OK, dudes, you keep filling up these open threads and I have to keep opening new ones…but that’s cool. Groovy even. I’m in California, and I feel fine.
Keep on truckin’, let it all hang out, and talk about whatever.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Dendy troll,
You never approved one comment, and deleted another while leaving your reply to it on this post.
You’re still lying. As Sven said, produce some evidence of any human culture that has ever been documented that has a diet consisting only of raw foods.
Fire was harnessed by hominins more than one million years ago. The use of fire by our ancestors predates the evolution of Homo sapiens by more than one million years, so your feeble “arguments” are laughable, irrelevant, and undeserving of my time and attention.
I’ll repeat again, why do you claim on your LinkedIn profile that you’re an Associate Professor when American River College lists you as an adjunct?
damn it, if Sortaprofessor Dendy hangs around, you guys are going to hit 20K while I’m sleeping.
It’ll be #548.
Would it be because he’s dishonest, morally deficient, second-rate sack of low-class walrus vomit who envies his betters and has to resort to misprepresentation to alleviate the shame he feels for his vast number of flaws and lack of real achievement?
Wow, just clicked on the Dendy blog.
This person teaches?
—
I was most amused by this post on that site, entitled Pharyngulists beware!. Here it is in its entirety, for your amusement and to save on clickthroughs (which is why I’ve not linked to it).
Humour and wit-impaired, is this Dendy, and TSTKHS to realise it.
Pygmy Loris: I don’t think kindaprof Dendy is ever going to make any substantial point. On some level he realizes that he is hopelessly outclassed and is reduced to schoolboy taunts and jeering. Embarrassing behavior to see in someone who claims to be an educated adult. I’ve had his type in my classes before, but those were 5th graders.
BS
Jadehawk, OM | January 26, 2010 10:16 PM:
Actually, the Medieval Warm Period is real, but in the context of your story, it was being (ab)used to tell four lies:
The first lie is the Medieval Warm Period implies that modern global warming is not caused by people. That is wrong. The second lie is that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the the present. It was much cooler. The third lie is that the Medieval Warm Period was global. As you can see by the previous link, it was limited to the North Atlantic, and perhaps a few other regions. The fourth lie is that modern global warming is caused by the ozone layer. That is also wrong.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I can condense this down to a short soundbite suitable for a coffee shop conversation. Maybe you should just get their email addresses and just mail them the links. And keep in mind they are more likely unknowing victims of the lies, rather than deliberate perpetrators.
Blind Squirrel,
LOL. You’re right. He hasn’t made a single point since he showed up. I’ve been trying to pin him down on one issue, his honesty, and he’s alternately claiming he never lies or simply ignoring it.
I find him kinda bizarre, and I worry that he is employed as an instructor in higher education.
I am an Associate Professor, a marine biologist, and a writer… also a member of MENSA with an IQ of 156 on the Catell and 145 on the Stanford Binet!
That ranks me on the intelligence scale above 99.75% of everyone in the world and statistically smarter than 100% of the “people???” commenting on this blog!
yeah, that’s specifically the part I was referring to myself.
*shrug* I don’t know about the new girl, but I used to work with the dude, and he’s a rather passionate anti-science person. I would bet money that he’s also a creationist, but his derision is generally reserved for everything environmental and everything liberal. So he’s not what I’d call an unknowing victim; willfully ignorant, more like.
llewelly,
I think this is actually one of the biggest problems when one is confronted by unscientific and anti-scientific ideas in casual settings. There is so much to explain, including much groundwork for those unfamiliar with science and research, that it makes it difficult to condense it for short, random interactions.
Evolution and global warming are the two ideas that I find myself explaining on a regular basis. If I could, I would memorize talkorigins and Real Climate in their entireties so that I could take down all the denialist claims briefly and succinctly.
no you’re not; liar.
no it doesn’t, you pompous fuckgnome.
Hey folks,
I’m mostly a lurker but… on the Prof Dendy topic I couldn’t help noticing that the only commenters on his blog posts seem to be from around these parts.
And that his blog has advertising on it. It’s only Google adwords, but still…
Every time you click on that guy’s blog, you’re basically giving him money. Every time you link to him, you’re sending all the readers here to him.
As a result, he may well be making a tidy little profit from baiting Pharyngula readers.
Talk about feeding the troll!
An internet tough guy!!! A force to be reckoned with!!! Um, that doesn’t explain the posts of piles of shit and a woman’s ass, does it?
BS
So you are not only a genius on one, but two IQ scales? With an IQ of 156, you’re in good company.
By ‘statistically smarter’, do you mean better at statistics? Because if you’re ‘statistically smarter’ than 100% of the people commenting on this blog then at least one of the following is true:
1. You’re not a person.
2. You’re not commenting on this blog.
The > relation is anti-reflexive, you see. I include the Wikipedia link so you don’t have to look up the word yourself.
Nope. I have my shields up and my cloaking device activated. (Adblock Plus and Adblock Element Hiding Helper).
BS
Oh, boy. Dendy, for a sooper-genius™ you sure write stoopid stuff. Why is that?
—
feegz, feeding trolls is a Pharyngula tradition; we like their antics. This one is capering satisfactorily, so far.
You might have a point about linking (as I’ve indicated above), but note SB software includes rel=”nofollow” in hyperlinks.
Someone here must have a MENSA membership and can log-in to the membership directory to verify Puff-Dendy’s claim.
ARRRRGHHH!!!! If there’s not already a formalized Intertoobz Law™ regarding the automatic presumption of wankerishness of anyone who brags about either Mensa membership or IQ (let alone both), one needs to be drafted up muy pronto.
Bill Dauphin: This is what came to my mind.
BS
How about Danner’s Law. After Adrian Danner in Blind Squirrel’s link @ 519?
“The whole internet is just jealous of my knowledge.”
~Adrian Danner
New Scientist has the article Clever Fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart, which covers exactly what it sounds like.
BlindSquirrel @515
Aaah… ad blockers.
Now, if I was reading this at home and not just wasting time at work where I have no control over my browser, I’d be able to copy your wise example.
I proclaim this to be Dauphin’s law. Of course, I have very little power or influence so me proclaiming it doesn’t mean much.
Hey, anyone remember when Charlie Wagner posted his (expired) MENSA card?
___
“I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers. ” – Stephen Hawking , on being asked what his IQ was.
Ah, hell. It’s always funny (if pathetic) when people, when challenged, must resort to telling us how smart/educated/experienced they are, rather than actually showing us.
In Jabootuish Jargon, it’s an Informed Attribute.
Just because it amuses me, I’ll point out that the full name of the ‘Catell (sic)’ is the ‘Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale’, administered to infants between the ages of 2 and 30 months.
“When I was 20 months old, …” is not a particularly compelling phrase.
I think I like Danner’s Law better than Dauphin’s Law, modest fellow that I am!
Feynmaniac:
Yeah, well… to be fair, that’s easy to say when you’re Stephen Fucking Hawking, innit? ;^)
And since this is an open thread, I’ll take this moment to pivot and announce that, despite having been an incorrigible defender of President Obama, I am officially Not At All Pleased© with what appears likely to be flowing downhill in tomorrow’s SotU speech!
A fish tried to give me sad eyes this weekend. I ate it and its liver with
fava beanspotatoes and a nice Chianti.—
It’s potentially hazardous to take that utilitarian line. What if fox hunting is significantly more ecstatic than sport fishing? And the death of one fox provides satisfaction for many hunters, whereas each fisherperson might want to torment several fish to be satisfied, and might do it more often than the fox-hunter. So it’s not entirely safe to assume that sportfishing always falls better on the scale than fox hunting. Depends on how many fish one fox is worth…
I didn’t know he was into fishing ;)
dumbo @ 508,
Look, it made a funny !!
@ 517,
Well if PZ the poopyhead hadn’t banned K*ok he could look it up for us now !! (IIRC)
Talk about banning, I’m sick of the creep already.
Sven @ 407,
Incidently, I saw a 14yo girl at work today whose urine sample looked like pure pus but only contained ketones and no cells whatsoever, she assured me she has always peed this gunky fluid, and never had any urinary symptoms.I was rather skeptic and sent it to the lab anyway.
Would not want to get that stuff near any of my cookpots….:-)
Yeah, if you _were_ a writer, you’d know the writer’s maxim, ‘show, don’t tell’ – you’ve told us you’re all these things; what you’ve shown us, on the other hand, is very different.
I could say that I wonder which is the better indicator of truth, but I already know.
You’re seriously pulling the intelligence card?
Just what does a high IQ prove exactly? Does it make you immune from error? Shit, you might as well just whip out your cock and conclude that from there you’re penis is bigger than anyone else here. And therefore…
Even if you do have a better IQ than people here, what does that really mean? It has nothing to do with any argument at hand, you’re just trying to put yourself as an authority. And doing that is an obvious red flag for quackery – even if you’re genuine, surely you appreciate that many do flaunt “qualifications” in order to sell their snake oil. If you’re genuine, then you should be able to recognise such a tactic is one of a false prophet, or at the very least realise that such a tactic won’t work here. There’s plenty of others with qualifications and intelligence who debate on here, but they at least have the decency to argue from evidence as opposed to trying to argue from intellectual authority.
i.e. If you have to tell us you’re smart…
see, this is why I didn’t study medicine
stop laughing!
We just need Vox Day back. Perhaps while he’s at it he can finally give that ultimate proof of God he hadn’t written it down yet. It’s been over well a year now!
*facepalm*
Incidentally, even !
Dendy, Vox Day, Charlie Wagner, Kwok…..MENSA may a better indicator for personality disorder than intelligence.
Windy @527, I wrote ‘justified’ in the sense that there at least is no hypocrisy therein, not in the sense that I agreed with the basis for such a justification.
David @ #346
Thanks for the rasberry;)
*slinks off, tail between legs*
Today is the 65th anniversery of the liberation of Auschwitz and it has prompted me reread Primo Levi. What a trully wonderful writer.
Dendy
That is seriously the single most pathetic attempt at trying to impress anybody that I have ever seen. If you had spent any time here at all you would realise that people here are completely unimpressed about claims, in your case probably fake, of being a member of MENSA. It’s been done before and quite frankly is pretty lame.
If it is true then it affirms my opinion that having a high IQ doesn’t necessarily make you smart, clever or, in your case, capable of social acceptance. You still haven’t addressed my claims of your mysogynism displayed on your site and it is childish to dodge any attempt at explanation of such behaviour.
I ask again, please explain how you came to reproduce a photo of a young woman on your site in some form of suuport for the point you were attempting to make? I also am extremely keen to know if you have definate proof this photo was taken with her consent and, if you do not, do your realise you are complicit in the abuse of her dignity?
On a lighter note
look at the last photo in Brownian’s photo set
http://www.okcupid.com/profile/Brownian_M/pictures
…now add glasses and look at this
http://piercework.typepad.com/mrs_pierce/images/2008/01/15/speng.jpg
..coincidence..I think NOT.
Uhm,
Harold Ramis ?
Harry Potter ?
Joe Basel ?
;)
Dr. Egon Spengler, of course.
Jebus, i’m slow tonight…The “speng.jpg” could have been a giveaway :D
‘trully’ – Prat.
Somewhere I refered to the IT department (where I work)as ‘Nazis’.
‘If This is a Man’ reminds me how inappropriate that is. Sorry Paul.
Come on! Only 5 more until we get 20,000 Comments Under the Post.
Ok then, why not fill it up with some german trash music..:-)
Eine Insel mit 2 Bergen
As if I would post merely for the purpose of increasing the comment count!
Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s get to that magic number – with a song from The Magic Numbers.
I suffered with this far too long. So glad my kid is in college now: One Card Short from the Yu-Gi-Oh tv show.
This comment claims to be first, but is also posted in the wrong thread.
I was quite tired and couldn’t comment much last night. More than a hundred comments behind and you start talking about fox hunting :-( I’m glad I decided to go to bed.
Anyway. My attitude to fox hunting has bee that it is not only of the same nature as bear bating and dog fighting, and also boxing and domestic abuse, but also that the real issue is not that cruelty is inflicted upon some, whatever other animal. The issue is that cruelty is inflicted _by_ individuals who get some psychotic pleasure from it and it is this sadistic psychopathology that needs to be addrressed for the protection of our community. Even drag hunting is allowing the psychos to act out their sadistic fantasies.
..Five more. Pish posh,
I say we aim for 50,000. Bwaaa, haa,haa haaa.
Rorschach
..well I guess we could but you know Germans in general are pretty freakishly weir…..
..oh, hang on, forget I said that.
Ok, this is what in German is called “Majestaetsbeleidigung” :
Fake
Original
[+1]
Listen, don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.
Oh, I love Die Ärzte, with, or without Lara Croft!
Please read this story of a rooster killing gone terribly wrong.
Eddie,
That’s entirely ridiculous. I have friends who go fox-hunting, and I’m pretty damn sure they’re not psychopaths. How many people do you know personally who go hunting? Are you speaking on the basis of any kind of experience or empirical evidence, or just blind prejudice?
My Google-fu is poor in my veins tonight. It took me at least three attempts to work this one out.
I only just spotted the most ridiculous part of Eddie’s comment:
So… boxing is comparable to domestic abuse? Yeah, hitting another consenting, trained adult participant in the course of a voluntary sporting activity is just the same as beating and coercing defenceless women and children.
Seriously, your comment is rather demeaning and offensive to domestic abuse victims.
German insider music thingy here….
Haensel&Gretel NDW versionHaensel&Gretel NDW version
Excuse me ? Say what ? May I please marry you, now, without delay ? You love Die Aerzte ? *faints then posts Aerzte song*
Manchmal haben Frauen
How about an Avenue Q song about a certain German word?
Walton @ 556
I know plenty that still fox hunt. Namely my cousins ( all 8), my uncles ( 2) and aunts(1) and even my goddamn great uncle (1) who still feels the need to satisfy his blood lust.
I bet I beat you, with your “I’m an urban child but still have ties to the landed gentry by friend default “in your game of “who has the most fox hunting friends”.
Look, Walton, I’m sure you have some sort of best intentions here. I don’t actually think you are any sort of a bad person, albeit a bit young and naive. I just want to say, I’m a bit more qualified than you, both in the foxhunting sense and the legal sense, and I think maybe it’s time you deferrred to you superiors. You are absolutely wrong if you think a fox hunt is either humane or the animal’s death is quick. I have been there ..it is sickening.
Rorschach
I accept your proposal with one coda.
…all sex talk must be made in German.
Ooooh. I’m getting all leggy at the thought.
Talk dirty to me in German baby. Woooot!!!
Walton, think about what Eddie means to be saying.
Maybe not perfectly well-expressed, but can you perhaps see any commonality between those things?
How would you feel if I used a similarly loose (I won’t suggest yours is malicious) interpretation of your intent earlier, for example:
“won’t you think of the livelihoods of domestic abuse social workers, not to mention the hospital staff, police and lawyers who deal in such cases?
How heartless.”
I vote for Dauphin’s Law, but propose that “presumption” be changed to “confirmation”.
BoS, yes, I defer to your greater experience, since I have never been on a fox hunt myself. But I would have expected you to be rather offended by Eddie’s comment, since he is branding several of your close relatives as “sadistic psychopaths”, on the basis of no apparent evidence.
You’re confusing me with John Cleese !
:-)
Assumed Prof. Dendy – please explain where, when, and by what criteria and promotion process you obtained the title of “Associate Professor”, given that your credentials indicate nothing of the sort. Without this information, it appears that you enjoy lying for sport, and is therefore clear that nothing you say should even be given the semblance of attention.
Shorter me to Dendy: data or STFU.
Haven’t read beyond comment 450 yet.
That’s not how it works.
That, too, is not how it works. Or at least there’s no reason to think that’s how it works.
That much is obvious.
John, that still doesn’t make any sense. I was primarily attacking Eddie’s comparison of boxing to domestic abuse. While a comparison between fox-hunting and domestic abuse is absurd and morally bankrupt in itself, the comparison with boxing is far more so.
Boxing, unlike domestic abuse, is an activity in which all the participants voluntarily choose to participate, and are physically capable of defending themselves. Ignoring the role of consent here is completely stupid and morally bankrupt; to compare boxing to domestic abuse is just as idiotic as comparing gay marriage to paedophilia.
Nah, Walton
I’m in agreement with Eddie. They ARE sadistic psychopaths. With nothing better to do with their time than feed off the fat of taxpayers dollars and act like a born-to-it privledged arsewipes.
..ohhh. Don’t I sound like a complely rogue member of the the royal family?
..Fuck ’em I am. As is my dad!!
Wake up and find we are over the 20,000 posts. Wednesday as Sven predicted. And still going.
