On Calculating the Circumference of the Earth

There is an approximate delay of 4 minutes from Atlantic City to Philadelphia--a 60 mile Earth distance--for the sun to set.  So... the Earth rotates at about 15 miles per minute.  And since there are 1440 minutes in a day, I calculate the Earth's circumference to be ~21,600 miles, which is a far more accurate estimation than Eratosthenes.

An Addendum to William S. Burroughs

I have heard that heroine addicts--junkies--seek by means of self-destruction to recreate their primordial high.  

"If you have no histamine-produced symptoms, antihistamine drugs produce no effect.  I bought some ampules of an antihistamine drug and shot a double dose.  I experienced nothing but a slight depression (the depressing effects of some antihistamine preparations are "side effect" which chemists intend to eliminate).  A shot that felt exactly like morphine when I was sick now produced effects that were barely perceptible.  It seems that a user does not get a positive kick from junk.  What he gets is relief from withdrawal sickness.  Possibly all pleasure is basically relief from a condition of need, or tension.  Junk is the medium in which the junk the junk-dependent cells live.  When junk is cut off junk cells die, and excess histamine is produced to carry away the dead cells.  The function of allergic sneezing, running at the nose and eyes, vomiting and diarrhea, is to get rid of something.  During addiction, junk is a biological necessity, like food, water or sex.  There is no other substance that becomes in this way a part of the biological rhythm of the body."

What then is redemption to a junky, but withdrawal sickness--a willful overcoming of a base biological process.  If though the junky craves junk as we--who shot not William Tell's Eve--crave "food, water or sex", have we willfully overcome our base biology?  Without a biological temptation to overcome by sheer will, we have not yet truly suffered ourselves and are thus as base as the unredeemed user and the biology that binds all of our natures together.

Towards Understanding the Modern Allergy

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”

~ "On the Sufferings of the World" by Arthur Schopenhauer

"Great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering."

~ "On Suicide" by Arthur Schopenhauer

This dis-ease with modernity, experienced psychologically and physiologically, stems from the modern conception of time as a linear progression.  Hegel articulated at length the necessary progression of humanity as conceived through linear time.

Unlike the more ancient view of a circular and thus eternal time, Hegel argued for a linear temporal progression to absolute knowledge.  Hegel's optimism first appears in Leibniz's notion of "the best of all possible worlds"--which Voltaire brilliantly parodies in Candide.  Diverging from Hegel and Leibniz, Schopenhauer astutely argues for "the worst of all possible worlds", and in his articulation of the world we see optimism's ugly sister--pessimism.  

The sufferings of the mind and body are not actually distinct.  If a body feels pain to a significant degree suddenly or over a period of time, the psyche complements the body in its physical reality.  They work in tandem.  In terms of pleasure and pain, mind and body are extensions of each other--as are will and representation.  There is a slight temporal disconnect between mind and body coexistent with its respective objectification of the will.  This permutation of body and mind finds its analog in subject and object.

My psyche & physiology react with modernity as if it were an allergy, manifesting as modern maladies:  asthma, hay fever, and comorbid psychological disorders--including, homosexuality.  (NB:  The last of which is no longer recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a disorder, but it certainly constitutes a dis-ease.)  This allergy and dis-ease with modernity is coincidentally revealed by modern means, that is, by medical diagnosis and a blog.  Thus--in me--modernity finds its own cause and effect.

“If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido.”

~ William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

(That there still could be an altogether different kind of pessimism, a classical type—this premonition and vision belongs to me as inseparable from me, as my proprium and ipsissimum; only the word "classical" offends my ears, it is far too trite and has become round and indistinct. I call this pessimism of the future—for it comes! I see it coming!—Dionysian pessimism.)  

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

On sexual equality in a shared bathroom

In a shared bathroom:  If a man has to lift up a toilet seat in order to urinate, then he should not have to put it back down.  For the equality of the sexes, a woman should then return the seat (with gravity's assistance) to its resting position so that she may also urinate.  In this scenario, the work output would be equal for both the man and the woman (excluding the force due to gravity).

NB:  Both sexes defecate in the same manner so this is negligible.

"A True Relation"

Following the Starving Time, God shows His mercy upon a madman:

"Finding of five hundred men we had only left about sixty, the rest being either starved through famine or cut off by the savages, and those which were living were so meager and lean that it was lamentable to behold them, for many, through extreme hunger, have run out of their naked beds, being so lean that they looked like anomalies, crying out “we are starved, we are starved”; others going to bed as we imagined in health were found dead the next morning. And among the rest one thing happened which was very remarkable wherein God showed his just judgment, for one Hugh Pryse being pinched with extreme famine, in a furious distracted mood did come openly into the market place blaspheming, exclaiming, and crying out that there was no God, alleging that if there were a god he would not suffer his creatures whom he had made and framed to endure those miseries and to perish for want of foods and sustenance. But it appeared the same day that the Almighty was displeased with him for going that afternoon with a butcher, a corpulent fat man into the woods to seek for some relief, both of them were slain by savages. And after being found God’s indignation was shown upon Pryse’s corpse which was rent in pieces with wolves or other wild beasts, And his bowels torn out of his body, being a lean spare man. And the fat butcher not lying above six yards from him was found altogether untouched only by the savages’ arrows whereby he received his death."

–George Percy, President of Jamestown (Sept. 1609 – May 1610)

God hath shown His ultimate mercy through death.