Marcel Popescu

One of the very stupid things you learn in school is about the shape of the Earth. You are told that the Earth is not exactly spherical - it has a "geoid" shape (which basically means it has a shape like the Earth... very intelligent). Like in the Microsoft joke , this is technically true, but rather pointless. The Earth's radius is 6500km; the deepest trench in the ocean is 11km and the highest mountain is almost 9km. Which makes it a pretty damn good sphere, with a precision of about 1:600. Think about it this way: the same precision on a billiard ball with a radius of 3cm would mean a maximum error of 0.05mm, or 50 microns. I'd call that a perfect sphere...

While reading Snakes on a Plane (I'm a big fan of Buffy, and of Buffy crossovers) I got to this part : Did they even have stores selling clothes and groceries and stuff back then, or did everybody make their own clothes and grow their own food? That seemed like a lot of wasted effort to Buffy. If you were good at making clothes or something, shouldn't that be, like, your job? And then you could sell the clothes you made or trade them to somebody who was good at growing things. This is something that most people seem to understand intuitively. If you're better at making bread, and I'm better at making clothes, we should specialize and trade with each other, instead of each of us trying to make both. We'll have products of a better quality (or a greater quantity, depending on the meaning of "better" in the previous statement). This is why, for example, it makes sense to grow corn in Kansas and bananas in Kenya and trade, instead of each trying to do both. W...

What would be true if creationism were true, but false if not? I don't mean "well, God would exist"; I mean what would we expect to happen differently? Well, there's the whole "the universe is comprehensible" thing, which has been discussed in other places (and I do believe it's a great argument). But I just had an idea: the universe is huge . It has either been created by impersonal natural laws, or by God. In the second case, we expect it to have been created for our use, just like the Earth, and therefore at some point we will develop / discover a practical way of faster-than-light travel - just as we developed a way of crossing the oceans. Such an expectation is not warranted in the first case, since it's irrational to expect impersonal laws to care for our wishes. So there. FTL technology. I can barely wait. grin

I have a friend who is normally a very intelligent man, and an extraordinary computer programmer. However, he has an IDEA, and he's unwilling to publish it in detail on his site - he wants to discuss it with a big company, to get the cash he believes he deserves for his idea. I was unable to persuade him that ideas are worthless. Here's an idea that would be worth a lot of money... if ideas were worth anything. Let's get rid of 99% of the existing government bureaucracy. (I'm an anarchist, I want to get rid of all government, but that's harder to sell. Most people would agree that 99% of the government is useless, though. grin ) Just think of the advantages: * you save on salaries and bribes * you force the leeches to actually work for a living and make something even marginally useful (like hamburgers) * a lot less spending on "feel-good" projects like houses for the poor which cost a million bucks a piece and look pretty much like a shack * ... and I...