Ok, explain to me this: how does mutilating your nose help in any way with vitiligo? I've seen African-Americans with the disease before, they just have patches of pigmentless skin. Any sufficiently wealthy individual could simply apply a cosmetic solution, like a darkening cream. God knows movie stars and singers have no shame about modifying themselves to fit someone's definition of 'pretty'. I just don't get it...how does a handsome young man voluntarily change himself into this mutilated freak? There's this bizarre idea that because he had a pigmentation disorder on certain parts of his skin, that this entirely justifies him disfiguring his face. WTF?
Oh, come off it. Micheal Jackson obviously had a huge complex where he wanted to be white. Look at the photos of him when he was young - he was a handsome African-American man with a wide nose. He could have done quite well with the ladies, had that been his objective. Obviously, it was not. As time goes on, he gets whiter and whiter, and his nose gets narrower and narrower until it became disfigured by too many surgeries. So he likes kids? Great! Get hitched and shit out a litter of his own pups. Then nobody will quest for inconvenient truths like why he sleeps in the same bed with children. If he honestly had a platonic idea of love with young'uns, then he wouldn't have needed his Jesus Juice, eh? The whole thing stinks of a tragic man, isolated from society by his wealth and his enabling entourage. Have you listened to "Thriller" in the past few years? Give it a fresh listen, it is an outstanding work. I cordially hated MJ during his popularity period in the 80s, mostly due to his endorsemanship of Pepsi (Coke or Dr. Pepper or DIE!)
However, his music before "Bad" was outstanding, even I cannot deny this. When "Bad" was released, it was obvious to everyone that he had jumped the shark (even though this term was not in common usage at the time). When he started molesting little boys, that was it. He crossed the line. America is endlessly forgiving of popular celebrities...just look at how many of them are reprehensible in one way or another. All you have to do is go to rehab, don the sackcloth and ashes of the repentant, and claim you have seen the light and will sin no more. Look at Robert Downey, Jr...the man got high and broke in to his neighbor's house. He got the Emmy when he was released from prison! A personage no less than Mel Gibson himself took the financial risk to get him back making movies again, and just look at the Ironman franchise these days.
But the whole "adopting white kids" thing took him really over the edge. There are millions of colored children who would love to be adopted by rich celebrities...just look at Madonna or Brangelina. It's fashionable! Micheal Jackson was a man with serious issues. If he wasn't the son of Joe Jackson, he would just be another 50 year old child molester serving a long sentence in a California prison.
If the package is heat-proof, then the temperature of the electronics will stay within its operating range and the device will function normally. Magma is only 1300-2400F.
You are seriously delusional, and have no idea how international business works. You're just casting about for some scenario where your opinions make sense. Once the bill of lading is released, the shipper has nothing to say about what happens to the shipment. It could be used to microwave fluffy duckies and bunnies and nobody could do anything about it. What "we" "asked them to do" was purchase an amount of scrap at a certain price, deliverable at a certain place. There is an entire industry built around scrap, surprising as that might be.
No, actually, I've read Shanghai Scrap for a while now. There is a lot of good, firsthand insight. Funny you assumed I pulled it out of my ass. That's what typically happens when people are confronted with cognitive dissonance. The guy has written for the New York Times and is friendly with environmentalists and other activists...is that liberal enough for you? No, anything that disagrees with my preconceived notions fed to me by the media MUST be a fraud of some kind, there is no other conclusion that allows me to keep my fragile mental state intact.
Before I went to Asia, I never sent a text message in my life. When I got back after my first stay, I started sending text messages to friends and such. Many of them had never received one before, and wondered why their phone was making that strange sound. People would just rather call you and say what they want to say instead of taking all the time to write out a text. I agree...to a point.
What's good about texts? Well, they're great when communicating with people who speak English as a second or third language. They have time to think about what they're going to say, and they have time to decipher what you say. Of course, mobile slang is extremely difficult for them. The advantages with native English speakers? You have time to reply at your leisure, and a record is kept of all conversations. If the recipient's phone is off, the network will store the message and deliver it when power is restored or when they pay their bill. Er...that's all I can think of.
