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Category: Interesting or Cool

Dysfunctional papal elections

Dysfunctional papal elections

History was made in the election of the American Augustinian as Pope Leo XIV.

While this election was fairly straightforward, people love to take for even the most minor signs as indications scandals and diabolical cover-ups.

As anyone who has studied history knows – the truth is far, far more crazy than anything conspiracy theorists have come up with. For those that think the world has never been worse off, perhaps take a moment to hear some real events the Catholic Church has gone through.

As Hilaire Belloc said, if the Church were not of divine origin, it wouldn’t have lasted a month.

Making and breaking codes for fun

Making and breaking codes for fun

I loved codes as a kid. I think I checked out every book on writing codes from the local library and even took a cryptography class during my college computer science courses.

While I usually stay away from social media, some of the non-political areas are decent. Reddit has a codes forum where users post different codes that they have made or run across and try to solve them.

Links:

Generate a massive prime number in seconds

Generate a massive prime number in seconds

PurpleMind demonstrates how modern algorithms generate giant prime numbers in just seconds. The key is they don’t actually check if it is exactly prime, but can do so with very high confidence using certain properties of primes. Bonus points for the fact he gives code too.

Speaking Latin at the Vatican

Speaking Latin at the Vatican

polýMATHY tried to use his Latin to talk to random priests in the Vatican and it goes pretty well. One of my instructors did Latin translations at the Vatican.

I would would have been a barely functional novice with my Latin verbal skills (even when I was still taking classes and using it regularly). My Latin knowledge was almost exclusively read, not spoken – so it would have been rough times. I could listen to him and understand a good bit of what he was saying, but I would have struggled to respond.