Aenna comments on Hong Kong election: ballot papers outnumbered voter turnout in at least 5 polling stations. Humpback whales around the globe are mysteriously rescuing animals from orcas : science.
The Banach-Tarski non-Paradox | Good Math Bad Math. For some reason, lately I've been seeing a bunch of mentions of Banach Tarski. B-T is a fascinating case of both how counter-intuitive math can be, and also how profoundly people can misunderstand things. For those who aren't familiar, Banach-Tarski refers to a topological/measure theory paradox. There are several variations on it, all of which are equivalent. The simplest one is this: Suppose you have a sphere. You can take that sphere, and slice it into a finite number of pieces. Then you can take those pieces, and re-assemble them so that, without any gaps, you now have two spheres of the exact same size as the original. Alternatively, it can be formulated so that you can take a sphere, slice it into a finite number of pieces, and then re-assemble those pieces into a bigger sphere. This sure as heck seems wrong. The thing is, when you think about it carefully, it's not really all that odd.
Here's an equivalent thing, which is a bit simpler to think about: Take a line segment. RangeVoting.org - Center for Range Voting - front page. A Dialog with a Madman. A Dialog with a Madman Permanent Link to this Comic: Wiki: TheSimpleTruth. This essay is meant to restore a naive view of truth. Someone says to you: "My miracle snake oil can rid you of lung cancer in just three weeks. " You reply: "Didn't a clinical study show this claim to be untrue? " The one returns: "This notion of 'truth' is quite naive; what do you mean by 'true'? " Many people, so questioned, don't know how to answer in exquisitely rigorous detail. Nonetheless they would not be wise to abandon the concept of 'truth'. There was a time when no one knew the equations of gravity in exquisitely rigorous detail, yet if you walked off a cliff, you would fall.
Often I have seen - especially on Internet mailing lists - that amidst other conversation, someone says "X is true", and then an argument breaks out over the use of the word 'true'. In this essay I pose questions. If you are one of those fortunate folk to whom the question seems trivial at the outset, I hope it still seems trivial at the finish. Late one afternoon I feel especially tired. "Can I help you? " Www.liarsforjesus.com/downloads/LFJ_FINAL.pdf. The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant.