Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Decided to check mythbusters on that one, and it turns out that our most famous predatory reptiles, crocodiles and alligators, don't need to be evaded by zigzagging. If you escape the lunge, they give up. Does this generalize to reptilian academics? Probably. If you're outside of their pool of specialty, their kill-zone, you'll be safe enough.
-
Is N/A somehow different from "None"?
-
Not to quibble, but I didn't mean teachers in the tertiary sector, who I think have far less contact time with the students and spend more time in front of the computer
Techs may be the exception to this. They're organized a lot more like high schools in that respect. But even still, while I forgive my Mum for not wanting to know much more about the blogosphere, I won't take much criticism from her of it.
If you ever get chased by reptilian academics, I've heard that running in zigzags works best. Something about the long tail makes it hard for them to turn.
-
It's not ironic. It's how I like it. It's my way of paying Russell back for making it all possible. He can put it in a book and make a buck, and I'll be glad if he did. Or through ads or however he thinks might work. I'm not in it for the money.
-
To pick a category of people almost at random, have you ever wondered why so few teachers write on PAS, by any chance?
My mum is also a teacher. She reads Hard News, but stops short of daring to venture into the comments. I asked her why. The answer was interesting: She assumed that it must be full of brag and abuse, and uninformed comment. I told her that it certainly was, but there was good stuff there too, including plenty more by Russell, which was what brought her to Hard News (having liked what he wrote in the other old-skool media she still likes to ink her fingers with). But her real reason was that she doesn't have enough interest to take the time. In other words, she has chosen self-exclusion.
I privately opine that she is also heavily influenced by her profession's (she teaches Media Studies at Tech) distaste for the entire genre. Tertiary teaching has always been an offshoot of academia, and always wants to hover around the cutting edge of that. Academia is pretty hostile to the way things are published on the net (straight from brain to audience, with very little editing in many cases). Not so much hostile to the existence of it, but hostile to the idea that it's a challenge to what they themselves do. It can be crushing to someone who has studied something their whole life to be told by a rank amateur something that they'd never even thought of about it.
Personally, I don't feel that way about my area of expertise. It's just happened too damned often, that end-users see a better way that the software could work than the engineers who wrote it. We learn to just roll with that.
-
I'm going to have to use that.
Isn't it great that you don't even have to ask?
-
This rhetoric that we are powerless serves power, as it always has and always will.
Sometimes it is rhetoric that is true, though. Some powers are beyond us. You can't stop the rising tide, or tectonic shifts. Attempts to fight mortality have all failed so far.
Of course we're talking about human movements, and being humans it might seem that we can control them. But when we're talking about the movements of billions of humans, the power starts moving to tidal levels.
I'm often struck by the idea that so much of humanity did not want WW1 and WW2, and saw both of them coming, and said so, and yet they happened anyway. Tolstoy had a lot to say about this in War and Peace, in his attempt to understand the tidal wave of French armies sweeping across Europe and then sweeping back. It is a direct assault on the idea of human free will, but that idea is definitely a controversial one.
That said, I don't actually know which way the tide of copyright is going, and I'm even uncommitted on where I'd like it to go. The viral power of a good idea could have more power to stop billions of people in their tracks than any level of strong intent, governmental or otherwise. To me, the rising tide is technology, which could sweep everything aside in a very short time, and legislation controlling it all is like levies and dams and dykes, massive works which can create highly fragile and vulnerable (and yet still massive and impressive and awesome) systems. Sometimes the only thing to do is decamp to higher ground.
-
andin, I already said I favor both Evolution and Atheism as positions. I'm just not dogmatic about them. I'm not quite ready to commit to the idea that Evolution can explain everything about the human mind, because so far it has not. It is a possibility that it never will, and if you are not dogmatic you have to accept this. I have no objection to attempts to explain, in fact I think that generating these ideas is a vital part of the process of discovering truth, and that it is a highly worthy pursuit. But something being a highly worthy pursuit does not mean it will be a successful pursuit.
It seemed to me that you were taking the position that evolution will absolutely certainly be able to explain it one day, which seems like a very bold claim, going well beyond the evidence.
I imagine that I have a far more inclusive view of the word science than you do. Again this is because I don't want it to become a church. To that end I have no qualms about saying that people who theorized about creation in the ancient world were scientists. Having a theory is better than no theory at all, even if it is a totally wrong theory. At least it gives you something to disprove.
What stands in the way of scientific progress is not bad theories. It is the dogmatic insistence on the truth of theories, backed with power to stop other research.
To that end I would say that the science of inquiry into the workings of the human mind has been going on in a highly systematic fashion for thousands of years. Theories have been proposed, discussed, debunked, refined, etc, probably since people began talking. The modern science of psychology built on this, and made fantastic progress in some areas for a period of time. The audacious idea that the mind could be studied as a biological process opened whole worlds of inquiry. But it is fallacious to see that which is progressing more rapidly at one time as the certain way of the future.
-
I'm not saying it shouldn't be criticised, but the response does seem to be insanely out of proportion to the 'crime'.
News must be slow. In the US, this kind of stuff has a much better place on pantomime stages like Jerry Springer.
-
My memory fails me every day, ask my wife
When disks got over 1MB, I quit relying on mine altogether. Having a memory is so 20th century. Now I have data, and search heuristics.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 875 876 877 878 879 … 1066 Older→ First