Special relativity is a great "click-bait" because I yet have to meet a (layman) person who does not go wide-eyes when you mention time dilation (most people think that time is a convenient notion invented by humans that does not "really exist as a thing" anyway). It's a great narrative - everyone intuitively understands the Galileo transformations, no problem there. Build it up with few examples (cars, trains) and the go to "let's see what happens when we try to measure the speed of light from different inertial frames of reference". Oh wait, it does not change! Oh no! The only way to make the maths work is if mass, dimension and duration are changeable. Oh piss off, that is nuts! OK, let's measure then! Shit, he is right!.
Bonus points if you involve a bit of human drama (people of all ages love that) - how physicists thought everything was figured out at the beginning of 20th century, how Einstein inadvertently paved the way to quantum mechanics with which he had so much trouble later on and so on....
However, in the particular case I think one should start with short introduction of "fields" to explain how objects can interact with each other without being in contact (differentiating between the cases when there is matter in between carrying the interaction, like a sound wave and when there isn't). That's easy - the electromagnetic filed provides a million examples from everyday life including the most familiar gadget in the world - mobile phone. Then you do the special relativity and finally go to the "rubber sheet illustration" of general relativity.
Final thought - Einstein is tricky to explain to youngsters but essential, because IMO the story represents the most difficult yet most exciting and desirable thing scientists have to cope with - a paradigm shift. When I studied all this in University I was expecting some heavy incomprehensible mathematics and long-winded incomprehensible explanations....nothing of the sort. The ideas are deceptively simple, it's just that if you go with it you need to abandon the present paradigm and formulate new one. That ability - to look at the body of facts with new eyes, to see a structure and an explanation that altered the most fundamental understandings in physics, that is the real genius. The lesson for the youngsters being that it is more important to think laterally , to challenge the established wisdom rather than being able to recite all classes of reactions in organic chemistry or name every star in the sky...
I remembered wrong - there is a decline in happiness around 70-80 yrs and your sexual desire lingers on for longer than I though. Still it is interesting....
Few year ago I read an article about how different abilities, of the mind and the body peak at different ages. The question was "is there an ideal age". Some things I knew (e.g. endurance peaks about 40).
The most interesting graph was the last one where happiness and sexual desire/ability were plotted versus age. Happiness is the lowest around 40 (stands to reason - you begin to reevaluate your life and will always find many things to regret). Around 60 you are as happy as you were around 20. And then happiness goes up to infinity, cut short only by death. However, exactly at that point where you become happier than ever in your live your sexual desire/ability is gone. So there it is - sexual desire is a hassle. Or rather the behaviors, desires and frustrations that it generates.
Anecdote: one of my best friends told me once " I can't wait until the moment I won't be interested in women. What a bloody distraction, like a constant buzz in your head and body!" While I frankly cannot imagine what it is to live without craving women I begin to think it might not be that bad...
The whole saga is the one of the best examples of the cultural war that is plaguing the western civilization since the collapse of the Wall.
Original trilogy - classic archetypal story; just an exciting, well executed variation of it set in space. Good actors, unseen special effects, groundbreaking musical score, super cool baddies, etc. Great stuff! Bonus - Lucas not directing 5 and 6 (and the one he did he was pressured, uncertain and disbelieved even by the cast, let alone the studio - art born out of crisis and strife - the best). The phantom menace - Ewoks (put something in purely for the merchandise sacrificing logic and plot).
Prequels - the senility of a (lazy, fat, rich ass) baby boomer who has turned too much PC and prone to injecting contemporary politics into it. The deconstruction, begun it has! Han shot last; commerce is evil, jedi are bunch of senile creatures that can't see beyond their noses, Palpatine resembles GWB (Iraq adventures - playing both sides), etc. Merchandizing is out of control but while this can be understood (though not condoned IMO) it is nothing compared to the mortal wound inflicted on the story.
Sequels - total destruction of the archetypes, replacing it with the most extreme, silly, anti-science, anti-history, anti-logic, anti-everything "ideology" that is being pushed in the last 10-20 years in the west. Because you know, every archetypal story is a social construct, patriarchy and oppression. All people are identical. Not equal, identical you bastard! Meanwhile, merchandising has reached an entire new level of obnoxiousness.
Don't people get it, seeing how the critics fall in line out of conformism and fear to be shamed and destroyed within 2 minutes via the mob ruled, bend on lynching hysterical "people's court" of Twitter and FB? Check the opinions of the real fans who truly love good movies and good stories - Red Letter Media for instance - unanimously negative from anyone with a bit of sense and 2 brain cells.
As a guy who lived under the so-called communism (we had people's courts you know - they killed all the people with skills, brains and education crippling society for a fucking century!) let me say it again - westerners, you have no idea what genie you have let out of the bottle. The cultural division of the west is the worst thing that can happen to the world - this kind of stuff leads to collapse of whole societies, wars and shit..... Stop it! Please! While I wholeheartedly agree that the western system needs continuous improvement and eternal vigilance so that it does not slide into nasty territory at least we can work on it....whereas what is proposed by the reincarnations of the fuckers who ruined my society is totalitarian. You can't control such a system or improve it, you can only wait for it to collapse (as it always does) - meanwhile you and everyone else live in hellish prison for your body and your mind.
I tell ya folks, one day SW will be studied in history classes as a "manifestation of the deconstruction of civilization values which led to WW3".
