the origins of christianity are unlikely to be what you'd initially think. the ancient israelites used to conceive of god as a physical, embodied, emotional deity - who originally belonged to a larger pantheon of gods who ruled over separate areas and engaged in competition with one another. this book is super readable, but it doesn't sacrifice technicality for the sake of its wider scope of appeal. if you're interested in the origins and evolution of abrahamic religion, i can think of no better place to start. big up my academic crush i love u francesca
if you start zooming in on a pattern, and the pattern doesn't seem to get more simple as you close in, there's a very good chance you're looking at a fractal shape. my new computer hobby is going on google earth (clean setting - no borders or labels) and zooming into random places to see if i can find these patterns. and they are everywhere. in rivers, mountains, deserts, forests, coastlines and on and on. its genuinely stunning, and a little bit frightening, how the same shapes appear over and over again. the beating heart of iterative processes is plastered all over the globe at every scale. from above, the shape of a forest can look like a leaf, or a neuron, or a blood vessel. great place to have a zoom is at the bottom of tibet, where theres a sharp cutoff between the icy mountain range and the grassy forests of nepal and bhutan. pic below is of the nile river in southern egypt. happy travels everyone
