If we assess ideas by Darwinian logic (and ever since Richard Dawkins coined that enticing term meme we have increasingly been doing so) then there is something remarkably satisfying about the idea of apocalypse. Here is an idea whose key advantage is that it ensures that religious fervour is massively increased at exactly the moment that a civilisation trembles on the edge of an abyss. It ensures that religious ideas are disseminated with even greater determination at a time when catastrophe is most likely to kill off all their previous adherents.
It's about that time again.
Pestilence is a rather clumsy way for God to go about culling humans. Aids was probably the hardcore moralists' favourite plague, because it seemed to have some sort of smart-targeting for those given to shenanigans of the back-bottom variety, but even the delight of the self-righteous must by now turned to chagrin as HIV turned out to be the usual blunt instrument striking about it with indiscriminate malice.
Where now is the Angel of Death who exceeded even the most optimistic boasts of ordnance manufacturers in striking down the first born of Egypt? Instead we have that epidemic equivalent of the cluster bomb: flu. Flu is what a wrathful deity finds at the bottom of His carpet bag once the locusts and boils have all been deployed. Short of any honest-to-goodness flu, He even had to make one up out of discarded scraps of other flus. H1N1 is the chop suey of flus.
Well, God made Adam from a handful of mud, I suppose, so He may regard working wonders with unpromising elements as a sort of prudent Home Economy.
So, let's look into the abyss and imagine that H1N1 does its grizzly work, bringing our civilisation to its knees. Almost certainly, the consequence would be an improvement in the religious fervour of the survivors, with the net result that the various faiths, great and small, would all claim a modest victory. Why is the overall reaction not that of Voltaire's to the Lisbon earthquake? Why is the net reaction to God's cruelty not the rejection of a cruel God?
Religious moderates argue that the problem of pain is not a problem because God is not specifically providential; He's more a "sit back and let the mechanism whirr" sort of deity, interested in the Big Picture and not so much the fall of a sparrow. If we're all saved posthumously, then the miseries of the world are a small price to pay for the freedom to carve our own moral path through the spatio-temporal whatnot.
All that is very well, but when people pray is that the God they are praying to? Or is it the one with The Carpet-Bag of Punishment?
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Truth Shall Not Set You Free
One of the problems with the term blogosphere is that it suggests that this corner of the internet is pristine and impermeable, whereas permeability is its most conspicuous attribute. It is a "blogo-sponge" (this term, admittedly, does not have the same ring to it) and - as we now know - is one of those sponges that is regarded as a fertile breeding-ground for corruption of all sorts. There is a perception, in fact, that it is full of plain lies, which is why (a lowly member of) the government was so keen to get into the business.
Since there is a temptation for this to slide into another "all politicians are liars" rant, let us remember one who told the truth. On 17 March 2003 Robin Cook received the peculiar honour of becoming quite possibly the first politician in British history to receive a standing ovation in the Commons for a resignation speech in which he gave what all recognised to be a truthful and compelling account of his analysis of the argument for the Iraq War. It is one of a handful of political speeches in my lifetime that have had any real resonance or significance.
The bitter irony of this speech, however, is that it marked the effective end of Cook's political career, and as time goes by it is becoming largely forgotten. Many of the same MPs who stood for Cook went on to give the second standing ovation of the Commons to Tony Blair, whose policies were Cook's target and who had been shown by the point of his own resignation to be (at best) mistaken in the case he had made for war.
There is no need, therefore, to say that all politicians are liars. All one need say is that the ones who tell the truth will never gain an effective majority over those who prefer (even if they do not utter) the lie.
In recent years, the truth about the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes came to light despite the ardent attempts of all involved to suppress it. It seems likely that the truth about the death of Ian Tomlinson will also come to light. The truth about MPs expenses is so nearly in the light of day that they are furiously calculating a way to feather their nests that can be disguised as a reform.
Lies are beset on all sides by the truth, yet - like some mendacious reworking of the defence of Rorke's Drift - they maintain a valiant defence against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Since there is a temptation for this to slide into another "all politicians are liars" rant, let us remember one who told the truth. On 17 March 2003 Robin Cook received the peculiar honour of becoming quite possibly the first politician in British history to receive a standing ovation in the Commons for a resignation speech in which he gave what all recognised to be a truthful and compelling account of his analysis of the argument for the Iraq War. It is one of a handful of political speeches in my lifetime that have had any real resonance or significance.