Yep, when your first woman's libido went down you changed her for a younger one, yes? So your sexual desires are more aligned. That's why for successful relationship the woman should be at least 10 years younger. And more attractive among the women than you are among the men. Believe me, in the opposite case she is forever resentful of your attractiveness and initiates endless pre-emptive strikes to "protect" you from those bitches ogling you everywhere you go...
Nowadays the lies have permeated even biology textbooks. While serious science concluded once and forever that men want it more for far longer in their lives than the ladies, the gender "studies" deny the very existence of libido let alone that there might be...gasp!....a biological difference between the genders.
If ShBill story is true I have only admiration and respect for his misus...hats down!
Look, I am not discussing the politics here but cannot resist to point out few things. Tribal is good. Tribes did not allow "redundant people" to exist, it would be stupid for a small group. Tribes were way more egalitarian than anything civilization has produced. So why the negative undertones? What does individualism has to do with tribalism?!? Those are diametrically opposite, yet you bundle them together into your "negative" package?
What is "animal Darwinism"?!? All mammals are cooperative; it is one of our major strengths. The mammal's social structure is not "nature red in tooth and claw" though of course competition for survival and procreation is a given. But it is us, humans who forgot about it all and build economic totalitarian system which emphasizes too much on competition and greed and too little on cooperation.
It is in our system that the leaders get all the benefits but do not take the responsibility to face the music and protect the people who surrendered their power to them (but this arrangement is a contract, did you forget that?!?) The alpha gorilla meets all danger head on. The tribal chief meets danger head on. The CEO gets golden handshake for ruining people's lives, the president hides in a bunker while the soldiers die...
Conservatives are against biology for mostly religious reasons, but I always wonder why lefties are also so ignorant in it as well. Again I am not disputing your political stance and such.....but there is quite a mess in your head about biology, ecology and anthropology. Just saying...
Well, I think both the baby boomers and the GenX have gone senile so the millennials through no fault of their own are less capable to face difficulties in life.
The Han Solo story illustrates this perfectly. Lucas commented that he never expected so much outrage for changing that scene. "If people want Han Solo to be murderer (!?!?!?) then so be it". Now wait a minute! What you say is that our children must be taught that if they have a professional murderer pointing a gun at them from 1m who has stated already that he wants to kill you (or take the money which from HS point of view is the same, if he had the money) and you have this one in a billion chance to come on top you should not take it because it is "bad" or "immoral"? What kind of retarded message is that? If I had children I would not want them to listen to senile uncle Lucas....
Looks like we're going to be in a fight, sarge," said Nobby, as the painter very carefully started on the final 'k'.
"Won't last long. Lots of cowards, the Klatchians," said Colon. "The moment they taste a bit of cold steel they're legging it away over the sand."
Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.
"Shouldn't be any trouble to sort out, then?" said Nobby.
"And o'course, they're not the same colour as what we are," said Colon. "Well... as me, anyway," he added, in view of the various hues of Corporal Nobbs. There was probably no–one alive who was the same colour as Corporal Nobbs.
"Constable Visit's pretty brown" said Nobby. "I never seen him run away. if there's a chance of giving someone a religious pamphlet ole Washpot's after them like a terrier."
"Ah, but Omnians are more like us," said Colon. "Bit weird but, basic'ly, just the same as us underneath. No, the way you can tell a Klatchian is, you look an' see if he uses a lot of words beginning with “al”, right? 'Cos that's a dead giveaway. They invented all the words starting with “al”. That's how you can tell they're Klatchian. Like al–cohol, see?"
"They invented beer?"
"Yeah."
"That's clever."
" wouldn't call it clever," said Sergeant Colon, realizing too late that he'd made a tactical error. "More, luck, I'd say."
"What else did they do?"
"Well, there's..." Colon racked his brains. "There's al–gebra. That's like sums with letters. For... for people whose brains aren't clever enough for numbers, see?"
"Is that a fact?"
"Right..."said Colon. "In fact," he went on, a little more assertively now he could see a way ahead, "I heard this wizard down the University say that the Klatchians invented nothing. That was their great contribution to maffs, he said. I said “What?” an' he said, they come up with zero."
"Dun't sound that clever to me," said Nobby. "Anyone could invent nothing. I ain't invented anything."
"My point exactly," said Colon. "I told him, it was people who invented numbers like four and, and–"
"–seven–"
"–right, who were the geniuses. Nothing didn't need inventing. It was just there. They probably just found it."
"It's having all that desert," said Nobby.
"Right! Good point. Desert. Which, as everyone knows, is basically nothing. Nothing's a natural resource to them. It stands to reason. Whereas we're more civilized, see, and we got a lot more stuff around to count, so we invented numbers. It's like... well, they say the Klatchians invented astronomy–"
"'Al–tronomy," said Nobby helpfully.
"No, no... no, Nobby, I reckon they'd discovered esses by then, probably nicked' em off'f us... anyway, they were bound to invent astronomy, 'cos there's bugger all else for them to look at but the sky. Anyone can look at the stars and give 'em names. 's going it a bit to call it inventing, in any case. We don't go around saying we've invented something just because we had a quick dekko at it."
"'I heard where they've got a lot of odd gods," said Nobby.
"Yeah, and mad priests," said Colon. "Foaming at the mouth, half of 'em. Believe all kinds of loony things."
They watched the painter in silence for a moment. Colon was dreading the question that came.
"So how exactly are they different from ours, then?" said Nobby. "I mean, some of our priests are–"
"I hope you ain't being unpatriotic," said Colon severely.
"No, of course not. I was just asking. I can see where they'd be a lot worse than ours, being foreign and everything.
