Hey! You took advantage of my prolonged absence trapped in a metal tube hurtling at 37,000 feet above the Atlantic to fill up the last endless thread. Sneaky. You’re making it hard to keep up.
Go ahead. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m in Ireland and you’re not, so I don’t care.
Let me sneak in and repost something that was languishing at the end of the previous subthread…
Something to amuse you all:
Ten Signs You Are An Unquestioning Christian
Enjoy!!
I never participate in endless threads.
Oops.
Fill. Up. Last. Endless. Thread.
Er… if it’s the last it’s not endless, if it’s full it’s not endless, and I think we both need another pint.
The Rev BDC at the previous subthread:
Please Rev… I crave your indulgence! I am learning so much about diverse and fascinating viewpoints on points of grammar.
I wish to correct the term I used @883 on the previous thread. It was not a “can opener” as such, but rather, the lid-puncturing end of a churchkey.
Whee, that was some flying.
Seeing the beached ship, i thought we were gonna drop in on Father Ted there.
This is not quite true – both forms existed before and after – but, IIRC, there does seem to have been a shift in frequencies.
Source: LanguageLog. Me: too lazy to look it up there, or rather, I have stuff to do…
It was discovered four times independently. This is all documented. :-)
And no, deliberate mistakes merely confirm the rule which compels you to add a mistake even if you failed to do so at first. B-)
Kausik,
I think the description you gave is better than mine, but explaining the same thing? When you put staff into an “of the” phrase it becomes a descriptor, not the actual subject? I’ve lost the correct words for these things.
David,
With the cafeteria food, was just having a conversation with a friend about their experiences with institutional UHO. :D
Walton (previous thread),
From what I gather Americans tend to use singular for collective nouns (e.g, “the government is”) and while you Brits use plural more often it varies greatly depending on the noun (e.g, “the government are” is frequently seen, though less often than the singular, but ‘committee’ is almost always singular).
Reference:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=877
“We shall typo on the beaches, we shall tyop on the landing grounds, we shall toyp in the fields and in the streets, we shall topy in the hills; we shall never surrender”
Ireland — there’s some sort of green stuff covering most of the rocks. That shouldn’t be allowed.
Aaargh. You did it again!
Well, as I was saying when you closed the subThread:
And that confusion arises from the fact that, in English, there’s only one definite article, the, both for plural and singular nouns. Because of that, neither form is obviously wrong.
You did feel the need to put it there, didn’t you? :)
All I can think of when I watch that video is the Father Ted opening.
In the video, at 1:45 there appear to be some aquatic horses, or possibly cows. Transitional species?
It’s mold.
@14, I was just about to ask if PZ will be visiting the folks on Craggy Island.
Carlie:
From my admittedly meager knowledge of grammar, I think – in your example sentence – ‘the staff’ is the object of the preposition ‘of’. So even when you use that phrase (‘of the staff’) as a modifier or descriptor, the subject of the verb ‘be’ (‘were’, in plural) remains ‘All’ which is, appropriately, a plural expression used in a plural sense.
If OTOH one uses ‘All’ in a collective sense, All can be singular as you doubtlessly know. For example, ‘All is well with the
worldmeatspace!’ (That is a new word I learnt recently!!)Here’s my favorite Irish song, sung by Robbie O’Connell:
Hmmm. I understand just enough to figure out it must be utterly hilarious, but just not enough to get where exactly the jokes are supposed to lie! Apparently it’s made in the chemical factory of Pardubice from the light fraction of petroleum and ammonia…
Chuckolate!
Still laughing about how “edit” is called “vandalize” on Uncyclopedia X-D
Jadehawk, get yourself this. Especially the two maps. Japan is going to join the EU in 10 years? :-þ
Ah, there’s the portculiis!
wait, I’m still typing replies to the last sT…
Longman’s guide to English Usage – Collectives
(slightly paraphrased to save typing)
In American English, a singular collective noun normally takes a singular verb. In British English, however, a singular collective may be treated as either singular or plural, depending on the point of view of the writer: when the group is considered as a whole, the singular is preferred; when it is viewed as consisting of individuals, the plural is preferred.
Consequently in British English, both these alternatives are correct:
Verbs and Pronouns should be consistent with the collective:
In each pair, the first statement considers the jury as a whole; in the second the jury is considered to be made up of individuals.
Only caught a glimpse of the plane’s shadow briefly (around 2:00). Us pedants look for such things.
I’ve got a soft spot for you gals and guys
It’s a bog on the West coast of Ireland!
/only joking
#16 ‘Tis Himself, OM
Drat. Beat me to it!!
Alan B (#1038)
Oh, so you wouldn’t have turned down an otherwise qualified applicant who just happened to sound “uneducated” due to dialect? You disagree that a lower class dialect is a good measure of a person’s capabilities? Even if you wouldn’t intentionally discriminate, this throwing up of your hands is silly. You could be part of the change by not letting prejudice make decisions for you, by realizing that language is a wee bit more complicated than “learning to do it right” and “being uneducated,” and by understanding that the current prescriptivist culture is about maintaining elitism more facilitating communication.
Taught a particular dialect, not taught “their language.” They acquired their language naturally like all children and then learned to speak an unnatural one to satisfy prescriptivist beliefs about linguistic propriety.
I suspected as much. The whole place looks to be dampish-to-wet.
PZ can clean the mold out of his beard when he returns to dry land.
Those were horses being driven by the plane into the water. The sheep scattered every which way, but the horses played follow-the-leader.
I would like to see a herd of horses drive a pack of photographers and a gaggle of videographers into the water.
You obviously haven’t been reading my comments here because if you had you would know that I suck at English.
And it’s the only language I know.
me fail english? Thats unpossible
I have a few questions for SC. She said:
I am curious about your opinion on this (I hope you are well rested by now).
(a) Would you support ‘Chairperson’ as a universal mode of address, say, even when you know whether the Chair is a woman or man?
(b) Same thing about Headmaster. In my corner of the world, I have always had Headmasters and Headmistresses (and commanding equal respect, if I may add). Is it important to change it into a gender neutral Headperson or Head Teacher?
(c) Do you support the alternate spelling of ‘woman’, viz. ‘womyn’, that some people have tried to promote?
(Please don’t take my questions in any other sense; I am curious only about the points of the language)
Now that is truly unpossibel. FYI, I always stop by yours when I am scanning (the red ‘V’ makes it easy, I must admit).
I can’t help but thinking of these threads in the imagery of an Ouroboros, occasionally puking it’s guts out… Oh look! More room!
All that coastline and surrounded by water yet, they never became a seafaring nation. Too nice to leave? Under the heel of the British? Not enough trees?
-DU-
Point of order: There is but one endless Thread.
It does not end.
How do you make that smiley thing that looks completely astonished? Wow! I mean, it’s not Bat Chain Puller or even Trout Mask Replica, but…wow.
My world is slightly expanded today; thanks, Janine.
[starfart]
A, It’s none of your fucking business. Snidely judging peoples’ spouses on the internet in the complete absence of information is bad form.
And where do you get off telling people what is and isn’t “OK”?
Further (B), the fact is that nobody can fully digest gluten–even you, SpokesGay. Research is ongoing, but it’s perfectly plausible that this could cause a variety of intestinal discomforts that, although not autoimmune in nature like celiac disease, would nevertheless be real.
Bill D. was polite later but your snotty, smugnacious comment pissed me off. Sorry.
And your #989 didn’t help much. ‘Organic Moms’ are doing their best to do the best they can for their children. Are all of your food purchases “fact-based,” snarkwad?
Personally, I see a big difference between feeding your children the healthiest food you know how to and can afford and pure woo like, say, homeopathy. People can actually be harmed by belief in the efficacy of homeopathy. Eating less wheat? Not so much.
And you? the self-dubbed “Official SpokesGay”? say that “Right wingers are totally hung up about sex. Left wingers are totally hung up about food, and the moral/fake-health-consequences-there-of. I hate them equally.”? Really? That’s an equivalence you wish to draw?
Not to mention that food-choice really does have an array of ethical (if not moral) and, yes, real health consequences that you’re blithely lumping in with your hated trendiness.
I think you’re the one with the issues here, frankly.
[/starfart]
Nature, actually (as you note yourself later), and yeah, he’s still a senior editor there.
When he’s not blogwhoring, he’s trolling as a means of blogwhoring. “Insipid” doesn’t come close to the Sortaprof’s outbut.
Thumbs up on the banhammer. He sucks.
There’s one on the shelf of my office. A recent re-issue, but still. [Max, btw, had nothing to do with YS; it’s not even clear who ripped off whom re the general style]
I have a YS sticker on my Jeep, too, but alas, the sun has faded it to an albino sub.
It cannot be done. Submit is final and absolute instantaneously.
Always welcome! Those guys have two great talents: writing relatively simple and hookily catchy pop tunes with relatively sophisticated jazz harmony, and hiring bad-ass pros to back them up.
That is interesting (even as relative frequencies). One of the last bastions of the plural was (is?) the Reader’s Digest column “These United States”.
portcullis
Yikes is right. Preliminary stats are in on the previous sT and the CR (commenting rate) was an absurdly whopping 356 comments/d. It was also the briefest sT yet, juuuuust under 3 d (by 12 min).
Soon we will break the internet! Onward!!
no shit, brother
Beautiful.
Can’t find a vid, but if I could I’d link to Charlie Haden’s recent version of “Fields of Athenry” with Pat Metheny on guitar…you want some goosebumps?
Please do not link to the travesty of the Dropkick Murphys version. kthx
Yes! Oh, yes!! I’d laff!
ok, posting and moving on to meatspace stuff
something like 21520
Rev BDC serves as an excellent example of how not to do it.
iasasai (#30)
Puking its guts out of its guts? Out of its guts out of its guts out of its guts out of its…. AAH!
My personal favorite typo I have ever made:
Ha! So close to correct!
from the previous thread:
I feel an idiotic* sense of schadenfreude at the fact that Germany is solving its creobot problem by exporting them overseas.
from this thread:
those maps are funny, indeed. the second one seems to imply that Poles are reversing those famous NY to Paris google directions, hehe.
Also, the thing over Japan says they’re trying to figure out what’s gonna be popular in Europe in 10 years :-p
——
*Idiotic because while Germany is still home, they’re exporting them to where I currently am, thus not helping my situation at all.
Here’s Paddy Reilly’s rendition of “The Fields of Athenry”:
This is Brian Kennedy’s rendition:
My favorite version is by Johnny McEvoy but I can’t find a video of it.
A. Noyd:
I absolutely agree with the points you and Pygmy Loris have been making about class/status and dialect, but I also agree, somewhat obliquely, with Alan B’s point about teaching grammar through a second language.
That it, if you desire students to have some knowledge of the structure of their language, and to be able to use a consistent metalanguage to talk about it, it’s useful to have them study a language that they did not “acquire naturally like all children.”
My experience as both a student and a schoolteacher has been that students — and I mean even bright, engaged students here, not just the lazy and disinterested ones of naysayers’ caricatures — never quite understand the need to learn how to do something they feel they already know how to do, and that they have been doing without conscious effort for literally as long as they can remember.
I was a bright and literate student, destined for an advanced degree in English, but nothing I was taught about grammar in elementary or middle school ever really stuck with me. It wasn’t until I started studying German in high school, and actually needed to think about structure in order to construct competent utterances, that grammar started to sink in. And once I started learning German grammar, English grammar started to make sense as well: It’s not that the two grammars were the same; it’s that this was the first time I was really aware of the very concept of language having a logical structure, as opposed to be purely “natural” and organic. I imagine it’s similarly different for most students to really “get” grammar if all they know is their mother tongue.
So I tend to agree that second-language teaching is a key tool for teaching grammar… but I don’t agree there’s any special magic to the second language being Latin (except maybe that with a so-called “dead” language you don’t get distracted by, you know, actually trying to produce useful language), and I don’t agree with the prescriptivist notion that the reason to teach grammar is to enforce a high-status dialect as a prerequisite for a decent life.
I just think understanding the structure of one’s language… and the very idea that language has structure… gives one better command of one’s linguistic toolbox. You know, that “expressing themselves” stuff somebody sneered at upthread (or maybe in the last subThread; I couldn’t locate the quote).
that’s exactly the same reaction my boyfriend had to Germany.
Moss-haters, the lot of you.
We’ve come this far. We must go on. We have to go on. *
Mmmm! Mint chocolate chip is one of my favorites, too.
Useful in determining your degrees of bacon.
I like that change…
Come on, people. This thread’s been open for two freakin’ hours and there’s less than fifty comments on it. If we dawdle the Professional Poopyhead will make his escape from Ireland without having to close this thread and open a new one.
Let’s Go!
Ten Signs You Are An Unquestioning Christian
Fooking saved!!!
BS
We did laundry yesterday. Now I’m putting my stuff away, but still have to match all the socks (typical nerd, I have a pile each of dark brown and navy blue, and match the lengths before putting them in the drawer). Of course, sometimes there is the odd number of socks…
Damn it, ‘Tis (@#37), bring a fucking tear to me eye, why don’t ya.
OK. Listen to ‘Tis’s versions, then check out the Haden/Metheny rendition (to which I finally found a strange (Vietnamese?) link, below). Starts out traditionally, but slowly gets reharmonized, hits a groove, and then suddenly there’s a jazz piano solo, then-wtf! Jerry Douglas on dobro!…back to traditional briefly, and from there it’s all Metheny.
Damn I love this track.
Hope you like it too *wink*.
http://mp3.xalo.vn/cakhuc/320425055570/The-Fields-Of-Athenry-Feat-Petra-Haden~Charlie-Haden.html
aratina cage of the OM;
I take my hat off to you in respect for the awesomeness of that quote. Poor Kane, we loved you so but you were perferated on the mess hall table (ohh, kinky) by a weirdly phallic immature xenomorph to the utter consternation of the rest of the cast (who apparently had not been warned about exactly what was going to happen).
My other favourite quote from that movie has to be;
Iron bound coastline. (sheer cliffs, no decent harbors.)
