At some point you know someone somewhere is going to get killed for poor movie etiquette. You've got to wonder how tempted the lawyer might be to go for jury nullification.
If you are a good thief it's not illegal. And if it is illegal due to some public outcry you'll only get a slap on the wrist and you'll get to keep your ill gotten money. Tax free naturally.
Some of the stuff I've been reading lately, dumbed down sufficently that I might understand it of course, involves recent research on the sugars our bodies use as building blocks. Knowing more about these sugars, and how organisms interact with them on a fine level may well allow us to build whole other classes of antibiotics (and a wide range of other therapies besides). With the insight we seem to be gaining in to how to more inventively interfer with the machinery at that level, it would seem that bacteria might be the ones with cause for alarm. They might be winning one battle, but it's starting to look like we'll be winning the war. To say nothing of the searches far and wide for natural ready made solution. Some poor researchers even humped out to indonesia to gather samples from komodo dragons to see what exactly might be the source of their appearent immunity to what are certainly lethal bacteria.
Some of the studies that have come out make me wonder if our particular pursuit of wellness is such a good idea. Kids who grow up with pets have fewer allergies, kids who play in the dirt are less likely to have asthma. Maybe being dirty and occansionally ill is like immunological exerciese. You always want to stretch first, and should never over do it; but, in general, it's a good thing.
Scientific American did a profile on him and his unbelieveably brilliant work. He solved the problems everyone else was trying to solve with mountians of money with little more than table scrapps. His work was the fruit of his singular pursuit and almost inhuman determination. The support his company gave him, if you can call it that, was limited enough that most research universities could have made room for it, to say nothing of how easy it would have been for him to get a government grant with some of his results with an all but abandoned technique.
There's no question he company should own some of the patent. But his contribution was worth a hell of a lot more than $162 dollars US. If that's your reward for brilliance. Your blood sweat and tears forcing a brilliant concept down the throat of a company that doesn't fully appreciate it, finding somehow to not just keep the project alive, but to make it a world leader with a 6 month head start, in the semiconductor industry no less, and then have them keep the billions of dollars, cut you a check for a cool 162 bucks (before taxes), and a pat on the back, that's incentive to you, or anyone? I hope he gets all that's comming to him. His accomplishment is impressive. When viewed from the perspective of how little he did it with, it's simply astonishing. I'd hate to have as a research advisor, you're not going to get much sympathy if you say something can't be done.
All kinds of cool remixes and blends of their songs, almost enough for another CD. Needless to say, that's the kind of value I appreciate. But again that's something that makes Daft Punk cool, and says nothing positive about the RIAA. Some bands like to give back.
As far as Bon Jovi goes, Young Guns is fine as a diversion maybe once a year, other than that they should have left their butt rock back in 1988. Christ first Bon Jovi, then Axel Rose and four dudes who call themselves Guns and Roses, I await the return of Winger with baited breath...no that's rising bile.
Just when I thought my hotmail account couldn't hold any more penis spam, you bastards find a way to double it. (No doubt in 60 days or my money back).
On the radio, in my email, on late night tv, in popup ads, everyone seems to think I have a tiny penis. I consider used to consider it 'space-efficent' but now I'm starting to develope a complex.
The real question is are otherwise decent people willing to violate laws to write linux. That said, Free Linus T-shirts will probably do pretty well. Free 1010011010, not expected to be a big seller.
I had a professor who told us of a practical joke he'd do every few years. He was fond of explosions and other cool things liquid oxygen and nitrogen being no exception.
Appearently he used to fill on of the fingers in a latex glove with hamburger, then put his hands in the glove. Careful to conceal his deception, he would stick stick his false finger into a some liquid nitrogen, while telling the class about how if one just left a finger in there it would shatter if struck. He then proceeded to demonstrate this by smashing the false and frozen finger with a hammer.
The way he tells the story, he was forced to discontinue this irregular practice when a bit of frozen hamburger hit a girl in the front row, causing her to faint.
And a styrofoam cup with a piece of what appears to be copper pipe, held together with duct tape and dreams, while it might be cool, doesn't rise to what I would consider "gear".