"And of course they're all mad for fighting," said Colon. "Vicious buggers with all those curvy swords of theirs."
"You mean, like...they viciously attack you while cowardly running away after tasting
Of course they were angry! Some fat ass dean of UU sticks his dirty fingers in and now we have to deal with matter-antimatter imbalance. His name was Henry, BTW.
'Things tend to form balls. Balls tend to move in circles. Once you figured that out everything fell into place. In curved motion, of course!' Professor Stibbons observing our Universe.
The real problem is that our Universe is sitting on a shelf in office at UU where the porters deliver 1 bucket of coal per day per title inscribed on the office's door. Since prof. Rinswind holds 8 positions including prof. of Fretwork, Cruel and Unusual Geography and so on and since the porters would deliver either 8 buckets or none we get all the global warming!
According to "The book of general ignorance" mosquitoes were the biggest killer of humans throughout history. The claim was rather bold though, IIRC that half of humans who ever lived died because of a disease transmitted by mosquitoes. That's 50 billion!!
Off-topic addendum - in the same book they say that the animal that has saved most human lives in history is the horseshoe crab, thanks to its "old fashioned" evolutionary speaking, blood. At least these days they don't kill them but "milk" them. It seems scientists have joined the Ubervald Temperance League:)
/. does not allow us to host images or I would show you all the pictures taken on the same (birth)date throughout my life. In the 70-ties there is snow, consistently. Like the GP post I tried skying. In the 80-ties there is hardly snow, no snow since until we came to 2015 when the max temperature on that day was 22 degrees Celsius!
During the last 15 years on our 120 year old far/farmland fruit trees are not fruiting because Jan and Feb are too warm, the trees begin to blossom too early and a March frost finishes them. All neighbors (many in their 70-ties, life time farmers) complain about it. And not just the trees - almost every agricultural crop needs additional help (e.g. temp greenhouse) because the natural variations of the weather are weird and not consistent anymore. The pests are multiplying (not cold enough to kill most of them in winter) and new ones appear that have not been seen before.
People indeed have short memories. When last winter there was snow of 2 meters for 2 weeks people freaked out while this was normal for MONTHS back then. The snow stayed for so long that it got black from pollution. The preparations for the winter were major undertaking both privately (chains on the car tires) and on state level. Oh yes - we used to make pickled vegetables in jars on the balcony in the big city because the temperature will hardly rise above freezing for months. My mother would use the balcony as a second refrigerator! And a drier - ice forms and then sublimates leaving perfectly dry clothing.
Fuck the politics, climate change is real and already costs us a lot!!
The Dutch are a wonderful nation but one of the few black spots on their image is throwing stuff on the ground. It is truly depressing widespread behavior. A bunch of people walk through a park on the way to a venue and after that it is like the Huns have passed. The non-smokers will trow other trash - they are not at all less likely to do it.
I know from my bird watching friends that every filter can cost a bird's, life because often they swallow them and suffocate. So I made an absolute commitment many years ago never to throw a cigaret butt on the ground and I followed through. However, I have seen (hours of commuting every day for more than a decade) people from all colors and social strata (truly, this is no PC!) throwing it on the ground NEXT to the designated ashtray!!! (on a train station for example). I have no explanation.
I always try to hit them where it hurts (the Dutch love cheap and saving money) mentioning the high garbage collection tax - well you pay for someone to clean your mess. Don't complain or do not be messy!
There is no epidemic as such (in my mind this word implies illness), just the results of our way of life.
If you throw the heavy math on the data you come up with wide variety of dependencies, some of which are startling. For instance, rapid social change always increases suicide rate irrespective of the nature of the change - even if society firmly marches towards utopia or becomes very rich and prosperous, there will be more corpses along the way... Another positive correlation is with easiness of life - the less our lives are endangered (and more care free and comfortable) the less we value them (rate drops to almost zero during wars; rich countries have higher rates).
In fact, if you assume that your aim is to decrease suicide (or you take the extreme religious stance that it is a sin - BTW that was not the case for the first 1000 years of Christianity for example - back then they actually encouraged the suicide of martyrs) the way to go is to reverse most of the social advances we have achieved and re-model society into something (IMO) unpleasant. Religious people - lower rates. Peasants versus city dwellers - lower rates. High intelligence - high rates. War, famine, strife - lower rates. Have kids - lower rates. Have strong family cohesion - lower rates. There is also a genetic component where for example within the white race Hungaro-Finns have the highest rate and Slavs the lowest (Russia being a very good example of societal change overriding the genetic predisposition - they quadrupled their rate after the fall of the Wall).
I for one await the day (alas, won't live that long) when all of us will have to voluntarily leave life since technology will make us physiologically immortal. For me there is no greater achievement than conquering death - not ultimately, mind you (that is not only impossible but highly undesirable - imagine being immortal and cannot stop it by your free will!), just temporarily - having a very long and healthy life and quick and painless death at the time of your choosing. Any takers?
It so happened with me that I watched TOS the last of all the others (started with TNG-->Voyager-->DS9-->Enterprise). Would you say that "Mudd's women" would draw feminist ire today? Hell yhea, they'd kill the director in his bed....That's the episode where the whole point is to accept women (and men!, as Harry points to Kirk) as who they really are....remember the empowering of Eva who thought she took the Orion drug but it was gelatin? The reaction of the dilithium crystal miner? Harry's? Kirk's?
