Friday, June 27, 2014

WHAT USE IS IFA TODAY?



According to Wole Soyinka (the only Nobel Laureate of literature in Africa), "it is a very curious phenomenon that Yoruba scholars are reluctant to come to terms with IFA. Even when they are trying to be somewhat objective about IFA, they are totally incapable of relating to it. They say it is a contemporary world. What use is IFA today?"

You can only ask "what use is IFA today" if you think IFA is merely a literary corpus of ancient verses, parables and anecdotes. However, there is more to IFA than a repository of literary corpus. IFA is high-science!

If African youths had not abandoned IFA for religious superstitions, they would have taken computer science to another level. For example, there are 16 principal Odu IFA elements, and these 16 IFA elements can further be extended to 65,535, and in some cases infinitely. Similarly, a CD uses 16 bits per sample. That gives each sample a range from 0 - 65,535. Coincidence?

There have been talks about computers running out of data storage space. This will never happen because the Odu IFA elements (i.e. patterns of binary code upon which computers operate) can be extended infinitely. So, if Odu IFA elements can be fractalized infinitely; certainly, computer-memory RAM can be extended infinitely.


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