Skepsikyma

As I understand it, the second verse of the patriotic hymn "I Vow To Thee My Country" is no longer widely sung. However, I find myself unable to find a single recording of the song with that verse included. Does anybody have any idea where I might find one?

The song (minus one verse): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7Ztac69H%E2%80%A6

The missing verse:

I heard my country calling, away across the sea,

Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.

Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,

And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.

I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,

I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.

This is just a little survey, to help me get a grasp on just how common a rather rude habit which I have observed actually is. I was in and out of the hospital while growing up, and heard many people thank God for curing them, while the doctors and nurses who had worked hard to save them just stood by, not receiving a word of thanks. I went to a religious family's house, and the other children all said grace, thanking God for their meal, without expressing any gratitude towards their mother, who had spent hours in the kitchen preparing their meal. Do you thank both God and the people who worked to make something happen, or just God? In your opinion, were these just instances of rude people acting rudely, or is there some sort of doctrine about not having to thank people, because God works through them, or something along those lines?

My sister works at a waitress, and she told me that the waitresses all pool their tips and split them up evenly at the end of the night. I think that this is a horrible practice, and that it is unfair towards the staff and deceptive towards the customers. When I receive exceptional service I leave a generous tip, assuming that it will be given to my server as a reward for their hard work. The idea that it might be being distributed to people who don't work as hard is very disheartening. And the way she explained it, new waitresses are pressured into doing it by the ones who already work there. Is this practice very widespread? My sister worked at a small family restaurant, while I prefer more upscale establishments. Is this practice as common in fine dining?

and found that a combination of small diesel-electric submarines, advanced ballistic missile technology (including the deadly ASBM), and an overall military strategy that is basically tailored to prevent us from intervening would result in the loss of an American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and the occupation of Taiwan. Doesn't anyone else think that it's rather naive to be calling for cuts in military spending during such a crucial technology race?

(This study was done by RAND, a non-partisan think tank)

I want to start trying a few drinks (Tequila Sunrise, Shady Lady, Margaritas, etc.) and I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations? Favorite brands, aged or not? Favorite cocktails? Thanks!

What was your impression? I'm a huge fan, and I want to see her some day. Was there a lot of improvisation, or did she mostly stick to the music as it is presented on her CD recordings?

I know that it comes from the Latin word Pontifex, which means 'bridge-maker', and that this title was applied to the high priest in ancient Rome (pontifex maximus, or 'greatest bridge-maker'). My question is: why on earth did they call their high priest 'greatest bridge-maker'? What did the ancient roman religion have to do with building bridges?

I want to download some more, and I'm looking for recommendations. So far I have 'Cry Me A River', 'Round Midnight', 'Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend', 'Misty', and 'You And The Night And The Music'. Are there any other songs by her that anyone really likes?

Okay, this is going to seem a little random, but here we go...

Where can I get rhum vieux (an aged Martinique rum). I live in Pennsylvania; is it tough to get in the US?

Does your average liquor store carry 151 proof rum? And could someone explain in detail how one would float a thin layer of that on top of a cocktail?

How on earth does one pronounce "Curaçao"? My best guess is Koo-rah-sow, but I've never learned Portuguese pronunciation, and the word looks Portuguese to me.

Where might I find vanilla beans? I've never seen them before, but then again, I've never really looked for them either. I want to make infused rum and, from what I've heard, you just let the beans sit in a bottle of rum.

I mentioned one of my favorite dishes to someone (bœuf bourguignon) and they made a comment about larding offhand. I had never done this before, so I asked them to explain. They tried, and I looked it up, but I still don't understand how it's done. I want to try it very badly, so can someone explain how on earth this is accomplished? How do you SEW fat into something? And how do you make the lardons in the first place? Thanks!

My garden is producing an absurd amount of these three vegetables, and I don't really have much experience cooking with them. I'm more of an oil and white-sauce person, so I don't know much about cooking with tomatoes, and I've never used eggplants or cucumbers in anything before.

Please excuse my weak math terminology, it's been a while...

I got bored at work today and was playing around with exponents. I would raise the numbers 1 to 9 to the first power, then the second power, then the third power, and so on, all the way up to the tenth power. Then I took the answers and looked for patterns. I found that, if you take the differences between the numbers, and then the differences between those numbers, eventually you reach a constant number. i.e. 1 squared is 1, 2 squared is 4, 3 squared is 9, 5 squared is 25, and 6 squared in 36. 4-1=3, 9-3=5, 16-9=7, 25-16=9, 36-25=11. The difference between all those numbers is 2. So that was the constant that I found for the second power. Each time I went up a power, I had to do one more 'tier' of calculations to get to a constant. Here were the constants that I found: 1, 2, 6, 24, 120, 720, 5040, 40320, 362880. I looked for a pattern in this, and noticed that 1*2=2, 2*3=6, 6*4=24, 24*5=120, and so on. If you increase the number that you multiply by by 1 each time you end up with that sequence. So my question is twofold. Firstly, what is this called? What are other ways to end up with this sequence? Secondly, how would I derive a function from this list of numbers? I want to play with derivatives now, but I've completely forgotten how to get the function!

I always though that Asus just made parts for computers, but I found this desktop on the Best Buy site:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Essentio+Deskto...

Does anyone have experience with their line of computers? Are they any good, in your experience? It's going to be a computer for my two sisters and my mother. My younger sister would be playing video games (WoW) on it, so it has to be able to handle that. It seems to have decent stats.

My cat vanished for a few days, and she recently came back after I called for her for about half an hour. She was obviously on edge about something, and kept looking at our driveway and flattening her ears, dropping into a defensive posture. I fed her some milk, and then played with her in the garden for a bit, but she suddenly stopped, flipped around to face the gate by the driveway, growled, hissed, and took off. I saw another cat there, much bigger, and VERY mangy-looking. I hissed at it and threw my shoe into a nearby spirea, which frightened it off. Eventually my cat came back, and I've stuck her in my basement for now with a bed, liter-box and food. But she hates being indoors, so I'd like to get rid of that nasty cat somehow. Does anyone have any tips? My father wants to shoot it, but I'd rather resolve the situation without killing anything.

This pretty much sums up why I reject mysticism. Are your reasons similar?

"Man’s need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality—but no control is possible in a universe which, by one’s own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house. His life and self-esteem require that the object and concern of man’s consciousness be reality and this earth—but morality, men are taught, consists of scorning this earth and the world available to sensory perception, and of contemplating, instead, a “different” and “higher” reality, a realm inaccessible to reason and incommunicable in language, but attainable by revelation, by special dialectical processes, by that superior state of intellectual lucidity known to Zen-Buddhists as “No-Mind,” or by death. His life and self-esteem require that man take pride in his power to think, pride in his power to live—but morality, men are taught, holds pride, and specifically intellectual pride, as the gravest of sins. Virtue begins, men are taught, with humility: with the recognition of the helplessness, the smallness, the impotence of one’s mind."

- The Virtue of Selfishness -

Identity, non-contradiction, either/or

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all of these complicated things can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama."

- Richard Feynman -

What philosophical views do you hold? Please explain your conclusion rationally...

"Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience-that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible-that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.

Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality-not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."

- Ayn Rand -

"It has often been noted that a proof of God would be fatal to religion: a God susceptible to proof would have to be finite and limited; He would be one entity among others within the universe, not a mystic omnipotence transcending science and reality. What nourishes the spirit of religion is not proof, but faith, i.e., the undercutting of man’s mind."

- Leonard Peikoff -