The bitter irony of this speech, however, is that it marked the effective end of Cook's political career, and as time goes by it is becoming largely forgotten. Many of the same MPs who stood for Cook went on to give the second standing ovation of the Commons to Tony Blair, whose policies were Cook's target and who had been shown by the point of his own resignation to be (at best) mistaken in the case he had made for war.
There is no need, therefore, to say that all politicians are liars. All one need say is that the ones who tell the truth will never gain an effective majority over those who prefer (even if they do not utter) the lie.
In recent years, the truth about the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes came to light despite the ardent attempts of all involved to suppress it. It seems likely that the truth about the death of Ian Tomlinson will also come to light. The truth about MPs expenses is so nearly in the light of day that they are furiously calculating a way to feather their nests that can be disguised as a reform.
Lies are beset on all sides by the truth, yet - like some mendacious reworking of the defence of Rorke's Drift - they maintain a valiant defence against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Elitists Do It Without The Rest Of You
People tell me that the problem with independent schools is that they are elitist. Under Conservative policies of the past, that might have been true, but when it did away with the Assisted Places Scheme, the Labour government ensured that these schools would go from being elitist to being plutocratic. I know which one I would prefer.
Our current Labour masters have made an odd priority of education. Whereas the old policy was to make the best in education available to all, they have concentrated their attention on making it available only to the wealthy. If the old Socialist ideal was to provide a ladder and a net, Labour have increased the capacity of the net by lowering the attainment standard for good grades and done away with the ladder completely by ensuring that even a university education is now available only to those with significant private means. Why would you need a ladder when you have a greasy pole?
Conservatives are natural plutocrats, but they had the good grace to disguise this with fig-leaf policies that offered opportunity to all. Labour politicians are plutocrats by accident (they are happy for the rich to govern just as long as they pay generously for the privilege) and are determined to provide a level playing field for social benefits such as education and healthcare, however low the level of that field.
All of which makes it interesting to note that when Gordon Brown wanted a gun for hire, he chose Damian McBride, who is an alumnus of Peterhouse, Cambridge: that university's smallest college and one whose reputation is certainly not for egalitarianism or inclusivity. One may decry the use to which Mr. McBride turned that education, but it seems to have been no barrier to advancement under an administration that seems eager enough to deny elitist trappings to today's children.
It's nice when equal opportunity extends even to those with an Oxbridge education, isn't it?
Our current Labour masters have made an odd priority of education. Whereas the old policy was to make the best in education available to all, they have concentrated their attention on making it available only to the wealthy. If the old Socialist ideal was to provide a ladder and a net, Labour have increased the capacity of the net by lowering the attainment standard for good grades and done away with the ladder completely by ensuring that even a university education is now available only to those with significant private means. Why would you need a ladder when you have a greasy pole?
Conservatives are natural plutocrats, but they had the good grace to disguise this with fig-leaf policies that offered opportunity to all. Labour politicians are plutocrats by accident (they are happy for the rich to govern just as long as they pay generously for the privilege) and are determined to provide a level playing field for social benefits such as education and healthcare, however low the level of that field.
All of which makes it interesting to note that when Gordon Brown wanted a gun for hire, he chose Damian McBride, who is an alumnus of Peterhouse, Cambridge: that university's smallest college and one whose reputation is certainly not for egalitarianism or inclusivity. One may decry the use to which Mr. McBride turned that education, but it seems to have been no barrier to advancement under an administration that seems eager enough to deny elitist trappings to today's children.
It's nice when equal opportunity extends even to those with an Oxbridge education, isn't it?
Monday, April 13, 2009
Tributary Flooding
There is very little merit in binding in a nutshell something that is inherently small, which is why these pages turn so frequently to large subjects. Unfortunately, however, we live our lives with a veil of very small things - a beaded curtain, if you will - hanging in front of our eyes, and it is for this reason that there is occasionally a reversion to topics that are, comparatively, as the mote to the beam.
One such mote that has been troubling my eyesight of late is the habit into which the television news has fallen of cutting to some airtime-filling vox-pop segment with the declaration (as if this were in itself news) that friends and neighbours have today been paying tribute to someone who was the topic of yesterday's news.
