Posts Tagged "homework"
"It is good to be able to see all sides to a question, but unwavering activists are the ones who make history."
— Dr James Henry Sanders"An explanation is chosen relative to its rationality, or its plausibility. Claiming that a giant tortoise sneezed humans into existence on a Thursday afternoon, for example, is usually rejected in favour of the more sober Darwinian natural selection."
— D. M. Williams and M. C. Ebach"Some Alabamians complain that taxpayers’ money should not be wasted on educating criminals [in prison]. Mr Hooks says he asks such people whether they would prefer the ex-con next door to be unskilled and jobless."
— Prison Conditions — Gently Does It | The Economist
Still having a hard time finding journal essays about Canadian penitentiaries. Wound up in this instead… conveniently, an interesting way to pass the time. I find all kinds of cool shit here.
People who defend smoking cigarettes. »
I don’t get it.
The following is the dumbest logic I’ve ever seen. If your lungs are in working order, the tar and other chemicals isn’t going to automatically just sit there and accumulate because that’s not what bodies are designed to do. It will take years of damage to make your body less efficient at processing the chemicals, and at a different rate for each person. So there is no way to say “it takes only 3 years to suffocate from tar in the lungs” because there are a lot of messed up assumptions in that.
But then again, I’m just in first year Biology. What do I really know. (Not a lot, but some stuff.)
In the United Kingdom, full strength cigarettes contain 10mg of ‘tar’, and in America they contain 20mg of ‘tar’. For arguments’ sake, we will use the American levels as this would accumulate faster. The lung capacity of an average adult human is about six litres, which is 6,000 cubic centimetres. At room temperature, one cubic centimetre (one ml) of water weighs about one gram. Tar however, being an oily substance, floats on water, so one ml weighs less than a gram. The exact density of tar depends on its composition. Tar is usually a mixture of many different oily chemicals. At its densest though, one gram of tar occupies about 1.25 ml of volume. At 20 mg (0.025 ml) of “tar” per cigarette, it would take at least 50 cigarettes to yield one gram of “tar”. That’s two and a half packs of cigarettes. This means that, if you smoke one pack of full flavour cigarettes, you would have about 0.5 ml of “tar” in your lungs. Because your lungs hold about 6,000 ml of air, you would have to smoke about 12,000 packs of cigarettes to completely fill them with “tar”. Smoking one pack per day, that would take about 33 years. This means that anyone who started smoking at age 15 would have nothing but a thick slurry of tar oozing out of their nose and mouth by age 48. There would be no air left in his or her lungs at all, just “tar”. This however, is not the end of the story. Obviously, if your lungs were completely filled with tar, then you would suffocate and die. Your lungs do not have to be completely filled to result in suffocation; about a cup (500 ml) will do. That’s only about 1,000 packs of full flavoured cigarettes. You could do that in just under three years at a pack a day. If the popular myths about cigarette “tar” were true, then every pack-a-day smoker would be dead, from suffocation, before the end of three years.
"Free will has a price of anxiety and despair."
— Rollo May, one of three chief leaders of humanist psychology; introduced European existentialism into North American psychology."Like secular anorexics, non-eaters initiate their fasting on the cusp between being girls and becoming women. Instead of preparing for courtship and marriage, they become saints."
— Lena Gemzoe"Some years after Alexandrina’s confinement to bed, Jesus appeared to her and announced that she had been chosen for a life of suffering in order to save human souls."
—Lena Gemzoe, on the story of Saint Alexandrina.
She’s a saint, apparently, because at age 14 she jumped out a window to avoid being raped/to “save her sexual purity”, and the injuries she sustained ended up paralyzing her and leaving her bed-ridden. For the last 13 years of her life she did not eat anything except the Eucharist, those thin white wafers, and for some reason her ability to fast for 13 years was a sign of holiness.
"Ignorance and misery in the working classes, idleness and luxury among the upper classes."
— “A Russian Nihilist” on what destroyed “the family”, but in my opinion, this is the general disease that is destroying a great many aspects of society to this day."The beauty of hard labor [in correctional workhouses] was its capacity to serve simultaneously as threat and therapy. If it did not succeed as one, it might still as the other."
—Adam Hirsch on using hard labour to rehabilitate “idlers” (vagrants) in work houses (early day prisons).
People were torn on whether deterrence through intimidation or rehabilitation was the best method of dealing with criminals, so hard labour supposedly fit the bill for both.
"In 1867 [Alexander II of Russia] sold Alaska to the United States for $7 million (equivalent to roughly $200 million in current dollars) after recognizing the great difficulty of defending it against Great Britain or the former British colony of Canada."
—Wikipedia
I had always wondered why Alaska was part of the US.
"The main failing of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich was that it was all a mistake."
— A.V. Nikitenko, one of Tsar Nicholas I’s “most devoted civil servants”, about Tsar Nicholas I on his deathbed.