Dandy keeps showing himself to be an evidenceless twit. All attitude, but no science. Dandy, you will never be considered an authority here. Why? You lie to yourself. Then you lie to us. We know that. So, you need to quit lying to yourself, which if you do long enough, will remove you from the delusional fool category. If you begin shape up now, maybe in ten years or so you might be considered rehabilitated. Start with disbelieving in your deity because there is no physical evidence for any deity, much less your specific man made deity.
Walton, boxing is two people battering each other for the entertainment of others.
Yes, I grant that it’s probably an inappropriate element in Eddie’s list, and under different circumstances I might’ve quibbled.
Perhaps without including boxing, you can more easily find the commonality I alluded to and which I suspect was the intended sentiment.
If I marry you do I get a castle ??
Robbi, Tobbi und das Fliewatuett ! There is a castle in there somewhere….
( and I cannot believe that a 70s TV series like this is available on YT)
(enough german subculture references for one night I guess)
Not only do you get a castle but you get your own title to drive Walton insane with.
Blokes who marry a hereditary titled chick get “sir” as their moniker.
..even if you won’t speak hot German to me.
But, as a good royal servant, here are some Aerzte songs :
Fake !!! Teenager Liebe cover
Meine explodierte Freundin
2000 Maedchen
Schlaflied
Zu spaet live
I’d like Duke or Marquis, that seems to drive him really wild…:-)
(And I just tried to post 5 Aerzte songs out of royal admiration, but got sooo caught in moderation, i.e. black hole, for those links never to be seen again)
The question, BoS, is if someone marries you, do they also get access to your vast… tracts of land?
I don’t understand you people who have coffee before showering in the mornings. I couldn’t trust myself to be alert enough for the hand-eye coordination needed not to cause scalding burns (or at least a big mess) before waking up with a shower.
Surely you’re not implying that Smoggy’s exploits are…exaggerated? For shame!
I was thinking late-80s George Michael. Given that I understand Brownian has Greek blood, that might be confirmation bias on my part.
The Drowned and the Saved is one of the most hauntingly brilliant books I have ever read.
Dendy’s bragging reminds me of the writeup the Church of Lawology gives Elrond Hunter, quite frankly. The exaggerated, untrue version, I mean.
Fick mich, du miserabler hurensohn
Fick mich, du miserabler hurensohn
Streck ihn aus
Streck aus deinen heifien gelockten.
Streck ihn aus
Streck aus deinen’ heinen gelockten
Streck ihn aus
Streck aus deinen heiften gelockten schwanz
Ah-ee-ahee-ahhhhh!
Mach es sehr schnell
Rein und raus
Magisches Schwein
Mach es sehr schnell
Rein und raus
Magisches Schwein
Bis es spritzt, spritzt, spritzt Feuer!
Bis es spritzt, spritzt, spritzt Feuer!
Aber beklecker nicht das Sofa, Sofa!
Aber beklecker nicht das Sofa, Sofa!
Aber beklecker nicht das Sofa, Sofa!
Aber beklecker nicht das Sofa, Sofa!
There are many forms of psychotic, abusive behaviour that have been in the past socially accepted norms an even profitable businesses. Fox hunting and other animal cruelty I think is in the same league as genital mutillation. Boxing has the same ‘consent’ issues as prostitution.
Then where do we fit in BDSM?
I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean to say this:
A quick literature search failed to turn up any scientific papers published by “Professor” Dendy. Not that publication is the sole criterion of value…just that if Mr. Dendy refuses to publish the results of his research on pinnipeds, what evidence do we have to support his claim that he is even a scientist? So far, the claim to be an “Associate Professor” is a hilarious* lie. The evidence thusfar indicates that Dendy is in instructor at a community college with an over-inflated sense of importance
*Actually, now that I think about it, it is not hilarious at all. Rather it indicates a sad lack of imagination. I mean if one is going to lie about their job title, they could at least make it interesting, e.g. “I am a top-selling porn-star” or “I invented a time machine”, etc.
Right between my pathetic, undeserving, a-
*This comment is suffering from technical difficulties. Please stand by.*
Speaking of technical difficulties, are the utube embedments loading for any one else? All I see is blank space.
The urine surfactant experiment proceeds apace. Produced a fine specimen this morning, darker than most American beers. It also has a persistent head.
The temperatures of the water and urine are equilibrating, and as soon as I get the cat off my lap the experiment will begin.
BS
20K!!!
This one, appropriately interthreadual and self-referential.
I knew the Oz contingent was going to put us over. Thanks to unprecedented commenting rates (over 240 comments/d in this subThread, which beats even the Curse of the Revenge), perhaps enabled by anastomosation, my early prediction has proven laughably conservative.
In this case, however, I am proud–yes! proud!–to be WOTI.
Congratulations, Threadizens!
that’s This one…
Boxing has no problem. Sports specifically have an exception carved out (at least in the US), because there’s a very real chance that people /can/ be hurt, but also that they /generally/ are not; As long as players remain within the rules of the game, they shouldn’t have to suffer liability for legitimate accidents, especially when both parties are running the same basic risks. Further, prostitution’s problems with consent arguably spring from its illegal nature in the US; It doesn’t necessarily have to involve physical violence.
BDSM is simple; Sexual activity between two consenting adults. State of Texas v. Lawrence laid out most of the rules there, as have a few other consent laws. Don’t cause serious injury (Second degree burns, broken bones) and you don’t cross over the line where consent stops being a legal issue.
the obligatory post-20K update
-Homer J. Simpson
That idiot Dendy. He can’t even recognize a simpsons’ quote.
eddie (@581):
Far be it from me to defend fox hunting (I’m no better than lukewarm about other forms of hunting that are arguably much more humane and sporting than chasing down a single small animal with huge numbers of dogs and riders), and while I think Walton is basically a decent, thoughtful person, if you’ve been reading here long you know I’m not shy about opposing his positions.
But even though I’m more-or-less on your side in this argument, I find your analogies to be full of FAIL:
If you’re referring to so-called female circumcision1,2 here, I disagree that it’s analogous on several grounds: First, fox hunting is humans vs. nonhumans, which makes it an inherently different game. Second, genital mutilation is decreed by parents or cultural elders who are at least ostensibly acting in the best interests of the subject person3; nobody imagines that fox hunting is good for the fox. Finally, AFAIK, nobody considers genital mutilation sport. IMHO there’s absolutely no useful comparison between the two: They’re both activities that cause suffering to a living creature; otherwise, unrelated.
This is closer, but I think porn fits better than whoring: In boxing, it’s not a matter of one participant paying the other for commercial “consent”; it’s a matter of third parties paying both for their activity, which is intended for the entertainment of yet more third parties. As I say, more like porn than prostitution (and this remains true regardless of how much boxing promoters may resemble pimps!).
I assume your reference to “‘consent’ issues” relates to potentially coercive economic motivations? To be sure, boxing has famously served as a “route out of the ghetto” (but then again, so have many other sports), and I don’t pretend to know much about the economics of the fight “game”… but just given the requirements for physical fitness, I suspect not many boxers fit the stereotype of starving, strung-out junkies willing to sell their bodies for their next meal/drink/fix/bed.
Oh, please! If you’re thinking of kinky porn or sex work, see above… but otherwise, BDSM is not a sport, it has nothing to do with actual cruelty (it may look like pain and/or cruelty to outsiders, but the participants wouldn’t be participating if it weren’t pleasure for them), and it’s arguably one of the most explicitly consensual of all human interactions, since safety demands trust and prior discussion of limits. I have no direct, personal experience with kink — maybe somebody here will chime in more authoritatively — but speaking for myself, I can’t even imagine why you would bring BDSM in this context.
1 Please, folks, let’s not have that whole thread again, ‘kay?
2 I assume this is what you intend, since the other possibility I can think of — the “mutilation” of self-chosen genital piercings — is pretty obviously not analogous.
3 Everyone knows from our previous threads on this that I vehemently disagree that genital mutilation is actually in anyone’s best interest, but it’s the intent of the perpetrators that’s relevant to the very narrow point I’m making here.
Blind Squirrel (and others): What does FCD stand for? Teh google doesn’t give me much, except maybe: Friend of Charles Darwin?
Please forgive my ignorance. It has been bugging me ever since starfart mentioned it in the process of going nuclear.
Friend of Chas. Darwin is correct.
You can be one too!
Mr. Fire, FCD is Friends of Charles Darwin.
A lot of commenters here agree that fox hunting represents a reprehensible, needless cruelty to animals. But in order to oppose that, many are bringing in their own pet peeves.
Let me ask: why exactly bring up boxing? If boxing is suspect, why not other forms of martial arts? Why not American football or the British Rugby? I fail to understand the point.
And those that are comparing animal cruelty to FGM, please understand that either you are engaging knowingly in false equivalences, or you really know nothing about the horrors of FGM.
Needless animal cruelty is repugnant to me and many others here. I think Bill Dauphin made a lot of sense when he indicated:
The true test of humanity IMO lies in how human beings stand up for those that cannot stand up for themselves.
But animal cruelty can be decried without resorting to comparisons with other human atrocities such as FGM; such unnecessary comparisons cheapen the import of both.
Indeed it does mean Friend of Charles Darwin. It started as a lighthearted way for us unlettered folks to add some whilst getting in the faces of creationists. The joke has run its course, but with the problems with commenting lately, I been afraid to change anything in my Typepad account. Sort of how you don’t fiddle with the rigging during a storm at sea.
BS
Blind Squirrel is that old?
[/kidding]
Thanks to Mr. Fire for bringing up that mystery. I have been curious (but never dared to ask) ever since I found someone named Ian H Spedding FCD comment at Pharyngula…
(Yes, I know Google is my friend… but I just didn’t.)
Wow. The Texas Freedom Network, an organization devoted to countering the religious right in Texas, has been active in the Texas State Board of Education’s efforts to rewrite the history books. They get email. It’s pretty entertaining, if you wet your hair first to keep it safe.
Up-thread there was a discussion about mormon doctrine. This was related to an old video (link in comment #283) that discussed spirit babies, god’s harem, god having once been a man, the fact that some christian sects produce videos about mormons that deliberately mislead, etc. This discussion was followed by a question from Rorschach (#284) as to whether or not mormons really believed that crap.
I made an effort to explain the current wishy-washy, public-relations orientation of so-called doctrine. There’s a discussion on exmormon.org today that speaks directly to this issue. And the discussion by the ex-mormons does a much better job than I can do explaining the “nailing jello to a wall” nature of mormon doctrine.
When we had a visit from a couple of mormons recently (in the Mormon Prophecy thread), one of them told Rev BDC and me that quotes we pulled from the Journal of Discourses were “not doctrinal”, and so he dismissed decades of racial prejudice. Here are some excerpts from the ex-mo post that addresses the issue:
At the exmormon link there’s one post that outlines the official mormon position on “negroes”, as written down in 1951, and it isn’t pretty.
From Destlund’s link @598:
Mr. Fire, I’m also a FCD, though I don’t append it to my handle. I’m reserving room for MM (Member of Mensa) as soon as my application goes through. Dendy has been helping me prepare for the exam.
Not Greek (μαλάκα!) but Croatian. Don’t tell David Marjanović. Interestingly, most people think my last name sounds Greek as well (a problem Ragutis may be familiar with), so I get the Greek thing a lot. But I don’t take offence. I like seafood and wrestling in the nude as well as anybody.
As an SCTV fan, I’m pleased by the Harold Ramis comparison.
I like seafood and wrestling in the nude as well as anybody.
Yeah but how well oiled do you like your nude wrestling?
Kausik Datta (@595):
Thanks for the approving quote!
As you know, I’m in broad agreement with your position in this thread, but I do think boxing (along with its cousins, the full-contact martial arts, and their inbred bastard children, the so-called mixed martial arts and “ultimate” fighting) stands in a unique position compared to other sports: With boxing (et al.), the intent is to cause pain and physical injury; that’s how you win. The other sports that explicitly mimic combat — fencing, wrestling (real wrestling, that is, not the theatrical farce that is professional wrestling), target sports, modern pentathlon, many forms of martial arts competition — are consciously designed to prevent injury, and are scored based on skills and performance. And even though rough team games like rugby and American football (is it true the rest of the world calls it gridiron?) produce many and serious injuries, they’re not designed to do so; dealing physical harm isn’t officially part of the game1.
I still don’t think boxing is a meaningful analog for sports that involve animal cruelty for human entertainment (e.g., cockfighting, dogfighting, etc., in addition to fox hunting), of course, because the whole question of consent is fundamentally different when we’re talking about nonhumans. Also, of course, even boxing doesn’t involve the killing of the losing participant (accidental fatalities notwithstanding).
So, yeah… no comparison at all.
1 The quasi-official toleration of fighting in ice hockey is a special case, about which don’t even get me started!
Good one from the Random Quotes box:
That’s a function of how much ελαιόλαδο one uses when making καλαμάρι.
Suffering from not just SIWOTI but also SIWIMS syndrome, I couldn’t have resisted entering the discussion, most likely. Complete with threats to go home, look stuff up, and come back.
And why would one harm one? I’d just catch them (in tupperware or something) and throw them out of the window.
Is meatspace really that much more real than teh intart00bz…?
Let me reword: there is no purpose, so nothing should stop me from being hedonistic.
Reformulation: I want to be treated as if I had certain rights the way I have a mass and an electric charge. The easiest way to get people to do this is to convince them they have the same rights.
Yeah. If you need to shower in the morning, you should have left the window open at night. If you have left the window open, chances are very good you don’t need to shower in the morning…
(On the other hand, don’t leave it too far open when it’s cold outside. If it’s too cold outside my bed, I can’t get out of it.)
People keep telling me I need to do all sorts of weird shit in order to wake up. Every single one of them requires having already stood up. The illogic! It burns!
After I’m sure I won’t eat anything for a long time. Which normally means… just once per day, right before going to bed. But thoroughly.
Oh for crying out loud. He’s actually showing off his well-trained ability to solve the IQ test!
Where’s your list of publications?
I’m not sure about that, actually. I mean, why bother joining?
I’ll jump to the money quote…
“Perkins explains this as follows: ‘IQ indicates a greater capacity for complex cognition for problems new to you. But what we apply that capability to is another question. Think of our minds as searchlights. IQ measures the brightness of the searchlight, but where we point it also matters. Some people don’t point their searchlights at the other side of the case much, for many reasons – entrenched ideas, avoidance of what might be disturbing, simple haste. A higher wattage searchlight in itself is no protection against such follies.’ Indeed, it seems even the super-intelligent are not immune. A survey of members of Mensa (the High IQ Society) in Canada in the mid-1980s found that 44 per cent of them believed in astrology, 51 per cent believed in biorhythms and 56 per cent believed in aliens (Skeptical Inquirer, vol 13, p 216).”
:-| Many people are psychopaths. They’re walking among us, Walton.
Hey, I can practically godwin this. One word: gladiator.
Reminds me of the strange concept of szerelemnyelv.
(That word is Hungarian, which in itself explains half of the strangeness.)
This one better not be, but, I mean, Soviet children’s TV is on YT. I posted some a few subthreads ago.
Anywhere where I don’t need to watch it <toothy grin>
Safari 1.3.2 did that about half of the time (unpredictably).
Guess I should go to work…
But it occurs to me that, although Teh CO has largely eschewed titular suggestions from the peanut gallery, it would be a shame if the next subThread wasn’t called something like “20,000 Comments Under the Sea.”
An offhand reference to Cap’n Nemo, or even Ned Land, would satisfy me here.
Don’t want to rise to the bait offered in comments #415, #421, and #453, huh? Prefer to wait until you’re down in the 3rd before the cheap desperation shots started flying, eh?
I like these threads. There are fewer trolls, and trolls make me angry. And I don’t like me when I’m angry.
I don’t know why I didn’t start hanging out here sooner.
Normally, there wouldn’t be much trolls.
What pisses me off is that one of these trolls decided to stalk and misrepresent me.
DM@606 Regarding Loxosceles…this is an idiom. I couldn’t harm any of them (as in not even one). What I did, in fact, was scoop them up in a glass and put them outside. However, there really was nothing to prevent them from coming back in…it was that type of apartment. I also was careful to shake out blankets, shoes, clothes before using them. I got used to living with them. It wasn’t bad at all.
Of course, and make no mistake, this is a battle and we are fighting for reason and truth, as much as we are able. But sometimes it’s nice to kick back and take some respite for the horrors of war. These threads are like M*A*S*H. Sven DiMilo is clearly our Hawkeye Pierce.
Oh, noes: I think I’m Radar.
Ooh, I’m familiar with brown recluses (well, not personally familiar), but my first impression of the Loxosceles adelaida in Wikipedia is that from any sort of distance I’d mistake it for one of the harvestmen that are ubiquitous around here.
