Cadaeic

        Cadaeic

 

          A “cadaeic” is a mnemonic for the number pi. “Cadaeic” itself is a cadaeic, if you use the letter-code A=1, B=2, and so on; then ‘cadaeic’ spells out 3-1-4-1-5-9-3; whereas pi’s expansion is 3.1415926…; so cadaeic is good to seven places if you round to the nearest digit.

          Most cadaeics use word-length coding, for instance:

          “How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.”

          Counting out word lengths, that’s 3-1-4-1-5-9-2-6-5-3-5-8-9-7-9; pi to fifteen digits. Here are others, some submitted by my Trigonometry students:

 

          How I, even I, adore campfires in August, while the bears scavenge.

 

          “Can I have a merry Christmas at Santa’s house?” she asked.

 

          Pie, I want a piece, blueberry or cherry peach pie helps maniacal cipherers conjure fantasies for an apt mnemonic that brings to faulty mind all the thougts for an apropos, memorable image.

 

          “Hah!”  I roar. “I never calculate pi, having known the shady, half-cute, contrived antique mnemonics!”

 

          Now I need a super difficult pi puzzle, afore our human capacity retaining numbers dissolves and we get mnemonic work.

          Can I have a small container of coffee? These are tough concepts, demanding nightly examining for me.

 

          Now I, with a small packhorse

          Go toward those low hills

          Constant beckoning

          Driving endlessly

          For in the distance

          Days beyond my memory

          Lies the one sleeping eye.

         

          Now I will a rhyme construct

          By chosen words the young instruct

Cunningly devised endeavor

Con it and remember ever

Widths of circles here you see

Sketched out in strange obscurity.

 

Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
in mystic truth and magic spelling;
Numerical sprites elucidate
and to the circular form relate;
If Nature gain, who can complain
yet my critics fulminate. Finis.

 

            Here are some e mnemonics:

 

 

            To compute a quantity to multiply, a treasure to increase, just apply exponents.

 

It enables a numskull to memorize a quantity of numerals.

To destroy a building we detonate a quantity of hydrogen bombs.

I’m forming a mnemonic to memorize a function in analysis.

In Florida, a kangaroo is escaping a teenager by bounding over gates.

We wrecked a building on Thursday, a hospital on Saturday, with eight engineers.

He repeats; I shouldn’t be tippling, I shouldn’t be toppling here!

He laughed, I screamed. We embraced a paradise of squeezes. ‘Twas love’s grandiose remarkable gift, silly to die madly for people. Faithfully be juvenile, embrace with passion. I was crazy to forget, stupid to fall, weakening quickly, holding love’s embrace.

 

On Creative Defeat

           On Creative Defeat

      Or, Three Little Words

 

 

          There comes a moment in any married man’s life when he learns – or is carefully taught – a strange magic spell which, when properly used, turns night into day, storms into rainbows, and misery into joy. Unmarried men will scoff, but I am not exaggerating in the least.

          You learn this incantation, as you do all true magic, in the midst of crisis. You and your spouse have reached an impasse, and the pressure and heat is rising. At the verge of mutual defeat, you suddenly experience an instant of searing insight, and a joyous recognition of the perfect solution. Thus spiritually prepared (for only thus can one even utter the spell) you speak three little words.

          Three little words, and that’s enough. The quarrel ends,  and all is peace and joy. And what are these three little words?

          “I love you,” perhaps?  So think unmarried men and other romanticists! No, any married person of experience knows full well that the Three Magic Words are:

          “You are right!”

         

 

Coping Strategy

          Coping Strategy

 

          I have given up on immortality and will settle for reproducibility.

A Philosophical Disagreement

          A Philosophical Disagreement

 

           I was at the gas station, paying for a tankful of gasoline, when Gina, the owner, asked me how my wife Sherri is. I said, “Well enough,” and then added that ‘well enough’ is my stock answer to how-are-you.

          Gina, as ever an optimistic extravert, said, “You can do better than that. If you say ‘I feel fantastic’ all day, then by the end of the day you’ll feel fantastic.”

          I, as ever an introverted pessimist, replied, “Ohh no no no no no, that’s not how my so-called mind works. If I say I feel fantastic all day then by the end of the day I’ll feel awful for not feeling fantastic!”

 

 

Sunblocks Ranked

         From the Annals of “The National Liar”:

       Sunblocks Ranked

 

 

          Ranking types of sunblock, in increasing order of effectiveness:

 

          rating 0:  A bottle full of chemical goop.

          rating 1:  loose-fitting, cool, all-covering clothes

          rating 2:  shade tree or shade forest

          rating 3:  overcast weather

          rating 4:  a floor, 4 walls, and a ceiling

          rating 5:  winter

          rating 6:  night

 

 

Mome Declares Himself Fallible

Mome Declares Himself Fallible

 

 

          Nome, Alaska  -  In a surprise announcement yesterday, J.R.”Bob” Dobbs, Mome of the Noman Particular Church, proclaimed the doctrine of Momal Fallibility.

