AfterMath

A scrap of papyrus dated about 250 AD from the Gospel of John.

In another life I would have been either a paleontologist or an Egyptologist. As it is, I have to settle for reading books on those subjects in the years I have left. The one I'm into now is Brent Nongbri's excellent 2018 book God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. It's a treasure trove of information detailing how, where and when New Testament scholars obtained the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, the Book of Acts and Revelation. While not a scholarly text, it's not an easy read due to the wealth of detailed information it contains.

As opposed to what many American Christians might believe, the New Testament did not drop down from Heaven in its various modern English editions, but had to be pieced together by dedicated collectors and scholars from ancient Greek and Coptic papyrus and codex forms, nearly all of which are fragmentary and in poor condition. We should be grateful to have what we have today, as much ancient material was either destroyed or dissembled by ignorant or unscrupulous people. It is frustrating to read that many finds were burned for cooking purposes or destroyed outright due to religious reasons. Many others were deliberately broken up to sell piecemeal on the antiquities market for more money.

It's interesting to note that ancient texts were made using crude handmade inks on either papyrus (an early form of paper made from the papyrus reed) or parchment or vellum (scraped animal skins). The papyrus texts were usually in scroll form, while the codices were like today's books.

Nongbri's book will probably be of interest only to Christian bibliophiles (like me), but it's worth checking out.

In Trump's America, where education, knowledge and reason are being decimated, there are still a few people who celebrate \(\pi\) Day. That's today, as if you have to be told that March 14 is 3.14, a decent approximation of the transcendental number \(\pi = 3.14159265\ldots\).

Some 2,500 years ago the brilliant Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzi calculated the number to be 355/113, which is \(\pi\) accurate to 6 decimals. What I find remarkable about this number is that it represents the double ratio of the first three odd numbers 113355. Today \(\pi\) is known to 105 trillion decimal places.

There's another amazing mathematical identity in which 3.14 is also PIE:

However, this only works in English, since in German it's Torte and pastel in Spanish.

Meanwhile, only a Red State would try to define \(\pi\) as 3.2

I was awakened around 3:00 am this morning by torrential rain and wind, which pounded my house and shook the windows for about 15 minutes, then subsided. We still need the rain, but the wind we can do without, considering the catastrophic wind- and firestorm that took place in the area in January.

But nearby Pico Rivera (a scant 15 miles from my house) had it worse: heavy rain and wind along with a tornado, very rare for Southern California.

I would say it's all due to climate change, but I fear the Trump police knocking down my door and dragging me away.

The wind- and firestorm that hit Altadena, California in early January left its mark, with some 9,000 homes and other structures burned to the ground and 17 lives lost. The state's governor came by a few weeks ago, promising relief. It's underway, thankfully, but it will take years for the area to recover.

I was born in one of the hardest hit areas (Glenrose Avenue), where my family was then living in a converted chicken coup in the back of the main house after moving to California from Missouri (in July 1949, six months after I was born, my parents bought a house in nearby Duarte, where I grew up).

I drove by the Altadena place this morning, wondering if the house had survived. Somehow it did, but most of the surrounding homes did not. Here's one just a few doors down, typical of the complete destruction that visited the area:

After getting married in 1977 we bought a house in nearby Pasadena, about 5 miles away. I had to evacuate in the early morning of January 8 due to the encroaching fire, but my house was okay. I cannot thank the firemen, police and volunteers enough for their bravery, dedication and hard work.

California's wildfires, winds, earthquakes, traffic and ridiculously high cost of living are bad enough, but I fear home insurance costs are now going to go through the roof.

Paradise it ain't (and never was). Sometimes I wish my parents had stayed in Missouri.

You may remember the horrific scene in the chilling 1993 Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List in which Nazi slave camp Oberführer Amon Goeth (played by Ralph Fiennes), perched in his apartment above the work area, routinely scans the Jewish men, women and children workers below, looking for "slackers." Upon spotting them, he takes out his sniper rifle and shoots them.

The film is not only chilling (to this day, I cannot watch the film) but prescient.

Today, President Donald Trump announced that he wants to take over the United States Postal Office, as he believes that the agency's workers include a lot of slackers whose work is also being made unnecessary by online mail and purchasing houses like Amazon. The USPS is not a federal agency, but it is under the purview of the Executive Office, making it subject to Trump's whims. In the first month of office, Trump has gone after the federal work force itself, whose millions of workers Trump also views as slackers. More recently, he fired the head of the Pentagon and is now in the process of getting rid of 5,400 Pentagon workers. He is also purging leaders at the U.S. Army and Navy, who he feels did not give him sufficient support during the 2024 presidential election.

