DrKrettin

It is not worth the effort counting up exactly, but I think the crackpot index is well over 100. I assume that this book is the only physics book you have read - I suggest you read plenty more.

An irritating article - how do you explain that it's the deepest but not the longest hole? Does the longest hole go sideways? No I didn't - I've known that for decades.

The suffix -less is cognate with the German suffix -los, gehirnlos, gedankenlos etc, but the German word los means something different. The same in English, but the difficulty with less and -less is that there is a confusing similarity of meanings. As an aside, note that English has a capital E even when an adjective. Thus English language. It is surprising how lazy people get with the shift key, even when there is no excuse.

Perhaps because a pile of crap seems appropriate.

But that makes it $13 worth per dump - which is rather hard to swallow. (Unfortunate metaphor)

Is that the amount produced each day? year? lifetime?

You have a strange concept of what constitutes a friend. The idea of being rich and buying them is grotesque. If you feel that you are socially unacceptable, a little personal examination might be appropriate - are you somewhere on the autistic spectrum? (I am, that's why I ask - it really does help to recognise this.)

I had an inspirational maths teacher who had an enthusiasm for 'A'-level maths. He was instrumental in bringing me out of myself and enabling me to progress beyond anybody's expectations. He did not have the same effect on everybody, I think it was just a few who responded to him. He allowed everybody to work at their own speed, solving any problem which baffled anybody. He gave homework to be done at any speed you wanted, and often said "leave number x out, it's too difficult" and grinned at me, so of course I would stay up half the night solving problem x. I was very lucky.

I have just learned that poker players have their own spellings. Have you watched the video? They claim it's 2.5 years, and Feynmann got it wrong. Today I learned that Feynman has only two "n"s

I didn't really get that far, although a quick skim brings out the overall quality. Another Nobel prize on its way.

Computer technology is clearly part of your problem. Switch the computer off (not many people know where the OFF button is) and forget the on-line morons. Go and meet real people. Some are quite nice.

Then concentrate on the tiny number of people who are not like that, and ignore the rest.

Well, consider the possibility that these two phenomena are two sides of the same coin. There have been societies with a total absence of computer technology which have left evidence to suggest that life was very meaningful, even if not quite so comfortable.

Maybe not, but I often get the feeling that the world is completely indifferent. Everybody very involved in their own little existence with no time or energy for anybody else. That is difficult to come to terms with.

Sorry, I can't improve on my previous stab in the dark.

I have just learned that there is no Wikipedia page about the Wikipedia page about the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia

If you can't find something better to do with $250 000 then there is something wrong with you, or obscenely rich, or both.

I think you need to consider your priorities - as a general rule, you can aim either for getting rich or studying a science. The two are rarely combined. As for spare time, do you know that the word "scholar" is derived from the Greek word scholé meaning leisure? A scholar was somebody who had the free time to learn something. That could be a good suggestion.

Have you tried that same in a different base, say octal and hexadecimal? Is the number 6 still as magical?

So we have different definitions of "sceptic". I have always understood this as somebody who suspends judgement until there is evidence, and always prepared to modify their view when required by new information. How do you define the term? (Apologies if you have already done so, but this thread is a bit dense.)

Surely Open-minded Scepticism is tautology, as well as a spelling debate.

Something I discovered recently when (trying) to learn Spanish is that they have a charming expression "media naranja" = "half an orange" which means your soul mate, or other half, the person which fits exactly to you. A strange expression, I thought, so I looked for an etymology and found that it is taken from Plato Symposium 189e-190a. This is a description of the original state of the species, being spherical with four legs, so the two sexes split into two so that a male and a female each had a partner which fitted each other exactly. The reason I mention this is that the Spanish rendering of Plato is taken from an Arabic translation, where the Arabic translator has inserted the words "like an orange" to the description of the original spherical being. This has then been faithfully translated into Spanish. The actual original Greek text does not mention an orange, which is not surprising since the Greeks did not know about oranges. This is what prompted me to investigate the etymology. So the Spanish expression is from an Arabic interpolation of the original Plato. Not many people know this.

I must take issue with this - I know that many ancient texts are known only through Arabic translations, but as far as I can make out, the vast majority of what we have of Aristotle is the original Greek. The texts listed here in the Corpus Aristotelicum are all in Greek, and I know this because I have them here on my computer in the original. I've just been searching the Nicomachean Ethics in Greek for the quotation I mentioned above. I might well be completely wrong, so if you can find some Aristotle which we have exclusively from an Arabic translation, I would be very interested.

Today I was investigating quotations from Aristotle, and as often happens, discovered that there are many attributed to him which he did not say (or more exactly we have no record of his saying it). This is not a dig at the previous poster, but his signature is just one example. (Link) If anyone could disabuse me, I'd be grateful for an exact reference. Google is extremely bad at propagating quotations, because once a false quotation is made, everybody copies it without questioning its validity.

I'm guessing that gland and eikel are both masculine nouns.