Not anymore +5......see, even here the distorted reality filed works...I guess the guys above missed the part about "brushing my action figures and posters"...one of IMDB reviewers said "see how every negative reviewer is called hater; that should tell you something..." - point confirmed!
Forgot to expand that part....so the message to the new generation is that if you are born proper (jedi) no training or effort is needed to master anything. The girl in the movie did not require any mentoring and in a few hours learned how to beat a Sith and knew better the Millennium Falcon than Han Solo! This drivel is a very poor and damaging attempt of PC girl-power shit. Listen, idiots, the female lead of all time and space is Ellen Ripley! We have done it many years ago, why is everyone hailing TFA for it?! Breaking such major Star Wars universe rule [you need to learn to use the Force and light-sabres] for the sake of PC points (but also financially rewarding, get it;) is...cynical to the extreme.
And I thought Lucas went senile with the whole "Han shot first" stuff...telling the kids that they should let hired assassin kill them for the sake of not appearing...what...bad?!? Who in their right mind would blame someone in this situation for taking a chance at Greedo?!
JJ outdid all this easily...I have the nagging feeling that a large group of marketeers was set to work and they scrambled "action points" - stuff that needs to be in to please this group or the other. At the end all the points were ushered in the script and the plot was twisted to accommodate them regardless of what it did to consistency with the SW universe rules...give it to bean counters to make...well...anything and watch the world burn!
Don't want to sound....whatever.....put any qualifier that comes to mind here....but I am done with cinema going in general and Star Wars in particular!!
I see now that the whole idea of what movie and movie going is, has changed. It is a much larger "consumer experience" that involves merchandizing, social media, a plethora of buttons being pushed cleverly on kids and their parents, social engineering, social media, stiffing political correctness.......and the quality of the actual film is not significant anymore! It is a product, not a movie!
The actual movie [only a part of the product]....ouch! Let's not bother repeating the obvious - just go to IMDB and read the top 50 "non-professional" reviews. 47 are negative and the points why TFA sucks tremendously are explained eloquently and in detail. The official reviews are an insult to our intelligence....my the gods even the guy who [hilariously] destroyed Ep 1-3 (red letter media) is buying the crap...I cannot continue...only curses come to mind:(
But man, the product worked like a charm! I watched it on 25th at 11:00 AM in the one of the only two places in NL where you get the 3D IMAX stuff. I had the best seat in the whole theater and was prepared to love the film. I did Ep.4-6 marathon the previous day, brushed my figures (R2D2, Imperial walkers) and posters - we are talking about a boy who saw the originals at age of 7 - a life time devoted fan!
Every family took a picture of their kids next to the model of BB-8! Merchandizing was everywhere....Every family kept on taking pictures inside the theater and sharing them in the last few minutes before the show. The cinema cleverly had a gallery of images form the trailers flashing on the screen starting from 10 minutes before 11. Guess what - everyone took a snapshot the moment they appeared like they'd been force mind tricked - I am sure that was the intention of showing the images. I honestly felt alien, like being surrounded by a herd of strange animals and you are not sure what they'd do next...
The show started at 11:00. Sorry , wrong, wrong , wrong....there were....wait for it....25 minutes of ads of which only 3 for movies the rest was beer, the cinema chain, Coca Cola.....I got crazy!!! You pay premium for this and they give you half an hour of ads!!! Also - politically correct BS as beer ad that says to drink responsibly and that women do not like drunken men (fuck you, you are a beer manufacturer!).
And then the show starts and I realize that I cannot bare the loudness of the sound. Surely I am partially to blame - for some inexplicable reason my hearing has grown more acute in the last year or so (go figure!) but still I am sure it was already at the the very edge of what is tolerable...I though why are not the parents worried about the kid's ears?!? So I watched the show with my in-ear headphones plugged in and the sound was just loud enough (no kidding).
Shame on JJ, shame on the official reviewers for buying this (hey, Empire magazine, do you remember your wall of shame, giving Attack of the clones 5/5 (WTF!!) - you are about to repeat that if you are not honest), shame on the whole industry for turning movie going into this....I don't know what this is..., shame on all of us for still supporting this, shame , shame, shame...
I am so sorry that one of my most precious dreams is being destroyed....the kid from the former communist state walking with his father in the streets of Sofia in 1980 (that's the delay you got back then) and we see a poster with stormtrooper firing the rifle and the title Star Wars. My father goes "this seems like a movie in space, you like this kind of things, what with reading Jules Verne and such...shall we try" [no ads back then, no reviews - you go "blind" to a movie unless someone has seen it and tells you].....we watched it sitting on the stairs between the rows - there were no chairs left. We went out and I said "again"...and we went on the other side of the cinema to join the line for the next performance...RIP!
I have always considered that the blaster rifles are firing some "plasma pack bullet" which travels rather slowly. Slower than a metal bullet anyway. Why would you use it then? Because the armor is too good for a simple metal bullet to pierce it so you are forced to "go plasma", sacrificing speed.
Why all the above? Because Force or no Force noone would be able to deflect blaster shot with lighsabre if it traveled with c. Sorry jedi! Even if the Force can move your body parts with appropriate speed the jedi will turn into plasma when doing so...
In "The Last Hero", Leonard has to build the first Discworld spaceship. When he lists what he needs to Vetinary he asks for hundred journeyman craftsmen. After Vetinary exclaims "But I can provide you with the best masters", Leonard replies "No masters my lord! I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible!"
