Genesis 19:15–17 ESV

As morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Up! Take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be swept away in the punishment of the city.” But he lingered. So the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the LORD being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city. And as they brought them out, one said, “Escape for your life. Do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley. Escape to the hills, lest you be swept away.”

But he lingered...

Walk away.

Matthew 17:4 ESV

“And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.””

Peter, not knowing what to say, said...

Acts 17:6 ESV

“These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also...”

How very cool!

I had an appointment this morning for an MRCP (magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography. yep, that's what it's called.

seriously).

The purpose was to gather evidence to assist in diagnosing conditions within my abdomen. Along the way, we acquired incontrovertible evidence of conditions within my psyche.

I am claustrophobic.

Indubitably.

Acts 9:23–25 ESV

When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him, but their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the gates day and night in order to kill him, but his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a basket.

Place a piece of paper over your coffee cup. Poke it into the cup. What happens to the piece of paper? Read on...Conical dislocations in crumpling.

A crumpled piece of paper is made up of cylindrically curved or nearly planar regions folded along line-like ridges, which themselves pivot about point-like peaks; most of the deformation and energy is focused into these localized objects. Localization of deformation in thin sheets is a diverse phenomenon, and is a consequence of the fact7 that bending a thin sheet is energetically more favourable than stretching it. Previous studies considered the weakly nonlinear response of peaks and ridges to deformation. Here we report a quantitative description of the shape, response and stability of conical dislocations, the simplest type of topological crumpling deformation. The dislocation consists of a stretched core, in which some of the energy resides, and a peripheral region dominated by bending. We derive scaling laws for the size of the core, characterize the geometry of the dislocation away from the core, and analyse the interaction between two conical dislocations in a simple geometry. Our results show that the initial stages of crumpling (characterized by the large deformation of a few folds) are dominated by bending only. By considering the response of a transversely forced conical dislocation, we show that it is dynamically unstable above a critical load threshold. A similar instability is found for the case of two interacting dislocations, suggesting that a cascade of related instabilities is responsible for the focusing of energy to progressively smaller scales during crumpling.