Negatives about texts? The laborious nature of texting means that the English language is horribly mangled in order to fit. The only real solution is a keyboard...T9 is a kludge and letter-by-letter texting is just too much work. It condenses thoughts into tiny pieces to fit inside 140 characters. Text messaging is horribly expensive for its cost.
Frankly, I think a lot of people just send texts in order to be able to play with their phones. It's fun when you're stuck on a bus and bored, you can talk to six friends at once. But to get some work done or exchange real information, it's easier just to call. The bandwidth of voice is so much greater than that of text messaging. Heck, I even notice this with instant messaging (something else I never bothered with before Asia), it takes 40 minutes to have a conversation when the same phone call would have taken 5 minutes. People in my office will sit at their desks and send MSN to each other instead of talking. It's weird...a quiet office with no sound but clattering keyboards.
I love how you frame this - they are victims, helpless in their fate, and we are the evil people doing them harm. "Pawned off on"...LOL. Scrap is a big business in nations like China, and waste is bought by the ton and shipped in. After the bill of lading is received by the buyer, there is absolutely nothing any Westerner can do to affect what happens next. I realize it makes good press to read the service tag off a junked Dell and say it came from Mamie Jenkins of Flyover Territory, USA, and it's therefore her fault that workers are being exposed to PCBs. Misleading and serving a personal agenda instead of reporting the facts, but that's where the press is these days. How about a little opprobrium for the unethical people who make the decision to recycle electronics in an unsafe manner? Oh no, we can't have that. "Victim" by definition means "no responsibility" so if it was their fault in any way, they would no longer be Holy Victims. Another very disturbing aspect of this framing is that because people aren't Westerners, then they by definition can make no decisions. They're too stupid, only we are the smart people who can take responsibility! Racist to the extreme, but then try creating cognitive dissonance in your typical PC drone...you won't get far.
It's also extremely Western-centric. Only we make e-waste! Ever pause to think about the fact that developing nations are creating huge amounts of waste themselves? China is the second-largest consumer of PCs in the world. Adam Minter of Shanghai Scrap makes a good point:
When China and other countries make a concerted, well-funded effort to do something about the problem, that, too, demands coverage. Put differently, after nearly a decade of wall-to-wall coverage of everything wrong with China's e-waste problem, how can the foreign media and activist community ignore what it is finally doing right - and doing right on a massive scale?
Put differently, after nearly a decade of wall-to-wall coverage of everything wrong with China's e-waste problem, how can the foreign media and activist community ignore what it is finally doing right - and doing right on a massive scale?
As longtime readers know, I'm no China apologist. This e-scrap program has problems. But it is a massive e-recycling program, nonetheless, and yet it has never - not once in its two month life - been reported by a mainstream (not industry trade) foreign news outlet despite the fact - over the last decade - mainstream foreign media outlets have done thousands of stories about the problem of e-waste. More damning, neither the Basel Action Network, which devotes itself to confronting the "unsustainable dumping of the world's toxic waste and pollution on our global village's poorest residents," nor Greenpeace, which actively solicits donations beide photos of south China's e-scrap recycling zones, has many any effort to mention China's progress on their respective websites (or, for that matter, recent progress on the same issue in Brazil). Why?
What's the breakthrough new recycling program in China he's talking about? You won't hear about it in the Western media because it is an inconvenient truth. It doesn't Fit The Narrative. And The Narrative is always that we are bad and they are victims.
Pushback? What have you been smoking, and where can I get some? Iran is a theocracy. Maybe you missed it back in 1979 when Shiite Muslims overthrew the government? Who controls Hezbollah? Who ordered the troops to fire on peaceful protesters last year? Who has real-live religious police? Seriously man, update your Persian outlook to 2010, please.
Why not have educational content folded into games
on
Learning By Playing
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· Score: 1
Can anyone tell me a reason why real educational content is not already seamlessly folded into games? Kids can't pass a test but they know the names of all 150 Pokemon, or the good items in WoW and how to use them effectively together, or the location of every last secret location in GTA4. Why not name the Pokemon #1=Hydrogen, #2=Helium, #26 Iron, and so on? We'd have an entire generation who memorized every element and their atomic numbers, without even trying. Just think of how much we all learned about ancient societies and leaders just by playing Civilization? How many people learned what a phalanx or trireme was? How many of you knew, before playing the game, who Rameses II was? Heck, how many of you even knew Frederick the Great?