Now, of course I also realize that the opposite stance [everything is possible; there are no boundaries of human ingenuity] can also be quite misleading and potentially very dangerous. Like the idea that we can screw this planet as much as we want because we WILL colonize space.....well, careful there, I always say....maybe we will need a few millennia of technological advancements to colonize. Or perhaps we can never circumvent c so then the best we can hope for is terraform Mars and Venus which is also a project that goes for 500 years or more [saw a rough calculation once about terraforming Mars with bacteria], whereas most of the problems we created for ourselves on Earth will hit us way sooner than that [and some already have hit with full force]...
I think it was in "Good omens" where Crawly [the demon that was the snake seducing Eve] sends back to hell EULA from HP to the department that crafts the agreements between the devil and mortals [think Faust] with a small note attached "Read and learn!"......nuff said
If you browse around you'll find substantial criticisms of his work by his colleagues. I for one was quite surprise about it for I did not see in his books any disrespect to his patients [one of the accusations] nor did I detect that he had twisted the stories or made them Hollywood-style to sell more [another accusation]. SO I don't know.....
What I do know is that his books opened a world for me so fascinating [and at the same time terrifying] that it changed my general perception about neurophysiology and the many bizarre illnesses that can suddenly manifest themselves due to dysfunction of a few hundred nerve cells. It also thought me compassion and understanding of people like this. For instance I used to look at Turrets as "crazy people", shy away from them, even be scared of them....not any more. I understand now and understanding heals fear and distrusts [and disgusts].
Moreover, it was simply unbelievably interesting to learn about those illnesses and people. Some of the stories made me think about profound philosophy questions. Like the one about the lady without a sense of body, the first recorded by medicine "zombi". And yes, she started doubting her own existence [the question here being can you have a sense of self if you are just a thought without a "carrier"].
Or that incredibly funny and insightful story about the patients that have no concept of words and speech while being so attuned to body language, melody of the speech and so on that many people would think they are mute, but understand everything you say to them. The story is about those people listening to president Regan's speech and how they laugh their asses off [probably] because they sense the discrepancy between his body language and the melody, tone and so on of his speech. In the same ward there were patients with the exact opposite issue - they understand only pure sense in speech, so tone, inflection, exaggeration, slang and so on - all of it is lost in them. One such patient said [for Regan] - "he is either sick or he is lying. he does not speak good prose; he does not make sense". So the conclusion was that so good was the speech as a combination between words and the rest of human expression that everyone got fooled except people who are not susceptible to one of those aspects [words or everything else]. Only the ill could see through him, us "normal" people were thoroughly deceived....brilliant!
Indeed in the past the wealthy were [mostly] obese. Guess what was that thing they could afford but almost no one else could [it was rare and very expensive]
How come that obesity is a modern day epidemic? Were people in the past ALL starving ALL the time and only barons, priests and kings were obese? I am not sure...looking at the pictures of the villagers where my mom was born [circa 40'ties] I see not a single obese person. Yet, all of them that are alive say they were not starving at all [despite war and shit]. After all they were mostly farmers. But when I ask "what is the major difference between your time and today in terms of food" the answer is unanimous - "sugar". They got 1 small cube of sugar per month, while gorging on fat, protein and grain [man, farmers DO know how to eat]
There is something more here, something hidden [accidentally or deliberately]. Something in our lives today pushes people's bodies in the wrong direction and trying to fix it through genomics seems futile and unwise to me...
I am on no grain, no sugar diet for 14 months already. Of course sometimes I have a piece of cake. In the last 4 weeks not even that. And just now, 5 minutes before finding this tread a colleagues brought chocolate for his newborn. I had 2 small pieces [20 grams in total] and at the moment my heart is racing, I feel dizzy and out of breath, even my hands are shaking a bit. I don't know what the hell is going on here...but I ain't gonna put sugar in my mouth for a long time I can promise you that...
Do you remember when people stopped laboring with that hunter-gatherer stuff and started farming? Agrarian society... less work, less labor invested to produce food to feed the tribe.
That is simply not true. The hunter-gatherers worked less that us today, let alone the glorious times of the industrial revolution with its 16 hrs working days and horrendous safety record. If you meant that we work more in order to have a bit more than just food, shelter and clothing you might have had a point, but you specifically mention food only. Hilarious. Do you now [for instance] that the average height of humans took a hit after farming was "invented"? Sitting on one place without trade means [usually] poor diversity of food....that's just a small tread to pull if you like to study the subject....
Small addendum - the bike lanes can [and are] used by senior citizens in those nice little cars that can only go 40km/hr or so. Old folks needs motorized transport sometimes. Would you prefer them to ride regular car and endanger themselves and the others [you know they are more dangerous than the young drivers]?
Oh, and the lanes are used by small motor bikes [again if you have some health issue that prevents you from cycling]. The pizza delivery guys use them too [those people are in fact the most dangerous participators of the traffic and their behavior should be sanctioned] Electrical motor assisted bikes are on the raise too...those are better since they don't make noise.
I did read through the whole tread and I am astounded that so many readers spell doom and gloom for a city that introduces proper bike infrastructure. Distorted reality, eh...
I have news for you. Let's take the obvious case - the Netherlands. Do you believe the countries exists? Yes? OK, so how come it has not collapsed to the bottom of the economic ladder if businesses cannot deliver their goods, customers cannot go to shops and employees cannot reach their work [all those are claims I found in the tread]? Reality check : FAIL!
