One of the ingredients is "Malted Barely Flour." OK...
The label says a loaf provides 17 serving sizes. Loaves consistently have 15 slices of bread, including the heels.
The loaf is listed as 1 lb. The kitchen scale says 1 lb 3 oz.
I'm not complaining, but has anybody looked at what they are advertising on their label?
Anyhow, the nutrition scaling factor is 1.34.
Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.” 28 Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” 29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” 30 So they said to Him, “What then do You do for a sign, so that we may see, and believe You? What work do You perform? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’”
"What then do You do for a sign?" In light of what happened just the day before, that's an odd question. "Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness" Hint hint hint.
"You just gave us ordinary bread and fish. We want a jazzier miracle."
But it is very interesting that a) the Chinese see benefits in charity which they didn't a few years ago or b) the Chinese government sees benefits in appearing to be charitable. Or perhaps both.
Hmm. I'm not fond of jello numbers. Alliance says 73% of Pakistanis donate money and 16% volunteer while 42% say "they are unable to donate to charitable causes due to financial constraints." Maybe they give to their neighbors (as required by Islam) and don't consider that "charitable cause." The WGR says 51% give directly.
The WGR says 61% of the US population donate and 28% volunteer, and only 28% give directly to people in need. Nigeria has 89% donating, 69% doing so directly, and has 76% volunteering.
The "UK ranked 64th most generous country".
I'm not sure where the data for all this comes from, and what the denominators are (in Nigeria they use "working age people" for the volunteering rate), so I suspect some fuzziness and some apples to pears comparisons. But at some level, in most places, people are helping neighbors and even strangers.
Why Pakistan? It considers itself the "land of the pure", devoted to Islam; and one of the pillars of Islam is Zakat: alms giving. Apparently they take it fairly seriously: 1.64% of income (.75% directly) vs 0.97% (.26% directly) in the US.
One should revisit these things now and then, and not take the solution as "good for all time." There's a pair of buses now you can take to get to Aurora, the commuter trains run every hour until late, and the intercity bus leaves from close to Union Station, so you can skip the O'Hare link. Which is probably a good thing, especially when not at peak ridership times.
We visited an Illinois park with a little museum attached, which included a reconstruction of the interior of one of the cabins, with lots of original artifacts.
The cabin had been in use for a century, and undergone some expansion and remodeling and refinishing. Which snapshot do you use to represent its history?
With computerized displays alongside it (all the "cool kids" use them), why not all of them? Pick a year range and show what it looked like then. Maybe even animate them. If you wanted to be really wild you could let a camera take a picture of your face and have yourself among the avatars inhabiting the house. But a camera is one more thing to break, of course.
I'd think you could do this fairly inexpensively these days with the new AI drawing systems – I hear they've even starting getting the number of fingers right. It might help make it easier to understand that everybody had to start small, and simple, and rough. And a lot of the first changes were utilitarian.
When monotheism arrives, most of the sacred sites are swept away, and those that remain are, as it were, baptized into meaning as part of the monotheism. The landscape is cleaned and emptied, to some degree dis-enchanted, certainly somewhat exorcised.
If the monotheism fades, what new demons come to fill that now-empty space?
I'd bet that you couldn't use a Taylor series to calculate it – maybe locally, but nothing like the famous $1 + x/1 + x^2/2! + x^3/3! ...$.
Suppose you approximated it with longer and longer polynomials. Name the polynomial that fits the first $N$ primes ${}_{N}\Pi(x)$ (with ${}_{N}\Pi(k) = p_k$; the k'th prime, with k less or equal to $N$), and the coefficient of the $x^j$ term call ${}_{N}c_j$.<\p>
As $N$ increases, and the new polynomial fits more and more primes, do the coefficients converge? The first (the constant term of the polynomial) ${}_Nc_0$ is always $1$. How about the second ${}_Nc_1$ (coefficient of $x$) and third ${}_Nc_2$ (coefficient of $x^2$)? (By the construction of these, the polynomial to fit $N$ primes will only have $N+1$ coefficients.)
It won't come as a great surprise to see that they don't seem to converge. The polynomials resulting from fitting the first 30 primes gives this for the behavior of those two coefficients. They look like they're about to blow up.
But its not that simple. Expand the graph to include the first 50 polynomial second and third coefficients, and they switch directions and start to blow up the other way. You see that the deviation that looked so large in the plot above is invisibly small in the one below.
Not a big surprise – we didn't expect that the magic $\Pi(x)$ function to find all the primes was going to be simple to approximate. After all, the magic function has to be extremely "jumpy" and polynomials are nice and smooth. But the variation is certainly dramatic.
Of course this isn't entirely fair – trying to fit polynomials to points is famously ugly and unstable. But this is pretty dramatic.
UPDATE: If you were wondering if I was plotting round-off error, the answer is no. I did the calculations using pari/gp 2.13.3, and only turned the integer rational numbers into floating point at the printing step. If you are curious, I include the script below:
Top = 50
coeffs=matrix(Top, Top)
for(N=2, Top, \
target=primes(N) - vector(N, k, 1); \
arr = matrix(N, N, i, j, i^j); \
co = (1/arr)*target~; \
for(i=1, N, coeffs[N,i] = co[i];););
\\
for(i=1,Top,\
for(j=1, Top, print1(1.*coeffs[j,i],","););print(" ");)
I'd thought it was a Roman thing, but apparently he knew a bit of the local custom.
After mentally squirming a bit, I moved on to other tasks of the day -- and ran across "The dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Pittsburgh" shoplifted $1000 worth of baseball cards from Walmart.