I've always thought this should be done as a standard tactic. But no, we have yet another nonsensical story for kids to learn about a magic turtle and his journeys where he met dozens of made-up people and their fake experiences. How about telling a piece of history, with cartoon characters substituted for the historical figures? Kids will realize one day that Fooky the Bear was actually Cromwell, or Woodrow Wilson, or whomever, and Fooky's story was actually the French Revolution or the Enlightenment. Mark my words, one of these days someone is going to "discover" this concept and get the Nobel Peace Prize.
If you read TFA, you will discover that they THOUGHT they were selling secrets to Venezuela. Very disingenuous there. Would they have sold the secrets to Zambia, or Bulgaria? Spies often act from idealogical reasons, not financial ones.
I got a HTC Touch Pro 2 (Rhodium) purely because it had a slide-out keyboard and supported Windows Mobile. Why WM? Well because there's this killer app called "Pleco" that only runs on WM (and iPhone, but I'm not an Apple guy). Pleco works great. But everything else on the phone TOTALLY SUCKS. I had to replace the stock ROM with a user-modified one because the stock was absolutely UNSUABLE. I'm a late adopter, and I rather foolishly assumed that, by v6.5, that anything made by Microsoft would AT LEAST WORK. I had to reset the phone at least once a day because it stopped responding - during mundane tasks like reading SMS. I got burned bigtime, and there's no way I can justify to myself the cost of buying a new smartphone for the next 12-24 months. Windows 7? Why would it be anything but the same? Seriously, I knew it was MS going in to it but I had no idea it could be this bad and the company's products would still sell.
You do know that factories are staffed by engineers and workers, not IT pros? I doubt if they're even aware that passwords exist on their equipment. When they set up the factory, they just called some people to get all the machines to talk to the computers properly. Then, the contract is finished and the IT people only get a call if there's anything wrong or new equipment is added.
Anyone who reads about physics knows that God has a different meaning in that realm. It's not talking about Jehovah but rather a different concept. But go ahead and show your ignorance and bigotry - after all, you can't have one without the other. A few quotes from Einstein, who you surely have read.
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."
"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
"One strength of the Communist system... is that it has some of the characteristics of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion."
PS starting a comment in the Subject: line is really annoying. Stop doing it. Subject is for your subject and comment is where you write the comment.
It's not *that* difficult to learn right-handedness, at least for video games. It might take a month or two, but keep at it, you'll get it. It's sort of like learning to touch-type, it's tedious work but pays off in the long run.
A fun dinner party trick I learned was left-handed chopsticks. When I moved to Asia, I had really never used chopsticks before, but it only took about two weeks to learn. Then, I learned that I had learned wrong. I had to re-learn the correct grip, and that was another two weeks of eating frustration. For a lark, I said how hard can this be, and taught myself how to use chopsticks left-handed, resulting in another two weeks of clumsiness and dropped food. Now, I have a fun trick. I'll change the dinner topic to left-handedness, because there is some superstition that lefties are more clever. I switch the chopsticks to my left hand, eat a few bites, and get a compliment. I follow this by challenging my hosts to use THEIR chopsticks left-handed, and hilarity ensues as nobody can do it. Ganbei!
"1984" did happen, only with paper records instead of computers. Where do you think the author got his ideas from? He got disillusioned by associating with leftists in the 1930s and 40s.
I live in China. This week, a friend of a friend left a large sum of money in a taxi. My friend's staff went down to the police station and came back with a record of surveillance video, all the stops the taxi made, a route the taxi took in Google Maps style format, the taxi driver's home address, ID card scan, and mobile phone number. This is coming to a nation near you, if it's not already there. It's funny, one of the ways you can tell if street construction is almost finished is when they install the surveillance cameras on poles.
Dude, you have some sort of one-issue blindness. It sounds like from your comments you have a beef against the FDA. I've seen insane rants against the IRS, White House, and Pentagon, but the FDA? Come on man, get a better opponent, there are dozens of three-letter agencies to choose from.
