What would happen if I drilled a tunnel through the center of th" Want to really get away from it all? The farthest you can travel from home (and still remain on Earth) is about 7,900 miles (12,700 kilometers) straight down, but you'll have to journey the long way round to get there: 12,450 miles (20,036 kilometers) over land and sea. Why not take a shortcut, straight down? You can get there in about 42 minutes -- that's short enough for a long lunch, assuming you can avoid Mole Men, prehistoric reptiles and underworld denizens en route. Granted, most Americans would end up in the Indian Ocean, but Chileans could dine out on authentic Chinese, and Kiwis could tuck into Spanish tapas for tea [sources: NOVA; Shegelski]. Of course, you'd be in for a rough ride. For sake of argument (and survival) let's pretend the Earth is a cold, uniform, inert ball of rock. At the Earth's surface, gravity pulls on us at 32 feet (9.8 meters) per second squared. You're still moving at a heck of a clip, though, so don't expect to stop there.
Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. Another worthwhile source is the title essay in The Prevalence of Humbug by Max Black. Humbug: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes. A very similar formulation might plausibly be offered as enunciating the essential characteristics of bullshit. Deceptive misrepresentation: This may sound pleonastic. Short of lying: It must be part of the point of saying that humbug is “short of lying,” that while it has some of the distinguishing characteristics of lies, there are others that it lacks.
100 Exquisite Adjectives By Mark Nichol Adjectives — descriptive words that modify nouns — often come under fire for their cluttering quality, but often it’s quality, not quantity, that is the issue. Plenty of tired adjectives are available to spoil a good sentence, but when you find just the right word for the job, enrichment ensues. Practice precision when you select words. Subscribe to Receive our Articles and Exercises via Email You will improve your English in only 5 minutes per day, guaranteed! 21 Responses to “100 Exquisite Adjectives” Rebecca Fantastic list! Birthday problem In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox[1] concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people. The mathematics behind this problem led to a well-known cryptographic attack called the birthday attack, which uses this probabilistic model to reduce the complexity of cracking a hash function. A graph showing the computed probability of at least two people sharing a birthday amongst a certain number of people. Understanding the problem[edit] The birthday problem is to find the probability that, in a group of N people, there is at least one pair of people who have the same birthday. distinct possible combinations of pairing. Calculating the probability[edit]
What Mimicking One's Language Style May Mean About the Relationship Oct. 4, 2010 AUSTIN, Texas — People match each other's language styles more during happier periods of their relationship than at other times, according to new research from psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin. "When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds," says James Pennebaker, psychology professor and co-author of the study. "This also happens when people read a book or watch a movie. As soon as the credits roll, they find themselves talking like the author or the central characters." This tendency is called language style matching or LSM. "Because style matching is automatic," says Ireland, a psychology graduate student, "it serves as an unobtrusive window into people's close relationships with others." Ireland and Pennebaker tracked the language used by almost 2,000 college students as they responded to class assignments written in very different language styles.
CCI Greenheart | Cultural Exchange | Host an Exchange Student | J-1 Work Travel | Travel Abroad Earth's True Shape Revealed for 1st Time After two years in orbit, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) is nearing the end of its planned life span in February, producing the most accurate map ever of the so-called geoid -- an Earth-encompassing spirit level and global reference surface. An unused supply of xeon fuel will allow the mission to be extended until at least the end of 2012. Markedly different from a simple sphere or ellipsoid, the geoid is the mathematically 'true' shape of Earth. The resulting small variations in the Earth’s gravitational field feature on the geoid as ‘bulbs’ and ‘dips’ in an idealized ‘ocean’ surface. ESA scientists presented the latest version of the GOCE-derived geoid map –- based on eight months of data processed so far –- at a user workshop this week in Munich, Germany. The Daily Galaxy via ESA
88 Important Truths I’ve Learned About Life | Raptitude.com Everyone gets drilled with certain lessons in life. Sometimes it takes repeated demonstrations of a given law of life to really get it into your skull, and other times one powerful experience drives the point home once forever. Here are 88 things I’ve discovered about life, the world, and its inhabitants by this point in my short time on earth. 1. You can’t change other people, and it’s rude to try. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. Photo by Philgarlic Have a lot on your mind? Everyday mindfulness has transformed my life, and the lives of many others.
The tree-climbing girl who turns the history of man on its head The discovery appears to have finally ended the debate over whether this bipedal hominid still continued to climb trees, much like their earlier ape ancestors. The fossilised shoulder blades and arm sockets belonging to Selam, meaning "peace", indicate that she and her family continued to climb trees like modern apes even though her lower body was perfectly adapted to upright walking. Scientists believe that the upward angle of her arm sockets and ape-like shoulder blades suggest that she was an active tree climber. Selam is a remarkably well-preserved specimen of the species Australopithecus afarensis, an important forerunner of the human lineage. The latest study, published in the journal Science, reveals the first complete set of shoulder blades of Australopithecus afarensis. "These remarkable fossils provide strong evidence that these individuals were still climbing at this stage in human evolution," Professor Green said.
Your beliefs about intelligence affect your beliefs about learning Your beliefs about intelligence really matter. Learning is a lifelong process. Kids go to school to be exposed to new topics ranging from history to math to science. Adults need to pick up new knowledge to understand world events and to succeed at new tasks at work. Sometimes, of course, the things we learn are fairly easy to pick up. Other information is harder to pick up. How does the difficulty of learning about something affect your beliefs about how much you can learn about it? This question was explored by David Miele, Bridgid Finn, and Daniel Molden in a paper in the March, 2011 issue of Psychological Science . They were interested in the role of people's beliefs about intelligence on learning. These beliefs can influence what happens when you encounter information that feels hard to learn. To test this possibility, Miele, Finn, and Molden had people learn to relate English words to Indonesian words with the same meaning. This result is quite important.