A Nuclear Machine That Heats Space

Counting

I don’t know why this is standard. It has the nice property that the cardinality of the set you use for a number is equal to that number, and I think it makes some things with infinities nicer, but I’m not sure if those are the actual historical reasons. Certainly your version, or “the successor of a number is its powerset”, or a bunch of other options, are all possible models.

The names spoil why the von Neumann construction is preferred. Both model the naturals, but the von Neumann construction is really a model of the ordinals, of which the naturals are an initial segment. This is because while a Zermelo numeral is a set containing only its predecessor, a von Neumann ordinal is the set containing all of its predecessors. This gives the nice property that in this model < is ∈, and ≤ is ⊆. For example, 4 is the set {0, 1, 2, 3} (shown above), ω is the set ℕ, and ε₀ = ⋃(ω, ω^ω, ω^ω^ω, … ).

Do not take this to be a serious disagreement with OP, but I am laughing thinking about someone saying this after they die to an Act 1 Elite in Slay the Spire.

Vastly different contexts for games; for me, almost none of the games I play would be any good without replayability.

i see what you're referring to, but that "never get that final block in place" thing is what infinity is for. the infinity is kind of for the moment when you do the final thing in a never ending pattern. its the last number. there is no last number. its there. you can see it. you cannot get there. but what if you did? then you'd be at two. you are at two. you measure the corners of your house. its a little bigger on the inside than the out. hm.

JP Morgan expects Brent crude to remain in the low-$100s for much of 2026, even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens in June, as accelerating inventory draws and logistical bottlenecks keep the oil market tight, the bank said in a note. JP Morgan's revised framework assumes that ‌the pace ⁠of ⁠oil inventory depletion will ultimately force the Strait to reopen "one way or another," ​with the bank's base case anchored on a June 1 reopening following a ​credible announcement confirmed by both sides.

Elizabeth 'Liz' Kendall is a Member of Parliament and a Secretary of State in the United Kingdom. She's an example of what I vaguely called 'wordcel' last time: faced with riots over deeply unpopular policies and mediagenic stabbings with a side of police failure ("I don't think you have"), she plans to make foreigners stop talking about it. Perception management and simulacra.

You can try to jail break equipment to raise your score back up but if you fail you have to roll on a table of consequences, ranging from an annoying pop-up to full deactivation and repossession of the cyberware by the corporation via force.

If it gets too low you still go cyberpsyco, that hasn't changed.

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.

"Using AI to design flyers looks cheap and tacky" 👍 I completely agree.