Or, how about "The city on the edge of Forever"? I was shocked and subsequently delighted to find the best love scene ever put to the screen in a TOS episode!. And they don't even kiss. Remember - the conversation on the street (34 seconds in total) - "Whatever it is, let me help!". Nowadays I can't look at the Orion belt without fixing my gaze on the leftmost star and hearing the voice of Edith. Are we talking about the same Kirk, who almost sacrificed the whole Universe for the love (not sex!) of a woman? The same Kirk who always struggled between his duty and family/long term relationship. The one that lost his son?
Has anyone noticed that large portion of TOS scripts and especially novels were written by women (I recently read about 60-70 of the total 130 or so TOS novels)? And in them there is a healthy dose of womanizing from Kirk and the rest of the male characters? It seems that sane, mature, professional women have no problem with it... The real fans of this franchise in all its forms have abandoned (and frankly do not need and never needed) gender wars and issues long time ago.
However, in modern day cinema the discussion/portrayal of those issues are marketing/selling points! Look at us, we are so diverse, so women/minority-empowering so.....WTF? Wonder woman, the first kick-ass female character in cinema! Finally, a role model for girls and young women! Patriarchy smashed by the whip of justice! (all those are quotes from the internet reviews).
Excuse me? The most beloved female characters of all time as per Empire's survey (readership, that is drastically more qualified compared to random visitors on IMDB) are Ellen Ripley followed by Sara Conner. No wonder woman in sight...how does spoiled, demi-goddess with magic powers (who's only "arc" involves few "fish out of water" moments) compare to a waitress thrown in the middle of an endless nightmare involving the destruction of the entire human race and a relentless killer robot? Aliens? There are 4 protagonists in that movie and they are all female! The alien queen, Ripley, Newt and Vasquez. The final confrontation is between 3 females and half an android, for pity sake! Did J. Cameron go "Ohhh, ahhhh, look at me I am so progressive"? How come male nerds adore those movies and characters? According to the PC narrative we nerds are worse than Jack the Ripper and we are sooooo afraid of powerful women that we run and hide in mom's basement.
Lastly, all of this modern-day moralizing and virtue signaling is coming from Hollywood? From fucking, sleazy, greedy Hollywood?!? From Disney, the white slavers behind the Mickey Mouse copyright act? The people who waited several decades before depicting Disney princess with dark eyes (and made a selling point out of it)? This is hypocrisy of mind-boggling proportions and it is insulting to our intelligence.
A million times this! I had a boss like that for 5 years - what a bliss! At a certain moment many employees started leaving the company and one of them asked us (my team) "Why are you still here?". We looked at each other and said in one voice "Because of our boss and the excellent atmosphere in the team".
Leaders eat first and get the best mate but when the lion jumps the fence they meet it head on....or that's how it was for most of human history until we invented modern economy. Real leaders do not throw the little guy under the bus when the going gets tough, they face the music. Since the CEO of my present employer makes per year enough for 2 comfortable lifetimes (!?) I do not see why when a crisis hits (which is 90 % of the cases due to poor management anyway) we get fired...
It's gold pressed lathinum. No, even that does not give it justice. It is priceless. And people gave it away for pennies. Rather than pay a buck per month for social media stuff if that is your thing, people gave away the priceless.... In defense I think noone imagined what can be achieved with big data plus machine learning. I believe that even if people offer 1000 bucks per month for Facebook without data collection Zukerberg will not take it since the data is way more precious. Priceless as mentioned...
A group of bacteria were growing in a petry dish. Their civilization lasted for 60 days. Every day they doubled their numbers. On the 59th day some bacteria were trying to make a point that the food is finite that this level of growth is unsustainable. "What, are you crazy!" - replied most of the rest - "We have always found a way! Look how numerous we have become, surviving and adapting for FULL 59 DAYS! Also - half the world is empty, you morons (yep, the last division changes the dish from half-full to full; progression, bitches)! Remember back in the ancient times during day 42 we ran out of food but we found a way, we found that New world full of untouched agar-agar (apart from few savage bacteria that we killed). And then there was that "crisis" during day 50 when we ran out of agar-agar but we mutated and started eating the polymers below, that the great bacteriophage in the sky created for us (that was the polymer support mesh that the PhD student used). We will always adapt, always have been and always will. Always, do you hear! Always!!! Bloody alarmists"....and so the 60th day came and the bacteria could not mutate to eat the dish itself. The great bacteriophage in the sky got all the souls she needed and the PhD student got his article.
Ponder this (you can also stibbons it) - on one hand we have, unprecedented by their magnitude and significance, events coming towards us (machine learning replaces intellectual jobs as well, no?) and on the other we console ourselves by extrapolating past events that have nothing to do with what is coming. Weird! You understand that we can make machines run the whole of the economy. ALL of it. Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand? All future jobs are gone as well. From that moment we either enter the Aurora situation - 1 human per 100 km2 served by thousands of robots or we kill each other since there is no "profit" in such future....
Slashdot Mirror
Special relativity is a great "click-bait" because I yet have to meet a (layman) person who does not go wide-eyes when you mention time dilation (most people think that time is a convenient notion invented by humans that does not "really exist as a thing" anyway). It's a great narrative - everyone intuitively understands the Galileo transformations, no problem there. Build it up with few examples (cars, trains) and the go to "let's see what happens when we try to measure the speed of light from different inertial frames of reference". Oh wait, it does not change! Oh no! The only way to make the maths work is if mass, dimension and duration are changeable. Oh piss off, that is nuts! OK, let's measure then! Shit, he is right!.
