Tuesday, April 16, 2019

All Jews are Mamzerim IV

In case your Hebrew isn't good enough to read Part I, this video presents pretty much the same mathematical argument. The video is directed towards proving that everyone is a descendant of royalty because everyone has a king somewhere in his or her family tree. The same logic shows that all Jews are mamzerim because every Jew has a mamzer or a mamzeret somewhere in his or her family tree. To show that all Europeans descend from royalty, you just have to establish that there was a king in Europe 1200 years ago. There was. Charlemagne. And to show that all Jews are mamzerim, you just have to establish that there were mamzerim among the Jews of 2400 years ago. And there were, according to the first mishnah of the fourth chapter of Kiddushin. And don't try to use this frame of the video:
to claim that all the mamzerim and mamzerot are over on the left. There is no reason to expect the mamzerim and the mamzerot to not be distributed uniformly across the whole population.

Added 7/5/19: This Numberphile video makes the same point.

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Approproate Names for Physicians

I used to have a urologist named "Wiener". It occurred to me this morning that "Krebs" is a good name for an oncologist and "Seymour" is a good name for a radiologist. Any others?