Re:Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare
on
Pure Math, Pure Joy
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· Score: 1
A MEDITATION UPON SCIENTIFIC INSPIRATION IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
Three lines joined together with no gaps between But you saw the squares on them no-one had seen. You said to yourself: 'Oimoi this idea's big' I'll patent it right now and trademark it 'Trig'.
Your mate Archimedes who shouted Eureka (Was smug about floating and history's first streaker) Was in a warm bath when he had his brainwave Where were you Mr Pythag, were you having a rave?
Where were you Mr Pythag when you thought of your theorem? Were you brushing your teeth or at play in the harem? Were you scraping out earwax, defluffing your navel Or out with disciples celebrating a revel?
Where were you Mr Pythag when you summed up the squares Were you at your ablutions or climbing the stairs To a tavern or hostelry, some drinking club Or were you just soaking yourself in a tub?
Where were you Mr Pythag when you joined up the lines Were you wiping your bottom or tasting fine wines Were you lathering bristles bent over the sink Or down the Three Lions quietly having a drink?
No fruit can have helped you to see the right angle Like an apple helped Isaac the truth to untangle So what was your turn-on, your mental enthuser Tell us now for the record was it bathroom or boozer?
Reveal to us all now what History's missed Were you towelling off Pythag, or just getting pissed?
That's homo sapiens. It's a singular, like biceps.
1 homo sapiens
2 homo sapiens
1 biceps
2 biceps
Alan Shitface - I am Virus
"You are what you don't excrete."
I am trolling slightly, but making the serious point that the easygoing Yank vs. stiff-upper lipped Brit caricature is not the whole truth.
Mavis Beacon Teaches StereoTyping is bad fiction, of course, but fiction and life are connected in a bizarre feedback loop.
I have visited the States & didn't witness much of the aforementioned. I was trying semi-humorously to make the point that people who had trouble spelling used to be beaten, then dyslexia was 'discovered'. People who had trouble paying attention... and so on and so forth.
What happened to these people before these conditions were discovered? By which I mean which people are currently being beaten/burned at the stake/ostracised because they will not sit still/believe in transubstatiation or any other such fashionable nonsense.
Well just from my experience of life I've never met anyone British who does, nor can I think of a single reference to anyone calling his father 'sir' in English/British fiction in the past hundred years.
I actually thought it was quite clear from my phrasing. Even without the exclamation mark it seems obvious that I find the practice alien & that I'm British. A bit like saying 'a country which forces children to salute a flag', really.
But my real point is that in all countries vast amounts of effort have been expended throughout history to make children behave. Violence used to be the preferred method of treatment & it's my understanding that in parts of America middle aged men are paid to hit thirteen year old girls on the bottom with a wooden paddle on imaginary pretexts when clearly such a bizarre sexual practice is inappropriate.
There's always something a bit creepy about those who remember their childhood beatings with glee, or the excuse that it never did them any harm. Do any American Medical Insurers cover visits to a Dominatrix or is la vice Anglaise recognised as therapy anywhere?
Try reading what Ayurvedic medicine says about vata dosha & you'll find that very far from being a 'new disorder', this sort of thing has been known about for 5000 years.
We are all told to eat raw food with no salt and no fat. Since I have started eating cooked, oily food with plenty of salt, my symptoms have nearly managed and I have stopped taking Ritalin. The very idea of 'counselling' or 'talk' for ADHD is about the same as using this therapy for a broken leg.
Without Ritalin, I wouldn't have found all this out & in the UK all the doctors spend all their time refusing to give it to you. I only found 1 doctor in London who wasn't a rip-off merchant.
I asked my GP why she wouldn't prescribe me Ritalin & she said 'I have sworn the Hippocratic Oath.' I asked her if she had ever prescribed the morning after pill (i.e. a pessary to induce an abortion) 'Oh I don't think that was in the Hippocratic Oath I swore,' she said! I'm not making a point about abortion, just about the nonsense that doctors talk. Like why does she call me by my first name and expect to be addressed with a formal honorific title herself?
I have sat with 2 Consultant Psychiatrists from a London hospital who told me that Wellbutrin has no antidepressant qualities (it's only prescribed as Zyban for smoking cessation here because as an antidepressant it's non-addictive and doesn't make people kill themselves).
The crux of the matter is of course that conditions which describe a wide spectrum of behaviours cannot really be said to exist in the way that appendicitis exists. That doesn't deny the experience of the sufferer, it's just a cry for more measurement and fewer conjectural surmises.
