In several European languages like French and Danish, 20 is used as a base, at least with respect to the linguistic structure of the names of certain numbers (though a thoroughgoing consistent vigesimal system, based on the powers 20, 400, 8000 etc., is not generally used).
"Eighty-seven" in English is "quatre-vingt sept" in French; "four twenties seven", which is basically what he's saying.
The second one is arguably not vigesimal but instead just an echo of the Germanic way of saying numbers that English has all but lost. You'd be surprised how long things will lurk around the fringes of a language despite not being the most popular way of saying things.
I should email him and ask if three days a week is infrequent enough to avoid burnout. That’s pretty often to maintain such an incredible level of quality. (Tom Scott had enough after 10 years.) But maybe since it’s his full-time gig, it’s optimal - he can spend most of the week reading cool stuff that gives him tons of good ideas and he actually wouldn’t want to publish any less frequently.
I mean Randall has been doing the comic since like 2004 or something so I feel like if he was going to burn out, he would have by now. At this point him burning out would just be him retiring.
I used to frequent the same IRC channels as Randall; I always got the impression it's a case of "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life"
Isaac Asimov's Bible guide convinced me that abrahamic religions are mostly made out from stuff either from Mesopotamia (Sabbath, Eden, the floods) or myths coming from later cults (e.g. Greece).
I don't know about the shrooms, my reading of the old testament made me think it started with some old guy trying to stop his nomadic desert tribe dying of anything too stupid by telling camp fire stories with some sort of message. The whole 'god will make the ground open up to swallow you and your family if you screw up' is a desperate attempt to scare them into not doing stupid things like slaughtering too many of their livestock at once, or eating shellfish whilst wandering around in a desert.
The stories get retold, changed and embellished over generations before being written down, and you end up with the weird mess of basic survival tips, animal husbandry, heroic stories and mystic fluff that is the OT.
The new testament is just the story of a fairly chill guy, with a slight messianic complex, wandering around with his mates and suggesting people be nice to each other, put through a similar transformation.
All Religion has its origin in shamanism. That then led to polytheism which then led to monotheism. What all those have in common is that people made it up as they went along.
Afaik, christians don't see the devil as a god, but as one of god's minions takes with temping the flock or having them prove their faith or some shit.
Catholics also have patron saints for nearly everything from infants to ice skaters that they pray to but that are totally not gods because there is only one god. I mean, yeah, their second most important prayer is directed at the Virgin Mary, but that doesn't mean they worship her or anything.
This presumes some type of "pure" original religion — which indeed some people believe — as opposed to an evolving understanding that is relevant in each generation.
You seem to be confusing religion with a bible, which is probably a reflection of the dominant religion near you, but not every religion has a book, and not every religion with a book understands it in the same way.
Pascal's triangle. This describes how to expand expresions of the form (a+b)^n as well as to compute how many ways there are to pick k objects out of a set of n (ignoring order.
This triangle is computed by starting with 1 at the tip, then having each element be the some of its 2 parents (except the diagonal edges with only one parent, which remains as 1)
Pascal's wager. This is a theological argument for a belief in god that goes "if you believe and god doesn't exist, nothing happens. If you don't believe and he does exist, you suffer for eternity. The logical choice is therefore to believe"
The natural conclusion is therefore to believe in all gods. If procelatizing happens in just the right way, and no one realizes people are talking about the same god, you end up with a triangle of polytheists, where the number of gods they believe in is given by Pascal's triangle.
Pascal was a famous thinker of their time, particularly in mathematics.
Two of the ideas they're remembered for are Pascals Triangle and Pascals Wager.
Their triangle is a helpful tool for combinations of things. Their wager is a (kinda bad in my opinion) argument for why you should believe in the Christian God.
I always took pascals wager as just being about some nebulous creator type of thing with no real specifics because the argument can't really handle specifics.
xkcd
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