rocket_scientist

Me too. Not just the obvious bits neither. Roma is phenomenal and unique. Tuscany is as good as everyone says it is although we far preferred Siena more than Firenze. In the north, Milano and Torino are just fantastic. But off the beaten tracks, there's some serious magic to be found. We were in Lecce for a week. Nobody speaks English so the opposite of a tourist trap. Cheap as chips, a genuine authentic part of the country, complete with natural political incorrectness. The chocolate ice cream in the Gelateria was called Obama when we were there, I kid you not.

The cost of this additional tier of government in Brussels alone outweighs any benefit. The rest of Europe will continue to trade with Scotland if we were not in the EEC. It's a wholly political alliance. Trade and economic alliances would remain irrespective of EEC membership.

I agree that Farage is penile and that UKIP attract divot votes. I also expect them to bomb at the election. But one thing I do agree with him is on Europe. I wanted a truly independent Scotland, out of the demands and the expense of the EEC but knew that was never going to happen. When Farage as a MEP attacked the system in that famous speech, I was hugely optimistic that here was a guy who said it like it is and had the balls to confront the real issue facing global politics. So him turning into such an insular racist knob was disappointing. He's also a divisive cunt, his continuing use of Hadrian's wall being a low blow, deliberately engineered.

Yet again the women spake sense and the men are proven to be totally insane.

Walking down the street with a coffee is a modern phenomenon. It's a shite one. Most of these practitioners are fuds. Other fuds travel across town just to get a free coffee and moan at the prices of stuff they didn't buy.

I wonder what the reason is for French and Italian bakery products being readily available throughout the whole of the UK and yet the lard-ridden, fat-filled rowie never made it south of Stonehaven? You get what you pay for.

You're a fucking knob mate. Job done.

Your insinuation of my nihilism or equally destructive objectives is unacceptable. Run away old man. Sad old man. Give us ONE thing you have contributed to society?

Listen to yourself. See how your pride has been pricked. Did you not stick in at school? Did you not hear what Shakespeare had to say on the subject? Or were you you too disinterested to engage? Maybe you knew it all back then? Now you turn on me? You nae liking the mirror held up to yer face? KNOW IT ALL CUNT.

That's a good point. The distinction between reality and not, the need for humility in everything. I accept this. But I'm not in the business of being humble right now. I'm trying to teach you where you can grow.

Good strategy. Pass the buck to others. Don't introspect. They are more likely to consider you in a favourable light. Or at least feed back to you in such terms. Ignore the reality.

There's the key. You think you get by but if you're honest with yourself, you are distorted by frustration. This was all due to your fixed mindset. Carol's work will revolutionise the world. In recruitment, in team-building, in management, in sport, in everything. You don't even have the imagination to look at it.

Surely if two people fail to understand each other then the possibilities are only two, or a combination of both? Then you go into the reasons why to find many other possibilities but there are only two possibilities when one communicates to another and the other failed to comprehend. This is basic. As Steve Jobs said; That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

If a person fails to understand another person then there are only two possible reasons. The receiver or the deliverer. An inability to comprehend or an inability to express. Binary thinking again. The person not understanding has an attitude problem or an intellect issue. The person failing to express properly has communication problems or is delivering messages that are not understandable. He is mad possibly. Interesting how you fail to understand and immediately think it's not you. It must be not you, eh? Then again, I have form for the lastly-expressed possibility

No it wasn't but it was an honest response to what I considered to be a throughly stupid sentiment. We agree that Trident and CERN are thoroughly different expenditures. You are right that the commitment to war (2% GDP NATO directive) is less likely to be diverted towards the basics and I agree that we should most definitely be investing in scientific understanding. I also understand that we already have the capacity to feed the world and that we choose not to, indeed the regimes in third world countries are notorious for spending western aid money on new Mercedes for themselves. People have been anaesthetised by the billions the politicians talk about. A billion = 1,000 million = one million x 1,000 pounds of course. How many millions of people could be kept from poverty and from dying unnecessarily from just a fraction of the waste and the mis-spending of public funds? Forget other countries for a minute. Look at the UK alone. Consider the social deprivation and council neglect leading to hundreds of thousands of kids growing up into useless adults, unable to contribute to society, a drain to the welfare state and costing us heaps in crime, in healthcare etc. It's the waste, the corruption and the total absence of prioritising the "human goals" (as you call them) I'm talking about. Just because a few employees get a job at average wage doesn't justify a spend if that spend is unjustifiable. On war-mongering alone, how many BILLIONS of public funds have been diverted over the decades into the hands of private individuals, whether security companies, arms and equipment providers etc. And at what cost? Why are the munitions and security personnel companies providers allowed to charge the government much more than they normally would. Why is the amount of money being given to these associated companies way more than is reasonably necessary? That's not even considering the oil and natural resources thefts going down that breeds hatred towards the hypocritical west, the US in particular and it's drive for world hegemony being understood by almost everyone else in the world. Let's not even go there in relation to banks and the institutions that steal openly from the sheeple, ably supported by the political classes and the associated press, our whole "way of life", the famous "our values" that Obama and Cameron spout. Even in the NHS, the waste means that we employ way too many no-productives and agency personnel (someone's getting rich from over-charging) and they are being charged two and three times for simple services, whether data, stationary, IT, even a lock on a door. The tendering process is a joke. It was ever thus. Transparency we are supposed to have. Obfuscation is what we get. Milne builds in places that the people don't want him to build in. He invested in people and relationships to get his way, allegedly. Politicians get bought. Councillors get bought and the whole time, public money gets stolen, nobody gives a fuck about his fellow man and we feel powerless to do anything about it.

