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KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE CAN MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE

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He had 109 hours to rehearse his lines, and his lines amounted to a mere 13 words. He could have spent eight hours on each word if he really wanted to. He could have devoted an entire working day to making sure each word came out just right. You couldn’t have blamed him for doing so. It had cost $25 billion to get him to this point. He’d travelled 240,000 miles. Half a billion people were watching. It had officially kicked off eight years ago, but this event was the fulfilment of a dream as old as dreams themselves. After centuries of learning, of striving, of fantasising, this was to be humanity’s finest hour. This was to be our first stop on our way out of the cradle and into the big, wide universe. A human being was going to walk on the moon. The occasion was momentous enough to be recorded to the second. At 02:56:15 UTC on the 21 st  of July 1969, Neil Armstrong set his left boot on the surface of the moon and delivered those famous words: Ex

TREAT YOUR FRIENDS LIKE MY BENZ

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It’s customary to begin discussions of Kant with a quick run-down of his eccentricities. He was a solemn man – near puritanical in fact – and devoted to his work. He never travelled further than ten miles from his home town of Königsberg and stuck to his daily routine with military-like precision. Whatever the weather, he never missed his afternoon walk, which he took at exactly the same time each day. His neighbours in Königsberg set their watches by the time Kant set his foot out of the door. These are great anecdotes. They make concrete the life of a man whose philosophy is forbiddingly abstract, so it’s a shame that none of them are true.   Apparently not as stern as he looks. Kant was a determined man but not a solemn one. In fact, he was criticised by his colleagues at university for throwing too many parties. He spent much of his life in Königsberg but not all of it. He spent a few years working as a tutor in Judtschen (about 15 miles away) and a few years

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

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One thing about Drake songs is that they always seem to feature a lot of numbers. Like, a lot. And it’s not just titles either. The hook to ‘ 100 ’ is literally just a sum: 8+92=100. And the square root of 69 is the lyric everyone remembers from ‘ What’s My Name? ’ These aren’t just passing references to math-concepts. The man is laying out entire equations in his songs, repeatedly. Is Drake really this passionate about maths? It’s enough to raise suspicions. Margaret Hamilton stands next to a stack of verses she wrote for Views . I reckon you could create a GCSE Maths paper made up entirely of Drake references. For instance: If Drake is 25 years old and is sitting on $25 million, invested in a mutual fund with an annual return of 2%, how much money will Drake be sitting on by the time he turns 40? Forget that for the moment though. Instead listen carefully around the 1:33 mark. Was that a YOLO ? ************************* As

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