It'll be interesting to see if this gets used politically to increase US resistance to the International Criminal Court. It's not as if the administration really needs to make their position more popular in the states, but haveing a this come up at this time.... Well, the Bush administration probably sent Putin a nice muffin basket and with a lovely card.
And on lighter news did anyone else see this? 116 trillion dollars? Appearently, Scott Evil will be taking the LSAT! I mean, I feel for those people, and maybe agree with some of their reasoning in assigning blame, but combining comic book supervillain plots with actual lawsuits seems less than productive.
If someone punches me in the nose, I can kick him in the nuts. And if he's a better, wiser person for it, so much the better. Now that doesn't mean I can incinerate him with one of my thermonuclear weapons, kill the whole town, beat him to death, or even go all ninja on him until I get that "so sweet I want to crap my pants" feeling.
AFAIK I get to beat on him till he quits, unless I want to skip right past go, and land my ass in a place where "getting doubles" has nothing to do with dice.
That said, I have it on good authority he's the guy who wrote the screen play for The Core
When something happens to cause the core of the planet to change in temperature, threatening to stop the planet from revolving, a band of NASA "terranauts" (led by a geophysics professor played by Eckhart) is formed to pilot an experimental deep-earth ship to try to fix it by setting off a nuclear detonation. (Swank plays the ship's pilot; Karyo plays a Russian "high-energy" weapons specialist; Woodard plays a NASA control chief)
It's only missing Kathy Ireland, or someone else equally interchangable, and midgets, preferably australian.
You didn't know why Iran's great experiment met with such dissapproval? They didn't want to tax the oil the US was pumping out, they wanted to just take the capital investment. They called it nationalization, but they were taking what someone else paid for without compensation. What would you call it? Did it warrent destroying a democracy trying to pull itself on to its feet? Probably not, but they still had to expect some kind of retaliation.
Same with Guatamala, and Cuba.
At some point the leaders of the US, and more broadly the West, needed to, and eventually did, come to the realization that the world isn't a chess board. It's time the rest of the world learns they don't have an equal say. It's not one person one vote, as nice and egalitarian as that sentiment is, it does not, and probably should not, represent the distribution of power.
Funny you call me a rightwing nut. I vote consistantly democrat, but consider myself an independant. Why? Nearly everything done well and worth doing was done by a democrat. As for the robber barrons, they've existed a long time. They came back into vogue when the saw what kinds of accounting tricks the Reagan administration used.
In the end, it all comes down to one word. Integrity. And that's not a virtue that's respected anymore. Finding people with it, is rare, and to find it in people in power well that's almost shocking. And sure I'm more affected by robber barons than feudal warlords. But in the sceme of things I know who's more evil.
What I love best is I've been reading how you've gone on chastising someone for jumping to conclusions about you, and then you jump to even more ignorant conclusions about me.
And again with Nash. I'm going to refrain from insulting your intelligence here, as it's already been done to death elsewhere. But rest assured, it is deserved. Nash's formula ASSUMES all players are completely rational. We know for a FACT that people don't play games rationaly. Because we all know not all people are rational, and we play the game accordingly. Is this really so hard to understand? There are models that build and diverge from Nash's work and try to account for this, some with more than a small measure of success. Was Nash's insight worthwhile, or even something of an achivement? Yes, in spite of a flawed assumption. Is it the best tool now available? No!
As for MY oversimplified world, please. You're embarising yourself. I'm not the one claiming all people are rational. (And your holy invocation of Nash, especially in your reply, implicitly states just that).
Picked on? Oh please. You act as if those governments were acting in a vaccume and out of no where the US started torturing people for money and a sense of self-statisfaction. In many of those cases the governments in question acted directly in opposition to the interests of the US. When you steal from the US, expect a response. You would think a single object lesson would be enough. But no. Time and time again, you see these people rise to power on platforms that were little more than, "We'll just take back all this capital investment from companies that enjoy the protection of 'The ARSENAL of Democracy', the beauty part is we just take it, and don't offer any compensation, what are they going to do? Kill us?" The answer, unfortunately for them, was unsuprisingly affermative. Picking fights with superpowers right out of the box with a newly minted democracy is a difficult proposition at best. You'd better be prepared for significant suffering, and have a damn good reason for taking the gamble. Witness the success of Vietnam. They got what they wanted, at a truly horrible cost.
