ascuttlefish

Essays and aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer

John A. MacDonald: The young politician by Donald Creighton

Comedy of errors by Wm. Shakespeare

Paradise Lost by John Milton

It's very well done, too. Great character development and a gripping story arc. From my layperson's perspective, the science of orbital debris collection is taken very seriously.

The opening sequence in the first episode powerfully illustrates the speed and devastation caused by the intersection of the orbits of a simple bolt and a passenger liner.

Nauseous has at least two meanings, one of which is causing nausea. The other is being inclined to vomit.

Yes: http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/01/18/deliciously-creamy-t...

The photos are darkened for me.

Thanks for the reply. I always thought the Russians had been lost more people, materiel, etc. than anyone else and were pretty much done in by the end of the war. (I'm not sure where I got that idea, now that I examine it.)

IIRC, the Soviet Union didn't test their first bomb until 1949, well after the war ended. Are you suggesting that the Soviets stopped their advance because of the American bomb?

Edit: Oh, I just noticed the bit in your comment about the 1950s/60s. So your contention is that the war might have reignited had there been no atomic bomb?

Did you mean damp squib?

Also http://thebrowser.com/

A search for alcholism gave me "How to brew: Everything you need to know to brew beer right the first time." Oops!

Neat idea! I like it.

My favourite reminder of the importance of not wasting time is On the Shortness of Life by the Roman Stoic Seneca: http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e...

Here's a NYT article on Eben Moglen and the Freedom Box: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/nyregion/16about.html

I agree with you, but practically, not all information can be kept.

There are teams of people right now deciding what is 'good' (i.e. what is kept) and what is shredded. They're called archivists, and, using their judgement in conjunction with government-created records retention schedules, they're culling both government and private records. This culled information is removed for a variety of reasons, space being one of the most prominent. By such means is the pool of available primary sources that will form the basis for future histories created by underpaid and underfunded but well-meaning bureaucrats.

Sounds like the same situation obtains not only in the dead-tree archives but also in the digital ones. Sigh. I wish people would prioritize our cultural legacy first instead of last when it comes to funding.

Probably not, but if everyone plays like it is...

I read the paper editions of The Economist and Macleans and I read CBC news online and listen to the hourly news on the radio.

I've chosen a couple sources that I enjoy. I don't worry too much about missing much or whether I'm getting the whole story; I assume that what I miss will either become important enough to crop up in one of my sources or it won't and that the whole story is impossible to get.

I think the reason the slants are not very different between sources is the fundamental laziness of journalists who rely heavily on material provided by government and corporate press releases.

That is definitely one of many ways a person can self-destruct, and it is indeed related to being wealthy and perhaps famous. But there are other motives that could explain suicides that don't involve money. I'm not saying they suicidal tendencies and wealth orthogonal (disclosure: I had to look that up :), but they're not always, uh, parallel either. Say for example you have someone who's been heavily goal oriented their entire life, but when they achieve their goals--of wealth and fame, or maybe just to be a hell of an entrepreneur, or something that has a side-effect of wealth and fame--they are completely unprepared for the emptiness and lack of purpose they now face. It could be argued that they face a despair unrelated to their wealth and riches but rather to the way they structured and lived their lives. (There's some interesting passages in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest about this.)

I don't disagree with you w/r/t wealth being a possible contributor to the motivations for suicide, but I believe that there are as many reasons a person could kill themselves as we can imagine, only some of which might involve their richness and famousness. Suicide is a dark, multi-tentacled thing.

Assuming of course that there are no specific reasons unrelated to money that could drive people to blackest despair. That a person is rich and famous is likely to be, in my humble and unexpert opinion, tangential to the problems that might make them suicidal. The tendency toward suicide is too complicated to generalize to a point about riches, I think.

I find it hard to believe that there's One Reason the rich and famous commit suicide. I think this essay reveals a fair bit more about the author and his take on richness and famousness than it does about the true motivations of the suicidal.