Nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11.
Yet according to wikipedia between 250 and 1,000 people in the US die each year from erotic asphyxiation.
So in the 15 years since 9/11 - between 3,750 and 15,000 people have died from that.
The US government may as well spend hundreds of billions of dollars encouraging people to jerk off more safely.
Terrorism is shocking and tragic. But it always surprises me that so much money is spent on it when it is such a rare way for people to die. Particularly when it is pretty much impossible to prevent in any case.
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There are now thirteen times as many suicides as murders in the UK.
When walking home late at night the footsteps you should be afraid of, statistically, are your own. You are far more likely to kill yourself.
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I have studied magic my whole life. The best thinker in magic today is an anonymous writer called Andy. He has a blog called The Jerx.
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Wanna' see a trick?
"This is a mystical trick that I learnt in Australia – the continent ‘down under’…"
Go grab a deck of cards – it doesn’t need to be complete.
Shuffle the deck and freely divide it into 4 packets ie cut the deck into 4 piles.
Pick up any packet and shuffle it. Look at the top card and remember it.
Now spell “Australian Shuffle” – transferring one card from top to bottom for each letter. This helps lose the card in the packet.
Once you have done that. We will now use the mysterious ‘Australian Shuffle’ to find your card.
First – I should explain what an ‘Australian’ Shuffle is – it is a DOWN/UNDER deal. So place the top card down on the table, and the next card under the packet – and so on…
Do this until you have one card remaining in your hand.
It is your selected card!
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We can use magic to entertain people. Or to scam them.
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Take a deck of cards and place them in red/black order:
RED/BLACK/RED/BLACK… etc.
You then take the top card (a RED card) and insert the card anywhere into the deck. A nice way of doing this is to spread the cards face-down on the table and have the spectator insert the FACE UP red card anywhere they want.
You then tell the spectator you will deal off a pair of cards at a time. If the FACE UP red card in the pair is with another red card. He wins. If it is with a black card – you win. Thanks to The Gilbreath Principle you will always win.
Free money! Yeah!!!
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Relativity is not really about time. It is about what do we mean by the word "Now"?
There is no single thing called "Now" that applies to the whole universe. Instead there are an infinite number of "Nows" depending on where you are in the universe. Two events only share the same "Now" if they occur in the same place at the same time.
For centuries, philosophers thought about time. And in doing so they smuggled in the assumption that inherent to the concept of time is that simultaneous events will be the same for all observers. Indeed this was such a buried assumption – that no philosopher even bothered to note it when analyzing the concept of time.
Then Einstein came along – teased out this assumption and the rest is history. To me - Einstein was a philosopher more than he was a physicist.
Cheers!
joE=mc2KAY
Joe Mckay
[email protected]
Durham, England