Memorize the keyword/phrase in each sentence you want to say so that you will remember to make every point. Don't memorize the entire sentences or unless you're very good you will-sound-like-someone-reading-a-script

I was watching a documentary about the wright brothers recently and right up until they actually did it many bright people doubted it would ever be possible to have powered human flight.

Like it always has, something will come along that will change everything.

Coding in VB6 keeps you forever young

oh, gods, BASIC.

my first programming experience was in unstructured BASIC. I think I've managed to reverse the brain damage from that, but I can't be too sure.

I got this message when I followed the link to his vbaclasses

Your computer or another computer on your network is compromised with a virus. This allows online criminals to use it as part of a botnet to send spam and attack websites.

Am I the only one?

I think this is the cloudflare message. You can complete the captcha to get in.

Reading this reminds me of a quote about the charge of the light brigade

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre, c'est de la folie

I'm curious. Why is there a "de" in "c'est de la folie" but not in "ce n'est pas la guerre"? How would the meaning change if you took out the "de"?

The "de la" means "some" or "some of," while "la" alone just means "the".

"Folie" (folly) is an amorphous, uncounted quantity, like water or sand. War is a one-of-a-kind entity, like "Peltier effect." So you speak of "some water" but "the Peltier effect."

When thirsty, you could say that "I want to drink the water," but unless there was an antecedent already set up in the conversation, it would sound a bit silly.

Interesting. I know the definitional difference between de and la and I know that de applies to indefinite things and so on. But the rules don't help here because to me (an English speaker with rudimentary French) la folie and la guerre aren't in different categories of definiteness to begin with. In English, war in general is just war, no different from madness in general being just madness. Thus I would never have constructed the sentence that way, and even after you explain it it still seems strange.

Once you tell me that la guerre is definite and la folie amorphous, then sure, I'd know to use the articles that way. But I would never have guessed this. It seems you have to know how the nouns feel to a French speaker; you can't simply compute the right answer from the concepts.

When something is frozen is there still movement at the subatomic level (electrons orbiting etc) or does that cease too?

Nothing ever stops moving. Ever. To do so would violate the uncertainty principle. So we'll always have time.

But as the Universe approaches 100% entropy, how would you determine the order of events? The only mechanism we have of determining the arrow of time is by measuring increases in entropy.

> To do so would violate the uncertainty principle.

Not if we don't know the exact location of the particle, right?

But you always know at least some information about the location. For example you know it's in the visible universe, which puts an upper bound to its location, and therefor it's momentum.

But don't forget the Time<-->Energy uncertainty. If you know the energy of a particle very exactly you don't know how time will pass for it.

There is a fourth quantity of some kind - a falling ball is not where it was a moment ago, and you want to be able to express that. The exact nature of this "fourth quantity" is up for debate, though.

So it's like we humans have made up time and it's acting as a mental block to truly understanding what's really going on. Time as a man-made metaphor gives a meaning to our world in a way analogous to religion?

The above thoughts are purely my real-time ramblings, I am clueless but interested :)

We don't understand exactly how gravity works, but I'm pretty confident that being "enlightened" will not allow you to fly. Similarly, although the exact nature of time is apparently up for debate, I'm pretty sure it's not entirely man-made.

I may give out about something in my country and say how it's so much better in that other country but if someone from there is here and does the same I feel like saying it's a wonder they didn't stay there so if it's so bloody good.

So it is quite possible that you may indeed agree with that foreigner on the issue being discussed and yet wonder why s/he didn't stay home... So much for open, frank dialogues!

In my case, I have plenty of criticisms of my own of the US and tend to have foreign friends (in part because I grew up in a bicultural home). So I have certainly had conversations with foreigners where I agreed with some of their criticisms. And I have also had friends who lived in a country where the country as a whole had a negative view of the US and where the US had a negative view of their country and it wasn't some big personal issue between us. In some cases, it was treated more like an in-joke. In this particular case, my friend was so consistently critical in a very ugly way and so rabid about it that I did often feel like "If you think all Americans are pure evil simply for being born here, why on earth are you friends with me? How sick is that?"

This was an extremely good friend. I still miss them. One of the things that stops me from trying to reach out to them is that I don't know how to get past these issues. And I'm not interested in being someone's "whipping boy" for their personal bugaboo. I don't think there is anything healthy or constructive about something like that.