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What the Fark 3: The Strange and Unusual

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Re: What the Fark 3: The Strange and Unusual

joecct said:
Aida played by white singers in Bristol, UK. What could go wrong.

Everything.
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This is so painfully stupid. Race does not matter at all in Aida. It's a story of the conflict between private and public responsibilities. The only reason it's in Egypt is (1) an Egyptian commissioned it and (2) Verdi was the Michael Bay of his day for production numbers, and pyramids and elephants make for way f-cking cool sets.
 
Re: What the Fark 3: The Strange and Unusual

joecct said:
The concept of zero was a shock to many. It seems easy, but there is no Roman Numeral for 0 and 0 was resisted in the West for centuries.
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The zero in decimal place notation came via the Arabs from India, but it's not true that the west had no zero before that. The Babylonians had a zero -- sort of -- and the Egyptians had a zero that did everything except hold place.

It traces to an even more fundamental difference -- measuring vs counting. When you count you start with "1" -- that's why when calendar dating came in it began with the Year 1, not 0. In China if you're born 3 days before the end of the New Year then a week later you're 2, because you've lived in two different years. Whereas if you measure you're just a week old.

It's not as if people didn't have the mental conception of "zero"-ness. They just didn't apply it to the same things we do.

There is a really fun concept that people truly couldn't wrap their heads around, though: irrational numbers. Greek math basically dead-ended with the realization that the square root of 2 and pi can't be reduced to a ratio. The Greeks thought of number as a sort of shadow cast by geometry, so irrationality was basically like telling them their world was built on sand. That truly must have been a sort of "wave/particle duality" moment.

If the model is so strongly identified in your head with reality, when the model breaks down it actually seems like the world is breaking down.
 
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Re: What the Fark 3: The Strange and Unusual

French Rage said:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tennessee-mom-islam_us_57f5bb81e4b0b7aafe0bf4e3?section=&

She's proud of the zeroes? Doesn't she know that's an Arabic numeral?
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If she's such a "Christian woman", why isn't she homeschooling them or sending them to a religious school? She has options.

These people just want to make a scene, and are upset their values are no longer being rammed down everyone else's throats. I'm guessing she's also been known to howl about the phony "war on Christmas".
 
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