BS
Bill Dauphin (#38)
I very much agree with that. (And it’s useful having a second language for it’s own sake, as well as to build interest in the structure of languages!) The thing about Latin is that there’s often not enough acknowledgment that Latin’s grammar doesn’t graft on to English at all. Given the massive differences, it would be even better to introduce features of grammar from all sorts of languages. I remember learning about prefixes and suffixes in grade school, but didn’t know about infixes till college, even though we use them occasionally in English and they’re common in other languages.
:-D
Oops. That happens when I just guess the verb.
I don’t think they’re trying to figure it out, however. Whatever they make will be popular over here. :^)
Absolutely. In fact, I think all the basics of linguistics should be taught in school.
Tsk, tsk, tsk. <headshake> I, for one, love moss. It’s like the natural-history museum in Vienna – the third time you look at it, you still discover something new!
And under a binocular microscope it’s just mind-blowing.
perferated? *sigh* That should be ‘perforated’.
Sorry.
Sorry Rev – been there, done that.
(I imagine the caption will be nuff splainin)
JC
Latin is a dead language,
As dead as dead can be.
It killed the Roman Empire
And now it’s killing me.
-Anon.
[taught to me by my grandmother, a veteran teacher of English and Latin and a descendant of a long line of teachers of English and Latin tracing back to the first professional Latin teacher in North America, John Cary of Plymouth Colony]
I just love how the latest subthread stays in the “Top 5 Most Active” even after it’s been closed… :-)
Me too! Me too!
Yes.
BTW, some knowledge of Latin–vocabulary more than grammar–is of immense help in learning the modern biological sciences.
Sure would have helped me, anyway.
Sven #45
You’re obviously more jazz oriented than me.* Metheny has a beautiful voice and I enjoyed her singing. The jazz interlude struck me as nice but unnecessary. It’s a folk song, not a jazz song.
*I refuse to write “than I”.
The alt-text for this subThread:
By coincidence, I happen to be wearing green today. But I refuse to type with a brogue.
And it’s “the Irish subThread“, not “the Irish thred”.
(And yes, the comma and the period are in the right place. :P)
My high school Latin teacher: Camilus Temple. Much hilarity ensued.
BS
this is why I buy my socks in bulk. they’re all the same shape and color, so I don’t have to pay attention to such details when putting them away.
That’s a vile lie. Txting killed the Roman Empire.
Indeed, it isn’t. Not even “the Irish thread“.
Sven (@starfart):
I’m sorry Josh pissed you off, but I remain unbothered. There’s always a fine line to be walked between rational critique of fadism and woo, on the one hand, and demonization of people just trying to do the right thing, on the other. That is, IMHO, one of the worst things about the most cynical purveyors of woo: They muddy the waters for people honestly trying to figure out how to live well.
As it happens, my wife is somewhat susceptible to irrational fears (I suspect it’s a post-traumatic reaction to our daughter’s cancer, but that’s admittedly an unscientific “diagnosis”), and that complicates our life together… especially when, as is the case with gluten, real health issues overlap with the domain of fads and quackery.
On a happier note, or rather, the collection of notes that is “Fields of Athenry,” I first heard the song as performed by The Wild Oats1, a now-defunct group my RennFaire/SCA-lovin’ sister-in-law turned me on to. I couldn’t find a video to link to, but “Athenry” is on an album called Weed ‘Em and Reap. They also did a version of “Whiskey in the Jar,” which is on their other album (yes, there were only two), A Few Oats Shy of a Haggis. Both albums are still available for download, at least, if not as physical CDs. While I couldn’t find any freebie links to those songs, I did find some videos of others. (Note that the quality of these vids doesn’t reflect how good the studio albums sound.):
Jolly Red Nose
John Barleycorn
Donald MacGillavry
And in searching for the above, I came across a filksong by the band’s founder, Eben Brooks, that might be somewhat amusing to this august crowd.
1 My search in this matter revealed that there have been a metric shitload of bands called The Wild Oats; I’m only talking about the one I’m talking about.
They acquired their language naturally like all children and then learned to speak an unnatural one to satisfy prescriptivist beliefs about linguistic propriety. – A. Noyd
Or in order to be more widely understood. When natives of Aberdeen, where I now live, converse in Doric (the local dialect), I can rarely understand what they’re saying (and not just because I’m a Sassenach – nor can most Scots). Fortunately, they switch to standard (though accented) English when addressing incomers – apparently automatically.
Arrggh! I keep hearing tales of moderation Hell, but it’s never happened to me ’til today. Trying again, in parts:
Sven (@starfart):
I’m sorry Josh pissed you off, but I remain unbothered. There’s always a fine line to be walked between rational critique of fadism and woo, on the one hand, and demonization of people just trying to do the right thing, on the other. That is, IMHO, one of the worst things about the most cynical purveyors of woo: They muddy the waters for people honestly trying to figure out how to live well.
As it happens, my wife is somewhat susceptible to irrational fears (I suspect it’s a post-traumatic reaction to our daughter’s cancer, but that’s admittedly an unscientific “diagnosis”), and that complicates our life together… especially when, as is the case with gluten, real health issues overlap with the domain of fads and quackery.
On a happier note, or rather, the collection of notes that is “Fields of Athenry,” I first heard the song as performed by The Wild Oats1, a now-defunct group my RennFaire/SCA-lovin’ sister-in-law turned me on to. I couldn’t find a video to link to, but “Athenry” is on an album called Weed ‘Em and Reap. They also did a version of “Whiskey in the Jar,” which is on their other album (yes, there were only two), A Few Oats Shy of a Haggis. Both albums are still available for download, at least, if not as physical CDs.
‘Tis,
Metheny is playing the guitar. The vocalist is Petra Haden.
And what’s wrong with a little fusion, especially when it’s as well done as this?
[Part 2 of @62]
While I couldn’t find any freebie links to those [wild Oats] songs [@62], I did find some videos of others. (Note that the quality of these vids doesn’t reflect how good the studio albums sound.):
Jolly Red Nose
John Barleycorn
Donald MacGillavry
And in searching for the above, I came across a filksong by the band’s founder, Eben Brooks, that might be somewhat amusing to this august crowd.
1 My search in this matter revealed that there have been a metric shitload of bands called The Wild Oats; I’m only talking about the one I’m talking about. [Ooops; just realized I split the footnote from its marker.]
Except one would need a bit of Greek, too.
<clenched-tentacle salute>
Good idea. I have never bought socks myself. :-)
Metheny plays guitar; the singer was Petra Haden. And yeah I am “jazz oriented” for sure, though I can find something to like in most genres. I find the folk/jazz hybridization on that track impressively seamless, one reason I love it.
Beyond matters of taste, about which to each her or his own of course, there is a backstory to that record that may help to at least appreciate its intent.
Charlie Haden grew up in Springfield MO in a family that had a hillbilly-music radio show in the Carter Family mold. He was singing and yodeling in public and in broadcasts from the time he was like 3, and then learned the bass to fill in the bottom of the family band. Then in young adulthood he somehow found himself in LA playing bass in the most avant-garde jazz group of the time, Ornette Coleman’s. He’s been playing hard-core jazz ever since, with Ornette, Keith Jarrett and his own groups.
Pat Metheny is also from Missouri, and although he plays in a wide range of jazz and jazz-like styles, he has always had a strummy acoustic/folk vibe that he incorporates. (He is also, IMO, the baddest-ass musician currently active, period. So there’s my bias.)
The two of them started playing together on Metheny’s fucking awesome 1981 record 80/81, which was mostly heavily Ornette-influenced acoustic jazz but had a strummer or two as well. Many years later they recorded a beautiful, ultramellow album of bass/guiar duets (and toured).
Haden’s 2008 album Rambling Boy is his nostalgic return to his country/folk roots, with guest appearances by all kinds of his family and friends. My point, I guess, is that as far as jazz/folk fusion goes, this is as legitimate and perfect as it’s ever going to get.
YMMV
…And the battle continues. :D
What you write is fine. You are using ‘than’ as a preposition, with ‘me’ as the object to that preposition.
OTOH, writing ‘… more jazz oriented than I’ is fine too, for people who consider ‘than’ to be a conjunction. The complete construction of the sentence would be ‘… more jazz oriented than I am‘.
In this regard, a post made by Jadehawk (AFAIR) was very illuminating, explaining the difference in meaning between ‘You like reading Pharyngula more than I’ and ‘You like reading Pharyngula more than me’.
According to Ken Wilson’s The Columbia Guide to Standard American English1:
1 Thanks to a Grammar Girl post that I had saved long back.
Blind Squirrel FCD #47
Ireland has some very good harbors (or harbours, if you prefer). Cobh, in the south of Ireland, is a large natural harbor. It was a British naval base from the Napoleonic wars to after World War I. Cork is also a good natural harbor. During World War I the British Grand Fleet operated out of Lough Swilly near Londonderry until facilities were built in Scapa Flow (in the Orkneys).
please tell me your mother isn’t still buying socks for you…
Yeah, but I never wear mine evenly, so eventually some are in worse states of disrepair than others and I top up. But I’m not gonna throw out perfectly good socks, just because they’re too worn to wear out of the house.
That is to say, I’m another sock-matcher. (When I can be arsed.)
why? bulk socks don’t care if there’s one fewer of them, and you really only need to re-buy them once you’re down to a pair or two…
and what does “too worn to wear out of the house” mean? a sock with holes so large they cannot be fixed is a dead sock.
I almost always end up wearing odd socks, as they get mixed up when I wash them and I really can’t be bothered to match them up into pairs. I got into this bad habit when I was in secondary school and wore plain black socks at all times, so there wasn’t any need to match them. Unfortunately, with patterned socks it can create a bit more of a problem, as I’ve realised in recent years.
So… why are we talking about socks, exactly?
because apparently it’s laundry day
Bill Dauphin, OM #64
Thanks for the link to “Hey There Chthulhu”. May you be eaten first.
No, Jadehawk, I am sure he stalks the basements containing washers and dryers, and whenever people throw away a single, clean sock because they can’t find the other of the pair, he sweeps down and snatches them away.
*Runs away. Fast.
What else are mothers for?
I actually do not have a single pair of socks which I have purchased. I work for the government (NPS) and just order a half-dozen of whatever the hiking socks in the catalogue are. For the past five years, no two years have been the same. Luckily, I wear them out in about three years, so I generally only have 15 pairs of brown socks of three different designs/patterns/shades/shapes/sizes etc.
And I generally just let (((Wife))) sort them.
Signed:
the former (((Billy))) The Atheist (before all this sign-in stuff started (and I miss my old name (so I guess I will continue to sign the bottom (((Billy))) The Atheist))).
And thank you American tax payers for keeping me in socks. Socks is good.
Now all I have to do is convince the uniform company to start selling scotch (Pinch is preferred) and thick-sliced bacon.
Chicken-soup recipes?
Sock-sorting tips?
I mean, the Thread is many things to many virtual people, but I sure hope it’s not turning into Hints from Heloise here.
Jadehawk:
Funny how the mind works: I simply assumed he was saying he never wears socks!
I like knitting socks.
When I see the Endless Thread on the front page, it confuses me. We’re supposed to be in the back room, or kicking back in the back bar spouting Latin. It’s odd to be in the spotlight, blinking. PZ needs to post enough new stuff to push us off the front page, to close the door on all that sunlight.
Here’s an update on the Baptists from Idaho who were arrested while trying to take orphans from Haiti to the Dominican Republic. After the orphans were rescued from the Baptists, they were turned over to a secular aid agency that is now doing what the Baptists should have done, searching for the childrens’ relatives.
There are a couple of things that really bother me about the Baptists transporting the orphans. Why were the kids still dehydrated when they arrived at the border? Didn’t the good church folk brink any water for them? Did they lie to the kids about where they were taking them? Note the comment from an older child who thought a vacation/camp was the destination.
Then there’s the problem of self-righteousness wed to poor planning, as in this quote about the Pastor at the home church:
Thanks Tis Himself, When I spoke in the universal negative, I realized I was setting myself up for correction. I should have said Few. Any theories on why the Irish didn’t become a seafaring nation?
BS
This is not irrelephant
My mother gets me socks for Christmas every year.
This made me think of Lauren Cooper. (also fun re:conversation about learning different languages and grammar)
That was a beautiful pair you knitted that the Trophy Wife™ displayed a while back.
The Redhead got a book over the Holidays by a knitter who tends to start in unexpected places. Like the heel, instead of the toe or top.
Tis: aren’t Cobn and Cork the same place?
BS
I know. At the moment, two of the “Five Most Active” threads ScienceBorg-wide are subThreads.
Will success spoil the Thread?
*shivers*
@Sven de Milo
Um. . wow. Yikes. Sven I’m genuinely surprised my toss-off snarkfest pissed you off that much. It was far more glib than serious (though, yes, I do think there’s a lot of diet woo going around), which seemed in keeping with the everything-goes nature of the thread. It’s not the first time the lack of tone and facial cues on the Internet has gotten me in trouble.
Yes, I do observe a stereotypical exaggerated concern about things like sex and food that does index to some degree, in some people (note the disclaimers) along political lines. No, of course I wasn’t serious when I said “I hate them all equally.” I was exaggerating for (failed, obviously) comic effect.
Yes, there are legitimate health and ethical concerns about food choices and production. But yes, there’s also a lot of non-fact-based folklore that people are heavily invested in. I know there’s a difference.
And Sven, the “SpokesGay” label is just a joke – something lighthearted. I am but one Gay, and cannot speak for All Teh Gay, no matter my ambitions for world domination.
I’m genuinely sorry to piss off someone like you – a fantastic commenter on Pharyngula. I’ll try harder to remember to be more clear about what’s supposed to be exaggerated for humor, and what’s serious. But I don’t think I deserved that thorough dressing down from you. If my original commentary was one-sided and exaggerated, then your complete dismissal of it was too.
Again, it was never supposed to be so serious. . sigh.
that would be an extra special type of nerd that sorts his socks, but never wears them.
my boyfriends mother does too. Except last Christmas, which I think might be a sign that it’s supposed to be my job now to supply him with socks. :-/
I don’t think I will ever understand this reflex of supplying your grown children with clothing*, and socks in particular.
