guys
May 20th, 2020
This is the 1002nd episode of Jesus & Mo. In this strange timeless lockdown I failed to notice the 1000th two weeks ago – which is a shame because I was going to invite all you readers round for a party. Never mind, we’ll have a proper celebration on the 2000th episode.
If you enjoy the comic and want to help it to reach that milestone, why not throw us a dollar or two every month? It makes us happy and it’s good for your eternal soul. Just follow this link:
Correct.
“If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+15&version=NIV
@Paolo, now that is some serious circular arguing going on in those passages!
Clearly cartoon Mo and Moses don’t believe Jesus’s dogma.
How do they feel about communion? Would they go cannibal on Jesus’s body and blood?
Moses would have to obey the Jewish injunction against consuming blood, while Jesus and Mo would bring up the ancient blood libel, that Jews makes matzo using the blood of Christians.
I wonder whether it hurts Jesus every time someone eats his bits. (I guess they just grow back miraculously.) Are any of the bits more tender? Is Jesus blood reminiscent of a nice Chianti?
Not to mention but the death and resurrection trope was already known in the ancient world with Egyptian mythology and Zoroastrianism.
I’d love to see you take on the people who argue for the ‘metaphor’ of Adam & Eve – and whether it’s necessary to be crucified for that 😀
Anything for tomorrow (May 21st)?
Maybe Moses & Mo wondering where Jesus is..?
Turns out he’s spending the day in lifts & going up escalators..?
[…] Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “guys”, is the 1002nd strip, but the author forgot to note the 1000th.. There is an addendum: […]
Superb! Brilliant Cartoon! But the comments? Bit an echo chamber or what! perhaps it’s time to bin them?
Smee, I thank you for your kind words about the strip. But I don’t know what your problem is with the comments. From the top down we have: additional information, a comment on that information, imaginative speculation, more additional information, a suggested topic, another suggested topic, a pingback, then you. Hardly an “echo chamber”.
If you really don’t like the comments, perhaps it’s time to stop reading them?
Smee: Please feel free to ignore this comment.
I am missing the wise interjections of the Barmaid at the Cock & Bull pub, which is of course closed by the lockdown (although one time, the boys turned up there anyway!). Perhaps she may pass nearby while they are on their park bench, enjoying the view.
Author: It’s good that you like the comments.
It would be nice to have better software for them. The editing feature seems to be gone, and for those of us that post from a smart phone and have 13.6 thumbs, it was a good feature. (Damn that mutation! ?)
Perhaps the problem is partly cost, and that this isn’t really a forum but rather a venue for J&M. Ok, I’ve convinced myself. Please ignore all of this.
BTW, did you hear about the couple that had to separate for religious reasons? He was an atheist and she was an agnostic. They didn’t know in which religion to not raise the children.
Laripu, I’m sorry about the comments editing failure. It was a good feature but the plugin I used simply stopped working, and there was nothing I could do to resurrect it. The only other plugin I found was a bloated Ajax-based thing which slowed the whole site down to a crawl.
Had you prayed properly ( for three days ;^) the plugin would have resurrected!
Author, were I the Author of this lovely, funny and intriguing comic, I would compensate myself for missing edition 1,000 by celebrating issue 1,006 then 1,007 and 1,010.
There really is nothing special about round numbers such as 25, 100, 1000 or any other. They are no more magical or significant than are 1,013 0r 1,301. You could pick any future issue that gives you sufficient room and time to prepare and simply decide to make that one, or those ones, your “anniversary edition”.
There is no need to religiously copy others in their archaic numerological traditions. Be bold, strike out in strange directions, do your own thing. You do this in the little boxes each week anyway. 🙂
Oh, and thank you for many hours of fun.
On the comments, some of these [mine for example] are tremendously wise, wonderful and funny. Perhaps almost as funny as the cartoons themselves at times. The lack of a correction tool can sometimes add a certain level of spice to the flow.
Having the comments is good. The spice must flow.
Paolo, in reference to your first comment, above:
“There ain’t no coming back.Not in the really, real world.”
Author, a small question of logic if I may?
Should there be no coming back, not in the really, real world, what the Hell are Joes boy and Moses doing hanging around our Mo’? I know where Mo’ came from and he’s obviously contemporaneous and real [for certain values of the term] but where did the other two come from?
