It seems to me, realising that a blind, unfeeling universe gets to be conscious through us, and thus able understand itself via our minds (for we are the tiny, infinitely precious, conscious bits of this vast universe), provides far greater comfort than some mythical stone-age god which threatens you with an eternal lake of fire and torture if you ( Read more... )

You're having a pleasant afternoon stroll in your neighborhood. With its tall trees, much shrubbery, plentiful birds, and lack of fences, it looks like virgin bushland, but it's actually fairly well populated suburbia, with low-built homes nestling among the trees, mostly hidden. You and most of the people who are privileged to live here are very ( Read more... )

You're on your way to a business meeting that could make you a lot of money. Ahead is a bus and a small car parked on the side of the road before a bridge and a lot of men milling around. Several of the men frantically wave you down as you approach the bridge. Reluctantly, because you don't want to be late, you stop and ask the men what's up. They ( Read more... )

I just got a threat from some piece of shit out there on the net ( Read more... )

Theory of mind is an interesting concept. It lets us understand what another person sees. We generally develop this ability at about age 4 years ( Read more... )

An opinion piece was published at Forbes a couple of days ago, but has mysteriously disappeared. Even stranger, when checking the Internet Archive I found the article there, but when I began to read it, it disappeared too, to be replaced by a blank page. I tried viewing it a number of times on the Internet Archive, and each time it showed for a few ( Read more... )

(A lovely friend, Dorejejaguar, prompted me to write this last night ( Read more... )

This calculates even weeks, that is, it can calculate fortnights:
expr \( `date +%s` / 604800 \) % 2 >/dev/null || echo "even"

or if you want odd weeks:
expr \( `date +%s` / 604800 + 1 \) % 2 >/dev/null || echo "odd"There are 604800 seconds in a week ( Read more... )

There must be a simpler way to do this. I was looking for words similar in meaning to "back" or "previous" or "before" but beginning with the letter "d".

My awk is a bit rusty so I used sed, which I seem to use almost every day, wonderful, ugly command it is. Here is what I came up with:

dict -d moby-thesaurus back | sed -z 's/,/\n/g' | sed 's ( Read more... )

Is anybody else confused by the abbreviations "am" and "pm" when applied to 12 o'clock midday and 12 o'clock midnight? It seems to me not only arbitrary and confusing, but actually wrong ( Read more... )