From an English point of view, I do think Americans are starting to class ordinary behaviour as pathological. A country in which people call their fathers sir! We 'Brits' are always being characterized as repressed and straight laced, but we would never let our teachers behave like the Goa'uld from Stargate SG1.
I think the point is that I might hear someone mention the phrase "Second Superpower" and trust Google to give me an authoritative answer. Google are free to return whatever results they choose.
They might choose to flood the results for "war" with articles which espouse a particular political stance in return for a fee. But most people assume that search engines are politically neutral.
Remember a lot of people are using Google to search for amazon.com. These are the same people who believe that what it says in the dictionary is what a word "really means".
I've been amazed at this for a while. Aren't a significant proportion of/. folk used to dealilng with arcane and unforgiving syntaxes. Yet I see this mistake made every day on this site.
BTW the only mistake I regularly make is to type homophones. Anyone else have a mistake they only make with a keyboard, not with pen & paper?
(Cue reply - pen & paper what is that? The penis mightier than the sword. Yes I daskjdflakjshd etc. etc.)
Alan Shitface
I am Virus
It's now quicker for me to look up Milton's Sonnet on His Blindness by typing into the Google box in Safari than walking across the room to where I can see Milton's Complete Works on the shelf.
It's also quicker for me to find a document hosted halfway across the world than a file on my own computer.
As a *Nix newbie I am starting to get my head around the command line, but it's not yet second nature. So many basic organisational tasks are still far too slow and we get no conceptual help with them.
For instance. I want to flick through the 4685 photos I took in SE Asia and select some of them to play around with. I want to view them fullscreen and tag the ones I like with a keystroke. I can't do this from the command line. I don't want to guess with an icon view and select holding down command only to lose the list. All the image editors I've seen think that displaying images is a passive affair and that ordering and sorting the files doesn't need you to be able to see them full resolution.
I can't use folder of images on a network volume for my screensaver reliably.
I have to think before opening a folder on a network volume whether it has too many files (>1000) for the Finder to cope.
fowl it up? How interesting - here in England we would say "cock it up". An instance of Barnyard Originated Nomenclature Clash?
Alan Shitface (I am Virus)
Windows XP runs nicely under Panther
A MEDITATION UPON SCIENTIFIC
INSPIRATION IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
Three lines joined together with no gaps between
But you saw the squares on them no-one had seen.
You said to yourself: 'Oimoi this idea's big'
I'll patent it right now and trademark it 'Trig'.
Your mate Archimedes who shouted Eureka
(Was smug about floating and history's first streaker)
Was in a warm bath when he had his brainwave
Where were you Mr Pythag, were you having a rave?
Where were you Mr Pythag when you thought of your theorem?
Were you brushing your teeth or at play in the harem?
Were you scraping out earwax, defluffing your navel
Or out with disciples celebrating a revel?
Where were you Mr Pythag when you summed up the squares
Were you at your ablutions or climbing the stairs
To a tavern or hostelry, some drinking club
Or were you just soaking yourself in a tub?
Where were you Mr Pythag when you joined up the lines
Were you wiping your bottom or tasting fine wines
Were you lathering bristles bent over the sink
Or down the Three Lions quietly having a drink?
No fruit can have helped you to see the right angle
Like an apple helped Isaac the truth to untangle
So what was your turn-on, your mental enthuser
Tell us now for the record was it bathroom or boozer?
Reveal to us all now what History's missed
Were you towelling off Pythag, or just getting pissed?
Alan Shitface
Symmetrical in what font?
Why do you ascribe that quotation in your sig to Tom Waits rather than Horace?
Credit where credit is due?
That's homo sapiens. It's a singular, like biceps. 1 homo sapiens 2 homo sapiens 1 biceps 2 biceps Alan Shitface - I am Virus "You are what you don't excrete."
So why not use Unix & all the tools on a Mac?
Alan Shitface - I am Virus
"Don't bother to spread the word - it spreads itself."
I am trolling slightly, but making the serious point that the easygoing Yank vs. stiff-upper lipped Brit caricature is not the whole truth.
Mavis Beacon Teaches StereoTyping is bad fiction, of course, but fiction and life are connected in a bizarre feedback loop.
I have visited the States & didn't witness much of the aforementioned. I was trying semi-humorously to make the point that people who had trouble spelling used to be beaten, then dyslexia was 'discovered'. People who had trouble paying attention... and so on and so forth.
What happened to these people before these conditions were discovered? By which I mean which people are currently being beaten/burned at the stake/ostracised because they will not sit still/believe in transubstatiation or any other such fashionable nonsense.
That's all I meant.
