We are interrupting our corrupt politician coverage to bring you a more typical Razor post. Besides misspelled words, what exactly constitutes a typical Razor post? A little sarcasm, a little human rights, and lots of miscellaneous.
First, the GREAT news: Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here.
Liu, 54, is in prison for helping to organise and disseminate a document called Charter 08, which called for sweeping political reforms in China, including the freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion.
If you want to learn more about Xiaobo click here, here, or here.
About once every 10 years or so, the Nobel Committee gets it right. In 2010 they hit a homerun.
For the sake of brevity I won't dwell on the Chinese political situation in this post (you're welcome). Before we leave this topic however, a few comments directed to the leaders of China:
- Thank you for lending us $1,000,000,000,000 (that's 1 Trillion), we really needed it.
- Good job on moving 500,000,000 out of subsistence farming into an emerging middle class over the past 2 decades.
- Thank you for manufacturing high quality textiles and electronics at remarkably low prices. Without you, most of the things we buy would be significantly more expensive.
- Finally, a request. Allowing your people to emerge as a middle class is a start, but it would be nice if they could express themselves, gather, and worship however they like without fear of being tossed in prison.
We'll come back to this topic later...
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10/10/10 - Three perfect 10's on one day.
What better way to celebrate than to get married (here)? All around the world, the attraction of saying 'I do' on an unforgettable date has sparked a massive rush by couples to organize their big day for the 10th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the century.
One of my best friends got married on 7/7/07 and that seems to be working out pretty well.
I, however, am not a numerologist. To fully declare my independence from superstitions involving numbers, I intend to get married on 13/13/13. The bride is to be determined (Christena does have the inside track), but the date is set. I will not compromise on this issue. Please mark your calendars accordingly, I would like you to be there to celebrate this sacred occasion.
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Warning: There is a ridiculous chain email going around that says something like this:
An interesting fact about OCTOBER 2010:
This October has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays, all in one month. It happens once in 823 years.
Oh how quickly we forget January 2010! And what about July of next year? So if you got/get this email and are concerned about not forwarding it and getting stuck with bad luck, fear not. Rather than forward it, hit reply and tell the sender:
"Dear Idiot,
This not so interesting occurrence happened just 9 months ago and will happen again next July. It seems more likely that you only use your brain once every 823 years.
Your friend,
(insert your name here)"
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How about a little more fun with numbers?* Let's see if any one besides Stevie can follow this through.
Just above I mentioned the date 10/10/10. This is one of the few six digit dates (October 1st, 2010 is another) written entirely in binary code. For those new to the Razor, a binary code is any system of representing text or computer processor instructions by the use of the binary number system's two-binary digits "0" and "1".
Removing the forward slashes, we're left with 101010. In binary code this represents the number 42 (it's true, look it up).
613 x 913 = 4213
Your eyes are not deceiving you! In base 13, 6 times 9 equals 42.
Impressive right? I took Sunday's date, converted it to binary, flipped over to base 13, and the subscripts of the corresponding multiplication problem represents my wedding date!
Romantic!
Aut disce aut discede
*I'm sorry for doing this, but I'm still experiencing higher than normal web traffic on my site. Surprisingly, I prefer blogging only for my friends and family. If that mathematical nonsense doesn't run the new people off, I don't know what will.
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