Now the editors of News 24 (if one can term a process editing that generally involves generously padding rather than any element of excision whatsoever) would claim in their defence that today's current affairs viewer has no attention span whatsoever. If the Day One story is the invasion of Afghanistan then the Day Two story had better be the capture of Osama bin Laden or you've lost your audience. For this reason, despite the fact that on Day One the audience is expected to wait for several hours in feverish expectation that the prime minister's car will drive from an airport to some other point before its very eyes, by Day Two even a tale of tragic demise is in need of seasoning.
At this point the story becomes this business of "paying tribute", which seems to involve cutting to video of someone saying that someone run down with a bus on the preceding day always had a smile for her neighbours when hanging out the washing. Tribute indeed.
It's not that I am opposed to the idea of celebrating lives of quiet decency, but (generally speaking) tribute is surely something that should be paid to something that is at least intentional. If the good citizen in my (strictly hypothetical) example had thrown herself in front of the Number 12 in order to save a small child from itself being run over, then pay tribute to her reckless bravery. But don't pay tribute to her cheerful disposition if she was simply standing on the pavement when a bus leapt the curb.
Unless witnesses are prepared to swear that she met her unmaker with a cheerful smile, then her customary laundry serenity is irrelevant. Moreover, if she was indeed smiling in the split second before the windscreen struck, I would suspect that she did not properly understand the gravity of the situation.
One such mote that has been troubling my eyesight of late is the habit into which the television news has fallen of cutting to some airtime-filling vox-pop segment with the declaration (as if this were in itself news) that friends and neighbours have today been paying tribute to someone who was the topic of yesterday's news.
Now the editors of News 24 (if one can term a process editing that generally involves generously padding rather than any element of excision whatsoever) would claim in their defence that today's current affairs viewer has no attention span whatsoever. If the Day One story is the invasion of Afghanistan then the Day Two story had better be the capture of Osama bin Laden or you've lost your audience. For this reason, despite the fact that on Day One the audience is expected to wait for several hours in feverish expectation that the prime minister's car will drive from an airport to some other point before its very eyes, by Day Two even a tale of tragic demise is in need of seasoning.
At this point the story becomes this business of "paying tribute", which seems to involve cutting to video of someone saying that someone run down with a bus on the preceding day always had a smile for her neighbours when hanging out the washing. Tribute indeed.
It's not that I am opposed to the idea of celebrating lives of quiet decency, but (generally speaking) tribute is surely something that should be paid to something that is at least intentional. If the good citizen in my (strictly hypothetical) example had thrown herself in front of the Number 12 in order to save a small child from itself being run over, then pay tribute to her reckless bravery. But don't pay tribute to her cheerful disposition if she was simply standing on the pavement when a bus leapt the curb.
Unless witnesses are prepared to swear that she met her unmaker with a cheerful smile, then her customary laundry serenity is irrelevant. Moreover, if she was indeed smiling in the split second before the windscreen struck, I would suspect that she did not properly understand the gravity of the situation.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Bounded In An Eggshell
Easter is the most counter-programmed Christian holiday. Having Christmas at the Winter Solstice sort of makes sense because "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light" and the incarnation makes sense as the dawning of the promise of redemption. Easter, on the other hand, is a pagan celebration of Spring birth recast as a celebration of Divine sacrifice.
This rich palimpsest of symbolism would have been taken some planning if it had not been for the fact that God routinely calculates pi to infinite places and doesn't recognise the concept of a challenge. Easter is more or less the vernal equinox because Jesus died at the Jewish Passover, and presumably Jesus died at Passover because at the original, Mosaic passover the first born (of Israel) were sacrificed that the chosen people might go free. God, with the sensibility of a fine poet, juggled ideas of sacrifice, freedom and (re-)birth. Oh, and Cadbury's Creme Eggs.
Mention of creme eggs is not flippant. If God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent etc. then He didn't simply construct one perfect associative structure and then turn in for a couple of millenia to see how the whole thing turned out. God foresaw (or, more properly, saw) that The Great Escape and The Sound of Music would end up being associated with Christmas, and He also saw that eggs of chocolate would be eaten at Easter.