I live in A'dam and work in Delft [bike-train-bike]. I have regular visits for business, medical and personal reasons to Maastricht, Leiden, Njimegen, Eindhoven, Hilversum and Leeuwarden. Check google maps to see what this means. Never owned a car. Never needed a car except when I shop furniture or tons of materials and tools for home renovation [but that can be delivered by the retailer, I can rent a car for a day or ask a friend with a car to help]. Trains and bikes can get you everywhere in this country and I do mean everywhere. You can go between cities [separated bike lanes that go usually through nice scenery double the road network].
What do I win and what society wins:
No costs for a car
1.5 hrs per working day reading books/magazines and meeting people in the train. Nice, clean trains that are used by all segments of society [so you don't have reasons for the old idiotic Clarkson retort that public transport is used only by junkies who will puke on you]. In fact traveling in the morning to the work you meet all the students that go to Leiden and Delft [university centers]. Did I mention the females are more in the NL than the males and the gays are more than the lesbians [there is a shortage of men here]? Hell, for the last nuclear summit in NL where Obama landed with the plane, shook hands with the king and then immediately disappeared in a helicopter [escorted by 2 others and hordes of bikes and cars] - btw, most dutch thought that was ridiculously paranoid, unnecessary and plain rude - the prime minister of Belgium took the train [high-speed line Amsterdam - Brussels - Paris].
No need for cardio in the gym so I can focus on power training. When I stopped going to the gym for 6 months after I started again the only exercise I could more of compare to before the break was legs [so it helps the power training too]. Because the infrastructure allows me to ride the bike as an exercise as well - very fast with rapid acceleration and braking.
General health benefits for all cyclists [to mention again those mythical [for/. ers] creatures, called women - any idea how riding a bicycle shapes women's legs. No? Thought so...]. Contemplate what this means on a country scale - MASSIVE saving due to healthier population [lower health cots, higher productivity ect.]
Environmental benefits [no need to elaborate I hope]
Convenience. Going out in Amsterdam with a car is idiotic [OK, if you go to the opera with 10 000 euros worth of clothing and a hair-do for 500 you might need a car but I am talking about the 99% here]. It takes me 10-15 min on the bike to go to the hearth of downtown, no need to pay huge costs for parking [if you find available place that is], you can drink [or smoke] and can go back home at any moment in the night independent from any transport.
Issues:
Cyclist can be nasty and sometimes dangerous on the road - just like everyone else. No surprises here. To claim that somehow there are more asses among them than the rest of the population is moronic at best [I saw that "argument" here as well]
What else? Oh, yes - when you arrive at work you stink of sweat [I see this retort often here]. Actually no. Really, really NO. With good hygiene [and diet!!] your smell is barely noticeable and with enough exercise you can bike with decent speed without breaking a sweat. Besides, at work we have this amazing thing, it's called "running hot water" and "a shower". Check it out!
Maybe there is something on the subject in PubMed? Their scope expands all the time. Don't ask for citation or details but 20 years ago my biochemistry professor explained why sugar substitutes [she focused on aspartame] are worst than sugar. Don't remember any details but she made me never use it for which I am very grateful.
No need to count really, just decrease the foods s/he mentioned and weight yourself a bit more often. You will find the balance by feeling. I lost 20 kg this way and am able to keep it without a sweat for 14 months already [even managed to use the period when losing the fat to build some extra muscle].
On the article - total BS. Sugar is the devil when it comes to food, it really is. My diet is also a personal research project in a way. Juts last week I had a small vacation and experimented with eating some chocolate, drinking sugary drinks and a bit of bread [and not that much from all this, mind you, way less than I used to do]. Result - 2 kilos up, bloated gut, too much gas, some diarrhea, less energy....the duration of the abuse was exactly 3 days!!! Today I finally feel "normal" - that is 4 days after I stopped the 3 day abuse....really someone should shoot those guys from Coke...I cannot understand that level of evil
What kind of retort is that? I just stated that it is a problem with epidemic proportions, that is strongest in the Western world. WTF? Are you going to tell me that the first world is not suffering from obesity, diabetes and cancer? And that those conditions are not on the raise [normalized for population] nicely coinciding with the whole "all fat is bad, eat sugar" scam? Seriously, WTF?!?
I live in the Netherlands, BTW, which is one of the better places in this respect [US and UK being among the worst]. Do you think that I am wasting my time to try fooling someone here? To what end? I have seen the results of vast world-wide scientific studies on gut flora. My own doctor is part of the project. Having healthy balance in the gut is the exception, not the norm!!! That is how far we have gone down this road. Seriously, it's juts science and data, data , data....
If you prefer to believe people who have vested interest in suppressing the facts, that's you own problem, but fuck it, just go to PubMed and start reading. Take a look at the TED talks on the subject. Do some research, man!
And lastly - I challenge you to not eat grain and sugar for 1 month and then introduce it back. Just do it and come back to me...
Look, there is no denying of the impact grains had on the development of civilization.
But on the other hand what AC said is also true. I went through the whole thing - a decade of suffering until I was told to stop eating grains. I am not gluten intolerant or something like that. Now, the story of course is way more complicated than it sounds. Why could I eat grains for 30 years and then suddenly I could not? My gut flora is terribly out of balance. What caused it? According to the medics I did not give them [gut bugs of all kinds] enough job by always eating stuff that gets processed in the small intestine. Too much sugar. Too much easy carbs in general [grain]. So, If I want to be healthy and productive at the moment grains are forbidden. Every few weeks I experiment once a day to see if I can process them again. So far the result is negative [one year on the diet]. This makes my life very difficult and expensive, but there it is...
