A freshman college student asked his grade advisor what he should study. "Logic," was the answer.
"What is logic?"
"Logic enables one to deduce certain facts from others. For example, do you have a lawn mower?"
"Yes."
"From which I conclude that you have a lawn."
"Yes, I have a lawn."
"From which, I take it, you have a house."
"Yes, I have a house."
"Then you are married."
"Yes, I have a wife."
"And children?"
"Yes, I have children."
"From which I conclude that you are a heterosexual male."
"I am indeed a heterosexual male. Gee, this logic is amazing! From the fact that I have a lawn mower, you could deduce that I am an heterosexual male. Remarkable!"
As would happen, later the student met in the hall another student whom he knew and told him that he should study logic.
"What is that?" the friend asked.
"It enables you to deduce one proposition from another. For example, do you have a lawn mower?"
The friend replied, "No." The student then said, "You faggot!"

"Brouwer and the mathematics of the continuum" par Mark van Atten

Last year, Technology Review announced a $20,000 prize for any molecular biologist who could demonstrate that a much-publicized prescription for defeating aging by biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey was "so wrong that it was unworthy of learned debate." The purpose of the challenge was to determine whether de Grey's proposals, called SENS (for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence), were science or fantasy. Here are the three submissions that qualified for consideration according to the terms of the challenge.

The Prophet of ImmortalityControversial theorist Aubrey de Grey insists that we are within reach of an engineered cure for aging. Are you prepared to live forever?

Dear Rousseau:

I am a receptionist. When people call the company I work for, they always either expect that I know everything or nothing. (And so they are always wrong.) And they are so rarely polite, and have quite obviously so rarely given any thought to what it takes to do my job, or what they would really have to say to me to enable me to help them in a swift and effective manner, that it makes me wonder: why? What makes them behave so irrationally?

—At Their Service


Dear Service:

When someone has been brought up to command others, everything conspires to rob him of justice and reason. Great pains are taken, we are told, to teach young princes the art of ruling; but it does not appear that this education does them any good. It would be better to begin by teaching them the art of obeying. The greatest kings known to history were not among those brought up to rule, for ruling is a science that is least well mastered by too much practice; it is one a man learns better in obeying than commanding. As Tacitus would have it, Nam utilissimus idem ac brevissimus bonarum malarumque rerum delectus, cogitare quid aut nolueris sub alio Principe aut volueris. [The best as well as the shortest way to find out what is good and what is bad is to consider what you would have wished to happen if someone other than yourself had been Prince.] If those higher up always imagined themselves trading places with those less “high,” the world could be a different place.

Yours truly,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

h2so4

Summa theologiae

Let's face it. Evil is running rampant. Terrorists strike without warning. Corporate executives defraud the public and their own employees. Politicians tear apart the fabric of national unity for their own agendas. Popular culture has become a banal river of unadulterated trash, a "hellmouth" slowly dumbing down our sense of reality. The people are paralyzed by indecision, ennui or terminal cynicism.
Meanwhile, the ozone layer is perforated, glaciers are melting, and crazies set wildfires that denude the landscape. While Generation X passes the baton to Generation Y, adolescence is still hell, AND THERE'S ONLY ONE LETTER LEFT!
We need someone who can not only deconstruct the problem of evil, but kick it's hiney; someone with a preternatural sense of comic timing and an eye for fashion.
We need Buffy.