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I am in need of a historical counter-example. In a discussion the other day I said that it would be cool to meet an alien civilization. Then someone replied that she would not want to, because amongst other in the history of mankind whenever a more "advanced" (or maybe better technologically more advanced) civilization met a "less advanced" one, it ended bad for the "less advanced" one. Take for example the native populations of north and south America and the Europeans...or the Aborigines and Europeans.

I can even extend make her argument more general: whenever 2 civilzations met, 1 one was off bad afterwards. Take for example the barbarians (less advanced) and the romans (more advanced), where it ended bad for the latter.

A weak counter-example might be Marco Polo in China. This is weak though because it was not a meeting between civilaztions, but a selceted few (Marco Polo's entourage) and a civilization.

So are there any strong counter-examples?

LOL, I was trying out to link a directory so I did

sandros@??? ln -s convert_tries/ link2convert

Seen that it works then I wanted to remove the link and what I did is:

sandros@??? ~> rm -r link2convert/
rm: cannot remove directory `link2convert/': Not a directory
sandros@??? ~> rm link2convert/
rm: cannot remove `link2convert/': Is a directory


Actually I thought it is only fun, but now I wonder how do I delete the link only, with rm link2convert/* ? Or does that actually delete the conent of convert_tries/ ?

I have this jacket which always charges me with static electricity when I take it off. So I always get an electro-shock when I touch something metallic afterwards (or water that is fun :-)). The question is what can you do so that you decharge slowly without shock?

I read often updates from a fb-groub (in German) called "useless" knowledge, where I read amongst other that if you go 45000 km/h the a red-street light would be shifted to appear green. That would be easy to check. But another which I am wondering how it is calculated is: Jesus (or whoever) would have had to run at 75 km/h to "walk" on water.

Now I am wondering how one finds this result. Surface tension? Archimedes-force? And where comes the amount oftime spent in the same spot into the calculation?