch, and swam back along Burwell Lode!

3mi swimming, plus 22mi cycling. That's by far the furthest I've swum, the only time I did more than 1mi before was the Slow Swim and Picnic. It was tiring by the end but felt very good. Very achy this morning!
When I swam along Grantchester Meadows in sunny weather people thought I was bold and interesting, but this time I met a boat tour who said, they'd never seen anything like it before, and I think I crossed over into being weird...

The swimming was mixed. It's never as glorious when it's not sunny, but the water was as nice as always in summer. Travelling down a narrow channel in the reads feels magical, like your own private trail. And you know that the footpath is just over the reeds if you need it. And the weeds never tangle. But there is a lot of mud and weeds/reeds below the water, and some stretches nothing much to see but endless reeds.

Photos on facebook or instagram: https://www.facebook.com/jack.vickeridge/posts/pfbid02nGcRCxShNyy28ikJ6cnjwKS8rcfVjcbkHUm4ZkqJwfEdScW6x49FT9VWWwmRDVBel

That almost never happens.

Most of the credit to Rachel's sister and her friends, and to Rachel.

There were only two questions I was really able to contribute to. One was the heaviest weight class in professional boxing, which was as most people thought "Heavyweight". But I shouldn't have been SO sure, because the categories do keep changing as people get more skilled and bigger, and amateur boxing split the heaviest weight class into "heavyweight" and "superheavyweight". But professional boxing did keep "heavyweight" as the unlimited category.

The other was a bonus question, the closest guess for the year of the first hot air balloon flight. I knew that was a bit before the early 1800s, because there's a famous quote by an Admiral to parliament about Napoleon crossing the channel "I do not say he cannot come, I only say he cannot come by sea" which was sarcastically referring to the idea that inventing air travel was more plausible than the French navy gaining superiority in the channel for a day.
But I didn't know the decade at all, and my brain slipped a gear, and everyone else was talking about the1880s or 1890s, and when Jules Verne died, and the victorian era, and they usually know way more history than me, and I hadn't noticed that that was actually 100 years later than what I was thinking.

RUNNING

There's been more than a month when I've been running regularly and haven't run into knee problems (EXCITE! But also fingers very very crossed!) That's done about 4x 5k, but I have been running every week so I am going to count that towards the "run 5k every week" badge.

And I should get the most significant part of that if I just keep going.

It does also require signing up to a race. I think I can just run 10k cold now, so I probably should try that, and I may count that, but also aim to run an official race at some point.

I might be able to do a half marathon, but I want to do more "find a level I can sustain forever" rather than "work towards a particular event".

WILD SWIMMING

I have been swimming outside since may, roughly once a week. Quite a few in the lido, although the last few weeks all outside. If I do 3 months averaging once a week I will count that (as long as I don't cheekily skip the cold weeks).

This is so much easier when the summers are regularly over 20 degrees...

I do also have to do the other parts of the badge, buying and caring for a wetsuit etc. I feel like I've fulfilled a lot of the spirit of the badge by swimming outside regularly *without* a wetsuit, but I think it's fair to prepare for being able to swim out in autumn not only summer (or some other similar challenge).

I did 1.5mi swim in the Slow Swim and Picnic. I'd like to do a longer distance when I have a day free, even try 3mi, although need to find a stretch that long to swim.

BAKING

I've done a variety of the things. Some I already know but want to do since I started the badge. A few I need to try.

Rachel had been very satisfied with my making efforts :)

And Eclairs and Millefeuille are actually difficult and I will need to learn.

ALT-COOKING

I have been experimenting with cooking more things. I made up my own target of a certain number of different recipes and improvisations and variations. I need to actually try making some things to a recipe because I haven't done as many of that.

DIARY-ING

I am still keeping up my regular personal diary, I will automatically reach the duration target at some point.

I made some efforts to write more to the point, including specifics which might be meaningful later and leaving out things that I wanted to get off my chest but would be too vague to mean anything when read. I'm not sure if I have a target there other than keeping trying.

I made similar efforts to post more to the point on facebook and dreamwidth.

There's a few other similar badges like daily habits and daily gratitude I've tried to build up a habit for but haven't quite got there. I've got some habits but none quite every day.

EXPLORER

I can't remember what this needed. I've done plenty and plenty of walking! But I also need one decent challenge.

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