Twitter cuts (#106)

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Luther (cited here):

Eight years ago [in the year 1532] at Dessau, I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did nothing but eat; in fact, it ate enough for any four peasants or threshers. It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy; but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said to the Princes of Anhalt: “If I were the prince or the ruler here, I would throw this child into the water — into the Molda that flows by Dessau. I would dare commit homicidium on him!” But the Elector of Saxony, who was with me at Dessau, and the Princes of Anhalt did not want to follow my advice. Therefore, I said: “Then you should have all Christians repeat the Lord’s Prayer in church that God may exorcise the devil.” They did this daily at Dessau, and the changeling child died in the following year…. Such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul.

Underlinings (#66)

Foundations of xenocryptography:

If we find signals that obey Zipf’s Law, for example, that would encourage us to go ahead and look for syntax-like structure within the signals in order to quantify how complex the candidate message actually is. […] To transmit knowledge, even a very advanced extraterrestrial civilization would still have to obey the rules of information theory. While perhaps not being able to decipher such a message because of lack of common symbols (the same problem we have with, for example, humpback whales), we would get an indication of how complex their communication system — and thereby their thought processes — may be.

Strange Days

Sorcery devours American politics:

On the morning of November 9, Théodore Ferréol sat in front of his computer in Paris and wondered what had just happened. Ferréol is not an American citizen and so hadn’t voted for Donald Trump personally. But as an occult researcher, he knew about those who claimed responsibility for Trump’s upset election victory: an online group that spreads images of a cartoon frog. …