(When I was young, my best friend would pull the legs off harvestmen because they legs would twitch even after being removed. He only did this once or twice, probably because I’d yell at him when he did. I’m pretty sure he’s no psychopath, though in the section for religion on his facebook profile he wrote, “Prove it”, thus making him clearly equivalent to Hitler. QED.)
I rather think that PZ’s decision to shorten the subthreads has triggered the frontpage effect more frequently. Lots of people comment here only for a short while after a fresh new subthread has appeared.
That’s because, among living Indo-European languages, only Greek and Lithuanian have kept the full masculine nominative ending, stem vowel + -s. Symplesiomorphy FTW.
(Latvian has -s alone. French has a few fossilized cases like fils “son”. Spanish has Dios and Carlos. And that’s it.)
The rest of the world doesn’t play it and consequently lacks a word for it… the only term I’ve ever seen is “American football”. (Kept in English even when used in German.)
That’s what I mean. ~:-|
I see.
Brownian (@608):
Actually, I don’t follow hockey closely at all, so I don’t have (if you’ll pardon the expression) a dog in this fight… but the notion that any sport (other than those that are explicitly about fighting) would defend fisticuffs as a normal part of the game offends my sense of the very term sport. In basketball, behavior that is common on a daily basis in hockey would get you ejected, fined, suspended, and potentially criminally charged; howcome it’s “sporting” if it happens on ice instead of hardwood?
David M (@Omnibus Comment 606):
I’m mildly surprised you’re the only one (so far) who’s called me on this!
I’m not sufficiently well lettered in philosophy (or the history of same) to know whether I could reasonably declare myself a hedonist, but I make room for the possibility. That said, I think most modern casual readers take hedonism as relating to a trivial, superficial interest in physical pleasure, and that is definitely not what I meant by happy.
I don’t exclude physical pleasure, of course: One of the things about contemporary culture is the sense, deeply embedded even in some of the most ostensibly liberal corners of society, that sensual pleasures, or at leats the indulgence of same, are inherently depraved and shameful; that they’re not the proper concern of the good life. Even so, I would never argue that sensual pleasure alone defines happiness.
I’ve told this story here before, but I once half-jokingly told my wife I thought Sheryl Crow’s lyric “[i]f it makes you happy/[i]t can’t be that bad” was a deep philosophical insight. She immediately laughed at me, saying I was being silly and shallow. My rejoinder was no, we have to turn it around: The proper definition of happy is the one that makes Crow’s line (or some similar expression) truly be a deep insight.
I don’t claim it’s a fully worked out philosophy — it’s really more a realization that’s in the process of gradually dawning on me — but I think if you apply a properly broad (in the sense of both emotional breadth and time horizon) definition of happy to my first proposition and combine that with my second (which is really nothing more than a restatement of the ubiquitous “Golden Rule”), you end up with this sort of conclusion: I cannot truly achieve my purpose of happiness at the expensive of others’ happiness; therfore, correct behavior consists in doing that which best balances my own happiness with maximizing the general happiness of others now and in the future. From this follows charity and sacrifice and altruism, but all tempered by the understanding that one’s own personal pleasure and satisfaction, no less than that of others, is a moral good to be striven for and defended.
I think — but of course cannot prove — that a world in which we all behaved according to this simple set of beliefs would be a very nice world indeed to live in. YMMV.
:-) :-) :-)
I’d even put this the other way around. Sidebar quote…
“If I do good, I feel good. If I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Oops. Inserted the wrong tags.
Urrk! Writing FAIL (@616)!
This…
…should have been…
I try to refrain from correcting my trivial errors (there’s at least one other typo in the subject comment), but this one really obscured the meaning of the utterance. Sorry for any confusion.
David (@617):
I’m with Abe (big of me, eh?), except that I’d explicitly include doing good for myself, along with doing good for others, in the set of things that make me feel good.
______________________________________________
I agree that joining MENSA is rather pointless; just figured someone here must have one. (Law of Averages and all.)
My mother was on my case for a year to take the test because she thought it would look good on a college application. Sorry, mom; NDSU just doesn’t have that lofty of an admissions policy.
Who gives a shit if he’s a MENSA member. Anyone, and I do mean anyone, that I remember posting here claiming MENSA membership has always been a gigantic fuckhead and gives a bad name to the organization.
Charlie Wagner
Davescot
now add Denby?
Sounds about right.
I don’t think Dick Clark ever really cared about music all that much.
I remember seeing that “funny bloopers/whatever” show that he and Mr. Ed McMahon fake hosted and fake voice-overed for. Fakest host/fake voice-over show I ever saw.
I think Dick Clark really could care less. I think Dick Clark just likes hearing Dick Clark’s own voice. Actually, he probably could care less about that too.
I agree with the Rev. BDC. Those who publically brag about MENSA membership are usually looney tunes. There is nothing about scoring well on certain tests that prevents people from becoming saturated with various forms of woo (like religion). They often attempt to use MENSA membership as an argument from authority. But I still look at the physical/scientific evidence they present, which is the only authority that really matters. Which, like with Dandy, appears to be totally absent. Ergo, he has nothing.
Same goes for Rush Limbaugh. If he didn’t have a radio voice, there wouldn’t be anything left except for a giant windbag.
A number of my Irish and British friends do call it gridiron. I myself like the term so much (and the so-called “game” so little) I have also started using that term.
Having said that, American football is very probably the most common term.
Jadehawk (#459)
Well, some days I would have confronted them. But I can’t say I would have for sure. Sometimes I just can’t get up the guts, like when I saw a guy on the bus reading the steaming pile of crap known as A Cancer Therapy by Max Gerson. Just reading bits of the first few pages over the guy’s shoulder, I noticed Gerson blaming cancer on lazy housewives for not cooking up proper meals and claiming that people are taught that cancer can’t be cured, as if it’s one disease. I wanted to ask him if he was reading it for a course on how to spot and tear apart quackery, but I didn’t. It would have been very easy to point out the complete stupidity/strawmannishness of both those claims, though. How could someone trust a guy on cancer who doesn’t even explain that it’s a whole group of diseases?
(#464)
Actually, that works out great. You can use yourself as an example of how their job doesn’t excuse them from being credulous fucking morons.
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Bill Dauphin (#462)
Easy fix. Say “Thank FSM nobody lets you do anything more intellectually demanding than serving coffee.”
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John Morales (#516)
For all of them? Even ones you write out in HTML rather than letting SB detect and linkify them?
Same goes for Rush Limbaugh. If he didn’t have a radio voice, there wouldn’t be anything left except for a giant windbag.
If he didn’t have a radio voice, all the gas would escape, remaining only the empty shell that he is. (Cue the grammar police.)
Apropos of nothing, I really hate hair salons that put perfumed crap in your hair that doesn’t wash out in a single shower.
Since this is an open thread, I will try to completely change the subject. Concerning NASA’s decision to turn the Spirit rover into a fixed station (giving up trying to get it unstuck from the sand),
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100127/sc_space/trappedmarsroverturningnewcornerscientistssay
there was this comment:
Yes their longevity has been amazing, but I do not believe for an instant that they were designed to only last 3 months. The mission was originally scheduled to only last 3 months. But I am sure that those little rovers were designed to last forever. I mean, just to survive blast-off requires them to built extremely sturdy, and then to send it someplace completely inaccessible, to be sure that it will work for 3 months, you have to design it to be damn near indestructible.
But it is paradoxical, on one hand it is a way to marvel at how well these were designed, to say they have lasted 24 times longer than expected, but on the other hand I don’t think it is fair to say they were designed to only last 3 months. If you say, however, they were designed to last forever and they only survived 6 years it gives the impression of failure that it most certainly is not.
I guess my problem is that, to me, as an engineer, it sounds like they are saying they were designed to fail (after 3 months), and that by some miracle they have lasted 6 years. While commercial products here on earth may be designed with “planned obsolescence”, sending things out into space are designed to be as perfect as possible and to not fail ever (at least that is the goal). But try as I might, I can’t think of a way to say both that it was designed to last forever AND it is still a tremendous accomplishment that they have lasted as long as they have. I think my problem is that the quted comment seems to take the accomplishment off the designers and puts it on the rover, kind of like a cancer survivor, “The doctors gave me three months to live and here I am 6 years later”.
I think I’m beginning to ramble, so I better stop now before I become completely incoherent.
@ A. Noyd #627:
Especially those! One used to be able to see the mess SB had made of the HTML code because it showed up in the preview page’s text box (instead of the text box preserving only what the person had actually typed). That particular piece of bad coding form got fixed quite a few months ago though. However, having just checked again, the rel=”nofollow” is definitely still there for links in thread comments.
Apropos of nothing, I really hate hair salons that put perfumed crap in your hair that doesn’t wash out in a single shower.
And charge a hundred dollars for it, too. I guess they want you to have your money’s worth, I guess.
I really Really REALLY FECKING HATE HATE HATE anything ANYTHING in/on my hair that smells of perfume. The only time I put anything on my hair (other than a hat) is in the shower, so if I can smell at all after rinsing that’s one less shitty CRAP rubbish product I’ll NEVER FECKING USE AGAIN.
I tolerate smelly hand soap to a tiny extent, but generally loathe the whole idea of stinking, which is all this rubbish does. (Well, Ok, some of it probably is Ok as soap/shampoo/whatever, but why the FECKING HELL DOES IT HAVE TO SMELL!!!1!)
Wanders away to eat dinner before he totally starfarts…
Regarding the rovers surviving far longer than the original mission, I love them like they were my pets. Think of all the nifty info they’ve provided. If a christian cult had designed them (how unlikely is that!?), they would be claiming a god-blessed miracle.
Speaking of miracles, Ted Haggard is no longer gay.
This is going to be added to the “cure the gays” myths.
I am mulling over ways to test that hypothesis. Unfortunately I fear that the subThread-length variable is completely confounded with the anastomosation experiment, making the latter uncontrolled. I don’t see how to tease out the separate effects without replicate anastomoses. No thanks.
I suspect you are correct, but available data are inconclusive.
By the way, everybody’s invited over to The Swamp for some bathtub gin.
Folks, thanks for clearing up my FCD query. I shall now sully the great man’s name by associating it with my own.
For your entertainment, up to the point where Bill Dauphin @616 said:
I had always been under the impression that it stood for You Make Me Vomit. Given how strange (or…awesome?) that would have been in context, I looked it up again. Google did not let me down this time.
HIPPIE!!!
/points and scowls
SEF (#631)
Awesome, thanks. Though, I suppose I could have checked it myself by looking at the page source. I blame having just woken up.
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blf (#633)
Haha, wow, nice response! Sort of what goes on in my head a lot of the time. Speaking of soap, I especially hate the Softsoap brand because they put something in their shit that makes the scent cling to you even after you rinse for ten minutes. Or twenty minutes if it’s a “low flow” faucet. (I don’t have any pet peeves, I have an entire frickin’ zoo of ’em.)
I’ve had this exact discussion before with some of my engineer friends… they put it into context this way:
It’s really no different than technical life-span specs for electronic products. A receipt printer (I’ll use that as an example since these engineers design them) is marketed to have a specific life-span of x months or x number of impressions or running hours of operation. They are designed to last at least that long… in other words, that is the amount of time the engineers feel comfortable with stating that the device should operate and be responsible for it it doesn’t.
I think of the rovers in the exact same way… they were designed to survive the trip and run at least the three months of the projected mission, but there was nothing in the specs or design that specifically prevented them from running indefinitely as long as the electronics held up and the solar panels kept supplying power. Just like the 25 year old Kenmore fridge I use as a spare in my garage, they far outperformed their expectations, but it’s certainly no “miracle”.
I don’t mind soapy things that smell like flowers or incense or what have you, but what I can’t stand are the ones that smell like FOOD. No, I don’t want my hair to smell like citrus or vanilla or cupcakes or steak! That would just make me wonder what I spilled on myself at lunch and why I can’t find it.
clearly, my SIWIMS is weaker than my self-confidence and self-worth issues. I wish I could just argue my point without my stomach revolting against it and feeling like an idiot for doing it, even when I’m clearly right.
Everybody, remain calm. Do not be afeared of the unusual tones you will encounter from hearing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg1jyL3cr60
It takes some getting used to. Sometimes you just have to break the rules and be different.
SIWIMS?
Something is wrong in my server?
In my status?
In manatee songs?
See, this is where taking a shower first comes in handy. *nods sagely at self*
Someone Is Wrong In MeatSpace
Maybe talk in terms of expected lifetime and standard deviation? Their designers may have hoped that the rovers would last forever, but the reality was probably that they were designed so that failure was 3 or 4 standard deviations below expectation on their lifetime. Someone may have actual knowledge on this issue; I’m only speculating.
—
On psychopaths, “Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us” (Robert D. Hare) and “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work” (Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare) are both quite accessible to the layperson. Both are fairly recent publications (1993, 2006 respectively).
Re 640:
Well put, and exactly what occurred to me moments after hitting “send”. That what was missing (from the original quote) was the phrase “at least”. Including that would have been much better at capturing both the skill that went into designing it and the amazing longevity that it has achieved.
Something is waking in my socks.
Update on the Prop 8 trial: This has to be filed under the “Say, What!?” category. The defense lawyers that are trying to keep Prop 8 from being overturned, that are trying to show gay marriage in a negative light, brought forward witnesses that, in some of their testimony, undermined their case.
Their expert, Ken Miller, demonstrated that he was really weak on the history of gay rights and on gay marriage, the very fields in which he was supposed to be expert.
And now David Blankenhorn (Institute for American Values) has testified that gay marriage will benefit children.
maybe I should get a crackberry. my boyfriend has one, and it has reduced the length of any discussion significantly, because crackberry = portable google
SteveM (@630):
Re the Mars rovers…
I think this is one of those cases where you can have it both ways. I’m not an engineer, but I’ve been working with them in the aerospace industry for 20 years now, and I grew up the son of a NASA engineer, so I’m not without insight into space hardware. My sense is that since spacecraft hardware is out of reach of either repair or maintenance (ISS and Hubble excepted), it must necessarily be both very robust (to resist failures) and very adaptable (to accommodate partial failures). When you design hardware for a very, very high probability of completing a 3-month mission on Mars without material support, you are inherently designing for a reasonably high probability that it will last much longer… and in practice, many spacecraft (not just these Mars rovers) in fact do last far longer than their design missions.
Sometimes this means vastly extended “lifetimes” of scientific usefulness (e.g., Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini) and sometimes it means the ability to accommodate major system failures and complete science objectives equivalent to (if not identical to) the original mission (e.g., Galileo).
The exceptions are those spacecraft that depend on limited consumable supplies, such as infrared telescopes which depend on liquid cryogenic cooling. Even in that case, I can recall one mission (I don’t remember the name) where all the coolant for the main instrument leaked out during launch, and the spacecraft was theoretically DOA by the time it reached orbit… except that the mission engineers and project scientists figured out a way to remotely repurpose the small star-tracker telescope — essentially a finder scope that, by design, had no scientific function and was entirely intended for navigational purposes — for (IIRC) what turned out to be years of useful science returns. Not the mission the spacecraft was designed for, of course, but the polar opposite of a total waste.
So at the end of the day, I agree that it’s not as “miraculous” as the reports sometimes make it seem when these spacecraft survive for many multiples of their design mission durations… but I also disagree that it’s in any way disingenuous to brag about it when it happens.
re 646:
That is how engineers talk, but my problem was how to present that in a very clear simple statement to the general public. I of course exagerate a bit that they were designed to last “forever”, but you are right, in order to ensure that they would last 3 months with a very high probability, they had to be designed to last much much longer.
KJV v. Conservative Bible
Passage: Passage: Luke 11:53-54
KJV: “And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of many things:
Laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him.”
Conservative Bible*: “As Jesus told them off, the scribes and Pharisees furiously interrogated Him about everything,
Plotting and seeking to quote Him for a politically incorrect remark to use against Him.”
____
*’Translation’ added by…*gasp*….Andy Schlafly
What kind of steak?
*double-take*
Oh, a different Ken Miller.
Re 651:
I must have expressed myself poorly (not unusual) because I did not in any mean to imply that it was disingenuous to brag about the rovers’ amazing longevity. I only meant that the comment seemed to be shifting the “credit” from the designers to the object itself, as though it survived through its own “will”, defying the designers’ expectation of only 3 months survival.
So yes, I’m being a “tone troll”, that it’s not the crowing itself I’m complaining about but the way they are expressing it.
But really, I’m being stupid to pick on this. The rovers have been amazing no matter how you look at it.
Lynna @649: Having read avidly about every word (well, almost!) that Kenneth Miller and David Blankenhorn had to say, I cannot imagine how the Proposition 8 came to pass at all in this country!
