"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." - H. L. Mencken
I would add irrational and highly delusional to the mix when faith requires one to accept magical violations of the well known, well tested or easily demonstrated laws of Nature. - PWL
"Science is Progress and the Future. Faith is regression to the Dark Ages." - PWL
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
"Nullius in verba. Take no one's word for it." - Motto of the Royal Society
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." - Thomas Henry Huxley
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein
"Science is empirical. Knowing the answer means nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything." - Lawrence Krauss
"Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism - and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency." - Stephen Jay Gould
"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work." - James Randi
“While the GPL powers as much as 77% of all SourceForge projects, Eric Raymond argues that the GPL is ‘a confession of fear and weakness’ that ‘slows down open-source adoption’ because of the fear and uncertainty the GPL provokes. Raymond’s argument seems to be that if openness is the winning strategy, an argument Michael Tiemann advocates, wouldn’t it make sense to use the most open license? Geir Magnusson of the Apache Software Foundation suggests that there are few ‘pure’ GPL-only open-source projects, as GPL-prone developers have to ‘modify it in some way to get around the enforcement of Freedom(SM) in GPL so people can use the project.’ But the real benefit of Apache-style licensing may not be for developers at all, and rather accrue to businesses hoping to drive adoption of their products: Apache licensing may encourage broader, deeper adoption than the GPL. The old GPL vs. BSD/Apache debate may not be about developer preferences so much as new business realities.”
Wow finally!!! The truth is said in public clearly about the vile pernicious bankrupt philosophy of Richard Stallman: enforced freedom and enforced sharing.
I think we live in a…universe…in which the GPL is unnecessary rather than futile. Mind you, I am not claiming the GPL is entirely useless. It’s a signaling behavior, like wearing a crucifix or yarmulke or pentagram; it helps build trust groups. But it has costs, too.
It [the GPL and it's GNU Cult Members] creates a lot of needless fear from potential allies and users who suspect they won’t be able to control their exposure, if they let it in… Is the GPL‘s utility as a form of in-group signaling worth the degree to which [of] fear and uncertainty about it slows down open-source adoption? Increasingly, I think the answer is no.
The GPL may be a community-building signaling device, but it is also a confession of fear and weakness. To believe that it matters, you have to believe that you live in a…universe where closed-source development is such an attractive proposition that you have to punish people for trying to move to it.
BSD wins for open source business hands down since it lets the developers (the only ones who actually matter from our point of view) do what ever the heck they want without being forced by communistic licensing terms of the GPL to give away our competitive advantage!!! If you don’t like that too bad for you. This is our point of view. You don’t have to like it or accept it for yourself but just don’t force your commune upon our income earning potential. Thanks.
Che-Stallman, Commune Overlord and Dictator of The GNU Communistic GPL Viral Infective Software Cult Clearly we don’t advise anyone to put their code under the GPL license as that means you’ve joined the dark side of the force. Why? For the reasons listed in this articles and others that describe how the GPL license is pernicious and a viral infection. It also imposes serious limitations when one wants to use otherwise good open source code within ones projects – it means that one can’t mix any GPL code into your own program without it being infected with the GPL virus. What a waste.
Che Guevara, a communist militant who was involved in the murders of many thousands of people. Although Richard Che-Stallman might not have murdered any people it’s clear that his cult has had a massive disruptive effect preventing open source developers from maximizing the potential of GPLed software due to the insane communistic restrictions of the GNU project and it’s GPL philosophy of Enforced Freedom which is a Faux Freedom. Heck, you can’t even load a GPLed DLL without infecting your code!!! How crazy is that!!!
Embrace Truly Free Software, BSD, MIT, Apache, et. al. (where et. al. excludes GPL like restrictive licenses) to ensure your freedom.
Uncouth Hippie Icky Richard Stallman, the Publicly Rude Slob-Icky Poster Child of Open Source.
Get a bathroom dude. Wash your hands with soap for ten minutes Ricahrd. Now we know NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES to shake Richard Stallman’s hands as we know that he doesn’t even care where he puts them. Tasty toe jam there Richard? Ick dude, get some manners Richard Stallman. Ok this is just too much to handle. Ick.
Most users never care about code. They simply want their system to work. It’s programmers who care about code.
If I want something you GPLers created I simply use it without paying you anything. There are ways around the GPL rules. Simply stick the darn program into it’s own space and only make essential minimal if any changes to it. Keep it a separate program wrapped in a protective condom to keep the GPL virus from infecting my code with it’s silly and stupid license terms that would convert my code into the GPL commune. No thanks, my code stays mine.
