Posts by Rob Stowell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Thanks for the heads up. Have put 1:30 Sept 5 'welcoming committee' at Memorial Ave Copthorne in diary :)
-
While Samsung & Apple are engaged in a bunny-ears lawsuit over who really invented digital tablets
Stanley Kubrick, apparently :)
-
they’ve done studies comparing BCom. students with other degrees and shown that one year of a commerce degree is enough to make people significantly more greedy and selfish.
Sorry to put you on the spot- but do you have a reference for this? (I read something similar- can't locate it.)
-
Senior management are often little more than courtiers.
this is so apposite I have to stop and doff my hat (or at least flick the remnants of hair out of my eyes :))
-
Jacinda Ardern’s repsonse was admirably clear
I was disappointed. Didn't feel the passion or the clarity of argument. I keep on getting the feeling Labour are phoning it in this time. Examining the polls rather than their consciences.
Makes me angry. -
Funny, I don't feel I have to think about it at all. I'm passionately of the opinion that MMP is the most democratic and best for the country. I'm open to tweaking it a little when the time comes. But anything else seems like a big step backwards.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
+1 thanks Gio- great link.
-
And a true piece of data is confined to that particular moment.
there’s a stool in the middle of the kitchen floor
Really?
Not any more. I moved it. With my bare hands :)
experiencing my place in the world in a way that would make the slings and arrows seem less painful, less personal, less malevolent.
Watching Kevin what-sit on TV tonight, 'slumming it' in India- he was amazed at how happy most people there people seemed. NZ and the "western nations" maybe not so much? I wonder if part of that's to do with continual close contact with communities/people- lots of them. Something most NZers might find very wearing, at least for the first decade or so.
-
I am also close to people who rely on SSRIs. I don’t doubt they do something :) But I’m wary of a/ the massive scale on which they are dispensed b/ some questions about how they work and c/ the long-term effects (it was spooky to be told people should be vary wary of stopping taking them- with suicide as a possibility).
Not moralistic about this (or much of anything) If they help, great!
Creon, I’m curious where this suspicion about ‘truth’ comes from? I’ve encountered it fairly often. I don’t think we can function without such a notion. Not truth in any grand sense; just ‘it’s true there’s a stool in the middle of the kitchen floor’ or ‘it’s true, he left his wife to go paragliding in Uruguay with a certain politician’ or ‘it’s true, the data relating to agw is confusing for the lay-person’.
As soon as anyone resorts to capitals and talks about ‘The Truth’ – they’re wrong :) -
Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Creon Upton,
No real argument, Creon- just another reminder that science is a human activity. Though when you say
a somewhat disappointing lament for "truth".
I'd just ask: if not 'truth'- what?
The inability to replicate initial data seems especially poignant in the so-called 'medicalisation of melancholy'- the explosion in use of SSRIs like prozac. Some of the most crucial data (how do you feel ) is essentially subjective, and the placebo effect looms large. (It occurs to me that all the data would be better if we didn't have pesky ethical considerations, like informing people they were being experimented on, and how. Wouldn't double-blind trials on people who didn't know they were taking anything- or thought it was to measure how fast their hair grew- be much more convincing? Not advocating this, of course...:))
We're fishing around in the dark, when it comes to SSRIs- and without a doubt, there's big money at play.