Bonus points if you involve a bit of human drama (people of all ages love that) - how physicists thought everything was figured out at the beginning of 20th century, how Einstein inadvertently paved the way to quantum mechanics with which he had so much trouble later on and so on....
However, in the particular case I think one should start with short introduction of "fields" to explain how objects can interact with each other without being in contact (differentiating between the cases when there is matter in between carrying the interaction, like a sound wave and when there isn't). That's easy - the electromagnetic filed provides a million examples from everyday life including the most familiar gadget in the world - mobile phone. Then you do the special relativity and finally go to the "rubber sheet illustration" of general relativity.
Final thought - Einstein is tricky to explain to youngsters but essential, because IMO the story represents the most difficult yet most exciting and desirable thing scientists have to cope with - a paradigm shift. When I studied all this in University I was expecting some heavy incomprehensible mathematics and long-winded incomprehensible explanations....nothing of the sort. The ideas are deceptively simple, it's just that if you go with it you need to abandon the present paradigm and formulate new one. That ability - to look at the body of facts with new eyes, to see a structure and an explanation that altered the most fundamental understandings in physics, that is the real genius. The lesson for the youngsters being that it is more important to think laterally , to challenge the established wisdom rather than being able to recite all classes of reactions in organic chemistry or name every star in the sky...
How about this phrase:
Milarodinotisizemenrajtvojtahubostnqmakraj
The most important password in my life so far is longer than this and I can type it without thinking in few seconds.
I wonder if anyone here might guess what is the principle behind it? Would dictionary attack work?
Somehow I picture the minister as Dr. Strangelove - clamping desperately the right hand with the left in a vain attempt to conceal his/her true self.
Found the article:
http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...
I remembered wrong - there is a decline in happiness around 70-80 yrs and your sexual desire lingers on for longer than I though. Still it is interesting....
Few year ago I read an article about how different abilities, of the mind and the body peak at different ages. The question was "is there an ideal age". Some things I knew (e.g. endurance peaks about 40).
The most interesting graph was the last one where happiness and sexual desire/ability were plotted versus age. Happiness is the lowest around 40 (stands to reason - you begin to reevaluate your life and will always find many things to regret). Around 60 you are as happy as you were around 20. And then happiness goes up to infinity, cut short only by death. However, exactly at that point where you become happier than ever in your live your sexual desire/ability is gone. So there it is - sexual desire is a hassle. Or rather the behaviors, desires and frustrations that it generates.
Anecdote: one of my best friends told me once " I can't wait until the moment I won't be interested in women. What a bloody distraction, like a constant buzz in your head and body!" While I frankly cannot imagine what it is to live without craving women I begin to think it might not be that bad...
The whole saga is the one of the best examples of the cultural war that is plaguing the western civilization since the collapse of the Wall.
Original trilogy - classic archetypal story; just an exciting, well executed variation of it set in space. Good actors, unseen special effects, groundbreaking musical score, super cool baddies, etc. Great stuff! Bonus - Lucas not directing 5 and 6 (and the one he did he was pressured, uncertain and disbelieved even by the cast, let alone the studio - art born out of crisis and strife - the best). The phantom menace - Ewoks (put something in purely for the merchandise sacrificing logic and plot).
Prequels - the senility of a (lazy, fat, rich ass) baby boomer who has turned too much PC and prone to injecting contemporary politics into it. The deconstruction, begun it has! Han shot last; commerce is evil, jedi are bunch of senile creatures that can't see beyond their noses, Palpatine resembles GWB (Iraq adventures - playing both sides), etc. Merchandizing is out of control but while this can be understood (though not condoned IMO) it is nothing compared to the mortal wound inflicted on the story.
Sequels - total destruction of the archetypes, replacing it with the most extreme, silly, anti-science, anti-history, anti-logic, anti-everything "ideology" that is being pushed in the last 10-20 years in the west. Because you know, every archetypal story is a social construct, patriarchy and oppression. All people are identical. Not equal, identical you bastard! Meanwhile, merchandising has reached an entire new level of obnoxiousness.
Don't people get it, seeing how the critics fall in line out of conformism and fear to be shamed and destroyed within 2 minutes via the mob ruled, bend on lynching hysterical "people's court" of Twitter and FB? Check the opinions of the real fans who truly love good movies and good stories - Red Letter Media for instance - unanimously negative from anyone with a bit of sense and 2 brain cells.
As a guy who lived under the so-called communism (we had people's courts you know - they killed all the people with skills, brains and education crippling society for a fucking century!) let me say it again - westerners, you have no idea what genie you have let out of the bottle. The cultural division of the west is the worst thing that can happen to the world - this kind of stuff leads to collapse of whole societies, wars and shit..... Stop it! Please! While I wholeheartedly agree that the western system needs continuous improvement and eternal vigilance so that it does not slide into nasty territory at least we can work on it....whereas what is proposed by the reincarnations of the fuckers who ruined my society is totalitarian. You can't control such a system or improve it, you can only wait for it to collapse (as it always does) - meanwhile you and everyone else live in hellish prison for your body and your mind.
I tell ya folks, one day SW will be studied in history classes as a "manifestation of the deconstruction of civilization values which led to WW3".
Yep, when your first woman's libido went down you changed her for a younger one, yes? So your sexual desires are more aligned. That's why for successful relationship the woman should be at least 10 years younger. And more attractive among the women than you are among the men. Believe me, in the opposite case she is forever resentful of your attractiveness and initiates endless pre-emptive strikes to "protect" you from those bitches ogling you everywhere you go...