——
*not that I’m complaining, since my mother reacts the same to seeing me wear old shoes, pants and jackets. it’s just weirding me out.
KG (@61):
In most cases, there’s not so great a divide in comprehensibility between dialects of American English. I gather there are a few places — parts of Maine, the Outer Banks, backwoods Louisiana (aka Cajun country) — where the local dialect is incomprehensible to speakers of Standard American English, but for the most part that’s not the case: Most regional dialects, and low-status urban and rural dialects, are understandable to speakers of the “standard” dialect (and vice versa); they just “sound wrong.”
Which raises the question: When does a dialect become, in fact, a separate language? I’m just ignorant enough about both linguistics and evolutionary biology to wonder if there isn’t a useful analogy to speciation: At what point in the divergence of two variants of one thing can we say there are now actually two things?
My knitting skills have improved some since the trophy socks were done. I was given an Elizabeth Zimmermann book over the holidays & it’s got some fun stuff.
Oh wait, better Lauren Cooper, in chemistry class.
I wish I could knit socks, but the heels scare me.
Our family sock gift is a tradition. When I was a kid my parents would always let me open one single present on Christmas eve, and every single year I’d manage to pick the nightgown or socks or what have you. Every. Year. It wasn’t like I was being tricked; I had a decent selection to choose from. I just always managed to pick the not fun one. So the annual socks are the symbolic carryover, since I’m not there to pick one to open any more.
Jadehawk:
D’Oh!! Shows you how good I am at keeping the slurry of conversation here straight, doesn’t it?
But then again, do we not think David is “an extra special type of nerd”? ;^)
Reminds me of a mean spirited but funny joke a friend said of me. “English is your second language but you lack a mother tongue.”
Oh, my first Lauren Cooper in French class video was frizzed.
When I’m in Vienna, I live, you know, at home. When I’m in Paris, I have enough socks with me that I don’t need to buy any because I only need to do the laundry once every 4 weeks… So, yes, she has bought all of my socks so far.
Of course, most socks last for years now that I’ve stopped growing, maybe decades.
Basically the same holds for other clothes. I bought two T-shirts at the SVP meeting of 2008 (I’m wearing one of them in the photo with the red eyes), but that basically is it :-)
Priorities, man! Should we revoke your nerd certificate?
Exactly.
No such sock I’ve ever found has matched any of mine. This was always immediately visible. Thus, alas, I can’t use this method. But I don’t need to, as explained above.
That’s not me, that’s my sister as far as she can get away with it outside of France.
Wozu Socken? Sie schaffen nur Löcher!
“Socks? What for? They only create holes!”
– Albert Einstein
HULK SMASH!!!
I thought only glibertarians lacked empathy. How stupid can one be?!?
For those who asked about why Ireland wasn’t a maritime nation, it is my understanding (sorry I can’t find a reference)that the English largely deforested Ireland in support of their maritime ambitions.
Carlie:
Funny link.
Re unbothered, I confess a liking for such words. When Roger Clemens testified before Congress and used the word misremembered, he caught an Imperial buttload of crap for it from sports reporters (!) who took it as evidence of Clemens’ ignorance.
Now, whatever you think of Clemens, misremembered strikes me as a perfectly cromulent word. It’s not a foolish way of saying didn’t remember; it’s a way of saying did remember, but did so incorrectly… a completely distinct cognitive phenomenon.
Sadly, I’ve misremembered plenty of things in my time. A fact about which I am not unbothered!
decades? that’s some high-quality socks you’ve got there…
There goes the whites
Getting whiter
There goes the colors
Getting brighter
Needs a laundry day song.
Only a speculation: they were too busy fighting with each other?
I haven’t been in the military, so I lack the compulsion to put everything into order :-)
Hah! That depends entirely on the definition! When asked like this, linguists tend to give up immediately and cite Max Weinreich, who wrote (in Yiddish): “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
Bingo.
There are, as of February 2009, no less than 147 definitions of “species” out there, and all of them produce different results. For instance, depending on the definition, there are between 101 and 249 endemic bird species in Mexico.
I submit that all these definitions have nothing in common except the word “species”. Indeed, there have been calls to abolish this term altogether.
If only I could find a way to compel my cats to do my laundry. Seems only fair recompense that they should have to trudge up and down the cellar steps with my clothes, after all the time I spend down their cleaning their litterbox.
Has anyone else noticed that cats violate the laws of thermodynamics? They actually leave more in the litterbox than they eat and drink. It’s a scandal.
actually, I now recall that my mom did buy me a pair of socks. the fuzzy, feet-warming kind. that’s because when I was visiting last time, I refused to wear crocs, and she refused to watch me run around the apartment barefoot. :-p
Carlie,
Here’s a sock pattern with no heels!
I’ve used it a couple of times, though not in that colour scheme, and it works fine.
mb
That’s some seriously high quality socks. My (admittedly supplied by a government low-bid winner) socks last two, maybe three years.
And Bill Dauphin @ 98:
Misremembered is a really good word. (((Wife))) and I both remember our past. She remembers what actually happened and I misremember what happened (even when later proven correct, I am still the one who misremembers). Whether vacations, when I went to which forest fire, who died when, who was born when, what we had for dinner last week, doesn’t matter. (((Wife))) remembers, I misremember.
(((Billy))) The Atheist
PS: (((Wife))): do not read the above paragraph.
I’d argue that cats should do the laundry because they’re the ones who make my clothes dirty. Them and Cheetos.
[I’ve had some strange connection issues and don’t want to risk the previous incarnation right now, but will go back in see if anyone has said anything to me there soon.]
Speaking of gluten, Orac posted this recently
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/01/pumping_autistic_children_full_of_an_ind.php
He quotes this:
So the kid’s waffle breakfast sandwich (whatever the hell that is) is covered in an untested industrial chemical, but happily it’s free of gluten. Swell.
It was more a case of not having the energy for this specific subject. :) It really isn’t a focus of my attention in any other contexts.
If you know the gender, though, I prefer “chairwoman/-man.” If you don’t know, “chairperson” or “chair” are cool. (That’s how it’s done with congresspeople now, AFAIK.)
I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary, since a female form exists. If you didn’t know, you could always ask “Who’s the Headmistress or Headmaster?” Head Teacher sounds strangely narrow to my ears, though I’m fine with Headperson or Head of School.
I don’t use it, or “hu,” either. But I don’t care if other people use them, and I don’t find the reasoning behind them silly. I guess I like to see language change in ways that are a bit more fun. (BTW, has anyone seen Code 46 with Tim Robbins? People speak this kind of blended language, which isn’t playful but is interesting.) For example, I’ve mentioned before that many Spanish speakers now substitute -@s for plural endings in place of -os in writing. I like that, but of course it doesn’t solve the problem in speech. I’d love to see something new start to catch on (maybe borrowed from another language…?), but till then I think alternating and s/he, his/her, and so on are workable approaches.
Moi ? ;)
Maybe, but they’re all from cheap supermarkets in Vienna.
Is it because here in Paris I (can) only wash at 40 °C?
Well, I watched the elephant masturbation link provided by Sven @83. Thank you, Sven, that was very educational. I note that the masturbator had to put his whole body into it. Talk about vigorous. Protective devices, like goggles and full-body plastic apron were also interesting. Can’t gauge much of a reaction from the elephant’s face, can you?
then they’re doing it wrong. the correct term is congresscritter
:-p
mb – That’s an interesting sock pattern, but what do they actually feel like when you walk on them? That ribby type stuff doesn’t please my feet much.
I am afraid that this is really predictable coming from me but, dammit, I want this song blasted at my funeral.
And here is a version where you can understand all of the words.
I doubt it. American laundry machines seem to only operate with warm water, too (can’t say for sure at which temperature precisely, since no American laundry machine I’ve ever encountered ever bothered to tell me the exact temperatures of “cold”, “warm”, and “hot”)
Oops, yes they are. The city of Cork is on one side of Cork Harbour and the city of Cobh (ex-Queenstown) is on the other side.
Humm, regarding the elephant video, the doctors at the vet hospital where I work must be really lazy – they have a machine jokingly called an electrojack that does the job.
Some years ago a French Canadian said to me, “I speak English, I don’t understand it.”
#25 A Noyd
I don’t intend to carry on this conversation because both sides have made their points and I sense an “edge” developing.
But I feel I should answer some of your questions.
(This reply has taken some time to write and dinner and family activities have taken precedence.)
What you look for in an applicant depends on the nature of the job. What skill/experience set is necessary? How far am I willing to go to train the person if they lack some of the skills? For example:
Is a first degree necessary for the job? (If it isn’t then you can’t reject someone just because they are not a graduate.)
Is post graduate experience necessary?
Does this person have to have on-the-job experience?
Is the person in a wheelchair? Does it matter? (If it is an office job we already have facilities that would allow otherwise suitable staff to carry out their role. If the person had to regularly climb in and out of confined areas on plant a reasonable person – even an unreasonable one – would see that the wheelchair was a hindrance.)
Are they able to read English? (If not, how are they going to be able to follow detailed written procedures required for their safety. And IIRC our Regulator required it.)
Is red/green colour blindness important (it is in the control rooms of a nuclear power station!)
Is writing or presenting good clear English important? If it is then I can justify the choice of someone where this is a skill they possess already. If it is not then to refuse someone for this reason is discrimination in the negative sense.
With the safety of the public, the staff and the environment at the forefront at a nuclear power station we would not want to turn the best candidate away just because the do not have a skill that is not required for the post.
Where I worked I was responsible for producing the short list for interview for posts in my Section, but with advice from Personnel Department to supply consistency and to be sure we met Employment Law. If challenged (and I sometimes was) I would have to justify why I chose one but not another.
At the interview there was myself as line manager, another line manager from another Section and a fairly senior member of Personnel Department. We agreed what skill/experience set we needed before the interviews started and we agreed the weighting we would give to each requirement.
After each individual was interviewed we would independently mark against each requirement and on the rare occasions when we were in major disagreement we would try to rationalise our differences because this suggested one or more panel members were not clear about the actual requirements of the post.
At the end we would independently make our assessment of how we ranked the candidates and would have to justify our tentative conclusions. All our “workings” were collected and filed by Personnel so that we could justify our decisions if necessary.
I believe our system was transparent and as far as is reasonably possible for human beings in our culture I believe it was free from discrimination in the negative meaning of that word.
One example of where a challenge was made was a student originally from North Africa who was black (sorry if that is no longer P.C. but he was). I had already discussed this with Personnel, explained why he was not in the top half dozen and should we shortlist him? Personnel agreed with my assessment but thought it would be sensible since he was the only non-British candidate to have him along for interview to see what he had to offer. He was a dead loss. Not suitable for the job, indeed, not capable of doing the job and bottom of the list on all counts. When he had the rejection letter he accused us of prejudice both on colour and that he was a French-speaker! Because we had identified the requirements of the job and could demonstrate how he did not meet them, his appeal was rejected.
Up to the time I retired the Company had never lost an unfair dismissal or discrimination complaint.
HOWEVER, I am sure that some other employers are not as scrupulous and some WILL judge on language and accent for reasons that are nothing to do with the requirements of the post. If our young people do not realise that I think we are letting them down.
The situation has only got worse with the recession.
when idiots are responsible for education, everybody loses.
And in that story, I wish the dumber minds had prevailed. That’s how bad it’s getting.
WTF. Is this an unholy crossing of a waffle and a sandwich?
Or a sandwich for a waffle breakfast (whatever that is), a waffle–breakfast sandwich?
Or a breakfast sandwich with a waffle in it even?
<headspin>
<headdesk>
I hope PZ has some green visual receptors that are not totally fried out by this trip to Ireland, although He(sic) will have 3 or 4 months for them to recover before He needs them in Minnesota.
‘Tis Himself @19:
Purist nitpickery compels me to point out that the song you link was written by a couple of Murikans.
research indicates that it’s either this, or this.
no idea which one was the one crazy mom was using. the former version is apparently the more common one overall, but the latter is the “healthy” version, which seems more likely in this instance
<sigh>
I suppose it’ll take another generation or two till some sort of sanity will prevail.
#80 Patricia, Queen of Sluts OM
Many, many years ago (when I was c.11) I knitted a pair of socks, including turning the heel. And a pair of gloves on 4 needles. I rather enjoyed it.
My parents encouraged it because it was supposed to help my manual coordination.
Thanks for the sock pattern, mb! I’ve been itching for something to try.
Elephant cake from Cakewrecks. (not a wreck)
That’s because it’s dependent on the initial temperature of the water going into the machine, set by the water heater. Having a temp control and heater on the machine itself would make it cost more, which means it wouldn’t sell well.
Patricia,
They are not the greatest but with boots or over, say, a fine pair of cotton socks for the very cold weather they do fine. Certainly great for toddling about the house in.
I used that pattern first because I had not turned a heel since the olden days when I had my great aunt sitting next to me – ready either to sort things out if I made a mess or to keep me at it.
The twisty rib ones got me through a psychological barrier. Yes, I could knit socks! Now I turn heels without worrying though I do admit most socks tend to end up with the heel pattern I like doing. I’m sure you’ve been there.
I was taught to knit in the 4th year of school, even with 5 needles (though not something as complex as gloves). Haven’t tried ever since, but I’d probably quickly remember if pressed.
What an appalling waste of perfectly good bacon!
Disgusting. :-)
Thanks anyway.
Absolutely. And by that I don’t mean they eat little…
I do that. It’s less cumbersome than the alternatives, -os/as or -os(as), and it works just as well. It may not solve the problem in speech, but at least when reading aloud it works as a reminder to alternate.
AlanB, RogerS posted again on the old Ken Ham thread. I invited him to come over here, explaining how this was just a continuation of his previous threads, and left a link. Hopefully he will show up.
X-D
But who could eat such a thing?!?
though not something as complex as gloves
I did see somewhere recently a way to do gloves by making the fingers out of i-cord – seemed like a nice cheat to me.
so does that mean “hot” is merely as hot as tapwater gets? interesting. next laundry day, I shall have to stick a thermometer in the tub to see what precisely “hot” means.