BTW Toss Nash's idealistic formula back in the drawer. It has a certain utility, but not all people are rational, and everyone knows it. Other methods of accounting for this game are more useful, for rational players, like The West. But feudal warlords who seem to be confused about what millenium it is, they aren't always rational.
I take it you haven't seen the footage of them firing the containers into concret walls on rocket sleds. Those things are many things, but easy to open is not one of them. A blast near it won't do crap. And I don't see them going all road warrior while they try to set up shaped charges, and fight off the tremendous security. Although someone will make the movie, and it will probably star Steven Segal. That alone is probably enough of a reason not to do it. Atomic Tornado II: Desert Territory.
How many people do you know that gulp their hot coffee? McDonald's customers who didn't cover their hands in creamy butter liked that the coffee was hot. Those customers should be able to buy hot coffee if that's what they like. McDonald's was being a good company takeing care of what MOST of their customers wanted. Funny how they didn't take into account how much cooler the coffee got when poured into a cup, cream and sugar were added, it was left to sit for a while, or perhaps held to enjoy the heat on a cold morning, and how hot it would finally be when swallowed after having been stirred blown on then gingerly sipped.
I've burned my mouth when I didn't blow on pizza enough, and the worst measure of whether the pizza was too hot was it's temperature when they put it in the special pizza deliver appliance. Hey, my teeth are really temperature sensitive too, I'm going to sue Ben and Jerry's for not making a more comfortable room temperature ice cream because I'm too stupid to learn and adapt unlike all the other mammals that preceeded me.
Steel isn't used because it's strong. In the scope of things it's not. It and other metals are used because they are tough. Very tough. I have a suspicion from whats written in the article that this super-metal isn't. That combined with the beryllium and a bunch of people whacking golf balls would make me wonder if you're going to get a lot of very small metal flakes dusting gold courses. And beryllium isn't a happy thing to get in organisms.
No one wants to drive a car that shatters into a cloud of possibly toxic dust. Well except maybe palestinians.
And to beat out DU it'll have to be self-sharpening. Which it may well be.
But even more importantly, there is a cost of pirating vs a cost of buying. I can walk into most stores, and get almost any DVD for less than $20 bucks, including special child-proofed editions of Memento with extras all over the place. CD's? Whoa! Maybe, is it on sale? And further more when I buy a movie I know for a fact I'll be getting around 2 hours, give or take, of enjoyment. With music, I suppose I could sit there and listen to the whole album before I buy it, after all it might only take 20 minutes, on a 74 minute cd.
I'm forced to observe that music costs as much as movies, occasionally more, provides far less entertainment for that expense, and for your trouble assumes you're a criminal just because that's one of many choices a person has. With the music industry so quick to screw me, and music downloading being so cheap and convienent, I sometimes wonder why I don't do it.
Not that I'm happy with companies like Disney, buying up movies like Kiki's Delivery Service and then not making them available on DVD, or making only vastly inferior versions of eXistenZ available forcing me to get the canadian import. Damn region crap.
Those businesses who choose not to serve their customers take a page not from Adam Smith's book, but from Lenin's, and they deserve all the mercy and compasion the free market reserves for such businesses.
It's almost too bad that I saw this so late. Given how much the math books of John Allen Paulos have entertained me. I really could have done some good karma whoring.
Many of them are about the bastardization of statistics, others not. My favorite is Mathmatics and Humor, short, interesting. Most are similar in that respect and pretty much all of them are written for the layman who doesn't have time for homework. All the ones I have were easy, quick, reads. And some of them I even paid full price for (normally I just pick up interesting looking stuff from half price books).
Most things have a qualitative and a quantitative aspect, the difference between how and how much. Math really isn't any different.
In that way, math with history might intersect with the history of Pi, and the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem (Unlocking the Secret of an Acient Mathmatical Problem, by Amir D. Aczel), both of which have been turned into interesting books.
