Ground Zero

From a legal standpoint I think that peaceful Muslims should be able to build their mosque or recreation center at a location that I believe is actually about two blocks away from ground zero. Any action taken by New York City or New York state to prevent the mosque from being built would probably be a pretty blatant violation of 1st amendment rights.

However whether or not they should be allowed to is a separate from whether or not they should. This is a more tricky question. If the site was on ground zero that would be one thing, but I saw a map in Newsweek Magazine that shows the proposed site about two blocks away from ground zero which as far as I know is as close to ground zero as it could possibly be. Whether or not they should is something I'm not as certain about.

What do I think will happen. From what I've seen the people who oppose the ground zero mosque seem mean, loud, and not too intelligent. I think the mosque will ultimately be built and history teachers will talk about it when teaching about first amendment rights.

My solution to the Merchant of Venice dilemma

Disclaimer: I have not read Merchant of Venice but I have heard of it and read about it.

My understanding of the premise is that Shylock lets Antonio borrow his ships under the condition that Antonio must give Shylock a "pound of flesh" if he can not return the ships. The ships are lost at sea. From what I've heard, what happens next is a judge tries convince Shylock to forgive Antonio's debt for money, the Judge offers large amounts of money but Shylock out of his furry against Antonio declines the offers and says something along the lines of, "the law says I can only take a pound of flesh." (this phrase here is the cornerstone of my argument but it is also the reason for my disclaimer) The judge then traps Shylock with what is called a quibble, the judge says the agreement allows Shylock a pound of flesh but not any blood. I think what happens next is Shylock tries to accept some of the money offers but the judge says something like, "you said that the law said that you could only accept a pound of flesh."

Shylock's downfall was not that he was holding a grudge, but that he did not pick his choice of words carefully. If not mistaken what he said was "I can only accept a pound of flesh," what he should of said was "your offer is not big enough," or even "I will only accept of pound of flesh."Although I think his poor word choice was the product of his lust for revenge, so I guess this book still does teach not to hold a grudge but not in the way it thinks.

This is a solution to how a pound of flesh could've been drawn without any blood being spilt.

1. Put Antonio in the sun.
2. Wait for Antonio's sunburns to recover.
3. Once his skin is starting to be flakey; lightly tear it off.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary.

Even if a little blood was spilt would that necessarily be illegal, I think the Judge's ruling was that the smallest amount of blood would've screwed Shylock, but I think that is unreasonable, after-all how bad is a paper-cut.

Dollar under a pyramid

In Malcom Gladwell's book Blink he talks about a challange where a 100 dollar bill is under an upside-down pyramid that is perfectly balanced in such a way that the slightest movement will cause the pyramid to tip over and the challange is to remove the bill from under neath the pyramid.

When I read this challange my answer was you just grab the dollar because even though it's under a pyramid the challange does not say that it's under the tip of the pyramid, however my answer was wrong, if it was a riddle about how someone had solved this dilema and the point was to figure out how my answer would've worked however this was different.

The "correct" answer is to destroy the 100 dollar bill by either tearing it or burning, the point of this riddle is that it shows us we are assumeing that we want to keep the 100 dollar bill to spend, but still I think my answer works better and I explain why.

What makes this challangeing is that the slightest most infintesimal force will tip the pyramid over, but under this condition neither answer would work. Tearing the dollar means applying force to the dollar which consequentially means applying force to the pyramid, and you could never destroy the whole dollar this way because the thickness of your finger would get in the way of getting to close to the tip. Lighting the dollar on fire doesn't really work either because the smoke from the dollar burning is also a slight movement that would tip the pyramid.

Which came first; the chicken or the egg?

I think it's time to blow another deep philosophical question out of the water.

This question surrounds the reality that all chickens come from eggs, and that all chicken eggs come from chickens. So which came first, well let me answer that by asking you this.

Do you believe that dinosaurs once existed.

• If yes, continue reading
• If no, this post will just make you mad and I think it would be pointless for you read further and I don't anticipate you will be persuaded by me.

So if you do believe in Dinosaurs does seems logical that chickens and dinosaurs would've existed at the same time, I would say no.

So my conclusion is that there is not really an answer to this question, the chicken simply evolved from some other bird or lizard or something, and eventually that animal became the chicken over time.