Nowadays the lies have permeated even biology textbooks. While serious science concluded once and forever that men want it more for far longer in their lives than the ladies, the gender "studies" deny the very existence of libido let alone that there might be...gasp!....a biological difference between the genders.
If ShBill story is true I have only admiration and respect for his misus...hats down!
Indeed...the Russian prisoners are ahead in the game (that was really popular in the Gulags as well):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...'
Look, I am not discussing the politics here but cannot resist to point out few things.
Tribal is good. Tribes did not allow "redundant people" to exist, it would be stupid for a small group. Tribes were way more egalitarian than anything civilization has produced. So why the negative undertones? What does individualism has to do with tribalism?!? Those are diametrically opposite, yet you bundle them together into your "negative" package?
What is "animal Darwinism"?!? All mammals are cooperative; it is one of our major strengths. The mammal's social structure is not "nature red in tooth and claw" though of course competition for survival and procreation is a given. But it is us, humans who forgot about it all and build economic totalitarian system which emphasizes too much on competition and greed and too little on cooperation.
It is in our system that the leaders get all the benefits but do not take the responsibility to face the music and protect the people who surrendered their power to them (but this arrangement is a contract, did you forget that?!?) The alpha gorilla meets all danger head on. The tribal chief meets danger head on. The CEO gets golden handshake for ruining people's lives, the president hides in a bunker while the soldiers die...
Conservatives are against biology for mostly religious reasons, but I always wonder why lefties are also so ignorant in it as well. Again I am not disputing your political stance and such.....but there is quite a mess in your head about biology, ecology and anthropology. Just saying...
Oh, it's a lot worse than that, I am afraid!
Frankie and Benjy are calling the Vogons - the experiment is a failure!
http://villains.wikia.com/wiki...
Well, I think both the baby boomers and the GenX have gone senile so the millennials through no fault of their own are less capable to face difficulties in life.
The Han Solo story illustrates this perfectly. Lucas commented that he never expected so much outrage for changing that scene. "If people want Han Solo to be murderer (!?!?!?) then so be it".
Now wait a minute! What you say is that our children must be taught that if they have a professional murderer pointing a gun at them from 1m who has stated already that he wants to kill you (or take the money which from HS point of view is the same, if he had the money) and you have this one in a billion chance to come on top you should not take it because it is "bad" or "immoral"? What kind of retarded message is that? If I had children I would not want them to listen to senile uncle Lucas....
Now, why would a guy like you know what a duvet is? Does it have an advantage in a hunter gatherer sence?
Looks like we're going to be in a fight, sarge," said Nobby, as the painter very carefully started on the final 'k'.
"Won't last long. Lots of cowards, the Klatchians," said Colon. "The moment they taste a bit of cold steel they're legging it away over the sand."
Sergeant Colon had had a broad education. He'd been to the School of My Dad Always Said, the College of It Stands to Reason, and was now a postgraduate student at the University of What Some Bloke In the Pub Told Me.
"Shouldn't be any trouble to sort out, then?" said Nobby.
"And o'course, they're not the same colour as what we are," said Colon. "Well... as me, anyway," he added, in view of the various hues of Corporal Nobbs. There was probably no–one alive who was the same colour as Corporal Nobbs.
"Constable Visit's pretty brown" said Nobby. "I never seen him run away. if there's a chance of giving someone a religious pamphlet ole Washpot's after them like a terrier."
"Ah, but Omnians are more like us," said Colon. "Bit weird but, basic'ly, just the same as us underneath. No, the way you can tell a Klatchian is, you look an' see if he uses a lot of words beginning with “al”, right? 'Cos that's a dead giveaway. They invented all the words starting with “al”. That's how you can tell they're Klatchian. Like al–cohol, see?"
"They invented beer?"
"Yeah."
"That's clever."
" wouldn't call it clever," said Sergeant Colon, realizing too late that he'd made a tactical error. "More, luck, I'd say."
"What else did they do?"
"Well, there's..." Colon racked his brains. "There's al–gebra. That's like sums with letters. For... for people whose brains aren't clever enough for numbers, see?"
"Is that a fact?"
"Right..."said Colon. "In fact," he went on, a little more assertively now he could see a way ahead, "I heard this wizard down the University say that the Klatchians invented nothing. That was their great contribution to maffs, he said. I said “What?” an' he said, they come up with zero."
"Dun't sound that clever to me," said Nobby. "Anyone could invent nothing. I ain't invented anything."
"My point exactly," said Colon. "I told him, it was people who invented numbers like four and, and–"
"–seven–"
"–right, who were the geniuses. Nothing didn't need inventing. It was just there. They probably just found it."
"It's having all that desert," said Nobby.
"Right! Good point. Desert. Which, as everyone knows, is basically nothing. Nothing's a natural resource to them. It stands to reason. Whereas we're more civilized, see, and we got a lot more stuff around to count, so we invented numbers. It's like... well, they say the Klatchians invented astronomy–"
"'Al–tronomy," said Nobby helpfully.
"No, no... no, Nobby, I reckon they'd discovered esses by then, probably nicked' em off'f us... anyway, they were bound to invent astronomy, 'cos there's bugger all else for them to look at but the sky. Anyone can look at the stars and give 'em names. 's going it a bit to call it inventing, in any case. We don't go around saying we've invented something just because we had a quick dekko at it."
"'I heard where they've got a lot of odd gods," said Nobby.
"Yeah, and mad priests," said Colon. "Foaming at the mouth, half of 'em. Believe all kinds of loony things."
They watched the painter in silence for a moment. Colon was dreading the question that came.
