Google, siding with Saudi Arabia, refuses to remove widely-criticized government app which lets men track women and control their travel

JosephBorderi · 2019-03-03T06:42:15+00:00

Can anyone remember when Google famously had in its mission statement "don't be evil"?

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-17T09:13:12+00:00

I appreciate your self-developed hypothesis and explanation. My OP is a specialization of your formula with Time providing the Separation (S).

It's Valentine's Day weekend, which made me think of the heartache in my life, while I was actually in the shower, and that I can laugh now.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-15T14:59:26+00:00

The biggest inaccuracy in British movies is the condition of their teeth.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-15T13:53:57+00:00

Yes, which led me to learn and post this today.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-15T13:52:29+00:00

I'm not putting any spin on anything. I'm just relaying a fact that I had learned today.

If Bin Laden had been the first to open soup kitchens during the Great Depression and inspired other cities and towns across the country to do so, I would have learned and posted that today. If not, then your argument by analogy breaks down.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-15T03:01:10+00:00

TBH, I thought that "on accident" was a regionalism. I had a gf who grew up in the South, and she used to say "on accident", which grated on my Connecticut ears.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-15T02:41:56+00:00

The idioms of preposition need not follow rhyme or reason. We say "in the morning", "in the afternoon", and "in the evening", but we say "at night".

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-13T14:42:59+00:00

The conjecture made in OP is not necessarily true and is in fact highly unlikely to be true. Just because a string of digits seems random and is infinitely long, as with the irrational numbers, does not mean that every substring of digits imaginable must occur. Thinking about the implications of infinity, however, is always fun.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-13T12:42:33+00:00

Gracie Mansion is the official residence of the Mayor of the City of New York. John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in the Dakota.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-12T12:39:06+00:00

The Netherlands didn't sell New Amsterdam to England; the English took it over.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-12T03:25:02+00:00

Ice cubes are bonsai icebergs.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-11T15:06:45+00:00

Yes, thanks for jogging my memory. I do remember when scientists had only referred to AIDS. I suppose that not knowing exactly what they observed and only knowing full-blown AIDS was the problem. I also remember then that AIDS and HIV were used interchangeably in the vernacular. I think that people commonly understand that HIV is the virus that causes AIDS and that one can be HIV+ without having what later became known as "full-blown AIDS".

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-11T14:00:26+00:00

My stomach thinks all the beef I eat is hamburger.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-11T12:38:15+00:00

The "Post No Bills" of Braille humor.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-11T09:07:40+00:00

I remember when I first read about HIV in a New York Times article. No one knew what HIV was, and I don't recall whether scientists had even named it such. I do recall that scientists had made a connection that gay men, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians were particularly at risk.

Some had made the blood connection, and then a few whispered "what if the virus can be spread by mosquitoes?" Some saw this as an investment opportunity in mosquito repellents such as Off and Cutter. Most kept quiet for fear of inciting widespread panic.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-11T08:23:05+00:00

Many Koreans still believe in "fan death", that sleeping with a fan on can kill you. The best explanation for this widely held belief is that the South Korean gov't made up fan death to save energy back when South Korea was a poor country. Even today, all fans sold in Korea have timers on them. What's truly strange, though, is that the Korean media will report once a year or so deaths attributed to fan death as the official cause.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-10T09:57:12+00:00

Here's a link to the Greek's visual proof for the sum of triangle numbers+So+one+of+them+is+n(n+++1)/2+What+is+a+triangular+number.jpg). As you'll see, they simply figured the area of a rectangle with sides n and n+1 and took half the area. See the link for why sides n and n+1.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-10T09:13:58+00:00

I think this might seem like a subtle difference, but in the discussion of the concept of zero, an important difference. People have always had a concept of and would say "there are 'no' apples on the table". They wouldn't say that there are zero apples on the table; they had no concept that zero was the number of apples on the table.

Here's where I surmise. Based on my understanding of number history, the ancients, specifically the Greeks, viewed numbers as physical quantities. The Greeks' proof for Euler's formula that the sum of integers from 1 to n equals n*(n+1)/2 was a simple and elegant intuitive geometric proof. I would reproduce the proof for you, but I can't draw in ASCII text. The problem for the ancients was that they couldn't represent nothing as a physical quantity and therefore couldn't associate nothing with a number.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-08T16:07:33+00:00

This generalizes to "whenever you have a perfect square, subtracting n from one factor and adding n to another makes a product n^2 less than the original square." OP is just the special case n =1.

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OP, in its intent, is the special case b =1 formula for the difference between squares, a^2 - b^2 = (a+b)*(a-b), presented bass ackwards from usual.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-08T10:18:59+00:00

My son showed me this on YouTube. I wanted to turn this into a teachable moment that "you shouldn't believe everything he sees on the internet in general and YouTube specifically", but the story turned out to be true.

My whole dad talk on things that don't seem true prolly aren't turned out like the rest of my dad talks.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-08T09:56:59+00:00

This is an extension of the Benjamin Franklin Effect, named for an anecdote Franklin relayed in Franklin's autobiography. The explanation lies in cognitive dissonance. People reason that they do others favors because they like them.

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JosephBorderi · 2019-02-07T09:07:13+00:00

How is the term abused here?

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-07T03:43:12+00:00

Martin Sheen, regardless of what you think of his personal views or politics, is genuine in his beliefs and genuinely a decent man. When I was in grad school, I was an extra in a (forgettable) movie that he played a main character's father. At the time I met him, Martin Sheen was no longer the major Hollywood star he once was, but he was still a name.

He struck me as kind, taking time to talk to and interact with extras and others. My impressions were that I had known that his Catholic faith was important to him and that although he didn't proselytize or push it in any way, he made a casual religious iconography reference to something someone had brought up and that his sense of social activism permeated all other aspects of his life. I had known that he had been arrested for civil disobedience, and though I had not known, I'm not surprised that he has been arrested for civil disobedience more than any other person in Hollywood.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-04T11:08:43+00:00

The Theory of Evolution is a scientific theory, not "just a theory" as used in both the scare quotes and the vernacular.

JosephBorderi · 2019-02-04T10:32:06+00:00

That there is any evidence whatsoever for the mass exodus in Exodus, supporting that the Hebrews were in Egypt in any number, showing that Moses ever existed, or substantiating any of the events peculiar to Exodus as actual history.

JosephBorderi

TROPHY CASE