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Small towns have fewer negros so they don't have the crime problems

What was the last time you were in a small town?

http://www.nydailynews.com/new...

http://encompass.eku.edu/cgi/v...

https://www.fdle.state.fl.us/C...

http://www.csg.org/knowledgece...

http://www.gainesville.com/art...

Here is a bit of history that explains where the police force in America came from: http://plsonline.eku.edu/insid...

According to this even pigeons have a small area of binocular vision. Notice the difference between the owl and pigeon. The owl is biased toward the attack while the pigeon is biased toward the defense but they both have binocular vision in at least a small part. Look at these illustrations showing hawks and crows. Notice the relatively large area of binocular vision. Not as big as owls but bigger than pigeons.

They only have one orifice in the back - it's called the vent, technically. The anal and vaginal opening is one and the same. To laypersons, it's the butt. Sheesh!

If you want to pick nits, check your facts first. Eggs come out of the butt, as do sperm, turds -- and urine (which mixes with extrement so you'll rarely if ever see a bird just urinate). Imagine being a bird with a urinary tract infection!

Check this out so you can edumacate yourself:

http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/bird_excretion.htm

Search the page for: Cloaca and lower intestine of an Ostrich for a nice diagram of the anatomy of an avian vent.

BTW, crows, parrots, and woodpeckers all have enlarged cerebellar portions of the brain, which corresponds to high levels of visual acuity, being able to analyze visual input, and then solve abstract problems. Read more here: http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdbrain.html

Google hyponatremia.

http://geo-outdoors.info/hyponatremia.htm

There have also been past incidents where frats, having been banned from using alcohol in initiations (to prevent alcohol poisoning), switched to water, because "water is safe!"

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146359,00.html (short version)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2005/02/04/BAGNSB576121.DTL (longer article)

http://www.mashinc.org/resources-essay-water.html (another frat initiation using water that resulted in death)

There's a reason they tell you to eat and drink and the trail... and not just drink. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of the mechanisms of water posioning, consider this:

1. Your nervous system uses electrical impulses
2. These electrical impulses rely on ions from such elements as Sodium (Na), Potassium (K), and Calcium
3. These electrical impulses regulate everything from brain function to the beating of your heart
4. Imbalance of ions due to excessive water consumption without some sort of accompanying salt (for example, a snack bar, or a bag of chips) disrupts your nervous system
5. Various organs shut down, or go unregulated
6. You die

See: http://www.people.eku.edu/ritchisong/301notes2.htm

Rasmus's first version of PHP (PHP/FI) was written in Perl http://www.kme.eku.edu/tools/php/doc.html#history

According to my unversity's spam filter, up to 25 percent of all incoming messages from off-campus addresses are spam!

Nope, not that Holt. Samurai Cat Goes to the Movies, yes.

No.

Real crypto (they type the government uses to protect top secret data) is free:

• Public domain C/C++ AES code
• DJB also has a public-domain C and assembly AES code
• Dr. Gladman has some simple BSD licensed (usable in any commerical closed-source program) C/C++ and assembly implementations of AES
• There are some GPL implementations of AES available, for people who can handle the GPL being in their code. (GPL forces the release of source code)
• This Javascript page will help people writing AES in other languages

Most arguments in ID nowdays center around the concept of "irreducibly complex" biological components. Some examples. The blood clotting cascade. The human eye. DNA replication.

There's gonna be a floppy version too, look

Wendell Berry also says that language and technology as they're now often used divide the world (see "Life is a Miracle" or really, just about anything else by him). I wonder what he thinks of the internet...

This reminds me of something that I was thinking about the other day as I passed some ad that said "communicate with anyone! anywhere! anytime!" I don't own a cell phone. Yes, I check my email twice a day, but I find that I don't really have to (several weeks in Australia reminded me of that).

How much of the communication ideals that seem to be pushed out (or community website ideas) do we really want? Need? I don't need to communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Sometimes I need the opposite. Sometimes I just need to be able to communicate with a few people, in the right places, and then have time to do something useful, like build a bookshelf (so I'll have a place to put those collectors items when people buy only eBooks that expire in 4 months).

Yeah, I'm starting to sound like Cliff Stoll and I'm also something of a hypocrite because I like the internet and technology as much as the next guy. But there's just something about the promise of virtual community (and often "Insta" or
some other manufactured word like that) that, like virtual books, doesn't seem quite as promising as community in the real world.

I have to agree with the feeling Katz expresses. The U.S. Constitution protects us against excessive government power, and by and large succeeds. But what protects us against multinational corporations? Corporations are coming to control and scrutinize ever-greater areas of our lives: homeowners associations, pre-employment urinalysis, grocery store discount "clubs". I don't even want to get started on my personal rants on the subject....

Instead, I offer a 27-year-old poem by Wendell Berry. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front . The poem speaks for itself. Read the whole thing, but I offer here the first stanza as a teaser:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

Nitpicky: the optimal strategy for player 1 and the optimal strategy for player 2 need not be the same, although admittedly it's difficult to see how they could be different in a symmetrical game like chess.

(Certainly, in the vague common usage sense of "strategy" good strategy for black differs from good strategy for white, but in the formal sense of a strategy as a function from game states to move, I'm pretty sure the optimal strategy for both sides has to be the same. The difference in practice is that they don't face the same game states in the early game.)

Optimal strategies exist for sufficiently intelligent players in both sides in any two-player zero-sum (zero sum means their loss of points is your win of points) game. This is a theorem by Von Neumann. See The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by Von Neumann and Morgenstern.

While I haven't read that book, I'm pretty sure the game has to be both deterministic and have complete knowledge of the game state available to both players. There is no optimal (in the sense we're using here) strategy for Paper-Rock-Scissors, nor for Poker, despite both games' being zero-sum.

Along these lines, in asking more game-theoretic questions about chess, it would be interesting to know if the leading player has a strategy available to always win and if the other player can always force a stalemate. Hell, I can't even think of an ironclad argument that the player who doesn't start can't always force a win.

Indeed not; consider a variation on Fox & Goose (you can find the rules here) with the diagonal line removed. In that game, whoever goes first is guaranteed to lose an optimally-played game. The reason people expect that chess is either a victory for white or a stalemate is that, empirically, white wins more often than black (though I don't think the difference is terribly large).