Traveling on the way

In The Great Divorce Lewis had a ghost say and be answered: "'to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.' 'If that were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for.'"

Which makes perfect sense.

And you know the way where I am going.” Thomas said to Him, “Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.

A little different: here the Way is also the Destination; the Trinity.

An older man's take on the song

I heard "Castles in the Air" along with everybody else back in the day. It struck me at the time was that the singer was a coward. Aside from that, the notion that the "cocktail generation" lived in an emotional desert didn't seem odd--it was in the air, and perhaps even overkill. Nobody I knew was into that kind of social climbing. It wasn't fashionable; easy to disdain. Mountains and forests cool, big city yuck.

I ran across the song today and the cowardice of it fairly screams now, and ... wait a minute, can we hear her side of this? McLean had some issues with wives; maybe there's some connection.

Maybe the sensuous nature of music makes it easier to just take the singer's word for what's going on.

Rise and fall of the key ring

When I was quite young, I typically never even carried a key to the house. Either someone was home already, or I'd stop at a neighbor's house, or just play outside until somebody showed up.

In Africa, it was pretty much the same. Sometimes I'd have one of those old round keys, but usually not.

In the States I had a dorm room key that I just kept in my pocket. In grad school, that turned into keys for the office, car, and apartment, on a ring in my pocket.

That's not the best way to carry a key ring, and I found myself sewing up holes in the pocket. My usual warning was feeling something falling down inside my pants--usually dimes. Sometimes (confession here) if I was in a hurry, I just used a stapler to fix the pocket. Yeah--don't do that. It works for a week or two, and then the holes get bigger.

At work I needed building, office, library, lab room keys, as well as 2 locks for home, and car keys. And a few additionals--bike lock, etc. I got a belt clip and hung keys off that.

More responsibilities, more keys. Not so many as the janitor or our chief engineer/building manager, but heavy enough.

Then I learned that hanging that much weight on a car's ignition switch could, and in my case did, loosen something in the lock mechanism that would keep it from turning. Car keys went on a carabiner that hung from the main key ring.

When I started traveling overseas for work, I divided the keys into personal and work rings, and hung one from the other, taking off car and work rings when I traveled.

Yes, it was messy, but my fingers learned where to go. And I generally left the work key ring in the drawer at work.

Retirement removed the work keys.

Dropping to one car removed one key from the carabiner, though I still carried a lockout key for some of the son's and daughter's cars.

And now the carabiner and car keys go on the dresser top. The belt clip's ring feels a bit naked without the extra dangly part. But the chemo and associated meds leave me too drowsy to safely drive.

I can probably safely remove another 3 keys from the remaining ring too.

There's a history in the keys in the dish too, if I could remember which was which anymore.

Intelligence

Hiroo Onoda came to my attention again today. He was the Japanese soldier who held out for 29 years after the war's end. He was celebrated in Japan on his return, though not so much in the Philippines, where he may have killed 30 civilians over the years.

He and the others (who eventually died/surrendered) rejected the leaflets and even letters from the soldiers' families (!!) as tricks. A "Japanese adventurer" found him, and arranged for his former commander to order his surrender.

Onoda had been trained as an intelligence officer.

Go figure.

Live in Concert

The billboard advertised a performer I'd never heard of, but that headline brought something else to mind first.

"make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose."

Primitive or not?

Cisplatin uses a heavy metal (platinum) to differentially kill more cancer cells than normal ones. Even taking care with the dosage and ameliorations, the heavy metal poisoning inevitably does damage to the body (e.g. kidneys, nerves, etc).

That might sound familiar. Paracelsus proposed mercury to deal with syphilis, for humor theory (and magical) reasons. (Inducing diuresis and salivation would excrete whatever mis-humor was causing the disease.) Of course the treatment killed quite a few patients and crippled many more. They kept on using it, though. Why?

Some patients, would "spontaneously recover" from the primary and secondary lesions. This could be attributed to whatever treatment was used (yay mercury! yay guiac wood!). And mercury ointment could aid healing of lesions. And it turns out that mercury is "strongly spirilocidal," so it could cure--provided it didn't kill.

If bismuth hadn't been developed for use, and penicillin not found, I wonder if we'd still be using mercury for the disease--presumably much more carefully calibrated. Heavy metal chemotherapy for a deadly disease...

Trade-offs

On one of AVI's posts I commented: "How many IQ points are we willing to trade for a 30% better shot at getting rid of a cancer?"

I pulled the 30% number out of the air; for some cancers adding chemo to radiation gives a factor of 2 improvement.

Typically I've assumed my "value-added" to a conversation lay in "knowledge/analytical skill/sideways take/humor", but what if that's not always so?

I have it on good authority that other qualities are sometimes more valued.