I have contributed some of my code to the GPL but always I have a dual license with the BSD license providing the true freedom for other coders (the only ones who matter are coders not end users) and even users.
Many projects are BSD-style licensed without the need to enforce sharing. That’s what the GPL does, it enforces sharing but it creates a nasty pernicious situation where if it’s included into your program ALL your code in that program becomes infected with the GPL virus license. Why? That’s totally insane terms. Just because I compile a source file into my program space ALL my other code in that space MUST become GPLed. Insanity.
So as a result wrap GPL code in separate program spaces to keep it from infecting other code.
Now, let’s compare that with BSD, Apache, MIT, the truly free license styles. They are truly free since I, a programmer, can include as much or as little of their source code in any program space I choose without their license infecting the rest of the code in that space. So they are non-infective and since they don’t require me to contribute my changes back to their projects I am free do so as I please: share or not.
I as a programmer dedicated to excellence in software for my clients do care about my end users, they after all provide my income. Producing the best software for them is paramount. However, giving them the source code won’t make the software any better for they are not programmers!!! So they really don’t care about the code. You just have to get that. The vast majority of end users are not programmers and never will be and really don’t care about the source code – it’s just gobbly gook to them. It’s geek without a translation matrix. What end users care about is great software.
Furthermore, more often than not the quality of open source software is, well, to be polite, a bit clunky and full of errors. That’s fine, you get what you pay for and since it’s free one must accept it as it is and if one chooses one can fix it as needed or even improve upon it as one is inspired.
The GPL is mainly aimed at people like Richard Stallman: DORKY PROGRAMMERS!!! Well, the vast majority of human beings will never program a computer. Certainly they’ll never want to go through the horrors of getting make files to actually work. It’s too geek for them. They are actually humans not geeks.
The GPL may actually make a lot of sense to people who are like Richard Stallman: dorky programmers who want a cause. You do know of course that Stallman is a hippie. Have you ever met him? I’ve meet him a number of times and he’s basically a geekie hippie with a cause. Great for him and his commune cult followers. Join his cult if you want, release your code as GPL if you want. Just don’t expect me to do the same. Just don’t expect me to be happy that you put so many restrictions on it that I have to alter my build process so as to not include your source in the same program as my code. Eesh. Annoying.
Anyway the work around the GPL is to simply keep GPLed programs within the condom protection of their own program space and to enhance them as needed to provide access to the real programs that are doing the primary work load: my code. That interface might be CLI in which case missing CLI options are added.
What’s really needed is something that is between CLI and having the code in my space. Sorta like a DLL loading but wrapped in a protective condom so that the GPL viral license terms don’t infect my application code. Maybe a program that loads up the GPL DLLs into it’s own space and then communicates with a BSD dll in my program space via shared memory. That’s the kind of protective bubble that’s needed to fully take advantage of ALL and ANY function in GPLed space. Not only would function entry points be visible but data structures would also be visible and usable from my program space through the protective layers always keeping the GPL infected code within it’s own memory space.
You see the lengths that you GPLers force people to go to just to take advantage of your code – some of which is good but most of which is well, to be polite, not. We have to jump through silly hoops that just mess up the beauty of code. That’s another reason that GPLed code is just a bad idea: it brings it’s ugliness to my code because hacks are needed to get around the license terms without actually violating them. I prefer to follow the rules when possible as it just makes life easier.
Ok, so we’ve established that you think that the GPL is hot damn and I think it’s communistic. Of course you’d like it as you gain benefits from being a member in the commune and don’t see the dark side of your jones town like commune with Richard Stallman as the nefarious one.
Ok, BSD, Apache, MIT, … are truly free licenses. Take the Apache project for example (or any of the big BSD projects or even a small project like minix3). These are all unrestricted licenses that don’t force sharing upon their members yet they still have people contribute freely. You see non-forced sharing is more free than forced sharing. When someone is forced to share under the GPL they are doing so against their will, I know many who have grudgingly shared. Yes, you counter with they don’t have to use your GPLed software and in some senses you are right about that, they don’t and I know many who don’t. However you falsely market your GPL software license as being “open source” when it’s not in fact “open”. The fact is that it’s “open with hooks into your flesh” as it REQUIRES you to share should you distribute your code as most/many programmers do who want to make a living from coding must.
If it’s truly open then I AS THE PROGRAMMER can choose what I want to do: (1a) including it in my program space or (2) keep it private for whatever reasons or (3) share it as I choose to or (4) contribute back as I choose to or …. many other choices that are LEFT UP TO ME!!!
