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August 26, 2006
Breadth requirements
My son took 3 breadth classes: half year "Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science", half year "Modern Symbolic Logic" and full year "Introduction to Economics". The following observations are the results of my discussions with him and looking through available class materials.
- HPS 100 H "Introduction to History and Philosophy of Science" consists mainly of anecdotes from the history of Charles Darwin and Galileo discoveries. Instructors lack scientific knowledge of the subject.
- PHL 245 H "Modern Symbolic Logic" is a deviant and schizophrenic form of formal logic clearly inferior to mathematical logic.
- ECO 100Y "Introduction to Economics" (and probably most of economics classes) consists of predictiion of economic effect analyzing arbitrarily drawn and completely senseless curves in the same manner as Roman Augurs predicted future based on the trajectories of flying birds or Haruspices did the same looking on the guts of sacrificed animals.
All these classes look like the degraded (lack of tambourines and glass necklaces) and parasitic (clearly overpaid professors and overpriced textbooks) form of classical shamanism.
Posted by Victor at 09:43 PM | TrackBack
August 24, 2006
Scumnesty (Scamnesty) International
Self-proclaimed "human rights organization" accuses IDF in committing war crimes. This and the similar organizations completely ignore the fact that IDF exercised the utmost caution trying to avoid civilian casualties, paying for these efforts by lives of officers and soldiers; moreover, many lives of Israeli civilians were lost because IDF was not able to destroy many launchers hidden in residential areas.
Meanwhile these organizations pay much less attention to deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians by Hezballah, Hamas etc, much less attention is paid to genocides committed by Arabs against black Africans, Copts, Assyrians, Kurds.
Persecution of dissidents in modern Russia is mainly ignored too. And this is a "human rights organization"? Their claims are scam, and these people are scum!
Posted by Victor at 12:31 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
August 21, 2006
Good job
Canadian and Afghan Government Forces killed 72 Taliban fighters. Good job! I am really proud to be Canadian.
In contrast to Hezballah Taliban is much less sophisticated and much more honest: Taliban does not announce that the killed Taliban militants were mainly just civilians.
Meanwhile almost all killed Hezballah terrorists were instantly demobilized and became civilians.
Posted by Victor at 03:01 PM
Ostriches
Few Canadian MPs from Liberal Party, NDP and Bloc Québécois suggested to take Hezballah from terror groups list. Bright idea! The number of terrorists organizations then would decrease as well as the number of acts of terror committed by these groups (the act of terror then would probably be reclassified as the legitimate resistance acts or as accidents).
But why to stop then? Lets empty this list completely... No list, no terror groups, no acts of terror. Bravo! Terror free world.
But wait, there is more: removing rape from the list of crimes will lead to rape-free world, removing AIDS from the list of diseases will lead to AIDS free world! Bravissimo!!!
Sticking the head into the sand solves all the problems... but only for ostriches.
Posted by Victor at 09:08 AM
New trains for TTC
TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) decided to buy new trains from Bombardier because they will be built in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada). Main competitor, Siemens, would offer a better deal but money will go out of the country,
The decision is misguided:
- Mr Miller is a Mayor f Toronto, not of Thunder Bay and he is responsible to the his constituency. Mr. Moscoe works for Toronto either. Do these people always buy Canadian for themselves even if the better deal is available for foreign produced goodies?
- This decision should be left to TTC financial management.
- Breaking normal tendering practice is absolutely wrong. If today it is done to reach a noble political goal, tomorrow it will lead to enrich friends or relatives of councilors. Guaranteed!
Posted by Victor at 07:52 AM
August 19, 2006
Universities and Maclean's ranking
11 Canadian Universities (University of Toronto including) refused to submit data to Maclean to be ranked. Iniversities are in their rights and Maclean' ranking is senseless. Really, the decent students are going to Universities to get a certain profession or to prepare for graduate studies in the certain profession. The "greate experience" is an asset but it is mainly delivered by departments. The outrageously small number of students voting for different student bodies clearly show where their interests are.
Because of this for mathematical student the quality of Department of English is mostly irrelevant.
However, at most of the Universities the general Admission and Awards offices act exactly as Maclean: they decide if the students fits to enter specific streams on the base of few school marks without consideration if the marks are in the relevant topics (mandatory inclusion of English at University of Toronto, Arts and Science, is an example of this) or if the school teachers are qualified to deliver them.
Posted by Victor at 08:57 AM
August 18, 2006
UNHPF
Most of the European countries refusing contribute troops for Lebanon mission while SE Asian Moslem countriesare very eager to contribute. Meanwhile their leaders claim that Israel objections against them should be ignored.
Fine but
- UN should change the name of UNIFL to UNHPF (UN Hezballah Protection Force).