The plaintiff side in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger (poor Arnie!) had very valuable evidence from multiple disciplines and from multiple people who testified. In contrast, the defendant-intervenor’s side had consistently poor arguments and generally poor show from the witnesses; they had no arguments to offer except a whiny “We say ‘No’ to gay marriage becoz teh babble sez Teh Gheyz are sinners, Teh Gheyz are rong, Teh Gheyz have agenda, Teh Gheyz are after our chuldrun”, and a few feeble attempts at portraying the LGBT community as no victim to discrimination. It was painfully transparent, the anti-gay side’s endeavors to retain a measure of dignity when evidence after evidence, testimony after testimony chipped away at their foundation of bigotry, ignorance and irrational hatred borne out of fear.
I hope Judge Walker sides with sanity and produces a landmark ruling that would go a long way in according human dignity and equality to the LGBT community.
SteveM:
I certainly didn’t mean to be calling you a “tone troll” (or any sort of troll, for that matter); I just love blathering on about spaceflight, on the rare occasions when I have an excuse. No harm intended!
Carlie (#641)
It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a pleasant smell or a bad one. The problem is how I can’t stop noticing smells (or other sensations). They’re intrusive at best, painful at worst. It’s like how while scratching an itch can nice, if you don’t stop scratching, you start hurting yourself instead. Okay, not usually quite that bad, but still.
Stoopid Imbeciles Wanking Innocent Minor Statements.
(sigh) My attempt to demonstrate the presence of surfactants in urine by wetting the cuticle of Asian ladybird beetles proved inconclusive. All I did was piss off a couple of beetles.
Ok, that was an inference,not demonstrated by experiment either.
BS
At least one of the gods is inordinately fond of beetles, so she/it/he/they is now also pissed off—at you.
I suggest sacrificing something that isn’t a beetle, or marrying a beetle. Otherwise, your remaining life will be full of incident.
I most whole-heartedly agree… these rovers are brag-worthy feats of engineering no matter how you look at it.
Just saw the latest iPad advert on Apple’s site. Looks pretty damned cool. Me want. Sniny!
In other news, Geologists Drill Deeper! Deepest Hole in Ocean Crust
Saw some of the presentation where they unveiled it… as Jobs was showing it I kept thinking, “wow… this is sooooo cool… if only they made one small enough to fit in my hand like a phone”…
Oh wait…
@657
Yes, it’s unbelievable when one knows even a semblance of the facts. However, the Yes on 8 people won by spewing anti-facts. Particularly egregious were the videos they telecast into churches, videos in which they interviewed idiots who repeated false statistics, like the anti-fact that gays are 12 times more likely to be pedophiles …. and that being gay is a choice …. and on and on.
Bill Dauphin,
No apology necessary, you did not call me a “tone troll”. At that point I was purely talking to myself and berating myself for picking on such an innocent comment. Cheers!
Did I misunderstand, or did you not piss on a couple of beetles? That much, at least, is not inference, is it?
Lynna:
I only saw the story on msnbc.com, but yeah, me want, too! Ahh, but aside from the $500-$800 pricetag, there’s also the matter of either fighting the no, Honey, WiFi really won’t fry your brain battle or paying AT&T $30/mo for a 3G data plan (over and above my existing Verizon mobile phone plan). Sigh. One of these days… maybe….
Oddly, I saw one quote that, apparently dismissively, wrote the gadget off as “only” a big iPod touch. Well, hell: A big iPod touch was exactly what I was hoping for!
As a writer, and as an avid reader, the iPad even fits into the category of “stuff I need for my job” — but it does not fit into the budget category.
Neuron Connections Seen in 3-D
It’s those Germans again.
“iPad”. My friends on Facebook are already going on about how the high-storage model will be the iMaxiPad, and the small iPhone will be renamed the iPon, etc. and so on.
Oh, wait, it’s not them, it’s me.
Flank, most likely.
I have a similar reaction to sustained smells. I like for soap to smell nice when I’m using it, but for the smell to stop once I move away from the soap.
Lynna:
One addition to my previous comment: Not long ago, I heard a review (on Fresh Air? I can’t recall) of the latest Kindle, and the reviewer ended up concluding that he actually preferred using the Kindle app on his iPod touch. Since the iPad presumably preserves all the virtues of the touch and combines them with a screen even bigger than Kindle’s, you have to wonder how many more sets of Kindle hardware Amazon will be able to sell. Why pay $XXX for a gadget that can only do books when a hundred or two more will get you one that does books better and does a bunch of other great stuff, too?
Thanks for the thoughtful responses to my last comment. I think many of the criticisms were good and I learned a lot. I cannot agree, tho, that a purely racist distinction between cruelty to humans or to other animals somehow makes a cruel act less cruel. Similarly, I continue to consider that the emphasis in these matters should be on the person inflicting cruelty. It is their behaviour that is needing to be addressed for the protection of our community.
In other comments; Portishead. Thanks for that link. The only ‘strange’ sounds I heard were because they had a ‘jazz audience’ :-( Their third album has been on in my car for the whole week. I have had the album for at least a year but listened to it less than I should, because I bought fuck buttons at the same time.
“…but why the FECKING HELL DOES IT HAVE TO SMELL!!!1!?”
Yes, indeed. That’s why I wash my hair with soap (I mean, instead of shampoo, not urine). Shampoo is yet anothrr [riot spelling] thing it’s not wise to rub on your scrotum.
Where’s Dendy? I pop into this thread at irregular intervals and see comments about how much of a diddy he is. I had a look at hi site when linked and yes, he’s a dolt but here, h could be god for all the talk of him in the absence of actually seeing him around. Is PZ cleaning his comments before I see them? How does that affect the BIG TWENTY KAYYY!!1!!!?
There. Fixed that for ya ;-D
An honest desire to upset the apple
cult…er…cart?Bill Dauphin OM got there first.
eddie:
WTF?? Call my position “speciesist” or accuse me of being “anthropocentric” and we can have a conversation, but I emphatically deny that making a distinction between humans and nonhuman animals can reasonably be equated to racism. In fact, I don’t merely deny that notion, I consider it batshit crazy.
OTOH, this…
…seems precisely consistent with the point I was making: It’s the willingness of the humans to inflict cruelty, and the psychic impact of having done so, that’s of concern, much more than the “rights” of the fox or fighting cock or whatever.
Not entirely sure whether you’re with me or agin’ me….
Lynna:
One thing I wish they’d put in the iPad is a good scroll button. On my iPhone, I find it very difficult to read these long threads on Pharyngula. Flicking the screen to go up or down a page can only work for so long!!
Brownian:
I dunno. I confess to being an Apple fanboy, but even if I weren’t… well, as Alton Brown might phrase it, why buy a unitasker if you don’t have to?
Regardless of brand name, at this point I would no more by a wireless device that was only a book reader than I would buy a desktop machine that was a dedicated word processor.
Not gonna happen… for two reasons, really… Apple is fairly nihilistic in its design concept and a jog / scroll wheel would go against that. Second, side-mounted scroll wheels and floating trackballs and such are notoriously fragile… just another mechanical component to fail or break and Apple has traditionally avoided them in favor of integrated navigation components.
if the new mice can have scroll (sideways and diagonally, too! want!) without a scroll-button, then why can’t the iPad? that’s a silly explanation.
by —> buy
<sigh>
Jadehawk:
Well, I haven’t used the Magic Mouse, but my understanding is that effectively its top surface accepts multi-touch commands… which is inherently already part of the iPhone/iTouch/iPad experience. The whole point of the Magic Mouse was to eliminate the little BB-sized mechanical trackball that handled scrolling in the previous Apple mouse design.
I fully support Apple’s single-minded efforts to eliminate mechanical moving parts wherever possible: Less stuff to break is always good.
What Bill Dauphin said at #681…
well, I have used the new mouse, and I still don’t understand why scrolling is such a problem on non-mice.
but then, portable devices aren’t really my thing anyway.
oh, and I know about the trackball on the old mice. i have one of those and have to open it up once in a while to clean the tiny wheels, because it stops working. THAT would be a pain on a device that has more electronic guts than a mouse.
Oh, C_E and Bill D, that’s not what I meant! I meant a digital scroll button (not a physical one) on the multitouch surface – one that I could operate with my finger and have greater control over, than I do over my iPhone virtual scroller.
Am I asking for too much?
*sad face*
Orangutan and dog are best friends.
Speciesist/racist? I think you’re neither, Bill. You clearly see that there is difference between humans and other animals but, as a Friend of Charles Darwin, you recognise that they are our (however distant) cousins. I mean, you wouldn’t _really_ pee on beetles, would you?
BTW, in my earlier comment, I brought up BDSM as an example of the kind of slippery slope that may or may not be there, and I wouldn’t want to go down anyway. Another one I could have indicated was the “where do you draw the line” discussion about humans and the other primates.
At the most basic level, we are living organisms that need to consume other living (or reasonably recently living) organisms to survive. Being vegetarian, let alone vegan, doesn’t get anyone a pass on this. That’s why I feel (and I’m glad you agree) that concentrating on cruel behaviour is the important point. I think that worrying about who/what one might be allowed to be cruel to is not helping.
No need for a mechanical scrolling wheel or other scroll device, just include the scroll bar that normally shows up in Safari, a bar on which one can double tap and drag (tap, plus tap-and-hold), so that one can quickly move the scroll button to the bottom of the page by dragging.
I think that was also the idea behind choosing Quayle and likely Palin (it was just a bonus with Cheney). One of these days we’ll see the folly of this strategy when the commander-in-chief is incapacitated and Vice President “Screech” steps in.
From the wiki article on speciesim [emphasis mine]:
My opinion of ‘some philosophers and scientists’ couldn’t get any lower. Their references for this include Carl Cohen, a Professor of Philosophy and Jeffrey Alan Gray, psychologist, who said
It seems to me inconsistent with:
Howard Read
Celtic_Evolution @#678
‘Very slowly, over thousands of years, the ideal of the perfect machine was approached-that ideal which had once been a dream, then a distant prospect, and at last reality: No machine may contain any moving parts.’
The City and the Stars
Arthur C Clarke
(although I think Arthur was a PC guy)
Aaarrrggghhh!!!
I should have added above that I love scientists and that quote just indicates that (some) psychologists aren’t.
Coming in late with this but American Football used to get called Gridiron in my presence a lot (I’m Australian). Not so much anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridiron_football
That wikipedia article reminds me of something – an American I was talking to about football a while ago expressed surprise about my use of the word “codes” to refer to types of football. Is that not a common thing?
Ok, so I just heard that the iPad has no writing functionality. Then how is it in any way Apple’s entry into the tablet market? The whole point of a tablet is to be able to write on it. I don’t see how the iPad is anything but a giant novelty iTouch without a pen function.
Also, sorry for the gratuitous Howard Read reference. He;s not that good. Just that I nearly didn’t that comment finished because he came on the radiol to Mitch Benn Music Show. His song was largely about how he’s not, NOT gay.
WTF! Never heard of the expression. ( I’m an American, but not scary)
BS
I’d never heard it either, and I lived with a wanderlusting Taswegian for a year or something.
Codes in the context of football refers to the distinction between rugby football and association football (that some utter cunt decided to abbreviate as ‘soccer’).
Rugby is further subdivided into rugby union, rugby league, american football (american rugby would be a more accurate term given the nature of the game) and the most whupass ballgame evar; aussie rules..
Carlie:
You mean no handwriting functionality, right? I’m pretty sure it has a virtual keyboard, which I presume is similar to that of the iTouch, except sized for, you know, actual fingers.
FWIW, I believe pen-based tablets have always been market failures. AFAIK even stylus-based PDAs are pretty much defunct, here in the post-smartphone era. Just as a trackball would be something to break, a stylus would be something to lose.
OK… but why the derisive “novelty”? As I said before, a larger version of the iTouch was exactly what I was hoping for. (YMMV, of course.)
BTW, since it is a touch screen device, if you really want to draw on it with a stylus, I bet… (wait for it)… there’s an app for that!… and if there isn’t yet, there probably will be.
I’ve heard the term “football codes” a-plenty.
For mine, only what we in Australia call “soccer” is truly football, all the others involve picking up the ball and carrying it around.
(Of course, footy is the most skillful, the most entertaining and just basically the best of all the codes).
‘Code’ is often used to differentiate Rugby League and Rugby Union – similar games but with quite different rules.
Used as ‘Jonathan Davies and Scott Gibbs changed codes’ (from Union to League)
*Yawn*
Yes, I meant handwriting.
You can wrest my Toshiba Portege from my cold, dead hands. I adore my tablet. I write over Powerpoint presentations while giving them in class, I make students turn in digital assignments and then ink them all up with comments and grading, I annotate pdfs of research papers, I can make quickie illustrations and animations without having to know programming, and best of all, I can play Inkball and make my own handwriting font. :)
The functionality of pen-based tablets is incredible for providing an easy user interface.
eddie:
Regarding the whole “speciesist” conversation, I’m still pretty sure you and I disagree, but I’m also still not confident I’m following your train of thought. All I can say is this.
I might be more inclined to continue the conversation if you hadn’t tossed in a totally gratuitous use of “cunt” after all the discussion we’ve had about that ’round here recently.
‘ta….
I just looked at the video that Apple has at their site about iPad, and it has an almost laptop sized virtual keyboard, similar to the Touch, but bigger.
John Morales:
You warm the cockles of my heart. Since birth, the only football I have known and I shall know is the one where a round, globular object (a.k.a. ball) is kicked around with the foot, and requires footwork, balance, skill, speed and style. Lots of it. All others are pretenders.
*wonders if this is going to start a ‘soccer’ flame war… Hoo-boy!
Well, jebus, Carlie: If you’ve already got a tablet you adore, you’re not gonna be buying an iPad (Maxi or otherwise; do they have wings?) anyway, are you? ;^)
First the generalities:
How stupid of me not to have thought of this myself.
I think that’s the intention – there are influences out there (dust storms or whatnot) that haven’t been taken into account during the design much and were expected to eventually destroy it.
I don’t know. My shampoo with linden flower extract smells nice, although the smell doesn’t last long (and I wash my hair once, rarely twice, per week).
(It was the only shampoo I found that wasn’t explicitly marketed at women. Well, I don’t remember if they had something like Axe’s vile shampoo for men… now that stinks!)
What, again?
(Or have I overinterpreted his previous returns to grace? I don’t follow that story very closely.)
Looks like you’re a bit too neurotypical. <slightly open grin>
No, actually, you said you already knew one of them. I have less trouble interrupting complete strangers; with people I expect to see again I do occasionally wonder what they might think of me when they see me the next time.
For self-confidence and self-worth, I recommend giving a talk at a scientific conference. I don’t have the slightest amount of stage fright when I do that (even when I presented my thesis to my thesis committee*, in French, sadly without any preparation and thus a couple of gaps in my vocabulary), because I’m not supposed to give a performance that the audience already knows to some extent and will judge me over – I explain something to them that they don’t know yet. Even the introduction (the only vaguely social part) is taken over by the moderator!
I’ve never tried, but I’d probably melt to a puddle if I were supposed to, like, sing in an opera.
* Not the same thing as the jury that will judge the thesis.
True; I guess I’m not their target market. But they aren’t even trying to woo me, darnit! I feel neglected.
> 700 comments in less than 3 days? We are approaching critical mass, ladies and gentlemen.
Perhaps we are even entering the Gravemind stage.
Fixed.
Link doesn’t work.
Also, <pet peeve>if you put an entire sentence in parentheses, why don’t you put the entire sentence, with its period, in parentheses???> Have been wanting to ask this for 10 years now; this abominable practice is all over teh intart00bz.
No need for a Kindle OR an iPad if you have a netbook. And I can download ebooks of any file format on that.
Except that, IIRC, the reason that the original games was called foot-ball is because it was played on foot rather than on horseback – not because the ball itself was propelled using the feet.
So, with that in mind, any code – rugby league, rugby union, soccer, Australian Rules football or Gaelic football – is correct in referring to itself as foot-ball.
Besides, even in soccer the goalie picks up the ball, as do players for throw-ins!
If you don’t want to skip the math entirely, just want to get the gist of what they’re doing, I recommend the explanation at http://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/2900_Parsimony_Analysis.htm
The cassowary has always been my favorite bird.
Ah, I didn’t manage to close the <pet peeve> tag. But no text was lost, only a line break.
They are awesome – but residents of rainforest Queensland are raised to be very wary of them, ’cause they are dangerous.
Or am I telling you something you already know ’cause you’re from there?
That’s a very, very, very small part of it! And it manages to misspell autapomorphy.
Which one? There are four species, you know.
