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ADVENT 421
Daily Mail, Wednesday, June 28, 2017 QUESTION The sentence 'amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes' contains all the alphabet's letters. Are there any shorter ones? THIS is a pangram. Others include 'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs' and `Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz'. A 'perfect' one uses each letter once. The Guinness Book of Records-called this example the world's most contrived sentence: 'Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz', meaning 'annoying question concerning letters carved into a glaciated hollow on the bank of a sea inlet'. Pangrams can be found in many other languages, too. John Ward, Bristol. THE best-known pangram in English is `The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' (35 letters). Dating back to 1888, it is famous for its coherency and often used for touch-typing practice. Robert Baden-Powell's book Scouting For Boys (1908) uses it as a practice for signalling. The shortest in English without abbreviations are 'Nymphs blitz quick vex dwarf jog', 'Big fiords vex quick waltz nymph', and 'Bawds jog, flick quartz, vex nymph' (all 27 letters). The question's pangram is shortest in terms of words. An equivalent is `Sympathizing would fix Quaker objectives' but contains a proper noun and an American spelling. Other good pangrams include: 'Fox nymphs grab quick jived waltz', 'My ex pub quiz crowd gave joyful thanks', 'Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs', `Schwarzkopf vexed Iraq big-time in July', 'Waxy and quivering, jocks fumble the pizza' and 'Foxy diva Jennifer Lopez wasn't baking my quiche'. Ian Dean, Birmingham.
Daily Mail, Monday, June 26, 2017 QUESTION A common misconception is -that sushi mans 'raw flsh'.1n fact, it means 'sour rice'. What other words are commonly mistranslated? THERE are a number of 'false friends' in French, words that sound similar to English counterparts, but have different eanings and are often mistranslated. Assister does not mean 'assist' but to `attend an event' e.g. 'Joanna assiste au concert' —Joanne attends the concert.' Deception doesn't mean 'deception' but `disappointment' e.g. `une immense deception' — 'a huge disappointment.' In English, sympathetic is an adjective based on the noun sympathy. In French sympathique means nice or friendly. Watch out for excite — this usually means excited in a sexual sense! Go with anime e.g. 'Jeanne est toute animee a cause de la parrure' — 'Jeanne is very excited about the necklace'. Mary Wilson, London SW7.
Ian Peel, Bray, Berks.
PARADISE THE GARDEN OF EDEN PARADE EYES IN THE GARDEN OF NEED
EXTRA TERRESTRIAL
THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN BOOK II THE EARTH CHRONICLES Zecharia Sitchin 1980 Page 275 "solar disk" ".........represented by the symbol for the Solar Disk........."
G Hancock1995 Page 287 "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language"
LIGHT AND LIFE "BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE" (THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN WITH THE SAME LETTERS AS THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA AND WINNIE THE POOH, ONLY THE ORDER OF THE LETTERS DIFFERS). IN THE SAME WAY NATURE IS ABLE TO CONVEY WITH HER LANGUAGE HOW A CELL AND A WHOLE ORGANISM IS TO BE CONSTRUCTED AND HOW IT IS TO FUNCTION. NATURE HAS SUCCEEDED BETTER THAN WE HUMANS; FOR THE GENETIC CODE THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE WHICH IS THE SAME IN A MAN, A BEAN PLANT AND A BACTERIUM. 1 000 000 000 'LETTERS'." AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA AND DNA
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"
Daily Mail 13, July 2017 Page 64 ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS Compiled by Charles Legge QUESTION Scientists claim that all the computer data produced last year could be stored on 4g of DNA. What do they mean by this? DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) consists of sequences of the nucleobases adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine (abbreviated to A, G, C and T). DNA represents a storage mechanism for a 'programme' which allows it to replicate itself so that life can exist. DNA can potentially retain its programme for hundreds or even thousands of years. In the laboratory, DNA sequencers can read the DNA programme from samples taken from living and dead organisms. There are companies who write a specific programme into synthetic DNA if supplied with the required sequence, which can later be read back. You can immediately see how this could be used to store specific non-biological information if a sequence were written to synthetic DNA for that purpose. The trick to being able to store usable computer data is not so much to do with synthesising the DNA, but in encoding the data to be used in the sequence in the first place so it can be later recovered. Without going into the absolute detail, researchers have been using synthesised DNA where the bases T and G represent binary '1', and A and C represent binary '0'. It's a lot more involved, as the data in each DNA strand consists of an address ) block followed by the actual data, and the sequence which is subsequently read back has to be reassembled using these t address blocks. It is a similar approach to what is used within the computer industry, though more advanced. It should be borne in mind that this i DNA has nothing to do with life or genetics. Its purpose is totally non-biological. The storage capacity of DNA has been going up as experiments continue. In 2012, Harvard scientists managed to get 700 terabytes (TB) of data into lg of DNA. This year, over 200 petabytes (PB) has been crammed into a single gram. To put this in perspective, a typical DVD can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes (GB) of data. A terabyte (TB) is 1,000 times bigger than a GB, and could hold the A petabyte (PB) is 1,000 times bigger than a TB, so scientists have managed to pack the equivalent of around 42 million DVDs into that gram of DNA. Going up the ladder, an exabyte (EB) is 1,000 times bigger than a PB, and a zettabyte (ZB) is 1,000 times bigger again. Some scientists have suggested that a single gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 EB of data (96 billion DVDs), though others have estimated a lower figure of 270 PB. As of 2011, total world data was estimated at just under 2 ZB (380 billion DVDs), meaning all of it could be stored. on 4g of DNA (a teaspoon) if this upper storage limit could be realised. Even with the recent results, all human knowledge would easily fit in a bucket or n two! Or a swimming pool—as of 2017 the entire content of the worldwide web is estimated at 1 yottabyte (YB), where a YB is 1,000 times larger than a ZB. Searching and indexing that amount of data would still be problematic. The numbers involved are hard to imagine, but 1 YB of data would take trillions of years to download on even the fastest broadband connection, so searching through it would take a lot of time. It is amazing science, and Microsoft is said to be working on the technique.
