Clueless question; this style of swimming because it's really energy efficient? Because it makes less wake and is stealthier? Because it's harder to hit someone swimming like this in the water with gunfire?

Sorry, I'm not sure why they settled on this stroke...He says faster and more efficient---but---any engineers/biomechanics/hydrodynamics folks who tell tell me why?

"Aside from Tourette's, brain injuries, strokes, dementia , seizures and many other forms neurological damage can usher the onset of coprolalia as well. It is known to be caused by brain dysfunction, but the details are, as yet, hazy. One hypothesis, described by psychologist Timothy Jay in his book "Why We Curse" (John Benjamins Pub Co. 2000), suggests that it's caused by damage to the amygdala, a region of the brain that normally mitigates anger and aggression. Because cursing is a form of verbal aggression, amygdala damage could result in the inability to control aggression, including verbal aggression, or cursing."
http://www.livescience.com/33384-tourette-syndrome-people-curse-uncontrollably.html

I can tell you it was a piece of cake in and out of Australia ... we were warned the NZ security was especially attentive. I still don't get it. Different strokes

No matter, it was the trip of a lifetime to be sure!

I have only been restating my opinion slightly differently to correct those who MISREAD my posts for the last day....like you

Yup, when everyone else in the thread disagrees with what you are saying, or how you are saying it, or the other things you're doing, it's obviously everyone else that has the problem... =)

No, I'm more worried about what the movement actually does, and feminism only works for women's equality.

Wow, talk about painting the world in broad strokes. I guess all Catholics are pedo's too?

You people were all triggered and apparently can't read because of your anger.

*giggle* Yup, it's everyone else. Not you.

PS: The bold (by which I think you mean the capitalized) was not PASSIVE aggressive, the edit was.

No, the bold that I put bold html tags around so it showed up as bold...

And I'm the one that apparently has reading problems. X D

I'm just done with this constant sniping by people who can't or won't read. Bye.

Don't let your ego hit you in the ass on the way out the door. /waves!

ps. You have far more in common with the 3rd wave feminazi's than you would like to think.

Edit: pps. Downvote me more baby, just shows you for the petty little sook that you are. ; )

Have you seen the list of Sanders' picks for the DNC platform? Some members of the Black Misleadership Class must be furious to see Cornel West being given another pulpit. And McKibben... some people are going to stroke out for sure.

I see a lot of entertainment on the horizon.

I remember studying algorithm time complexities, where ideally the time complexity of an algorithm is a polynomial function -- like O(n)=n^2, or even O(n)=n^100. Most things that seem really hard at first are exponential, O(n)=2^n or whatever. *IF* somebody gets a brilliant stroke of inspiration, those exponential time complexity algorithms sometimes get tweaked to become logarithmic, like O(n)=log(n).

But almost never does a problem that seems really hard at first (exponential) get some brilliant solution that makes it jump into easy (polynomial).

I think we get so caught up in the abstract concepts and semantics that we tend to overlook what seems like common sense: some problems are simply harder than others, with no "magic bullet" solution. So, I think that P is almost certainly NOT equal to NP. But that quote around the 10 minute mark puts that in a pretty eloquent way that is easy to understand even to the layman -- a trait which is entirely too uncommon in academia.

BUT, I must admit that the few occasions when I studied an algorithm that seemed like it obviously couldn't get any better than exponential time complexity, only to be shown a brilliant outside-the-box solution that brought it down to logarithmic time complexity definitely taught me some humility. So, you never know.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I don't think dogs liked to be embraced, but they do liked to be patted and stroked.

Shock seems more likely to me. As for the swimming, stroke survivor isn't out of the question, nor is any chest/shoulder operation.

Looks almost like a stroke victim of some sort.

"Doing these things as a prelude to proselytizing means they aren't altruistic..."

Altruism isn't the right word. When people help others to their hurt, that is called agape love, a word the Christian community has owned for 2000 years. You're right of course, that more than a few churches out there are always trying to figure out how to get more members, more money etc. But that isn't all the churches, or even nearly so. For instance the churches in this community dont care who goes where; they all work together and no one is taking the credit for it. This is just one counter example to the broad brush strokes you're painting here.

I think you need a little more nuance here too, newtboy; for instance, would you say it is wrong for atheists to do good deeds in the name of atheism? Or, for the red cross to air commercials showing their accomplishments so they could raise more money to expand their mission in the world?

"And yet, here you are calling attention to yourself (and them), so you proved your statement wrong by stating it publicly. Oops! ;-)"

I didn't mention what I do newtboy, but I have no problem calling attention to the righteous who glorify God through their lives.

"Churches are for profit institutions.."