This thread goes on and on, man… I’ll go to bed rather than await the next subthread. :-)
This is called the typesetter’s rule. It’s an old rule that has been retained in American English, but not (in general) elsewhere. So much emphasis is placed on the rule in American schools (or at least, used to be — I’m not current on American English pedagogy) that Americans generally believe that it is The Proper Way. In my technical writing, I use the grammatical rule, which has been advocated for more than a century now.
I think the rule is actually like that for quotes, that the period is supposed to go inside the parentheses in all cases. However, that is just as asinine, because then even if only the last portion of the sentence was parenthetical, the period would be trapped in there.
David @710, I forgot to include the URL.
Link was to Australian rules football.
—
Wowbagger, interesting and plausible.
The Wikipedia etymology entry is non-committal, and I couldn’t be stuffed investigating further, but I’ll bear it in mind henceforth.
No. That which is parenthetical goes inside the parentheses. If the entire sentence is parenthetical, then the entire sentence, including the ending punctuation, goes inside.
Hooray! Even I am not immune to Shaker’s Law!
Oh, so it’s part of the stupid rule (adhered to by most Americans and nobody else) that periods and commas are supposed to go inside quotes no matter if they’re part of the quoted material?
What? No, only when an entire sentence is in parentheses.
Computer screens are really hard to read for long periods of time. The iPad is a total waste really, it’s just a glorified iPod – it’s not even in the same market as eBook readers.
That’s what makes sense, but I thought the rule was the other way around. It makes me very happy that it’s not.
So handball is football?
I’ll facepalm myself to sleep :^)
To illustrate:
No. That which is parenthetical goes inside (the parentheses). (If the entire sentence is parenthetical, then the entire sentence, including the ending punctuation, goes inside.)
:)
If you were born before 1982.
Somehow, my generation seems to lack this
featurebug entirely.I’m pretty much neutral when it comes to football – well, to the extent that all of them are equal other than rugby league, which is a game that appears to have been designed to give angry nightclub bouncers something to do when they’re not curb-stomping people too drunk to put up a fight.
For me there are only two kinds of balls really worth paying attention to – yellow and fluffy or red, stitched leather.
YARGHABARBLE! One of my Law professors is.. I don’t know, deathly sick, has deathly sick family, whatever. The substitute is a crazy libertarian (Not that I know 2 sane ones. And no, the one is not Walton). It’s so painful to have ot hear stupid shit like “Universal Health Care means we’ll never allow recreational drug use”, “Guns reduce crime rates”, and that Gun Control was “The first step of every successful totalitarian regime”. Also that Obama’s election was a “Revolution” and a “Coup”.
If there’s a mass murder wave carried out by a tiny person in Florida, it’s because she repeated that most retarded Libertarian canard “The Tree of Liberty must be fertilized from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.
Bill Dauphin, FCD, I deliberately chose to use the word ‘cunt’ because of that discussion. I contend that it is a peculiarly misogynist interpretation that some, mostly americans, put to it. I find american (and indeed human) exceptionalism as offensive as you appear to find strong language.
More particularly, I agree that “In my [british] experience “cunt” is used as a strong version of “bastard”: without any implication of femaleness or femininity and usually about a man”, I totally disagree that it’s reasonable to expect American rules of conduct on an American site”, I come from a place where ‘frog’ is used with the same venom and intent and at one point thought newfie was being (homorously) a cunt.
I’m one who sits in front of a computer all day, I’m not adverse to using a computer. Just reading text for long periods I’ve found is more straining than using actual books.
Inverse the colours on the screen and the problem largely goes away.
David Marjanović wrote:
Screw you, junior – this old bastard (born 1973) reads screens for long periods just fine :)
I appear to have misattributed this;
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/01/stop_sitting_there_reading_thi.php#comment-2229317
to newfie. The quotation’s numbering seems to have been out as the comment quoted was from a troll.
Sorry.
/pet peeve
I just woke up and the alert-headline thingy on CNN was : “Apple releases IPad”
This is not fucking news, it’s advertising !!
/end pet peeve
Kausik @ 705,
There is just no controversy here, despite the attempt of certain groups in society to create one, football is soccer, the others just have no leg to stand on.
;)
eddie, just fuck off, already. No one wants to have that conversation for the fucking thousandth time.
Or keep it up. Really doesn’t matter. Your posts have long been confused and seemingly trollish at times, so I generally ignore them.
It’s reasonable to be reasonably aware and sensitive – i.e., not an asshole.
I can’t imagine what your point is, if you’re acknowledging venom and intent in the US and other contexts. You should appreciate that it’s disparaging to many. (I’m half “frog,” btw, and even if I weren’t I would call out someone using that as an insult here.)
Yeah, sure.
Anyway, fuck off.
Don’t darling, just don’t…..:-)
There’s some good advice eddie.
Yawn, Eddie, time to stop with the female parts discussion. It is old, very old, around here. Boring. If you notice, many of us regulars avoid the use of those words, on both gender sides, and can insult people well enough without them.
Eddie – Please read.
OK, Neil Patrick Harris is already making me laugh on American Idol:
“Welcome, sparkle.”
***
Rorschach, for some reason I think of you when I hear this:
*Watches*
*ponders*
*studies Wiki page about the song*
So you have cheated on me ?? Oh, don’t tell me , not that Krapotkin fella !!!
:D
I was born in 1948 and I’ve read online novels in one or two sittings. Every morning I read a newspaper on line (although that may change because the computer weenies at work insist on using IE7 and the WSJ won’t be supporting that browser too much longer).
For no obvious reason: mind games.
OK. I’ll just have to remember that it’s OK to use the work ‘fuck’ instead.
I said “for some reason”! A few vague themes in the song, and nothing to do with me.
*face turns blue*
Good.
Assclam.
Youngsters, the lot of you. And I can read from a screen just fine.
BS
Btw, we think we have SIWOTI syndrome, but there are obviously people out there who spend hours and hours writing Wiki pages about one particular song on one album of one artist…..:-)
What did I do now???
Rorschach, surely you’re not jealous guy?
Blockquote fail. Sorry about that. ‘Assclam’ is funny as hell.
I hate that smug “geezier than thou” attitude. :-P
+1
No, make that +2
Rorschach,
Um, it’s Kropotkin.
And, quite co-incidentally, ‘crap’ refers to faeces.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom (#729)
Well, I met your substitute teacher’s opposite today. I was hanging out in front of the yellow tape at the scene where a guy shot himself in the head two blocks from my house (I didn’t see anything, just heard half the city’s cops showing up and went out to investigate) and telling passers by what happened. One of them was this old lady who thought the world would be safer if no one but the cops could carry guns. She told me the whole Constitution was a terrible thing, especially that awful First Amendment which lets people use the internet to learn how to make bombs. I wasn’t shy about turning her bomb example right back at her to show her how silly that was. Not that it seemed to penetrate.
It’s about all that I have left.
BS
Surely you could think of one more kind?
Ok, I suck at puns…:-)
I can read for hours just fine on my netbook. Not being able to read the ebooks I already have in my library is not. And I have a rather large collection, in at least four different file types, since I’ve been reading ebooks since the late ’90s. Why should I be forced to repurchase them to fit some proprietary format?
<Lawrence Welk accent>Play that funky music, white boys.</Lawrence Welk accent>
Grr. :)
***
BTW, don’t know if I’ve linked to this before, but it’s a decent doc (I don’t think this link has the whole thing):
boygenius wrote:
Well, no – I’m not interested in the kind attached to people because a) what little inclination I have for things carnal is directed toward women and therefore those of others don’t interest me; and b) that lack of inclination and a growing inability to enjoy time spent in meatspace means I unlikely to have much use for my own, either….
[compulsive honesty]
I didn’t invent it. Stole it from a writer/blogger.
[/compulsive honesty]
Well then, the lack of that distraction should serve you well in your quest to insult every living thing in the universe, at least. BTW, what letter of the alphabet are you on these days?
no, it doesn’t quite work that way, which is why I corrected myself and said “it’s actually more complicated than that”. Though, we’re both nightowls so we do both go to sleep very late at night. otherwise the dynamics are complicated, and simply saying that we don’t interfere with each others’ sleeping cycles and morning routines was the simplest way to describe it without writing a dissertation about it. let’s just say this protocol has evolved slowly and painstakingly and is irreducibly complex ;-)
that’s one way of putting it. (also, stop teasing you bastard)
eh. I’ve given speeches in front of classrooms, congregations, groups of soon-to-be-exchange-students etc. all my life. that is easy, since it comes with built-in audience interest and “authority”. butting into conversations is not, because no one gives a fuck about what I have to say and I have nothing to convince them that I know what I’m talking about. so I feel like an intruder and idiot.
true, but with a minor caveat: computers give me ADD, so even though I can read the screen all day, I cannot stay focused on the same piece of writing for more than a few minutes. so books can only be read on paper; and possibly on an e-reader that doesn’t do anything else (esp. doesn’t have internet surfing abilities).
oh eww, old people
*runs*
*trips Jadehawk with my cane*
Chmee,Speaker to Animals:
This is how. :)
Did you follow a link here, to Pharyngula, from a computer forum?
I ask because my husband, who knows that I hang out here, saw a mention of one Alan Clarke on a programming website where he hangs out (and it’s possible that the word “douchenozzle” was loosed upon the aether at this point, but that may have only been in my head, because my husband never uses such language) whereon A.C. had, in his own inimitiable fashion, been being tiresome.
Around that same time, my Pharyngula-reading pleasure was being substantially reduced by unusually slow and sludgy response times (even by previous Pharyngula standards), and I wondered if the slow-down might be caused by a lot of computer guys popping over to see what all the hoorah was about.
Just idle curiousity. :)
Jadehawk wrote:
Don’t run in the house! And stay off my lawn!
Jadehawk,
Heh. If you’re lucky, you will be too, one day.
Consider the alternative…
I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been 25 for almost 3 years now, and I’m planning on keeping it that way forever :-p
My shyness division:
– not shy: performing on stage; teaching/presenting; bars/clubs
– shy*: attending lectures; parties; random social situations**
*My landlord keeps pointing out how much I blush. I can’t control it. (I’ve also gotten goosebumps from music my whole life. Never thought twice about it….)
**Making eye contact has been a New Year’s resolution for me more than once in the past. I don’t rule out ASD, although some people who know me would be shocked by this.
That’s terrible. I mean, near as I can tell, civilians with guns isn’t particularly safe-enhancing, but seriously, Freedom of Speech? I do believe this is the first time I’ve heard a direct strike at the concept from a Merikan, and not just on any one person’s usage of it. Also the first time I’ve heard a Merikan lash out at the constitution itself, out loud…
this.
and the entirely frustrating tearing up during discussions, even on entirely unemotional topics in which I have no stake. no one takes you seriously when you start crying over politics
For the last hour I have been watching a weird gymnastics session on CNN, a black fitness instructor is training with a hall full of elderly citizens and makes them stand up and wave their arms every 30 seconds or so.
Oh, wait….
Part of the reason I love the internet.
Somehow, anger doesn’t seem to come across as a real emotion.
;/
So…here’s a vid…:
http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2010/01/potato_salad_food_poisoning_an.php
Unless, of course, your name is Starfart.
It’s ok, Wowbagger, I knocked her over.
I used to blush so terribly that my friends would tease me just to see how long it took before the part in my hair turned red, kind of like those animated cartoon thermometers where the level rises and rises and then explodes out the top. Thankfully, a consequence of my advanced age is that I rarely blush anymore, and when I do it’s slight. I assume it’s because of circulation problems. Either that, or I’ve just gotten old enough that I have lost all capacity to be embarrassed by anything.
At least that one doesn’t make you think of me..:-)
Btw, I think he made some great points in the address, and got to love the naive attempts to get those scoundrels to take their job seriously, stop the influence of lobbyists and the like, but “off-shore oil and gas exploration”, “clean coal” and “new nuclear reactors”, srsly ??
Nah, just the bitter man one. ;D
Politics is serious, and emotionally meaningful. If you’re not emotional about it you’re not worth talking to, in my opinion.
@777, I stand in awe. That is… extreme.
I brush my teeth just before going to bed at night. Otherwise, skunks and maned wolves play tag in my mouth all night. Unsanitary ones.
Coconut and/or vanilla scented salon products ought to be forbid by law. That shit has to erode away; no amount of rinsing dispels it.
David,
This is the second time you’ve called me old!* Those of us born in 1980 have been known to read computer screens for long periods of time with no problem.
*I might be a little over-sensitive since my brother has been teasing me about being (gasp) 29.
like you said, some emotions are considered serious, others not so much. I’m allowed to be angry and “passionate”, so long as I don’t start crying. Then I’m just “too emotional to think about it rationally”, and I’m “taking everything too personally” and so on.
Fucking annoying, and another reason the Internet is better than meatspace.
Legend has it that Laurence Olivier would throw up before a performance. According to some people, it was opening night only. According to others, it was every single time.
I am totally useless in clubs. Singularly so if the music is loud. And getting drunk only makes me quieter for some reason.
Despite having no idea what you look like, and at the risk of sounding very creepy, I’ve always imagined that you have a piercing, no-bullshit stare.
Jadehawk,
I routinely get teared up when talking about politics. If I’ve had a couple of drinks be prepared for full-on bawling about the destruction of my country and the US Constitution.
SC,
I agree! Politics affects real people. It’s not just a game, and if you’re not emotional about it, you haven’t bothered to think about why you think the things you think.
is this an inappropriate moment to mention that I thought you were much older than I?
(in my defense, I also thought David M was older than me, but it turns out he’s actually a bit younger; must be the fact that I lag a decade behind everyone in life-development, so everybody in their 20’s seems 10 years older to me)
my grammar is failing. and worst of all is that I can’t figure out which version is wrong *sigh*
Jadehawk,
LOL! Not at all. :)
SC OM @ 777
Early, cheesy-singing NINJAS !!
eddie:
You misunderstand me: I don’t find strong language offensive at all (or should I say, “I don’t find strong language offensive at all, fuckwad“?); I find it offensive that you would casually and trivially ignore the carefully and politely expressed norms of the community you presume to participate in.
Strong — even offensive — language in the service of some purpose is fine, even admirable; pissing people off just for the hell of it is pointless asshattery, and I, for one, have no patience for it.
So just fuck the hell off, won’t you? Thanks ever so much.
I’ve been half-listening to the Republican “rebuttal” (or whatever they call it) to the State of the Union Address, and I’m wondering if there’s an institute or something where Repubs learn to do that condescending, sing-song oratorial style that sets my teeth on edge.
Any ideas people?
And here I was starting to feel old at age 25…
Oh, and I should mention that it isn’t specifically about politics. it’s absolutely everything, if the discussion goes on long enough and is being taken seriously enough. And ironically, the only time I am not likely to cry is when I get really emotional, involved, and angry: then I just get loud.
*sigh*
Bill, old buddy, I have to chastise you for this uncouth remark. You should have phrased it thusly:
“So just fuck the hell off, won’t you, shithead.”
This gives the proper indication that you were addressing the right person.
I burned my finger on a test tube of Barium Cloride. :(
I know people complain about having teh gay agenda shoved down their throats. Good news, singer Utada Hikaru prefers to throw teh gay agenda at people instead.
I guess I’m late saying it, but SC @782 wins the fuckin’ internet!! Right on!
And speaking of politics and emotion, did anyone watch the SotU? I still hate the idea of a spending freeze, but if it truly turns out to be, as some critics on the left claim, “only a gimmick,” maybe the harm will be limited. The rest of the speech I thought was very good… much better than I had feared… and +1 to Obama for promising to repeal DADT.
Eddie @698
My dad used to call Aussie Rules “aerial ping pong”.
I, personally, think that it combines all of the best elements of rugby and basketball – a nice, open field and tight uniforms from the former and tall men in singlet tops from the latter.
Go the Bloods…
Howard Zinn died today.
Bill,
He keeps promising to repeal DADT, and yet he hasn’t done it. No points until DADT is repealed!
Is it just me, or does that not sound like the title of a They Might Be Giants song?
Only half the citizens, it seems.
Jeez, way to make a girl feel old. Not saying what decade I was born in, but I was well into my school years by 1980.
PL @802:
Duly noted. It is, however, in my nature to be optimistic.
I’m guessing you were doing the flame test, and got distracted looking at the pretty colors?
Just don’t eat it, mmkay?
Jadehawk, this weeks Dirty Jobs had Mike Rowe at the Soo Locks in winter. He was mucking out deep in the tunnels as usual, but the topside shots showed the UP winter. Clean, white snow everywhere…
By ‘Just don’t eat it’, I mean barium chloride is pretty toxic. FYI.
No, we were determining whether water would appear if we heated it, what the color of the residue was, whether it was water soluble, and whether it was a hydrate. And I was distracted by a text message.
Cool. Go with that.* :)
Nobody knows. :) Seriously – I have no idea. (But more to the point, it would be difficult to be more impressed with your English.)
