For the little bit I've been playing FreeCiv, a free and open source redesign of the Civilization series, particularly to give it a stronger multiplayer component. I've always loved the concept behind the series - to take control of a society at the dawn of history and haul it up by the bootstraps to modernity and beyond. I was just never a fan of ( Read more... )

Piddling around the internet on my day off when I should be writing the next brilliant science fiction novel (currently pages of plotless background), I tend to come across lots of wonderful gems that show how the large majority of us have not learned to properly interpret the media around us. That any news is never the full story and that feeding ( Read more... )

I found this article the number 0.9999_. As much as normal reasoning would dictate, the number is equal to 1 rather than infinitely never reaching 1. Here's a little algerbra to show you how this is so.

x = 0.999…
10x = 9.999…
10x − x = 9.999… − 0.999…
9x = 9
x = 1

I found this little gem over at Relicforums which I am now a moderator since August. I've been working my way up the ranks for nearly three years now. Well this is an excellent example of perfect grammatical structure with no actual meaning. I challenge you to find out what the hell he is trying to say. When someone does his job, a good job, the ( Read more... )

I was bored while researching the Nizari Ismaili Assassins of the Middle Ages (not as interesting as you might think) for an essay and got side tracked into mystery religions, particularly the Odin BrotherhoodSo many of these completely modern synthetic belief systems try to claim some sort of lineage to the ancient past, this one going back as far ( Read more... )

I found an amusing little essay talking about the evils of chess. It was a written as a satirical response to the moral panic associated with role-playing games during the late 1980s and early 1990s. At one time, role-playing games (in particular, Dungeons and Dragons) were the subversive immorality facing society at the time. They were blamed for ( Read more... )

Well in a religious debate over here I ran into a gross violation of the most fundamental law of logic, the law of non-contradiction: that two opposing thoughts cannot both be true at the same time.

Here's the post:I never felt any affinity to Christianity. I have a problem with people who cannot see mythology for what it is ( Read more... )

I got bored so I solved the Problem of Evil today. I am ever so much a genius. It’s also another Philosophy of Religion question and easily refutable, so I can’t lay claim yet to that genius I know I possess. Man, there is nothing like self-aggrandisement. The problem of evil has plagued philosophers since Epicurus and continues to plague them ( Read more... )

I have a bit of a poser for anyone who knows a bit about philosophy. Which, I think almost all of you do since we’re all here at King’s. Basically this is my spin on the foreknowledge conundrum, which basically put is: How is human action free if an omniscient God knows what that action will be? Divine foreknowledge has always posed a problem to ( Read more... )

Man some Japanese fellow got owned by the Tokyo stock market's computer today. Instead of selling one share for 610,000 yen, he sold 610,000 shares for 1 yen, and then the computer wouldn't let him change it. So the fellow lost $225 million because wasn't paying attention to the number he entered. Looks like his only option is Seppuku(ritual ( Read more... )