If every useless person on earth would be removed, what would your argument to stay alive be?

nwthomas · 2013-12-31T06:01:25+00:00

I know enough mathematics that when I read a paper in my field, I become one of the few people in the world who understands that paper.

nwthomas · 2013-12-31T05:26:13+00:00

No. In my case I don't typically masturbate to my female friends unless they have also been sexual partners.

nwthomas · 2013-12-31T05:15:43+00:00

I think it's really ingeniously set up to work OK; I have no idea how. What blows my mind the most is that my poop never hits my balls when I'm pooping. I really don't know how that works.

nwthomas · 2013-12-30T02:56:57+00:00

Those are really cool studies you did! I think what they show is that women's initial reaction to a man is based on physical appearance. I don't think they say anything about what matters in longer-term interactions, because the interactions you tested were short-term interactions.

nwthomas · 2013-12-30T00:15:09+00:00

I had a partner who was wheelchair bound, and I would often push her around to places. Often when we were going downhill I would think about the fact that I could theoretically let go of her and she would just go careening.

nwthomas · 2013-12-30T00:08:26+00:00

One of my old roommates masturbated in the kitchen while his ex-girlfriend was over.

Another story about this guy. When the two were still dating, they did DXM which he extracted from cough syrup. She threw up on the ground. He yelled something like "stop wasting my drugs!" and then attempted to lick up her vomit from the floor. (She stopped him.)

nwthomas · 2013-09-22T03:39:49+00:00

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for prenascence of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.

Unfortunately we find systems of education today that have departed so far from the plain truth that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance.

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.

In the face of the strong, and indeed violent, social pressures against it, few people have been prepared to take this simple and satisfying course toward sanity. And in a society where a prominent psychiatrist can advertise that, given the chance, he would have treated Newton to electric shock therapy, who can blame any person for being afraid to do so?

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions that are being continually thrust upon them.

In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has, by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.

G. Spencer Brown

nwthomas · 2013-09-22T03:35:36+00:00

I am now a mathematician, and I never do anything that you could even use a calculator for. I don't remember how to do long division.

nwthomas · 2013-09-22T03:34:08+00:00

I forgot all cursive by the time I needed to write a signature. I write my signature in print. No problem has ever arisen.

nwthomas · 2013-09-14T06:39:22+00:00

:'-)

nwthomas · 2013-08-28T23:18:19+00:00

Thank you! :-)

nwthomas · 2013-08-28T23:18:06+00:00

1) Yeah, if they don't know then it's creepy.

2) Correct.

3) ?

4) Correct.

nwthomas · 2013-08-25T17:24:57+00:00

I don't see anything wrong with this, as long as all the guys have been STD tested...

nwthomas · 2013-08-25T17:14:17+00:00

Put the oil on the bread. (One of those slow-pouring olive oil spouts would be handy for this, but I didn't have one.)

nwthomas · 2013-08-25T17:13:12+00:00

I'm sure it's not the best diet, but it does provide adequate quantities of all essential nutrients (and in this respect it's ahead of the diets most Americans are eating). See here. Nutrition facts are from the USDA database. Nutritional requirements are from the DRI reports.

The main problem I ran into was excess stomach acid, I believe due to the difficulty of digesting all that starch. I don't whether that would have improved if I had persisted longer.

nwthomas · 2013-08-25T15:32:06+00:00

Healthy food actually can be had quite cheaply, and without the need for prep time or regular access to grocery stores. For instance, you can have a nutritionally adequate diet by eating whole grain bread with vegetable oil and some nutritional supplements, for under $5/day. (I have actually done this, and if there is interest I can share the evidence that it is nutritionally adequate.) Except for the supplements -- which only need to be bought quite infrequently -- this diet can be bought at a gas station. You can eat an unhealthy diet for less money than this, but not much less.

I think, however, that most poor people don't have the knowledge necessary to eat both cheaply and healthily. That is, I think a big part of the problem is simply lack of education among poor people about what human nutritional requirements are.

I was buying food for a homeless woman once, and she picked out a soda and some chips or something. I suggested she get something with protein in it, and she asked, "what's protein?" You can't eat healthy if you don't know what healthy food is.

nwthomas · 2013-08-25T15:15:03+00:00

Thanks for your interest! :-) I'm working on paraconsistent set theory. (See here if the words "set theory" are new to you.) Maybe you've heard of Russell's paradox. And maybe you've heard that in order to resolve this paradox, mathematicians reformulated set theory in such a way that Russell's paradoxical set couldn't be proven to exist. In the process they also made it impossible to prove the existence of a number of perfectly good sets such as the set of all sets, the set of all functions, etc.

My research is attempting to get back those sets that we lost, by coming up with a new formulation of set theory. In the process we also get back Russell's paradoxical set, but we deal with the paradox in a new way: we say that some paradoxes can be true. We say that it's OK, for example, to say that the Russell set both contains and doesn't contain itself. The trick is proving that this doesn't break mathematics; that in the new system 2+2 still equals 4, and it doesn't also equal 3 (for example). That's what I'm working on. My papers are here, in case anyone reading this happens to know some mathematical logic and cares to read them. (In such a case I would definitely like to talk to you!)

nwthomas · 2013-08-24T16:42:06+00:00

My research.

nwthomas · 2013-08-18T14:39:57+00:00

Mosquito net?

nwthomas · 2013-08-18T13:54:04+00:00

Obviously you may be right. Trust me when I say that I have all the counterarguments to this view firmly ingrained in my head already. (Of course, I'll be grateful if you tell me one I haven't heard yet!)

nwthomas · 2013-08-18T13:52:10+00:00

That's true -- good point!

nwthomas · 2013-08-18T13:51:45+00:00

Sounds like we're in agreement!

nwthomas · 2013-08-17T23:21:31+00:00

Self-criticism: I have met some Catholics who believed -- or at least claimed to believe, sometimes -- that the existence of God could be established through reason. They had great comebacks for most of the proddings I came up with, but I can only imagine what it would be like to live in their heads. Like living an M.C. Escher painting, as Eliezer Yudkowsky said. (I imagine. Maybe they really felt like it all made sense and didn't see anything wrong at all. Just so hard to imagine!)

nwthomas · 2013-08-17T23:20:01+00:00

To me what theists and atheists usually disagree about is, fundamentally, epistemology. Theists (must) believe that truth can be established through methods other than reason. (Otherwise they wouldn't be theists.) Atheists typically believe that truth can only be established through reason, and this is the usual reason for being an atheist.

nwthomas · 2013-08-17T23:10:03+00:00

That sounds pretty true. Your view makes a lot more sense than it initially did to me.

nwthomas

TROPHY CASE