Not the commune. When the commune gets to choose then it’s not free it’s communistic!!! You see when folks like you come out of the woodwork insisting that I follow your communities rules you are the ones enforcing the commune and being communistic! My mom came from a country that fell to the communists, I know many people who actually lived in real communist societies and yes some are even programmers and they have no hesitation in saying that the GPL is communistic in nature since it values the commune more than the individuals. Sure the propaganda would lead you to think otherwise however that’s just typical communistic propaganda, the official party line.
Anyway who cares really? I don’t use GPL code whenever possible. When I’m forced to use it either by it being required for a project or if it’s the only working solution out there it must be wrapped in protective condom layers so it doesn’t infect the rest of our code or other truly free code that we might want to merge with it – but we can’t merge them since the GPL virus wins in those situations resulting in our need to protect the truly free code from the nasty pernicious viral spreading of GPL.
So do as you do and continue your commitment to your communistic ways in your community of the GPL commune. I’m sure you’ll do fine.
I prefer the ways of true freedom unrestricted by being forced to share code. Apache doesn’t force me to share the code back so why should any GPL project do that? For no reason other than Richard Stallman’s geekie hippie communistic leftist agenda. So be it. We’ll wrapper the heck out of it and project ourselves and find alternatives to the GPL.
LLVM rules. LLVM proves that the GPL philosophy isn’t needed to make successful truly free and open source.
May you go in peace and leave us freedom fighters alone with our true freedom. Stallmanistic Communism not wanted here.
Just for fun:
Make sure to check out the list of links to “Tools [BSD Style]” at the bottom of the right column —>.
These photos and video where taken in Vancouver, BC, Canada a few weeks ago. Yes, it is a real surveillance helicopter… just don’t know who’s they are flying it for… Vancouver Police? CSIS (Canada’s spy agency)? RCMP? News? Someone else?
The chopper was flying near Vancouver General Hospital however it’s NOT a medical chopper as it didn’t land on the hospital like many choppers do. No, it circled for a while, maybe five to ten minutes… My Cannon G9 camera wasn’t going to get any better shots… need an SLR with a telephoto lens for that… besides I wanted closeups with the photo function of the camera. Anyway these are max optical zoom with digital zoom due to cropping and image magnification… otherwise no filters or touch ups… I tried a sharpen but it didn’t really help as the G9 is a bit grainy when you zoom in lots.
Here are some close up shots taken with the same camera in photo mode.
Can anyone tell what kind of chopper this is? What kind of camera is that? What are it’s capabilities? Whose chopper is it?
Even people who believe in Darwin can have delusional beliefs such as this Christian narrator of this BBC show “Did Darwin Kill God?”. Of course it does, it’s the last nail in the cross!
WARNING DELUSIONAL MATERIAL PRELEVANT IN THIS SERIES OF VIDEOS!!! DON’T LET YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT OF YOUR HEAD WITH THESE CRAZY DELUSIONAL BELIEFS OF GOD.
The problem with conspiracies is that there can be truth to them even while they are stitched together in paranoid delusions. How do you tell if they are really occurring or not? Hmmm…
“A neutron bomb, technically referred to as an enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a type of tactical nuclear weapon formerly built mainly by the United States specifically to release a large portion of its energy as energetic neutron radiation. This contrasts with standard thermonuclear weapons, which are designed to capture this intense neutron radiation to increase its overall explosive yield. In terms of yield, ERWs typically produce about one-tenth that of most fission-type atomic weapons.[1] Even with their significantly lower explosive power, ERWs are still capable of much greater destruction than any conventional bomb. Meanwhile, relative to other nuclear weapons, damage is more focused on biological material than on material infrastructure (though extreme blast and heat effects are not eliminated …).” – Wikipedia on Neutron Bombs.
Then there is this monster of all nukes so far.
Yes, all forms of nukes are evil no matter who sets them off.
Americans destroyed Hiroshima with a Tiny Nuke Bomb.
Americans destroyed Nagasaki with a Tiny Nuke Bomb.
Get your popcorn, pull up a chair, press full screen and play! Enjoy this full feature film with Vincent Price in his full glory!
The Last Man on Earth (Italian title: L’Ultimo uomo della Terra) is a 1964 Italian horror/science fiction film based upon the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend. The film was directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, and starred Vincent Price. The script was written in part by Matheson, but he was dissatisfied with the result and was therefore credited as “Logan Swanson”. William Leicester, Furio M. Monetti, and Ubaldo Ragona were the other writers.
It was filmed in Rome, Italy, and was later released theatrically in the United States by American International Pictures. It has since fallen into the public domain.