Mo’ having multiple personality issues? The Barmaid being nice by supporting his imaginary friends? Too much iron from the Guinness?
While I’m having existential worries, what the Hell is Ganesha?
Apart from him being an Indian elephant-god.
This is all getting complicated. I need a good cup of tea. Fortunately, I believe I still have some makings.
On occasion, faith is a useful thing.
tinkling think: 1,024 is a “special” number for obvious reasons.
Author,
about missing out on 10^3, which looks nice to those who randomly chose 10 as the base of there numerical system, why not just choose the much more fundamental number 2?
That gives a nice number at every doubling, the nearest one coming up “soon”:
2^10, also known as 1K.
SoG:
Great minds think alike, eh?
Dr John the Wipper: I don’t know if it’s familiar to you in the Netherlands, but there’s a second line to that saying.
SoG:
at least not to me, but please enlighten me.
Dr John: Great minds think alike … and fools seldom differ!
I am currently having a significant religious epiphany caused by my contribution to restarting the Chinese economy.
I bought a new iPad Pro with a monster 12.9 inch screen. The whole world seems brighter and everything is lovely.
The only problem was that it insists on using facial imaging to let you access it, the first three attempts didn’t recognise me as human. It worked fine when I set the location as England and my species as “northern”.
And “yes” this is off topic but I’m so ecstatic I had to share.
For those who understand the significance of 1024,2048,8192 and 16384 – may I also offer 101,301,511 and 1013.
A propos binary numbers.
I still have a vivid recollection of way back when in my student days.
Way back then, if you needed cash (and FINALLY your next allowance was in!)
you had to go to the post office and fill a request for said cash.
It required eighter the awkwardly long passport number, or the (much shorter) driver license number. So,when I got my driver license, of course I started using that.
Writing down that number for the first time, I got a shock of recognition: 131072. At that time, pretty much anything with computers (which I was doing a course in then) required binary; and my drivers license number happened to be exactly 2^17!
Deimos:
1013 does seem to be of prime quality, but I don’t see anything otherwise special about it, or about 101301511
Everyone is the hero of their own story, and they make up the rules, often as they go. These guys are perfect examples (hey, whadda you know, Mo is perfect at something!) and as long as people buy the bullshit, we’ll never hear the end of the tale.
Speaking of which, 42.
101, 301, 511, and 1013 made no more sense to me, so I took a look at The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences to see it thought of those numbers … “Sorry, but the terms do not match anything in the table.” 511 does fall into 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, 127, 255, 511, 1023, … numbers with only the digit 1 in binary, but that may be coincidence.
Efogoto says:
The standard way to denote those is: 2^n – 1; where n is integer.
When n prime, many of those numbers (but not all, eg 2^11 – 1 = 2047 = 23 × 89) are also prime; they form the class of Mersenne primes.
FRom Dr. John: ” … they form the class of Mersenne Primes.” which one can contribute to finding by going to The Great Internet Mersenne Search page, downloading Prime95 and running it all of the time on your PC’s.
When you find a new one, you enter the realm of Scientific and Mathematical History but it will take a while. Maybe centuries.
Other ways of contributing to Science by way of loaning out your local machines as part of a truly gigantic super-computer are the BOINC projects at The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing one of which, PROTEINFOLDING@HOME is helping to decode the Winnie-the-Flu virus’s genes. Not only can we contribute to Real Science but we can also help to save lives.
There are other distributed computing projects, including BitCoin mining.
Interesting mathematical oddity, there seems to be no way to predict ahead of time which Mersenne number will be a prime and which will have factors. There seems to be no systematic rule, no equation for finding the primes. No one, at present knows whether this is true or simply due to us not knowing enough about the sequence. No one knows whether a rule, an equation if found would ever turn out to be useful for anything else.
Mersenne Primes, at least the ones yet to be found, are now multi-million digit integers and are difficult to work with and we know ever so little about them.
On the other hand, some of the BOINC projects are of obvious immediate use and will contribute to the betterment of the Human Condition very quickly if we throw sufficient CPU at them. Some others not so much.
BitCoin mining is obvious.
On the possibilities for an “anniversary edition” issue, I picked my numbers because they are close to today, they give the Good Author some time to plan a huge party with all of his people invited [but few turning up due to Winnie’s Flu] and the numbers rarely get celebrated so they are all probably lonely.