Well just from my experience of life I've never met anyone British who does, nor can I think of a single reference to anyone calling his father 'sir' in English/British fiction in the past hundred years.
I actually thought it was quite clear from my phrasing. Even without the exclamation mark it seems obvious that I find the practice alien & that I'm British. A bit like saying 'a country which forces children to salute a flag', really.
But my real point is that in all countries vast amounts of effort have been expended throughout history to make children behave. Violence used to be the preferred method of treatment & it's my understanding that in parts of America middle aged men are paid to hit thirteen year old girls on the bottom with a wooden paddle on imaginary pretexts when clearly such a bizarre sexual practice is inappropriate.
There's always something a bit creepy about those who remember their childhood beatings with glee, or the excuse that it never did them any harm. Do any American Medical Insurers cover visits to a Dominatrix or is la vice Anglaise recognised as therapy anywhere?
Try reading what Ayurvedic medicine says about vata dosha & you'll find that very far from being a 'new disorder', this sort of thing has been known about for 5000 years.
We are all told to eat raw food with no salt and no fat. Since I have started eating cooked, oily food with plenty of salt, my symptoms have nearly managed and I have stopped taking Ritalin. The very idea of 'counselling' or 'talk' for ADHD is about the same as using this therapy for a broken leg.
Without Ritalin, I wouldn't have found all this out & in the UK all the doctors spend all their time refusing to give it to you. I only found 1 doctor in London who wasn't a rip-off merchant.
I asked my GP why she wouldn't prescribe me Ritalin & she said 'I have sworn the Hippocratic Oath.' I asked her if she had ever prescribed the morning after pill (i.e. a pessary to induce an abortion) 'Oh I don't think that was in the Hippocratic Oath I swore,' she said! I'm not making a point about abortion, just about the nonsense that doctors talk. Like why does she call me by my first name and expect to be addressed with a formal honorific title herself?
I have sat with 2 Consultant Psychiatrists from a London hospital who told me that Wellbutrin has no antidepressant qualities (it's only prescribed as Zyban for smoking cessation here because as an antidepressant it's non-addictive and doesn't make people kill themselves).
The crux of the matter is of course that conditions which describe a wide spectrum of behaviours cannot really be said to exist in the way that appendicitis exists. That doesn't deny the experience of the sufferer, it's just a cry for more measurement and fewer conjectural surmises.
From an English point of view, I do think Americans are starting to class ordinary behaviour as pathological. A country in which people call their fathers sir! We 'Brits' are always being characterized as repressed and straight laced, but we would never let our teachers behave like the Goa'uld from Stargate SG1.
and "secnod superpower" is I believe a googlewhack!
I might as well mention the phenomenon of registering misspellings.
I think the point is that I might hear someone mention the phrase "Second Superpower" and trust Google to give me an authoritative answer. Google are free to return whatever results they choose.
They might choose to flood the results for "war" with articles which espouse a particular political stance in return for a fee. But most people assume that search engines are politically neutral.
Remember a lot of people are using Google to search for amazon.com. These are the same people who believe that what it says in the dictionary is what a word "really means".
Can anybody tell me the exact moment when a cat dies?
I've been amazed at this for a while. Aren't a significant proportion of /. folk used to dealilng with arcane and unforgiving syntaxes. Yet I see this mistake made every day on this site.
BTW the only mistake I regularly make is to type homophones. Anyone else have a mistake they only make with a keyboard, not with pen & paper?
(Cue reply - pen & paper what is that? The penis mightier than the sword. Yes I daskjdflakjshd etc. etc.)
Alan Shitface
I am Virus
It's now quicker for me to look up Milton's Sonnet on His Blindness by typing into the Google box in Safari than walking across the room to where I can see Milton's Complete Works on the shelf.
It's also quicker for me to find a document hosted halfway across the world than a file on my own computer.
As a *Nix newbie I am starting to get my head around the command line, but it's not yet second nature. So many basic organisational tasks are still far too slow and we get no conceptual help with them.
For instance. I want to flick through the 4685 photos I took in SE Asia and select some of them to play around with. I want to view them fullscreen and tag the ones I like with a keystroke. I can't do this from the command line. I don't want to guess with an icon view and select holding down command only to lose the list. All the image editors I've seen think that displaying images is a passive affair and that ordering and sorting the files doesn't need you to be able to see them full resolution.
I can't use folder of images on a network volume for my screensaver reliably.
I have to think before opening a folder on a network volume whether it has too many files (>1000) for the Finder to cope.
And yet it's a supercomputer and I'm a big fan.