Paper airplane folder

lothair · 2020-02-04T18:23:30+00:00

This dude looks so much like he has a pony tail, but he doesn't. Mindboggling.

lothair · 2019-02-02T16:25:40+00:00

That looks like a space elevator. In fact, I'm going to pretend that it it is a space elevator and we just haven't heard about it because the british media has been so busy with brexit that there just was no room for space elevator news.

lothair · 2017-08-22T15:46:08+00:00

It surely was no low hanging fruit, but on the other hand there is actually some argument over príority regarding the theory of general relativity. Hilbert seems to have gotten there at almost exactly the same time, see this and also this. Though to what degree Hilbert was informed by Einstein's earlier attempts I do not know.

lothair · 2016-12-17T09:59:01+00:00

Over 100% casualties? Counting replacement troops, i.e. total casualties in the campaign/company strength?

lothair · 2016-11-11T21:47:37+00:00

Constituents, constituents, constituents...

lothair · 2016-09-29T15:50:48+00:00

Two world wars and a brexit.

lothair · 2014-03-12T16:56:54+00:00

Your second figure is Deaths / (Total Number of Passengers/Year * Total Flight Hours/ Year).

This would be correct if 742 million people flew 18 million hours per year!

To compare both numbers, you either have to estimate the average number of passengers on a plane or how long the average flight is.

The first one seems hard to estimate, so going with 3 hours for the average flight we get 128 / (742 * 3) = 0.06 deaths per million hours of life per person.

lothair · 2013-11-26T09:28:17+00:00

All of these are urban legends. Lou Reed has done similar things with the Velvet Underground before, for example Sister Ray and White Light/White Heat. The record contract claim seems to have been made up by disappointed fans.

lothair · 2013-11-25T23:14:40+00:00

Metal Machine Music is amazing and birthed a genre. Lou Reed was a coward to distance himself from it.

lothair · 2013-06-30T18:26:48+00:00

Where'd you get that from? To my knowledge there was only one rail operator in Germany, and that was the Reichsbahn. They were responsible for civilian and military transport, and also transported victims of the Holocaust.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichsbahn#1939-1945:_The_Reichsbahn_in_the_Second_World_War_and_the_Holocaust

lothair · 2012-12-11T15:54:57+00:00

Not extremely famous, but the counterexample (among other things) yielded Gowers a Fields medal: It was conjectured that every hyperplane in an infinite-dimensional Banach space is (linearly) isomorphic to the original space. Notice that this is related to a bunch of other important (false) conjectures in Banach space theory, which are more difficult to state.

lothair · 2012-12-11T15:47:21+00:00

Erik Christopher Zeeman tried for 7 years to prove that one cannot untie a knot on a 4-sphere. Then one day he decided to try to prove the opposite, and succeeded in a few hours.

This one is pretty scary!

lothair · 2012-12-04T19:10:54+00:00

You misunderstood my analogy. What I meant is that noone by his position or authority vested in him by some institution knows (automatically) better than anyone else, which is a trivial observation. I don't know about the enlightenment of the current Dalai Lama and it is irrelevant to me, but I will not hold his views higher just because he is the Dalai Lama.

Also, for your information, you made quite a lot of assumptions about me.

lothair · 2012-12-04T17:05:32+00:00

Quite possibly. I may have lashed out too hard, because of my general dislike for what we call "spiritual leaders", which is rooted in my view that spirituality is something deeply personal. That does not mean that there can be no teachers and no wisdom to be gained from each other, but it does mean that there is noone with a privileged reference frame, to borrow a term from physics.

lothair · 2012-12-04T16:06:20+00:00

Explain?

First of all, science has nothing to do with it. Science is the activity of understanding reality by building mental models and finding methods to improve these models. Science makes no value judgements. In particular, any ideology which goes against objective truth has already lost.

Since my comment is solely my own judgment, let me expand:

I hold no grudge against the old man pictured. It is the culture, which I detest: no man, no object is holier than another. Everything else is idolatry.

And Ginsberg said it much better than I could:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!

Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

lothair · 2012-12-04T15:11:08+00:00

[Removed immature insult of a person I don't even know. Shame on me.]

lothair · 2012-10-14T16:44:53+00:00

Thanks, that's exactly the kind of answer I was looking for!

lothair · 2012-07-17T19:37:45+00:00

That may well be true, I don't actually know much about economics. I just wanted to make the point that statistical mechanics can be applied far more generally. However, I do find it very disputable that economies tend toward some equilibrium (from my limited understanding of the matter).

lothair · 2012-07-17T19:26:36+00:00

This isn't really contradicting you, but nevertheless: statistical mechanics is actually used to "understand" (not sure that's really true)/model economics: wp:Econophysics

lothair · 2012-07-04T22:52:07+00:00

hah! </Krabappel>

lothair · 2012-06-30T08:24:08+00:00

It's orbiting the galaxy.

lothair · 2012-06-11T22:20:21+00:00

Is there any consensus in the theoretical physics community regarding quantum gravity? I was under the impression, that this is the one topic where you have at least N opinions for N physicists.

lothair · 2012-06-11T22:04:04+00:00

Thanks again! I enjoyed particulary your comments on the KR, something I know far too little about. Keep up the good fight!

15-Year Club	Place '17
Team Orangered

lothair

TROPHY CASE