*Apropos of nothing, I always thought one of the best stares was Valérie Quennessen’s in Summer Lovers.
I’m not saying what decade I was born in, but by the time I was done with school, Sigourney Weaver was having her first encounter with that slimy bug alien thingy.
Christ, I’m old.
Jadehawk @790,
It ain’t difficult: both are pronouns, but ‘I’ is the subject of a verb, whereas ‘me’ is the object of a verb.
Here, the verb phrase is ‘were older than’, the object is the person you refer to, and the subject is yourself.
Or try completing the phrase: (you were older than I (am)) vs. (you were older than me (is)).
@ Jadehawk #790:
The confusion results from the loss of a word. I.e. it would once have been “much older than I am”. Put back the lost word and the confusion goes away.
RickR, I see we aren’t that far apart, age-wise. ;-)
But the snootiness multiplies. :)
it doesn’t work like that. the phase is, after all, “I am older than you”, not “me are older than you”. therefore, in the sentence “x is older than y”, x is the subject, not the object as you say. What I can’t figure out is whether this is a parallel structure comparing two full subject/verb constructions (x is, and y is), or whether it’s a single structure that needs one subject (x) and one object (y).
Well, it turns out that I am almost exactly as old as Wowbagger, perhaps even older by months.
Damn I am old!
But my problem is I don’t feel it in my head. I should be more serious, circumspect, knowledgeable, prudent and wise. Hell, I am none of those! :(
Any idea when Uncle Squidward is going to close this thread and get the horde a new undead thread?
A little older. A little more confused.
Jadehawk:
In the phrase, “I am older than you (are),” “I” is the subject, and “you” is the object. When you use the reverse (You are older than I [am]) “I” is the object. Really, adding the verb to the object makes it easier.
You wouldn’t say, “You are older than me [is OR am].”
For all the back-and-forth about who’s old, this 49-year-old offers this for you delectation.
Curious – in German is it: “How old are you?” or “How many years do you have?”
I doubt I’ve ever said “You’re older than I” in my entire life. (I have said “You’re older than I am” and “You’re older than me,” however.)
“i” cannot be an object!! if it were, it would be “me”
“I” and “me” are the same word, but one is in the subjective case, the other is in the objective.
and it’s “how old are you?” (wie alt bist du; even with exactly the same word order) in German. In Polish it’s “how many years do you have?” (ile masz lat)
…and since we’re here…:
How weird, me too, and I always thought I was the only one !!
Did you guys know that….
The Contrapositive of any A proposition is the obverse of the converse of the obverse of that proposition ?
:D
Here’s to hoping that the godless Californians keep him busy a while longer…:-)
The answer to the question is 42.
Gee, I’m cryptic today.
That’s the price I pay for posting on Pharyngula without first looking something up.
You are correct, Jadehawk. First person, as an object pronoun, would be “me.” So, even though it sounds funny (to me), the correct sentence would be, “You are older than me.”
BTW, in Italian, it is also “how many years do you have?”
The bobbing muppethead is particularly amusing. :)
SC,
Wie alt bist du? How old are you? Same words in the same order :)
Thanks, speakers of German.
Always trust CNN to come up with a ridiculous headline( and the internet to come up with weird shit in general) :
IPad draws feminine hygiene jokes
Having just been subject to some “granny-porn” from Germany ( don’t ask) I have to the conclusion they don’t really CARE how old you are.
Oh, here is the vid :
http://www.break.com/index/ipad14.html
Jadehawk, I note your objections, and conclude that, in informal use, both are as correct as need be. Best as I can make it out, it depends on whether you consider ‘than’ to be a conjunction or a preposition.
So, I am certainly not right, and possibly wrong — perhaps an educated grammarian can help out here? :)
cf. Than I versus Than Me, or Grammar Girl on “Than I” Versus “Than Me”.
And that’s enough of that from me!
oh, I see how it is. You watch videos SC posts, but not ones I post. because if you did, you’d know that I posted that clip already
pffft
Jadehawk, I take it back. The reason we were confused was because of the comparative “more than.”
*faints*
( I am also interested in the use of the term “subject” in the context, was that like in A Clockwork Orange where they keep your eyelids open tie you to a chair and force you to watch ?? )
;)
Oops, my apologies , I missed that !!
A friend sent me an email with some embedded in it as a joke. My eyeballs took in about 30 seconds before my retinas imploded as a self-defence mechanism. That Alex guy had it easy- he only has to watch ultra violence, me- I saw an approximately 80 years old erection.
Kind of like being Rickrolled but in an even worse way…um…Dickrolled perhaps?
Great links. The point is that one is technically correct but pretentious, while the other is technically incorrect but natural. I’ll go with the latter (or with spelling it out), but no one is wrong here.
splendid. so the conclusion to this grammar debate is that “than me” will make me sound grammatically incorrect, while “than I” will make me sound like a grammar nazi and elitist
:-p
Damn, didn’t see Jadehawk’s response before I posted. Sorry ’bout that.
OK, I see that my quote wasn’t very illuminating. Damn home-made limoncello.
From what I’m reading, using a comparative means that you’re not using an object at the end of a sentence. Instead you’re sort of linking two subjects together (by comparison). So “I” – being the subject – would be the correct choice.
And with that, “I” must go to bed. See you on the next sub-thread.
Really, I doubt it. But just use “than I am” and save yourself the aggravation.
:)
I note it’s been a couple of threads since Leigh Williams offered to engage regarding her theistic beliefs.
Leigh, if it’s a worry for you andit’s holding you back from commenting, please consider my request rescinded.
I’m more interested in whether an American would instantaneously pick me as a foreigner if I said something ending with “than me” ? And how about an Australian ?
Could you forward it ? :-)
Rorschach,
I don’t think many Americans are even aware that there is an alternative to “than me.” No one I know would see it as a marker of being from elsewhere.
*eyeroll*
Please. Don’t get me started.
No way. That’s how I talk (and write). You don’t have an accent? And why would you care – you a spy?
:P
I feel I have to make up for yesterday’s John Waters quote-a-thon with JoshS on the “This comment…” thread, so here’s some John Waters EVERYONE can enjoy!!
Who knew the Prince of Puke had all these talents?
Johnny Depp sets the screen on fire!!!
Turn it up!
This is one of the things I like about Japanese. Once I pick which of the various “I” to use — there are only 4 appropriate for a man my age and status — no declension is necessary. In the same way, once I pick one of the half-dozen or so words which mean “you” (or decide that a pronoun cannot be used in the situation), no declension of that is necessary either.
All that then remains is to pick one of the roughly forty inflections for the verb. Since all but 3 Japanese verbs are regular, this is not actually a problem.
It’s just that a lot of the word-to-word translations of certain terms from one language into the next don’t work, like “how old are you” is the same construct in german, but differently constructed in italian or spanish for example.
I do have an accent, most people strangely(to me) put me as being Irish or Canadian, few pick the german, don’t ask me why.
Hee.
My language only has 5 pronouns: I, you (familiar), you (formal), they/it, and it. However, there is rarely a situation in which I can actually use “you” or “they/it” for anything, because my native language demand I address people by gendered-classed titles.
This is Korean? I read somewhere — it may have been in something by Malcom Gladwell — about the contribution of language distance to airline crashes. That when pilots were forced to use English, their interactions changed in nature. I haven’t seen a whole lot written about this, so I’m not sure if it’s a well accepted theory.
Japanese is very high context, but less so than Korean. I think. I’m not a linguist. I could refer to myself as 私 (watakushi)、私 (watashi)、僕 (boku)、or 俺 (ore), which are in roughly descending order of aggressiveness. 儂 (washi) marks the speaker as old-fashioned, and 我が輩 (wagahai) is excessively formal and condescending. I generally stick with boku for casual conversation and watashi for business situations. ore is beer drinking language.
A popular book on cats is 我が輩は猫である (wagahai wa neko de aru) or “I am the cat”. Both the pronoun (wagahai) and the inflection of the copula (de aru) contribute to the cat’s self-elevation and disdain for the lower-class around it. I’ve never seen an adequate translation of the title into English — I certainly can’t think of one.
Native Japanese speakers also tend to drop any words that can be inferred from context, including the subject and the object of sentences. I’m still getting the hang of this.
That should be roughly ascending order of aggressiveness in 855. I should probably quit trying to multitask.
So, I’m reading Platypus and there’s a section about the early scientific arguments regarding the animal’s reproductive anatomy. Sir Everard Home dismisses a rival German scientist’s theory as ‘the imagination of a mind prepossessed with the existence of Mammae’. Oh snap!
mmm…. sushi has been made and delivered to my computer… nom nom nom
In the 21st century we’re stuck with things like:
Alittle older. A little more confused.
Yes, I am having visions of excess.
bleeeaaa…
I did not invent this world
Call my words a string of pearls
Rorschach
send it to you? I was depending upon you translating it for me!
…because my education will not be complete until I find out which of the words in it is German for “fisting” 8-)
God, I love CNN :
Pope JP II self-flagellated
Alittle older. A little more confused.
Yes, I am having visions of excess.
I like your twisted point of view
Dogdamned fucking buggy Scienceblogs!
I think we say “fisting” too, I’m not sure actually…:-)
Like we will say “software” or “burger”, anglicisms.
Miki Z | January 28, 2010 2:16 AM:
“I am the cat” is sufficient. The connotations of self-elevation and disdain are conveyed by the word “cat”.
No, not Korean. Korean and Teochew were the languages my great grandparents did not want to teach their descendent. My mother tongue is an Austro-asiatic langauge.
I can call myself “kyom”, “I” or “me” which is generally the same in all grammatical cases since case are determined by particles. Or I can call myself “nak kyom” which literally translate as “you me.” It’s a formal way of addressing myself. Or I can call myself in the third person, which has decline in modern times. Now if you were older (but not that much older)/my boyfriend/big brother/big sister/older cousin I’d call myself “paoun” which is a neuter younger person or “paoun too’ch” which means little brother. If you were my parents, I’ll call myself “kon” which means child, if you were my aunt/uncle/much older person, I’d call myself “kmuy” which means nephew/neice and if you way old or grandparents and ancestors, I’ll call myself “jao” which is grand child. If you’re a monk, I call myself “obasak” for a male or “obasika” for female which means layperson and is not native. If I was female and polite, I’d call myself “neng kyom” which is “Lady I/me.” If you are younger, I’ll call myself “bong” which is older sibling, if you were my child I’d be “Mai/Lok Mai/Madai” which means mom, lord mom, mother, or “Ow, Lok Ow, Lok Pa, Pa, Ow pok, pok” which means father, lord father, lord father, father, father father, and father. If you are a very young person or a neice/nephew I’d be “Om” which I can’t find an equivalent, “Menh” aunt, “Bhuh” uncle. And you you’re just a tyke compared to me, I’m “Ta” or “Yeh” which is grandfather grandmother respective and can by modified with “lok” to mean lord grandfather and lord grandmother. *gasp for air
As for addressing others, I depends on your relative status to me and how rude I want to be. :P
Priest shortage
BS
A wretched ‘current affairs’ show has a feature on a family with 11 kids – I want to throw up. To quote Bill Hicks: ‘Too many of yer. Quit rutting, just for a fucking day. Let’s work out this food/air deal. Then go back to your rutting.’
From BS’s link :
Good to hear.
Windmills Of Your Mind
Just A Little Lovin’
I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore
Same in Spanish: ¿Cuántos años tienes?
And I’ve never heard anyone say “You’re older than I” in English. I’m pretty sure “You’re older than me” is correct, at least by established usage.
That said, there are some grammar rules which English-speakers simply ignore most of the time: for instance, the prohibition on placing a preposition at the end of a sentence. “This is the mug I put my coffee in” is wrong; “This is the mug in which I put my coffee” is correct, for instance. (Sorry for the choice of example, but it’s 8.30am here and I’m unable to think about much except coffee.)
In the US, we have yet an other strange evangelical offshoot known as Quiverfull. No birth control and the wife is to bare as many kids as she can until her body gives out. Their is a reality show about one of the families, The Duggars. Nineteen kids. And damn straight the wife serves the husband.
Janine, there was a very talented young man named Tyran Parke at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival last year who did a version of Windmills of My Mind that – all respect to the awesomeness of Dusty Springfield – is the most amazing I’ve ever heard.
Funny, another religious cult that sounds great if you’re a heterosexual male. Not so much if you are anything else.
* Actually, strike that !! 11 kids, no way Jose !! *
;)
Gyeong Hwa Pak, the Pikachu of Anthropology,
Very interesting. I didn’t encounter particles until I started learning Japanese in university. My mother tongue is (American) English, and I’m literate (but not fluent) in German from high school.
Particles were hard for me until I started thinking of them as relational operators; they started to make sense after about 6 months, and now I find myself searching for them when I’m trying to speak French. (I speak French well enough to get to a train station, buy tickets, and head somewhere that I can speak the language.)
I still get tripped up on familial nouns (which differ by age and whether it is the speaker’s family) and politeness level / humility level (orthogonal concepts in Japanese).
The No Longer Quivering Blog = awesome resource about how this shit (and similar cults) looks from the inside.
I’m amazed her uterus hasn’t fallen out in protest.
More language immersion
Liekki
CMX
But Walton, you have heard people say “You’re older than I am”.
Scanky cunt, OM said:
“assclam” “fuck you”
You honestly think the hypocrisy is less offensive than the choice of words? Pathetic. Perhaps you can advise the board of education on what words should and shouldn’t be in the dictionary.
Get it straight: Those here who would consider we should have freedom of expression, if we only use words that they like, are clearly wrong. Tone trolls of the worst sort; they think they are right and their dogmatic insistence on jacking whatever thread with their stupidity is on a par with the worst of alan clarke or silver fox. But they’re always the first to cry ‘troll’ when someone calls them on their dogma.
Also, hypocritical tone troll bawbag dauphin, OM said:
“Strong — even offensive — language in the service of some purpose is fine, even admirable; pissing people off just for the hell of it is pointless asshattery, and I, for one, have no patience for it.”
Of course. If you are too stupid to see the point, it has no point. At least, at one point, you were honest enough to say you were having difficulty following my line of thought. It’s your right to not even try and I will not treat you like a baby by talking down to you. But don’t miss the point and then whine about it not being there. Learn to read.
Eddie, you have freedom of expression, but you will be judged by what you say.
Your indignation is noted with amusement, as is your utter misunderstanding of what hypocrisy entails; it is especially ironic when you whine about tone trolling whilst tone trolling.
BTW, you misspelled ‘skanky’.
Especially, bawbag, when you use the same point yourself and are a) too stupid to know when you’re doing it, or b) so hypocritical you believe it’s OK for you but wrong for others.
Aaaaaand out come the true colors. Amusingly enough, I was considering apologizing for being harsh earlier, and then I read this.
Idiotic.
Idiotic.
I see my earlier impression of eddie was correct.
Alas.
PZ,
troll spill under the name “eddie” needs cleanup please, it has sunk to personal insults and yelling and screaming, it would seem obvious that no more cogent argument is to be had from this one.
John Morales, I fully expect to be judged, and accept it. But would prefer to be judged for what I write, including the choice of words, than have the choice of words used as a pathetic excuse to dismiss an argument. I have heard it said that it may be best not to use such strong words, because it gives such an excuse to those who would use it. I disagree and think those who do use it, show themselves in the bad light they deserve.
If I’m misunderstanding what hypocrisy is, then what is the word for what SC, OM and BD, OM are doing. I do expect to be judged the same way as others. Is my referring to others’ trolling, trolling, but their trolling not? What is hypocrisy if that’s not it? You seem not to be immune from that irony.
This thread is supposed to be mellow and groovy, damn it! Mellow and fucking groovy!
Way to dodge the question, SC.
Poopy darn.
You haven’t the faintest clue what the question is. You’re quite stupid, sadly.
PZ answers reddit →
Is there a better way to start the day or neutralize the troll odor?
† Holy Jesus H. Freaking C. †
Thanks, aratina cage.
Eddie is an unimaginative asshat. He can’t avoid using certain words unnecessarily. His lack of public decorum says all that needs to be said about his lack of intelligence, and general over belligerence.
SC, OM:
“You haven’t the faintest clue what the question is. You’re quite stupid, sadly.”
The question was right there, with a ‘?’ and everything. You even quoted it back to me. What’s your answer? I mean, apart from ‘idiotic’, which is arguable. But if you are going to just dismiss it you have no cause to accuse others of stupidity, idiocy, trolling…
Nerd of Redhead:
” He can’t avoid using certain words unnecessarily.”
The ‘unnecessarily’ part is wrong. As I said to Bill Dauphin, if you can’t see the point, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. As a clue, look at Bill D’s comment to which I said that. See where he uses strong language for emphasis and to make a point. Or is objecting to me doing the same as him not more hypocrisy?