Even more compulsive nitpickery compels me to point out the song was written by one man named Peter Jones.
Alan B – Gloves! Oh my. I can make socks on 4 or 5 needles, but I’m not up to all those fingers yet.
mb – I’ve noticed that lots of people get scared by socks. I decided if little children could do it as drudge work for hours every day during Victorian times, I should be able to figure it out as an adult.
blockquote fail!
#129 Nerd of Redhead, OM
Yes, I noticed that and gave him a cordial invitation. Suggested there was some unfinished business with him explaining Flood Geology.
My #218, your #220
Yes, I believe it’s the same hot as the hot water tap (unless you have exposed pipes and it cools down before it gets there). When I had my first child one of the big safety tips that’s pushed is checking the hot water heater temp and lowering it until the water out of the tap doesn’t go past 120 degrees F. Standard setting is around 140, and I think some of them can go as high as 160.
yeah, I don’t actually know what that is supposed to mean in the context of an apartment building.
It means the temperatures will correspond to those you find when you turn on your own taps in the apartment, unless of course the washer is elsewhere and hooked up to a separate tank. Who knew laundry could be so engrossing?
Carlie – I pick up some of my best tips from gay mens knitting blogs.
When does a dialect become, in fact, a separate language? I’m just ignorant enough about both linguistics and evolutionary biology to wonder if there isn’t a useful analogy to speciation: At what point in the divergence of two variants of one thing can we say there are now actually two things? – Bill Dauphin, OM
I think there are useful parallels, especially if you think of each speaker’s idiolect as an individual “organism”. Idiolects then reproduce, although typically an idiolect has multiple “parents”. At any rate, just as with species, (hyou get both languages that are neatly defined, and others that blend into each other, but are mutually incomprehensible (don’t “interbreed”) at the far ends of the distribution (Zulu and Xhosa for example: if you go south down the east coast of South Africa, most people speak Zulu in the north, most speak Xhosa in the south, but they blend into each other). Nationalism and mass media have tended to standardise languages, but this process is far from complete. English apparently developed all down the east coast of Britain around the 7th-8th century, as a lingua franca (ha!) between all the groups who were mingling, trading, fighting etc. in that area – hence its loss of grammatical gender and other peculiarities. “Doric”, incidentally, was originally a derogatory term, applied to Scottish dialects of English as a whole, and meaning “rustic” (by analogy to the Doric form of Greek spoken in Sparta, considered inferior by the Attic speakers of Athens), but the term is now a proud badge of local NE Scots patriotism.
This is one of those rare occasions that I’m glad I don’t have access to YouTube at work…
A further note on the song “Kilkelly”.
Peter Jones was going through his grandparents’ attic when he found a bundle of letters sent to his great-grandfather. That man had left the small village of Kilkelly in County Mayo 130 years before Jones found the letters. The letters told of family news, births, death, sales of land and bad harvests. The were from the family in Ireland to remind the son that he is loved, missed and remembered by his family in Ireland. The final letter informs him that his father, whom
he has not seen for over 30 years, has died. Jones used those letters to write the song.
and
so, that would mean that the absolute hottest the “hot” setting can be is 70C, but only in optimal conditions. 60C is standard, and most likely NOT what the laundry machines I have been using were set at; my guess is 50C maximum.
Definitely sticking a thermometer in the laundry machine next time.
#135 Patricia, Queen of Socks
From memory (it’s a LONG time ago) I found the gloves a bit fiddly but straight forward. I was very slow, of course.
Some background:
My birth was arduous for my mother, for me and for the midwife. Eventually, and out of desparation, the midwife sat on my mother to try to get things moving! I suspect that was unacceptable even in those days (shortly after Semmelweiss retired from the local hospital).
Left me with a lack of coordination (unable to catch a beachball at 9). And with a speech defect which turned into a debilitating stammer at around the same time. Anything that improved my coordination was encouraged – origami, fishing, knitting, fly tieing eventually(!). It seemed to work and I gradually grew out of the problems although the stammer took decades rather than years.
KG #61. You were lucky. When I got to Aberdeen in the 70’s my landlady was not at all willing to drop many of the Doric words from her conversation and while I was Scottish and she might just have expected me to understand my flatmate was English. When we first heard her refer to us as loons and talking about loons and quines we hadn’t a clue!
Young men and young women for those who wish to know.
My daughter is dyslexic and had almost unreadable handwriting at the age of 9. She took calligraphy lessons for three years and I taught her typing. When she was 13 her handwriting was quite legible and she could type faster than she could write.
I think Zach’s figured out who his audience is.
Today’s SMBC
‘Tis (@144):
I had missed your link @19, but this prompted me to go back and check it out. “Kilkelly” is another one of the songs I encountered by way of The Wild Oats (see me @62 and 64), and it never fails to make me cry: The doomed earnest hopefulness that John will ever return from America, the blameless but permanent division of this loving family, always gets to me.
That’s a lovely version, BTW.
Laundry day for me also! An excuse to drive into town, where I saw my first human face in 5 days.
I can well believe the English denuded Ireland for trees for her navy. When the first colonist hit the new world, there was an official who went about branding certain tall trees as the property of the queen for masts for ships. There was so much trade across the Atlantic that the streams of England were picked clean of stones for ballast, and it was necessary to open quarries to obtain the same.Savanna Georgia was built from ballast stone; that’s were I saw my first pudding stone.
BS
Knockgoats (#61)
That was in the context of defending those who sound “uneducated.” I already put in a favorable word about teaching a standardized (rather than “proper”) English for purposes of cross-dialect communication.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Carlie (#84)
I got some awesome socks for Xmas this year. They’re nice and thick and actually stay up inside rubber boots.
~*~*~*~*~*~
Bill Dauphin (#90)
Pretty much. There are some new languages (creoles) that develop naturally within two generations, but I guess some plants can speciate in two generations, too?
~*~*~*~*~*~
Alan B (#117)
I appreciate the explanation. It sounds like a very fair and meticulous process. I note that you’re talking now about “clear” English, but earlier you were referring to people sounding “uneducated,” which are different concepts. Yes, education can improve clarity for some people, but it has the opposite effect in others. (Granted, it’s about written English, but surely you’ve read Politics and the English Language by George Orwell?) And a person’s use of low status grammar doesn’t necessarily mean they’re uneducated (even in English!) or that what they say will be unclear. A shift from propriety to clarity in English classes would do the world a hell of a lot of good, in my opinion.
Alan B – Sounds like you are lucky to be here at all! My most fiddly stuff is knitting Estonian lace. Nine stitches into one called a nupp , rhymes with soup.
‘Tis Himself @ 133:
Wikipedia says it was written by Steven and Peter Jones, both. Hmmm.
Back in the 1980’s, I used to do a Celtic/British Isles folk radio show. People would call and request “Kilkelly” pretty much every week. Eventually, they started to be outnumbered by the people calling to request that I *not* play it that week, for a change.
So, there was this sort of interesting article in the NY Times Magazine today:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html
About “ecopsychology”; I was wondering what people thought of it, because it seems kind of woo-ish, but I don’t know enough about the subject to really make that determination. Thoughts?
Bill Dauphin, OM #150
Me too, Bill.
Every few years Robbie O’Connell performs at the Mystic Seaport Sea Music Festival. Five years ago I heard him sing “Kilkelly” there and bought his CD on the basis of that one song. Last year O’Connell performed at the Festival again and I made a special point of asking him to sing “Kilkelly.” He did. The tears streamed down my cheeks.
O’Connell also sang Stan Rogers’ “Sailors Rest”. It’s another song I love.
Linnea #154
The cover notes for Robbie O’Connell’s CD Recollections, Vol. 1 just lists Peter Jones.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
It was a tasty nit, either way.
‘Tis:
Maybe we should plan to meet there this year? I’m no expert on sea music, but it sounds like the sort of thing I’d love.
Re: dialect and language.
I am a Newfoundlander. Ostensibly, then, a native speaker of English.
If I were to attempt to do my job whilst speaking my native dialect, nobody would take me seriously. I doubt indeed I would ever have gotten in to medical school in the first place.
In Canada, I would get Newfie jokes. In the US, I would get “Huh? Can you say that again?” In the UK, I would get mistaken for Irish, and get the discrimination that goes with that.
So, fair or not, I see that dialects like mine are dying because the people who would otherwise sustain them are being forced to change for social and economic reasons.
I can understand it though. The grammatical constructs- many of them are technically incorrect (“I likes them boots, I do.” “What are ye at over there?”), and some words simply don’t exist in modern English. It makes me sound uneducated and by extension unprofessional.
So then wouldn’t I go to Quebec and instead of learning standard French, learn Joual. *sigh* I’m the only person I know who gets service in English as a matter of course in Paris.
Dialect continua are common. Dutch, German, and Luxembourgish (to name the three standards that have been developed from it) form one: the dialect of one village is always understood in the neighboring villages, but it adds up. When the lowland Swiss or the Flemings speak, I understand about half (and in the latter case I have to cheat by drawing on knowledge from English and French). I can have a conversation with a Tyrolean where each speaks their own dialect, but beyond that, it would get difficult…
In one even, by polyploidization. Can’t think of a linguistic analogy to that one. :-þ
Except that Estonian distinguishes short and long consonants (here’s a long one, written double) and short, middle, and long vowels (the latter two are both written double, and I don’t know how they tell them apart).
So… nuup would more or less rhyme with soup, but nupp doesn’t.
I make a habit of binning odd socks as soon as they appear then finding their partners about a week later – sigh.
Ok, my stupidometer is seriously uncalibrated at the moment because I have been working all night so please indulge me if you are inclined.
I invented a product last night that I think might have legs so to speak.
A Solar Powered Hi-Fi (proper hi-fi, low noise and distortion atc).
Basically a small solar panel, 12V battery, microprocessor controlled battery charger, 20W stereo amplifier, USB charger for Ipods and such and a funky colour changing Led to make it look cooler.
Designed to be be bolted to a patio or verandah with appropriate outdoor speakers. Just plug in your MP3 player or Ipod (if you must :)), turn it up and away you go.
Why am I seeking advice from this forum?, you may well ask. Firstly, it is 7:30am here, so none of my friends are up and I am impatient, Secondly, you guys might not laugh at the idea outright, Thirdly, this thread is so wide ranging that it might not be out of place and finally I am interested in your feedback.
There may be similar products out there already, but I am not too fussed about that.
I followed a thread earlier that referred to ant behavior, in particular how one species would go away from the nest to die.
When I have observed ants going about their business, they always seem to pick up the corpses of their sisters and return them to the nest.
I always assumed that this was because the remains were useful as food or building material.
It strikes me as odd that an ant would remove itself from the vicinity of the nest to die, when sooner or later another ant will come along and drag it back.
What purpose would this behavior serve?
Maybe some ants have an “Altruistic gene” :).
My musical pick of the day.
An Englishman in New York – Godley and Creme
Bill,
I’ll be there with wife and daughter. I’d be happy to meet you and enjoy some music together.
Hello bottle of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale.
In Newfoundland???
They would be incorrect in Standard English. But it’s not Standard English in the first place. :-| Grammar differs between dialects, that’s normal.
Fixed it for you.
Even if you speak it in, like, a bar???
Even this is normal these days – as soon as they find you stuttering, all below the age of 40 immediately switch to English, and English pronounced in the French sound system is really hard to understand sometimes. Fortunately I’m enough of a nerd about my own pronunciation, and have amassed a sufficiently large vocabulary, that I hardly get that anymore.
Another sort of interesting thing.
As I have been getting older, my eyesight is slowly deteriorating, getting a little farsighted you see.
Anyway, I happened one day to have a bright blue LED powered up and pointed it at a page that I was trying to read, to my surprise the page snapped into focus and I could read it without trouble and without glasses.
I haven’t as yet investigated the reasons for it, I suspect that it may have something to do with the near monochromatic colour of the LED and the eye only having to cope with focusing just that colour.
I attempted to validate the effect by collaring a few friends who also wear glasses and they all noticed some improvement.
Cheers
Pretty much. The lens of the vertebrate eye, so praised by the cretinists, does not correct for chromatic aberration (the fact that refraction separates the wavelengths).
Can never have too much Pogues.
Whiskey You’re The Devil
Streams Of Whiskey
Whiskey In The Jar with The Dubliners. Fits in with the other versions of the song already posted and last night rather strange jar talk.
David – The spelling nupp, and translation came from Knitted Lace of Estonia by Nancy Bush. Trust me, the word gets even more badly butchered at the Local Yarn Shop.
Chmee,Speaker to Animals: I can just hear the Horde scrambling to explain the phenomenon to you, so I will skip over that and suggest another experiment: Punch a small hole in a piece of paper and hold it close to your eye and view the page. You will be amazed.
BS
Dave M, if that explanation were accurate, a red led would suffice. Recall that the highest resolution microscopes use ultraviolet light.
BS
Allow me to clarify; that should read “entirely accurate”.BS
The CSI shows have devices that will show monochromatic light of differing wavelengths on burnt/degraded documents. Sometimes the right wavelength increases contrast sufficiently to be able to read the object. I suspect you are seeing such an improvement.
No one? Ok, I’ll go: The shorter the wavelength of radiation used the more sharply an image can be focused. The monochromatic effect also contributes.
BS
@96 – This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes attributed to Einstein: In reply to congratulations on a birthday, he is supposed to have said, “Yes, I have reached the age where, when somebody tells me to put on socks, I don’t have to.” (Google is failing to find confirmation of the quote, but it certainly confirms a lifelong aversion to socks.)
@117 – I appreciate your description of hiring procedures designed to be transparent and non-biased. Research shows that this kind of mindfulness is exactly what is effective in overcoming subconscious bias. Most of us in our culture acquire and carry with us at least some of this bias, despite its not being consistent with our explicit values. In my line of work, we need to write really good, clear reports, but we also need good research underlying them, and the research (applied social research on a variety of populations, especially those not in the mainstream) is greatly improved when our team includes people who have life experience outside the mainstream. I’ve found it’s not too hard to edit a draft report for the writing bits, but not worth trying if the thinking is not clear. As a mainstream member, my editing skills can make up for someone else’s lack of same; but no skill I can acquire can supply the value of a different kind of life experience. Many of the older team leaders in our group will disqualify an applicant if the writing sample is not up to par. Our team is more diverse, and does better research, because when we have an applicate with a different background we look at the underlying thought quality and not just the editable surface parts.
