Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 296 other subscribers
Archive:
Month: October 2016
If Stephen Hawking were incredibly racist, would people still call him smart?
Geoffrey Sampson is a very good scholar in Natural Language Processing. One of my .sigs quotes him. He’s also a UKIP member who got kicked out of the Tories after saying he was an unashamed racialist. Protests at his university wanted him kicked out, saying no person of colour could comfortably sit his classes. And […]
What did you do with your partner on your first anniversary?
Why, what else does one do on a first marriage anniversary? Put your wife on a gondola. (Luxury Gondola Cruises: Venice on the Yarra) Everyone on the riverside assumed this was for a proposal. I kept hollering out to onlookers: SHE SAID YES!!! (sotto voce) Two years ago… Answered 2016-10-05 [Originally posted on http://quora.com/What-did-you-do-with-your-partner-on-your-first-anniversary/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]
In the traditional British public school system, why is (or was) it believed that knowledge of “the classics” was necessary?
As you found out in comments, OP, the history came along for the ride with the literature: Thucydides and Caesar were read more as literature, than because schools actually cared what happened in Syracuse in 415 BC. But they are great literature. Why were the Classics valued in elite schools in 19th century England? Well, […]
Men of Quora: what do you look like with and without facial hair?
Mid-2012. I need to put some text content here. So I’ll say what people said when Derryn Hinch, way too prominent Australian reporter, shaved off his beard. The image everyone conjured was that of Daffy Duck, sans bill: Oh, and I don’t deserve to be on the same thread as Michaelis Maus. But there you […]
Which intellectual topic can you just not get into?
Lots. It seems that the dismal science, economics, is a popular answer here, and I’ll put my hand up for that as well. (I just looked up the origin of the phrase The dismal science and… holy shit! Carlyle made up the phrase to decry economics as being amoral, and hence depressing—because economics was concluding […]
If atheists are proven wrong, how will they explain to God why they never bothered believing in him?
My time for struggling with that question, like so many others’, was high school. I did not have Augustine to debate with, as Michael Masiello did. But it was pretty painful. I looked over the poems I wrote at the time, to see if I had an answer at the ready back then. To my […]