Pedantic
You can’t use the word pedantic without seeming pedantic.
hoopyfrood.org
The Blog at The End of the Universe : Musings on Life, the Universe and EverythingArchive for October, 2008
The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography
What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
The odds of a President McCain dying in office
Theres been a lot of talk about McCain dying in office if elected, and a lot of numbers flying around, regarding that. (I’m thinking Matt Damon’s interview)
I work for a firm that employs a lot of actuaries. Out of curiousity, some of my colleagues tried to calculate the odds of McCain dying in office, if elected.
The odds of a 72 year old North American male dying are:
Slightly above 8% within the next four years, and approximately 20% in the next 8 years.
The calculation is based exclusively on his age.
The fact that McCain was a POW has no bearing upon these odds. Research shows that as a group, POWs are no likier to die sooner than the rest of the population. Personally, I believe that if he was tortured for an extended period of time, its bound to have shortened his life somewhat.
Caveats:
These numbers do not take into account the fact that McCain had (and survived) cancer. Nor do they take into account the stress of being President. Both of which are bound to shorten his life.
The tables used to come up with these numbers are intended to calculate odds for very large groups of people, using them for one person will produce extremely inaccurate odds. The margin of error when calculating the odds of a single person’s death is too high for the above numbers to be meaningful in any way. Just thought you might find them interesting.
TED Talks
I’m a fan of the TED Talks series of lectures. For those not familiar with TED, its an annual conference that brings together some of the greatest minds and performers in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design (hence TED). They make the best talks and lectures from the conference available to the public for free. I’ve spent much time watching these lectures online or listening to them on my ipod.
I think my favorite TED lecture by far is this one by Ken Robinson, about education and creativity.
Richard Dawkins does a good job of talking about the Strangeness of Science here:
by Gaddis
by Harris
by Sachs