/end rant about implicit bias and unequal opportunities
Obviously, in a bar nobody cares whether I’m educated. It was the fact that to be employed, to be employable, I had to change the way I spoke.
I don’t even know that I can speak my native dialect any more.
In Newfoundland, things are different. Screw the dialects, whole communities are disappearing. My dialect no longer exists because the village where I grew up no longer exists, and living elsewhere, everyone has had to change. It’s the way it goes, probably everywhere.
Ah well, at least I have not picked up the Great Lakes accent so far. Ever see the movie Fargo?
Thanks Blind Squirrel,
I tried it, yep it made a difference :)
As I said, I haven’t really investigated why the Blue LED seems to work so well and I look forward to being educated.
I brought it up because possibly someone might find it a useful technique for reading without glasses. Of course it would tend to cause pictures to look a little odd.
I spent some time a few years ago writing a program to help visually impaired people to read.
This was for people who are technically blind but with some sight remaining and for those who have the opposite of tunnel vision (can’t remember the name of the condition, sorry).
I stumbled across an article somewhere that discussed how presenting text a word at a time on a monitor could aid comprehension and make reading physically easier for some people.
I also remembered that dyslexics can sometimes read more easily with a particular combination of differing text colour and background colour.
My program attempts to combine the two ideas.
Basically the top half of the screen is dedicated to presenting one word at a time to the viewer, the remainder of the screen is used for controls.
The current version of the software uses ordinary .txt files (Gutenberg library files for example) and allows the user to select background and foreground colours, font, font size, reading speed and a file selection dialog. It also remembers the last word read when the program is closed.
You may think that reading one word at a time without moving your eyes is a little weird, but I easily read half of Stephen Hawkings “A Brief History of Time” sans pictures, at well over 1000wpm.
Truth to tell, it is pretty trippy and comes close to a “stream of consciousness” type of experience.
I noticed improved comprehension myself and the few people who have tried it commented that their ordinary reading speed was substantially improved afterwards.
If anyone is interested in trying it out, let me know and I will poke in on my website as a download.
@ Chmee #177:
Maybe: macular degeneration?
Redrabbitslife,
That may well be it.
The afflicted have only peripheral vision.
My attempted solution is to have the text move around the centre of the display area in as big a circle as possible (font size is the constraint here) to excite the peripheral vision.
I haven’t coded it yet, but intend to in the future.
I don’t know if it will work, but I am sure that I can find a volunteer somewhere to try it.
Could you please explain the last chapter to me?:)
BS
Blind Squirrel, Not sure I agree on the explanation you gave for the blue LED making it easier for Chmee to read. Yes, it is true that blue light gives finer resolution, but unless he’s reading microfiche, the image is not diffraction limited. It may be that the blue cones are more responsive, or it may be that the lens is allowing passage of more blue light. Hard to tell without more info.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space: I believe blue cones are more responsive; certainly shorter wave photons are more energetic. The greater resolution comes when the image is focused on the retina. Consider how shorter wavelengths are used in photolithagraphy, up to x -rays, to make computer chips.
I have used this effect in industry to demonstrate the density variation in granola bar depositors and retro-reflective materials demonstrations.
BS
Setting priorities: The mormon church is spending more money to build a mall and related condos, etc. in Salt Lake City than it has spent in total charitable aid in the last 30 years.
In January, 2006, the LDS Church PR department said, “since 1984, the LDS Church has donated nearly $750 million in cash and goods to people in need in more than 150 countries.”
That averages to 37.5 million per year. The total of $750 million in 22 years spent in cash in goods to people in need is less than half what the church is spending on the mall and associated buildings. The Mormon church is spending less than 1% of its income to help the poor.
It’s also noteworthy that the Jesus Mall project was first estimated at “close to $1 billion”, then that estimate went to $2 billion, and now it is at “around $3 billion”.
The start of an answer may lie here.
Georgia State University
Ain’t the Internet grand sometimes :)
The above seems to explain the phenomenon, the blue cones are possibly closer to the required focus than the others.
Nice :)
Chmee,Speaker to Animals: Check this though: the refractive index for blue light is enough different from red and green that when they are in focus, the blue is slightly out of focus (chromatic aberration).
The focus of the eye is dominated by the red and green frequencies when they are present. When only blue light is present, the eye focuses them just fine and the above effect vanishes.
This Wiki article goes into some detail about the use of shorter wavelengths to produce finer detail.
BS
A few decades ago I dated a morman woman a few times.
I asked her why there were no women in the church hierarchy.
She didn’t know, but promised to ask the church elders the coming weekend.
The response was more or less as follows.
Women have a sacred duty to bear and look after children, cook, clean and so on.
They shouldn’t worry their heads about church matters, what they were doing was much more important anyway.
A little misogynistic I thought and pointed it out to her.
Sadly, it didn’t change her mind a bit.
Christopher Hitchens wrote A Fault Is Not a Sin in response to the earthquake in Haiti. He comes up with some interesting tidbits, including the fact that “It was widely asserted in earlier times that earthquakes were caused by sodomy, yet San Francisco still stands, and when it suffered thousands of deaths in the catastrophic 1906 earthquake, it was rather more heterosexual than is is now.”
It would have been mine, too, but the sun came out and so I spent the day rescuing my garden from the clutches of blackberry vines, instead.
The laundry will still be waiting for me tomorrow.
Sven DiMilo:
Oh yeah. And lovely reharmonizations. Metheny’s?
More Petra, with Bill Frissell:
Re: Elephant video
Did I miss it or did no one mention the old Elephant Joke–what’s gray and comes in quarts?
Sven DiMilo:
Metheny and Haden (the elder) also collaborated on Song X, which featured Ornette himself.
Right; great record. I’d forgotten that Haden was on that.
I don’t think I will ever understand this reflex of supplying your grown children with clothing*, and socks in particular.
It’s weirder when it’s not even your own parents! Mr. ODS’s grandmama buys me a new sweater every time she goes to a department store/Target/outlet-type store. His parents also tend to give me socks on special occasions*. I chalk this up to: 1) I’m pretty frigging difficult to buy gifts for, and 2) I work outside year-long and they don’t want me to be too uncomfortable or cold.
* Nice socks, not like a 12 pack of athletic socks or anything.
Can God make a rock so heavy that even he cannot lift it ?
No. God doesn’t exist, so he can’t make anything.
I know no Estonian, but I note that Google translate includes Estonian, and offers nothing for nuup, and for nupp, has:
1. knob
2. button
3. bud
4. winder
FWIW, YMMV, HTH
You had best eat your eggs in the morning
then savor the flavor of some weißwurst
then you can have some milk.
Oh, man, I love weißwurst, but it’s been a long long time since I’ve had any. I had a pale imitation in Copenhagen a few years ago, but it just made me regret having settled.
When I was growing up the Official Doctrine was that women were so incredibly special and lucky that they go to bear children and did not need the extra god-juice that the priesthood provides. The priesthood was promoted as a sop to men for their deficiencies. Any woman who complained was denying herself the incredible power of creation with which she had been gifted.
I never heard such women called ungrateful bitches for asking, but Mormons are generally good about saying vile things without using particular ‘bad’ words.
I personally would much rather hear “Fuck yes you have a say!” than “I so regret to inform you that you have no right to voice an opinion because of your genitalia.”
Weißwurst spoils too quickly. Darn Bavarians.
Ooh white sausage. Mustard and beer and more beer…
Here in Cornwall (Ireland big deal – Cornwall is the most beautiful part of the British Isles hands down and no argument) we have a variation on the better-known British black pudding (which originated in the North) called white pudding. BP is made from the blood and fat and bits of pig with rusk/oatmeal. WP is made from like pig stuff, oatmeal and herb/spice seasonings and, like BP, is encased in ‘skins’ and then sliced and fried for brekkie.
It is very good when bought of the butcher or a farm shop.
Re Lynna #187 – the Great Lisbon Earthquake caused a hefty tsunami to tear up the Cornish coast, with considerable loss of life and -especially- livelihood. Cornwall is a region long renowned for exceptional hardship and poverty (we still have the lowest GDP in the UK) which, back then, was largely due to the capitalist-industrialists enabled by corrupt landowners (including the monarchy viz. the Duchy of Cornwall lands) to exploit the tin, copper, mineral and clay mining that the peninsula uniquely afforded the British govt.
The ethnic-socio-cultural make-up is historically different from the rest of the UK down in the far SW. The local equivalent of the working-class trade union movement was a movement galvanised by the independent Protestant churches (Wesleyan, Methodist), who still have an unusually vigorous presence that attests to the traditional influence they once had.
As a result, all classes of Xtians feel an overwhelming need to come and try to gab themselves a piece of the residual evangelical feeling they seem to feel certain must be floating about the area all lost and looking for salvable souls and stuff. Born and bred down here, I left in my late teens. In the 3 and a half years since I moved back I have been visited by the:
-Jehovah’s Witnesses (x3)
-Mormons (x1)
-Elims (x1)
-Christadelphians (x4)
-local Church of England (apologists ++) (x2)
-local Independent Baptist church (x5)
-the dotty old bag down the road who feels the call (via her dead sister-in-law) to start a Spiritualist congregration asap (x lost count).
But I maintain this parade of nuttiness is not a fraction as bad as having the Ulster versions around me. Between the likes of Ian Paisley Prods and The Pope People, that place is a bloody good advertisement for good, sane atheism.
You get more religious visitors than I get unexpected visitors at all. I think my list over the past year is something like:
– Door-to-door stove hood filter salesman (x3)
– Door-to-door dry cleaning solicitation (x1)
– Wrong door (x1)
The mailbox gets stuffed with various things:
– fliers for delivery sushi, pizza, dry cleaning, prostitutes
– notices of neighborhood construction
– ads for real estate for sale or rent
– tissues
– magnets
Today’s SMBC Theater: “Both Sides”
(Made of WIN. And funny. But mostly win.)
I haven’t got door-to-door jesus salesmen in a while. The last I got were two Korean men who wanted us to know Jesus, but only in Korean apparently (they left as soon as I said that I don’t speak Korean, but they spoke English.) But lately, my mailbox has been filled with pseudoscientific crap ranging from crystal energy to pyschics.
I’m sorry if this makes it clear I’m a complete newbie and also for cutting across whatever is happening in this thread, but please please tell me you guys are responsible for this:
http://objectiveministries.org/kidz/art.html
Ellie: Objectiveministries.
Hey Americans, keep your loons for yourself !!
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/1006615/evangelists-will-save-darwin-from-stds-booze
Ha! We’re clearly dealing with a punctuated equilibrium, which defies your simplistic projections of progress!
The weakness of the prevailing capitalist-gradualist theories of thread evolution will be revealed in an upcoming paper! Or actually, it’s just a title, so far. Or half of a title:
The Portcullises of St Paul (the Poopyhead) and the Paradigm of Perennial Procrastination
LOL @ the breathtaking arrogance and stupidity of the evangelicals (#206) who plan on turning Darwin into a city of God.
Good luck in a place where men outnumber women something like three to one and are mostly rather non-pious uranium miners, fishermen and natural gas-rig workers.
Sex workers from cities in the south and the east fly in for a week or two and make a bundle. But if the evangelicals want to be popular with the red-blooded blue-collar crowd they won’t want to start off by preaching about that.
One good thing that might come out of it is that at more Americans will learn that we actually named a city after the great Charles D. Bwahahaha!
Lynna
You might be interested in the photos here:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Lavaman-Volcano-Photographer-Patrick-Koster-Shows-Off-Latest-Pictures-Of-Erupting-Volcanoes/Media-Gallery/200907215337864?lpos=World_News_Third_Picture_Gallery_Teaser_Region____6&lid=GALLERY_15337864_Lavaman%3A_Volcano_Photographer_Patrick_Koster_Shows_Off_Latest_Pictures_Of_Erupting_Volcanoes
Sorry about the dreadfully long link!
(Just don’t let your brother see them – he might get ideas …)
More Patrick Koster “Lavaman” photos of volcanoes.
(Some of the photos in the sky news article are also in the telegraph article, but the telegraph article has a total of 24 photos, including many not in the sky news article.)
Via ThinkProgress:
CBS greenlights a controversial anti-abortion ad (featuring Tim Tebow! whatever) from virulently anti-gay PAC Focus on the Family, but refused to air a commercial ad for Mancrunch.com, a gay
datinghookup service.The ad is funny and, imo, inoffensive, unlike Tim Tebow (a known MALE) whining about his alleged rights to other people’s wombs.
Oh yes, a right-wing hate group can get primo air time no problem, but the UCC, which ran an ad about how inclusive they are (including welcoming gays) was also rejected for the Superbowl only a couple years ago.
FotF is bankrolled by Coors, IIRC. DO NOT BUY COORS.
But Mary Cheney worked hard to get Coors back into gay bars!
Is there any reason anyone would buy Coors in the first place?
Windy@207:
I would argue that this never ending thread is a perfect example of punctuated equilibrium (or (possibly) punctuated inebrium). The thread will meander for a while, then someone writes something either breathtakingly stupid or breathtakingly brilliant and the following comments shift to adapt to the new equilibrium.
Carlie@213: Some people by Coors (or (even worse) Coors Light) because they don’t like beer. (Last night I had a Saranac Brewery Black Bear, and excellent beer.)
Coors is like making love in a canoe.
iambilly (@214):
David Sedaris reference, or does that joke predate him?
Come to think of it, your “tone of voice” here occasionally reminds me of Sedaris’ representation of his brother (who’s the one he quotes as making the canoe joke); you wouldn’t by any chance be said brother?
BTW, punctuated inebrium FTW!!