Who's next on Trump's chopping block? It will likely be the Environmental Protection Agency, the Social Security Administration and Medicare/Medicaid. And Blue States like California and New York can expect Trump to deny disaster aid when the next round of wildfires, hurricanes and floods arrives.

Did you know that Presidents Obama and Biden made one big mistake? It was not closing Guantánamo Prison, where Trump has sent the first batch of 200 migrants to be incarcerated without being charged with a crime and without trial or attorney. Expect that number to increase dramatically, as Trump sees 12 million undocumented aliens in America to be disposed of.

As tens of thousands of jobs are cut, American voters are slowly but belatedly coming ot realize that Trump is a monster whose sole aim is to acquire unstoppable Nazi-like power. He views ordinary Americans as chattel to be eliminated from "his" country, sparing only his incredibly stupid and ignorant MAGA base (which he will also ultimately betray).

By eliminating military officers he views as dangerously unloyal to his game plan, Trump will eventually create his own military force similar to Germany's SS and Einsatzgruppen, with a personal protection team similar to the Gestapo.

Trump's MAGA base will never wake up, and his more moderate supporters are afraid he'll turn on them as well. I fear America's only hope now is for an emboldened military to remove him and his administration from power while there is still time.

Either that, or the Second Advent of Jesus Christ.

We can now create compelling experiences of talking with our dead. Is this ghoulish, therapeutic or something else again?

I was devastated when my wife passed away in 2019. I underwent two years of grief therapy and began taking antidepressants, all of which only helped to a limited extent. But then I had to start going through all her stuff and the things we had accumulated over our 42 years together, and that's a process I'm still struggling with. The problem stems from the fact that my wife, who was something of a packrat, saved everything—theater ticket stubs, grocery lists, our kids' homework, shopping receipts, handwritten Bible notes—everything. That was difficult enough for me to deal with, as I had to toss much of it. But then there's the stuff I cannot throw away: over a hundred camcorder videos, some 500 audio tapes that she made recording telephone calls and conversations with me and the kids, and perhaps 10,000 family photos, all collected helter-skelter in numerous boxes kept in our house, garage and shed.

Fearing magnetic tape degradation, I bought some equipment and transferred all of the video tapes to digital format, resulting in some 150 hours of video. I've only just begun converting the audio tapes, making notes of what's on each one (made difficult because many of her conversations are in Arabic). Even today, going on six years since she died, I often break down in tears watching and hearing my wife in days gone by.

What I'm leading up to in all this is that with the advent of advanced digital image and voice recognition/duplication software and artificial intelligence (AI), programmers now have the ability to resurrect the dead to a great extent. This is detailed in a new Aeon article, which also discusses the pros and cons of moving ahead with this technology. The article mentions an episode of the interesting but often disturbing British series Black Mirror entitled Be Right Back, in which a grieving widow purchases a clone of her deceased husband.

I initially thought AI would be disastrous for the human race, because in an age of disinformation it might be misused for political purposes. But I also believed it would make for interesting new forms of entertainment, such as a digitally resurrected Humphrey Bogart in a sequel to 1942's Casablanca. [The downside is that film creation and production would be reduced to the work of a handful of programmers assisted by AI-generated scripts (thereby eliminating 99% of production costs), but also leading to massive job loss while entailing many legal and copyright issues, such as who "owns" the characters.]

As for the article's topic of artificially recovering lost loved ones, I believe it would be psychologically devastating. With years of computer programming experience, I gave a brief thought to the idea of bringing my wife back in some way with the tools available, but almost immediately I knew it would destroy what's left of my aging mind. As a Christian, I am relying instead on the hope that I will see my real wife again in Heaven.

Science keeps coming up with amazing new discoveries, like the recent LIGO observation of a supernova event in which gravitational waves, neutrinos and gamma rays (light) were all seen together for the first time, expanding the new science of gravitational astronomy to a new level.

Unfortunately, the researchers also determined that the event occurred some 1.1 billion years ago, in concurrence with the 13.8 billion-year age of the universe but in disagreement with the belief of biblical creationists that the universe is only 6,000 years old. When Trump Administration officials get word of what science continues to tell us, they may decide to shut down LIGO and similar facilities for fear that their conservative young-Earth supporters will get angry.

A little background: By tracing the genealogies of the Old Testament, in 1650 the Irish Archbishop James Ussher determined that God created the universe on October 22, 4004 BC, around 6:00 pm. He did not specify in which time zone it occurred.