Last point - once I started paying attention to all this and talk to people I discovered that almost anyone around me is in a certain stage of the downwind spiral of imbalanced gut. People do not realize that the feeling of tiredness, too much gas, bloated gut, compromised immune system, joint pain and god knows what else can be traced to the performance of their guts [60% of immune system response is from the gut]. Whether it is eating too much carbs, or too much E numbers, or toxic metals or lack of minerals in food due to accelerated growth practices, too much sugar...ect. all those things push a bit until your system is out of balance and you are fucked. That is why I am in principle against even more experimenting with food - we already have many bad practices and many bad habits. The natural food pyramid has easy carbs at the top [least available]; the food habits of the modern civilization has the piramyd inverted [mortal fear from fats;extremely stupid idea BTW and carbs, carbs, carbs..].
Don't forget that stomach cancer is on the rise consistently in the developed world and that regions in the world who are adopting the western food habits experience increase in obesity, diabetes and cancer. It really is like this - ATM the Arab world, China, Latin America - they are all on the rise.
"And while some rate of rotation is essential for evening out weather, there is nothing sacred about Earth's specific rotation rate."
I concur. According to the documentary "First life" when evolution started the day on Earth was merely 6 hours long.
What made me an impression though, was the speculation of how "snowball Earth" promoted the evolution of oxygen secreting microbs and kick-started the whole multi-celular life as oxygen gave more energy available to the future organisms [aerobic metabolism]. That event seems to me to be kind of "lucky" - I wonder if on other planets pure chemical reactions without life being involved can lead to free oxygen and promote similar evolutionary path...
A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault.
For me the greatest change was adopting low carb diet and exercising. However, I think I did this a bit too late [at 40]. So now I can do a lot more than a year a ago and I mean a lot more [figure and fitness level are as a young man]...but the skin is not very elastic anymore so in the face I kind of aged [smoking for 20 years does not help].
Stress - the biggest killer. A few years worrying all the time about health [the system fucked me] , my relationship [dying, now totally dead] and financial troubles [stemming from health] really, really aged me.
Genetics has a lot to do with it too [messa thinks]...my grandmother had baby skin at 72 when she died [she looked like Merlin Monroe as young woman] . She never smoked but drunk quite a bit. My mother at 67 looks at least a decade younger and without her life-time smoking it would have been much better. Next to her sister you see that the smoking aged her skin quite a bit but mom had better diet so aunty is smooth in the face but not so energetic, agile and resilient compared to mom.
Another thing I have noticed with my grandparents is the importance of the will to live. From my father side both were classical farmers. Whole life waking up at 5AM...work and work and work....but once they decided to sell the house and the farm and move closer to the capital where both sons were living they collapsed. Although the idea was exactly the opposite - that they'd be closer to family, easier to receive help, enjoy their retirement with grand kids... somehow it went exactly the other way. Once they were torn away from the life they knew since forever they both aged quickly, got all kinds of illnesses and eventually passed away...
That's right! Instead find the phage that kills it and make a medicine...
For the life of me I cannot understand why the phage treatment was never developed in the west to complement [and in some cases replace altogether] antibiotics. The only reason I can think off is profit. It will be difficult to patent phage strain that is naturally found in the sewer system of a hospital. Also, phages are cheap and we don't want cheap effective medicine, do we? And thus thousands of people in the so called developed nations die from super bugs every year. Those people could have been saved by a bunch of medical professionals from an institute [that looks like the stage for a B horror movie] created by Stalin [see the documentary below; it's very interesting]
Sorry, you are the idiot. The number of 60 million includes WWI, Civil war, Stalinist repressions and WWII. It is right there in the article you cite. Here is the whole excerpt:
Excess deaths over the course of World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million,[114] some 10 million in the 1930s,[29] and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued.[35] According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."
Also, the population of USSR during Stalinist repressions was below 180 million. Look at the graph they show in the very same Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Notice that they are at 180 million the 50-ties, while the great Stalinist purge was in the end of the 30-ies.
I do not endorse anything evil done by the fake communists - I am myself from a former communist state. But the amazing BULSHIT that westerners are misled to believe about eastern Europe and USSR are BEYOND imagination. Seriously, get a grip!
Like, the company will actually TELL you the real reasons for not hiring you....some years ago I once caught the HRM of my company when a bit drunk and she admitted to me that she would never hire anyone with a tattoo....I was shocked beyond believe, because we are talking about cutting edge semiconductor company with more than 50% of the staff with MSc. and 30% with PhD.
The chance that you find any "normal" person in my company is close to zero...unless you go to the HR office, the finance or the administration. Everyone who actually does the job is weird....to say the least. To expect that creative hyper-thinkers would conform to common appearances is lunacy.
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Not anymore +5......see, even here the distorted reality filed works...I guess the guys above missed the part about "brushing my action figures and posters"...one of IMDB reviewers said "see how every negative reviewer is called hater; that should tell you something..." - point confirmed!
