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neomage
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Name: Shaneal
Country: United States
State: Illinois
Birthday: 5/28/1986
Gender: Male
Interests: Personal: Reading, tennis, philosophy, chess, sleeping, driving people crazy (it's actually a good thing, the more i try to annoy you the more i feel comfortable with you)
Academic: High perfomance networks, *nixes(esp. OS X), c++, vhdl
Expertise: I wish i had an expertise ... is uber leet slacking an expertise? no? what about avoiding consequences of my actions? damn, i dunno then
Occupation: Student
Industry: Engineering
Message: message me
AIM:  mewantcar
Member Since:
6/26/2003
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| I finally got around to putting up a real website at http://arantaday.com/blog/. I just gave in and used wordpress. I'll try to update once a week or so ...
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| In the US there are 2,270 children who were sentenced to life in prison without parole.
http://hrw.org/reports/2005/us1005/
In the US 7.5 Million adults are on probation, parole, or are currently incarcerated. That's about 1 in every 30 adults. Over 4 Million of those are for victimless crime.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/corr2tab.htm
The Sentencing Project
The US has less than 5% of the world's population, and over 25% of its prison population. We have the higher incarceration rates than China, USSR, Nazi Germany, or any other nation in the world has ever had.
Ziedenberg and Schiraldi, May 2000.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate
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| Richard Feynman, for you non-engineers, was arguably one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. Einstein, Pauli, Von Neuman and many others traveled across the country (or further - Pauli came from Switzerbland) to attend Feynman's first lecture. And this was when Feynman was 23!
Feynman had mastered differential equations by 15, helped create the first atomic bomb in his 20s, and won a Nobel prize for the work he did in Quantum Electrodynamics in his 30s.
But what truly set him apart was the breadth of his expertise: on a whim he spent a year working as a biologist and a year as a computer scientist and helped revolutionize both fields. He was a also a well respected musician and painter. His paintings, published under a pseudonym, were honored in an exhibition dedicated to his work. His drum playing was even on several popular recordings at the time.
Feynman was a true polymath - a modern renaissance man.
I tell you all this just so you understand what I mean when I say that all his other works pale in comparison to his greatest discovery. They were nothing.
The most impressive thing Feynman ever did was to discover a surefire
method to get girls to sleep with him.
I present you with (an abridged version) of the secret from his best
selling autobiography, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman":
(note that 'Dick' is Richard Feynman)
**********************************EXCERPT***********************************
"The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn't want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy's motives so well, it's easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
"Therefore," he continued, "under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don't buy a girl anything--not even a package of cigarettes--until you've asked her if she'll sleep with you, and you're convinced that she will, and that she's not lying."
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
[Skip to that night at the bar]
After the first act my friend says, "Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman." I say "Hi" and keep looking at the show.
A few moments later Ann says to me, "Why don't you come and sit at the table here with us?" I think to myself, "Typical bitch: he's buying her drinks, and she's inviting somebody else to the table." I say, "I can see fine from here."
A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn't long before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!
Later that evening I'm sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant's back is toward me and she's facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, "Some bitch! Now she's doing this trick on the lieutenant even!"
Then I get a good idea: I don't look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what's going on. So her trick didn't work for long.
A few minutes later she's not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, "I'd like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?"
I think to myself, "You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can't do it permanently, or you won't get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along." So I say coolly, "I'll walk with you." So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a café, and she says, "I've got an idea--let's get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them."
The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the café and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them. As we're going out of the café, I think to myself, "Something's wrong: too many sandwiches!"
On the way to her motel she says, "You know, I won't have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over..
I think to myself, "See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn't asked her anything, and now I know I'm gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher."
I stop suddenly and I say to her, "You . . . are worse than a WHORE!"
"Whaddya mean?"
"You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!"
"Well, you cheapskate!" she says. "If that's the way you feel, I'll pay you back for the sandwiches!"
I called her bluff: "Pay me back, then."
She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.
After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.
He said very calmly, "It's OK, Dick; it's all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she's gonna sleep with you tonight."
"What? "
"That's right," he said confidently; "she's gonna sleep with you. I know that."
"But she isn't even here! She's at her place with the lieu--"
"It's all right."
Two o'clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn't appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure.
Just as we're coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, "Come on, let's go over to my place.
The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!
When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and suddenly I got this idea: "Let's go to a bar and have a drink," I said.
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks--but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
**********************************END EXCERPT***********************************
And thus ends the most important lesson Feynman taught 
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