Sorry Cricket, you are wrong. Deal with it elsewhere. Try another blog for your idiocy.
Sigh. It’s too early in the morning for this much concentrated stupidity. Here’s a clue: this is not about “strong language.” Now fuck off somewhere and ponder that for a while, dipshit.
You were right, SC. “Assclam” is a good descriptor.
On PJP2’s self-flagellation:
For every dollar donated to Haiti, a Catholic will suffer. Don’t blame logic, you smugnacious skeptics!
Thank you for the link Aratina Cage, i forgot all about that one !! I would have hoped it is a bit longer, they gave the Hitch half an hour !!
“try another blog…”
But I can’t address your double standard on another blog. Your double standard is here. Similarly with the refusal to even acknowledge a counter-argument and your crying foul when someone has the temerity to have a different view that your own, or even the preference for consistency.
And “It’s not about ‘strong language”
Of course, for you, it’s not. It’s about your hypocritical insistence that some strong language is different from other strong language. For others, it’s about the right to use language at all to express strength of feeling, and to be judged on the merit of the arguments so expressed. Ah, but others don’t count. Others are ‘trolls’.
I could maybe make more sense to you and others if you would care to state a position other than ‘I don’t like it, so it’s wrong’. In strong language is not the issue, and I’m prepared to be persuaded you might have a non-hypocritical point but just won’t say it, then what?
I read Carlie’s shakesville link @739 anf they certainly didn’t make a case that, e.g. ‘cunt’ may be unacceptable but ‘fuck’ isn’t. They were arguing that somehow you can excuse the use of such words by following it up with a racist epithet, couched as a request for forgiveness. They then tried to avoid being called on using ‘damn’ with it’s religious connotations, while forgetting the forgiveness part has similar religious overtones.
They made their point plain:
And sure, ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck are indeed exactly equivalent. I’m not claiming they’re not ” fundamentally discriminatory and/or oppressive” and indeed have stated that I used the word because it is so offensive. You are claiming that either a) ‘cunt’ is bad but ‘fuck’ is not, or b) such guidelines don’t apply to you as they apply to others, or c) something else you just won’t say.
“This is the mug I put my coffee in” is wrong; “This is the mug in which I put my coffee” is correct, for instance. – Walton
Says who? According to Richard Nordquist this “rule” derives from trying to import the grammar of Latin (where you can’t end a sentence with a proposition) into English, and has been rejected even by most prescriptive grammarians in the last century.
(BTW, Walton, were you pointing at yourself when you uttered that sentence? ;-)
There is a story that Winston Churchill, confronted with an edit of one of his sentences to move the preposition from the end, expostulated:
“This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
However, in another layer of error, the attribution is apparently undocumented: Churchill on Prepositions.
Another result of trying to transfer Latin grammar to English is apparently the “rule” against splitting infinitives, as in “To boldly go”. In Latin, an infinitive is a single word, so splitting it would indeed be odd.
All this reminds me of a very old (1975?) paper called “The Phrasal Lexicon” by someone called Becker, who argued that much of our speech and writing consists of pre-formed phrases, sometimes with spaces for variables (e.g. “I will not put up with”) tacked together. One that always irritates me (but presumably shouldn’t) is “The thing/problem/point/etc. is, is that…”. Why two “is”s?
eddie,
a suggestion if I may, get away from the computer now, stay off Pharyngula for 24 hours, and if PZ doesn’t ban you in the meantime, come back, re-read your posts and try again.
More particularly, I agree that “In my [british] experience “cunt” is used as a strong version of “bastard”: without any implication of femaleness or femininity and usually about a man”, I totally disagree that it’s reasonable to expect American rules of conduct on an American site” eddie
Hogwash. Of course “cunt” is often applied to men, but that does not mean it’s not a sexist insult: the implication is that really vile men resemble women’s genitals.
I come from a place where ‘frog’ is used with the same venom and intent… eddie
Where’s that? The 19th century? Come off it eddie.
Obviously. Look, you insufferable fool, I said above that “frog” is objectionable as an insult. It is not profanity. Why is this so difficult to understand?
What if your sentence is a proposition?
(Did the Romans make lame jokes based on vowel substitutions?)
(Well, the late Romans did: Non Angli, sed Angeli.)
Worst comedy duo: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover
Knockgoats,
Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue (a book I highly recommend), points out that trying to move a proposition from the end of a sentence often results in some very inelegant language. The famous Churchillian quote* is a prime example.
My bugbear about silly prohibitions in English is the word “hopefully.” For some reason this is disdained by various grammarians. Notably the New York Times Writing Style Manual imperiously informs the reader that “hopefully” is not to be used under any circumstances. No other adverbs seem to suffer the disapproval that “hopefully” engenders. “It is to be hoped” strikes me as an awkward neologism which can be avoided by using a simple, easily understood word.
*Why is it that so many famous quotes attributed to various people were never actually said by the person usually accused of saying the quote?
The Japanese do. Puns are high humor here. I’m hilarious in Japanese.
A non-pun Japanese joke (at least, I first heard it in Japanese):
A man and his wife are lying in bed. The man has terrible gas but doesn’t feel like getting out of bed, so he decides he’ll just fart in bed.
*brup* “Did you feel the earthquake?” he asks his wife, and she says nothing.
*brup* “Did you feel the earthquake?” he asks his wife again. Still, she says nothing.
*brup* “Did you feel the earthquake?” he asks his wife again. “Are these happening before or after your farts?” she replies.
“Religion is the opiate of the people.” –Mr. Ed McMahon
I say we’ve heard enough from this one, actually.There are creationists with better arguments.
I’ll just killfile it.
The only bad thing about the interview of PZ is that it is too short, otherwise I don’t think PZ could have been more huggable or farther away from the caricature of an evil, hateful, scary atheist. The way I remembered* the interview was by slogging through this section of Teh Thread (which I had sadly put off while trying to catch up on the previous section), and when I got to #126 by iHunger (who asks one of the interview questions BTW), I went and checked YouTube and the interview was there. It was delightful!
On PJP II, the CNN article’s first words are eye-opening:
Oooh. Kinky. Turns out Smoggy (HI SMOGGY! Glad you are back!!) had it a little too close to the truth after all.
* I didn’t. :-
A Grammar Rock clip seems appropriate. Here’s one:
The best known is probably “Conjunction Junction”:
@912: I think the “hopefully” thing is because technically it should mean “in a hopeful manner”, as in “to travel hopefully is better than to arrive”, but it’s frequently used to mean “I/We hope that…”, as in “Hopefully, we’ll be there soon”. As with the split infinitive, actual usage has long since overwhelmed the strict prescription. Anyway, language is flexible enough that “hopefully” can mean two things without causing any difficulty. I was brought up to avoid the second usage, but I got over it.
I never worry about grammar or vocabulary shifts that are good for expressiveness. I do try to resist shifts that reduce expressiveness or elide an important distinction: the recent tendency to conflate “disinterested” with “uninterested”, for example, or the use of “refute” to mean “deny”. I hate that last one because the news is always full of claims that some politician has “strongly refuted” the accusation that they’ve wrongly claimed three barrels of midget-fisting lubricant as a parliamentary expense, when in fact they’ve only denied it.
See you all in the next
lifethread incarnation folks,good nite…:-)When “fly” can refer to a means of travel, an annoying insect, and a part of one’s trousers, then “hopefully” can also have more than one meaning.
There is no double standard. This is a public area. People should talk (post) like they would in a place like Disney World, where people of all ages, colors, sexes, and religion are present. You attempt to pretend this is a private area, like your basement bedroom, where you can sit in your underwear and be as lewd and crude as you wish. Sorry. Grow up. As a public area, you don’t go out of your way to offend people when other less obnoxious words can be used to convey your idea. Your inability to find those words gives us all we need to judge and condemn you for being stoopid. The “f” word usage should be restrained, limited to cases like yourself that don’t take the hints and go away. In that context, it is acceptable. So, fuck off idjit.
So, people are still discussing the relative offensiveness of c**t then? I thought this thing had been settled on the other thread.
It seems pretty unambiguous to me that the word is a pretty nasty slur with distinct misogynist undertones. I think that it is best avoided.
(On a side note, I cannot imagine what kind of misogynist moron first came up with the idea of using the [to my mind, at least] rather wonderful female genitalia as an insult.)
Also eddie, I do not feel that it is reasonable to dismiss as ‘tone trolling’ legitimate concerns over the use of forms of language that perpetuate discriminatory attitudes toward women or any other group in society.
Given the resonance of c**t in the USA, it is perhaps no surprise that many commentors here were offended by it (though as I have stated before, I am a Brit and I still consider the term to be an unnacceptable gendered insult). There are many words that do not translate accross the pond exactly, but that is no reason to take umbrage if someone finds them offensive. It would be better if a person took the time to understand the sensitivities of their audience, and if they gave offence unintentionally, then why not just apologise and explain the cause of the confusion?
For instance, to me a ‘faggot’ (apologies for the use of the term, but for illustrative purposes it is lamentably necessary) is a bundle of dry fire wood that, in an age before modern chemical ignition sources, was the vital next step in building a fire after the use of kindling. To an American, the term has a somewhat different connotation. Misunderstandings, especially in a sentence involving a phrase like ‘I am off to burn some fa***ts’, are perhaps inevitable. To make a mistake based on such cultural gulfs periodically is unavoidable, but to continue to use the same kind of terminology knowing its meaning among your audience seems no more than a concerted effort to give offence by deliberately using a term that carries a freight of bigotry.
I also frankly fail to see the parity between f**k and c**t in terms of their history as words. Fornication Under Command of the King was certainly a policy that doubless caused no small suffering in its time, but it does not seem to have the connotations of contemporary discrimination that c**t does, although I confess that my knowledge of etomology is sadly lacking.
shitty shit, I missed a golden opportunity-
SC, the best thing to do in those situations is to BAIL OUT.
re: “than I” vs. “than me”
“than me” is fine.
Don’t believe the 18th century prescriptive grammar stuff. Those people didn’t understand actual grammar.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001061.html
The “rule” about ending a sentence with a preposition is bogus, too. Churchill had it right.
http://www.snopes.com/language/acronyms/fuck.asp
Huh. I don’t think I had ever heard that proposed etymology.
***
:P Repeatedly.
I just don’t understand the need for the complexity of this discussion, nor eddie’s stubborn asshattery…
For me, anyhow, it’s very simple. I am quite aware that in most arenas, this one included, using the word “cunt” pejoratively is considered very bad form, as it is a particularly nasty turn of phrase with quite clear and obvious misogynistic undertones, whether you intend it or not. I think eddie is also keenly aware of this. So his use of the word while holding that knowledge indicates a stubbornness and desire to be offensive that I simply can’t understand.
Comparing it to any other word is simply stupid. “Cunt” is particularly offensive to women because it refers to a part of the anatomy specific only to women and does so in a belittling, denigrating way. “Fuck” may be offensive to some, but it does not single out any specific gender, race, eye color or dick size in a similarly degrading way. Therefor comparing the two words, especially in reference to the reasons for taking offense, is simply ridiculous.
Bottom line, I think if one would like to express oneself using crass, harsh language and cussing, by all means feel free to do so… but one should also understand that if one wishes to not be seen as a racist, bigot, misogynist, or other brand of asshat, one should endeavor to avoid insults that single out a person or group, or aspects of people or groups, in a derogatory way.
Unless of course your very goal is to be called an asshat… then you should do those things. Definitely.
Remember, eddie… you don’t have to intend to be an asshat to actually be one.
Knockgoats:
“Hogwash. Of course “cunt” is often applied to men, but that does not mean it’s not a sexist insult: the implication is that really vile men resemble women’s genitals.”
Nobody’s claiming it isn’t a sexist insult, as far as I can tell. What I’m not getting is why that is a sexist insult and other words are not. If you think ‘cunt’ and ‘prick’ are sexist insults while ‘fuck’ is OK because it is ‘gender’ neutral, you really don’t know the historic misogyny of the word which described sex as something a man does to a woman. Does that word not have the same connotations?
Also, did you not see the quotation marks? I was quoting another commenter who has not been similarly vilified. Again with the hypocrisy.
me fail english? Thats unpossible
I guess it’s partly due to the Matthew Effect. Credit to a quotation or idea often goes to someone who is famous, rather than the relatively unknown person who actually thought of it. It happens a lot in math. I had a friend who joked about getting a bachelor in math with every single course description having something named after either Euler or Gauss.
“I really didn’t say everything I said.” – Yogi Berra
No. In common modern vernacular “fuck” is widely accepted as gender neutral. And only an asshole trying to make a reach of an argument that using “cunt” should be considered on equal footing with “fuck” by reaching back through its etymology (which is hardly common knowledge) would try to make such a ridiculous argument.
Stop being an asshole, eddie.
SC @ 926;
That’s what I love about Pharyngula. I learn a new thing everytime I come here. Admittedly, some of the information is of an exotic type whose usefulness in that strange place called the ‘real world’ may be limited, but it is of great interest all the same.
Also, why, oh why, oh why do I keep mispelling ‘etymology’? At least I stopped mixing it up with Entomology when I was about 10. That would be really embarrassing…
Eddie, shut the fuck up. You have nothing cogent to say to us, as we have heard such drivel many times before. Your only recourse is another blog that accepts your inability to properly express yourself. Which says nothing good about you or your character.
And by the way, I’m not particularly fond of “prick”, either… but as it as a gender-based insult with a masculine inference, it can not be compared with a gender based insult of feminine inference, since it has long been the case that simply implying femininity, in general, is intended to be degrading… not so much the case with masculinity.
It’s the same reason that using derogatory names for African-Americans is far worse than using derogatory names for Caucasian Americans… (an argument most of my right wing acquaintances, all white of course, don’t understand either). They are both insulting, but one is far worse because of the historical inequity of the two things being compared.
SC, OM:
“
Obviously. Look, you insufferable fool, I said above that “frog” is objectionable as an insult. It is not profanity. Why is this so difficult to understand?”
It’s not difficult to understand your position. I thought it was that so listed it first. You are simply wrong. As I said to knockgoats; “do you know the history of the word?” ‘frog’ may not be profane, but ‘fuck’ certainly is, and you certainly are a hypocrite.
Nerd of Redhead:
“You attempt to pretend this is a private area…”
No. I have been clear about expressing myself in public, and taking responsibility for what I say. Does one’s freedom of expression stop at one’s front door? No, so why do you imply that it’s exercise in a ‘private area’ is more acceptable? Is it because it offends you, so it’s wrong. Watch those pearls, Nerd.
Rorschach @915:
Who drew first blood here? I reacted in kind and yet you vilify me and not those I reacted to. I’ve yet to be corrected on my alleged misunderstanding of what ‘hypocrisy’ means. Perhaps you can help.
Gregory Greenwood @923:
Thank you for accepting that both words are equally [un]acceptable. Yes, they are both deeply offensive. On the accusations of trolling; again I ask, who drew first blood.
The attempts to censor, or to intimidate into self-censorship, were exactly what was wrong with the texas school case discussed in the previous case. SC, OM and others are clearly in the wrong here.
eddie, what term could be applied to you that would be as dehumanizing as the word “cunt”?
Wow… the persecution card. Talk about your last gasps… that’s downright creationist of you!
Calling you a misogynistic asshole /= censorship. Say whatever you want. Your still responsible for what you say and should expect to be criticized for it if criticism is warranted, as it is here.
If you are really feeling persecuted maybe you should take your toys and leave…
In this old thread I was asking some questions about genetic transfer by various viruses.
Semi-related to that, Carl Woese and Nigel Goldenfeld have been saying some more about horizontal gene transfer, and evolution.
Are we at the point where eddie’s discourse on whether to regard certain words as offensive can be described as mansplaining? ;)
I must be free to call women cunts, otherwise the people who desire to censor me will have won. And I will prove I am a free man by calling women cunts.
Killfile is a useful tool. Please, call me a cunt. I will not read it. I am obviously a follower of Comstock. I judge you for your use of words. Assclam.
What a ridiculous, grasping, piece-of-shit argument.
I just can’t take this stupidity. I can’t take it.
Gregory Greenwood @923:
I rememer the reaction when I asked an American coworker if she had a rubber (eraser)
And the somwhat different reaction to the following conversation;
(American) Q: Did you do sports at school?
(Me) A: Yes -Rugby
Q: What position?
A: Hooker
@ Paul W. #925:
CGEL is wrong in its examples.
… is clearly a reduced form of “It is longer than a foot is [long]”!
That one, in its unadorned form “He’s inviting more than X”, has two quite different meanings and hence both endings are possible.
