We were sitting in a beer park one day, thinking up a nice controversial research question for a friend's paper. After a lot of bouncing of ideas, I got to thinking: Of all the nightclubs in the world, there are some fancy ones with a cover charge which stings a bit. Some of these again charge half off for women. (I wouldn't know these assumptions for a fact, of course.)

Anyway: How can they get away with this?

Well, for…

The events that took place 70 years ago on this date - 03:15 on June 22nd 1941 - should be firmly imprinted on your mind. If you cannot immediately guess what I am referring to: Shame on you, and welcome to history class.

To quote Coleman's commentary on Santayana: "Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat history class."

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It is, of course, the start of one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history: Operation Barbarossa. The effects…

Applied logic is a form of art, akin to the art of war or the art of medicine and unrelated to the fine arts. Specifically, it is the art of persuasion - how to convince others to believe your arguments on face value. Humans talk like they think, and usually write like they talk. How a conversation with this person would be can therefore be interpreted from forum activity, and it's quite easy to understand a substantial part of the psychology of others from online behavior.

(This is…

The rights and freedoms you enjoy are neither rights nor freedoms - they are privileges. When you break a law, the first thing that happens is that you lose most of them after having had an unfortunate run-in with the justice system. In most countries, even at this point you are awarded a few privileges - prison law is a fairly abbreviated version of civilian law, more on par with military law.

Law is an ever increasing body of knowledge of behavior we find to be anti-social. It is…

I bit of a recommendation here, you could do worse than check out this site:

A. Piccard,…

So my best girl friend (note the space) here in Prague has her mom visiting from St. Pete/Leningrad/Petrograd, and Russian delights were of course brought and distributed. I was advised that the top candy was "special candy", and I should wait until I got home before eating it. It's a recommendation I followed, and I'm about to eat it. Wish me luck. ;)…

Just found this little gem in where the ever expanding field of economics is expanding.

The whole article is essentially a bit of a complaint that those who have legitimate arguments for a type of God - think Einstein or Habermas' God definitions - gets crowded out (a…

Everyone has heard about the Nobel prize, and that a lot of people take it very seriously, especially within the fields it's awarded to. But academia celebrates it's funny solutions to problems too, the Ig Nobel prize.

The most funny thing about this prize is that the winners are genuinely happy to receive it, because some of the smartest people in the world has come together and read one of your works. It may…

The head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, will now probably go down in history as one of the "founding fathers" of a Federation of European States. His exact quote was:

"In this Union of tomorrow, or of the day after tomorrow, would it be too bold, in the economic field, with a single market, a single currency and a single central bank, to envisage a ministry of finance of the…

Warning: Most of these links contain material considered in some places to be unsuitable for children.

Well, admittedly I was not expecting to make a sequel to my original post, but this story that…

I see this quite often, that people say that believing in God is the same as believing in unicorns.

Well, it is:

"God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."

(Numbers 23:22, King James Bible)

Behold the Abrahamic God, with all the masculine strength a unicorn!…