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This book describes many medical oddities, modern day hoaxes, and sexual superstitions. Mary Toft was the Monica Lewinsky of the 1700s. Both women elicited a barrage of media coverage, jokes, and national shame. Monica's story cast a bad light on American politics; Mary's affair placed the eighteenth-century London physicians in a bad light.
Other topics discussed in the book: multiple personality disorder, child abuse, hypnosis, repressed memories, Torquemada, sexuality in the Bible, fringe science, psychic surgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Fox sisters, spiritualism, Piltdown man, Joanna Southcott, Joanna, virgin birth, alligators in sewers, gerbils, LSD, sooterkins, cadaver art, UFOs, garadiavolo, Cottingley Fairies, Cardiff giant, Feejee mermaid, cryptozoology, witchcraft, vomiting frogs, obsessive compulsive disorder, rectal objects, dinosaur fossils, the state of medicine in the 1700s, the effect of the mind on how we perceive reality...
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By analogy, what would one make of a 6th grader sending a college physics department his proof that "E<>MC^2" because E, as the 5th letter, M as the 13th and C, the 2nd, don't add up? Seriously. It's that bad. The image of the author standing on the shore skipping stones across the surface of a deep ocean came to mind quickly.
There is a field called "theology" for which it is historically and epistemologically correct to describe modern science and logic as being subsidiary branches.
While not all answers are in hand even now, most issues raised in the book have histories that extend back centuries or more. The author displays almost no awareness of this. The primary sources are atheists, agnostics and skeptics currently living. Most such people have never encountered serious theology in their lives; everything they know of religion is gleaned from what other atheists say or from caricature figures like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. So the author keys off of quotes from lawyer Alan Dershowitz and random people who have sent him e-mail on the Internet.
Theology is a difficult subject because people usually approach God by projecting themselves onto an immense scale. Thus, there is certainly much garbage out there (95% of it). And Pickover weaves as much of it together as he can, while leaving out the brilliant analysis of thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas that have shaped the modern world and given birth to science itself.
If your time is valuable and you are seriously interested, better books are "The Existence and Attributes of God" (Charnock). Or "Eternal God" (Helm), "Systematic Theology" (Geisler), "The Battle for God" (Geisler), "In Defense of Miracles", "Warranted Christian Belief" (Plantinga)
These may be harder to read than Pickover's (no cartoons); theology has technical words with precise meanings, as does physics and other fields of study. Careful thinking requires clarity in meaning, the preservation of subtle distinctions. One should expect to have to learn things to advance a well-developed discussion -- not amble into the physics department wagging your finger about how the "gravitational immutability of color demonstrates the paradox of orangeness surrounding depth of vibration".
Here are some concepts relevant to understanding God as Christians do:
Aseity -- self-existence. God is pure actuality with zero potential. He cannot be anything other than He is. All other beings have actuality and potential and are contingent. Humans endure a state of progressive actualization.
Simplicity -- God is absolutely simple and indivisible. Simpler than a hydrogen atom. No "parts" or divisibility, yet a living being.
Necessity -- God is a necessary being. Not being contingent, he has no potential for non-existence.
Immutability -- unchangeability; change implies unactualized potential and is a tensed (time-dependent) concept.
Eternal -- God exists outside of time and space. He is aware of the universe's past, present and future simultaneously and eternally. Eternity does not mean "endless time", but the absence of time. God is aware of all places and times at once and directly, without intermediary agents. From God's point of view, the universe was never created, it is eternal. It is created only as seen from the point of view of beings in time. Time is the progressive actualization of things with potentiality.
The universe is neither small nor large to God; these are intrinsically spatial terms relevant only to creatures in space. Carl Sagan's observation that there must be alien life otherwise the "universe would be a waste of space" imposes human perceptions on God. 12 billion light years or the nucleus of an atom -- neither large nor small to God because he is not similarly dimensioned.
One of the most common problems in the book is to phrase the discussion using words that have subtle spatial and tensed meanings -- the paradox is drawn by mixing concepts improperly.
Relatability -- God, as eternal and unchanging, is not dependent on anything. Everything else is defined relative to Him. When the Bible speaks of God's "anger" being kindled, it is a clarifying anthropomorphism describing the result of people changing relative to God. Biblical Hebrew had 3000 words to choose from to communicate subtle concepts across thousands of years. It does so very well to the careful reader, but moderns prefer not to understand.
