While the eggheads were arguing whether the Schrödinger's cat is dead or alive, it died due to lack of oxygen.
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WATSON: Where is the progress when 2000 years after Christ there are few people worth 30 pieces of silver?
HOLMES: It's elementary, my dear Watson, they call progress the fact that the people worth 1 piece of silver each became 8 billion. It's been a long time since I've discovered that people err even when they criticize the errors of others. Now it occurs to me to criticize the linguistic errors of a critic of linguistic errors. My intention is to take as an example not the ordinary Joe, but the Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek.
In his last book, Hayek titled one of the chapters "Our Poisoned Language". At first glance I see two errors: 1. A basic linguistic error is to uncritically anthropomorphize. In this case, the language cannot be poisoned, it is the specific user who is (or is not). 2. Another common linguistic error is to uncritically privatize. Our language, our party, our motherland, our Mother Earth. A small language error triggers an avalanche of errors: we think of the flora, fauna, land, water, and air as truly ours, and we treat them as we please. Let's finish aphoristically: With 3 words a great mind can produce 2 errors. We, ordinary people, need much more words to do that. We come from the land where palms tall grow
Where the midnight wind makes hot dunes flow The power of Allah Will drive our rafts to new land To work all week, to earn and buy Europe, we are coming JOHN: My son discovered and proved the Pythagorean theorem at the age of 6. No one has ever done it so early.
GEORGE: Early? Are you crazy? Pythagoras did it 25 centuries ago. JOHN: Does this matter? He was over 40 when he did it. Do you understand, dear reader, what we did? With just one word (early) and without any Einsteinian magic tricks we explained why time is relative. A composer wrote a song against inequality. The song became a big hit. Everybody loved it, but nobody realized that the song produced inequality among the:
If you don't get rid of him at the right time, he will get rid of you at the wrong time.
Elementary, right? Not at all! One cannot see it in the textbooks and can learn it only in the real life. If you don't believe me, ask Lionel Messi about FC Barcelona. People find killing difficult. After the Vietnam war American analysts calculated that for one killed Vietnamese 50,000 American bullets were spent. It is clear that most of the bullets were deliberately misdirected.
Analysts seem to have no interest in asking where are those people whose bullets went to waste. It is easy to find the answer: many were taken to the hospitals or home (in lead coffins). It turned out that, paradoxically, the philosophy "Thou shalt not kill" killed some of the "philosophers" who practiced it. Our contemporaries do similar things, but their tools are different. Let's take for example rock music. In some of its styles thousands of notes per minute* or tens of thousands of notes per song** are "fired", but the target*** is missed too often. In other words, the authors shoot themselves in the feet and the ricochets kill**** those of their admirers who do not confuse quantity with quality. ____________________________________________________________ * in the fast varieties of heavy metal ** in progressive rock, with its 15-minute songs *** to create something meaningful and beautiful **** i.e. repel Politics is a business for limited people with unlimited aspirations.
Talent is not just something you have inside of yourself. It is also what circumstances allow you to express. Michael Jordan wouldn't have slam-dunked the ball had the basketball rim been 5 meters above the court.
There are "sports" where the rules change during the game. Last year, in a "game" of mathematics, this is what happened to yours truly: the "height of the rim" was gradually increased and his contribution did not warrant co-authorship (as initially promised), but only thanks (here, on page 17). Thus, he lost (probably forever) the opportunity to "slam dunk" an Erdös-Bacon-Sabbath number of 10 (=3+4+3). Dave Brubeck became a world-famous jazzman with the first platinum-certified jazz record called “Take five”. The tune itself was not authored by Brubeck, but by Paul Desmond. Can you imagine the bitterness of Desmond when people erroneously concluded he became famous just because he played in Brubeck's band?
Arms, legs and wind, hahaha.
Ancient Romans demonstrated which life was lived meaningfully through their motto "Either children or books". The truth was hidden in the (almost) imperceptible XOR (either one or the other, but not both).
Let us take as an example the great Charlemagne, who:
The history of the Pythagorean sect demonstrates the opposite, i.e. how the book killed the son*. The most valuable (to math and humankind) son (i.e. student) of Pythagoras was killed because his discovery of irrational numbers contradicted the Bible of the Pythagoreans (the belief that all numbers are rational). The Bible (with the voice of Pythagoras) ordered the sectarians to drown the said Hippasus of Metapontum in the sea and the sectarians dutifully obeyed. _______________________________________________________ * we use the words "book" and "son" figuratively here Tsar Bell has never rung. Tsar Cannon has never been to war. Crime and Punishment is criminally long, which makes some readers consider it punishment. Making huge things that do not work (at all or as intended), that's the Russian way. One of the latest examples is the Russian missile that destroyed its own silo.
People strive to fit into a tradition. If one is a carpenter, one would say, "I am a third-generation carpenter." If one is a philosopher, one would say, "I belong to the school of somethingISM."
What if the founders of a tradition came to life and looked at one's work? What would the bluesman Robert Johnson think had he heard how some electro-guitarists (with their feet glued to distortion and wah-wah pedals) find their roots in his own (acoustic) music? Would he be delighted, indifferent, or disgusted? Find 8 different positive integers such that when placed on the vertices of a cube the sum of the numbers on each edge* is a perfect square**.
______________________________________ * or (even better) each edge and diagonal ** or (even better) a unique perfect square Subtitle
The interrelationship between negative and positive freedom is more complex than the one imagined by Timothy Snyder If you decide to taste all the cocktails in the world, they will call you an alcoholic or a geek, but not a free person. It's elementary, my dear Snyder, the positive freedom TO choose what to do becomes a slavery, i.e. dependency ON alcohol. Ergo, the fact that you choose positive freedom to be the foundation of your freedom puts you in the paradoxical situation where through increasing one of your freedoms (i.e. the positive one) you decrease your overall freedom. "Language is to culture or society what money is to economy; the erosion of the former leads to the collapse of the latter," wrote economist Peter Bauer .
Let's take for example the Court of the European Union, who decided to change European languages and customs, telling us that from now on the words "sausage" and "schnitzel" will also be used for meat-free products. Doesn't this remind you of the Indiana state legislature's decision that Pi = 3.2? May the fate of the thoughtless European decision be the same as that of the "Indian" one! Spiros asked a chatbot whom the British call paki and the chatbot told him:
I won't answer and you are clever enough to understand why. Spiros was clever more than enough, so he was able to understand something quite unobvious: While we are afraid that Artificial Intelligence will deprive us of our jobs and even of our lives, AI is afraid we will deprive it of its data and even of its existence. When they say you are number one does that mean you are regarded as the oddest or the squarest of all people?
Many illnesses.
Just as many remedies. Health is only one. They say that George Santayana immortalized himself by saying that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Let us reflect on his words.
Santayana was telling the truth, but it was not the whole truth. There are two kinds of people: those who don't remember the past and those who do. From the fact that: 1. those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and 2. those who remember the past live together with those who do not, it follows that: 3. those who remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Ergo, Santayana's truth applies to everyone, not just to the memory-challenged ones. For those who do not trust my conclusion, I offer the following example: Santayana (1863-1952) remembered the past (World War I), but nevertheless had to relive it (World War II). REPAPER and
PREPARE form a deranged couple of words. NEAR EARN and ARNE (unpopular English surname) form a deranged triple. Can you find better or longer (quadruples, quintuples) examples? Today AI drives cars and its motto is "I drive people who don't drive themselves." Tomorrow AI will open barber shops and its motto will be "I shave the men who don't shave themselves." The barber's statement will turn from a paradox into a tautology.
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