"So how exactly are they different from ours, then?" said Nobby. "I mean, some of our priests are–"
"I hope you ain't being unpatriotic," said Colon severely.
"No, of course not. I was just asking. I can see where they'd be a lot worse than ours, being foreign and everything.
"And of course they're all mad for fighting," said Colon. "Vicious buggers with all those curvy swords of theirs."
"You mean, like...they viciously attack you while cowardly running away after tasting
Of course they were angry! Some fat ass dean of UU sticks his dirty fingers in and now we have to deal with matter-antimatter imbalance. His name was Henry, BTW.
'Things tend to form balls. Balls tend to move in circles. Once you figured that out everything fell into place. In curved motion, of course!'
Professor Stibbons observing our Universe.
The real problem is that our Universe is sitting on a shelf in office at UU where the porters deliver 1 bucket of coal per day per title inscribed on the office's door. Since prof. Rinswind holds 8 positions including prof. of Fretwork, Cruel and Unusual Geography and so on and since the porters would deliver either 8 buckets or none we get all the global warming!
According to "The book of general ignorance" mosquitoes were the biggest killer of humans throughout history. The claim was rather bold though, IIRC that half of humans who ever lived died because of a disease transmitted by mosquitoes. That's 50 billion!!
Off-topic addendum - in the same book they say that the animal that has saved most human lives in history is the horseshoe crab, thanks to its "old fashioned" evolutionary speaking, blood. At least these days they don't kill them but "milk" them. It seems scientists have joined the Ubervald Temperance League :)
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
/. does not allow us to host images or I would show you all the pictures taken on the same (birth)date throughout my life. In the 70-ties there is snow, consistently. Like the GP post I tried skying. In the 80-ties there is hardly snow, no snow since until we came to 2015 when the max temperature on that day was 22 degrees Celsius!
During the last 15 years on our 120 year old far/farmland fruit trees are not fruiting because Jan and Feb are too warm, the trees begin to blossom too early and a March frost finishes them. All neighbors (many in their 70-ties, life time farmers) complain about it. And not just the trees - almost every agricultural crop needs additional help (e.g. temp greenhouse) because the natural variations of the weather are weird and not consistent anymore. The pests are multiplying (not cold enough to kill most of them in winter) and new ones appear that have not been seen before.
People indeed have short memories. When last winter there was snow of 2 meters for 2 weeks people freaked out while this was normal for MONTHS back then. The snow stayed for so long that it got black from pollution. The preparations for the winter were major undertaking both privately (chains on the car tires) and on state level. Oh yes - we used to make pickled vegetables in jars on the balcony in the big city because the temperature will hardly rise above freezing for months. My mother would use the balcony as a second refrigerator! And a drier - ice forms and then sublimates leaving perfectly dry clothing.
Fuck the politics, climate change is real and already costs us a lot!!
And the non smokers are just as bad. Really.
The Dutch are a wonderful nation but one of the few black spots on their image is throwing stuff on the ground. It is truly depressing widespread behavior. A bunch of people walk through a park on the way to a venue and after that it is like the Huns have passed. The non-smokers will trow other trash - they are not at all less likely to do it.
I know from my bird watching friends that every filter can cost a bird's, life because often they swallow them and suffocate. So I made an absolute commitment many years ago never to throw a cigaret butt on the ground and I followed through. However, I have seen (hours of commuting every day for more than a decade) people from all colors and social strata (truly, this is no PC!) throwing it on the ground NEXT to the designated ashtray!!! (on a train station for example). I have no explanation.
I always try to hit them where it hurts (the Dutch love cheap and saving money) mentioning the high garbage collection tax - well you pay for someone to clean your mess. Don't complain or do not be messy!
There is no epidemic as such (in my mind this word implies illness), just the results of our way of life.
If you throw the heavy math on the data you come up with wide variety of dependencies, some of which are startling. For instance, rapid social change always increases suicide rate irrespective of the nature of the change - even if society firmly marches towards utopia or becomes very rich and prosperous, there will be more corpses along the way...
Another positive correlation is with easiness of life - the less our lives are endangered (and more care free and comfortable) the less we value them (rate drops to almost zero during wars; rich countries have higher rates).
In fact, if you assume that your aim is to decrease suicide (or you take the extreme religious stance that it is a sin - BTW that was not the case for the first 1000 years of Christianity for example - back then they actually encouraged the suicide of martyrs) the way to go is to reverse most of the social advances we have achieved and re-model society into something (IMO) unpleasant. Religious people - lower rates. Peasants versus city dwellers - lower rates. High intelligence - high rates. War, famine, strife - lower rates. Have kids - lower rates. Have strong family cohesion - lower rates. There is also a genetic component where for example within the white race Hungaro-Finns have the highest rate and Slavs the lowest (Russia being a very good example of societal change overriding the genetic predisposition - they quadrupled their rate after the fall of the Wall).
I for one await the day (alas, won't live that long) when all of us will have to voluntarily leave life since technology will make us physiologically immortal. For me there is no greater achievement than conquering death - not ultimately, mind you (that is not only impossible but highly undesirable - imagine being immortal and cannot stop it by your free will!), just temporarily - having a very long and healthy life and quick and painless death at the time of your choosing. Any takers?
Millions of flies can't be all wrong! Eat shit!
The Netherlands is the same. People here find it very bizarre to use credit cards for everyday shopping.
Was it?
