Posts by Rich Lock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
The The, Jackson Browne, Christian rock? Come on, give the poster some credit. These are not the sort of people you see at Parachute.
No, they're not Christian rock. It's music that just happens to be made by people who may, or may not, be Christians. And that belief may, or may not, influence their art.
Christian Rock itself is deadly dull for the same reasons that Satanic Metal is deadly dull - it's a one-trick pony. Once you've set your agenda that narrowly, you're bound to run out of good material after about half a track.
And what's so wrong with the letter I that it has to be changed to Y?
How should Y know? Yt can look kynda cool yf done ryght, but you have to be careful not do do yt too much.
I think it's a nod back to mediaeval writing styles, where 'y' was used more or less interchangably with 'i'.
I get my back fixed up by an osteopath, when I know that osteopathy's core tenets are bunkum.
This doesn't actually strike me as an irrational belief. Just because you get your discs manipulated by someone who believes that your body is, uh, 'somatically dysfunctional', doesn't mean it doesn't work.
I wouldn't give a stuff if my car mechanic sincerely believed that a gremlin lived in my engine, and could only be appeased by changing the oil every 20,000K. Right solution, wrong reasons.
-
-
To drag this back on topic:
Emma, I'm not entirely sure what point you're making here, apart from 'effectively managing internet communities is hard work'.
Do you lean more towards one approach (heavily/lightly/not moderated) than another?
I'm interested because PAS seems to fit within the 'self-moderating' camp more than any of the others you have mentioned, although I'm sure there's a ton of stuff going on behind the scenes which I'm not aware of.
It's also about the only internet community I'm active in at all any more. When I first arrived in NZ, I got involved with a few local hobby/specialist type forums, such as this one. Make friends, get to know the local gen, you know the drill.
Kiwibiker is apparently NZ's largest/most popular forum. In my opinion, it's management style sits squarely in your "Moderation is for Pussies" bracket.
Become a free speech advocate. Let anybody say anything in any way they choose, no matter how big of a dickwad it makes them – and by extension you – look. Sure, you'll end up actually losing speech as users walk away from the bear pit, but those losses will be pretty much invisible. Suggest that anyone who objects to the resulting flood of personal abuse that they harden the fuck up and learn to take a joke.
And, yes, it has lost at least one user (me, and I'm sure many others) who walked away from the bear pit. There's only so much 'Heilen Klarke Helengrad PCgonemad' that I can stomach when I'm trying to have a discussion about cam chain tension, or whether to switch from Bridgestones to Pirelli.
My point being that if these sort of communities are left lightly moderated or not at all, they will ineviably be taken over by the sort of extremist nutbars who make kiwibloggers look civilised, and it is extremely off-putting for those in search of civilised debate.
I also suspect that these sort of rabid mouthfoamers are very much a minority, but by by sheer volume tend to drown out any sort of moderate discussion, and drag what I will uncharitably call the mob down to their level.
I would say that my personal preference is for quite heavily moderated on-topic discussion, but I don't think that's trues either. I'm as guilty as anyone on here of dragging topics off the main points, but it doesn't seem to do that much harm (random BSG references notwithstanding).
One final point: I've noticed quite a contrast between some local NZ forums and global forums. A lot of the local ones have a parallel 'real-life' component - a lot of the participants know each other outside the forum, and this inevitably colours the discussion. Although funnily enough, it doesn't appear to make it more civilised.
-
The artists don't have to be out of their minds.
I was being a little flippant/facecious/whatever. I do appreciate the good stuff, wherever it comes from. Truly.
Love William Blakes stuff, for example.
-
Or, occasionally, indulge it. I regard my irrational thoughts as poetic. They have a place.
Yes, true. There's a lot of great art I enjoy that wouldn't have been created if the artist(s) hadn't been freaking out of their tiny minds. And one needs a bit of sympathetic resonance to really, like, groove on it.
-
Dragging this slightly more back on topic, but remaining on the science vibe:
The latest thinking from white-coated boffins is that we are hard-wired for belief and pattern-recognition.
It makes sense in the context of foraging on the serengeti plains for my monkey forebears to see an odd pattern of light and shadow in the grass and instinctively assume TIGER! In that context, scepticism might get you killed....
It also makes sense to me, working from that starting point, that over millenia the instinctive pattern-recognition we are hardwired for would evolve into something a lot more complicated and odder - the teachings of organised religion.
We sacrificed a virgin last year, and the harvest was ok. We'd better do the same this year. QED.
Thrug mocked the Mountain God, and now the Thunder has come. Burn Thrug to appease the gods. QED.
So, we're hardwired for belief. It doesn't actually mean that there is anything out there to believe in.
Personally, I find it useful to know that, and to use it as a good dose of weedkiller in the fertile garden of belief. I can train myself out of it like sportspeople re-train the flinch reflex.
There are dozens of sports where the instinctive reaction (the flinch reflex) is entirely the wrong thing to do in any given situation. Training to do the right thing first involves recognising the natural instinct, and then either training to work around it and use it to your advantage, or re-programming it into a different instrinctive reaction.
This isn't going to stop the hairs on the back of my neck standing up when I hear an odd sound in a dark house in the middle of the night, but it might instinctively stop me automatically assuming thatit's something malevolent crawling through gaps in my non-euclidian geometry.
I find it very difficult to take any sort of supernatural stuff seriously. No-one believes in Jupiter or Thor or Ishtar or Cernunnos any more. But they did once, as fervently as people these days believe in.....whatever.
-
I was rather surprised when someone answered my question "should we be teaching students that light is a particle or a wave?" with a "yes", instead of a "no; we should teach them it's both."
I think in context both answers mean the same thing.
-
Ever worked in customer service?
Yes.
And thank you for unlocking that long-repressed memory.
-
Evolution is a scientific theory.
To clarify slightly, and to try to go some small way towards closing the knowledge gap which is so ruthlessly exploited by fundies:
Evolution is a fact.
The theory part is why it happens.
We can observe evolution happening in a number of controlled and uncontrolled situations. We just don't know why.
We have theories which suggest why it happens. We can't prove them right or wrong. Therefore they are still theories. This doesn't stop evolution itself being an observable fact.
-
In my experience people like this are actually told to shut the fuck up because they are disrupting other people's learning by asking questions that don't actually make any sense, that others can see the obvious answer to or other, similar, issues. I've got no idea about this particular case (or about physics in general) but that's what my guess would be, having been a university tutor.
Your guess would be wrong, although I do take your underlying point.
Rather than telling someone to STFU who is disrupting a class by labouring on an obvious point, or asking dumb* questions, why not tell them you'll talk to them outside the group session?
There are ways and ways to keep classes running smoothly without beating individuals into a surly submission, and giving them the hump over an entire subject which they were once quite enthusiastic about.
In this particular case 'dark matter'
was the answer. The question being something along the lines of 'why does the Universe act as if it's actually far heavier than it should be based on the amount of matter we can see or hypothesise from direct observation?'. It was just tha the University Syllabus hadn't caught up with what was at the time the theoretical cutting edge.*Ever the heard the line about there being no such thing as a stupid question?