Kayfabe

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined. [...] The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump support...

 Profligation of Biblical Literacy Led to Ideological Trib...

Luther thought the result of his movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church would be what came to be called “the priesthood of all believers,” the sixteenth-century equivalent of Zuckerberg’s “global community.” In practice, the Protestant Reformation produced more than a century of bloody religious conflict. This was because new doctrines such as Luther’s, and later John Calvin’s, did not spread evenly through European populations. Although Protestantism swiftly acquired the ...

 The Wonder of a Child Learning Their Native Language

Imagine you are faced with the following challenge: You must discover the underlying structure of an immense system that contains tens of thousands of pieces, all generated by combining a small set of elements in various ways. These pieces, in turn, can be combined in an infinite number of ways, although only a subset of these combinations is actually correct. However, the subset that is correct is itself infinite. Somehow you must rapidly figure out the structure of this system so that you c...

 Theoretical Uncertainty has No Meaning

If one looks at the history of knowledge, it is plain that at the beginning men tried to know because they had to do so in order to live. In the absence of that organic guidance given by their structure to other animals, man had to find out what he was about, and he could find out only by studying the environment which constituted the means, obstacles and results of his behavior. The desire for intellectual or cognitive understanding had no meaning except as a means of obtaining greater secur...

 4th Edition Player's Handbook Definition of RPG

A roleplaying game is a storytelling game that has elements of the games of make-believe that many of us played as children. However, a roleplaying game such as D&D provides form and structure, with robust gameplay and endless possibilities. D&D is a fantasy-adventure game. You create a character, team up with other characters (your friends), explore a world, and battle monsters. While the D&D game uses dice and miniatures, the action takes place in your imagination. There, you h...

 Eternitas: Transforming Data into Architecture

There is a little local exomemory that opens up while Isidore studies the structure. It describes Eternitas as an ‘experiment in transforming exomemory data directly into architecture and livable spaces.’ The Oubliette is full of similar art projects – indeed, many of Isidore’s fellow students work on considerably stranger things – but clearly there is something deeper here, something that is or has been important to the thief. On impulse, he takes out his magnifying glass. He gasp...

 Life is Like a Sonnet

"In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not? …There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm, or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it? …But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn’t he?” “You mean you’re comparing our lives to ...

 The World is a Black Box

The world with its quarks and chromosomes, its distant lands and spiral nebulae, is like a vast computer in a black box, forever sealed except for its input and output registers. These we directly observe, and in the light of them we speculate on the structure of the machine, the universe. Thus it is that we think up the quarks and chromosomes, the distant lands and the nebulae; they would account for the observable data. When an observation turns out unexpectedly, we may try modifying our th...

 Prayer is Silent Observation

Learning to pray, then as I understand it, is learning to listen with the mind and the heart – making oneself attentive to each exquisite detail of the world. It is a fearsome exhilarating task, best suited to solitude and silence. Such prayers are answered not with miracles tagged with our names, or those of our loved ones, but with beauty and terror. For the prayerful listener, the world becomes the sublime scripture, full of stories of structure and chaos, law and chance, complexificatio...

 Dissecting Crystals

A casual glance at crystals may lead to the idea that they were pure sports of nature, but this is simply an elegant way of declaring one's ignorance. With a thoughtful examination of them, we discover laws of arrangement. With the help of these, calculation portrays and links up the observed results. How variable and at the same time how precise and regular are these laws! How simple they are ordinarily, without losing anything of their significance! The theory which has served to develop th...