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Cake day: February 21st, 2026

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  • crwth@piefed.ziptoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldwhat makes a person a hero?
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    5 days ago

    A definition I heard and considered useful included a few required elements. A hero:

    • Acts voluntarily and altruistically

    This excludes most military and first responders, such as the prison laborers in your hypothetical. Hero is not a profession. Heroes also can’t have any moral or legal duty to the rescued, such as pulling victims out of the fire you started yourself.

    • Leaves a place of safety

    You can’t be a hero by saving others incidental to saving yourself. A hero must have had the safe option to merely be a bystander to the emergency.

    • Subjects oneself to risk of death of serious injury

    Heroes don’t have to die in the act of heroism, but they must have been cognizant of that possibility and chosen to act in spite of the risk.

    • To aid an stranger

    You can’t be a hero by saving your children, or anyone you have a duty to protect, or anyone you expect to be able to reward you in the future.



  • crwth@piefed.ziptoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    14 days ago

    I’ve answered a jury duty summons, but never even got to voir dire.

    1. Get summoned by mail.
    2. Check website or call ahead to see if you need to show up.
    3. I check website. It’s owned by domain squatters.
    4. I call number, recording says go to courthouse tomorrow morning.
    5. Take bus because I don’t want to deal with downtown parking.
    6. Check in to juror waiting room. Get jury number. It’s high.
    7. Can we validate your parking? No but you could reimburse me a dollar for bus fare.
    8. LOL. We don’t do that. The bus. LOL.
    9. I tell clerk about their website. They know. They lost it last year. (But still direct unsuspecting citizens to it?)
    10. Okay everybody. We have enough jurors and the rest of y’all can go home now.

  • A philosophy major explained to me that studying philosophy isn’t really as useless as it seems. That’s because whenever philosophers start to understand what they’re doing, they stop calling it philosophy and branch into real scientists. He said it’s unfair to judge the value of philosophy by the useless proto-sciences currently under study, but to consider the whole history of philosophy which includes every other field of study one can get a PhD in.







  • I know a couple of math tricks you can do with playing cards.

    • Give an audience member a pre-sorted deck of cards. Remove any card. Riffle shuffle the deck 3 times (4 if you’re bold). Return the removed card to a random position in the deck. Magician examines the deck and identifies the card.

    • Audience member selects any 5 cards and hands them the the magician’s beautiful assistant. Assistant examines these cards, and reveals 4 of them, one at a time, to the magician. Magician predicts the 5th card.



  • crwth@piefed.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyz$1$
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    3 months ago

    I had a student tasked with summing a finite geometric sequence with |r|>1, let’s say 1+2+4+8+16. He had apparently forgotten the formula for that, but knew the formula for the infinite series a/(1-r). Good enough he thinks, and sums 1+2+4+… = -1, then subtracts off the excess terms 32+64+128+… = -32, and gets the correct answer of 31.