I grew up with dd/MM/yyyy; however after starting work in an international company and dealing with US colleagues writing MM/dd/yyyy and Japanese colleagues writing yyyy-MM-dd, I eventually switched to the Japanese style for almost everything I do in daily life - it's a scaled order (like the one I grew up with; just the other way around) but also has the additional advantage of sorting correctly in a text sort as well. If I speak a date without the year, I tend to stick to what I grew up with though "11th of August" instead of "August 11th". I generally never write a date without the year though so both 11/08 and 08/11 look "wrong" to my brain.

I'm not Aussie, but I lived there for 6 years. In my experience, the Australian word "sandwich" is more strictly defined as two pieces of sliced bread with something in between. Rolls, buns, baguette bread, etc. that have been sliced open and something placed in between get called a sandwich everywhere else in the English speaking world that I know of, but not Australia.

The thing is, in metric countries, I've never heard anyone say the temperature is "in the twenties". We generally say, "low twenties" for 21-23; "mid twenties" for 24-26 and "high twenties" for 27-29. You'll note that this is somewhat MORE granular than dividing the Fahrenheit scale in to groupings of 10. There's of course nothing stopping you dividing Fahrenheit further of course, and many people do (including yourself in your post with "high sixties" and "mid eighties"), but the point is that both systems are granular enough for normal usage since in neither system does anyone really care about a difference of one unit.

Generally, it's a matter of what you're used to as to what feels more comfortable or "fitting to reality". I grew up with metric and so the imperial system feels unnatural to me. Most people who grew up with imperial say that metric feels unnatural to them. So, which one is more "natural feeling" is therefore an invalid argument from either side and the sensible argument has to come from practicality. Generally, metric is more mathematically practical - this is hopefully immediately obvious even to the people who don't want to use it.

I do understand the argument that others have put forth for MPG over L/100km (km/L is used in some countries from what I've heard but it's pretty rare). The idea being that you can more easily say, "I've got approx x number of gallons left in the tank, which means I can go y distance". However this is actually less of a problem with L/100Km than most people who are used to MPG think. When I'm driving, I can look at my fuel gauge and think, "Hmm, I've got approx x litres left, which gets me y kilometres... this is [more|less] than the amount I need to get to my destination.". It clearly is another way of looking at it since it's reversed, but the calculation is no less simple.

Can't speak for the GP, but yes - I have tried it, and it's fairly common to do in international companies within Europe.

I work for the European HQ (based in Germany) of a large multinational with a Japanese parent company. On a daily basis, I deal with at least 3 or 4 different EU cultures plus Japanese culture. At least once every couple of weeks, I deal with India. Generally a few times a month, there'll be something I need to deal with in North Africa, Middle East, or Russia.

Yep, there's a lot of cultural differences, but the other side of the coin to remember is that most people in these situations are forgiving of cultural mistakes. They are aware that they and you are probably not 100% familiar with each others' cultures and there's a mutual understanding to politely ignore cultural faux pas.

Linguistically by the way, I speak around 5 languages with varying degrees of proficiency, or up to 15 if you count languages where I know some, but couldn't really talk to someone about any particular topic. Nevertheless, the people commenting that English tends to be the language used are quite right - it's our official language for business in my company (despite being, as said, based in Germany) and if I see a Frenchman and a Russian talking to each other, I'd put pretty high odds they'll be speaking English to each other. I personally even speak German at home with my wife, but English to my German colleagues at work...

I find it interesting you call me arrogant and then claim to know things about me. At no point did I say, "it is xyz", I just said, "I think it is FAR more likely that xyz". As in, based on the evidence and available knowledge, one cause seems more likely than another. If there were more evidence in favour of another cause, I'd happily change my mind to that.

I doubt that you'd deduced it would explode through any special knowledge, as you say you yourself. But - based on the evidence thus far - I also doubt it was precognition that would turn our understanding of the universe and physics completely on its head. It seems more likely to me that you thought, "I wonder what it would look like if it explodes" and then after it did, your memory altered itself to make you think you had thought something slightly different.

No, I can't prove it, but there is plenty of evidence of memories changing themselves like that, and none whatsoever for the kind of precognition you're describing. It's simply a matter of probabilities.