Firstly, there could be two lots of contrasting invites taking place – some by the male and some by another group. There the correct form would be:
“He’s inviting more than we [are]” (or “I [am]” or “she [is]” or “they [are]” etc).
Secondly, there might be only one set of invitations but the significance lies in which people are being invited. There the correct form would be:
“He’s inviting more than us” (or me or her or them etc).
The reason to bother getting the construction correct (ie to be a grammar nazi about it) is to be able to distinguish reliably between these situations rather than have ambiguity or misunderstanding.
Yawn, Eddie is a boring idjit. We have heard his inane and wrong complaints many times before. Eddie, if you want to be a member of this community, you must meet certain community standards. And part of those standards is the use, or non-use, of certain language. We don’t change those standards for idjits like you. So, stop being an idjit and either accept the community standards, or go elsewhere (my recommendation). Your choice Cricket. Choose wisely.
On “fornicating under consent of the king”:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rape+weapon+of+war&search_type=
Who is _your_ king, SC, OM?
On ‘faggot’:
It also may have roots in Brit. public school slang fag “a junior who does certain duties for a senior”
As I recall, it was practice in english public schools (not like US public schools), for faculty and senior students to have junior students as servants. The boy who lights the fire of an evening was referred to as ‘faggot boy’ (using the word in it’s original meaning), and they were occasionaly forced to perform other duties. It is offensive to consensual homosexuals as it is really about child abuse performed by hetero men in positions of power.
A nice little dustup between Reed Cowan, Director of the movie “8: The Mormon Proposition” and infamous Senator, Chris Buttars, results in Buttars being filmed saying exactly what he thinks about gays, and then complaining that he was tricked into saying exactly what he thinks about “the meanest buggars.” Excerpts:
Hi Cicely,
Yep Nosy but not Personal :)
I was more or less drawn here by a link on the Programming Forum that I frequent.
I was interested in seeing how A.C. comported himself here and in the process decided that I quite like this community.
No surprise to see that he had made himself unpopular here as well.
Now I am curious about who your husband is he might be one of my forum friends. :)
To change the subject slightly.
I spent a few months in Wyoming in the late 90’s and had the opportunity to visit the Wyoming Dinosaur Center.
I took the guided tour of the relatively close diggings and had a photo taken of me standing on the bones of a large T rex which sort of fulfilled one of my ambitions.
Anyway I asked a few questions about it and found that the T rex bones were found amongst eggs and the bones of other dinosaur species.
I think that the eggs were T rex eggs and the other bones were not those of complete animals.
My surmise is that, if the eggs were in fact T rex eggs then it is possible that it was a T rex nest so to speak?
If it was a nest, then the other bones were those of prey animals dragged there feed the young.
If this is the case, then it might be possible to map this behavior to that of some modern birds and thus indirectly provide evidence that birds and dinosaurs are behaviorally linked.
Is this a farfetched idea?
I’m curious because I fired an email off to the center about this and never received a reply. So my question was either ignored or considered too obvious to bother answering or maybe to silly to answer.
Regards
I’d rather talk about what Ring Tailed Lemurian mentions above (and I will). But on the issue of an equivalent to ‘cunt’, the only one I’ve ever come up with is ‘rapist’. There’s a difference, of course: someone called a rapist has recourse to the courts for slander or libel.
—
There seems to be a lot more theorizing on horizontal gene transfer as our ability compute and collate increases. For example, the endosymbiotic theory of cells was not taught the last time that I took a biology class, and several credible additions to the theory such as the hydrogen hypothesis have been proposed to deal with deficits in the theory.
I used to deal primarily with economic and physical simulations, but I’m seeing more interest lately in biological simulations. Protein folding, horizontal gene transfer, gene sequencing, DNA comparisons, etc. The raw computing power available has made some theories tractable that were previously theoretically interesting but untestable.
assclam:
I can’t figure out if you’re pathologically desperate to stick with a bad argument or just an unintelligent loon.
No, that (if true) isn’t why it’s offensive.
WTF is a “consensual homosexual”?
eddie, you are becoming a caricature… a pathetic display of a person making desperate, outlandish attempts at defending his clearly wrong-headed position (to save face? appear to not resemble the person his comments portray him to be? Not sure of the reasoning). I really think you need to simply slink off at this point…
The idjit troll is still being an idjit troll. He shows he isn’t an adult with self control, but rather a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum. Shutting up is his only intelligent recourse. But then…
In the same way that the fun-loving 60s rolled over into the sordid, depressing 70s, so this thread is beginning to sour as it comes to a close.
But look on the bright side: it means that two threads from now, Ronald Reagan will ride in to save the day!
Do I really want to unkillfile the assclam so I may try to figure out what a consensual homosexual is? It is rather oddly and, I am sure, accidentally poetic.
I think I would like to hear Rufus Wainwright sing that term.
Lynna,
How long before BYU tells Daniels to give back his degree, do you think? Part of my childhood was spent on the BYU campus when both of my parents were students there. There is absolutely the feeling that it’s okay to let loose around members with things that would not be said in front of non-members.
When I got engaged my family all felt the need to call me and tell me how relieved they were that I wasn’t gay, how worried they had been for me, how hard they had been praying, how awkward it had been to be around me. A few suggested that maybe getting married would clear up the ‘gay confusion’ I had been having. It took a careless aunt for me to find out that they thought my uncontrolled seizures were a mark and warning from God.
It didn’t even occur to me to mention that my fiancee was notwhite (there’s only whites and notwhites, after all). “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” was much more kindly scripted.
Janine:
“I must be free to call women cunts…”
I realise you are being sarcastic. But I’m not the one who is shouting ‘shut up and go away’. Killfile away. Your choice.
Aratina cage:
“eddie, what term could be applied to you that would be as dehumanizing as the word “cunt”?”
Pick one. Your choice. I will never try to censor you. I will note if you just want a gratuitous insult or to use it for emphasis and try to see what point you are making either way. If you are seriously looking for alternatives, perhaps you can ask SC. Perhaps not.
Nerd:
“We have heard his inane and wrong complaints many times before. Eddie, if you want to be a member of this community, you must meet certain community standards”
So community standards are to vilify some ‘ignorant mother’ for trying to cut words out of a dictionary, while vilifying those who would use words to communicate ideas. What are your standards, exactly? Of course, I got it already: They’re double standards.
Maybe we wouldn’t have to go through this repeatedly if you would just be consistent with yourselves. Maybe PZ will get sick of my comments and bin me. Fair enough, his blog. But I haven’t heard that he died and put you in charge.
:) Are you saying eddie is our Altamont? Sounds about right.
*shudder*
I much prefer this usage for faggots
http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/faggotsmushypeassals_91049.shtml
For a relevant but hopefully amusing distraction from eddie’s meltdown, check out this.
Those who knew someone at the University of North Texas may find it familiar…
eddie:
I’m arriving to Pharyngula late this morning, and I see others have been busily, and quite effectively, boxing your ears. There’s really no need for me to respond to you, but I find there’s an interesting point to be made by doing so. The point will no doubt be lost on you, of course, but it might be interesting to somebody else.
Actually, if a number of intelligent, thoughtful people (and, at the risk of sounding prideful, good luck trying to convince folks around here that I’m the stupid one) can’t see your point, it really does mean it’s “not there.” Either the point you think you’re making doesn’t make sense, or it’s not properly embodied in the language you’re using. When you’re addressing a competent audience — and all your ignorant sneering aside, this is a very competent audience — it’s your obligation to make sure your point is meaningfully “there” in your utterances.
Ahh, but you really didn’t “do[] the same as [me].” What you did was casually drop a word this community had just discussed as offensive into a tangential aside about some hypothetical third person. You did not use “strong language” to express anger at me (at that point in the conversation, you apparently weren’t angry at me yet), or to characterize your own passion, or to emphasize anything materially related to the discussion we were having about animal cruelty. Instead, you used it, as you admitted later, because you knew it would offend others and you thought that would be amusing. In effect, you poked a stick at the spectators so you could laugh at their pain.
It’s a bit ironic that you did this in the context of a conversation about gratuitous cruelty, because what you did was the rhetorical equivalent: You knowingly caused pain and upset in the absence of any actual purpose that even arguably might justify your action.
There’s a lot of “strong language” around here, and I’m not given to complaining about it. I also am usually not the first one to complain about the use of gendered slang as insults. I agree with those who do complain, of course, but it’s not something I’m hypersensitive to. I also don’t object to passionate, angry, feisty, even personal arguments.
I do, however, object to people who offend my friends for no good reason. It’s just a shitty way to behave; if you can’t see that, “well, Hell, Jed, I just don’t want to know you.”
Every time you continue to insist that criticism = censorship, you continue to expose yourself for the stubborn asshole you are.
Yawn, the troll is still showing he is an idjit. Nothing cogent said. But then, to say something cogent requires the intelligence and maturity he so obviously lacks. Boring, ignorant, insipid, childish troll.
eddie, please drop your persecution complex. You don’t appear to know any words that would strip you of your humanity or any words that make your very existence the butt of jokes; if so, you have nothing to compare to and that could be a factor in your misunderstanding and awkward defense of the freedom to be a bigot.
MrFire, that was just sick and wrong. But just remember that RR was governor of California during that time. He was not the warm and cuddly caricature that he was when he was president.
Miki Z’s mention of protein folding @948 got me thinking. PZ should set up a Pharyngula team for Stanford’s Folding@home project. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a distributed-computing project that uses your idle CPU time to complete small chunks of extremely large calculations. I’ve been doing it for 5-6 years; it’s very discreet, I’ve never noticed any performance issues from it, and its for a good cause!
I was thinking specifically of Folding@home when I mentioned protein folding and tractability; thanks for mentioning it.
I have hopes that someone (probably a biologist, physicist, mathematician, or some combination) comes up with a breakthrough on this, but even the work done to enable these massively distributed computational checkers has been interesting.
Bogenius, I agree those idle computing time projects are worthwhile. More such applications can be found here. Personally, I run Seti@home and Einstein at home.
SteveV @ 942;
That is both funny and cringe-inducing in equal measure. I imagine that any Brit who has spent significant time amongst our much beloved transatlantic cousins must have similar anecdotes. When I was at university I once had to explain certain Brit-isms to a rather confused colonia…errr, I mean American student.
You know the kind of thing:- a bonnet is the same as a hood unless you are actually referring to headware; a boot is the equivilent of a trunk; lorry is a term for a heavy goods vehicle; a truck is akin to a lorry and not an abbreviation of ‘pickup truck’; ‘f*g’ is a colloquialism for cigarette; and, of course, ‘fanny’ does not refer to the same part of the anatomy in the UK as it does in the USA, so the term ‘fanny pack’ may lead to some raised eyebrows.
The entire conversation resulted in much hilarity and a little unexpected insight into another culture for all concerened without any acrimonious words exchanged. Unfortunately, we do not seem to be doing as well today.
Treason! The warm, dark weather is back.
“Dear Sir/Madam,
I wish to complain”…
And will we get this subthread to 1000 before PZ ends it?
Saddam.
Every man who considered himself one had a Kalashnikov. The palace guards and the Republican Guards and so on just had more and bigger weapons.
Bush v. Gore was a coup. And what’s wrong about a revolution? :-)
I’m strongly inclined to believe all such assertions. For instance, it took me months to figure out that asshole actually has a meaning other than “evil person”*, and that shit is a concrete noun as well as an interjection, and I remember how newfie once insisted that bitch (or was it whore even?) was gender-neutral in Newfoundland and truth machine spent a hundred comments on how he just couldn’t believe that.
* …That one was aggravated by the fact that the vowels of that word are exchanged in my dialect, but this only drives the point home: children must have been learning this word from each other for generations – before finding out what it had once meant.
But, obviously, that doesn’t mean people can expect not to come across as sexist when they use insults that have a gendered origin in places where people are still aware of that.
More and more burgeoning Internet romances! Who spilled the pheromone bottle into the tubes!?!
:-° <innocent whistling>
<scratching head>
See, I don’t even think that far.
“Planning”? Hah. Barring some sort of miracle, I just won’t progress beyond 5 in some respects and 80 in others. I can’t do anything about it. =8-)
:-o
I’m fully capable of talking to people without looking at them (when I’m not waiting for a visible reaction). At my first scientific conference, I actually overcompensated and stared everyone in the eyes too much.
…I see, I think. I wonder whether to recommend trying to get angry instead (as in “righteous anger” and “holy wrath” – I’m so good at this that my family teases me with my SIWIMS syndrome…). But… that’s US politics you’re talking about, isn’t it. I spent the day after the US presidential election in 2004 being depressive. I didn’t actually start crying*, but I thought of nothing else while drawing my fossil plants under the microscope.
* As long as they stay below a certain level, emotions just don’t reach my face. (A teacher once told my mother I had a pokerface.) When they do, though, I can’t restrain them at all! It’s pretty much either-or. For instance, once a teacher made a joke near the beginning of a lesson, and I started laughing again and again throughout the whole 50 minutes. Annoyed him a lot, but I just couldn’t help it. And, yes, I got teared up a bit in the famous scene of Titanic, while being angry at the incredible stupidity of the guy who tried one single time to climb on the door, abandoned, and just chose to die. ArrrGRRRRRRR!!!!1!
My head is spinning, and I’m still trying to find out in which direction.
(Fortunately I turned the sound off early enough, though.)
:-(
I’m just not consistent. Sure I’m capable of <throwing up hands> spouting wisdom like an 80-year-old philosopher of biology – but just wait till you see me… like… moving around in meatspace. The Internet tends to let only one facet of my… issue-laden personality through.
I miss kindergarten…
(Well, in some respects. Having no friends there, and being too clueless to really notice that, was a weird feeling.)
I imagine that can get pretty impressive.
:-)
Flame test colors are lovely indeed! :-)
All wrong. There are two coordinate clauses here, each with a subject, and no object.
With that already answered, I offer:
French: “You have what age?”
Russian: “How many years to/for you?” (No verb, and “years” at the end. The Russians still have the verb “have”, but they hardly ever use it.)
Chinese (Mandarin anyway): “You much big?” (Yes, there’s no actual question in there.)
Exactly. <vehement nodding>
It’s actually very simple once you notice where to look. The grammar of Standard Average European* would require “than I”, but English, having spent some time in Splendid Isolation™, often uses “me” for emphasis instead of “I” (as also, sort of, happens in French), so “than me” has ended up being much more common than “than I”. Add to this the fact that various elitists over the last couple of centuries have tried to bring the grammar of English closer to that of Latin (and thus SAE), which means completely forbidding “than me”, and you get utter confusion.
Incidentally, I’m told “this is me”, while completely absurd all over SAE, is fine Turkish.
Oh, and, the shift is completed for “you” – in the KJV I : me :: ye : you. The elitists came too late for that one.
* That’s a term linguists really use when talking, with only slight sarcasm, about features most European languages have in common but don’t share with the rest of the world. Seriously. :-) There’s even a book chapter out there somewhere that’s called “Standard Average European as an exotic language”. Unfortunately that’s all I know about it.
When I find all my words in time, my French is such that I was once asked if I’m English because of my intonation. I must have overcompensated for the utter unmelodiousness of the German language.
If you’re thought to be Irish, do you pronounce th as t/d or close to that?
Both written with the same character??? That’s cruel.
(Four syllables for a single character is also cruel.)
Oh, so that’s where the character 我 was hiding! It’s the only surviving word for “I/me” in Mandarin.
(No declension, no conjugation! Mwahah.)
Am I glad I didn’t witness the Victorian age firsthand. Check out what Mastodon and Mastodonsaurus mean, and why Sir Richard Owen tried to rename the latter Labyrinthodon even though it was (perhaps unfortunately) too late.
And there was desking of heads and palming of faces.
Oh dear.
It’s just a feature by which English differs from the rest of SAE (…other than French in some contexts, and some kinds of German in very limited ones).
C’est normal, quoi.
<falling over backwards together with chair>
…though… this confuses prepositions with, uh, verb affixes. “With which I will not put up” would work, but ripping “put up” apart doesn’t.
Good question.
Apparently it was invented several times in English and has, this time, reached the critical mass it needs to stay. I use it to translate German hoffentlich.
I think I get it – but why is it supposed to be funny?
Celtic_Evolution:
“Every time you continue to insist that criticism = censorship, you continue to expose yourself for the stubborn asshole you are.”
I have never claimed criticism = censorship. I have responded to criticism and got told to shut up and go away. That part is censorship. If you object, take it up with them.
I have also been accused of lacking reading comprehension. I wouldn’t accuse you of that, but the alternative is you are deliberately misrepresenting me.
It still won’t provide a proper comparison with the earlier threads – because PZ has been making slightly fewer posts while away, so the front page effect has been lasting longer.
Screw you guys, I’m going home.