Poor unloved things.
Sorry, my memory is not current. PROTEINFOLDING seems to have become ROSETTA. or maybe it always was?
I’m not worried. You guys are all smart enough to find the anti-Winnie projects even when misdirected by me. After all, you found your way to Reality while being massively misdirected by myths and fairy-tales so a simple name change would be easy for you. 🙂
BOINC – that reminds me of the noise that an irony meter makes when it is overloaded by some remark by J or M, or both of them.
SoG, Berkeley is a University. It is full of students.18-year-old USAlien students. No name, acronym or initialism originating from there should ever surprise us. That an initialism and acronym for a global scientific effort should be homophonic with a certain euphemism for a biological function is just an example of their simple senses of humour.
Bless them.
Even with the funny name, I earnestly encourage everyone to volunteer CPU cycles to the cause of killing off Winnie’s Flu. I’m usually all for biodiversity and mulicultures but that is one species we can happily do without.
tinkling think, you’re correct, Berkeley is indeed a University, specifically a famous of University of California.
But it is also a family in the west of England that hosts a fox hunt. You probably know that the Berkeley Hunt is so well known that it is used in rhyming slang to denote a certain body part that can be used to BOINC. Which brings us full circle.
Anyone that’s still clueless, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Hunt#Lending_a_name
I’m too old to be running after foxes, but I remember them fondling. Ahem, I mean fondly.
When I worked, I used to often see early morning, mid-night and late evening foxes on my walk to work. They won’t be there any more as a developer built a ton of houses on the greenery the critters used to wander about on.
I like foxes, especially the vixens with cubs. Those were cute. I never approached closely. If one is wise one does not annoy a mammalian mother with teeth but watching them play at a distance was nice.
The hundreds of micro-hutches and miles of roadway now there are less so.
Yes, Laripu, I was aware of the family connection. I’ve been in England and have been using her language(s) for a very, very long time.
Both are lovely.
Laripu: You interesting link re Berkely Hunt mentions Berkeley Square, but fails to mention that the Square is famous for its connection with nightingales, or that the nearby Ritz is a popular dining place with angels.
How is it the three of them aren’t dizzy from all the circular logic?
SoG, I believe all the angels have abandoned the Ritz out of fear of COVID-19.
For all those posting about numbers, the number that may matter more than those others is 196883. The reason can be found here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monstrous_moonshine#Origin_of_the_term
Sadly, I’m no longer able to drive into the details, if I even ever was.
Laripu, as anyone with a modern device can easily discover, 196,883 issues of the comic at a rate of one per Wednesday will take at least 3,700 years. Longer should the Author and her [his?] descendants need weeks off for holidays.
While a gap like that would allow for plenty of time for the Author and his heirs in the business to prepare something really special as an “anniversary”-style edition, I suggest that most of us would prefer not to wait that long.
We are talking about getting our Special Super-Good Edition sometime in the 60th Century or so. That is asking a lot of our patience.
I still think 1006, 1007, 1013, 1031 and possibly 1037-1039 would be more immediately accessible. Maybe all of those? Perhaps the Author could collate them to actual events that took place in the equivalently numbered A.D. years as a sort of extended series of temporal jokes?
Your link the the Monster and friends is probably too esoteric and arcane a joke for most of us even were the issue with that number not so distant in time but it might make a wonderful meta-comic if some way were found to fold in Fibonacci and Fermat.
Or am I just being weird again?
Okay, 58h Century but that’s still a long time from now. Almost as long as is the End Of Quarantine. Still, it’s a couple of centuries closer than I worked out without using the calculator so that’s nice.
Hmmm, I wonder whether anyone ever hand-checks these sorts of short, simple, small-integer calculations for reliability or whether absolutely everyone always takes it on faith that the magic box “just works”?
tinkling think:
reality stinks
esoteric and arcane,
maybe slightly insane,
ought to be
my middle names.
even mice
know they must hide
when predators threaten
their only lives.
but people go out
and boldly brave
the deadly virus,
the incipient grave.
We find a monster
wherever we look
from theory of groups
to the sacred books.
they live in our dreams
and our woken minds,
and when angels are sought
in girls’ behinds.
the monsters are coming
and will not relent.
keep them at bay
till we create them again.
this two and four
and six and eight
and sixteen lines
won’t set us straight.