THE GROWTH OF SCIENCE A.P.Rossiter 1939 Page 15 "The Egyptians,…" "…made good observations on the stars and were able to say when the sun or moon would become dark in an eclipse (a most surprising event even in our times), and when the land would be covered by the waters of the Nile: they were expert at building and made some discoveries about the relations of lines and angles - among them one very old rule for getting a right-angle by stretching out knotted cords with 5, 4 And 3 units between the knots." "...among them one very old rule for getting a right-angle by stretching out knotted cords with 5, 4 And 3 units between the knots."
CIVILIZATION, SCIENCE AND RELIGION A. D. RITCHIE 1945 THE ART OF THINKING Page 39 "The Egyptians could set out a right-angle on the ground, for building or for land surveying, by means of a cord knotted at intervals of 3, 4 and 5 units of length."
TO SLEEP PERCHANCE TO DREAM.
1 ONE YOU MAN NAM RU LUCIFER. 3-3-3-FIRE PROMISETHEEUS MAGICIANS OF THE GODS Graham Hancock 2016Page 425 Chapter 19 The Next Lost Civilization? Page 425 More than two thousand flood myths that have come down to us from the remote past are eerily consistent on many points, and on one in particular: the cataclysm was not a random accident, we are told; we brought it upon ourselves by our own behaviour. Our arrogance and our cruelty towards one another, our noise and strife and the wickedness of our hearts, angered the gods. We ceased to nurture spirit. We ceased to love and tend the earth and no longer regarded the universe with reverent awe and wonder. Dazzled by our own success, we forgot how to carry our prosperity with moderation. So it was, Plato tells us, with the once generous and good citizens of Atlantis, who in former times possessed 'a certain greatness of mind, and treated the vagaries of fortune and one another with wisdom and forbearance', but who became swollen with overweening pride in their own achievements and fell into crass materialism, greed and violence: To the perceptive eye the depth of their degeneration was clear enough, but to those whose judgement of true happiness is defective they seemed, in their pursuit of unbridled ambition and power, to be at the height of their fame and fortune.' If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization - a society that ticks all the boxes - is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our /Page 426/ consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is - that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology - all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us. Meanwhile, we have made ourselves the possessors of a technology so advanced that it seems almost like magic, even while we use it constantly in our daily lives. Computer science, the internet, aviation, television, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, nanotechnology, transplant surgery . . . The list goes on and on, yet very few of us are able to understand how more than a tiny fraction of it works, and as it proliferates the human spirit withers and we engage in 'all manner of reckless crimes, wars and robberies and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul :2 Suppose for a moment that a cataclysm besets us, a cataclysm so vast that our complex, networked, highly specialised technological civilization collapses - collapses utterly beyond any hope of redemption. If such a scenario were to unfold it is likely that the meekest and most marginalised of the peoples who inhabit our world today - the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon jungle and the Kalahari desert, for example, who are used to making do with very little and whose survival skills are exemplary - would be the very ones most likely to make it through and therefore carry on the story of humanity in post-cataclysmic times. How would their descendants remember us a thousand or ten thousand years from now? How, for example, might something that we regard as routine, like our ability to receive 24-hour rolling television news and hear sound and view images from all parts of the world, and even from outer space, be recollected in myth and tradition? Might it not be said wonderingly of us, as it was of 'the Forefathers' recalled in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the ancient Quiche Maya: Page 427 They were endowed with intelligence; they saw and instantly they could see far, they succeeded in seeing, they succeeded in knowing all that there is in the world. When they looked, instantly they saw all around them, and they contemplated in turn the arch of heaven and the round face of the earth. The things hidden in the distance they saw all without first having to move; at once they saw the world, and so, too, from where they were, they saw it. Great was their wisdom; their sight reached to the forests, the lakes, the seas, the mountains and the valleys.3 Yet, in common with so many other memories that seem to hark back to an advanced lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity, we learn that in due course the 'Forefathers' became arrogant and proud and overstepped their bounds so that the gods asked: 'Must they perchance be the equals of ourselves, their Makers? Let us check a little their desires, because it is not well what we see.'4 Punishment swiftly followed: The Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes, which clouded their sight as when a mirior is breathed on. Their eyes were covered and they could see only what was close, only that was clear to them. In this way all the wisdom and all the knowledge of [the Forefathers] were destroyed.3 It is interesting to note the mechanisms used by the gods to keep our ancestors in their place, as described in the Popol Vuh: A flood was brought about by the Heart of Heaven . . . A heavy resin fell from the sky . . . The face of the earth was darkened and a black rain began to fall by day and by night . . .6 The faces of the sun and the moon were covered . .7 There was much hail, black rain and mist and indescribable cold . . .8
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