In light of eternity many things we're fascinated with are foolish, but even by ordinary light: he's 42 and "Very Reverend"; is fascination with children's toys seemly?
"For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... but for Wales!"
Perhaps the "hunger and thirst for righteousness" is really very common, but we go hunting for it in the wrong places: Do-it-yourself frameworks (If I do X, Y, and not Z I'm good), excuses, or persuading (or intimidating) other people into affirming you.
All instead of wanting real righteousness and finding the One who can make it right.
Well, minivans are scarcer and pricier, and a pickup doesn't match our main use cases. So if one or both of the drivers have a grumpy back, an SUV is quite a bit easier to get in and out of than a sedan. Sort of like those "old people's" big sedans with soft suspensions. I get it now... and we did, a compact SUV.
I've no objection to -- in fact it seems fine -- a pastor or other leader joining in some silly and perhaps slightly humiliating play: e.g. slide down into a tub of jello just as the kids are doing.
The dunk tank (or pie throwing) isn't the same. Somebody is humiliating another. Participation is voluntary, yes, but the ball thrower is acting against the dunkee. All in fun? Maybe. I still don't like it.
My record at prediction isn't good, so don't take this as prophecy, but at a guess, since politics is the art of the possible and Iran's mullahs invested the IRCG with a lot of their enforcement power, then if there is "regime change" the IRCG will play some role. Who has the arms and organization to stamp them out?
That would imply that the new government wouldn't be entirely satisfactory to us, since it would include a faction that still wants regional domination (and maybe to "immanentize the eschaton" too), and not be altogether stable either.
That's almost certainly still better than the previous situation. We can't command nice clear-cut victories and transformations all the time; or even most of the time. Even World War II -- we had lots of boots on the ground and "unconditional surrenders," and we still had to make some very messy compromises at the end of it: not least with the USSR, but also with the Germans and Japanese.
I sometimes think it's safer to fight for interests rather than ideals. Interests you can compromise, if the matter is not existential: "We need X but the price is too high so we'll settle for Y, at least for the next decade"; but ideals sometimes demand more dedication.
Unfortunately I am as wise as before; these don't map into categories I use.
At least it is clear that when one is told to "keep" the testimonies and statutes, the testimonies -- things God said that aren't commands -- are as important to remember as the rules.
I think it rises from the denial that there's a human nature – physical, mental, spiritual. The way they define things, and people, is by their actions. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck – nevermind if it needs batteries.
If you define humanity by the things a person does rather than some essence or nature, inequalities of ability are a problem for you. The world's economies define human worth by economic value added, but there's no reason for us to give assent to that. We know better (I hope).
There are normal differences in people, e.g. skin color. There are also abnormal differences, e.g. skin color (albinism). It's normal to have 5 digits on each limb, and rare indeed for more than 5 not to be a defect.
The Salisbury Organist goes to old country churches to play their organs. Not infrequently a note will be bad or the machine slightly out of tune – and you wouldn't be able to tell because he picks the music to fit the organ.
If you don't have a right foot, walking is more of an accomplishment than it is for a healthy youngster. If we flatten everything to "difference" you lose that extra accomplishment.
Plenty of things are legitimately just "difference": including a lot of the skills. Just because it isn't always easy to agree on the names of things that are human essence doesn't mean they aren't real.
We seem to have a hunger to oversimplify. A "definition by action" is very useful (especially in mathematics), while a "definition by essence" is also important in determining purposes – like what a government is actually for. If we don't know what the essence of human-ness is, how do we know what human flourishing is? Keep both approaches, but in tension with each other.
Imagine yourself in one of those 50-minute classes. The now-year-old you would be bored silly by the material, and frantically trying to recall the names of the classmates around you.
Now imagine that 17-year-old you suddenly has the now-year-old you's mind and memories. You have 45 minutes – 5 to persuade the teacher to let you speak, and 40 to address your friends (aka captive audience). What do you say?
"Buy Microsoft" is pretty trivial advice. What do they need to hear? Can you warn them, inspire them, encourage them?
Would any of it do any good? Maybe just the apology...
It might be fun to guess how your friends might answer. Everybody at a table secretly writes what they would do, and then everybody guesses who wrote what.
A different video said use 4 clamps. I'm using 3 large ones and about 20 small ones, and am going to wait overnight for for the felt seal to "relax" into its new length before I try to glue it on. In the meantime I'll get a few more strong spring clamps (they'll also be good in wood work, so won't be a waste) before I start.
(*) Not with hard evidence, just with "It's obvious that they would." And it is obvious that they'd want to try, but I'm not expert on how supply, command, and control would work on a decades-long insertion. It's probably way cheaper to fund existing networks than to create your own; though you lose the "control" part.
On the other hand, faculty and researchers at the Michigan Technological University (MTU) School of Forestry and Wood Products have found that the Project ELF’s antenna grid makes the trees grow faster. MTU foresters have been studying the effects ever since the system became operational ten years ago.
The forester's final report says "subtle EM effect to the cambial and stemwood growth of some tree species but not to any other parameter". They claimed a relationship between "diameter growth and magnetic flux density" for aspen and red maple, and "annual height growth and magnetic flux density" for red pine.
That looked like an increase when the field was O(2-3mG), dropping off to "normal" for higher exposures. My first guess when seeing something that only effects a few species is a "look-elsewhere effect", but there's enough similarity that maybe it's worth looking at in more detail. I wonder what the conductivity of the sap is in the different species.
Squirrel!
Yes, I know there can be confounding factors, like distance from a cleared area (they look at that) or herbicides