…
In the year 1968, every day is the same for Dr. Robert Morgan (Vincent Price). He wakes up, gathers his weapons and then literally goes vampire hunting. Morgan lives in a world where everyone else has been infected by a new disease that turns them into vampire-like creatures. They cannot stand sunlight, fear mirrors, and are repelled by garlic. They would kill Morgan if they could, but fortunately, they are weak and not too smart. At night, Morgan locks himself inside his house listening to jazz on the hi-fi, and in the morning, he kills as many vampires as he can, destroying the bodies.
The sun is the superpower of our solar system, a thermonuclear blast furnace, erupting with massive explosions. At 93 million miles away it would seem that we are safe from the suns wrath. But are we? With some experts predicting the most violent outbreak of solar activity in modern history its never been more important to understand the secrets of the sun.
TRUTH, FAITH AND REASON: POPE BENEDICT XVI’S LECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF REGENSBURG
By Gerald E. Marsh
The Stupid Delusionals with Invisible Friends, it burns. Cartoon by Plognark dot com - Thanks...
Pope Benedict XVI interleaved two themes in his lecture at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006.1 These will be discussed here in two separate parts: Truth, Faith, and Reason and The Dialogue of Cultures. The first addresses the Pope’s proposal to expand scientific reasoning to include the “rationality of faith”; and the second with the threat of radical Islam, and whether a “dialogue of cultures” is possible if the West persists in its belief in what the Pope calls a “reason which is deaf to the divine”.
PART ONE: TRUTH, FAITH AND REASON The essence of the Enlightenment, as put by Isaiah Berlin in his essay The Counter-Enlightenment, “is the proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge”. Notice that Berlin does not say that this approach is the sole method of obtaining knowledge, only that it is the sole reliable method, meaning that knowledge obtained in this way can be confirmed by experiment. This form of knowledge is increasingly coming into conflict with beliefs based on divine revelation.
Knowledge based on reason and the methods of natural science is threatening to many of those who hold conventional religious beliefs because the implications of such knowledge raise the fear that their lives may lose meaning and direction, and that they will no longer have an ethical basis for behavior. They especially abhor a future bereft of personal immortality. If the origin of life, and humanity in particular, has a natural explanation, how can one believe in the immortal soul, or that humanity is central to God’s creation? Belief in the findings of science about our origins will not only destroy the creation myths of humanity, but will also force the acceptance of the proposition that impersonal and indifferent forces were behind its creation, along with that of all other living creatures.
Professor Oleg Georgievich Sorokhtin, Dr. Sci. (Phys.–Math.), is chief
researcher at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Of all the solar system’s planets, only the Earth possesses a unique atmosphere that provides a friendly climate for the development of higher life forms on its surface. This is due to a fortunate combination of a number of preconditions: the Sun is a quiet star; the Earth is at an optimal distance from it; the Earth has a massive satellite, the Moon; the chemical composition of the primeval Earth itself, etc. The comfortable climatic conditions for life on our planet have developed owing to the optimal composition and pressure of the earth’s atmosphere and strong feedbacks between the evolution of the earth’s biota and the development of the atmosphere. As for the periodic coming of ice ages, they are connected to precessional self-oscillating processes provoked by lunisolar interactions; this is the topic of the article below.” – The Evolution of the Earth’s Climate and the Genesis of Glacial Epochs
THE COMING OF A NEW ICE AGE
BY GERALD E. MARSH, physicist
CHICAGO — Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age.
What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended.
The Ice Age is Ending... It must be our fault.
How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earth’s surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply don’t know.
Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit — an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years.
While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt.
Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization.
This image of our solar system’s asteroids sure freaks me out since it shows how precarious life on earth is in terms of the celestial game of billiards. Some say that the conditions are just right for life here on earth, and yes they are but it’s such a tiny pocket of life most of which exists in the thin layer of atmosphere or even thinner ocean layer. We exist in a bath tub of air and water that could get knocked around pretty darn good with any wayward space rock of sufficient size. Splat into earth and there goes life.
“Look at the volume of the Universe Where You Can’t Live! … The universe is not here for us! … What’s this going on between our legs… an entertainment system in a sewage system… no engineer would design that at all.” – Neil deGrasse Tyson
“In an effort to transition to a sustainable economy the planetary skin concept proposes a unifying approach to monitoring, measuring, and managing rural environments, rural to urban interconnects, and urban environments. Planetary Skin unifies a distributed nervous system of networked ground, sea, air and space based sensors, machines, and humans all into a cognitive decision space for trusted communities.” – Planetary Skin Promo Video
Yeah, and just who is in that “trusted community”? Not you or I that is for sure.
