Cuba State of Mind

Nothing rhymes with "treasury."

The History of Easter Bunnies

How did bunnies and eggs come to be symbols of the holiest day in Christianity? It goes back to the tenth century.





76% of people eat the ears off the chocolate bunny first. Why? Here's my answer.

In case you're wondering, I ate the left shoulder first. The chocolate has a slight mint aftertaste that came as a surprise to me.

New World Order

First, President George H. W. Bush talks about dismantling the United States and creating a UN-run "New World Order," which he assures us "will succeed."




Second, Vice President Joe Biden talks about the imperative for creating a "New World Order," because the old order - the United States - doesn't work in the 21st century world where Mongolia is serious economic threat and the "playing field" must be "leveled." They're task is not complete, but they're getting there.



Get it? Political parties are a fiction. They exist to distract us from the truth: the
people in power want to dismantle the United States and create a one
world government. With the horrendously extreme increase in executive power, the relegation of the Congress to a farcical show, and the courts legislating from the bench the overthrow of the very foundation of every single society that has ever existed, is it still a conspiracy? Do you not believe yet?

Achilles and the Tortoise

Zeno's arguments about motion, which cause so much disquietude to those who try to solve the problems that they present, are four in number. The first asserts the non-existence of motion on the ground that that which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal. This we have discussed above.

The second is the so-called 'Achilles', and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead. This argument is the same in principle as that which depends on bisection, though it differs from it in that the spaces with which we successively have to deal are not divided into halves. The result of the argument is that the slower is not overtaken: but it proceeds along the same lines as the bisection-argument (for in both a division of the space in a certain way leads to the result that the goal is not reached, though the 'Achilles' goes further in that it affirms that even the quickest runner in legendary tradition must fail in his pursuit of the slowest), so that the solution must be the same. And the axiom that that which holds a lead is never overtaken is false: it is not overtaken, it is true, while it holds a lead: but it is overtaken nevertheless if it is granted that it traverses the finite distance prescribed.

Aristotle, Physics VI:9



The first two paradoxes (the dichotomy and the Achilles) are directed against the opposite conception, that of the infinite divisibility of space and time, and are based upon the impossibility of conceiving intuitively the limit of the sum of an infinite series. The four paradoxes are, of course, easily answered in terms of the concepts of the differential calculus. There is no logical difficulty in the dichotomy or the Achilles, the uneasiness being due merely to failure of hte imagination to realize, in terms of sense impressions, the nature of infinite convergent series which are fundamental in teh precise explanation of, but not involved in our oubscure notion of, continuity.

C. B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development, p. 24-5



Of course Achilles wins. The distances and the times between each step get shorter.



Let's say Achilles and the tortoise are given a 1 kilometer track that they must race.



The
tortoise is given a 100 meter head start. Achilles travels that same
100 meters in 10 seconds (just under the world record). When he gets
there, the tortoise has travelled a farther 10 meters (we can already
see, the tortoise has a speed of 1 meter/second and Achilles has a speed
of 10 meters/second). No problem, this takes Achilles 1 second to
travel that 10 meters, by which time the tortoise has traveled only 1
farther meter. No problem, this takes Achilles 1/10 second to catch up
(we're now straining human reflex time to even notice these small
numbers). How far would the tortoise travel in that 1/10 of a second?
Less than 1 meter. So what? In the next 9/10 seconds the tortoise will
have travelled 1 meter from where it was 1 second ago while Achilles
will be 9 meters ahead of the
tortoise. Given a 100 meter head start it will take Achilles (assuming
he does not fatigue over the distance) 11.2 seconds to overtake the
tortoise.



Even if Achilles slows down from fatigue, he will be
much farther down the track than the tortoise. So far, in fact, that the
tortoise will have no chance of catching up unless Achilles decides to
stop and wait just to taunt the tortoise (Achilles was a notorious
braggart).



Not much of a paradox, is it?

Lego, The Hagia Sophia, and Terrorism

Lego officially stopped production of the Jabba's Palace building set after the Austrian terror group the Turkish Cultural Association (and make no mistake, they are a terror group) made an uproar over the toy. Any units that are still in stores will not be recalled, but no new units will be produced.

Jabba's Palace, which, if you seen the movie, looks like a bunch of nested beige domes on the desert planet of Tattoine, supposedly is insulting to Muslims, who seem to be offended by everything but the slaughter carried out in the name of their religion (I'm STILL waiting, eleven long years, for those so called "moderate" Muslims to appear and speak out against the terrorists).

The TCA claims that Jabba's Palace looks like the Hagia Sophia, which they claim is a mosque in Istanbul. No. The Hagia Sophia is a secular museum. It started out as the largest Christian church in the world, then it was taken over by the Turks when they captured Constantinople in 1453. Sultan Mehmed II was going to tear the building down, but then he decided it would be especially insulting to Christians if he made it a mosque. Hagia Sophia was a church for almost 1100 years, over twice as long as it was just one of many mosques in the city that the Turks didn't take very good care of.

My ancestors - the Romans - did the same. They conquered an area and converted the religious shrines to Roman temples. And they were violent, bloodthirsty, decadant assholes and the only slack I cut them is for preserving and adapting the system of Hellenistic eduation and governance. What did the Turks do but let all the lands they conquered go to ruin?

Let's face it, the worst group of people calling themselves Christians are the Westboro Baptists, and they're just assholes. They haven't killed anyone, as far as I know. Radical Buddhists? Yep, those Tibetan monks who had enough and led an armed uprising against the Chinese overlords and were quickly, and bloodily, stopped. Jains become LESS violent the more radical they become, culminating in the ultimate form of radicalism: starving ones self to death to prevent harming others, including microscopic spores one might accidentally inhale. The few radical Jews there are do kill the Syrians who have invaded their land (they like to call themselves "Palestinians" but they're really Syrians, and the agreement at 1923 stipulated that they were supposed to all live in Jordain - which was the Muslim country - and the Jews were to live in Jewish Palestine - later renamed Israel. The Jordanians have refused, for over 50 years, to let the Syrians settle in their rightful territory, and yet there is no outcry against Jordanian inhumanity, but when Israel exerts its right to exist woo boy is there ever an outcry from the anti-Semetic media and billions of anti-Semites around the world), but if you invaded my house I would kill you too, or at least forcibly make you reconsider your choice.

I'm not even saying there are no moderate Muslims (most people, not just Muslims, but people all over the world, just want to survive and improve the standard of living for their children), I just want to know where the hell they are and why they don't put a stop to the evil people who are ruining their religion? Do they not care? Worse, do they approve of what the radicals are doing? I don't know, but I want to know.

Is it fair to blame Lego? No one wants to appear on a grainy video babbling inanely while masked men point an AK-47 to one's head. No one wants to be decapitated in public like Theo van Gogh. No one wants to get a truck bomb parked in front of their building. I can sympathise with their lack of balls when it comes to standing up to terrorists.

Fuck the Turkish Cultural Association.
Fuck the Turks and their genocide that they neither apologised for or even acknowledged.
Fuck Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, a ghazi (someone who engages in rading, burning farms and villages, extortion, rape, pillage, and - later - killing people who belong to a different religion), and his descendants and all the wanton bloodshed they produced.
And maybe, just maybe, a little fuck to Lego for letting evil win, yet again.