Hey troups, any suggestions for a good book on origins and basics of the abrahamic religions ?
iambilly, you must be somewhere near my neck of the woods if you’re drinking Saranac. In fact, once a year I take my college food/society class on a tour of the Saranac brewery itself. I would tell you to be jealous, except that every time we get to the end of the tour and I have to use my free drink coupon on a ginger beer instead of something good because I’m driving a university vehicle. That’s always a letdown.
Re Coors: The funny thing is that, back in the 60s and 70s, when I was a kid, Coors was full of geek cache… not because anybody necessarily thought it was great beer, but because it was hard to get. I forget the precise reasons — something to do with the fact that Coors was not pasteurized? — but Coors was unavailable, even illegal in most states outside the West.
I know my father and all his geeky engineer pals would invariably bring home a six-pack (a case, if they could manage it) of Coors whenever they went on business to states where it was legally sold. It wasn’t about flavor, it was about knowing about this (then) relatively obscure regional brand, and about the thrill of having something scarce and only quasi-legal.
In fact, the interstate smuggling of Coors was the basis for a trashy classic of a movie.
Now that you can find a terrifying ziggurat of Silver Bullets at any megamart, the geek factor is… shall we say… somewhat diminished.
Eastbound and down, y’all!!
Objective Ministries is a parody site, but it comes very close to proving Poe’s Law on some pages.
ROTFL!
What I just said.
Urrrk! By cache (@218), I obviously meant cachet.
TSIB.
David (@221):
Dude, don’t shoot the messenger. I call’s ’em as I
see’ssaw ’em!Rorschach #216: Karen Armstrong “A History of God”
covers a lot of ground. Wouldn’t say its a wonderful read but I found it well researched (as far as my limited needs and expertise goes).
Alan B @209. Thanks! Great photos. However, Lavaman is flirting with the devil. So far, he’s forty years old and hasn’t been fried yet, but he’s pushing it.
I liked the caption to one photo, the one that said Lavaman reorganized his honeymoon plans so that he wouldn’t miss any eruptions — hmmm. I’m sure his wife appreciated his thoughtfulness.
Bill Dauphin@215: I first ran across the joke watching a video of Monty Python in LA. As to someone’s brother, I’ll have to google David Sedaris.
(Long Pause)
Sorry, no relation.
Come to think of it, I don’t even have a brother. Never have. Sorry.
Carlie: If your neck of the woods is Northeast PA, you have my sympathy.
Mark S. Smith is a fine scholar of the early Yahweh cult.
I must caution that he does not write with the popular audience in mind. The work is not inaccessible, but it is dense. And his findings are not nearly as exciting as L. Ron Hubbard’s scholarship on the subject.
shatfat (@211):
No inconsistency here: Both decisions ultimately reflect the worldview that says sex is bad and freighted with consequences, and the only good reason to ever have it is to have teh babeeez. Since gay men hooking up is never going to result in a story as “heroic” as Mama Tebow’s, there’s obviously no reason to advertise it, right?
BTW, I’m a sports fan, and have enjoyed watching Tebow play football. Obnoxious godbothering aside, he seems like a decent human being, and it probably is true that the world would have been diminished if he’d been aborted… but then again, the world has also probably been diminished by the loss of the three children my wife and I lost to miscarriage, too. The fact that shit happens, and sometimes the world suffers, is no justification for placing the imaginary “rights” of a ball of cells over the unquestioned human rights of an adult woman.
I said I have been a fan of Tebows; I won’t continue to be one, as long as he pursues (under the disingenous pro-life label) this anti-living agenda.
Bill Dauphin:
I’m pretty sure that joke predates David Sedaris in every sense.
iambilly – No, upstate NY.
Hi, strange gods! I’ve been missing your comments. If I’ve just been overlooking them, sorry I’m dense.
this is a weird fucking world
Oh hi Carlie! I’m afraid I’ve been ridiculously busy. I have been peeking in though, and once in fact said to myself, “good thing Carlie’s handling this one.”
Mind you I am only now being trolled into commenting on that other thread… ;)
Regarding the Tim Tebow ad, the fundies are out in force, painting all of us as people who wish Tim Tebow had never been born.
I think it was mentioned earlier that there’s something a little fishy about the story of Tebow’s mother refusing abortion, since abortion was illegal in the Philippines at the time, with jail time and fines included for mothers who had abortions, and for doctors that performed them. Which is not to say that the story is false — because the doctors may have suggested an abortion even though abortions were illegal. It’s just unlikely.
The Womens Media Center countered with a letter to CBS, but it looks like CBS plans to go ahead with the ad.
I don’t wish Tim Tebow had never been born — what a stupid thing to say. He’s here and he’s successful, and he’s fun to watch. Go, Tim! But an ad misrepresenting abortion in this way reminds me of the “What if the Mary, the mother of Jesus, had aborted her baby?!”
Facepalm
To participate in the beer discussion, I present Polygamy Porter. You can even buy a sign on ebay That bears the Polygamy Porter logo and the slogan, “Why have just one” — It’s made by Wasatch Beers.
Ex-mormon, Richard Packham has a pale ale page on his website:
http://packham.n4m.org/pale-ale.htm “Oh God, beer is good for my mouth!” This is in reference to part of the mormon temple endowment ceremony:
ianmhor @ 223
I hope it’s better than Armstrong’s The Case for God, which I read and found interesting but ultimately came away thinking it was largely bullshit revisionism.
She wants to make it sound like the core of religion, cross-culturally, is basically something like apophatic theology, and that everybody who didn’t or doesn’t think so was just Doing it Wrong.
That’s basically her response to the New Atheism, and it’s an extended No True Christian / Courtier’s Response rant against fundies and New Atheists, making it sound like they just “don’t get” religion.
Her basic mode of argument is too pooh-pooh and condescend, and present her views as the obvious reasonable ones for anybody who “gets it,” without ever clearly stating what those views are—presumably because she is doing a Mooney and trying not to alienate the moderates by letting them know just how radical she is and how much she thinks the vast majority of people’s theology is wrongheaded too. She never really gets around to justifying what she does state about her oh-so-wise views, e.g., the idea that there’s an intellectus that transcends mere reason and can intuitively recognize Deep Truths about the Ultimate Ground of Being, which are beyond words, much less the ability of mere “scientistic” reasoning to critique.
Various scholars of religion have pointed out that her scholarship sucks.
There’s a pretty funny takedown of just the opening paragraph by Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch, which I highly recommend.
I’m not a Jihad Watch kind of person myself, but I found Fitzgerald’s criticism of Armstrong more convincing than Armstrong herself:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/04/fitzgerald-a-tribute-to-karen-armstrong-or-the-coherence-of-her-incoherence.html
Sven, here’s How to Poop, with subtitles:
hmmmm…perhaps you’re correct. Perhaps I am an unwitting captive of the prevailing panadaptationist gradualist capitalist misogynist racist ultradarwinian poopyhead paradigm. Perhaps I would benefit from adopting a more, hmm, pluralistic worldview.
If only someone would step forward and write a rhetorically brilliant if metaphorically hamstrung corrective!!
Yeah! Sort of like that!
If you get me the manuscript by Friday, I’ll fake the peer review and get you published in the IJTS by Sunday. Saving space, so hurry up!!
Bill beat me to it, here, including the reference to S&tB. There really was this idea floating around that Coors was “great beer” (of course, it should be noted that this was back in the day before Sam Adams or even Pete’s Wicked, when Michelob was widely considered to be “good beer”), but only because it might as well have been unobtainium. We learned.
Self-correction leads directly to forgiveness.
At least you are not like the odious Dr. Isis, who recently used “cache” when she clearly meant “cadre” but then wouldn’t even admit error.
I often buy their sampler 12-packs here in the NYC metrorea. All of them are quite delicious, and relatively inexpensive for craft beer to boot. Recommended.
Paul W #236:
That’s one of hers I won’t be reading.
She does have her own view about religion that comes with her books that can be read around but would be annoying if that’s all she had to give.
I am no religious scholar but did think she covered the ground which for me at the time was the history of Islam in relation to Judaism and Christianity.
Can’t go and check for more detail as it’s already gone off to the charity shop so it wasn’t a book I thought worthy of keeping for future reference. I have kept Hinnells’ “Handbook of Living Religions” a useful reference which might suffice though it covers a lot more.
Hmmm… let’s play with that one for a moment: First, assuming abort refers to a well-founded medical procedure, rather than some horrifying folk “remedy” for inducing a miscarriage, the mere fact that she would have had that option would indicate a two-millennia headstart on medical science in this counterfactual world, compared to the world as it actually played out.
But leaving that aside, what if there had been no Jesus? Leaving aside the possibility that there was no Jesus, and that he was invented, and that he would have been invented no matter what, it strikes me as possible that, in a world without the Jesus story, monotheism itself would have withered away. Failing that, it’s possible that modern, Western monotheism would’ve developed more along the lines of Judaism1, with substantially less emphasis on “winning souls for” a personal savior, or on preparing for a personal afterlife.
Either way, it sounds like not a bad alternative to what we actually ended up with. Of course, it’s also possible that something even more virulently anti-humanist than Christianity would’ve sprung up in its absence… but that’s kind of hard to imagine, isn’t it?
In any case, it’s interesting that people who pose the “what if Mary had aborted Jesus” question never seem to wonder what it would’ve meant if Stalin’s mother, or Pol Pot’s, or Hitler’s, had aborted her bundle of joy. The argument that every child is a unmitigated blessing is hard to sustain, if you make it from the “look how they turned out” POV that the Tebow ad apparently will adopt, and if you expand your field of view to include more than just messiahs and quarterbacks.
1 What follows is based on my very untutored impressions of Jewish theology and history. It’s possible I’m talking through my sphincter here, but I promise I mean no harm, and am ready and eager to be corrected/enlightened.
ianmhor,
To understand what’s wrong with Karen Armstrong’s theology, you might want to read the discussion of what it means for something to be supernatural and/or falsifiable in the recent “Comity and Reconciliation” thread:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/01/comity_and_reconciliation.php#comment-2225963
One of the reasons I wrote that stuff was because of reading Armstrong’s (woefully misnamed) The Case for God.
Without saying so, Armstrong is trying to take the supernaturalism out of religion, and claim that the religion has never really been about the supernatural, and that religion done right is entirely consistent with scientific knowledge.
She could not be more wrong, but given that we don’t generally have a shared vocabulary for discussing such things, it’s hard for most people to see why.
The basic reason is that science has a lot to say about the human mind, and what mystical states really are, and how religion actually works.
On the scientific view, the human mind is simply not the kind of thing that could do what Armstrong claims it can. It can’t meditate/introspect and find Deep Truths about the Ultimate because it’s basically a computational phenomenon with extremely limited and fallible introspective abilities.
Expecting human minds to apprehend such Deep Truths without using evidence and reason—to divine them by intuitive introspection or some utterly extraordinary kind of perception—is like expecting an AI program running on a digital computer to introspect down many levels, past the language it was written in, past the actual machine language of the computer, to the nature of transistors and far beyond—past physics to some deep Underlying Reality.
If the scientific view of the mind is right, this is utterly ridiculous.
And it gets worse. What Armstrong claims that people find, if they do religion right, is that there’s a deep connection between mind and matter, and that in Hindu terms, the Atman (mind stuff) is the same thing as Brahman (universe stuff), and that that’s the reality of God.
That is exactly supernaturalism in the sense that Sastra and I discuss in the Comity and Reconciliation thread, and it is horseshit, scientifically speaking.
That’s the reason it’s important to get clear on what “supernaturalism” really is—so that we can see that people like Armstrong are wrong, for the same deep reason other religious people are wrong.
Their ontological presuppositions include very basic category mistakes about minds and matter, of the same general kind as the fundamentalists they loathe and condescend to.
It’s also why scientific theories of religion like Pascal Boyer’s (in Religion Explained) are important. They make it clear that when people like Armstrong make religion “done right” out to be a particular sort of thing, with a grand tradition of ancient wisdom, they are simply factually mistaken—that is not what makes religion actually work, and never has been. It is a marginal phenomenon, and an aberration, as well as being scientifically just as wrong as other religion.
I’ll have that on a T-shirt, please: XXL, if you don’t mind!
Paul W #241: Thanks for that pointer I will look it over in due course. I will admit that my interest is more historical that theological and I have let most of Karen Armstrong’s musings on what religion is go over my head. I remember lots of mythos and logos references raising a passing query as something I had not been exposed to before but I did not dig deeper as it was not what I was reading the book for. Having read a few reviews of “The Case for God” I realized it was unlikely to be any use to me. You have now confirmed that. Many thanks.
Good to see you back, SGBM. I was almost at the point of emailing you.
***
How strange that the same word would come up twice in mistakes in such a short span.
(I’m still in the Henry Gee battle over at Greg Laden’s, which is making me increasingly angry…though it has recently taken a turn for the amusing. Say, anyone know the Yiddish term for “douchebag”? ;))
***
I recently followed one of Zeno’s links (in his summary of one of PZ’s talks) to Richard Carrier’s site
http://www.richardcarrier.info/jesus.html
and got caught up reading his blog. It’s fascinating, especially the lengthy discussions about historical evidence.
Blind Squirrel@182 OK, I know I’m late to the party–but, shorter wavelength only gives a sharper resolution if the image is diffraction limited. That is not the case here. The reason why they use extreme UV for semiconductors is because the feature sizes are so small–and hence diffraction limited.
I think it’s more along the lines of the greater sensitivity of the blue cones–as we all know from those damned blue headlights!
I, too, buy the sampler packs. I really wish that Yuengling would start selling a sampler pack again. With the amount of beer I drink (not much), the sampler packs are a good way to do it.
Have you noticed that Palin and Tebow both brag about the fact that the mom ‘chose’ to have the baby? And now want to deny the choice to everyone else?
Miki Z #201
Magnets? You get unsolicited magnets in the mail? Not fair, I want magnets. All I get are bills and a lot of mail for the hundred-and-twenty-foot-high-Baptist-church-down-the-road-that-looks-just-like-a-church-and-absolutely-nothing-like-my-house-and-has-an-address-nobody-could-possibly-confuse-with-mine.
Do I take any of this misdirected mail to the church?
Only if there is no money enclosed. :)
That would be good. During the 4 years I lived in eastern PA I developed a serious addiction to their Lord Chesterfield Ale. Cheap, tasty, and in a green bottle too.
I can’t find it around here.
Google translate has Yiddish, but I would be careful…
It says (דאָוטשע זאַק), which is a transliteration of “doutshe zak” (the latter word being “sack”, of course)(I think the transliteration is simply wrong, since it’s a French “che”=>”sh”, so the “t”/”ט” and “e/”ע” should be removed).
Translating “douche” from French (“shower”) gives (שפּריץ זאַק); “shprits zak“.
====
I’ve gotten magnetic adverts with my phone books. They are terrible weaksauce magnets, and are not worth the effort of putting them on the fridge.
Of the sort that Owlmirror describes: terrible weaksauce magnets
I keep some of them — water company, gas company, etc.
We have a box with a 1cm x 10cm slot. There are no rules against putting unstamped items in the slot (as there are for mailboxes in the U.S.), so a variety of things get dropped through.
Our favorite is the tissue. This is a pretty ordinary advertising item here, the way pens are elsewhere. We save these packs as handy travel items.
ianmhor,
I highly recommend “The Varieties of Religious Experience” by William James. It’s more than a century old (1902), but very tightly written. It’s available online here, and also in print from several publishers. It is not, however, specific to the development of the Abrahamic religions, but to how religion is actually practiced.
Don’t worry about a precise translation, SC. Though online dictionaries are a bit prissy here, for most purposes schmuck will do fine.
You mean she (whoever it is we’re talking about) is the sockeater?
Re washing machines, at least in the UK (and presumably Ireland) some models only have a cold water input and heat up the water themselves. I was stuck with one of those once (a long time ago), and as I now recall, it was dreadfully slow. I don’t think my current French machine is like that (this isn’t entirely clear); and in any case, it claims to go up to 90°C, albeit I haven’t stuck a thermometer in check.
It is. She must have written it during her short atheistic phase, because it isn’t nearly as mushbrained as her later books. Actually, I don’t remember it being mushbrained at all, but it WAS the first book of that kind I ever read, so I might be misremembering.
Not to mention that Mary had kind of a big reason not to, having been impregnated by God himself and all. I think she knew she would be in pretty deep shit if she tried to change her mind.
Sven #230, that pretty much sums up Lion IRC’s entire time spent here on Pharyngula.
「うんち うんち うーんぱっぱ！」
I’m not sure we were as successful toilet training him as they were with the tiger in the video, but you can’t say we didn’t try.
Jadehawk:
<clenched tentacle salute!>
It was suggested earlier that the problem with “older” vision could be chromatic aberration, that is, not being able to simultaneously focus red, blue and green. This seems like a pretty good hypothesis and I think a good way to test would be to use monochromatic green LED’s. You would get the advantage of a more sensitive detector than red, with more sensors in the fovea than with blue. Would seem to be the optimal combination.
As for the blue headlights; if we really do have more blue cones in our peripheral vision, maybe that’s what makes blue headlights so annoying. That even though you look away, you don’t really reduce their perceived brightness as when looking away from the older “yellow”(ish) headlights.
Speaking of tigers, the first interview With Bill Watterson in 15 years:
http://www.cleveland.com/living/index.ssf/2010/02/bill_watterson_creator_of_belo.html
Sadly, it’s rather short and dry. He does get off one good line re: the Calvin and Hobbes postage stamp coming out this summer.
Q: How soon after the U.S. Postal Service issues the Calvin stamp will you send a letter with one on the envelope?
A: Immediately. I’m going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.
Herr Rat, Paedophile-Major, is at it again, this time in it’s role as Gayphobic-General and Bullshiter-Serjeant, Pope condemns gay equality laws ahead of first UK visit:
Arrggghhhh!!!1! That should be this time in its role as Gayphobic-General and Bullshiter-Serjeant. I do know the difference between it’s and its, and whilst Herr Rat is a person, I prefer not to use he/him for it and similar feckers.
a_ray_in_dilbert_space: I’m looking at the formation of the image on the retina. Blue light can be focused sharper than red, regardless of what the original image is of. The image on the retina is very tiny, analogous to the limitations of photolithography. Think of the low resolution of infrared telescopes compared to optical scopes. I don’t feel like I am explaining this very well. Anyone else?
BS
SCOM@244:
Retrieved this from an old Salon article: (actually, the letters section corresponding to that article)
Here’s an update on the Prop 8 trial, more of a summary really, since we’re still waiting for a verdict. These are just a few excerpts from a much longer article by Joanna Brooks:
Chino Blanco adds, “At this Mormon Studies conference [http://www.uvu.edu/philhum/religious/ ] last spring, LDS pollster Gary Lawrence publicly stated that he wrote the ‘Six Consequences if Prop 8 Fails’ document.”
Lynna (@263):
Forgive my ignorance, but is inappropriate/illegal political activity on the part of the LDS Church part of the actual case? I had had the impression that the primary argument was that Prop 8 exceeded the allowable scope for referenda… in essence, that it subjected to popular vote aspects of rights that the constitution doesn’t really allow the public to overturn.
I don’t question the pernicious role of the Mormons; I just didn’t realize that was part of the legal case. Enquiring minds want to know!
It’s not a literal translation, but I’d say he’s a bit of a meshuga putz, with some serious chutzpah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yiddish_origin
I wish I knew how to say “paranoid.”
—
FWIW, I posted the following in that thread at Greg’s blog. It’s stuck in moderation a the moment, but I’m posting it here for reference.
(Partly so that the Pharyngulan hordes don’t descend on Greg with too much redundant wrath and incinerate the intertubes.)
—
Greg, Stephanie,
I’m sorry, but Greg Godwinned this thread in the title, and again, in comment 36—after SC’s crucial comment 31.
Stephanie further Godwinned the thread by trying to defend Gee against the charge of paranoia.
There is no way in hell this thread is going to stop being about Henry Gee, and all the issues that Henry’s behavior brings up. It is far too late for that. If you want a thread that’s not about him, I suggest that you start a new thread that doesn’t mention him.
Sorry, but Henry Gee is quite clearly a bit paranoid about the Jewishness thing. He really, really is. It’s perfectly understandable why he might be paranoid about it, given the history, being in Britain etc., but that doesn’t make him not paranoid when he comes over to ScienceBlogs and pisses on PZ’s rug, clearly implying that some people there—including me, I’d guess—are really genocidal antisemitic zealots, or at least condoners and enablers of such things, who should stop being such reprehensible New Atheists because their criticisms of his particular religion (among all religions) will lead to persecution of his people.
There are norms of civility at Pharyngula. Greg is dead wrong to imply that “anything goes” there, such that Henry can’t have done anything wrong by stooping to our utterly uncivilized level:
Greg could not have more thoroughly missed the most fundamental point about the subject than that.
The whole issue of online civility is what counts as civility, and which standards of civility are and defensible tenable where, vs. having no standards of civility at all.
Greg basically used Pharyngula as an example of the latter—it’s just a troop of poo-flinging screechy monkeys anyway, so who the hell are they to complain about Henry calling them Jew-hating baby-killing Nazis, or at best hypocrites for not having the courage of their convictions, such that they wouldn’t bother to vandalize Jewish graves and actuallly burn synagogues?
Holy crap. You think Pharnyngula’s standards are simply low, and that they’re that low?
Let’s take what SC quoted in comment 31 paragraph by paragraph, since a lot of people seem to have missed the significance that struck many pharynguloids like myself as over-the-top to say the least:
Here Henry is either arguing with a straw man—the idea that New Atheists are uncivilized because they vilify people for their religious views, rather than acceptably disagreeing with their religious views—or is begging the question of when it is acceptable to criticize someone’s beliefs bluntly, as opposed to being a demagogue who singles people out for persecution.
If that’s not clear, read on:
Wow. Henry is clearly saying that some of us at Pharyngula agree with the Nazis that Jewish babies deserved what they got when the Nazis killed them and turned their bodily tissues into household items.
Seriously. He said that. No, he didn’t say that everybody at Pharyngula was that bad, but I think it’s clear that he was implying that Pharyngula’s moral standards are so low in that regard that such people would not be clearly unwelcome outliers in that community.
Wow again. He’s saying that we New Atheists who explicitly disrespect all religion, including his, have every reason to desecrate Jewish graves and torch synagogues, and no good reason not to. And if we disagree vehemently, he must be right—he’s touched a nerve.
Fucking right he touched a nerve. He’s hammering on pretty much every anti-New Atheist canard, making us out to be the kinds of amoral and immoral villains who perpetrated the Holocaust, or at best cowardly enablers with no moral standards.
Then there’s this:
Isn’t that at least a bit paranoid? Isn’t it at least a bit simplistic, in a broad-brush way that is at least a wee bit paranoid with regard to some of the people he’s tarring with his broad brush?
Shouldn’t he at least note that even if the situation is as bad as he paints it some places, perhaps the UK, the mostly American audience at Pharyngula might not be aware of the evil he claims they’re contributing to, and the immediacy of the threat of persecution?
Shouldn’t he assume that we have some decency, and explain the threat clearly, and appeal to our better natures, rather than vilifying us every way he knows how, especially in the very worst possible way?
Holy crap. Most of us regulars at Pharyngula are liberals and staunch civil libertarians, for whom the Nazis are about as morally repugnant as it is possible for something to be. Many of us are Jews and/or people who work with Jews daily and fail to notice our own alleged antisemitism, or insensitivity to the issue.
As somebody who’s served on promotion and tenure committees in the U.S., discussiong and voting with Jews and gentiles regarding the cases of Jews and gentiles, I’m simply shocked. I really never noticed how antisemitic we are, given the disproportionate number of Jews we have in academia, and how nobody seems to mind. (Or if they do, they keep their damned mouths shut about it, apparently because they wrongly think that we’d be shocked and offended by antisemitism.)
Come on, the guy’s fucking paranoid, however understandable that might be, and it makes him a simplistic hypocrite who thinks that free speech about religion—at least his religion—is just not worth the cost in enabling substantive persecution, even on a very short timescale.
He is clearly implying that there ought to be norms, if not laws, that prohibit the free discussion of whether Judaism is a dopey religion like we New Atheists think that all religions are.
And note that Henry pulls out all the stops, in that thread and elsewhere, with the usual litany of fallacies and slanders.
He’s exactly the kind of demagogue that he’s accusing Dawkins and the New Atheists of being.
By his own logic, the New Atheists should be shut up some means means—somehow deprived of their free speech, at least, because what they say will predictably be used to justify more persecution of the Jews and others, and apparently serves no valid purpose.
At best, they should be vilified and marginalized by right-thinking people, but if Henry is not to be the kind of “hypocrite” he accuses us of being for not burning his synagogue down, it seems that the threat he says we pose would justify much harsher measures.
Greg, I’d say you blew it in a big way, from the start, and repeatedly since, by not recognizing that even Pharyngulans deserve a little better treatment than such clear comparisons to Nazi psychopaths and their sociopathic enablers.
This is very sad. One thing I’d like to point out is that Henry himself is (at least now) an atheist.
As a Jewish atheist, his viewpoint could be very interesting in straightening many of us alleged persecution-enabling demagogues out about Judaism.
As I understand it, most of us Pharyngulans are not racist and having nothing against Jews on racist or ethnic grounds. It’s trite and ludicrous, but some of our best friends are Jews, really—my best friend, for example.
Some of us have even gone regularly to synagogue, at times, and socialized primarily with Jews. (Me for example.)
Some of us think we’re able to appreciate Jewish people and culture while still being New Atheists.
Perhaps we are just wrong, and need to have our consciousness raised.
What we don’t need is to be painted as Nazis and sociopaths, and told that people who paint us that way are not paranoid.
“Diagnose Lynna” or “What the hell is wrong with that woman anyway?” is underway.
Teton Radiology charges $1,302.00 for the CT Angiography (Head), as ordered by Dr. Leland Krantz. Plus, there’s a charge of $93.75 for the contrast. So, $1395.75 for that bit of diagnostic imaging.
Snake River Cardiovascular & Pulmonary Laboratory charges $440.00 for an ultrasound described as “Carotid Duplex (Complete bilateral scan of extracranial arteries)” — however, this company will give me discount of 50% off if I can prove than my earnings are below the poverty line, and I can do that. So, $220.00 for that bit of diagnostic imaging.
Teton Radiology is more difficult to work with when it comes to asking for a discount. One has to do the test first, then apply for a discount and/or a payment plan. There’s no way for me to know for certain, but a typical discount is 25%, and they will set up one-year payment plans.
To use my daughter’s Paypal account for donations, enter her email of [email protected], and that will bring up her information as a registered user. Identify your donation as either “Diagnose Lynna” or “What the hell is wrong with that woman”. My daughter is completely trustworthy, but feel free to email her first if you have any questions. Also, if you want to speak to my daughter before sending off hard-earned cash, contact me via the email on my website and request my daughter’s phone number(s).
I have a feeling that the “discounted” costs for such tests are close to what insurance companies pay, so they are not really discounts, just less gouging of people without health insurance.
This is fucking embarrassing, and odd, and goes against the grain in so many ways that I think I’ll go hide now.
ambulocetacean #208
3:1! That’s a vast improvement over the ratio when I lived there in 73/4. It was over 25:1 then (and almost all the women were married), which probably explains why, when out in the bush working for weeks, I once woke to find someone’s hands inside my sleeping bag. Of course, it was the most vocally homophobic workmate who did this. (He then pulled his rifle on me and told me not to tell. I agreed, if he stopped immediately, which he did. Then, when he was otherwise occupied, I stuffed some twigs way down the barrel. I hope it blew up in his face the next time he used it).
I got a lift from Alice to Darwin in a very nice motorhome which was rotating sex workers between the various towns between Port Augusta and Darwin. The girls hated the men in Darwin (“violent”) but loved the opal miners in Coober Pedy (“generous”).
Lynna (@266):
As soon as I get home this evening. Count on it.
And now for something completely different:
Me want! Sniny!