That might not be the case - maybe you said it out loud to someone who also remembers you saying it, in which case the chance of it being changed memory is lessened significantly.

But to me, even the chance that you spontaneously thought it, then it happened, and it was just "dumb luck" is significantly higher than the chance of this kind of precognition being a phenomenon that exists in our universe.

Conventional wisdom can often be wrong; but it usually has a basis in reality since otherwise it wouldn't be considered wisdom of any kind. We know we don't know everything and we know that in many cases we know "damn near nothing" about a lot of things. But we do have a reasonable picture of the basic functioning of elements of the fundamental properties of the universe and from our understanding at this point in time, precognition of any kind seems very unlikely. That might change in the future - maybe someone will discover something really new and interesting about time that turns our ideas on our heads; but until such a thing happens, there are two things to do:
1) Continue to study and refine our knowledge
2) Focus on things that we believe are wrong
Perhaps you should consider studying in the field of neuroscience, or perhaps deep in to the fields of physics dealing with time (depending on whether you think the precognition might be a property of the brain; or of the universe), or even both if you've got the time and the smarts. Maybe you'll come up with something really interesting.

If you look at my post history, you might get a somewhat different picture of me than you currently seem to have. Yes, I'm scientifically minded and consider Occam's Razor to be a fairly reliable guide in many situations (but of course, it must be used appropriately). However I'm also a strong advocate of the use of psychedelic substances for self-discovery; a fairly "unconventional thinker" in general; and don't hold any stock in the idea of believing something just because everyone else does (mostly, I'm quite anti-authoritarian, which includes holding the concept of arguments from authority in extremely low regard).

I fail to see how you consider these things to be increases in complexity. When we moved from "fire, earth, air and water" to "atoms" and the initial subatomic particles, we simplified from four types of things down to three (protons, electrons, neutrons). The structure of how these three come together makes up elements and the structure of how these atoms come together makes up molecules.

Then we discovered more kinds of subatomic particles, giving us a further array of "more types of things" again (thereby THAT is a complexity increase). However string theory, if it pans out to be more than just a bunch of very pretty maths, would simplify this down to one. To me, it seems like the complexity of HOW it all goes together is increased, but the complexity of WHAT there is is reduced.

I never said our understanding of physics isn't more complex - of course it is. What I said was that "complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways". So I was really only talking about physical matter and not the interactions of it. That said however, it also seems apparent to me that the interactions of things is also simple when you're talking about sufficiently small areas of interaction and time slices. It's only when this gets extrapolated to larger areas of interaction or longer time periods that things become complex. Or, to put it another way, "complex interactions are usually just made up of a LOT of very simple interactions".

My reason for using the drug induced mystical experience as an example was to show that the mind can "lie" to itself. You're coming at it from the wrong direction by saying, "I experienced precognition, what does that say about the nature of the universe?" when you should be saying, "I experienced something that appears to be precognition, what are the possible causes?"

I think it's FAR more likely that your mind lied to you. You experienced a waking dream; later an event happened; as the events were over a particular threshold of similarity (threshold depending on many other factors of your mind and personality) you now remember those two events as being identical and believe that you saw the event before it happened.

We have very many examples in psychology for the mind playing tricks. We have no evidence anywhere for the competing theory is that it is possible to be aware of specific events that have not yet happened. It therefore seems clear to me that without evidence, it makes more sense to assume the former than the latter.

And for that matter, when you wake up after a deep sleep, is the guy that wakes up really the same as the guy who went to sleep at night?

This is the reason I don't fear the idea of transferring my brain in to a machine should it ever become a reality. If it remembers being me, thinks like me, and the other "me" isn't there anymore, then it IS me. Fearing the "loss of self" would have to mean I'd fear dreamless sleep or comatose states in the same way, and that wouldn't make a lot of sense from a practical standpoint...

To me, this sounds too much like an argument from desire. You would find it "disappointing" and therefore do not want it to be true, and so have a hard time imagining it to be true. The universe however does not pander to your desires, and what is, is. It may be that something more complex is needed, however so far we've time and again seen that in reality, complex things are usually just made up of a LOT of very very simple things behaving in very very simple ways. I see no reason our brains should be any different.