Forgot to expand that part....so the message to the new generation is that if you are born proper (jedi) no training or effort is needed to master anything. The girl in the movie did not require any mentoring and in a few hours learned how to beat a Sith and knew better the Millennium Falcon than Han Solo! This drivel is a very poor and damaging attempt of PC girl-power shit. Listen, idiots, the female lead of all time and space is Ellen Ripley! We have done it many years ago, why is everyone hailing TFA for it?! Breaking such major Star Wars universe rule [you need to learn to use the Force and light-sabres] for the sake of PC points (but also financially rewarding, get it;) is...cynical to the extreme.
And I thought Lucas went senile with the whole "Han shot first" stuff...telling the kids that they should let hired assassin kill them for the sake of not appearing...what...bad?!? Who in their right mind would blame someone in this situation for taking a chance at Greedo?!
JJ outdid all this easily...I have the nagging feeling that a large group of marketeers was set to work and they scrambled "action points" - stuff that needs to be in to please this group or the other. At the end all the points were ushered in the script and the plot was twisted to accommodate them regardless of what it did to consistency with the SW universe rules...give it to bean counters to make...well...anything and watch the world burn!
Don't want to sound....whatever.....put any qualifier that comes to mind here....but I am done with cinema going in general and Star Wars in particular!!
I see now that the whole idea of what movie and movie going is, has changed. It is a much larger "consumer experience" that involves merchandizing, social media, a plethora of buttons being pushed cleverly on kids and their parents, social engineering, social media, stiffing political correctness.......and the quality of the actual film is not significant anymore! It is a product, not a movie!
The actual movie [only a part of the product]....ouch! Let's not bother repeating the obvious - just go to IMDB and read the top 50 "non-professional" reviews. 47 are negative and the points why TFA sucks tremendously are explained eloquently and in detail. The official reviews are an insult to our intelligence....my the gods even the guy who [hilariously] destroyed Ep 1-3 (red letter media) is buying the crap...I cannot continue...only curses come to mind :(
But man, the product worked like a charm! I watched it on 25th at 11:00 AM in the one of the only two places in NL where you get the 3D IMAX stuff. I had the best seat in the whole theater and was prepared to love the film. I did Ep.4-6 marathon the previous day, brushed my figures (R2D2, Imperial walkers) and posters - we are talking about a boy who saw the originals at age of 7 - a life time devoted fan!
Every family took a picture of their kids next to the model of BB-8! Merchandizing was everywhere....Every family kept on taking pictures inside the theater and sharing them in the last few minutes before the show. The cinema cleverly had a gallery of images form the trailers flashing on the screen starting from 10 minutes before 11. Guess what - everyone took a snapshot the moment they appeared like they'd been force mind tricked - I am sure that was the intention of showing the images. I honestly felt alien, like being surrounded by a herd of strange animals and you are not sure what they'd do next...
The show started at 11:00. Sorry , wrong, wrong , wrong....there were ....wait for it....25 minutes of ads of which only 3 for movies the rest was beer, the cinema chain, Coca Cola.....I got crazy!!! You pay premium for this and they give you half an hour of ads!!! Also - politically correct BS as beer ad that says to drink responsibly and that women do not like drunken men (fuck you, you are a beer manufacturer!).
And then the show starts and I realize that I cannot bare the loudness of the sound. Surely I am partially to blame - for some inexplicable reason my hearing has grown more acute in the last year or so (go figure!) but still I am sure it was already at the the very edge of what is tolerable...I though why are not the parents worried about the kid's ears?!? So I watched the show with my in-ear headphones plugged in and the sound was just loud enough (no kidding).
Shame on JJ, shame on the official reviewers for buying this (hey, Empire magazine, do you remember your wall of shame, giving Attack of the clones 5/5 (WTF!!) - you are about to repeat that if you are not honest), shame on the whole industry for turning movie going into this....I don't know what this is..., shame on all of us for still supporting this, shame , shame, shame...
I am so sorry that one of my most precious dreams is being destroyed....the kid from the former communist state walking with his father in the streets of Sofia in 1980 (that's the delay you got back then) and we see a poster with stormtrooper firing the rifle and the title Star Wars. My father goes "this seems like a movie in space, you like this kind of things, what with reading Jules Verne and such...shall we try" [no ads back then, no reviews - you go "blind" to a movie unless someone has seen it and tells you]. ....we watched it sitting on the stairs between the rows - there were no chairs left. We went out and I said "again"...and we went on the other side of the cinema to join the line for the next performance...RIP!
I have always considered that the blaster rifles are firing some "plasma pack bullet" which travels rather slowly. Slower than a metal bullet anyway. Why would you use it then? Because the armor is too good for a simple metal bullet to pierce it so you are forced to "go plasma", sacrificing speed.
Why all the above? Because Force or no Force noone would be able to deflect blaster shot with lighsabre if it traveled with c. Sorry jedi! Even if the Force can move your body parts with appropriate speed the jedi will turn into plasma when doing so...
Yhea, but football matches make money!
In "The Last Hero", Leonard has to build the first Discworld spaceship. When he lists what he needs to Vetinary he asks for hundred journeyman craftsmen. After Vetinary exclaims "But I can provide you with the best masters", Leonard replies "No masters my lord! I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible!"
Now, of course I also realize that the opposite stance [everything is possible; there are no boundaries of human ingenuity] can also be quite misleading and potentially very dangerous. Like the idea that we can screw this planet as much as we want because we WILL colonize space.....well, careful there, I always say....maybe we will need a few millennia of technological advancements to colonize. Or perhaps we can never circumvent c so then the best we can hope for is terraform Mars and Venus which is also a project that goes for 500 years or more [saw a rough calculation once about terraforming Mars with bacteria], whereas most of the problems we created for ourselves on Earth will hit us way sooner than that [and some already have hit with full force]...
