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.

Summit County (Akron) Ohio. It’s $1.25 now, but I think $1 per ride was the rate then. No free transfers, but all busses meet at the courthouse so that didn’t matter.

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 got Buzz Aldrin’s at some university watch party for some incoming space probe pictures.

You don’t need that sort of instructions, just vague feedback on what’s good and what isn’t is sufficient. Do more stuff like what got good feedback and less stuff like what got bad feedback. Think of it as AI training set and hope you have enough I to learn without the A.

One neat thing about solar and wind energy, that might have national security implications in light of recent events, is that it’s really hard to blockade.

I just wait. They’ll eventually understand and present my “losing” position as their own.

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.

Indeed, and would have earned full marks had he said that, or even showed any awareness that his intermediate results were somehow nonstandard.

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.

Jingle bells Jingle bells, Santa Claus is dead // GI Joe the Eskimo shot him in the head.

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream // Throw your teacher overboard and listen to her scream.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school // We have tortured every teacher and we’ve broken every rule.

Chinese, Japanese, Dirty knees, Look at these.

If she’s used all the pieces and solved enough to reverse engineer the shape of all the missing pieces, then it is fully solved. If the missing pieces cannot be individually identified due to shared edges, then it is still solved, but is no longer a 1000 piece puzzle and she should only claim to have solved the 999 or 998 piece subpuzzle.

Yes, I switch between a few OTA stations. Usually just on as background noise. There’s a couple of NPR programs that I sometimes try to listen to.

You shouldn’t kill anyone in private that you wouldn’t kill in public.

Get a good look. You might never see another.

So someone with an income of $1M (20A) has a tax liability of $2M, and earning $10M means you owe $200M? At least with traditional tax brackets, it’s hard (but not impossible) to accidently get marginal rates over 100%.

I flooded a dormitory once, but I blame building maintenance for tricking me into it.

I wake up and head to the bathroom. Turn on the shower, nothing happens. Try the sink, still no water. No advance notice to the residents, but the water must have been shut off for some reason. I have a class to go to, so I turn everything “off”, get dressed, and leave. I’d forgotten that one of the sink knobs was threaded the opposite way from the standard convention, so that one was full on when the water was restored. Came back to the dorm after lunch and realized exactly what I’d done as soon as I entered the hallway and saw the maintenance man running his shop-vac outside my room. It overflowed the sink drain, and the bathroom floor drain, flowed through the dorm room, and was in the process of flooding the hallway.

I’m not at all sure it even is murder, even if she deliberately withheld medical care. I’ve seen advance directives from people who would refuse care in similar circumstances, and it’s not a crime for a wife to honor such a wish. Maybe you could get her on lying to the police about it, or for a lesser crime of medical neglect, but not murder.

If you really want it to be a prosecutable murder, find her fingerprints on a bottle of the virus she poisoned him with. Take a blood sample to test for antiviral treatments she took to prevent accidently infecting herself. Maybe find her impatient boyfriend who didn’t want to wait for a divorce.

1. Apply for access to age-gated content.
2. Ignore application for 18 years.
3. Your account has been approved.