- In case of Hezballah acting from their midst IDF should ignore their presence and just wipe out the whole area
Posted by Victor at 06:18 PM
August 15, 2006
Marshall plan for Lebanon
The donor conference for Lebanon is planned. Excuse me?
- Israel suffered too and agression came from Lebanon
- There are plenty of people who suffer much more than Lebanese (f.e. people of Darfur) without any fault of them;
- Lebanese government already sends signals that it is not going to keep their part of the bargain.
Does it mean that I am absolutely against any money for Lebanon? No, Marshall plan for Germany was a good deal. But as Marshall plan came after denazification of Germany, aid to Lebanon should come only after dehezballazation of Lebanon, with the first installation of it paying for gallows for Mr. Nasrallah and his top henchmen.
Posted by Victor at 08:25 AM
August 13, 2006
AIDS Conference
A very important AIDS conference starts in Toronto. One of the guests of honor is Mr. Bill Gates who definitely deserves this honor: he and his spouse gave a lot of money (many billions of dollars) to fight against AIDS.
What is AIDS? It is a disease causing affected person to be very vulnerable to viruses. Such disease is known for computers too. Affected computers are very vulnerable to viruses. Such computer disease is called Windows.
Yes, that is right! Some part of the enormous wealth Mr. Gates made, developing and spreadsing Computer AIDS, is now given to fight Human Windows.
Another guest of honor is Mr. Bill Clinton. He deserves this honor too for practicing rather safe sex with: Ms. Lewinsky.
Posted by Victor at 08:43 PM
August 09, 2006
Double game of Chirac
So French renegaded their deal with US and are now insisting on immediate withdrawal of IDF as a part of ceasefire. They double crosssed USA and they blame USA for delay of ceasefire.
But IMHO it is not all. Chirac seems to be sure that USA will never accept such deal, thus ceasefire will be delayed, IDF will kill more Hezballah troops, clean more area and make a deployment of French troops less dangerous.
Or, if something falls through cracks, there will be no deployment of French troops at all, and he will blame USA and Israel for this.
While I am not sure that all Arab governments understand that putting impossible demands they give more freedom to IDF, some of these governments definitely understand this and want to harm Hezballah.
Bad thing is that for achieving this goal more Israeli soldiers and civillians will pay by their lifes and Israel will be even more vilified.
Posted by Victor at 12:37 PM
August 08, 2006
Complimentary crap II
Events started from Complimentary Delivery of "newspaper" Toronto $!@&. No other newspaper has an indecency to pimp itself in this way: make a "Complimentary delivery" (without even thinking to ask permission; complete arrogance), aggressive phone-marketing, door-to-door solicitation (at least this was their practice few years ago) and dumping a lot of free copies at University of Toronto (I think even at $0 it is overpriced; when we arranged to high-schoolers events at Sundays and are required to leave rooms clean, we spent a lot of time removing this garbage scattered around; it was in Sidney Smith Hall. This stopped when we moved to Bahen Centre for Information Technology where these guys are not allowed to keep their garbage distribution station) .
This is a Complimentary Log (milestone days are marked by red)
- Monday, August 1. Day 1 of getting litter on my porch.
- Tuesday, August 2. Day 2 of getting litter on my porch.
- Wednesday, August 3. Day 3 of getting litter on my porch. Thinking about countermeasure.
- Thursday, August 4. Day 4 of getting litter on my porch. Sent the fax to one of T-Star fax numbers asking them to stop.
- Saturday, August 5. Day 5 of getting litter on my porch. My fax was ignored: poor morons failed to grasp consequences. Faxed to editors one of my articles with watermark Complimentary Copy across each of 21 pages (Sample page on the left).
- Sunday, August 6. Day 6 of getting litter on my porch. My fax was ignored: poor morons failed to grasp consequences. Faxed to editors another article with watermark Complimentary Copy across each of 93 pages.
- Sunday, August 6. Realized my mistake: these guys confuse write and wrong, black and white and thus have difficulties reading black-on-white. Will send them tomorrow everything in inverted colors (Sample page on the right)
- Sunday, August 6.
Placed a sign at my house:
- Monday, August 7. No junk.
- Tuesday, August 8. No junk. Victory? Have David (me) beaten Goliath? What move brought down the juggernaut (faxes or a sign)? May be some resuorceful person begins to make such signs and sell them? Should I take a patent? Let's wait for the next day to see if the victory is full and final.
- Tuesday, August 8. Victory! I got a call from (416) 367-2000 and I was told that from Toronto Star, that they got my faxes and will look at this matter and asked not to fax my articles. As long as there are no more newspapers there will be no articles said I. But added that I asked not to call me and I am not interested in their explanations.
- I am feeling that I own them few articles more but hopefully they will not be too disappointed not getting them.