Greasy and salty is some sort of bizarre regional variation. China is a huge place. The cooking styles are not even the same from region to region. It's not unknown for a happy couple to break up before marriage because she likes to cook sweet food and he can only eat spicy. Actually I find the basic Chinese diet to be quite healthy, as it is vegetables, rice (or other grain in such form as noodles), and a little bit of meat. You'll lose weight eating it every day, that's for sure.
What's the matter, Japanese men? Japanese women not good enough for you? They are widely held by many cultures as the best women in the world. It reminds me of that ancient joke that goes:
Heaven is:
an American salary,
a Chinese Cook,
a British Home,
and a Japanese Wife.
Hell is:
a Chinese salary,
a British Cook,
a Japanese House,
and an American Wife.
Killed off the smartest? Where on Earth did that trope come from? The people who died during the socialist reforms were millions of contemptible, ignorant peasants. And the lack of independent thinking is nothing new either, Confucianism says learn from the classics, there's nothing else to learn. They haven't "overcome" it in thousands of years of their culture, and in fact it is why they still have a culture while so many others have failed. Austro-Hungarian Empire, anyone?
Not to get in the way of a good old-fashioned America-bashing comment but if you think China is going to be a center of learning and research then that's just ignorant and wrong. They have huge problems, much worse than popularly believed, which are never reported by any media. However, and I see this all the time, Americaphobes typically look to China for relief and project their feelings onto it. The highly educated and frustrated are highly vulnerable to this malady. China is China, they don't give a shit about what anyone thinks about them. For research? I've seen it again and again, Chinese typically don't do new things, they look around for what someone has done before and copy it. Learn about Confucianism some time.
Least developed country? Bullshit. Vanuatu has some of the most developed communications infrastructure on the planet. Since it is so remote and has some of the highest long distance rates in the world (Niue Island is similar) it processes calls for phone sex. People used to pay $4/minute on the long distance bills I used to process. We had a lecture once where they explained it all. The calls get relayed back to the States for operators to answer.
Your point of view, I guess. I'd say it was a reporter who didn't bother to fact-check anything, but then that would indict the entire trade. In my old government job years ago, I used to fax press releases to reporters, and my office phone was at the bottom. The stories regularly appeared in the newspaper the next day, and I never ever even once got a phone call to verify anything. This was before Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and all the other ones who got caught.
The Internet is a default-accept network. Changing it to a default-deny network would have far-reaching consequences way beyond taking down spam networks. Which would you rather have, the internet of today or "we'll shut you down or else" decisions being made by drunk-on-power nerds?
Hmm. That's onto something there. Have multiple terminals in different locations throughout the house, with different Skype accounts. If you want to get really fancy, hook it up with motion detectors so as to follow people throughout the house, or auto-connect to the location that has most recently sensed movement.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, explain to me this: how does mutilating your nose help in any way with vitiligo? I've seen African-Americans with the disease before, they just have patches of pigmentless skin. Any sufficiently wealthy individual could simply apply a cosmetic solution, like a darkening cream. God knows movie stars and singers have no shame about modifying themselves to fit someone's definition of 'pretty'. I just don't get it...how does a handsome young man voluntarily change himself into this mutilated freak? There's this bizarre idea that because he had a pigmentation disorder on certain parts of his skin, that this entirely justifies him disfiguring his face. WTF?
Oh, come off it. Micheal Jackson obviously had a huge complex where he wanted to be white. Look at the photos of him when he was young - he was a handsome African-American man with a wide nose. He could have done quite well with the ladies, had that been his objective. Obviously, it was not. As time goes on, he gets whiter and whiter, and his nose gets narrower and narrower until it became disfigured by too many surgeries. So he likes kids? Great! Get hitched and shit out a litter of his own pups. Then nobody will quest for inconvenient truths like why he sleeps in the same bed with children. If he honestly had a platonic idea of love with young'uns, then he wouldn't have needed his Jesus Juice, eh? The whole thing stinks of a tragic man, isolated from society by his wealth and his enabling entourage. Have you listened to "Thriller" in the past few years? Give it a fresh listen, it is an outstanding work. I cordially hated MJ during his popularity period in the 80s, mostly due to his endorsemanship of Pepsi (Coke or Dr. Pepper or DIE!)