The church according to the bible is a non-profit organization. Whether churches in America reflect that or not is another question entirely. I know for my church, and almost any other church, you can request to see how the church spends its money year by year. None of the churches I have dealings with are making "profits"

"Once again I would ask, why do you question your god's clear wish that I (and others) not believe in him..."

Jesus Christ died for our sins, yours and mine. God already demonstrated His love for us while we were sinners, now the only question is, will you reciprocate? The insanity of the question posed to Stephan Fry, ie what would you say to God, is exposed by the answer "How dare you!" by Stephan. It seems that people believe God is a man who needs to explain Himself, who has something to hide. Yet, Stephan and every other human being have a lot to hide; the brutal and ugly truth of how we have all lived our lives here.

It's easy for a man to say to people who know nothing about him that he will shake his fist at God when they meet. Yet, what will he do when all of his lawless deeds are exposed and the secrets he has kept from everyone are brought to light? All the fight will go out of him immediately, this I guarantee you. Yet, this in itself is still ridiculous, considering that even merely being in Gods presence is enough to make the most hardened sinner fall to his knees and weep uncontrollably. But people won't be weeping because God loves them on that day, they will be weeping and gnashing their teeth after being confronted by the fact that they have missed the boat for eternity.

"Shirley.."

My name isn't Sherlock..

"Doing 100 good deeds and one incredibly evil deed makes one evil. No church in history has ever reached that level of goodness. Churches are evil. I hope that clears things up."

I'm glad you understand what I have been trying to explain to the sift for years; a relative goodness is no goodness at all. If you set fire to someones home, and then built 27 orphanages, would people call you good? Why is it then that people think that all of our good deeds should cause God to forgive us for a single sin? This is the reason Jesus died for us, because we can't earn Gods forgiveness and our good deeds can't erase our bad ones. Could you ever go to court and say "your honor, although I commited this crime I have done over 1000 hours of community service in my lifetime, so please dismiss the case; will that ever happen? That wouldn't be justice, and if God threw out our case without true justice, He wouldn't be a just judge.

What would I say about churches who have done evil? These are institutions; the true church is the body of Christ, of which every born again believer is a member of. That is what is happening in my community, is that no one cares about the institution of the church; they are just being the church. The reward is simply this, to serve God honorably by living a sacrificial life predicated on sacrificial love.

I missed this one years back.
To think, I actually thought for a moment that I might vote for him...but that thought evaporated long before he chose a VP candidate.
It was really like he had a stroke, or was replaced with a pod person part way through the election. So sad.

"Automatically ok"? Not necessarily. But in cases where it makes sense, at a stretch even "plot sense" for the character to be there; yeah, I think that is OK.

The Last Samurai isn't a documentary. But, the general historical justification for Tom Cruise's character being in Japan is pretty much valid. Meiji was interested in the West -- clothes, technology, weapons, and military. He actually did hire Westerners to train his army, although from what I read it sounds like they were German, French, and Italian rather than American. Still, the movie portrays the general situation/setting with at least *decent* broad-strokes historical accuracy. LOADS of movies deviate from even this degree of historical accuracy *way* more without drawing complaints; particularly if their main purpose is entertainment and not education / documentary.


Your hypothetical reverse movie makes some valid criticisms. Even though it would have been historically possible for a Westerner to be in Japan at the time -- even to be involved with training a Western-style military -- it would be unlikely for such a person to get captured, run into a Shogun that speaks English, become a badass (or at least passable) samurai warrior, and end up playing a major role in politics and significantly influencing Emperor Meiji.

My defense against those criticisms is that, for me at least, the movie is entertaining; which is kinda the point. Your "Union Samurai" movie might be equally entertaining and therefore given an equal pass on historical inaccuracies by me.

The whole characters as a "lens through which the audience can appreciate a culture/history outside their own" issue is (slightly) more weighty to me. I don't think those are often necessary, but I don't feel like my intelligence is being insulted if the movie maker feels that they are in order to sell tickets.

I love the Chinese historical novel "Three Kingdoms". A few years ago, John Wu made the movie "Red Cliff", mostly about one particular battle in the historical period portrayed in that book. For the Chinese audience, Wu made the movie in two parts, summed up about four and a half hours long. For the US / West, he made a version trimmed to just over two hours. Why? Because he (and a team of market researchers, I'm sure) knew that very few Westerners would go to see a 4+ hour long movie, entirely in Mandarin Chinese (with subtitles), about a piece of Chinese history from ~1800 years ago that very few in the West have ever heard of or know anything about.

I think the full 4+ hour long movie is great. In my personal top 10 favorite movies of all time, ahead of most Hollywood stuff. But I also understand that there's no way that movie would appeal to all but a tiny, tiny fraction of Western viewers in that full-on 4+ hour format. But, even though I personally think the cut-down 2 hour "US" version is drastically inferior to the full cut, I am glad that he made it because it gives a suitably accurate introduction to the subject matter to more people in the West (just like the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dynasty Warriors" videogames do), and makes that tiny, tiny fraction of Western people that know anything about it a little less tiny. While being entertaining along the way.

