No caffeine after noon
New personal rule: no caffeine after noon. Especially no cappuccino at 7 PM. I can't sleep. Not even Tom Paine's
Age of Reason put me to sleep.
Yes, I just read it. It was mentioned in
Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About in an example on random sampling and the Bible. Let me quote Dr. Knuth:
[…] many of his comments can be seen today as valid criticisms of 18th century Bible interpretation. But in general, he went way overboard in his argument. For example, here's one of the things Tom Paine said:
When we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God.
My sample of 3:16 verses shows that in this respect, at least, he was dead wrong. You have to work very hard to imagine that even 5% of those verses have anything at all to do with what he claimed occupies more than half of the Bible.
I got the feeling that Mr. Paine based much of his book on stereotypes and hearsay—one of the very reasons that he was panning the Bible. At the same time, quite a few of his comments about church corruption ring true. Perhaps the church organizations are simply more corrupt when they are a government agency—such as in France before the revolution. Either way, that is what happens when a group focuses on contemporary implementation rather than on the source document.
I'm going to need to re‐read some of my books on punctuation, because I can't help but feel like I'm misusing dashes and commas.