However, his music before "Bad" was outstanding, even I cannot deny this. When "Bad" was released, it was obvious to everyone that he had jumped the shark (even though this term was not in common usage at the time). When he started molesting little boys, that was it. He crossed the line. America is endlessly forgiving of popular celebrities...just look at how many of them are reprehensible in one way or another. All you have to do is go to rehab, don the sackcloth and ashes of the repentant, and claim you have seen the light and will sin no more. Look at Robert Downey, Jr...the man got high and broke in to his neighbor's house. He got the Emmy when he was released from prison! A personage no less than Mel Gibson himself took the financial risk to get him back making movies again, and just look at the Ironman franchise these days.
But the whole "adopting white kids" thing took him really over the edge. There are millions of colored children who would love to be adopted by rich celebrities...just look at Madonna or Brangelina. It's fashionable! Micheal Jackson was a man with serious issues. If he wasn't the son of Joe Jackson, he would just be another 50 year old child molester serving a long sentence in a California prison.
If the package is heat-proof, then the temperature of the electronics will stay within its operating range and the device will function normally. Magma is only 1300-2400F.
You are seriously delusional, and have no idea how international business works. You're just casting about for some scenario where your opinions make sense. Once the bill of lading is released, the shipper has nothing to say about what happens to the shipment. It could be used to microwave fluffy duckies and bunnies and nobody could do anything about it. What "we" "asked them to do" was purchase an amount of scrap at a certain price, deliverable at a certain place. There is an entire industry built around scrap, surprising as that might be.
No, actually, I've read Shanghai Scrap for a while now. There is a lot of good, firsthand insight. Funny you assumed I pulled it out of my ass. That's what typically happens when people are confronted with cognitive dissonance. The guy has written for the New York Times and is friendly with environmentalists and other activists...is that liberal enough for you? No, anything that disagrees with my preconceived notions fed to me by the media MUST be a fraud of some kind, there is no other conclusion that allows me to keep my fragile mental state intact.
Before I went to Asia, I never sent a text message in my life. When I got back after my first stay, I started sending text messages to friends and such. Many of them had never received one before, and wondered why their phone was making that strange sound. People would just rather call you and say what they want to say instead of taking all the time to write out a text. I agree...to a point.
What's good about texts? Well, they're great when communicating with people who speak English as a second or third language. They have time to think about what they're going to say, and they have time to decipher what you say. Of course, mobile slang is extremely difficult for them. The advantages with native English speakers? You have time to reply at your leisure, and a record is kept of all conversations. If the recipient's phone is off, the network will store the message and deliver it when power is restored or when they pay their bill. Er...that's all I can think of.
Negatives about texts? The laborious nature of texting means that the English language is horribly mangled in order to fit. The only real solution is a keyboard...T9 is a kludge and letter-by-letter texting is just too much work. It condenses thoughts into tiny pieces to fit inside 140 characters. Text messaging is horribly expensive for its cost.
Frankly, I think a lot of people just send texts in order to be able to play with their phones. It's fun when you're stuck on a bus and bored, you can talk to six friends at once. But to get some work done or exchange real information, it's easier just to call. The bandwidth of voice is so much greater than that of text messaging. Heck, I even notice this with instant messaging (something else I never bothered with before Asia), it takes 40 minutes to have a conversation when the same phone call would have taken 5 minutes. People in my office will sit at their desks and send MSN to each other instead of talking. It's weird...a quiet office with no sound but clattering keyboards.
I love how you frame this - they are victims, helpless in their fate, and we are the evil people doing them harm. "Pawned off on"...LOL. Scrap is a big business in nations like China, and waste is bought by the ton and shipped in. After the bill of lading is received by the buyer, there is absolutely nothing any Westerner can do to affect what happens next. I realize it makes good press to read the service tag off a junked Dell and say it came from Mamie Jenkins of Flyover Territory, USA, and it's therefore her fault that workers are being exposed to PCBs. Misleading and serving a personal agenda instead of reporting the facts, but that's where the press is these days. How about a little opprobrium for the unethical people who make the decision to recycle electronics in an unsafe manner? Oh no, we can't have that. "Victim" by definition means "no responsibility" so if it was their fault in any way, they would no longer be Holy Victims. Another very disturbing aspect of this framing is that because people aren't Westerners, then they by definition can make no decisions. They're too stupid, only we are the smart people who can take responsibility! Racist to the extreme, but then try creating cognitive dissonance in your typical PC drone...you won't get far.