For other movies, sometimes the best way that a filmmaker can sell a movie to an audience that otherwise might not accept it (at least in large enough numbers to justify the production costs) may be to insert one of these "lens" characters for the audience to identify with. I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with that. It might not work for movies that are taking a more hardline approach to historical / contextual accuracy (ie., if Tom Cruise showed up in "Red Cliff" in circa 200AD China), but outside of those situations, if that is what the studio thinks it will take to sell tickets... Cool.

The Last Samurai is, like @ChaosEngine said, a movie primarily about an outsider learning a new culture (and accepting his own past). He serves as that lens character, but actually the hows and whys of his character arc are the main points of interest in the movie, at least to me.

I'm sure that an awesome, historically accurate movie could be made dealing with young Emperor Meiji, Takamori (who Katsumoto seems to be based on in The Last Samurai), and the influence of modernization on Japanese culture at the time. It could be made with no Western "lens" character, no overt influence by any particular individual Westerner, and be entirely in Japanese. But that movie wouldn't be The Last Samurai, wouldn't be attempting to serve the same purpose as The Last Samurai, and very likely wouldn't sell as many tickets (in the US) as The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise!) did. That wouldn't make it a worse movie, just an apple instead of an orange.

your stance about veganism is very similar to the climate deniers in that you choose to buy into myths and lies as opposed to looking into the facts youself. the documentary i posted considers the issues of local, and so called "small" farms also. they are no more humane or less cruel than so called "factory farming" and are every but as inefficient and environmentally devastating. "factory farming" is a mere symptom and the root cause is the commodification of sentient non-human animals, just as in the past humans used to commodify other human beings of certain races. for example here is an article on the myth of "humane" animal farming: http://freefromharm.org/animal-products-and-ethics/factory-farming-alternative-farming/

the fact that climate change is driven in large part but the raising of non-human animals for food is without question a well documented fact. the human population is without a doubt a major factor but above this issue is the fact that it requires MANY times the resources to produce on calorie of flesh, dairy or eggs than it does to produce one calorie of plant based food. are you aware that in the USA, around 80% of crops grown are fed to the 10 billion farmed animals who are murdered every year for food? it has been estimated that 800 million humans could be fed on the crops which are grown for farmed animals alone. these issues are also gone into detail in the documentary.

as far as "tugging on your heart strings" goes, how is having compassion and empathy for anyone who suffers a bad thing? no one would be questioning it if the victims were human children but since they are "only" cows, pigs chickens and fishes (all of whom feel pain just like you or i do, perhaps even more so), suddenly violence against them is considered a matter of personal choice. the bottom line is that if you would not wish to expeience something yourself, it is never moral or ethical to force others to experience it, especially not in the name of a momentary taste sensation.

finally, here is a quote which i think best summarizes the situation:
“Aren’t humans amazing? They kill wildlife – birds, deer, all kinds of cats, coyotes, beavers, groundhogs, mice and foxes by the million in order to protect their domestic animals and their feed. Then they kill domestic animals by the billion and eat them. This in turn kills people by the million, because eating all those animals leads to degenerative – and fatal – health conditions like heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and cancer. So then humans spend billions of dollars torturing and killing millions more animals to look for cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals. Meanwhile, few people recognize the absurdity of humans, who kill so easily and violently, and once a year send out cards praying for “Peace on Earth.”~ David Coates

Sadly, I expect the Republicans will agree with Cruz and block ANY nominee Obama puts forth in the hope that they will retain control of the legislative, and grasp control of both the executive and judicial in one stroke.
His passing (and likely not being replaced) should have every single American itching to get to the voting booth. This election just got even MORE consequential for the direction our country goes from here...and I didn't think that was possible.

Women, minorities, individual voters, and those who like drinkable water and breathable air should all rejoice. This single man has held our country back from advancements (social, political, or ecological) more than any other individual person in history. He's the one responsible for the legal concept of 'corporate personhood' and passing 'citizens united' which took our broken political system and repeatedly smashed it in the teeth with a sledgehammer.
Good riddance in my opinion, I'm not the least bit sad about his death, but I am a bit worried what might happen from here.
*promote a possible glimmer of hope that our country might course correct now....it's a dim glimmer, but more 'light' than we've had for quite a while now.

Quads have quite a bit of ground clearance. I wonder if letting it roll over on top of him (gently, not letting it bounce) would have been an option. Piled up the wood to either side of him in case the clearance was too tight.

Also, throwing his helmet down at the trail was a stroke of genius or a gargantuan portion of luck...