Moreover, it is a theological nonsense to suggest that God planned all the imagery of Easter up to Easter Sunday, A.D. 30-odd and then left the rest to be debased by humanity. The popular image may be of a creator god who keeps coming back to His creation only to discover that his hooligan offspring have messed it up again, but that isn't a view that squares easily with the concept of an omniscient or omnipotent deity. Pretty much the only reasonable interpretation of the course of history is that at the point God said "Let There Be Light" He also willed the sacrifice of Christ and that Cadbury's creme eggs would get mysteriously smaller from invention to A.D. 2009 and beyond. He also saw that His own raising from the dead would become inextricably connected with an Irish rebellion of 1916.
The presence of God is often felt on mountainsides and barren coasts, but omnipresence is also fortuitously manifest in Lindt bunnies. You just have to know how to look.
This rich palimpsest of symbolism would have been taken some planning if it had not been for the fact that God routinely calculates pi to infinite places and doesn't recognise the concept of a challenge. Easter is more or less the vernal equinox because Jesus died at the Jewish Passover, and presumably Jesus died at Passover because at the original, Mosaic passover the first born (of Israel) were sacrificed that the chosen people might go free. God, with the sensibility of a fine poet, juggled ideas of sacrifice, freedom and (re-)birth. Oh, and Cadbury's Creme Eggs.
Mention of creme eggs is not flippant. If God is infinite, omniscient, omnipotent etc. then He didn't simply construct one perfect associative structure and then turn in for a couple of millenia to see how the whole thing turned out. God foresaw (or, more properly, saw) that The Great Escape and The Sound of Music would end up being associated with Christmas, and He also saw that eggs of chocolate would be eaten at Easter.
Moreover, it is a theological nonsense to suggest that God planned all the imagery of Easter up to Easter Sunday, A.D. 30-odd and then left the rest to be debased by humanity. The popular image may be of a creator god who keeps coming back to His creation only to discover that his hooligan offspring have messed it up again, but that isn't a view that squares easily with the concept of an omniscient or omnipotent deity. Pretty much the only reasonable interpretation of the course of history is that at the point God said "Let There Be Light" He also willed the sacrifice of Christ and that Cadbury's creme eggs would get mysteriously smaller from invention to A.D. 2009 and beyond. He also saw that His own raising from the dead would become inextricably connected with an Irish rebellion of 1916.
The presence of God is often felt on mountainsides and barren coasts, but omnipresence is also fortuitously manifest in Lindt bunnies. You just have to know how to look.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Lost In Transliteration
However frivolous it may appear to defend the ampersand, the appearance of language on the page does matter, and nowhere more conspicuously than with regard to the perpetual familiarity of Judaism and the perpetual strangeness of Islam in a Christian cultural context.
Within my lifetime, it was once regarded as perfectly proper to speak of Moslems and their holy book, the Koran. These days, however, some Muslims regard the former transliteration as offensive, it having gone the way of Peking and Bombay. Their holy book is The Qur'an. For Western readers - an increasing number of whom are challenged by the distinction between it's and its - the presence of this apostrophe (representing the Arabic letter hamza) is an obstacle too far. For all that Muslims regard their theology as fraternal to Christianity, there is little chance on casual acquaintance that an English-speaking Christian would recognise this while coughing up a glottal stop.
The Jews, of course, have the Tanakh. This title is the acronymic combination of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, but Western readers are more familiar with this document in the redaction that we know as the Old Testament. Since Western readers are happy to ignore the body of Jewish religious literature aside from the Tanakh, the only Jewish holy book that they are required to encounter is something translated from Greek by, um, Shakespeare. Even the name of the Judaic-Christian holy book, the Bible, is etymologically orthodox, comforting to those bibliophiles amongst us.
So, how absurd is it to treat the relative distances between the three major monotheistic religions as partly, perhaps largely, orthographic?
The counterargument, I suppose, is that the Tanakh became incorporated in the Bible because Jewish religious writings were constitutive to Christianity in a way that Islam (being historically later) could never be. Most Christians have (however inadvertently) a Tanakh in their home; few have a Qur'an. Islam was a world political force long after the Jewish Diaspora, leading to a clash of civilisations that established a long rivalry between Christian and Islam nations. Those looking for substantive reasons for Western Christians to feel that Jews have an underlying similarity to them have plenty of arguments to call upon.
