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A Thread for Random Musings


Old Man

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A student today said that in one of her courses the instructor was having them do Myers-Briggs type things for assessing strengths and so on.  I told her that personalty tests where others get the results are never administered for the test subject's good, and all they are are the beginnings of manipulation, whereby the outside agency with the test results can be expected to exploit weaknesses, provoke reactions, etc., in the test subjects for the advantage of the tester.  (I firmly believe this to be true, FWIW.)  Since truly random responses are fairly easy to detect, I suggested that she answer the questions as if she could be suspected to go into homicidal rage when others tried manipulating her in that way.

 

The students in the room were initially shocked by this, but the student in question took my advice, erased her initial responses, and put in the latent-killer responses.

 

... And duly reported she got the same Myers-Briggs type as before.  :rofl:

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  • 4 weeks later...

Welp. Here I am, at the out-patient hotel at the University Hospital of Norrland. I've been enered into the rolls of the thoracical surgery ward, all tests have been run and samples have been taken. Next thing is surgery on Monday morno. 

 

What to do in Umeå on a lazy weekend? I know! Let's go to the Norrland's Open Kendo Championship! 

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I am finishing up a second BA and getting ready to apply to doctoral programs. If anyone wants to know why our society is growing so vacuous and trite, the non-degree core course requirements at universities are increasingly filled with counter-intellectual and empirically disreputable ideological bullshit. Indoctrination is not education. And, while many degrees have serious core classes, others allow core requirements to be filled with classes that are nonsensical and perilously idiotic at best. This is especially true at the undergraduate level, which is as far as most university "educated" people ever go. Most of these oddball courses are taught by "academics" who seem to believe repeating utter (and often offensive) nonsense with a straight face and moralizing tenor makes it true rather than deeply ironic. Its not that our educated elites have failed. Its that they are AWOL from all but the most advanced, specialized, and serious of courses.

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For a moment, I thought I might have invented Möbius pants, but more careful inspection of the situation revealed merely a garment malfunction I had not previously heard of.

 

In the men's room, of course.  Finished using the urinal, but I had succeeded in untucking my shirt, so I had to undo the pants and belt (and unfoul the front of the shirt bottom from the zipper).  With some errors induced by my DEX 5, eventually I got all that done.  Next step is to put everything back as it should be, and all of zipper, bottom shirt button, top pants button, and belt closed up in the conventional manner.  

 

Several repeated failures later, things would not close.  And the tongue end of the belt was coming out of the not-fully-zipped fly, which made no sense whatsoever.

 

My first impression was that I had developed a topological singularity in my garments such that belt emerged through the pants in a way not in accordance with standard 3-D Euclidean geometry (hence "Möbius pants"), which was at that moment intensely irritating, but would have been just insanely, unspeakably great when looked on in a more general way.  After all, if you can induce that kind of singularity repeatably, then if you could do it in the right way you might be able to come out, say, near Alpha Centauri.  

 

For a moment I was blinded by the prospect of having pulled an interstellar drive out of my pants.  

 

Not only would that answer uncountable prayers for solving and/or dodging Earthbound problems, it would also be just about the greatest imaginable geek line for impressing babes in random conversation.

 

Sadly, it was not so.  Moving over towards the mirror so I could see what the Hell was going on, even mirror-reversed visual inspection revealed a more mundane arrangement, albeit one explicable only in terms of the aforementioned DEX 5.  Somehow I had looped the end of my belt over the waistband of my pants, then run it outward through the notched top of the pants with the fly fully unzipped, then buttoned the waistband over the belt tongue and tried zipping up the fly.  This was the arrangement I initially observed and, with the power of my INT 24, was able to reproduce without the topological singularity.

 

Oh well.
 

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19 hours ago, Cancer said:

 

 

For a moment I was blinded by the prospect of having pulled an interstellar drive out of my pants.  

 

 

May I quote you on that?

 

16 minutes ago, Bazza said:

Why do we call this planet "Earth" when three-quarters is water? 

 

3/4 of the SURFACE yes, not of the mass or volume.

 

Naming it after a surface feature would be superficial don't you think?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary wants to name it Bob.

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15 hours ago, Cancer said:

Meanwhile, it seems the place we stayed for a week on Hawaii back in early 2014 has been overrun and buried by the lava flow.

 

Yup, it and the area for several blocks around.  Guess I add those pics to the folder "Places that aren't there any more".

 

EDIT: Link

 

At times USGS's tag line, "Science for a changing world", seems to challenge the bounds of good taste.

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