When you strike a match, the match moves while something else doesn't. Similarly, people change their position/potential with respect to God who doesn't change. Sort of like holding a glass upside down under a waterfall, saying it is empty, then turning it up and, as it fills, claiming turning the glass over "turned on" the waterfall. The waterfall is the same, your position has changed relative to it. So it goes with God's seeming "changes".
The history, basis, reasoning and analysis of these issues is fascinating. Those interested in "Paradoxes of God" might want to look into the real deal. Theological students at conservative seminaries might enjoy this book for the light-recreation of picking it apart in late night bull sessions. Of course liberal seminaries would adopt it as a text.
An apparent paradox is one way of saying you don't understand the subject. Science has learned this over and over. Hopefully the author's "science of omniscience" will too. -- archimedes_tritium.
1. The Paradox of Omniscience
6. The Devil's Offer
7. The Revelation Gambit
9. The Brain and God: Who's in Charge?
10. The Bodhisattva Paradox
13. Two Universes
14. The Paradox of Uzzah
15. The Paradox of Dr. Eck
16. The Paradox of Led Zeppelin
I plan to show this to a friendly priest to get his opinion on the subject.
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The core of the book is a series of 100 quotations or expressions encoded via a substitution cipher. While some are challenging, after you do a few, many become rather easy. An unencrypted, explanatory message appears with most of them, and in the case of quotations, the message reveals who the author is. Since that persons name is coded at the bottom, once you know the name and how the attribution appears, the problem is half solved.
Nevertheless, the book did keep my interest, although in many cases, I found myself converting the given characters into the English alphabet before attempting to solve the problem. There is also a chapter containing seventeen puzzles that together make up a contest. The first five who solve all seventeen will earn a set of small prizes.
If you are a fan of puzzles, you are always on the lookout for new ones. While most are not true stumpers, the use of the unusual characters does make them more difficult and it held my interest throughout. Solving these problems will keep everyone but experts involved for some time. If you find yourself overwhelmed, solutions to all but the contest problems are in the back of the book.
This time, its cryptography. While some of the aspects of these puzzles might be hard for some novices, and I could wish for room and space to more easily work on the puzzles, the puzzles themselves are a joy to play with.
If you like cryptographic analysis, enjoyed Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, or want to try a brain teaser of a different sort, then you might want to delve into Cryptorunes.
It is not *just* a puzzle book, there is plenty of fact and anecdote to interest you as well. The main theme of the book is simple cryptography, as described in the works of Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe. Obviously you cannot decipher relatively modern cryptograms such as those produced by the Germans in the last world war without a lot of time and a computer, but in previous times when the average person was a lot less well educated many simple codes were baffling to most readers and could maintain secrecy.
Understanding how these simple cyphers work and may be "broken" is the first step to understanding modern cryptography.
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What is the next number?
2, 4, 6, 8, ?
The answer is 2. Why? It's because I'm only doing even number less than 10. This is typical of his "puzzles". There is no logic to them, simply guessing. I suggest reading his other books or finding a different brain-teasing book.
Pickover uses this as a premise to present a series of puzzles and create a little intellectual paranoia in his readers. Most of these puzzles are hard, although he does take pity and provide detailed solutions. Hopefully any alien in the same position will be as tolerant. And he also raises some very serious points of debate. What is the proper gift for an emissary from another planet? A human body part or a priceless Van Gogh? What one message would provide the most information to a human society attempting to rebuild a civilization? Which is more important, belief in God or the existence of God?
Once again, Pickover demonstrates his exceptional ability to pose unusual and challenging questions. Perhaps there is a grain of truth in the premise to the book.
Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission
Preface
Chapter 1. Who This Book is For
Chapter 2. Symbols and Difficulty Levels
Chapter 3. Alien Tiles
Chapter 4. Alien Sperm
Chapter 5. Alien Ellipses
Chapter 6. Alien Repeats
Chapter 7. Alien Matrix
Chapter 8. Internal Organs
Chapter 9. Alien Dissection
Chapter 10. Alien Addition
Chapter 11. Hyperdimensional Sz'kwa
Chapter 12. Alien Spiral
Chapter 13. Survival on Arcturus
Chapter 14. Alien Medallion with Lights
Chapter 15. The Omega Prism
Chapter 16. Alien Worm
Chapter 17. Alien Homoptera
Chapter 18. Star Chart
Chapter 19. Alien Spores 1
Chapter 20. Alien Spores 2
Chapter 21. Alien Spores 3
Chapter 22. Alien Spores 4
Chapter 23. Alien Spores 5
Chapter 24. Rubik's Tesseract
Chapter 25. Animal Eye
Chapter 26. Cosmic Rosetta Stone
Chapter 27. Alien Ants in Hyperspace
Chapter 28. A Severed Human Finger
Chapter 29. The Antikythera Mechanism
Chapter 30. Alien Scrambling
Chapter 31. Alien Aesthetics
Chapter 32. Alien Knowledge and Talent
Chapter 33. The Sagittarius Maneuver
Chapter 34. Siriusian Geometry
Chapter 35. Human Brains in a Jar
Chapter 36. Human Belief Structure
Chapter 37. Contact from the Pleiades
Chapter 38. The Elk Hunter's Abduction
Chapter 39. Loss of Scientific Knowledge
Chapter 40. Aliens and Sprinklers
Chapter 41. Unanswered Questions
Chapter 42. Moral and Emotional Choices of Humans
Chapter 43. Coded Transmission
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The author presents an SF story, in which an FBI agent, "you," gives personal lectures on hyperspace to his younger fellow agent Sally. Finally they both experience surfing into a four-dimensional world. Meanwhile the reader learns concepts and terms such as "hyperspheres," "tesseracts," "enantiomorphic," "extrinsic geometry," "quaternions," "nonorientable surfaces," etc. The author succeeds in achieving his aim rather well by the use of many illustrations and computer graphics, though he cites too much from Edwin Abbott's "Flatland" in early chapters and from Karl Heim's "Christian Faith and Natural Science" in later chapters.
The book has nine Appendixes (one is a list of SF stories and novels about the fourth dimension), "Notes" and "Further Readings" sections, and Addendum about recent publications dealing with parallel universes and cosmic topology. These are also interesting and informative. This is a good book especially for theologians, philosophers, artists, and general readers who like wild imaginations or computer experiments. To the serious reader who wants to know the implications of hyperspace in modern physics, I would like to recommend Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace."
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I really loved some of the characters in the book, especially Martha, the woman with long fingers. I couldn't put the book down and found the unusual sequence of events to be a masterpiece of oddness and scariness -- in the spirit of Vonnegut, Hitchcock, and other geniuses who combine adventure, fear, and wonder. I see some of the reviewers nitpicking at plot "absurdities," but these are precisely what makes the book fascinating. If you read the book a few times, you'll find that the odd logic fits together, and all events are quite plausible, or at least possible, given the complex situations. Buy this book, and feed your head. I hear it's a bestseller.
The only puzzles that take more than 5 minutes to solve are the scrambled famous phrases. Wow! ...
On top of all this, most puzzles have gazillions of solutions. here is an example of a supposedly "Mind-Bending" puzzle in the calendar:
"Hazardous is a commen English word that ends in 'ous'. Can you name three others?"
Oh please! Spare my brain!
Please do not buy this calendar. Any other puzzle calendar will be better. Or at least, it won't be worst.
I'm only into February now, and I'm getting more and more frustrated with the puzzles. The straight-up puzzles, like the cryptograms and the anagrams, are enjoyable and satisfying, but when he gets into the mathematical puzzles, I find myself frustrated because Mr. Pickover doesn't explain the rules well enough. Today's puzzle, for example, asks me to switch two pairs of numbers so that all the rows, columns, and diagonals equal the same sum, and the example given uses two adjacent numbers. After 15 minutes of trying to figure this puzzle out, I look to the answer, and discover that the numbers switched aren't consecutive. Maybe GAMES Magazine has spoiled me, but if they had a puzzle where any numbers anywhere could be switched out, they'd let me know that in the instructions.
If you're a puzzle-hound, too, then you might do well to skip this one and go for the Mensa puzzle calendar (if you can still find one). I bought one at an end-of-season sale at the mall, and am much happier with that one -- the puzzles are more varied, more original, and much more intuitive.
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