But why math? Physics can certainly have a similar bent. And there are quite a few books that seek to explain the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and relativity in simpler, less rigorous, and less tedious, terms. Many of them aren't even written by kooks! To say nothing of those books that cronicle some of the more interesting discoveries that are crying to be made into a Nova special if not an actual movie. The book about the COBE experiment, I think it was called First Light, comes to mind. The personal drama is engaging enough to keep someone interested even if one finds the science, impenetrable, which I would think unlikly.
For whatever reason I dislike the vast majority of fiction, so I browse at Half Price Books and buy $30 or so of math and science books.
But it's all about what one hopes to gain. I don't hope to build a supercollider in my back yard, even if I could afford it and the DOE would sign off on it (and they might!). I seek more illumination about the world, and larger universe I get to live in, that, I can get from a book.
I've no quarrel with frozen pizza designed to be microwaved. When hunting and gathering one must accept what one finds. But you savages who defile perfectly excellent cold left over pizza have no place in a civilized society. Some social ills make me wonder what horrible childhood pain would cause a person to behave in such a disturbed manner. But those dysfunctional individuals microwaving delectible left over pizza, clearly they must be shot, incinerated, with their ashes encased in glass rods, buried under a mountain or maybe a salt flat, then covered with lye and never spoken of again.
When people ask "What's this world coming to?" you can be sure that people who microwave perfect precious left over pizza are at fault. Filthy animals!
It seems pretty unlikely that aliens frequent our modest little sphere. I just can't see what they would get from a field trip, that they can't get from our broadcasts for free. To say nothing of what they might think of the broadcasts that deal with the what ifs surrounding our discovery of their excursions.
I suppose I wonder what void does this willingness to believe in E.T. fill? Does God seem remote and unbelievible to some, and they have this need to believe in something greater? Or does it flow from our secret belief that we are infinitely fascinating and deserving of attention? Now that we know our tiny blue home isn't the geographic center of the universe are some people trying to reinvent it as the social center?
Slashdot Mirror
At some point you know someone somewhere is going to get killed for poor movie etiquette. You've got to wonder how tempted the lawyer might be to go for jury nullification.
If you are a good thief it's not illegal. And if it is illegal due to some public outcry you'll only get a slap on the wrist and you'll get to keep your ill gotten money. Tax free naturally.
Some of the stuff I've been reading lately, dumbed down sufficently that I might understand it of course, involves recent research on the sugars our bodies use as building blocks. Knowing more about these sugars, and how organisms interact with them on a fine level may well allow us to build whole other classes of antibiotics (and a wide range of other therapies besides). With the insight we seem to be gaining in to how to more inventively interfer with the machinery at that level, it would seem that bacteria might be the ones with cause for alarm. They might be winning one battle, but it's starting to look like we'll be winning the war. To say nothing of the searches far and wide for natural ready made solution. Some poor researchers even humped out to indonesia to gather samples from komodo dragons to see what exactly might be the source of their appearent immunity to what are certainly lethal bacteria.
Some of the studies that have come out make me wonder if our particular pursuit of wellness is such a good idea. Kids who grow up with pets have fewer allergies, kids who play in the dirt are less likely to have asthma. Maybe being dirty and occansionally ill is like immunological exerciese. You always want to stretch first, and should never over do it; but, in general, it's a good thing.
Scientific American did a profile on him and his unbelieveably brilliant work. He solved the problems everyone else was trying to solve with mountians of money with little more than table scrapps. His work was the fruit of his singular pursuit and almost inhuman determination. The support his company gave him, if you can call it that, was limited enough that most research universities could have made room for it, to say nothing of how easy it would have been for him to get a government grant with some of his results with an all but abandoned technique.
There's no question he company should own some of the patent. But his contribution was worth a hell of a lot more than $162 dollars US. If that's your reward for brilliance. Your blood sweat and tears forcing a brilliant concept down the throat of a company that doesn't fully appreciate it, finding somehow to not just keep the project alive, but to make it a world leader with a 6 month head start, in the semiconductor industry no less, and then have them keep the billions of dollars, cut you a check for a cool 162 bucks (before taxes), and a pat on the back, that's incentive to you, or anyone? I hope he gets all that's comming to him. His accomplishment is impressive. When viewed from the perspective of how little he did it with, it's simply astonishing. I'd hate to have as a research advisor, you're not going to get much sympathy if you say something can't be done.
