Posts by B Jones
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Except if you have a judge like the Italian one who found that wearing jeans implied consent because of the difficulty in removing them without it, or our own local hero who thought the world would be less fun if a young man had to accept the first no as a final one.
The thing about juries is that it's harder to find 12 idiots than one.
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My sort of sister in law went into a sewing shop in Ireland and asked for some pins.
No, she was told, they don't sell any. Perhaps she should try the stationers down the road.
You must have some, she responded. Why wouldn't a sewing shop have pins.
I'm sorry, we don't sell any, they said, wondering why this crazy kiwi thought they'd sell pens and was being so rude in insisting that they do.
I think she found them herself, but she had less luck with getting a quick-unpick. Even when she explained what it did, they had no idea what she was talking about.
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Or "the psychotherapist tainted the evidence" a la Gottlieb this morning.
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Deborah - yes. But the way the guilty beyond reasonable doubt thing seems to work, is that the jury is invited to acquit if there's any possibility that the woman (or sometimes man) consented. And some of the weird things that people, judges or jury, think about how women should behave around strange men, mean that standards that work ok for burglary or assault convictions are functionally useless for these kind of cases.
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The De-Press's latest fit of Beebophobia is proof that bad health reporting should be considered a public health issue?
Don't get me started. The Press ran a story on annual std testing with the subtitle saying that the Ministry of Health was calling for annual testing of young women, when the Ministry was actually saying both young men and women should be tested. Last time I checked on stuff, it was running with a photo of someone getting a vaccination in their upper arm.
Reading that kind of rubbish is certainly a challenge to my mental health.
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Creepy stories, and I don't envy (or question) your experiences for a second. But I'd draw different conclusions from them.
Coincidence, spooky things the human subconscious naturally does when you're worried about people you care about, acquiring information without realising it (eg the news the night before the morning paper came out), and most of all confirmation bias, which records the hits (premonition plus death) but not the misses (premonition without death or death without premonition) provide satisfactory explanations as far as I'm concerned.
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Also, if you approach every phenomenon with an entirely open mind, you'd get nothing done for wondering if really the sun was going to come up tomorrow. We take shortcuts to save on processing power - some of these are fantastically useful (Copernicus says the earth rotates around the sun every day, of course it will happen tomorrow), some are provisionally useful (Ptolemy says the sun rotates around the earth set on a crystalline sphere, of course it will keep doing so) and some are pretty unhelpful (the sun returns at the will of the gods, we must sacrifice in order to keep them happy).
I'd also check to see if Weta Workshop was staging a publicity stunt.
I blame Weta and co for my hardass adult skepticism - I've never recovered from the embarrassment of believing Forgotten Silver when it first screened. Fool me once.
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The Geonet page for the quake even shows a little wriggle way down in South Westland,
The map on the page you link to is of the centres of all earthquakes in the last ten years, and how deep they were. It's interesting, though - it clearly shows how the plates overlap one another. And why the rock in Fiordland is different from the rock in Central Otago. The one on the left shows the epicentre of the Napier Earthquake of 1931.
The one on this page shows the reader's reports of how they felt this quake, which extend to Westland but not down the bottom in Fiordland.
I love Geonet. It looks like Dino's still keeping an eye on White Island.
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If it's a good anecdote (not the after a few drinks sort) it can do something - one black swan can disprove "all swans are white". It can't do much else, like say anything about the number of black swans, whether it's a mutation, a species, or the result of an oil spill, without other information.
But mostly people use it to mean the equivalent to an urban legend.
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Fascinating story on Sensing Murder psychic.
Burden of proof aside, you'd want to be sure a psychic was reliable: not talking to the wrong dead person, hearing them properly, conveying their messages faithfully etc. Otherwise it's a fun trick but not worth paying the entry fee for. Telephone communication is an amazing thing, and in its early days it was through unreliable party lines, but we'd complain now if you couldn't hear half of what someone said, and half of what you could hear was wrong. I'd like to see some psychic research into improving the quality of communication with the dead.