I once (well, more than once) experienced the sensation of the universe cradling me in its arms; being spoken to by gods; pulling the fabric of the universe in to my heart with my bare hands; and crystal clear visions of events happening far out the scope of my vision. These experiences were brought on by having taken LSD, but that doesn't make them any less of an experience than your precognition. I can however clearly say that despite the extremely positive changes that these experiences have brought about in my personality, I do not attribute them to any kind of mystical "external" forces - the insights that lead to these changes were simply brought about my own brain figuring things out in a drastically altered state from what it is used to.

While precognition may appear to stand at a different level to these sorts of changes, it's a numbers game in the end. Had your precognition been wrong, you probably would've forgotten about it by now. Many people experience clear and "startling" visions of events that have not yet come to pass. They're nothing more than a kind of waking dream. Very rarely, the event does come to pass (more common when the event is mundane of course) and when it does, people can almost (but not quite) be forgiven for assuming that something "magical" has happened.

Drop me a quick email at my username excluding the last three characters at Google's well known email service. I'll keep you informed when it's published and if you like, maybe I can ask you a few questions about your experiences and thoughts on the subject (no promises I'll use anything you give me; but I promise I'll read it and consider it)

For reference, the book is about two-thirds done as far as content is concerned - I'm expecting to start approaching publishers by around September/October.

Sorry for the off-topic post, but as you don't make an email address public, I can't contact you any other way.

I'm currently writing a book (non-fiction) on the topic of self-discovery using psychedelics (specifically LSD) and would like to paraphrase your comment. I'd be happy to give attribution or not, as you'd prefer.

Specifically the context will be the discussion of negative experiences during a psychedelic trip and how it can be used as a learning experience for self-improvement; I'd like to paraphrase your post as a part of an explanation that many drugs (both legal and illegal) are used to numb these negative feelings instead, which potentially leads to even worse situations both for the individual and the society in which they are in.

Of course, I suspect that of the number of people that do enjoy it, there is only a very small percentage that sit there and literally "wait" for an update. There are those of us who will clean our garages, put TVs up on walls, plant grass seed and so on and then once a day or so, go back and spend 2 minutes or so checking what's happened over the course of the day in the comic.

Personally, I'm really enjoying it thus far. The characters are somehow beautifully naive about the world and have a curiosity to go and learn as if they somehow didn't exist prior to the existence of the comic itself.

Call it art; call it wonderful; call it crap; call it masturbation... whatever - as long as I and others enjoy it, we really don't care what you think.

Not to nitpick, but your mind is subject to the manipulation of anyone and everyone you come in to contact with - usually with neither you nor them being aware that they're manipulating you.

At least the psychotherapy option is honest in that both parties are aware of the manipulation (and in most cases, agree to it).

I do, and if my kid texted me something like that, I'd probably either assume I was being pranked, or freak out a little (but definitely wouldn't go "ape-shit" or anything). If the latter, then when they told me it was all just a prank, I'd see the funny side of it and we'd have a good laugh together.

I've never understood the type of child-parent relationship where so little trust exists. Someone, somewhere, screwed up bad in that situation.

Funny you say that, since in all my years of coding so far, my default assumption is, "damn, everyone else is so much better than me - the reason I can't wrap my head around why they did it this particular way in this code is because they're better than me"... at which point I dive in, spend a lot of time trying to get a feel for what they did, and in 60% of cases DO learn something interesting and new to me that justifies why they did what they did (in the other 40% it seems they really were just crappy coders; or working under a deadline turning proof-of-concept code in to very messy production code; or whatever).

Part of it might be that I'm a self taught coder. Never formally studied; just lots of books, online examples/tutorials, and now somewhere around 25 years of experience/practice (10 years of it being my "day job" as opposed to just a hobby). I know there's a lot of theory that I don't get as well as someone who has just been in university studying it - but I also know that a great deal, if not most of it is stuff I can or already do understand, just don't know a lot of the terminology or formalised concepts.

(note: 60/40 figures are gut feeling figures only - I haven't actually recorded each instance to determine the real ratio)

Out of interest, what drugs contributed to your hearing loss?

I could understand some drugs leading to enjoyment of overly loud music - which itself contributes to hearing loss - but I struggle to think of any that will cause or contribute to hearing loss directly (other than drugs that will cause much more significant problems than ONLY hearing loss and you probably wouldn't be posting on slashdot any more).