Daft Punk already did it.
All kinds of cool remixes and blends of their songs, almost enough for another CD. Needless to say, that's the kind of value I appreciate. But again that's something that makes Daft Punk cool, and says nothing positive about the RIAA. Some bands like to give back.
As far as Bon Jovi goes, Young Guns is fine as a diversion maybe once a year, other than that they should have left their butt rock back in 1988. Christ first Bon Jovi, then Axel Rose and four dudes who call themselves Guns and Roses, I await the return of Winger with baited breath...no that's rising bile.
Just when I thought my hotmail account couldn't hold any more penis spam, you bastards find a way to double it. (No doubt in 60 days or my money back).
On the radio, in my email, on late night tv, in popup ads, everyone seems to think I have a tiny penis. I consider used to consider it 'space-efficent' but now I'm starting to develope a complex.
The real question is are otherwise decent people willing to violate laws to write linux. That said, Free Linus T-shirts will probably do pretty well. Free 1010011010, not expected to be a big seller.
When did onsale.com come online? I seem to remember them running online auctions around 1994.
Have you guys tried or considered trying dry ice?
I had a professor who told us of a practical joke he'd do every few years. He was fond of explosions and other cool things liquid oxygen and nitrogen being no exception.
Appearently he used to fill on of the fingers in a latex glove with hamburger, then put his hands in the glove. Careful to conceal his deception, he would stick stick his false finger into a some liquid nitrogen, while telling the class about how if one just left a finger in there it would shatter if struck. He then proceeded to demonstrate this by smashing the false and frozen finger with a hammer.
The way he tells the story, he was forced to discontinue this irregular practice when a bit of frozen hamburger hit a girl in the front row, causing her to faint.
And a styrofoam cup with a piece of what appears to be copper pipe, held together with duct tape and dreams, while it might be cool, doesn't rise to what I would consider "gear".
Wow with such an informed and insightful analysis it's hard to see how you, and other like minded individuals, are so flippantly dismissed as kooks.
It'll be interesting to see if this gets used politically to increase US resistance to the International Criminal Court. It's not as if the administration really needs to make their position more popular in the states, but haveing a this come up at this time.... Well, the Bush administration probably sent Putin a nice muffin basket and with a lovely card.
And on lighter news did anyone else see this? 116 trillion dollars? Appearently, Scott Evil will be taking the LSAT! I mean, I feel for those people, and maybe agree with some of their reasoning in assigning blame, but combining comic book supervillain plots with actual lawsuits seems less than productive.
To be fair, no one is passing The Phantom Edit off as The Phantom Menace.
If someone punches me in the nose, I can kick him in the nuts. And if he's a better, wiser person for it, so much the better. Now that doesn't mean I can incinerate him with one of my thermonuclear weapons, kill the whole town, beat him to death, or even go all ninja on him until I get that "so sweet I want to crap my pants" feeling.
AFAIK I get to beat on him till he quits, unless I want to skip right past go, and land my ass in a place where "getting doubles" has nothing to do with dice.
That said, I have it on good authority he's the guy who wrote the screen play for The Core It's only missing Kathy Ireland, or someone else equally interchangable, and midgets, preferably australian.
Seriously?
You didn't know why Iran's great experiment met with such dissapproval? They didn't want to tax the oil the US was pumping out, they wanted to just take the capital investment. They called it nationalization, but they were taking what someone else paid for without compensation. What would you call it? Did it warrent destroying a democracy trying to pull itself on to its feet? Probably not, but they still had to expect some kind of retaliation.
Same with Guatamala, and Cuba.
At some point the leaders of the US, and more broadly the West, needed to, and eventually did, come to the realization that the world isn't a chess board. It's time the rest of the world learns they don't have an equal say. It's not one person one vote, as nice and egalitarian as that sentiment is, it does not, and probably should not, represent the distribution of power.