In reality, however, the Tanakh and the Qur'an are not staggeringly different documents, and they draw upon similar material. Muslims draw on Jewish history just as much as Christians do and incidents such as Abraham's near sacrifice of his son (albeit of Ishmael rather than Isaac) is just one of the narrative focal points that are shared. Moreover, while Jesus finds a place both in Islam and in Christian-era Jewish teaching, Islam gives a far more prominent role to Jesus than Judaism does. Theologically speaking, Islam has a much more Christian mindset than Judaism does, not least because Judaism retains its focus on the fate of the Chosen People, whereas Islam and Christianity are both strongly transracial and evangelical religions.
Now that there is a U.S. president with a heteronymic name (however much people try to force it to conform to an Irish-American logic as President O'Bahmer) perhaps the alien nature of Arabic will be somewhat diminished in the public mind. Given, however, the reflex to which many Westerners appear to have become conditioned at hearing the declaration in Arabic that "God is great", there may be some work left to do in reconciling Western fear of the unknown.
Within my lifetime, it was once regarded as perfectly proper to speak of Moslems and their holy book, the Koran. These days, however, some Muslims regard the former transliteration as offensive, it having gone the way of Peking and Bombay. Their holy book is The Qur'an. For Western readers - an increasing number of whom are challenged by the distinction between it's and its - the presence of this apostrophe (representing the Arabic letter hamza) is an obstacle too far. For all that Muslims regard their theology as fraternal to Christianity, there is little chance on casual acquaintance that an English-speaking Christian would recognise this while coughing up a glottal stop.
The Jews, of course, have the Tanakh. This title is the acronymic combination of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, but Western readers are more familiar with this document in the redaction that we know as the Old Testament. Since Western readers are happy to ignore the body of Jewish religious literature aside from the Tanakh, the only Jewish holy book that they are required to encounter is something translated from Greek by, um, Shakespeare. Even the name of the Judaic-Christian holy book, the Bible, is etymologically orthodox, comforting to those bibliophiles amongst us.
So, how absurd is it to treat the relative distances between the three major monotheistic religions as partly, perhaps largely, orthographic?
The counterargument, I suppose, is that the Tanakh became incorporated in the Bible because Jewish religious writings were constitutive to Christianity in a way that Islam (being historically later) could never be. Most Christians have (however inadvertently) a Tanakh in their home; few have a Qur'an. Islam was a world political force long after the Jewish Diaspora, leading to a clash of civilisations that established a long rivalry between Christian and Islam nations. Those looking for substantive reasons for Western Christians to feel that Jews have an underlying similarity to them have plenty of arguments to call upon.
In reality, however, the Tanakh and the Qur'an are not staggeringly different documents, and they draw upon similar material. Muslims draw on Jewish history just as much as Christians do and incidents such as Abraham's near sacrifice of his son (albeit of Ishmael rather than Isaac) is just one of the narrative focal points that are shared. Moreover, while Jesus finds a place both in Islam and in Christian-era Jewish teaching, Islam gives a far more prominent role to Jesus than Judaism does. Theologically speaking, Islam has a much more Christian mindset than Judaism does, not least because Judaism retains its focus on the fate of the Chosen People, whereas Islam and Christianity are both strongly transracial and evangelical religions.
Now that there is a U.S. president with a heteronymic name (however much people try to force it to conform to an Irish-American logic as President O'Bahmer) perhaps the alien nature of Arabic will be somewhat diminished in the public mind. Given, however, the reflex to which many Westerners appear to have become conditioned at hearing the declaration in Arabic that "God is great", there may be some work left to do in reconciling Western fear of the unknown.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
It Simply Doesn't Add Up
Prof. Marcus du Sautoy is the man to whom television turns when it wishes to satisfy its educational remit with regard to Mathematics. Regular viewers of mathematical educational television may recall his wholly uninfectious enthusiasm being coughed, spluttered and quite possibly spat in the bright young faces of a group of young people at the Royal Institution Christmas lectures in 2006. The name of this series of lectures was The Num8er My5teries, which horrendous title probably goes some way to explaining why none of the attendees or viewers contracted anything more serious than a mathematical headcold. It was gr8. (Not really.)
