Embedding a male-ended USB stick in concrete is just begging for a string of ruined motherboards. How still can you hold your laptop or netbook against the wall, even for 30 seconds? Now how about while you're trying to use the mouse, keyboard, or trackpad to copy files?
I thought of "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" too. Another good one is Carl Sagan's "Contact" - a great read, much better than the Jodie Foster movie, and his only fictional work.
The quoted story sure looks paradoxical to me. Suppose the time traveler who exited the gate had a beard that was 1 mm long. In the 24 hours he loiters near the gate, it might grow to 2 mm. But clearly he can't be the same man who exited the gate, since the man going in had a 2 mm beard but the man coming out only had a 1 mm beard. I think the author must have forgotten to mention one of his assumptions.
Michael Sandle and Richard Demarco are actually just po-mo posers. They pay lip service to radical art, but they're actually a pair of Philistines: obviously arresting Harman was a bleeding-edge artistic statement.
"Should a cop be bothering a pedestrian, committing no crime?"
Loitering, trespassing, and public drunkeness are all crimes. There's a lower tolerance for vagrancy in the suburbs then there is downtown.
Also, the role of the police is to protect AND serve. If she's helping an elderly or mentally ill man find his way home, she's serving him and the community. She gave him a ride; it's not like she arrested him. It would have been nicer if she had let him ride in the front of the car rather than the back seat, but the regulations are in place to protect her.
If your parents or grandparents wandered away from a hospital or senior's home, would you want a caring community to look out for them? Or would you prefer a bunch of libertarians that say "I look out only for myself, and you can do the same".
Suppose you saw an elderly man, shabbily dressed, wandering the streets in the pouring rain. He doesn't seem to have any destination or business. If you were a police officer, wouldn't you go over and say hello? Ask him if he's lost, or cold, or needs help? When he claims he's Bob Dylan, but doesn't have any ID, you might reasonably suspect that he's mentally ill. So, you give him a ride back to where he says he's staying, and when someone verifies that he is, in fact, the real Bob Dylan, everybody laughs at you. Why?
Should a 24-year-old cop be expected to know what a musician looks like, 45 years after he peaked? I mean, I've heard of Bob Dylan, but I have no idea what he looked like in the 60s, let alone today. And frankly, he's not that big anymore. I'm 29, and I only recognize two songs from his greatest-hits album. If they hadn't been on the Forrest Gump soundtrack, it would probably be zero. From the same era, I recognize about half a dozen songs by the Rolling Stones, a handful by Elvis, a dozen by Simon and Garfunkel, and at least 30 or 40 by the Beatles. You can blame society for not popularizing songs that couldn't be easily commercialized, but you can't blame young people for not knowing him now.
Regarding "Card Shark", I take my lead from modern working professionals, like Jeff Wessmiller ("Weapons of the Cardshark") and Darwin Ortiz ("Scams and Fantasies With Playing Cards", "Gambling Scams", and "Cardshark"). Besides which, S.W. Erdnase never used either term (sharps or sharks) in his seminal work on card manipulation, and the great "Professor", Dai Vernon, tended to divide card manipulators into two groups, cheaters and conjurers. I don't want to search through Daryl's 8-volume "Encyclopedia of Card Sleights", but I seem to recall he just brings up both terms and then never mentions them again. So, I stick with card shark.
I use "decimate" to mean "losses of about 10%, or somewhat more" (so, if 700 troops went into battle and 83 died, they were decimated. If my stock portfolio lost 14% of it's value, it was decimated). But some people take decimated to mean "totally destroyed", when they could be using the perfectly good word "annihilated".
Wine isn't pure alcohol. A standard drink has about 14 grams of alcohol in it. So, drinking 20g would get you about 2/3 of the way to being too drunk to drive.
The downside of living 5 years longer is that you have to spend the previous 60 years slightly intoxicated.
Maybe I should become a police officer so I can order people to do whatever I want - oh, wait. It turns out that citizens aren't soldiers, and they're not obliged to follow orders from some high-school graduate with a taser and an attitude. In a democracy, the police serve at the pleasure of the civilians, not the other way around. Dave's way is the way of the sheepish holocaust victim - just because someone has a gun doesn't mean you shouldn't stand up to them.
Actually, studies have shown that patients who know they're being prayed for have worse health outcomes than people who are not prayed for. When you say "Do you want me to pray for you?", the implied subtext is "because you're probably going to die and prayer is your only hope". That puts people under stress.
As an atheist, I probably wouldn't be offended on multicultural grounds if someone offered to pray for me, but I'd probably be concerned that a nurse is wasting effort on this pointless activity instead of doing something that might actually help.
Loitering, trespassing, and public drunkeness are all crimes. There's a lower tolerance for vagrancy in the suburbs then there is downtown.
Also, the role of the police is to protect AND serve. If she's helping an elderly or mentally ill man find his way home, she's serving him and the community. She gave him a ride; it's not like she arrested him. It would have been nicer if she had let him ride in the front of the car rather than the back seat, but the regulations are in place to protect her.
If your parents or grandparents wandered away from a hospital or senior's home, would you want a caring community to look out for them? Or would you prefer a bunch of libertarians that say "I look out only for myself, and you can do the same".
Should a 24-year-old cop be expected to know what a musician looks like, 45 years after he peaked? I mean, I've heard of Bob Dylan, but I have no idea what he looked like in the 60s, let alone today. And frankly, he's not that big anymore. I'm 29, and I only recognize two songs from his greatest-hits album. If they hadn't been on the Forrest Gump soundtrack, it would probably be zero. From the same era, I recognize about half a dozen songs by the Rolling Stones, a handful by Elvis, a dozen by Simon and Garfunkel, and at least 30 or 40 by the Beatles. You can blame society for not popularizing songs that couldn't be easily commercialized, but you can't blame young people for not knowing him now.
Besides which, S.W. Erdnase never used either term (sharps or sharks) in his seminal work on card manipulation, and the great "Professor", Dai Vernon, tended to divide card manipulators into two groups, cheaters and conjurers. I don't want to search through Daryl's 8-volume "Encyclopedia of Card Sleights", but I seem to recall he just brings up both terms and then never mentions them again. So, I stick with card shark.
I use "decimate" to mean "losses of about 10%, or somewhat more" (so, if 700 troops went into battle and 83 died, they were decimated. If my stock portfolio lost 14% of it's value, it was decimated). But some people take decimated to mean "totally destroyed", when they could be using the perfectly good word "annihilated".
Wine isn't pure alcohol. A standard drink has about 14 grams of alcohol in it. So, drinking 20g would get you about 2/3 of the way to being too drunk to drive.
The downside of living 5 years longer is that you have to spend the previous 60 years slightly intoxicated.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2002901053_pray31.html
As an atheist, I probably wouldn't be offended on multicultural grounds if someone offered to pray for me, but I'd probably be concerned that a nurse is wasting effort on this pointless activity instead of doing something that might actually help.