Latest blog posts

I've been trying to figure out how to get DOSBox to run "Omnicron Conspiracy". The game hangs at the title screen playing the title music saying "press ENTER key to continue". It remaps INT9 (keyboard IRQ) and has its own keyboard buffer at a different location from the standard position at 0040:001E.
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I came across this geometry puzzle a while ago. Many people, even professional mathematicians seem to have problems with it, taking hours or days to solve it. Oddly enough, people with only basic knowledge of geometry seem to do a lot better, often a matter of minutes.
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When I woke up this morning, I felt up rather like I did on September 12th 2001. The world seems different somehow. Last night at 18:06, the enfant terrible of Dutch politics, Pim Fortuyn, was murdered, the week before the general election.
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Recently, at a party, one of my friends said, "it's so easy to manipulate men". Following that, she continued "I know what you're thinking: oh, that doesn't happen to me". That immediately reminded me of the rules of psychology. Although psychology claims to study the way people think, to me it seems to be all about imposing your own way of thinking on others. The moment somebody disagrees, make use of it. The most classic example I can think of is this. Suppose I want to prove that everyone is a drug addict. I can do that with a simple questionnaire, with only one question:
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Are you American?
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