Have you ever talked about your end? Creepy, huh?

[Art Blade]

 

I know that Shakespeare passage -- I love those "struts and frets his hour upon the stage" / "a tale told by an idiot" / "signifying nothing" bits We had to read and interpret Shakespeare quite a bit back in the day. We even read Romeo and Juliet in an old English version. It was incomprehensible to put it mildly. The pages were composed of two parts. The inner part was the original text, the outer part full of notes that helped translate it to modern English.

[fragger]

That's a good quote, but I have trouble getting my head around some of Shakespeare's writings. Some of it I get, but with some of it I'm like, "Uh... What?"

On the matter of contentment - whenever I get the blues, which isn't often, I find the best way to snap myself out of it is to count my blessings. I think about my situation compared to that of a great many people in the world and it makes my own problems seem pretty darned trivial.

It's easy to get complacent about things when you live in a good civilized country where you're not going hungry, where there are all sorts of welfare and support organizations in place to help you should you need it, where there are first-class medical facilities available, where there is a dedicated and professional police force which isn't brutally corrupt, where there are no wars being fought and no civil strife taking place, where you're not enslaved or in bondage, or where you live in constant terror and wondering whether the next day is going to be your last. If I get exasperated and curse when the washing machine goes on the blink or the toaster burns my bread, I stop and think to myself, "What are you going on about, you damned fool? You're lucky to have electrical appliances, fresh running water and plenty of good food!"

Just this week I urgently had to have another skin tag removed from under my right arm (I had one removed from under my left arm a couple of months back, so I'm smoothed out on both sides now ). It started causing me pain late on Tuesday, so on Wednesday morning I had it examined at our community medical centre (which is about a three-minute walk from where I live) and on Thursday they removed it. It cost me just $27 thanks to our Medicare system (like a great many Aussies, I do not have private health insurance). Had I been living in some poverty-stricken third-world backwater, I would possibly have been in increasingly excruciating pain until the growth became infected and killed me in an agonizingly protracted death before I could get any kind of decent medical attention. People in some countries can die from a tiny infected cut on a finger for want of a simple Band-Aid and clean water to wash with.

So I always try to look on the positive side of things, and when it comes down to it, that really isn't difficult in a country like this. There is always someone worse off than myself - in fact, there are an awful lot of people in the world worse off than myself. Millions of them.

[Art Blade]

"People are complaining that they don't have bread to eat? Well, why don't they eat cake, then?" 

[BinnZ]

"People are complaining that they don't have bread to eat? Well, why don't they eat cake, then?" 

I am usually too busy focussing on beautiful things like art, pretty women, good food and cool things to do and goals to obtain. I hang on to life.
We are born to live and connect to what's around us. Do what we are good at and strafe forward. We have the ability to plan and look forward, and look backwards to learn from what we did and what happened. I do have my moments of thought. I love thinking, but even in thinking I'm carried away by lively things.
I live. And I don't want to die. I will probably be shocked when my end is nearing. We'll see when it is my time. Not now, that's for sure

[PZ]

"People are complaining that they don't have bread to eat? Well, why don't they eat cake, then?" 

Off with her head!

[Art Blade]

well spotted

[spoiler text= Marie-Antoinette]
There are several sources that come to one conclusion: it is unlikely that she said that.

http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/did-marie-antoinette-really-say-let-them-eat-cake

It's one of the most famous quotes in history. At some point around 1789, when being told that her French subjects had no bread, Marie-Antoinette (bride of France's King Louis XVI) supposedly sniffed, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"—"Let them eat cake." With that callous remark, the queen became a hated symbol of the decadent monarchy and fueled the revolution that would cause her to (literally) lose her head several years later. But did Marie-Antoinette really say those infuriating words? Not according to historians. Lady Antonia Fraser, author of a biography of the French queen, believes the quote would have been highly uncharacteristic of Marie-Antoinette, an intelligent woman who donated generously to charitable causes and, despite her own undeniably lavish lifestyle, displayed sensitivity towards the poor population of France.

That aside, what's even more convincing is the fact that the "Let them eat cake" story had been floating around for years before 1789. It was first told in a slightly different form about Marie-Thérèse, the Spanish princess who married King Louis XIV in 1660. She allegedly suggested that the French people eat "la croûte de pâté" (or the crust of the pâté). Over the next century, several other 18th-century royals were also blamed for the remark, including two aunts of Louis XVI. Most famously, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau included the pâté story in his "Confessions" in 1766, attributing the words to "a great princess" (probably Marie-Thérèse). Whoever uttered those unforgettable words, it was almost certainly not Marie-Antoinette, who at the time Rousseau was writing was only 10 years old—three years away from marrying the French prince and eight years from becoming queen.

[/spoiler]

[BinnZ]

... and 13 years away from being 'guillotinado'

Nice little detail of European history there, I didn't know that qoute
When I read PZ's reply I thought of the queen of spades in Alice's Wonderland

[Art Blade]

 

[PZ]

 

[Art Blade]

Just Cause 2 - Player Death by impact - Point Cloud Visualisation

creepy and beautiful. Imagine, ALL you SEE is death..  painted by 11 million deaths..

Uploaded on 5 May 2011

A visualisation of the spatial clustering of death by impact in the videogame, Just Cause 2. The video is made up of over 11.3 million player death events, specifically, death by impact with terrain or objects. See http://jimblackhurst.com for more info.

[Dweller_Benthos]

So that is a model of the map where each point is where a player fell to their death? How do they track this?

[PZ]

 

I still love this game 

[BinnZ]

It is a very cool map, but it seems awkward that so many players found their death against vertical walls of buildings

[Art Blade]

you can smack against a wall with a paraglider or a plane.. anything goes 

D_B, not only "fell" but had some kind of impact with any kind of object or terrain. How? Data mining at its best.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting. So, the game keeps track of how and where each player died, and by what means, and all that gets sent somewhere?