Prof. du Sautoy waited patiently, and sure enough the B.B.C. - discovering a need to bolster its own so-called educational programming - decided to give him another tilt at the windmill. This time, rather than an audience of young people, they brought in ordinary-man-for-hire Alan Davies to act as stooge while the grand professor ran through what my limited acquaintance with mathematics would term a "sub-set" of his earlier Christmas lectures. Slapping the once-proud brand of Horizon on the resulting programme, they aired the result this week and you can probably catch it, roughly now, on any digital channel, or again an hour from now.
The problem with Mathematics is not that we all hated it at school (and with good reason) but that we all hate it now, and with good reason. The poster-boy for our hatred is Marcus du Sautoy, who knows all about Mathematics, is a wonderful communicator, and couldn't communicate the smallest fraction of his understanding of it if you gave him eternity and a big blackboard. Oh, and you would also need to give him a dougnut, since a doughnut is evidently an important element in explaining a cosmological theory that describes a hypothetical universe that is quite possibly nothing like ours.
So, Alan and Marcus (as the chirpy, up-the-Gunners tone of this programme would have us think of them) went up the Grande Arche in Paris so that we could see what a three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube might look like. Wikipedia tells me that this shape is called a tesseract, but Alan and Marcus steered clear of a term like that for fear that their audience would call for torches and burn down the mansion inhabited both by this mathematical Frankenstein and his ill-stitched and inarticulate sidekick.
There was a strong homoerotic undercurrent to all this, and it went beyond Paris, which the couple will presumably always have. In fact, by the end, Marcus and Alan were rolling on a beach in what promised to end up as a From Here To Eternity-clinch but for the presence of two telescopes and Alan's fatuous speculations on the universe. (I suppose they could have used the telescopes for that purpose as well, but that would have entailed moving into territory that Channel Four has been covering in The Sex Education Show v Pornography.) They had bonded, which was nice, but one does wonder whether this narrative was really a fair substitution for any actual, y'know, mathematics.
By the end, others honestly viewing for an entertaining mathematical exploration rather than the spectacle of two grown men shying balls at tin cans may have felt as I did. It seems that the mathematical problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Prof. du Sautoy waited patiently, and sure enough the B.B.C. - discovering a need to bolster its own so-called educational programming - decided to give him another tilt at the windmill. This time, rather than an audience of young people, they brought in ordinary-man-for-hire Alan Davies to act as stooge while the grand professor ran through what my limited acquaintance with mathematics would term a "sub-set" of his earlier Christmas lectures. Slapping the once-proud brand of Horizon on the resulting programme, they aired the result this week and you can probably catch it, roughly now, on any digital channel, or again an hour from now.
The problem with Mathematics is not that we all hated it at school (and with good reason) but that we all hate it now, and with good reason. The poster-boy for our hatred is Marcus du Sautoy, who knows all about Mathematics, is a wonderful communicator, and couldn't communicate the smallest fraction of his understanding of it if you gave him eternity and a big blackboard. Oh, and you would also need to give him a dougnut, since a doughnut is evidently an important element in explaining a cosmological theory that describes a hypothetical universe that is quite possibly nothing like ours.
So, Alan and Marcus (as the chirpy, up-the-Gunners tone of this programme would have us think of them) went up the Grande Arche in Paris so that we could see what a three-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional cube might look like. Wikipedia tells me that this shape is called a tesseract, but Alan and Marcus steered clear of a term like that for fear that their audience would call for torches and burn down the mansion inhabited both by this mathematical Frankenstein and his ill-stitched and inarticulate sidekick.
There was a strong homoerotic undercurrent to all this, and it went beyond Paris, which the couple will presumably always have. In fact, by the end, Marcus and Alan were rolling on a beach in what promised to end up as a From Here To Eternity-clinch but for the presence of two telescopes and Alan's fatuous speculations on the universe. (I suppose they could have used the telescopes for that purpose as well, but that would have entailed moving into territory that Channel Four has been covering in The Sex Education Show v Pornography.) They had bonded, which was nice, but one does wonder whether this narrative was really a fair substitution for any actual, y'know, mathematics.
By the end, others honestly viewing for an entertaining mathematical exploration rather than the spectacle of two grown men shying balls at tin cans may have felt as I did. It seems that the mathematical problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
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