“Yikes! Their video is corporate government enviro-mental double speak gone wild and crazy! Big Brother will be implemented to enforce the bogus climate change politics of the likes of Al Gore! Yikes!!! Run for the hills, oh wait, Cisco is there with their planetary skin sensors monitoring you! The holier than thou crowd can control swarm after you to correct your 4% exhale of Carbon Dioxide in your breath foot print! They are after you since you didn’t get your lungs downgraded to 1% carbon exhales!
Planetary Skin is no less that the Total Information Awareness Grid/Matrix needed for the USA to combine with their Flying Death Machines to Control the World with the Threat of Death at Any Moment From the SkyNet.
Let’s hope the skin gets a rash.”
Very Scary: “Plantetary skin plays an active role…” in controlling the planet! Yikes.
NASA and Cisco Systems Inc. are developing “Planetary Skin” — a marriage of satellites, land sensors and the Internet — to capture, analyze and interpret global environmental data. Under terms of an agreement announced during a Capitol Hill climate summit today, NASA and Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) will develop the online collaborative platform to process data from satellite, airborne and sea- and land-based sensors around the globe.
The goal is to translate the data into information that governments and businesses can use to mitigate and adapt to climate change and manage energy and natural resources more effectively, NASA and Cisco officials explained in interviews.
“There are a lot of data out there, but we have to turn that into information,” explained S. Pete Worden, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. “What we are trying to do is use Cisco’s expertise in data handling, put our data in there and explain what’s really going on in the rainforests.”
The speed of c, also known as the speed of light, has some very interesting implications.
Einstein’s theories prove that information can’t be transmitted faster than the speed of “c” which I suspect no one will deny. Over a 100 years of attempts so far have backed this up.
“Einstein’s theory of relativity together with the principle of causality requires that no matter or information can travel with a speed larger than c.[5][6] Speeds faster than that of light in a vacuum are encountered in physics but, in all such cases, no matter or information is transmitted faster than c.”
Read what I write very carefully.
It’s easy to see that if information from the next nearest star system (Alpha Centauri) which is ~4.2421 light years distant (give or take depending on which source you get the measurement from and on the error amount of plus or minus 0.16 light years) and thus takes ~4.2421 light years to travel from Sol to there and another ~4.2421 years to get back. So if the mythical god was hanging out on that star for a vacation from the annoying prayers on Earth it would take ~8.4842 years for any prayers on Earth to be heard and responded to assuming no delays in gods thought processes upon receipt of the prayer by the magical telepathy. Maybe that’s nothing in god years but that’s a very long time in human years, for most humans a good chunk of their life!
Now the universe is a very big place if you hadn’t noticed. Very big.
The speed of “c”, light, is all that is needed to demonstrate that no god can be omniscient, nor omnipotent, nor omnipresent since it would take next to forever for god to communicate with parts of itself spread out all over the place across millions and millions of locations and light years.
This doesn’t even mention the “future horizon” problem where parts of the universe are cut off from each other casually therefore making it impossible for even god to see into them or affect them in any manner whatsoever.
Nor does it mention the required cpu and processing power any god would need to watch all these places at once even with the multi-million and multi-billion light year delays.
Nor does it mention that god would only see the past and never know the present at all places at once. The standard model of physics and quantum physics rip the notion of gods to shreds.
The laws of Nature are a harsh mistress for any gods.
This proof depends upon Einstein’s work and was inspired by Victor J Stenger‘s work. I’ve not heard nor seen this analysis anywhere else. I’ve been making these observations public for a few years now online.
Some people’s reactions are quite quaint when they hear this for the first time. Calm your reactive mind and let your rational and thoughtful mind have time to contemplate the consequences and implications of the above for a while, then raise rational criticisms.
I was inspired by Stenger. For the record I don’t claim that Einstein wrote the proof of what I wrote here in this post and the other posts, I simply state that fact that Einstein’s work proves what I’m saying, his work backs up what I’m saying as does the work of many physicists such as Feynman. The list is quite huge actually.
I do assert that these ideas (no matter how simple they really are) were originated by me as far as I know – I never heard them anywhere. They are obvious to me given the well known and well tested laws of the universe that I’ve been exposed to since I was a young child. When I was in my early teen and pre-teen years (10 to 15) I’d sneak off to the local planetarium almost every day for their show. After a while they simply let me in since I’d seen and paid for the show so many times.
(Recently posted here in a blog comment debate with Richard McCargar, although I’ve been posting this analysis in various forms for many years now).
The scary bit is that if you loan out your phone to someone you can catch whatever they have: their cold, their herpies outbreak, their cuddies!!! Yikes! Double Yikes!!