There was an old joke from communist times.
"Why do we need two layer toilet paper?"
"One layer for you , the other for the KGB archive"
After the changes
"The toilet paper now has 3 layers!"
"It's for your comfort and the extra copy for the NSA archive"
I think it was in "Good omens" where Crawly [the demon that was the snake seducing Eve] sends back to hell EULA from HP to the department that crafts the agreements between the devil and mortals [think Faust] with a small note attached "Read and learn!"......nuff said
If you browse around you'll find substantial criticisms of his work by his colleagues. I for one was quite surprise about it for I did not see in his books any disrespect to his patients [one of the accusations] nor did I detect that he had twisted the stories or made them Hollywood-style to sell more [another accusation]. SO I don't know.....
What I do know is that his books opened a world for me so fascinating [and at the same time terrifying] that it changed my general perception about neurophysiology and the many bizarre illnesses that can suddenly manifest themselves due to dysfunction of a few hundred nerve cells. It also thought me compassion and understanding of people like this. For instance I used to look at Turrets as "crazy people", shy away from them, even be scared of them....not any more. I understand now and understanding heals fear and distrusts [and disgusts].
Moreover, it was simply unbelievably interesting to learn about those illnesses and people. Some of the stories made me think about profound philosophy questions. Like the one about the lady without a sense of body, the first recorded by medicine "zombi". And yes, she started doubting her own existence [the question here being can you have a sense of self if you are just a thought without a "carrier"].
Or that incredibly funny and insightful story about the patients that have no concept of words and speech while being so attuned to body language, melody of the speech and so on that many people would think they are mute, but understand everything you say to them. The story is about those people listening to president Regan's speech and how they laugh their asses off [probably] because they sense the discrepancy between his body language and the melody, tone and so on of his speech. In the same ward there were patients with the exact opposite issue - they understand only pure sense in speech, so tone, inflection, exaggeration, slang and so on - all of it is lost in them. One such patient said [for Regan] - "he is either sick or he is lying. he does not speak good prose; he does not make sense". So the conclusion was that so good was the speech as a combination between words and the rest of human expression that everyone got fooled except people who are not susceptible to one of those aspects [words or everything else]. Only the ill could see through him, us "normal" people were thoroughly deceived....brilliant!
Indeed in the past the wealthy were [mostly] obese. Guess what was that thing they could afford but almost no one else could [it was rare and very expensive]
Vegies? Nope.
Fat? Nope.
Protein? Nope.
Sugar? Bingo!!!
How come that obesity is a modern day epidemic? Were people in the past ALL starving ALL the time and only barons, priests and kings were obese? I am not sure...looking at the pictures of the villagers where my mom was born [circa 40'ties] I see not a single obese person. Yet, all of them that are alive say they were not starving at all [despite war and shit]. After all they were mostly farmers. But when I ask "what is the major difference between your time and today in terms of food" the answer is unanimous - "sugar". They got 1 small cube of sugar per month, while gorging on fat, protein and grain [man, farmers DO know how to eat]
There is something more here, something hidden [accidentally or deliberately]. Something in our lives today pushes people's bodies in the wrong direction and trying to fix it through genomics seems futile and unwise to me...
I am on no grain, no sugar diet for 14 months already. Of course sometimes I have a piece of cake. In the last 4 weeks not even that. And just now, 5 minutes before finding this tread a colleagues brought chocolate for his newborn. I had 2 small pieces [20 grams in total] and at the moment my heart is racing, I feel dizzy and out of breath, even my hands are shaking a bit. I don't know what the hell is going on here...but I ain't gonna put sugar in my mouth for a long time I can promise you that...
Do you remember when people stopped laboring with that hunter-gatherer stuff and started farming? Agrarian society... less work, less labor invested to produce food to feed the tribe.
That is simply not true. The hunter-gatherers worked less that us today, let alone the glorious times of the industrial revolution with its 16 hrs working days and horrendous safety record. If you meant that we work more in order to have a bit more than just food, shelter and clothing you might have had a point, but you specifically mention food only. Hilarious. Do you now [for instance] that the average height of humans took a hit after farming was "invented"? Sitting on one place without trade means [usually] poor diversity of food....that's just a small tread to pull if you like to study the subject....
Small addendum - the bike lanes can [and are] used by senior citizens in those nice little cars that can only go 40km/hr or so. Old folks needs motorized transport sometimes. Would you prefer them to ride regular car and endanger themselves and the others [you know they are more dangerous than the young drivers]?
Oh, and the lanes are used by small motor bikes [again if you have some health issue that prevents you from cycling]. The pizza delivery guys use them too [those people are in fact the most dangerous participators of the traffic and their behavior should be sanctioned] Electrical motor assisted bikes are on the raise too...those are better since they don't make noise.
I did read through the whole tread and I am astounded that so many readers spell doom and gloom for a city that introduces proper bike infrastructure. Distorted reality, eh...
I have news for you. Let's take the obvious case - the Netherlands. Do you believe the countries exists? Yes? OK, so how come it has not collapsed to the bottom of the economic ladder if businesses cannot deliver their goods, customers cannot go to shops and employees cannot reach their work [all those are claims I found in the tread]? Reality check : FAIL!
