The Voynich manuscript "tie in" I see as just another interesting digression while talking about Ethel's life.
But the Boole family bit ties in thematically in that it provides two people who represents two contradictory possibilities for the future:
The stagnating world described in the first part of the article where nothing changes because we're locked in place by technology, represented by Hinton's view of time as an illusion, where it is just what part of a static four-dimensional landscape we see that changes.
Or a future where things are allowed to change again, represented by Ethel, whose novel inspired a generation of revolutionaries, and who herself continued to believe in change to the end.
But the Boole family bit ties in thematically in that it provides two people who represents two contradictory possibilities for the future:
The stagnating world described in the first part of the article where nothing changes because we're locked in place by technology, represented by Hinton's view of time as an illusion, where it is just what part of a static four-dimensional landscape we see that changes.
Or a future where things are allowed to change again, represented by Ethel, whose novel inspired a generation of revolutionaries, and who herself continued to believe in change to the end.