Most honest and "young" screenwriters write crossovers / RPFs and they are often far better than the "original" content that hollywood produces. I am on a mission to convert the film industry to the geek / amateur/ share / open / free model: Queen Padmé [ Amidala ] Tales.

You win by being a hacker and working smart - not hard

Happy new year from Tel Aviv, Israel!

Here’s the thing - why should posing naked matter? Not only that, but why should starring in a hardcore pornographic film ("XXXXX...." to infinity) or even doing prostitution (= selling sexual services for money or goods) be considered wrong, or disrespectful? And the answer is that it isn't because a man or a woman are allowed to do all that, and still should be treated as a gentleman or a lady - with respect and admiration and friendliness.

Mark my words - if tomorrow one of the great living men or women who are well-known (celebs, e.g: actors, film makers, bloggers/writers/authors, scientists, singers, YouTube personas, even models and reality T.V. show contestants), or alterantively people I personally know, like my siblings, or cousins, and which I admire, and draw a lot of inspiration from, turned out to do all that - I would not think any less of them, because it's ultimately their body and their life.

I feel a lot for the poor people whose privacy was violated. I wouldn't want people to publish my private email messages or instant messaging utterance or IRC, either. But what I would do if I were them is after sulking a little (and realising one should not feel bad about bad) is make the stance that it should not reduce their reputation or their ability to act as a role model, or that of any other people's.

A little more - the standards for what is considered sexually acceptable varied a lot in time. For example, after Miranda Kerr got separated from her husband (= actor Orlando Bloom), she's been boasting in interviews about all the "great sex" she's been getting from various willing men, and all this is without being negatively labelled as a "slut" or "bimbo" which is what would happen a few years ago. Furthermore, there are now many openly homosexual men and women and celebs, while they were persecuted some decades ago.

(This post is based on an earlier attempted post of mine to some subreddits.)

First of all, congrats to Ms. Mizrakhani for her award, and it is indeed notable. That put aside, there are a few important reasons why I think Maths education is f***ed up in university which prevents more girls and women from doing it. These reasons are:

1. While learning maths, the tests are given without an open material, and often require memorising proofs of many pages. This is while a good mathematician can easily look these up and does not need to keep them in his resident mind and that a mathematician or other real scientist is more about deducting and inventive thought than about memorising.

   Finishing a maths degree requires a complete buyout into the system, which risks transforming the students into Captain Nemos who are cynical, destructive, people who think they are a "nobody", which is what "Nemo" means in Latin. Also see what I wrote about it in a different context.

   Now girls are by their nature, have been more unwilling to become Captain Nemos, and also realise that in this day and age, being an amateur, who are people who love (= 'aime') what they do, and/or who cut corners and disobey the rules, or are willing to produce somewhat less stellar results, is much better than being a professional, which is a mostly 20th century fad. It is well known that in many fields of endeavour some people who are underage, and/or inexperienced, and/or less professional can beat the pros at their own game: software development, music, acting and film making, martial arts and other combat fighting, modelling, writing (blogging, novelling, etc.), being a waiter/waitress/shop clerk/shop vendor/etc, cooking, even sports. And yet maths education in our f***ked-up university system believes that a mathematician should be a "Captain Nemo"-like professional than a happy, well-rounded, polymath, amateur (a.k.a a "geek").

   You can also see what I wrote about amateurs and hackers (a.k.a "Action heroes" in a different ccontext.).

2. Another problem is the fallout from Euclid's reported “There is no Royal road to Geometry” adage. Thing is, when teaching maths, you can and should skip some stuff and show the cool stuff. There is no need to teach the very basics and instead one can skip stuff. I recall that we didn't learn the Jewish Bible from its beginning to its end, and we also skipped eras when studying history, and stuff like that. A lot of the material I had to learn in my Electrical Engineering degree, such as the physics of semiconductors proved of zero utility to my work as a software developer, and later on as a writer/entertainer/philosopher, which is what I am now.

There are other problems with the academic world: instead of collecting donations at the end of the lectures or otherwise getting a motivation to be popular (like philosophers did at ancient times), the so-called scientists/philosophers are getting tenured positions, and don't want or need to try to improve (which makes their students unhappy). Currently, the world's best philosophers (or in their modern name: "scientists") are the various entertainers of the world: actors, screenwriters, authors, bloggers, models, musicians, T.V. celebrities, YouTube/etc. artists, talk show hosts, etc. etc. 50 or even 20 years from now, people are more likely to remember a famous actor, directory, blogger, or even - model - than a university professor of philosophy, which I cannot name a single one, and do not care to remember any one of them. And many more people are likely to read or watch an interview with Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Watson, Candica Swanepoel, or even - Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales etc. than they are with an obscure, and likely boring, contemporary professor of philosophy.

This does not have to be this way.

Arresting a man for parodying a local politician on Twitter sounds incredibly stupid. I'm glad the politician in question did the right thing and resigned after that, and if I were the blogger in question, I'd stop being vindictive and make peace with the politician. Hopefully, he can later help pass a law protecting people similar to him from future abuse while remaining on good terms with his target of criticism.

As a citizen and resident of Israel, I should note that something like that seems highly unlikely to happen here. I have been a humorist, writer/blogger and amateur philosopher for a long time, and my site and other sites and mediums where I've blogged features a lot of positively blasphemous stuff (or stuff that was formerly considered blasphemous) including: jokes about the holocaust, a reflection about holocaust denial, racist or nationalist cliches, sexism, sexualism, critiques of local politicians, critiques of a lot of the constitutional foundation of Israel, an in-your-face Illuminaty/Elders of Zion pan-historical conspiracy theory, and many parodies and criticisms of Judaism (including the Old Testament, the Oral Torah and later additions). I left almost no stone unturned.

And almost nothing happened to me except some people who told me I Was being out-of-line (Often truly) or some threats from non-officials, or getting myself removed or banned from some Internet forums. The USA may wish to consider how much of a free country they are compared to other parts of the civilised world. The 2001 bombings made many Americans paranoid and paranoid people are miserable, and miserable people are insecure and unsafe. So if you want to be safe, be happy and don't be afraid. Israel now has much laxer national security, which makes us safer in the long run. And as opposed to popular belief, most of Israel since 1990 was never really a warzone, and certainly isn't now, and I believe that Jews, Palestinians and non-Jews mostly live in peace and even friendship even in the occupied territories. There's still a long way to go for close-to-100% harmony here, but we're much closer than before.

Cheers from Tel Aviv, -- Shlomi Fish (a.k.a "Rindolf").

Hi iamhigh! Thanks for your comment.

First of all, I should note that I tried to cover the general method for finding help online with an issue you've run to (especially a technical one). My target audience also doesn't include ultra-laymen who cannot figure out how to adjust their screen resolution. Arguably, I may have been too encompassing in the scope of the article (like we say in Hebrew “Try to catch a lot - and you shall catch nothing.” (or “ ” in Hebrew)), but I didn't want to write similar guides that will essentially say the same thing.

Anyway, I recommended the Freenode IRC network and the StackExchange network (not only StackOverflow mind you - it has other sub-forums like the English StackExchange and many others), because from my experience, they are both relatively friendly and the quality of the answers there tends to be very high. I hesitate to recommend someone to get help on a random Internet web-forum (though I'm sure many of them would be OK).

That put aside, I noticed that many IRC clients are hard for inexperienced people to figure out, but I think there are some easy to use ones, and some IRC networks also provide web-interfaces.

Regards, -- Shlomi Fish.