A blog in July, posted by I, the musician analyzing the magician.

“Let us assume you met a rudimentary magician. Let us assume he can do five simple tricks--he can pull a rabbit out of his hat, he can make a coin disappear, he can turn the ace of spades into the Joker card, and two others in a similar vein. These are his only tricks and he can't learn any more; he can only do these five. HOWEVER, it turns out he's doing these five tricks with real magic. It's not an illusion; he can actually conjure the bunny out of the ether and he can move the coin through space. He's legitimately magical, but extremely limited in scope and influence.

Would this person be more impressive than Albert Einstein?”

If I were to ever meet this magician, despite his true ability to use magic, I would have to say that his impressiveness would be overshadowed by that of Einstein. Considering all of what Einstein has actually done for the scientific community and society as a whole, even some simple, yet actual, magic would fail in comparison to the wonder that is Einstein’s accomplished career. The most impressive thing, though barely so, on the side of the magician is that one could speculate that other magic exists besides this magician; magic that could be used to do things far beyond anything Einstein has done. This, however, doesn’t compare to Einstein because of the fact that it is merely speculation; the chance other magic being out there and the chance of us finding it if it is combined is so small that this fact can easily be deemed insignificant. Despite this, I still feel the need to emphasize the importance of what Einstein has done compared to what this magician can do.
Einstein’s achievements are numerous; ranging from discoveries about the speed of light to his famous formula relating mass and energy: E=mc2. His theories changed physics forever. He basically discarded the whole idea of physics up until his time, throwing everything about physics that everyone ever knew out the window. His ideas forever changed man’s basic understanding of the universe and the way it works. He also seems to have greatly influenced the way we think of light traveling: as particles instead of waves. He laid the path for what may be one of the most important branches of the present day: quantum physics. He had, in short, revolutionized all of science as we knew it in one lifetime, influencing the way physics has been taught for years to come, and setting the stone for tons of new discoveries about the way everything works, will work and has worked.
Now this magician has no “achievements” in which to compare to that of Einstein’s, so that is one sign, already, that he is not as impressive. The magician could, and I do repeat could, be useful in some ways. For example, it could be said that since there is one person on Earth that can do magic, there could be more; however, there is a flaw in this idea. There is the same chance that there are no other true performers of magic in the world so he could also be totally useless in this sense. The good thing about having real magic in general is that it could be used to improve all sorts of things in the world like curing diseases, getting rid of trash, hunger, and other nuisances. Since this magician is so closed minded, he will not do these things, or exert the effort necessary to do so. Then we would need to rely on other magicians that may not even exist. This definitely takes away from how impressive this magician is.
Compared to Einstein’s numerous achievements, this magician’s possible one achievement seems nominal, presenting absolutely no amount of impressiveness on any level. Even with his amazing magic tricks, after seeing the same five over and over again, anything impressive about them would be lost in boredom caused by repetitiveness. Einstein’s overall transformation of physics continues to amaze anyone who has ever studied him, proving far more impressive than anything this magician can do. Also, the magician is doing tricks that many can do without real magic. Even though others who do these are not authentically doing it, it still seems almost as convincing as real magic. This basically takes away any little drop of impressive left in anyone’s view of this magician.
In conclusion, the magician’s narrow-mindedness seems to be his downfall while Einstein’s open-minded view on the universe and how it works has impressed us for ages. In the question of who is more impressive, Einstein wins by a long shot. This magician just lacks the ability to do something that could actually be deemed impressive by most people. He lacks what Einstein had that not only influenced millions of people, but also the mind to think beyond his limit. He would impress me if and only if he could achieve this feat, alas he will not. Therefore, My answer is still Einstein.


~THE END~

I post this in the form of a blog:

“Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy, Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with thick rope. He is conscious and standing upright, but completely immobile. And let us assume that--for some reason--every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes.

You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots.

Would you attempt to do this?”

Upon reading this question, my first impulse would be to kick this horse to death, following the logic that one life is worth less than the lives of multiple political prisoners. After thinking about this for a while, I realized that this may not only be false, but the prisoners’ lives may not be in as immediate danger. Also, it comes to mind that many political prisoners are possibly being held for good reason, which sounds unlikely, but can be possible. Another thing to take into consideration is the chance of actually killing the horse while attempting this. If you cannot kill the horse, then it would be senselessly beating a horse until it can probably barely move without any positive outcome. That seems very inhumane.

Now, assuming that all of the political prisoners set to release in this situation will remain alive for a good while, that leans me even more towards the side of not kicking said horse to death. Consider this: if the prisoners remain alive, that gives us more time to get them released in the future, without having to kill anything. Now one might think it is only a horse; does its life matter as much as any humans? Well, I recently found a quote from the cartoon TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. During the show one of the characters states that “all life is sacred”. Upon thinking about this, I realized that perhaps killing a horse is no different than killing a human, cat or any other animal. Basically, it would make more sense to preserve life as much as possible, and since the prisoners aren’t as prone to death as a horse that is going to be kicked to death is, then it would make more sense to not kill the horse.

There is, however, a good argument towards kicking this hypothetical horse to death is present. After reading up a bit on political prisoners on Wikipedia, I learned that many political prisoners, even here in the U.S. are innocent people who criticized the government, represent a commonly unliked government, or are from a country that is an enemy of the country that arrests them. This makes it very immoral and wrong to hold these people for doing little to nothing to harm anyone. Again, this makes me want to free them, but I also learned that political prisoners only seem to die in captivity after many years, time periods long enough to get them rescued by other means. Either way, the governments of the world will still take political prisoners, so there is no real point in freeing them considering the fact that they’ll either be snatched right back up or replaced by someone else. Virtually, freeing them will have no effect on the number of political prisoners in captivity in the long run, so why bother?

If I do indeed to decide to kick it, despite my obvious negativity about wanting to, would it even be possible? This horse is fully grown, and now matter what type of horse it is, any fully grown horse is really big. It could be possible to kick the horse to death by crushing its ribs, but the problem with this is that that may make it take a bit longer to die instead of say, kick it in the head. If wearing steel toed boots, I could probably barely be able to kick it in the chin, which could eventually kill it, but would 20 minutes be enough to do this? To be totally honest, I think not. It is already a stretch to kick as high as a fully grown horse without steel toed boots, but with them it would just be a plain out struggle, making each kick take longer and longer until I can barely kick it. Though it is certainly possible to get enough good kicks in to kill it, I’m not sure I would want to take that risk, considering I may just leave it brain damaged and unable to do anything at all. This further stretches the argument towards the side of me not kicking the horse to death, but is it really worth it?

Political prisoners tend to be innocent people who just want change in their government, but are they worth kicking a horse to death? Is the U.N., the U.S. or anyone else in the world really doing all they could be doing to get these prisoners released? What if by releasing them all we do is start a war over meddling in other countries government? Could it not be their fate to be prisoners, perhaps sparking some sort of righteous act to negotiate their release changing history as we know it forever? Honestly, I think not only that it would be wise to not aggravate other countries more than we already have and it would probably be more than difficult to accomplish this task either way. I would not kick the horse to death. I feel that I should never take a life, and if others want to, they will pay for it in the long run. In conclusion, it would be better in the now to kick the horse to death, but long term effects are more positive if I don’t, I will let the horse live and let the prisoners try to survive in the confines of wherever they may be situated.