January 2012
57 posts
December 2011
63 posts
International Association of Time Travelers: Members’ Forum Subforum: Europe – Twentieth Century – Second World War Page 263
11/15/2104 At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote: Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the...
A smugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its provenance? Of course she can, because this is the kind of cool restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where patrons regularly seek elaborate assurances about the virtuousness of their food. The waitress informs the couple that the...
“Why act morally?”
That question is not only legitimate but fundamental.
In the recent New Atheist debates (as well as debates preceding these) religious folk will often ask the question, partly rhetorically, and partly as a sincere challenge. When they ask it rhetorically they will often suggest that without divine punishment there is no reason to act morally at all and that...
It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel’s legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s argument that Palestine is an “invented nation”. The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not...
2011 is almost over. Inbox me something you've...
http://deathtaxes.tumblr.com/ask
x-tea:
reblogged from @viina :)
http://x-tea.tumblr.com/ask
Ad hominem To attack the person not the argument: “We should increase taxes”, “Don’t listen to him, he only showers once a week”.
An ad hominem only occurs if you ignore the argument and attack the person to undermine the argument. “It’s hot outside, let’s all go for ice-cream.” “That’s a bad idea. I’m diabetic, you...
When a bank wants to encrypt information with you, here’s the gist of what happens: Bob (the bank) sends to Alice a box with two keyholes, and one key. You need both keys to open the box, but one key opens a mail-slot. Alice opens the mail-slot, and puts her message and sends it back. Bob uses the key that he didn’t give, and the key that was sent to open the box and read the...
War sucks.
You’re away from the comforts of home, you’re in a foreign land, and the locals are shooting at you. Because of this, you have to rely strongly on the people in your unit. If you don’t have that support, it’s the worst thing possible, because aside from the lack of friendship, the loneliness and the boredom, you don’t ever want someone to pause when you need rescuing. You want your...
One of life’s most important and valuable skills is to learn how and when to tell people to fuck off.
Now, I know you are thinking that is a bit harsh, but please hear me out on this. It isn’t just the church that wants to dictate the narrative of your all-too-short life. There are quacks, sharks, cons, and things much too awful to even mention by name, all of them want something...
On blacks (the color)
My work was hosting a group African businessmen, mostly from Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania if I remember correctly. They were there because their governments were buying our products en masse for their big cities and were getting major discounts and so were visiting our headquarters.
They were waiting in the lobby putting on their name tags as my colleague and I were walking back in after...
My story takes place in Lagos Nigeria. When I was a junior in high school, i was busy cutting class hanging out in the library with my friends like I usually do. Then this senior suddenly rushes into the silent library and screamed “hey everybody Mr. Are is getting beat up”.
Mr.Are was the economics teacher and was arguably one of the most annoying teachers we had, he was very strict and...
I was in 4th Grade, and had just moved to a new school.
The most popular kid in my class liked me, and we instantly became “best friends.” We hung out all the time, we played basketball all the time, we were into the same games, thought the same girls were cute, and his parents were rich and they spoiled us rotten.
But my new best friend had a dark side. He was a bully, a very...
Watch
Driving to work one morning in late winter, I lost control of my car.
After a short spin on the ice and slush, the back half of the car had jumped the curb and was stuck in someone’s front yard.
Problems: I worked at a country club, and this was a home located almost within eyesight of the place. Which is to say, it was a very nice home, and I didn’t like my chances of leaving it...
The Poincaré Conjecture
I. Euclidean Spaces
I assume you’ve heard of some of the following concepts: points, lines, planes, space. These are the “Euclidean spaces” in 0 dimensions, 1 dimension, 2 dimensions, and 3 dimensions respectively. What does that mean?
The dimension of a space is the fewest number of directions you need to get anywhere. In a plane, you can get anywhere by going in the...
P vs NP
We have problems. We want to solve them. We don’t want it to take very long. We are busy people, after all.
I. What is P?
Here’s one problem. I give you a picture, and I ask you to turn every red pixel blue. Easy! You go down the line asking every pixel, “hey man are you red?” and, if it is, you turn it blue. That wasn’t so bad!
If we had an n x n grid of pixels,...
Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis
You like taking things and putting them in order from smallest to biggest. You want to take this attitude and apply it to sets.
If you try on finite sets, everything seems easy. the set {1} is clearly smaller than the set {0, 2} ‘cause it has less stuff in it.
But if you try this on infinite sets, you run into trouble. Consider the set of natural numbers {0, 1, 2, 3, …}. This set...
In the UK, there’s a TV show about border security in Australia, and Old Asian Ladies are apparently major offenders when it comes to importing bugs/ diseased leaves/ other banned agricultural things.
My stepmother is Vietnamese and I can attest to this phenomenon. She often sends care packages full of western goodies to her friends in Saigon; large-ish boxes invariably sealed in 18 layers...
Before I went to Costa Rica, a crazy Panamanian told me to find an Englishman there called John Chapman (literally the only clues he gave me). One day I was in a tiny beach town, Dominical, and I asked a man if he could give me a job. He was John Chapman.
So I was on a bus in Guatemala when I met Eloy, the skydiving Panamanian on his was to the North Pole with an oil tycoon on a...
The cornerstone of French politics is not liberty, it is equality. So if a few demand that the rest put up with their antics, whatever their reasons, they will get the cold shoulder. Do it in private where no one else has to put up with it. This by the way, also explains why the privacy laws in France are so strong: it’s the flip side of the strength of the power of the State in public...
On OWS
Hedge funds. These guys are basically the vehicles of choice for ultra-rich people to get into the financial markets, besides family offices and private wealth managers. What are hedge funds? They are funds that have a 1-5 million deposit minimum, cater to the mega-rich, and can invest in anything without regulatory restrictions, use leverage to pump up their exposure by 15x, and pretty much eat...
On Twilight
Let’s put problems with spelling, grammar, narrative flow, plot structure, etc. aside and just look at the story and, in particular, the character arc of Bella Swan.
At the beginning of the story, she is moving from Arizona to Washington on her own volition - she has decided to give her mother and her step-father some time and space and to spend some time with her father. At this point in...
On Kobayashi Maru
There is a test like that in at least one infantry leader training exercise in the U.S. military. Or at least, there used to be. Don’t know if it still exists. I participated in this at Ft. Stewart in Georgia. Maybe it was Ft. Benning, but I’m pretty sure it was Ft. Stewart. I’m trying to remember the name of the course, but I can’t. Part of it consists of ten scenarios....
On the Beatles
No, neither Paul nor John could read standard music notation. That’s not as big of a deal as you think, since reading (or writing) music is simply ONE method of capturing the notes and rhythms of music. There are actually many different ways to notate music. For example, you can simply write down the names of the notes and chords in standard English if you like. Not being able to read...
On black holes
Let’s imagine one guy on a spaceship heading towards a black hole - Mike - and his twin brother back on earth - Jim. A camera on board his space craft connecting the two is sending images back to his twin brother on earth through radio waves, as well as vice versa. On earth, Jim decodes these radio waves, reconstructs them on a screen, and follows what’s happening to his brother on...
On Death & Dying
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of...