h50

Workplace assessment:

See also elsmar.com/Forums/showpost.php?p=552837&postcount=4

The formula tought by the Butcher to the poor Beaver is y=((x+7+10)*(1000-8)/992)-17.

The formula simplified: y=x.

This is lots of number crunching for proving nothing.

This reminds me to Charles Babbages number crunching in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837).

Babbage described a machine, which simply counted from 1 to 100000001 and then changed the "law" for computing the sequence. After applying that 2nd law 2762 times, the machine would switch to a 3rd law, etc.

...
-2: 99999998
-1: 99999999
0: 100000000
1: 100000001
2: 100010002
3: 100030003
4: 100060004
5: 100100005
6: 100150006
...
2760: 38174202760
2761: 38201802761
2762: 38229412762
2763: 38257032763
2764: 38284662764
...

Today it would be easy to implement this as a program. But in the sequence above you see, that nothing special happens at around 2762. Thus, a modern programmer just would have to check a counter or the value after which the law should be changed in order to change that law. But that proves nothing.

Babbage wanted to prove, that a creator could build such a machine. But for sudden changes of rules for sequences you don't need a surprise generator programmed by a creator. There are zillions of state changes in the universe each second. That is a high enough number for "experiments" to allow for the sudden emergency of events which can cause sudden changes to the paradigms for subsequent events.

A meteor crushing into earth can be such an event, or the emergence of a species whose individuals can think about thinking. Sometimes they even do that.

Very high resolution: www.ipernity.com/doc/goetzkluge/37490830

www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/ballads/Rd005433.html

[...] If the name "Colenso" is vaguely familiar today, it is probably from Lewis Carroll. Before becoming a bishop, Colenso had written a popular set of books on mathematics. If you look at Holiday's original illustration to "The Beaver's Lesson," chapter five of The Hunting of the Snark (p. [49] in Carroll/Gardner), you will observe that one of the books shown there is Colenso's Arithmetic.
Once he became a Bishop, Colenso turned the analytical skills which he had previously used for mathematics to examining the Bible. One of his missions was to the Zulus, whose language he learned (a very unusual act for an Englishman of the time); he published a grammar and dictionary of the language, and began to translate the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Zulu.
This proved rather embarassing, because the Zulus had a lot of tricky questions about his teaching (Carroll/Gardner, p. [47]). He began to analyze the Old Testament in mathematical and scientific terms (Ellis, p. 218). His results were published in The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined (completed 1879, according to LarousseDict, p. 329). Carroll/Gardner, p. [47], says that Colenso "reduced to absurdity the literal interpretation of the Bible." Among his calculations was an estimate that, to make the Bible literally true, six men would have had a combined 2748 sons, and that priests would have been forced to consume 88 pigeons daily (Green, p. 281). [...]

Robert B. Waltz and David G. Engle: The Ballad Index (2015)