I live in A'dam and work in Delft [bike-train-bike]. I have regular visits for business, medical and personal reasons to Maastricht, Leiden, Njimegen, Eindhoven, Hilversum and Leeuwarden. Check google maps to see what this means. Never owned a car. Never needed a car except when I shop furniture or tons of materials and tools for home renovation [but that can be delivered by the retailer, I can rent a car for a day or ask a friend with a car to help]. Trains and bikes can get you everywhere in this country and I do mean everywhere. You can go between cities [separated bike lanes that go usually through nice scenery double the road network].
What do I win and what society wins:
No costs for a car
1.5 hrs per working day reading books/magazines and meeting people in the train. Nice, clean trains that are used by all segments of society [so you don't have reasons for the old idiotic Clarkson retort that public transport is used only by junkies who will puke on you]. In fact traveling in the morning to the work you meet all the students that go to Leiden and Delft [university centers]. Did I mention the females are more in the NL than the males and the gays are more than the lesbians [there is a shortage of men here]? Hell, for the last nuclear summit in NL where Obama landed with the plane, shook hands with the king and then immediately disappeared in a helicopter [escorted by 2 others and hordes of bikes and cars] - btw, most dutch thought that was ridiculously paranoid, unnecessary and plain rude - the prime minister of Belgium took the train [high-speed line Amsterdam - Brussels - Paris].
No need for cardio in the gym so I can focus on power training. When I stopped going to the gym for 6 months after I started again the only exercise I could more of compare to before the break was legs [so it helps the power training too]. Because the infrastructure allows me to ride the bike as an exercise as well - very fast with rapid acceleration and braking.
General health benefits for all cyclists [to mention again those mythical [for /. ers] creatures, called women - any idea how riding a bicycle shapes women's legs. No? Thought so...]. Contemplate what this means on a country scale - MASSIVE saving due to healthier population [lower health cots, higher productivity ect.]
Environmental benefits [no need to elaborate I hope]
Convenience. Going out in Amsterdam with a car is idiotic [OK, if you go to the opera with 10 000 euros worth of clothing and a hair-do for 500 you might need a car but I am talking about the 99% here]. It takes me 10-15 min on the bike to go to the hearth of downtown, no need to pay huge costs for parking [if you find available place that is], you can drink [or smoke] and can go back home at any moment in the night independent from any transport.
Issues:
Cyclist can be nasty and sometimes dangerous on the road - just like everyone else. No surprises here. To claim that somehow there are more asses among them than the rest of the population is moronic at best [I saw that "argument" here as well]
What else? Oh, yes - when you arrive at work you stink of sweat [I see this retort often here]. Actually no. Really, really NO. With good hygiene [and diet!!] your smell is barely noticeable and with enough exercise you can bike with decent speed without breaking a sweat. Besides, at work we have this amazing thing, it's called "running hot water" and "a shower". Check it out!
Less space for ca
Maybe there is something on the subject in PubMed? Their scope expands all the time. Don't ask for citation or details but 20 years ago my biochemistry professor explained why sugar substitutes [she focused on aspartame] are worst than sugar. Don't remember any details but she made me never use it for which I am very grateful.
No need to count really, just decrease the foods s/he mentioned and weight yourself a bit more often. You will find the balance by feeling. I lost 20 kg this way and am able to keep it without a sweat for 14 months already [even managed to use the period when losing the fat to build some extra muscle].
On the article - total BS. Sugar is the devil when it comes to food, it really is. My diet is also a personal research project in a way. Juts last week I had a small vacation and experimented with eating some chocolate, drinking sugary drinks and a bit of bread [and not that much from all this, mind you, way less than I used to do]. Result - 2 kilos up, bloated gut, too much gas, some diarrhea, less energy....the duration of the abuse was exactly 3 days!!! Today I finally feel "normal" - that is 4 days after I stopped the 3 day abuse....really someone should shoot those guys from Coke...I cannot understand that level of evil
Share and enjoy?
What kind of retort is that? I just stated that it is a problem with epidemic proportions, that is strongest in the Western world. WTF? Are you going to tell me that the first world is not suffering from obesity, diabetes and cancer? And that those conditions are not on the raise [normalized for population] nicely coinciding with the whole "all fat is bad, eat sugar" scam? Seriously, WTF?!?
I live in the Netherlands, BTW, which is one of the better places in this respect [US and UK being among the worst]. Do you think that I am wasting my time to try fooling someone here? To what end? I have seen the results of vast world-wide scientific studies on gut flora. My own doctor is part of the project. Having healthy balance in the gut is the exception, not the norm!!! That is how far we have gone down this road. Seriously, it's juts science and data, data , data....
If you prefer to believe people who have vested interest in suppressing the facts, that's you own problem, but fuck it, just go to PubMed and start reading. Take a look at the TED talks on the subject. Do some research, man!
And lastly - I challenge you to not eat grain and sugar for 1 month and then introduce it back. Just do it and come back to me...
Look, there is no denying of the impact grains had on the development of civilization.
