What's a piece of esoteric knowledge you have?

I'm Western esotericism, names have power beyond simply being signifiers for the thing they represent- they embody some part of the thing they represent. The word "fire" contains some intrinsic "fire-ness" but not the whole picture. After all, everyone has different names for the same thing. It is thought that everything has a "true name" that perfectly encapsulates all things about it in their entirety, and this true name could be found by intense study, meditation, or etymology. The Bible pays a lot of attention to names in this way. Adam, the first man, names all the animals. Genesis pays a lot of attention to the names of places, and a lot of stories in Genesis are essentially folk etymologies of locations. God's own name is of special importance, and its meaning was revealed to Moses by the Burning Bush. Even today Jews believe that even saying God's name is powerful and dangerous and that only the High Priest would be allowed to say it once every year during Yom Kippur. Jewish folklore says that even this name is merely a part of God's true name, and that Moses pronounced a longer more complete form of The Name to part the Red Sea, and some systems hold that there are even longer and even more complete forms that have been known to rabbis in the past.

There's a trick with our loan servicing XML imports. If you pre-encode the property address into a [Comment] tag inside the [CIF] section, the system auto-fills it in three different screens, even though none of them actually pull from that tag offcially. I don't know why it works, just that it does. Doesn't really save me more than about thirty seconds but when you're boarding dozens of loans per week, it can add up.

There is only one model structure that can be put on the category of small categories for which the weak equivalences coincide with honest equivalences of categories. It's called the Joyal-Tierney model structure. You can define the suspension of an object in any model category as the homotopy pushout to two terminals, then define an abstract notion of a sphere in any model category by setting the 0-sphere as the coproduct of two terminals and the (n+1)-sphere as the suspension of the n-sphere.

A small category is a CW-complex if and only if it is a groupoid.

There are two types of color E-ink displays:

One that uses a color filter on top of a regular black and white particle display, like in their Kaleido screens. This has a faster refresh rate like black and white displays, but the colors are muted and the screen’s “pure white” is much more gray than other displays.

One that uses four colored particles, cyan, magenta, yellow, and reflective white, like in their Gallery screens. This has a much slower refresh rate, but the colors are vivid and the screen’s “pure white” is just as good as a non-color screen.

There are also color transflective LCD screens from other companies that are sometimes marketed as “e-paper” or “paper like” that are fairly uninteresting.

And there are just straight up backlit LCD screens marketed as “e-paper” or “paper like” that are just not. XPPen just made one. I personally think this should be considered false advertising.

The SR-71 used an Astroinertial Navigation System that used stars to keep the navigation information accurate as the plane flew over long distances. Normally an inertial navigation system degrades in accuracy over time and distance due to small errors building up and something called gyro drift. The NAS-14V2 used a catalog of known stars and a gimballed telescope to identify specific stars (even during a cloudy day) and determine the position of the stars in relation to the aircraft. Using this information the position of the aircraft can be used to revise the inertial navigation system's data every so often so the accuracy is much better.

Hm, I guess this is esoteric in the sense that most people aren’t interested in it?

Some clothes are made with what’s called ‘slub cotton’, which is cloth made from cotton thread that has irregular lumps jutting out of it. It gives the final woven fabric an interesting look, almost like static. If it’s done with bright or contrasting colors it can give a really interesting pop to the final item.

All contradiction is reconciled above the abyss, hence why spiritual visions can sometimes appear horrible at face value.

Wait, what kind of esoteric did you mean?

The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered "bank tokens" as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.

the internet is bad.

Crime novelist Jim Thompson [Pop.1,280] wrote a novelization of the TV show Ironside.

If that's not esoteric, I don't know what is.

I mean I've spent time studying occult stuff, so I guess pretty much the trope codifier.

Turns out they mostly just like to do the macarena. ¯(ツ)_/¯

Everything you learn from being active on Tumblr from late 2012 to now

1. This is true and remote from all cover of falsehood
2. Whatever is below is similar to that which is above. Through this the marvels of the work of one thing are procured and perfected.
3. Also, as all things are made from one, by the condsideration of one, so all things were made from this one, by conjunction.
4. The father of it is the sun, the mother the moon.
5. The wind bore it in the womb. Its nurse is the earth, the mother of all perfection.
6. Its power is perfected. If it is turned into earth,
7. separate the earth from the fire, the subtle and thin from the crude and course, prudently, with modesty and wisdom.
8. This ascends from the earth into the sky and again descends from the sky to the earth, and receives the power and efficacy of things above and of things below.
9. By this means you will acquire the glory of the whole world, and so you will drive away all shadows and blindness.
10. For this by its fortitude snatches the palm from all other fortitude and power. For it is able to penetrate and subdue everything subtle and everything crude and hard.
11. By this means the world was founded
12. and hence the marvelous cojunctions of it and admirable effects, since this is the way by which these marvels may be brought about.
13. And because of this they have called me Hermes Tristmegistus since I have the three parts of the wisdom and Philsosphy of the whole universe.
14. My speech is finished which i have spoken concerning the solar work