Funny you call me a rightwing nut. I vote consistantly democrat, but consider myself an independant. Why? Nearly everything done well and worth doing was done by a democrat. As for the robber barrons, they've existed a long time. They came back into vogue when the saw what kinds of accounting tricks the Reagan administration used.
In the end, it all comes down to one word. Integrity. And that's not a virtue that's respected anymore. Finding people with it, is rare, and to find it in people in power well that's almost shocking. And sure I'm more affected by robber barons than feudal warlords. But in the sceme of things I know who's more evil.
What I love best is I've been reading how you've gone on chastising someone for jumping to conclusions about you, and then you jump to even more ignorant conclusions about me.
And again with Nash. I'm going to refrain from insulting your intelligence here, as it's already been done to death elsewhere. But rest assured, it is deserved. Nash's formula ASSUMES all players are completely rational. We know for a FACT that people don't play games rationaly. Because we all know not all people are rational, and we play the game accordingly. Is this really so hard to understand? There are models that build and diverge from Nash's work and try to account for this, some with more than a small measure of success. Was Nash's insight worthwhile, or even something of an achivement? Yes, in spite of a flawed assumption. Is it the best tool now available? No!
As for MY oversimplified world, please. You're embarising yourself. I'm not the one claiming all people are rational. (And your holy invocation of Nash, especially in your reply, implicitly states just that).
Picked on? Oh please. You act as if those governments were acting in a vaccume and out of no where the US started torturing people for money and a sense of self-statisfaction. In many of those cases the governments in question acted directly in opposition to the interests of the US. When you steal from the US, expect a response. You would think a single object lesson would be enough. But no. Time and time again, you see these people rise to power on platforms that were little more than, "We'll just take back all this capital investment from companies that enjoy the protection of 'The ARSENAL of Democracy', the beauty part is we just take it, and don't offer any compensation, what are they going to do? Kill us?" The answer, unfortunately for them, was unsuprisingly affermative. Picking fights with superpowers right out of the box with a newly minted democracy is a difficult proposition at best. You'd better be prepared for significant suffering, and have a damn good reason for taking the gamble. Witness the success of Vietnam. They got what they wanted, at a truly horrible cost.
BTW Toss Nash's idealistic formula back in the drawer. It has a certain utility, but not all people are rational, and everyone knows it. Other methods of accounting for this game are more useful, for rational players, like The West. But feudal warlords who seem to be confused about what millenium it is, they aren't always rational.
I take it you haven't seen the footage of them firing the containers into concret walls on rocket sleds. Those things are many things, but easy to open is not one of them. A blast near it won't do crap. And I don't see them going all road warrior while they try to set up shaped charges, and fight off the tremendous security. Although someone will make the movie, and it will probably star Steven Segal. That alone is probably enough of a reason not to do it. Atomic Tornado II: Desert Territory.
How many people do you know that gulp their hot coffee? McDonald's customers who didn't cover their hands in creamy butter liked that the coffee was hot. Those customers should be able to buy hot coffee if that's what they like. McDonald's was being a good company takeing care of what MOST of their customers wanted. Funny how they didn't take into account how much cooler the coffee got when poured into a cup, cream and sugar were added, it was left to sit for a while, or perhaps held to enjoy the heat on a cold morning, and how hot it would finally be when swallowed after having been stirred blown on then gingerly sipped.
I've burned my mouth when I didn't blow on pizza enough, and the worst measure of whether the pizza was too hot was it's temperature when they put it in the special pizza deliver appliance. Hey, my teeth are really temperature sensitive too, I'm going to sue Ben and Jerry's for not making a more comfortable room temperature ice cream because I'm too stupid to learn and adapt unlike all the other mammals that preceeded me.
Steel isn't used because it's strong. In the scope of things it's not. It and other metals are used because they are tough. Very tough. I have a suspicion from whats written in the article that this super-metal isn't. That combined with the beryllium and a bunch of people whacking golf balls would make me wonder if you're going to get a lot of very small metal flakes dusting gold courses. And beryllium isn't a happy thing to get in organisms.
No one wants to drive a car that shatters into a cloud of possibly toxic dust. Well except maybe palestinians.