It's also extremely Western-centric. Only we make e-waste! Ever pause to think about the fact that developing nations are creating huge amounts of waste themselves? China is the second-largest consumer of PCs in the world. Adam Minter of Shanghai Scrap makes a good point:
What's the breakthrough new recycling program in China he's talking about? You won't hear about it in the Western media because it is an inconvenient truth. It doesn't Fit The Narrative. And The Narrative is always that we are bad and they are victims.
Pushback? What have you been smoking, and where can I get some? Iran is a theocracy. Maybe you missed it back in 1979 when Shiite Muslims overthrew the government? Who controls Hezbollah? Who ordered the troops to fire on peaceful protesters last year? Who has real-live religious police? Seriously man, update your Persian outlook to 2010, please.
Can anyone tell me a reason why real educational content is not already seamlessly folded into games? Kids can't pass a test but they know the names of all 150 Pokemon, or the good items in WoW and how to use them effectively together, or the location of every last secret location in GTA4. Why not name the Pokemon #1=Hydrogen, #2=Helium, #26 Iron, and so on? We'd have an entire generation who memorized every element and their atomic numbers, without even trying. Just think of how much we all learned about ancient societies and leaders just by playing Civilization? How many people learned what a phalanx or trireme was? How many of you knew, before playing the game, who Rameses II was? Heck, how many of you even knew Frederick the Great?
I've always thought this should be done as a standard tactic. But no, we have yet another nonsensical story for kids to learn about a magic turtle and his journeys where he met dozens of made-up people and their fake experiences. How about telling a piece of history, with cartoon characters substituted for the historical figures? Kids will realize one day that Fooky the Bear was actually Cromwell, or Woodrow Wilson, or whomever, and Fooky's story was actually the French Revolution or the Enlightenment. Mark my words, one of these days someone is going to "discover" this concept and get the Nobel Peace Prize.
If you read TFA, you will discover that they THOUGHT they were selling secrets to Venezuela. Very disingenuous there. Would they have sold the secrets to Zambia, or Bulgaria? Spies often act from idealogical reasons, not financial ones.
I got a HTC Touch Pro 2 (Rhodium) purely because it had a slide-out keyboard and supported Windows Mobile. Why WM? Well because there's this killer app called "Pleco" that only runs on WM (and iPhone, but I'm not an Apple guy). Pleco works great. But everything else on the phone TOTALLY SUCKS. I had to replace the stock ROM with a user-modified one because the stock was absolutely UNSUABLE. I'm a late adopter, and I rather foolishly assumed that, by v6.5, that anything made by Microsoft would AT LEAST WORK. I had to reset the phone at least once a day because it stopped responding - during mundane tasks like reading SMS. I got burned bigtime, and there's no way I can justify to myself the cost of buying a new smartphone for the next 12-24 months. Windows 7? Why would it be anything but the same? Seriously, I knew it was MS going in to it but I had no idea it could be this bad and the company's products would still sell.
You do know that factories are staffed by engineers and workers, not IT pros? I doubt if they're even aware that passwords exist on their equipment. When they set up the factory, they just called some people to get all the machines to talk to the computers properly. Then, the contract is finished and the IT people only get a call if there's anything wrong or new equipment is added.
Anyone who reads about physics knows that God has a different meaning in that realm. It's not talking about Jehovah but rather a different concept. But go ahead and show your ignorance and bigotry - after all, you can't have one without the other. A few quotes from Einstein, who you surely have read.
"A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man."
"The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."
"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."
"One strength of the Communist system ... is that it has some of the characteristics of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion."
PS starting a comment in the Subject: line is really annoying. Stop doing it. Subject is for your subject and comment is where you write the comment.
It's not *that* difficult to learn right-handedness, at least for video games. It might take a month or two, but keep at it, you'll get it. It's sort of like learning to touch-type, it's tedious work but pays off in the long run.