Up to now, young-Earth creationists have had to rely on the unquestioning belief of their adherents that the Bible is the only truth, regardless of what science says. Occasionally, they were able to use a little science on their side, like the recent discovery of soft tissue material in a (supposedly) 70 million-year-old Edmontosaur skeleton. Creationists have decided that this discovery confirms that dinosaurs cannot be more than 6,000 years old.

In only a little more than a month in office, President Trump has shut down many science facilities and programs, leading to the elimination of thousands of positions. And this is only the start: the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), lead by uber-billionaire Elon Musk, is looking into all manner of government-financed scientific, social and domestic programs to cut, supposedly to save taxpayer dollars but actually intended to give its rich backers another source of wealth. DOGE is especially focussing on eliminating what it sees as liberal-biased programs like the National Science Foundation, PBS, 60 Minutes and National Public Radio. Already, once somewhat liberal outlets like the New York Times and even National Geographic have swung to the right in support of more conservative views. Even Amazon.com, owned by giga-billionaire Jeff Bezos, is showing the same signs.

I recall being shocked reading the prescient 2016 book The War on Science—Who's Waging It, Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It. Now Trump is bringing a whole new meaning to what the war on science has become. (I bought the book from Amazon in the year before Trump first won the presidency. Now it's now even listed on the site.)

You might remember the word "truthiness" when it was first coined by comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005. He was referring to the lack of veracity in the policies of then-President George Bush, and his administration's lies involving its justification for the disastrous Iraq War. Now we are living in a country where truth, transparency and accountability no longer exist.

And it seems Americans still could not care less. When will I learn?

Georgia Representative Earl "Buddy" Carter has introduced H.R. Bill 1161 authorizing President Trump to acquire Greenland and rename it as "Red, White and Blueland":

I wonder how Trump might actually acquire Greenland, which he resolutely intends to do. It belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, which has firmly stated that it is not for sale. Perhaps he'll make Greenland's Prime Minister Múte Bourup Egede an offer he can't refuse. With a total population of under 60,000 people, he couldn't offer much resistance to a relatively small force of U.S. troops, or a few cruise missiles.

Trump has also indicated that America has a "right" to acquire Gaza, but only after its 2 million Palestinians are removed. Trump wants those residents to be relocated to nearby Egypt and Jordan, whose leaders have resolutely stated that they will not accept them. Regardless of how this is resolved, Gaza is now a bombed-out wasteland, thanks to the stupidity of the Hamas leadership that instituted the atrocity of October 7, 2023. Israel obliged by reducing Gaza to a trash heap and killing nearly 50,000 Palestinian civilians. But once rebuilt at a cost of perhaps $1 trillion, Trump could turn Gaza into a high-priced seaside resort for the wealthy.

As far as Israel is concerned, that leaves only the Palestinians living in the West Bank. Trump's Gaza deal might include a provision to remove them as well, although with a population of nearly 3 million people that will be a tall order. However, the nearby desolate Negev Desert should be adequate to house all 5 million displaced Palestinians, although it too is part of Israel, so a suitable rental fee or tribute system would have to be set up to reimburse the Negev's Israeli owners.

My goal of posting this is really a plea to America's Christians to open they eyes to the evil that Trump is attempting to do in the world, by military force if necessary. For the sake of God, open your eyes.

It has been three months since I said goodbye to this website, which I announced right after Donald Trump secured the 2024 presidential race. But since then I've received many emails (well, only a few dozen) from readers telling me to maintain it. More important to me, though, was the realization of how much work I've put into the site since I began it in late 2004 and the countless scientific articles, family and personal remembrances, and political and religious posts the site has hosted over the past 20 years.

But I have several problems, now that I'm living in Naziland. One, posting anti-Trump material is likely to be ineffectual on one hand and personally hazardous on the other. In addition, the status of unbiased science in America is not only being threatened by the Trump administration but also by the ongoing years-long spate of garbage being promoted as scientific research. In short, I've lost interest in a lot of the stuff that motivated me for nearly 50 years.

Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl and literally hundreds of German scientists left Germany in the 1930s following that country's takeover by the Nazis (you know, the nation that gave the world the great minds of Hahn, Meitner, Bayer, Haber, Born, Heisenberg, Noether and Kepler, along with philosophers like Kant, Leibniz, Schiller, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein). In a very real sense, Einstein and his close colleagues were lucky, as they had places to run to. In today's world, no one wants Americans—celebrated or otherwise—because Trump has made our particular nationality something to despise and keep away. Just ask Canada.

As for what direction this site goes now, I have no idea. I'm working on it.