h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

5 mins left of my allocated 1/2 hour break from revision for the day... not nearly enough time to catch up with my conversations, so sorry to everyone for that. maths is really, really getting me down-its supposed to be the one i can get an A in without too much trouble, but its just not happening. two of the three exams are a week on tuesday, so wish me luck... dont think i'll appear again until i'm past them

Good luck.
Just remember the basics and you'll be fine. A quick refresher course:
1+1=2
2+2=4
3+3=6
And most of all-when it says divide-do not subtract!

Keep breathing.
Jen

and the answer to life, the universe and *everything* is 42!!!

best of luck, arwen we'll see you after you emerge from the exam hall.

(and don't write 'i am a fish' on all the papers. rd ref

that'd be great! (i *love* red dwarf) i may actually get a few marks for doing that in philosophy-there's not way to prove its technically a wrong answer-what is a fish? we could actually be fish, they could be humans. (i love this stuff-saw matrix2 on saturday-it was INCREDIBLE!)

There is a story I heard once, of a college philosophy class. For the final exam the teacher put a chair on her desk, wrote on the board "prove to me that this chair does not exist" and then proceeded to ignore the class for the rest of the exam time. All the students scribbled furiously, talking about different philsophy type things, except for one, who wrote "What chair?"
I always thought that was a good story.

you went and watched matrix reloaded right in the middle of exam season?? wow. it was cool though, wasn't it? especially the architect bit and the room full of screens showing neo reacting in different ways... the movie has elicited a heated philosophy debate on what the matrix actually is, and whether neo's plane of existence is actually real, or merely another level of the program etc etc.

oh, and re: fish - george bernard shaw once lamented that english was so degenerate a language that one could spell 'fish' as 'ghoti'.







(in case you're wondering, it's 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women' and 'ti' as in 'nation'. shaw left quite a bit of money for people to develop a new alphabet for the english language, i believe...)

re: fish/ghoti-I've actually heard of that one. ! A piece of life that you old people mentioned and I ACTUALLY KNOW ABOUT IT!

v,v happy right now-not to mention I've got a big pile of parmesean cheese-its for snack-my favorite, that we rarely buy!

i'm depressed. i haven't even hit the third decade yet, and somebody's already calling me old ah, well, i should be going. there's the rocking chair and walking stick to buy and... er, er... medication for my memory. yeah.

mmm, cheese! to be honest, i like brie and blue cheese more, but we all know why, don't we?

*makes affirmative hmming noise*

please understand that I don't actually eat this stuff plain. It's the parmesean and garlic flavor that I like. Otherwise I only use it on pasta. (not going to try to spell that one that starts with an s and means the same thing)

Did you know that rocking chairs are good for you? The movement helps keeps your knee joints working if you're really old, particularly if you're not doing a lot of walking.
May I suggest one of those really nice walking sticks-maybe with a cavity for a drink or a small dagger in the handle?

my friend hobbie sprinkles parmesan on *everything* - not just the pasta beginning with 's', but also the one beginning with 'f', 'r', 'm' and 'l'

my gramps actually has one of them walking sticks with a dagger in the handle! not to mention an incredibly large collection of walking sticks of various designs and functions! i should start my own collection. (you know you're getting old when your favourite music is on the lines of noel coward and jerry lee lewis and swing, when everybody else is listening to eminem and backstreet boys...)

this is the first time we've been online at the same time. when is it where you are? 9:10 PM on Thing here.

we seem to be half a world apart. it's 9.10 AM, poets here, and i'm freezing to death in the computer lab!

I believe you are correct. Although if you are GMT +8 and I am -5 wouldn't that make it 13 hours (even though the evidence suggests the contrary)? What kind of daylight savings time do you do? We're currently an hour ahead, if that explains things.

there's no daylight savings time here! the sun comes up at 7, and doesn't go down 'til half past 7 at night, year in year out. one of the advantages of living in the tropics.

that sounds useful actually, its not nice when the sun sets at 5pm in winter and 11pm in summer. although it does make for some great celebrations!

I agree. From about october to march I can't do any work in the car coming back from my violin lesson (don't forget-I'm not the one driving) because it's too dark. And when it's finally light enough it's the time of year when we get less homework to begin with.
I wouldn't know about the celebrations part though.

i can read in the car, no prob... but you can actually *write*??

by the way, the integral of 1/k dk is log k

oh wait, nevermind didn't see that t.....

the celebrations are at midsummer and midwinter-the shortest and longest days of the year. wouldnt have quite the same effect if the days were the same length! also have equinox celebrations, when the day and night are of equal length, around april and september i think.