Near the top of a newspaper article about meerkats’ murderous ways: “The team of Spanish biologists and geneticists behind the study did not set out to point a bloody paw at the meerkat, however. They were more interested in plumbing the evolutionary history of lethal violence, comparing murder rates for 1,024 different types of mammals.”

1024 is 100,0000,0000 in binary. With the numbering starting at zero instead of one, so that the ordinal of the last item, the 11,1111,1111th, is a ten-bit identifier.

Monday night Mrs. Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who Trump was mean to, and bragged that she is now a U.S. citizen and will be a Clinton voter. Apparently, Miss Machado has lived a fairly wild and sordid life since her dealings with Trump twenty years ago. Not really the sort of person that candidates of the past would have pointed out by name before a national audience as supporters of theirs. But it’s not the past. It’s now, and as Mr. Trump asked, “Where did you find this?” Part of the answer is that Trump has contributed a lot over the decades, and more each decade than the one before, to creating our Kardashian era in which people like Miss Machado are easy to find. Unpleasantly hard to avoid, really.

So here we are with one candidate who thinks it’s a nifty thing that a woman who posed naked in magazines, served as the getaway driver for her homicidal boyfriend, and threatened to kill a judge has been given citizenship and a vote—because she finds some small advantage in this. The other candidate is married to a woman who posed naked for magazines, thinks that is normal, and has performed an oversized labor toward normalizing public depravity.

Mormons have a very broad and democratic collection of biographies of their 19th Century predecessors. This is due to two causes. The first is our belief that family bonds have eternal significance which leads us to seek familiarity with our dead and to leave records that will allow our descendants to know us. The second is that the first Latter-day Saints felt they were eyewitnesses of something important and wanted to leave a testimony of it. Thanks to these factors, it is easy to find research on hundreds of second-tier associates of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and tens of thousands of multi-page biographical essays on nobodies written either first-hand by the nobodies themselves or by their children. These are of most interest to direct descendants of these people, so today most of those 19th Century Mormons are each known in detail to a few percent of present-day Mormons, but we like hearing the stories of others’ kin too.

A few of my favorites: (more…)

A traveler on a long journey came to a ford.  Due to recent rains, the stream was swollen to a flood.  The traveler was perplexed to know what to do and exercised his mind for a solution. (more…)

Last night Elder Cook spoke to the young adults of the LDS Church. My two older sons attended the broadcast in our stake center. (more…)

The story of Adam and Eve, Mormonly understood, makes a mockery of the idea of salvation under the Law.

The standard Christian view is that Adam and Eve were given a strict commandment not to eat the fruit, the Serpent tricked them into eating it, so God in his anger cast them out of Eden. The Mormon view is that Adam and Eve were given two commandments which could not both be fulfilled, so one (don’t eat the fruit), had to give way to the higher one (multiply and replenish the Earth). Adam fell that men might be.

Elder Oaks explained, more clearly than I can ever hope to, the Mormon belief that what Adam and Eve did was a “transgression,” not a “sin”:

For reasons that have not been revealed, this transition, or “fall,” could not happen without a transgression—an exercise of moral agency amounting to a willful breaking of a law (see Moses 6:59). This would be a planned offense, a formality to serve an eternal purpose.

The obvious theological objection to our doctrine would be: “God is perfect and perfectly just, so why would he give a commandment knowing that it could not be fulfilled? How is that fair?” As Elder Oaks says, the need for such a transgression has never been fully explained, and I admit that this one used to bug me a little when I was younger. Eventually I shrugged it off; it was a one-off deal, so why think too hard about it?

Then I served a mission, got married, had kids, and realized that God gives impossible commandments all the time. (more…)

It’s been my impression that it is the policy of North Korea to scrape together all the loose fissionable material to found around the world, and when they have enough scrounged up for a critical mass, to make it into a bomb and blow it up. This seems like a useful service to the world. The interval between bombs had been three years (2006, 2009, 2012, 2016), but the latest came less than a year after the previous and released a larger yield.

The gentlemen here have some interesting answers to prayers.  God, it seems, trusts us enough to unbutton a little. (more…)