zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — a tale of Guru Nanak — & the things you can buy on Amazon these days ]
.

Painting by PM Wylam of Guru Nanak Dev Ji as a young boy

It is said that in his schooldays, young Nanak who, as Guru Nanak, would go on to found the Sikh religion was in math class when the numbers one, two, three and so forth fourth were explained, and objected when the teacher began to talk about two, on the grounds that he hadn’t yet fully grapsped the number one.

Respect.

**

Putting that another way, the number one is at least as fascinating in its own possibities as it is with the series of integers that follows it — you may recall my earlier discussions of one and its possible opposites in earlier posts:

**

Here the conversation takes a completely different turn..

It’s in the spirit of that kind of mythematical — or perhaps better in this case, mathemagical — thinking that I offer this equation:

I’m inclined to think they’d somehow cancel, or at the very least balance, each other out. I wonder whether Amazon has an algorithm that knows that, yet.

Really, I had no idea one could buy dragon’s meat in a can, nor that of unicorns.

**

I found out about canned unicorn and dragon while while reading up on Tactical Bacon in a spell of NSFW research on the Malheur business:

Oy, the world we live in.

[ by Charles Cameron — a brief comic digression about them and us ]
.

Generally, we’re stuck with this:

Best political cartoon I've seen in a long time. pic.twitter.com/LEjK1URjpk

— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) March 1, 2015

It is a good one, I’ll admit.

I’m inclined, however, to agree with this analysis on occasion:

Could be the Best Cartoon Ever pic.twitter.com/UPTVTPMhCJ

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) December 6, 2014

What I hadn’t realized, though, is that the theriomorphic rabbit and duck divinities in question are orthogonally related:

Proper labeling of axes is absolutely crucial. pic.twitter.com/rngFg9PAXK

— Pascal Wallisch (@Pascallisch) June 25, 2014

Very clever!

**

Two sides to every coin, two hands for every koan?

[ by Charles Cameron — on the (Pythagorean) arithmetic of morals ]
.

Sendan Kendatsuba, one of the guardians of Buddhist law, banishing evil, Tokyo National Museum

**

What’s right is generally supposed to be positive, while what’s wrong is seen as negative — and as they saying goes, two wrongs don’t make a right.

In effect, that’s saying two negatives don’t make a positive. And if you add them, that’s correct.

But if you multiply two negatives, you get a positive — hunh?

So two wrongs can indeed make a right — that’s the mathematics of vengeance — multiplicative:

And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

— Deuteronomy 19.13

And it is also true that two wrongs don’t make a right — that’s a mathematics that denies vengeance — additive.

And then there’s the mathematics of forgiveness :

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

— Romans 12.21

Patient men, desirous of the Face of their Lord, who perform the prayer, and expend of that We have provided them, secretly and in public, and who avert evil with good — theirs shall be the Ultimate Abode

— Qur’an 13.22

And what’s most interesting to me in all this, is that the mathematical formulations, additive and multiplicative alike, don’t make a feature of time — where as their moral equivalents tend to introduce time into the equation / situation — in each case, it’s the response to evil, real or potential, that is considered.