John Gray at The New Statesman: There were “many Jesuses, many Christs – many of them unimaginably strange to us today” – alongside other magi who resembled some of these Christs. Sometimes Jesus had a physical body; at others he was an ...
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3 Quarks Daily - 5 new articles

Brain & Transformers Work The Same Way

     
 


Western Christianity Triumphed Not By Destiny But Accident

John Gray at The New Statesman:

There were “many Jesuses, many Christs – many of them unimaginably strange to us today” – alongside other magi who resembled some of these Christs. Sometimes Jesus had a physical body; at others he was an apparition that left no footprints. There was a Jesus who warned his disciples against “filthy intercourse” and instructed them never to have children. In one account, an angry young Jesus curses a small boy, who becomes withered and deformed; later Jesus curses another boy, who falls down dead. There were Jesuses that hung in agony on the cross, and others who suffered no pain. In addition to diverse Jesuses, there was Apollonius, a first-century Greek philosopher and miracle-worker, sometimes called “the pagan Christ”.

Much of Nixey’s case rests on the revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Bible contains only four gospels, which gave us the received image of Jesus. But there were many others, with titles such as the “Gospel of Thomas” and the “Gospel of Truth”, discovered between 1946 and 1956 in the Qumran Caves on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea.

more here.

     
 


In Conversation with Catherine Nixey | The Darkening Age

     
 


How asset managers came to own everything and you failed to notice

Mark Blyth and Brett Christophers discuss:

     
 


Recursion builds bridges between ideas from across different math classes and illustrates the power of creative mathematical thinking

Patrick Honner in Quanta:

Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place?

This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a math teacher, I love it because there are so many different ways you can arrive at the solution, and the diversity and interconnectedness of those strategies beautifully illustrate the power of creative thinking in math.

One solution goes like this: Start with each person shaking every other person’s hand. Ten people, with nine handshakes each, produce 9 × 10 = 90 total handshakes. But this counts every handshake twice — once from each shaker’s perspective — so the actual number of handshakes is 902=45. A simple and lovely counting argument for the win!

There’s also a completely different way to solve the problem.

More here.

     
 


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