it will be alright

Sapient distant descendants of rats, known as packers, living on Earth millions of years after the extinction of humans, began to develop mathematics using cognitive mechanisms never intended for such tasks. Due to an evolutionary quirk, multiplication came more naturally to them than addition, and their mathematics reflects this.

Packers write numbers as shapes, with each number having a corresponding number of corners.

And they write large numbers as nested shapes. The number inside is multiplied by the number outside.

Examples of some numbers:

Packers haven't invented 0 yet. They haven't even invented 1! In fact, they don’t need the concept of "one" much in their system. There's no need to say "I ate one fish" when they can simply say "I ate fish".

Packers can't yet write large prime numbers, like 101 or 10,501, because they would have to draw a huge shape to represent them! Even writing 17 or 19 would be quite difficult if they only used convex shapes.

So packers use non-convex shapes too!

Many years later, some packer noticed that large prime numbers look suspiciously symmetric.

So this packer improved the notation system and made it clearer.

Later, another packer simplified this system even more, deciding that there was no point in writing the same shapes twice.

This packer was the first in their culture to declare that "a dot isolated from a number" should also be considered a number. The packer called this dot "the wonderful number that's less than two".

Many years later, another packer made an important innovation: the "dot isolation" could be repeated multiple times as long as the result remained odd. When the result became even, it could undergo a "two isolation" (division by two). The final result will be a series of dots and twos.

This invention led to the creation of a binary system based on one and two, which had a significant impact on the technological advancement of packers.

The comic "the book written by tiny paws" talks about all of this in more detail. There will be mistakes, debates, the invention of rational, irrational, multivariate numbers, and some other stuff. Some stuff will be very much like human math, and some will be different. After all, math is still math, only the point of view has changed.

Yes to both

Queer Community yes, Straight Community no

Straight Community yes, Queer Community no

No to both

"When a quantity of this mixture is placed on a shovel, and heated gradually, until the sulphur begins to inflame, it explodes, giving a loud and stunning report, and leaving the ears hardly in a state to hear any thing more for hours, or if the quantity be considerable, even for days. Not more than 15 or 20 grains of this powder should be exploded at once, unless in the open air."

@queenlua Happily! This is going to be long, so here's some set dressing first:

Eton College, for anyone unfamiliar, is a prestigious boys' school in England that has famously educated MANY MANY politicians, royals, nobility, and other assorted famous people. All you really need to know about it is that's it's incredibly posh and expensive and exclusive

The Eton Society (called “Pop” internally) is a self-selecting body of senior students at Eton that have historically held a decent amount of power at the school. If you’ve ever attended a school with a prefect system/house system etc you probably know a little bit about how obnoxious this kind of group can get. Now imagine they're all called Lord Godfrey Pickerington or something. Are you getting it? Is the set being dressed? Good.

Now that the scene is set, here’s our tale!!

I stumbled into Eton’s archives while doing research for a fanfiction and we’ll just leave that admission where it is!! It was in reading old issues of their student-run paper, The Chronicle, from 1883 that myself and @carebewear started becoming fixated on one guy in particular.

Cecil B. Gedge (from this point on known as Gedge) was a member of the Eton Society in 1883/84. He won a few Science awards during his time there (Biology!!) and seemed to like rowing during school sports events. He went on to become a barrister, which will make sense once you know more about him.

The best part of Gedge, though, is his appearances in the minutes for the Eton Society meetings. At least at Gedge’s time, the Eton Society seemed really fond of staging debates (more like loosely organised discussions) on a wide variety of topics.

Here are some of the riveting questions they discussed!

And my personal favourite: "Are Ghosts Real?"

(They were very divided)

Gedge first came to our attention in debate about the annexation of New Guinea, in which he apparently started an "abusive attack on the British army and missionaries":

Wow! Based Gedge!? He continues to spit period-typical truths about things like how we shouldn't tax bicycles actually because it would disproportionately affect poor people. YIMBY Gedge?? He would've loved light rail.

The final nail in our Gedge obsession was a debate on women's suffrage, in which Gedge vehemently advocates for women's right to vote and then gets no supporters at the end of the meeting. But I appreciate that he said it anyway and kept saying it. He is more persecuted that Christ, to me.

Here are some more, from anti-conscription sentiment to indirectly calling his classmates stupid to weirding everyone out by saying he wants to donate his body to science (his friend dissecting him for fun):

We started getting the feeling people might not have liked Gedge that much, mainly since one of the Society members wrote a poem about all his friends and Gedge isn't in it.

In 1884, there was some extended drama in the Chronicle where someone whom I groundlessly suspect was Gedge under a pseudonym ("A Socialist"), wrote to the editor complaining that the "debates" published by the Eton Society were "bad" (genuine quote) and that they should make a REAL debate society at the school that ALL boys, not just the self-selected seniors, could participate in:

To make a long story short most of the vocal members of the Eton Society threw up their hands at this and refused to do anything, basically boiling down to "Just because we're the prefects of the school doesn't mean we should have to actually DO anything!! Unfair!!" and also this quote which reads exactly like at least a thousand real tweets I've seen in my life

Liberal. Gedge, of course, was there giving practical suggestions, but the discussion was ultimately cut short because their principal died and they had to push a memorial issue of the paper. We have a working theory that the staff might've used that interruption as an opportunity to get the boys to cut it the fuck out.

Anyway it's a little unclear what happens to Gedge after that. He isn't credited as being in the 1884 Eton Society in the larger school register but it's unclear if that's because he wasn't re-elected or if he just graduated. Either way, he went on to become a barrister in London, which makes a lot of sense. Sadly though, he passed away in WW1, which we were really normal about

Thank you Lt. Gedge, for truly embodying the eternal spirit of an outspoken debate-kid, a friend to the lefties, a proto-yimby, a terminal back-talker, and the kid in a biology class that's a little too excited for the dissections. I hope your life, however short, was a rich and bright one. Thanks for the incredibly entertaining afternoon, brother 🫡

Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!

It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.

Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.

Like if you want to read basically any physics, math, or CS paper, arXiv.org will have you covered, because everyone uploads their papers there before submitting to a journal (and generally updates it after peer review). I know all of my papers are on there. This is such common practice that journals have it baked into their licensing agreements that authors retain the right to upload their work to these places.

"Copy. Moon joy."

"I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working."

"Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow that will help out my vocabulary a little bit, that would be great. Thank you."

“If you’ve ever seen the top of the spotlight of the top of the Luxor at night in Vegas, this looks like what it wants to be when it grows up.”

"To all of you down there on Earth... we love you, from the moon."

"We just went sci fi."

"It is so great to see Earth again. To Asia, Africa, and Oceania: we are looking back at you. We hear you can look up and see the moon right now. We see you too."

"We will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other."