Learn something new every day

I lived there for some time, but never realized(*) that Liberia grew its own coffee variety: "quite different (and somewhat superior) in every way compared to other species, including Arabica and Robusta". It's a bit rarer and pricier, and has a "more complex flavor profile with distinct fruity and floral notes."

The main growers are now Malaysia and the Philippines, not Liberia.

---

(*)Of course I hadn't acquired a taste for coffee then. Nor have I now, though if there's nothing else to drink or I need to stay awake ...

Medical technology

They warn you that an MRI makes very strange and loud noises. That's ignorable.

Your body position is a bit cramped. For half an hour, that's OK.

They warn that it's a tight space, and not for claustrophobes. Close your eyes to keep the lasers out, and you won't notice a thing.

The personalized mask tries to clamp your head into position, pushing on the base of your nose. That gets old in seconds. I don't know about other people, but I felt like I had to be proactive about breathing through the thing; it didn't feel natural or easy.

No surprises, which was good.

At the end of the Exodus

At Bible study this morning, the teacher noted that during the exodus, the Israelites had been eating manna, and at the end they are starting to see fruit. Maybe not the first time, but they'd have had to trade for it before, and the description in Exodus doesn't describe a lot of opportunities for trade. What would the land's bounty have looked like to them?

Once they got into the land, what were they to do with it? Herding they knew. Planting and harvesting--more theory than practice. Whatever their grandparents may have taught them wouldn't be entirely relevant to the new environment, which had different landscapes, different watering, and different crops.

Though the book of Joshua talks of expelling all the existing inhabitants of the land, that's clearly not what happened, as seen in Joshua and Judges and Samuel. So it's a safe bet that the Israelites learned from the locals how to plant and harvest. And what sacrifices you needed to make.

Scarlet or white ribbon?

Youtube tossed up at me a video claiming that the Talmud recorded a change in the scapegoat ritual at the Temple at about 30AD. I didn't watch the video; typically there's little addressing of ambiguities in such things.

The ritual of the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement is probably, if not familiar, at least known, to anybody who has read Leviticus. As part of it, the priest took two goats, cast lots for them. One was sacrificed, and the other driven into the wilderness.

The Talmud and Mishnah and Epistle of Barnabas and Tertullian mention a couple of modifications, not spelled out in Leviticus.

A red ribbon was divided, part tied around the scapegoat, and part {retained in the temple/tied to a rock near the cliff}. The scapegoat was then {driven out of the city/taken to a cliff and pushed off}. I suppose that as the area grew more populated, wilderness as such got to be harder to come by. Whichever, when the scapegoat died, the retained part turned white, presumably representing the purification of sins per Isaiah 1:18.

I hadn't run across that before. From the Palesinian Talmud:

During all those days that Shim‘on the righteous was alive, the scarlet ribbon would [always] turn white (malbin). After Shim‘on the Righteous died—at times it would turn white (malbin) and at times it would turn red (ma’adim).

Shim'on the Righteous was "a semi-mythical high priest whose period of activity is roughly dated to the third century BCE and who serves in rabbinic literature as the ultimate embodiment of a forlorn golden age"

The Babylonian Talmud is similar; except that instead of sometimes turning red it sometimes "did not turn white."

It should be noted that in another tractate of the Babylonian Talmud (Rosh HaShanah 31b) the same passage appears with somewhat different wording: “Forty years before the Temple was destroyed the scarlet ribbon would not turn white, but would turn red

A slightly different citation, from the Babylonian Talmud:

It was taught: Forty years before the Temple was destroyed the [flame] of the western candle would die down, and the scarlet ribbon would turn red (ma’adim), and the lot [with the Name] would come up in the left [hand], and they would lock the doors of the Temple hall in the evening and rise in the morning and find them open. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai said to it: Temple, why are you frightening us? We know that you are destined to be destroyed,

Taken by itself the latter passage's symbolic connection to Jesus is obvious: temple isn't needed anymore. But the presence of the other references makes it ambiguous.

FWIW, The Torah.com notes a number of pagan uses of red thread and scapegoat-like ceremonies (e.g. "Now, any evil of this camp that has been found in person, cattle, sheep, horses, wild asses, or donkeys—right now, here, these rams and the woman have removed it from the camp. Whoever finds them, may that population take this evil plague for itself.")

I draw no conclusions from this, except that even things that seem to be clearly prescribed may have unexpected accretions.

A heads-up about Multi-Factor-Authentication

You can still be phished.

The malicious link leads to the attacker’s proxy server that, thanks to the phishing-as-a-service toolkit, looks identical to the real Google login site (except for the URL displayed in the address window). The user then enters their username and password.

The proxy then forwards the credentials to the real Google site. Google will then send the proxy server an MFA request, and the proxy server sends it back to the victim, who is expecting it since they believe they’re trying to log into the legitimate Google page. The victim then sends the MFA code to the proxy server, which sends it to the real Google site.