A fun dinner party trick I learned was left-handed chopsticks. When I moved to Asia, I had really never used chopsticks before, but it only took about two weeks to learn. Then, I learned that I had learned wrong. I had to re-learn the correct grip, and that was another two weeks of eating frustration. For a lark, I said how hard can this be, and taught myself how to use chopsticks left-handed, resulting in another two weeks of clumsiness and dropped food. Now, I have a fun trick. I'll change the dinner topic to left-handedness, because there is some superstition that lefties are more clever. I switch the chopsticks to my left hand, eat a few bites, and get a compliment. I follow this by challenging my hosts to use THEIR chopsticks left-handed, and hilarity ensues as nobody can do it. Ganbei!
"1984" did happen, only with paper records instead of computers. Where do you think the author got his ideas from? He got disillusioned by associating with leftists in the 1930s and 40s.
I live in China. This week, a friend of a friend left a large sum of money in a taxi. My friend's staff went down to the police station and came back with a record of surveillance video, all the stops the taxi made, a route the taxi took in Google Maps style format, the taxi driver's home address, ID card scan, and mobile phone number. This is coming to a nation near you, if it's not already there. It's funny, one of the ways you can tell if street construction is almost finished is when they install the surveillance cameras on poles.
Dude, you have some sort of one-issue blindness. It sounds like from your comments you have a beef against the FDA. I've seen insane rants against the IRS, White House, and Pentagon, but the FDA? Come on man, get a better opponent, there are dozens of three-letter agencies to choose from.
Greasy and salty is some sort of bizarre regional variation. China is a huge place. The cooking styles are not even the same from region to region. It's not unknown for a happy couple to break up before marriage because she likes to cook sweet food and he can only eat spicy. Actually I find the basic Chinese diet to be quite healthy, as it is vegetables, rice (or other grain in such form as noodles), and a little bit of meat. You'll lose weight eating it every day, that's for sure.
What's the matter, Japanese men? Japanese women not good enough for you? They are widely held by many cultures as the best women in the world. It reminds me of that ancient joke that goes:
Heaven is:
an American salary,
a Chinese Cook,
a British Home,
and a Japanese Wife.
Hell is:
a Chinese salary,
a British Cook,
a Japanese House,
and an American Wife.
Killed off the smartest? Where on Earth did that trope come from? The people who died during the socialist reforms were millions of contemptible, ignorant peasants. And the lack of independent thinking is nothing new either, Confucianism says learn from the classics, there's nothing else to learn. They haven't "overcome" it in thousands of years of their culture, and in fact it is why they still have a culture while so many others have failed. Austro-Hungarian Empire, anyone?
Not to get in the way of a good old-fashioned America-bashing comment but if you think China is going to be a center of learning and research then that's just ignorant and wrong. They have huge problems, much worse than popularly believed, which are never reported by any media. However, and I see this all the time, Americaphobes typically look to China for relief and project their feelings onto it. The highly educated and frustrated are highly vulnerable to this malady. China is China, they don't give a shit about what anyone thinks about them. For research? I've seen it again and again, Chinese typically don't do new things, they look around for what someone has done before and copy it. Learn about Confucianism some time.
Least developed country? Bullshit. Vanuatu has some of the most developed communications infrastructure on the planet. Since it is so remote and has some of the highest long distance rates in the world (Niue Island is similar) it processes calls for phone sex. People used to pay $4/minute on the long distance bills I used to process. We had a lecture once where they explained it all. The calls get relayed back to the States for operators to answer.
Your point of view, I guess. I'd say it was a reporter who didn't bother to fact-check anything, but then that would indict the entire trade. In my old government job years ago, I used to fax press releases to reporters, and my office phone was at the bottom. The stories regularly appeared in the newspaper the next day, and I never ever even once got a phone call to verify anything. This was before Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and all the other ones who got caught.
The Internet is a default-accept network. Changing it to a default-deny network would have far-reaching consequences way beyond taking down spam networks. Which would you rather have, the internet of today or "we'll shut you down or else" decisions being made by drunk-on-power nerds?
Hmm. That's onto something there. Have multiple terminals in different locations throughout the house, with different Skype accounts. If you want to get really fancy, hook it up with motion detectors so as to follow people throughout the house, or auto-connect to the location that has most recently sensed movement.