And to beat out DU it'll have to be self-sharpening. Which it may well be.
Pluto has been kicked out of the planet club. As reported elsewhere on slashdot.
We could stage a science coup d'tat and have it reinstated. You get the pitchforks, I'll bring the bunsen burners.
But even more importantly, there is a cost of pirating vs a cost of buying. I can walk into most stores, and get almost any DVD for less than $20 bucks, including special child-proofed editions of Memento with extras all over the place. CD's? Whoa! Maybe, is it on sale? And further more when I buy a movie I know for a fact I'll be getting around 2 hours, give or take, of enjoyment. With music, I suppose I could sit there and listen to the whole album before I buy it, after all it might only take 20 minutes, on a 74 minute cd.
I'm forced to observe that music costs as much as movies, occasionally more, provides far less entertainment for that expense, and for your trouble assumes you're a criminal just because that's one of many choices a person has. With the music industry so quick to screw me, and music downloading being so cheap and convienent, I sometimes wonder why I don't do it.
Not that I'm happy with companies like Disney, buying up movies like Kiki's Delivery Service and then not making them available on DVD, or making only vastly inferior versions of eXistenZ available forcing me to get the canadian import. Damn region crap.
Those businesses who choose not to serve their customers take a page not from Adam Smith's book, but from Lenin's, and they deserve all the mercy and compasion the free market reserves for such businesses.
It's almost too bad that I saw this so late. Given how much the math books of John Allen Paulos have entertained me. I really could have done some good karma whoring.
Many of them are about the bastardization of statistics, others not. My favorite is Mathmatics and Humor, short, interesting. Most are similar in that respect and pretty much all of them are written for the layman who doesn't have time for homework. All the ones I have were easy, quick, reads. And some of them I even paid full price for (normally I just pick up interesting looking stuff from half price books).
Most things have a qualitative and a quantitative aspect, the difference between how and how much. Math really isn't any different.
In that way, math with history might intersect with the history of Pi, and the solution of Fermat's Last Theorem (Unlocking the Secret of an Acient Mathmatical Problem, by Amir D. Aczel), both of which have been turned into interesting books.
But why math? Physics can certainly have a similar bent. And there are quite a few books that seek to explain the mysteries of quantum mechanics, and relativity in simpler, less rigorous, and less tedious, terms. Many of them aren't even written by kooks! To say nothing of those books that cronicle some of the more interesting discoveries that are crying to be made into a Nova special if not an actual movie. The book about the COBE experiment, I think it was called First Light, comes to mind. The personal drama is engaging enough to keep someone interested even if one finds the science, impenetrable, which I would think unlikly.
For whatever reason I dislike the vast majority of fiction, so I browse at Half Price Books and buy $30 or so of math and science books.
But it's all about what one hopes to gain. I don't hope to build a supercollider in my back yard, even if I could afford it and the DOE would sign off on it (and they might!). I seek more illumination about the world, and larger universe I get to live in, that, I can get from a book.
I've no quarrel with frozen pizza designed to be microwaved. When hunting and gathering one must accept what one finds. But you savages who defile perfectly excellent cold left over pizza have no place in a civilized society. Some social ills make me wonder what horrible childhood pain would cause a person to behave in such a disturbed manner. But those dysfunctional individuals microwaving delectible left over pizza, clearly they must be shot, incinerated, with their ashes encased in glass rods, buried under a mountain or maybe a salt flat, then covered with lye and never spoken of again.
When people ask "What's this world coming to?" you can be sure that people who microwave perfect precious left over pizza are at fault. Filthy animals!
It seems pretty unlikely that aliens frequent our modest little sphere. I just can't see what they would get from a field trip, that they can't get from our broadcasts for free. To say nothing of what they might think of the broadcasts that deal with the what ifs surrounding our discovery of their excursions.
I suppose I wonder what void does this willingness to believe in E.T. fill? Does God seem remote and unbelievible to some, and they have this need to believe in something greater? Or does it flow from our secret belief that we are infinitely fascinating and deserving of attention? Now that we know our tiny blue home isn't the geographic center of the universe are some people trying to reinvent it as the social center?