The Country on the Edge of Forever

Both pix, h/t Steven Hayward, PowerlineBlog This week in Pictures

Three Days of Darkness according to Blessed Padre Pio

“Hurricanes of fire will pour forth from the clouds and spread over the entire earth! Storms, bad weather, thunderbolts and earthquakes will cover the earth for two days. An uninterrupted rain of fire will take place! It will begin during a very cold night. All this is to prove that God is the Master of Creation. Those who hope in Me, and believe in My words, have nothing to fear because I will not forsake them, nor those who spread My message. No harm will come to those who are in the state of grace and who seek My Mother’s protection.”

“That you may be prepared for these visitations, I will give you the following signs and instructions: The night will be very cold. The wind will roar. After a time thunderbolts will be heard. Lock all the doors and windows. Talk to no one outside the house. Kneel down before a crucifix, be sorry for your sins, and beg My Mother’s protection. Do not look during the earthquake, because the anger of God is holy!” Jesus does not want us to behold the anger of God, because God’s anger must be contemplated with fear and trembling.

“Those who disregard this advice will be killed instantly. The wind will carry with it poisonous gases which will be diffused over the entire earth. Those who suffer and die innocently will be martyrs and they will be with Me in My Kingdom. Satan will appear to have triumphed. But in three nights, the earthquake and fire will cease. On the following day the sun will shine again, angels will descend from Heaven and will spread the spirit of peace over the earth. A feeling of immeasurable gratitude will take possession of those who survive this most terrible ordeal, the impending punishment, with which God will visit the earth since creation.”

Read it all

The Ulam Spiral

Wikipedia: The Ulam spiral or prime spiral is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963….^[1] It is constructed by writing the positive integers in a square spiral and specially marking the prime numbers.

Ulam… emphasized the striking appearance in the spiral of prominent diagonal, horizontal, and vertical lines containing large numbers of primes. …Ulam… noted that the existence of such prominent lines is not unexpected, as lines in the spiral correspond to quadratic polynomials, and certain such polynomials, such as Euler’s prime-generating polynomial x² − x + 41, are believed to produce a high density of prime numbers.^[2]^[3] Nevertheless, the Ulam spiral is connected with major unsolved problems in number theory such as Landau’s problems. In particular, no quadratic polynomial has ever been proved to generate infinitely many primes, much less to have a high asymptotic density of them, although there is a well-supported conjecture as to what that asymptotic density should be.

In 1932, more than thirty years prior to Ulam’s discovery, the herpetologist Laurence Klauber constructed a triangular, non-spiral array containing vertical and diagonal lines exhibiting a similar concentration of prime numbers. Like Ulam, Klauber noted the connection with prime-generating polynomials, such as Euler’s.[4]…

Goo…oogle

Anonosaurus Wrecks on A♠: I hate to say anything good about Google, but this is funny.

Regular Fast Radio Burst

Powerful Radio Signal From Deep Space Appears to Be Repeating in a 16-Day Cycle
Michelle Starr, Science Alert
c/o The Woodpile Report
h/t Misanthropic Humanitarian on A♠

…Now, for the first time, astronomers have found a fast radio burst (FRB) that repeats on a regular cycle.

Every 16.35 days, the signal named FRB 180916.J0158+65 follows a similar pattern. For four days, it will spit out a burst or two every hour. Then it falls silent for 12 days. Then the whole thing repeats.…

…FRBs are hugely energetic flares of radiation in the radio spectrum that last just a few milliseconds at most. In that timeframe, they can discharge as much power as hundreds of millions of Suns.

Most of them spark once, and we have never detected them again. This makes it rather difficult to track these bursts down to a source galaxy. Some FRBs spit out repeating radio flares, but wildly unpredictably. These are easier to track to a galaxy, but so far, that hasn’t brought us a great deal closer to an explanation.…

…”The discovery of a 16.35-day periodicity in a repeating FRB source is an important clue to the nature of this object….”

Illustration: belfasttelegraph.co.uk