Whoa. Trident is a whole different ballpark, not even the same planet. In fact, the goals of war-mongering and scientific understanding are complete opposites. Forget the public funds being fraudulently diverted by government(s) policy. This is about justified spending. The end justifying the means. You can't justify fraud by sharing out the crumbs amongst a handful of employees. What about the millions who starve and live with no hope? Your blindness is as culpable and neglectful to their plight as is the wilful fraud and deceit. Wake the fuck up.

Very interesting Madrid conflict in progress. Way too much facial hair going on however. Very disappointing.

Good fun for sure but within reason. I can't see that CERN is worth the money because the fundamental philosophy on which they seek to experiment is such a mindwank and so ridiculously tenuous by any truly robust and free imagination that the money would have been better spent feeding the poor. Or educating and feeding them. I am fully aware of the contradictory possibilities within my opinion on this but to me it is fully reconciled. Hawking has a lot to answer for!

Don't listen to that garlogie girner, pheen! I wisna slagging ye... as you kent fine. It goes to show the individuality of individuals and the individuality of our minds, the way we think, what we think. Whilst I personally care nothing for the composition of a nanosecond even, nor does the speed of light and the inter-relationships between certain "fixed variables" amaze me (it taks an imagination to get that een), the concept of time itself is a fundamental staple of our existence and not just for the obvious reasons. I actually care less than nothing for posters who contribute nothing, spouting only negativity and offering nothing of interest and therefore my neutral interest i.e. not giving a fuck about the fitever is significantly less offensive to me than fixed mindset fuckheads, of which the human population is majority populous, unfortunately. Time is different for different scenarios. The eternity of being contrasts with the finite existence of the body but the fool considers the whole by limiting himself to only what he can reference. The circularity of "life", of consciousness is immortally celebrated in Billy Shakespeare's "All the World's a Stage" whereas Buddhism recognises this truth within its core. This is different entirely to T S Eliot's lines in Little Gidding, Four Quartets: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time Time is a wonderful staple but it's what within it that interests us that is interesting... to us. I'm not a believer that string theory will ever come to be accepted, wonderful a concept as it undoubtedly is. Nor do I think that man will ever time-travel, forward or back but having the humility to know - or to think we know as it's not an absolute but continuously organic - our own limitations as a species is nae a bad starting point, particularly when one does not sacrifice the ultimate no-limits growth mindset thinking in recognising all possibilities. Opinions. Facts. One changes more frequently than the other but neither are fixed. Time certainly isn't fixed either but our knowledge of it is very much in its infancy and possibly forever unknowable, the "possibly" being key.

I can hardly imagine that 99%+ of people would give a second thought to considerations of the definitions let alone the nature of time. The possible reasons why they wouldn't is twofold. Or a duality of twofolds. Since that made zero sense whatsoever to anyone other than me, let me share. Imagine four large letters standing together, like in a poster or a PowerPoint slide in my case last month. I and A on the top row, A and I on the second row so you have an arrangement of a square of four letters, two A's and two I's. The reason why most people aren't even looking at a subject is simple. They're either naturally interested or apathetic. INTEREST or APATHY. Secondly, aspects of themselves which determine their curiosity is their ATTITUDE and their INTELLECT. This Binary Thinking is great, isn't it? Attitude is the will to learn. Intellect is the capacity to learn. The following slide I put up had F oblique G & H. Fixed or Growth mindsets (ref: Carol Dweck, Stanford) will determine interest whereas the intelligent student always has Humility in his or her approach to learning. On the subject of time-definition, when we start to fragment the unit known as a second into nine point something billion particles, I don't give a fuck.

Record breaking by Spieth. Phenomenal performance.

But if what were the case?

Sorry to hear that you are one of the millions who caught cancer Phee. Great to hear that treatment is concluding. Been mony a muckle since I seen ye. Diverting off topic away from the subject of retirement, a concept alien to my imagination, I would be interested to hear your views as a survivor of the big c. It's a terrible condition. When we get to our age, we all have experience of somebody in our families or friends who has suffered it. But what is it, is the question that interests me? In particular, is it a "modern" condition? Is the incidence now far greater in recent decades than centuries before? Is it a by-product of the way we live, what we eat, the environment in which we now live? Maybe it's always been there but was unidentified before? Interesting that they're now saying in their adverts that "we will beat cancer one day". Are you familiar with Aaron Schwartz, the young man killed by the U.S. government and his efforts to free knowledge, whereupon a 14 year old came up with a cure for pancreatic cancer, completely ignored by every institution apart from one solitary research assistant? A cynic might think there's money in cancer and diabetes. Perhaps millions are being sacrificed for profit? War gives greedy men the ability to steal on a grand scale. Our own populations are rich pickings for like minded cunts.

Directed to Big Al - You seem like you have something to say? Nobody ever blamed a keeper for a clean sheet. The bigger issue is that it is impossible for AFC to compete without a competent keeper. As it is obvious that we've not had competence between the sticks for a whole decade, the real question is why? Leighton is a wage we can ill afford. Anybody adding zero value to the cause shouldn't get paid for it. What is Milne's cause is a definition that requires clarification and the competence of Brown and McInnes with respect to their knowledge of goalkeeping in particular must be zero. We employ experts to run our club. The fact that they fail us is sickening. The fact that some of you can't see it is no surprise. The fact that our successive managers and Directors of Football - executive and non-executive - can't see it is totally unacceptable.

Eds Miliband and Balls are unelectable. The fact that Labour will get a third of the seats throughout the UK is a testament to habit, indoctrination and non-thinking. A system that is inherently corrupt and the absence of credible alternatives will drive some votes towards Labour but the idiots who vote Labour because their fathers and their grandfathers did and believing that they stand for something, even pretending that these public schoolboys represent socialist ideals and integrity are so thick it is arguable that they even have the intellectual capacity to vote. Balls himself is an intellectual gnat, as proved this week with his defective numeracy skills.