It so happened with me that I watched TOS the last of all the others (started with TNG-->Voyager-->DS9-->Enterprise). Would you say that "Mudd's women" would draw feminist ire today? Hell yhea, they'd kill the director in his bed....That's the episode where the whole point is to accept women (and men!, as Harry points to Kirk) as who they really are....remember the empowering of Eva who thought she took the Orion drug but it was gelatin? The reaction of the dilithium crystal miner? Harry's? Kirk's?
Or, how about "The city on the edge of Forever"? I was shocked and subsequently delighted to find the best love scene ever put to the screen in a TOS episode!. And they don't even kiss. Remember - the conversation on the street (34 seconds in total) - "Whatever it is, let me help!". Nowadays I can't look at the Orion belt without fixing my gaze on the leftmost star and hearing the voice of Edith. Are we talking about the same Kirk, who almost sacrificed the whole Universe for the love (not sex!) of a woman? The same Kirk who always struggled between his duty and family/long term relationship. The one that lost his son?
Has anyone noticed that large portion of TOS scripts and especially novels were written by women (I recently read about 60-70 of the total 130 or so TOS novels)? And in them there is a healthy dose of womanizing from Kirk and the rest of the male characters? It seems that sane, mature, professional women have no problem with it...
The real fans of this franchise in all its forms have abandoned (and frankly do not need and never needed) gender wars and issues long time ago.
However, in modern day cinema the discussion/portrayal of those issues are marketing/selling points! Look at us, we are so diverse, so women/minority-empowering so.....WTF? Wonder woman, the first kick-ass female character in cinema! Finally, a role model for girls and young women! Patriarchy smashed by the whip of justice! (all those are quotes from the internet reviews).
Excuse me? The most beloved female characters of all time as per Empire's survey (readership, that is drastically more qualified compared to random visitors on IMDB) are Ellen Ripley followed by Sara Conner. No wonder woman in sight...how does spoiled, demi-goddess with magic powers (who's only "arc" involves few "fish out of water" moments) compare to a waitress thrown in the middle of an endless nightmare involving the destruction of the entire human race and a relentless killer robot? Aliens? There are 4 protagonists in that movie and they are all female! The alien queen, Ripley, Newt and Vasquez. The final confrontation is between 3 females and half an android, for pity sake! Did J. Cameron go "Ohhh, ahhhh, look at me I am so progressive"? How come male nerds adore those movies and characters? According to the PC narrative we nerds are worse than Jack the Ripper and we are sooooo afraid of powerful women that we run and hide in mom's basement.
Lastly, all of this modern-day moralizing and virtue signaling is coming from Hollywood? From fucking, sleazy, greedy Hollywood?!? From Disney, the white slavers behind the Mickey Mouse copyright act? The people who waited several decades before depicting Disney princess with dark eyes (and made a selling point out of it)? This is hypocrisy of mind-boggling proportions and it is insulting to our intelligence.
A million times this! I had a boss like that for 5 years - what a bliss! At a certain moment many employees started leaving the company and one of them asked us (my team) "Why are you still here?". We looked at each other and said in one voice "Because of our boss and the excellent atmosphere in the team".
Leaders eat first and get the best mate but when the lion jumps the fence they meet it head on....or that's how it was for most of human history until we invented modern economy. Real leaders do not throw the little guy under the bus when the going gets tough, they face the music. Since the CEO of my present employer makes per year enough for 2 comfortable lifetimes (!?) I do not see why when a crisis hits (which is 90 % of the cases due to poor management anyway) we get fired...
It's gold pressed lathinum. No, even that does not give it justice. It is priceless.
And people gave it away for pennies. Rather than pay a buck per month for social media stuff if that is your thing, people gave away the priceless....
In defense I think noone imagined what can be achieved with big data plus machine learning.
I believe that even if people offer 1000 bucks per month for Facebook without data collection Zukerberg will not take it since the data is way more precious. Priceless as mentioned...
Always....always...always....
A group of bacteria were growing in a petry dish. Their civilization lasted for 60 days. Every day they doubled their numbers. On the 59th day some bacteria were trying to make a point that the food is finite that this level of growth is unsustainable. "What, are you crazy!" - replied most of the rest - "We have always found a way! Look how numerous we have become, surviving and adapting for FULL 59 DAYS! Also - half the world is empty, you morons (yep, the last division changes the dish from half-full to full; progression, bitches)! Remember back in the ancient times during day 42 we ran out of food but we found a way, we found that New world full of untouched agar-agar (apart from few savage bacteria that we killed). And then there was that "crisis" during day 50 when we ran out of agar-agar but we mutated and started eating the polymers below, that the great bacteriophage in the sky created for us (that was the polymer support mesh that the PhD student used). We will always adapt, always have been and always will. Always, do you hear! Always!!! Bloody alarmists"....and so the 60th day came and the bacteria could not mutate to eat the dish itself. The great bacteriophage in the sky got all the souls she needed and the PhD student got his article.
Ponder this (you can also stibbons it) - on one hand we have, unprecedented by their magnitude and significance, events coming towards us (machine learning replaces intellectual jobs as well, no?) and on the other we console ourselves by extrapolating past events that have nothing to do with what is coming. Weird! You understand that we can make machines run the whole of the economy. ALL of it. Forever, because AI learns faster so if we create a new job, ANY new job, AI will be able to do it better and cheaper...understand? All future jobs are gone as well. From that moment we either enter the Aurora situation - 1 human per 100 km2 served by thousands of robots or we kill each other since there is no "profit" in such future....
In 20 comments all relevant was said. Before the troll brigade arrived. I've nothing to add.
Bravo gentlemen!