Posted by Victor at 05:52 PM
This site is best viewed with the browser...
| $ wget http://www.thestar.com >> /dev/null |
Posted by Victor at 01:44 PM
Ratios
| Fox News | : | CNN = |
| Firefox | : | Micro$oft Internet Exploder = |
| Gmail | : | Hotmail = |
| National Post | : | Toronto Star = |
| Mac OS | : | Windoze = |
| Rules | : | Sucks |
Posted by Victor at 12:04 PM
August 06, 2006
Mad Mel
I am really puzzled with all this fuzz around Mel Gibson? Overpriced celebrity, bad actor, worse director, deunk driving. He should be dealt as any other drunked is dealt with; probably given 10 miles of the same road to clean the litter dropped by his fellows Holywood stars. I bet, other celebrities driving along this road would make it Sisyphus task.
Posted by Victor at 11:01 AM
August 04, 2006
Sea horses
2 Ass. Professors (where Ass. stays for Assistant but alternative interpretation is also completely appropriate), teaching something about Mid-Eastern history/politics at University of Toronto Mississauga and Scarborough campuses, wrote the article in Toronto Stürmer (aka T-star), full of blantantly false and outrageously insulting claims concerning current Israel-Lebanon conflict. They claim that "Hezbollah and terrorism are manifestations of deeper political injustices" thus blaming the victims for crimes of perpetrators.
I wonder, what these two dirty boldface liars and Hezballah cheerleaders teaching in their classes and getting paid for this?
One can claim that I should avoid insulting my colleagues.
Excuse me, but these scumbags are not my colleagues. My colleagues in Technion and Haifa Universities are under fire of terrorist missiles launched by Hezballah from the territory of Lebanon wit full cooperation of "pro-Western and moderate" government of Lebanon. My junior colleagues in Israel are fulfilling their reserve duties and fighting with Hezballah. My colleagues are the real scientists.
These two guys are ``political scientists''. Political scientists are like sea horses: political for sure, but definitely not scientists. There seem to be no positive knowledge here. At least it is not recognized this way.
One can say that different sciences have different methodologies. It is true, methods of mathematics differ from those of physics, leave alone chemistry, biology, psychology or linguistics. However different the methods of different sciences are, they have one common denminator: honesty and integrity. Which is definitely not the case for political sciences. Otherwise these two Zün-like revisionists of the modern history would not be hired.
And do not tell me that University of Toronto hiring them gave them some kind of legitimacy. Those who hired them acted like a rabbi proclaiming the pork to be kosher: the rabbi would cease to be kosher.
Posted by Victor at 09:27 PM
Complimentary crap
This is a fax I sent to Torontische Stürmer (also known as T-Star, Torstar):
Thanks, but no thanks
Dear Sir/Madam,
Few days ago I found your newspaper (as you call it) on my porch. I took it (through plastic bag) and placed where it belongs: recycling box. I thought it was a honest mistake from your delivery person. However it continued and I investigated. Oh, it was not a mistake. It was a “complimentary delivery”.
What is this, kind of postal spam? I did not ask for it. I do not need this. And I neither want to take care of the garbage you put on my porch nor leave it here. So, please stop littering there!
Or I can decide to send you in return a full collection of my research papers or lectures by fax or email. With my “best compliments”.
My address is … BTW, some poor people you hired for this dirty job sometimes are calling me soliciting your newspaper. When I ask them not to call agail, they say “OK” but few month after someone else calls. Please, stop this as well. My phone …. Please, do not call.
Thank you in advance.
V.Ivrii
Posted by Victor at 07:50 AM
Bad news, good news
Every day now we are getting bad news: 4 Canadian soldiers killed, 4 Israeli soldiers killed, 8 Israeli civilians killed... Toll grows.
The good news is that our countries are fighting the same war, against the same islamofascist enemy and hopefully winning.
Posted by Victor at 07:25 AM
August 03, 2006
My Acronyms
HRW = Hezballah' Rights Watch
Posted by Victor at 12:30 PM
August 02, 2006
Honest Broker
Some people claim that the current stance of Canadian government caused Canada to abandon its neutrality and Canada cannot play the role of honest broker. Well, I heard this before, when Canada included Hezballah and Hamas in its list of terrorist organizations (and it was under Liberal government) and even earlier when Canadian representative abstained in the vote in some obscure UN Committee (resolution was blatantly anti-Israel and biased). Some people believe that honest broker is the one who support their cause.
In their opinion Canada was neutral and played a role of honest broker when her representatives voted for less blatant but still very blatant resolutions...
I have very bad news for them: now we have a government which is principled and honest. Too principled and too honest to fit to the role of "honest broker" as you understand it. Try to find another one: Russia, Syria, North Korea, Iran.
Posted by Victor at 10:22 PM