          “What, me infallible?” the Mome snarked. “Of course Momes can make mistakes. In fact we’ve made some big ones. Just judge for yourself.”

          Sources high in the Noman Particular Church said that they adopted this doctrine because they needed more wiggle room. “We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. It’s high time we ‘fessed up,” said Ordinal Maustinger, the Mome’s most trusted advisor. “His Holiness has made a bad call lately, and he needs a face-saving way to back out of the mess.”

          The ‘bad call’ referred to is the infamous Elvis Clone debacle. “His Holiness sure dropped the ball there,” Maustinger confided. “We never made sure that that hanky was really one of Elvis’s; or if the genetic material found there was his; or even how that genetic material got there in the first place. But ‘Bob’ insisted on cloning, so we went ahead; after all, he’s the Mome. And the result? Well, let’s just say that the clone we grew didn’t see things our way. Put it all together, and it spells M-I-S-T-A-K-E.”

          “I am a man, mortal and therefore sinful,” the Mome confessed to the world. “I say I am fallible, and I say so ex cathedra. My judgement is not perfect; to claim otherwise is the sin of intellectual pride. Only God is free from all error – and sometimes I wonder about Him.”

 

         

"Alternate Jesus"

      Review of Imaginary Book:

     “Alternate Jesus”

 

 

          Every so often there comes along a book which shakes the world. Such books incite revolutions, topple empires, destroy religions, spread mass insanity, and spark genocidal wars. Fortunately, “Alternate Jesus” is not such a book.

          In “Alternate Jesus”, the author asks, what if Jesus of Nazareth had never been crucified?  How would history have been different? The author gives us two answers; two “alternate worlds” in which Jesus lived. Unfortunately, only one of those answers is convincing to this reviewer.

          The book has two parts: “In This Sign Conquer”, and “What is Truth?” In Part One, Jesus seizes control of his environment by secular means; in Part Two, Jesus takes a more spiritual approach. Part One is all too convincing, for its message is “power corrupts”. Part Two is mystical, not dramatic. It teaches that “truth shall set you free”, but it deliberately does not tell us what truth is.

          “In This Sign Conquer” starts in the city of Rome, where King Jesus had just successfully concluded his Crusade Against Empire. With the defeated Roman Empire at the mercy of his Zealots, he proclaims himself Prophet, Messiah, and God-Emperor of the World. “That was his high point,” the chronicler wryly comments. We then see Emperor Jesus play out, within his reign, the entire history of the medieval Church, including censorship, repression, fanaticism, fraud, corruption, witch-hunts, wars and genocides. It ends with Emperor Jesus’s death and the collapse of his tyrannical theocracy.

          “What is Truth?” shows Jesus as an old man, teaching Torah to his students – among whom we find the Roman Ambassador to Judea. The story is a dialog between the old Rabbi and his students, friends and rivals; they ask each other what truth is. In a style similar to Plato’s dialogs, Jesus draws from all participants their own ideas as to the nature of truth; and in return the students draw out his own views. This part of the book is lyrical, philosophical and mystical – and for those reasons lacks the spectacular drama of Part One.

          The book, as a whole, lacks balance. “In This Sign Conquer” is a critique of the historic Christian Church; and as such, all too effective. After such an indictment one would expect praise of equal power, but “What is Truth?” seems thin in comparison. It is more for poets, priests and philosophers than for the rest of us.

          The difficulty is partly due to the nature of the subject. It is easy to write political protest for the masses, but far less easy to present ecstatic mystical liberation theology in terms that relate to the average reader’s everyday life. Neither Dante nor Milton could describe their Heavens as vividly as their Hells. This difficulty is compounded in a secular age such as ours.

          Another difficulty is due to the nature of history. “Alternate Jesus” is an alternate-worlds story, subject to the epistemological limits of such a narrative. We of this world-line can visualize the world-line of “In This Sign Conquer” because it is a lesser line than ours; it contains less information. The opposite is true for the world-line of “What is Truth?”; it is a greater world than our own, one of higher content, and for this reason we cannot know it fully.

          God-emperors have risen and fallen many times; there is nothing new in that old story. But in our world, Jesus died young, so we do not know what he would have taught, had he lived to old age. For this reason, “What is Truth?” falls short; it ends with mystery; one must fill in details for oneself. It ends with silence, as “In This Sign Conquer” ends with noise; and in both cases we see reflected the tragedy of our own world-line’s Jesus, who died before he could tell us all that he had to say.