But on the other hand what AC said is also true. I went through the whole thing - a decade of suffering until I was told to stop eating grains. I am not gluten intolerant or something like that. Now, the story of course is way more complicated than it sounds. Why could I eat grains for 30 years and then suddenly I could not? My gut flora is terribly out of balance. What caused it? According to the medics I did not give them [gut bugs of all kinds] enough job by always eating stuff that gets processed in the small intestine. Too much sugar. Too much easy carbs in general [grain]. So, If I want to be healthy and productive at the moment grains are forbidden. Every few weeks I experiment once a day to see if I can process them again. So far the result is negative [one year on the diet]. This makes my life very difficult and expensive, but there it is...
Last point - once I started paying attention to all this and talk to people I discovered that almost anyone around me is in a certain stage of the downwind spiral of imbalanced gut. People do not realize that the feeling of tiredness, too much gas, bloated gut, compromised immune system, joint pain and god knows what else can be traced to the performance of their guts [60% of immune system response is from the gut]. Whether it is eating too much carbs, or too much E numbers, or toxic metals or lack of minerals in food due to accelerated growth practices, too much sugar ...ect. all those things push a bit until your system is out of balance and you are fucked. That is why I am in principle against even more experimenting with food - we already have many bad practices and many bad habits. The natural food pyramid has easy carbs at the top [least available]; the food habits of the modern civilization has the piramyd inverted [mortal fear from fats;extremely stupid idea BTW and carbs, carbs, carbs..].
Don't forget that stomach cancer is on the rise consistently in the developed world and that regions in the world who are adopting the western food habits experience increase in obesity, diabetes and cancer. It really is like this - ATM the Arab world, China, Latin America - they are all on the rise.
"And while some rate of rotation is essential for evening out weather, there is nothing sacred about Earth's specific rotation rate."
I concur. According to the documentary "First life" when evolution started the day on Earth was merely 6 hours long.
What made me an impression though, was the speculation of how "snowball Earth" promoted the evolution of oxygen secreting microbs and kick-started the whole multi-celular life as oxygen gave more energy available to the future organisms [aerobic metabolism]. That event seems to me to be kind of "lucky" - I wonder if on other planets pure chemical reactions without life being involved can lead to free oxygen and promote similar evolutionary path...
A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault.
"Going postal"
Terry Pratchett
For me the greatest change was adopting low carb diet and exercising. However, I think I did this a bit too late [at 40]. So now I can do a lot more than a year a ago and I mean a lot more [figure and fitness level are as a young man]...but the skin is not very elastic anymore so in the face I kind of aged [smoking for 20 years does not help].
Stress - the biggest killer. A few years worrying all the time about health [the system fucked me] , my relationship [dying, now totally dead] and financial troubles [stemming from health] really, really aged me.
Genetics has a lot to do with it too [messa thinks]...my grandmother had baby skin at 72 when she died [she looked like Merlin Monroe as young woman] . She never smoked but drunk quite a bit. My mother at 67 looks at least a decade younger and without her life-time smoking it would have been much better. Next to her sister you see that the smoking aged her skin quite a bit but mom had better diet so aunty is smooth in the face but not so energetic, agile and resilient compared to mom.
Another thing I have noticed with my grandparents is the importance of the will to live. From my father side both were classical farmers. Whole life waking up at 5AM...work and work and work....but once they decided to sell the house and the farm and move closer to the capital where both sons were living they collapsed. Although the idea was exactly the opposite - that they'd be closer to family, easier to receive help, enjoy their retirement with grand kids... somehow it went exactly the other way. Once they were torn away from the life they knew since forever they both aged quickly, got all kinds of illnesses and eventually passed away...
Go figure....
That's right! Instead find the phage that kills it and make a medicine...
For the life of me I cannot understand why the phage treatment was never developed in the west to complement [and in some cases replace altogether] antibiotics. The only reason I can think off is profit. It will be difficult to patent phage strain that is naturally found in the sewer system of a hospital. Also, phages are cheap and we don't want cheap effective medicine, do we? And thus thousands of people in the so called developed nations die from super bugs every year. Those people could have been saved by a bunch of medical professionals from an institute [that looks like the stage for a B horror movie] created by Stalin [see the documentary below; it's very interesting]
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com...
Sorry, you are the idiot. The number of 60 million includes WWI, Civil war, Stalinist repressions and WWII. It is right there in the article you cite. Here is the whole excerpt:
Excess deaths over the course of World War I and the Russian Civil War (including the postwar famine) amounted to a combined total of 18 million,[114] some 10 million in the 1930s,[29] and more than 26 million in 1941–5. The postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 million smaller than it would have been if pre-war demographic growth had continued.[35] According to Catherine Merridale, "... reasonable estimate would place the total number of excess deaths for the whole period somewhere around 60 million."
Also, the population of USSR during Stalinist repressions was below 180 million. Look at the graph they show in the very same Wiki article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Notice that they are at 180 million the 50-ties, while the great Stalinist purge was in the end of the 30-ies.
I do not endorse anything evil done by the fake communists - I am myself from a former communist state. But the amazing BULSHIT that westerners are misled to believe about eastern Europe and USSR are BEYOND imagination. Seriously, get a grip!
Like, the company will actually TELL you the real reasons for not hiring you....some years ago I once caught the HRM of my company when a bit drunk and she admitted to me that she would never hire anyone with a tattoo....I was shocked beyond believe, because we are talking about cutting edge semiconductor company with more than 50% of the staff with MSc. and 30% with PhD.
The chance that you find any "normal" person in my company is close to zero...unless you go to the HR office, the finance or the administration. Everyone who actually does the job is weird....to say the least. To expect that creative hyper-thinkers would conform to common appearances is lunacy.