Imagining the 4th dimension

Ever since I was little, well fairly little, inspired by the writings of A.A. Attanasio, I have tried to imagine higher-dimensional shapes. Shapes like the lovely hypercube:



Dimensions is a lovely project which takes you through the maths of higher dimensional shapes, without overwhelming you with detail. It's all done through animation, and you can watch it online. Don't be a flatlander. JFDI!

Agnostic buses

The two things that you need to know about the atheist bus campaign (to which I've dutifully added my tenner) :

1. They were hoping to make £5,500, but have in fact made over £75,000 in the first couple of days.
2. The CiF comment thread now has 1739 comments on it. More than I've ever seen on a CiF thread.
   

Yay atheists!

The buses are actually agnostic, apparently because Transport for London advertising rules don't allow people to be definite in their unbelief for fear of causing offence to religious people. Considering the enthusiastic response to the campaign, there are obviously a lot of atheists out there who might be offended by those adverts which definitely proclaim their belief.

I'm not overly bothered about this, being a bit of a 6 myself on the Dawkins Scale, although it would have been nice to have slogans that were a bit more 'in your face'. Maybe next time.

Bryan Appleyard doesn't like it though.

Fat camp, here I come

From the Daily Telegraph we have the following UK government proposal. They want companies to be able to provide tax-free incentives to their employees to encourage them to lose weight.

I spot a business opportunity here. Suppose I run my own company (which I do) does this mean I can pay myself to get thin and claim the tax back? Tax free skiing holidays on health grounds beckon as well.

Would I have to pay the tax back when I almost inevitably put all the weight back on (as 19 out of 20 dieters do)? Or can I just make a pledge to improve things and keep paying myself tax free. Sounds like a winner to me.

Mind you it's a mystery to me why doctors invariably prescribe diet and exercise to lose weight when, long term, the vast majority of their patients will fail to lose weight that way. It's as though I went in with a headache and they gave me a pill with the advice that there's only a 1 in 20 chance that it would fix me up. I wouldn't be very satisfied with that, and I don't suppose many others would either. Yet people simply look shamefaced as their disgustingly obese BMI is read out and promise to try harder.

I think this is because being fat is regarded as a moral weakness (especially by some young people) , rather than simply being the result of us being anatomically cavemen with a metabolism tuned to make the most of scarce food resources. The only problem is that we're living in a culture in which tasty nutritious food is all around us. It's not about willpower, it's about biochemistry.

H/T to Mr Eugenides for this one.

Achieving my Apotheosis

With yet another h/t to Surreptitious Evil it appears that I am a Nerd God. I always though of myself as more of a bacchanalian pagan God. However nerd is good too. I really must put some sensible posts up...



UPDATE: Oh wait. Actually I'm not as nerdy or dorky) as all that:

Elsewhere

More of my childish, ill-formed and unimaginative thoughts can be found in this thread on the Sophistry of Liberty over at the Devils Kitchen. Hopefully this will prove that I'm not someone else.

My brain hurts

With a h/t to Surreptitious Evil, the reading level of this blog has been determined to be:



So welcome morons, cretins and assorted preschoolers to this cornucopia of speculation on the ontological and existential paradigms which bedevil our existence.

What a Wanker

I had a brief pointer to people having sex with their cars in a previous entry. That was pretty risible, but at least the folk involved were left alone to get on with their vehicular onanism. By way of a follow-up we now have have someone actually getting punished for pleasuring their bicycle. Of course what we actually have is a man pleasuring himself with said bicycle. Another way of looking at this is that a man was having a wank, by himself, in a locked hotel room.

For this Robert Stewart got hauled up in front of the local beak, Sheriff Colin Miller, who put him on probation for 3 years, and on the Sex Offenders Register for the same amount of time. He's now a convicted criminal, and officially a nonce. He's doubtless had his DNA taken by the police, and his job prospects ruined.

All for having a wank. In private.

It's not Mr Stewart who is the wanker here.