Search This Blog

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

numbers and the holy spirit

Oh no, thirteen months will never do, they don't divide easily into seasons. and you can't print them out in a three by four pattern for a one page calendar, and there is that luck thing,  Who wants a whole year of bad luck?  It may be well and fine for Sunday to always be on the 1, 8, 15 etc, though a bit too ordered for my free-flying nature, but this would mean that every 13th would fall on a Friday,  It would be a world of black cats and everywhere you had to go there would be an open ladder between you and it, and when you looked down the ground would be covered with shards of broken mirrors.  This would never do.

And of course thirteen is a perfectly fine prime number, before it we have three which is the trinity, and five which seems a little secular but is right there between 0 and 10 holding a convenient place, and of course seven is magnificent in so many ways.  Okay eleven gets a bit of a short shrift standing in the shadow of ten the way it does, and after it seventeen has a good rep, nineteen again that shadow thing with twenty.  After that twenty-three and twenty-nine don't get much notice.  Thirty-one is a personal favorite of mine, but that's probably just me.  After that it gets pretty bland, but none of them are reviled like thirteen.

Well it's that Judas Iscariot thing I assumed, but wait a minute weren't there twelve of them? So was he or wasn't he?  A little internet research revealed that that is one whole can of worms.  Even the Catholics who are normally so sure of that stuff, and very orderly even to the point of making up early popes, were all sort of well it depends on this and that.

We use those Nordic week names because we got them from the English, who got it from the Fisians.  The Arabs and some other people use a lunar calendar, sure it means that the seasons wander through the months over the years, but so what, you are right with the moon.  I don't know if the month begins with the new or the full moon, but I reckon if you know the date you know what the moon is going to look like.


I believe the error in units resulted in one of those satellite telescopes being myopic, or maybe they put the lens in backwards, no, it was the units.  All those guys with all the pens in their protectors are smart as whips but sometimes a clown with a wrench fucks it all up.

I suppose the milles and the centis and the decis and the kilos and all don't have the warmth of jolly old inches and feet and miles, but try to figure out how many five and a half inch discs it will take to line the road from here to Mandalay, and this comes up more often than you think it would, see already it has come up once, and see if you would rather use English or metric.  I have to admit though that I have worried about what would happen to the six pack if the metricanatrixes took over.  Speaking of which isn't that a half dozen, doesn't yellow beer, and sometimes even IPAs, come in twelve packs?  There's my buddy the dozen again.

I was a little taken aback by base 8 in computer science, I didn't  remember it,but it seemed mildly familiar and I decided to let it pass, but in the process I missed the mention of base 16. Sorry Old Dog.

But I don't know about this ternary system Old Dog speaks of.  A true ternary would be 0,1,2,10,11,12,20 etc.  And how does a negative number get into it?  And why are there only three options, sounds more like a triad, make that a trinity.  The Father would be zero, because of the close relation between zero and infinity, and one would be the Son, because that rhymes with one, and everybody is always saying He is the One, and negative one would be the holy ghost because of that eerie thing.

No comments:

Post a Comment