There was a question up-thread about the legality of the mormon church contributing time and means to the Prop 8 campaign. I’m too debilitated right now by embarrassment to provide my own thoughts, or a summary of the legal issues. So, in lieu of that, here are some good sources:
http://lds501c3.wordpress.com/
News for the Mormon Legal Community
Understanding Proposition 8
Ah, damn! I posted my daughter’s email in a way that invites spam. I should have posted it so that it was not recognizable as an email address to harvesters. It should have been littlemy at rcn dot com.
Crap.
Maybe PZ can delete the post and I can put it up again properly?
Does anyone with more internet savvy know how much trouble I may have caused?
Lynna,
I’m confused about the Paypal thing. (Never used it before.) Where is one supposed to enter the email address? I didn’t see a likely spot for it on the Paypal site and their search engine returned no results when queried w/ the email you provided.
I can’t do much, but I’d like to help out a little. I’m just not down with the procedure.
meh. I’m still praying to the Spaghetti Monster for this:
Oh
LordFSM, won’t you buy me aMercedes BenzTesla Roadster?Alternatively, I’ll take this cute little critter.
Somewhere from “mildly annoying” to “not even noticeable”, depending on your daughter’s isp and mail habits.
My person email address has been posted near-daily on the web for about 10 years now. I used to get in excess of 500 spam emails a day, but recently the isps have gotten better and better at sorting these, and I usually get no more than 10 per month now that aren’t handled by either my isp or my mail program.
Unless your daughter is prone to opening emails to fill out delivery forms which need her bank account info to deliver packages she has not ordered, or if she thinks a Nigerian prince needs her help smuggling money out of his country, the result is likely to be annoying at worst.
Lynna:
I’ve auctioned off creepy basement paraphernalia to fellow weirdos in order to raise revenue :)
Nonsense. Glad to help anytime!
Jadehawk:
The distinction between my “me want” and yours just goes to show you how thoroughly domesticated I am!
That said, the Volt looks (and, if the article is to be believed, feels) surprisingly unboring. More to the point, my daily round-trip commute is <40 miles, and I find the prospect of driving for weeks without pumping any gas very sexy indeed.
the thing with personal pay-pal accounts is that they only accept money from other pay-pal accounts(which are free, BTW), AFAIK.
An alternative is to set up a website with a paypal-button, which then does accept credit cards, but charges a small fee, like all other credit card transactions.
Lynna (#270)
Probably not much, presuming her ISP/email service has decent spam filters as most do these days. And I’m sure PZ can just edit your post for you, if you want to lower the spam risk further.
it might also have to do with the fact that I have no idea what I’d do with a car that has four doors. why are all american cars so needlessly huge?! The moment there’s an electric 2 door hatchback(preferably with collapsible backseat), I’m sold :-)
Oh, and Lynna;
There is absolutely NO shame in accepting help when it is offered, be it from friends or strangers. I know exactly the position you are in. I am self-employed, uninsured, and living in Idaho. I just thank FSM I haven’t had any medical issues to date.
Jadehawk@272, those both my if-I-ever-bother-with-a-car-again current favourites. (I have not had a car for years now.) The catch is that I’m spending a fair amount of time at the moment in a somewhat isolated seaside village, I’d need a bit of range (and mountain-climbing ability) for trips outside the village. However, up to a point, the train is quite good, so it’s not a killer… Around the village and immediate area, however, it’s either bus, bicycle, or walk, and there are situations where none of the three is a good choice. (Taxis are expensive and rare, and hire (rental) cars even more expensive.)
Jadehawk,
Thank you. Done and done.
They may seem to be needlessly huge, but we need extra room for when we need to transport turtle traps out to the field site and back.
(or…is that just me?)
Jadehawk:
Actually, my own personal car is a 2-door hatchback (a Hyundai Accent), and if there were a version of that car with a Volt-like drivetrain, I’d be on it like white on rice! But ever since our daughter was born, it’s been the rule that at least one of the family cars be a 4-door (my wife’s current car is a Honda Accord sedan)… and now that my daughter is not so much of a concern (she has her own car), we’re beginning to have adult friends who’re of an age that doesn’t easily accommodate crawling into the backseat of a 2-door.
Ah, well; if that’s the worst thing about getting old, I think I can live with it.
bah. my trusty Acura Integra 2-door hatchback fits everything I own (including boyfriend), as was proven when I moved from WA to ND :-p
It also easily fits two mountainbikes plus backpacks. That is entirely sufficient.
I wish I could get by with only a compact car. :( They just fare poorly when pulling a trailer filled with 3,500 pounds of woodworking equipment. This requires me to maintain insurance and upkeep on both a 3/4 ton work truck and a grocery-getter (Geo Prizm).
You haven’t seen my turtle traps.
Discussing beer on a Monday morning? Very cruel. Now I want a Fat Tire *sulk*.
On the other hand, considering the spirit of the thread, maybe the corrective could be published in a less articulate but more entertaining form, as an Irish drinking song:
Plura-loora-loora-lism,
plura-loora-loora-lism,
give that man a jar of porter!
etc.
My current car has laces. In the summer, I usually switch to straps. There are days I miss the convenience of having a personal automobile, but not many. An air-conditioning unit made for pedestrians would make fewer such days.
This is the first place I’ve lived where not having a car was a realistic option — though I’ve done without one in places where it’s a major hassle — and nearby effective public transportation is now one of my requirements for a residence.
I dream of the day I can finally live in a place where a car isn’t necessary*. Fargo will be a big step up from the current wasteland, though.
—–
*not that I actually use it much. mostly, it’s there so my boyfriend can get to work. Which means it’s not actually ever used in the summer, where bikes are the preferred form of transportation.
Apropos of nothing, but I just saw an interesting and sort of unexpected advert on TV for a HIV prevention campaign. Target audience: men who have sex with other men. It made me smile. I’m so glad to see that we’re going in the right direction.
So, I went looking for the ad on YouTube and found out that there are two of them, one depicting a casual encounter and the other a stable relationship. Nice.
Interesting blockquote fail in comment #290. I would have to try hard to do that on purpose.
Didn’t mean to. I was just too lazy to spell out that the attitude you describe is one of my pet peeves and the root of 30 % of all evil.
I suppose it’s not as old as the oldest known horses, though?
…but not Beyond Capital Letters, it seems.
PZ wrote a
destructioncritique of The Case for God a bit after Newtonmas, IIRC.And then Sastra weighed in and showed that Armstrong isn’t a Christian – she’s a faitheist. (…Unless I’m confusing Armstrong with someone else here.)
Unlikely; the Jews would have kept going, people would have kept converting to Judaism (at a low rate), and there’s always Zoroastrianism. Wasn’t the Mithras cult rather monotheistic, too?
But it’s nonetheless possible that the ancient Roman attitude – “all religions were thought by the common people to be equally true, by the philosophers to be equally false, and by the magistrate to be equally useful” – would have stayed in force and prevented what always happens when a religion gains secular power.
Epicureanism would have spread a lot. But Epicurus is the guy who invented the concept of dogma – he thought that doubt makes unhappy! The moron! Considering how the Pauline epistles are to a large part a reaction to Epicureanism, he seems to have a lot of blood on his hands, posthumously.
(Warning about that link… it’s a night-waster.)
Note how hard he tries not to give a religious reason.
Note how hard he fails.
There’s not going to be another word for this concept that, IIRC, Freud came up with. There isn’t in German…
But perhaps Gee merely needs to be reminded that the Nazis didn’t care about the Jewish religion? They defined “Jew” by ancestry, and by ancestry only. A couple of Catholic saints are such primarily because they were killed for being Jewish.
Making street-colored or otherwise background-colored cars should be forbidden. If I ever buy a car, it will be SCREAMING YELLOW. Embarrassing? Sure. But it beats causing an accident because I wasn’t seen.
Depends on your daughter’s spam filter.
Oh for crying out loud. Is the testosterone crystallizing out of your blood already?!?
But, actually, it fits your interest in canine teeth, I suppose.
An electric Smart! That’s neat.
In the warmer (and drier) months I avoid the car as much as possible: bus to work and ride the bike to anything nearby. But I couldn’t live without one – some things are too far to ride (and carry everything, like beer) and while the public transport is great between home and the city, using it to get anywhere out of the way is a nightmare.
The Adelaide Fringe starts soon; I ride to that to avoid parking and so I can get from venue to venue quickly when I’ve got half an hour between the end of one show and the start of the next.
pffft. just for that, I’m now informing you that it’s snowing, and that I’ve spend this morning building a snow
manperson on my roof.Jadehawk @289:
From your posts, I was under the impression that you were in Fargo. Goodness knows what kind of a wasteland you must currently reside in if Fargo is a big step up? Grand Forks? Wahpeton?
*shudder*
Blockquote fail in the very first line of comment 293.
* * *
From the sidebar…
* * *
Nicely put. :-)
For this kind of turtle?
Minot
David M., my blockquote fail in #290 was more spectacular than yours in #293. My blockquote fail is bigger than your blockquote fail.
Thanks for the Yiddish douchebag information, people! To be clear, my inquiry was related to a funny exchange between Laden and CPP. I wasn’t looking for something to call Gee. Although, having now read his responses to Arikia Millikan here
http://network.nature.com/people/U6E5B2CE1/blog/2010/01/26/nature-network-blogs-receives-50-000th-comment
… Grr.
“Putz” was always one of my favorites, but I had to give it up when I stopped using “prick.” Alas.
***
Great post, Paul W. I’ve had one in moderation for a few hours now, too.
***
Lynna,
My small donation has been sent. It may come through with my real name and information. I would prefer that your daughter not reveal that, if possible. Please keep us updated.
Seriously, I get all aggressive just from <HRRR> looking at it. Road rage even.
It snowed heavily over here in the morning!
But only for about an hour, and it was too warm.
Hello, Pharynguhorde! Question for you:
(much obliged if you respond)
I saw this on BBC’s news site:
Female suicide bomber kills dozens in Iraq, along with the news report and the thought that immediately crossed my mind was: Some religion of peace this is! People are killing followers of their own religion, including innocent children, women and men.
My question is: Does this make me a bigoted Islamophobe? I do know that this event was politically, rather than religiously, motivated. I also know that Islam, the religion of the people from these parts, plays a huge role in their daily lives, and the political party and ideology line is drawn chiefly on religious basis (Shia and Sunni).
What I want to consciously guard against is forming an irrational bias against any group.
Please help!
Ooooh, baby.
(I realize that makes no sense, but anything that starts with “You haven’t seen my” invites, nay requires, flirtatious silliness.)
I read that post, but did CPP actually threaten to sue Laden? That sounds absurd. Childish even.
<sob> I want to play in the snow with Jadehawk… <whimper>
Oh, I almost forgot… I bought bread yesterday. Pérène multicéréales again. <nom nom nom>
Ouch. X-D I don’t dare looking it up!
He was back on that thread. He ignored it (or was already gone – I can’t remember). The problem is far, far larger.
Oh, dear. Worse, much worse, than I had imagined. Get. Out. Now.
May I be so bold as to inquire your initial reason for moving to Minot, of all places? I was under the impression that Minot was a place people moved away from.
for starters, this issue is as much a question of “killing followers of their own religion” as the Catholic vs. Protestant violence in Northern Ireland (i.e. they don’t really consider themselves to be of the same religion, and it’s not really about religion per-se anyway).
Secondly, it certainly invalidates any claims of Islam making people more peaceful in the same way Christianity’s claims at making people more moral are invalidated on a regular basis.
Any thoughts beyond that would be unwarranted, and if you start accusing every Muslim you meet of being a potential suicide bomber, you have a problem.
Ehem.
Religion might help with kamikaze actions, and it obviously provides something to quarrel about, but it’s not necessary. Anything will do if people consider it worth dying for. This is most clearly shown by the PKK, the Kurdish Workers’ Party, which had suicide bombers (many female) a few decades ago, and which is a Stalinist organization. In other words, those are atheists we’re talking about here, atheists who don’t believe in any afterlife at all whatsoever.
ROTFL!
Nah, they were playing. CPP was actually making the opposite point with his “threat.”
All information will be considered private. I’ll specifically ask my daughter not to pass on any personal info. That’s a good point. Thanks, SC, for the reminder.
Thanks to everyone for the help.
For that kind of money you’d think these tests would be guaranteed to reveal all my faults.
They were? I didn’t pick that up. (Though I honestly didn’t understand most of that thread.)
well, it has extremely low living costs, which allowed me to scale back on crappy McJobs to finally start working as a freelance graphic designer/illustrator, resulting in not having to have McJobs at all now*. Which means it’s time to get out of here.
And will it make it worse if I told you I moved here from Seattle?
——-
*And oh yeah, my boyfriend was here.
*checks personal account*
Looks like Seti@home will have to wait.
Tried putting a new battery in my old iPod, and appear to have upset the touch panel. Grrr. But the new nanos are quite sniny.
Holy culture shock, Batman…
Don’t they have boyfriends in Seattle? ;)
So many trees downtown…
…and four Christian radio stations.
Also from there:
Heh. Let me guess who arrived “in recent years”…
Kausik Datta,
If you think Islam encourages violence and extremism, leads to the slaughter of innocents, suppresses science, women, and others not of their faith: this does not make you an Islamophobe as that term is normally used. If you believe Islam does this and other religions do not, you may qualify as an Islamophobe.
I think of myself as a fundie-phobe. I don’t particularly worry whether the particular fundie religion and culture uses suicide bombing, random shooting, machetes, poison gas, knife attack, vehicular bombs, plane crashes, beheading, crucifixion, drowning, burning at the stake… if your particular group thinks killing others for not being you is a viable option, your group should be stamped out. Education, legislation, liberalization, prosperity seem to be the best at stamping out extremism.
I warned everyone that with the history involved you’d need like flip charts and a pointer. :) A lot of it loses me, too. It’s like a soap opera.
Read this comment as sarcastic:
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/01/should_just_anyone_be_allowed_1.php#comment-2242114
(It’s especially funny if you’re familiar with the way he writes on his blog.)
Minot
Always wanted to visit again after they built that cool phased array radar site and closed it down. Imagine, a huge concrete and steel pyramid on an endless plain.
I suppose it would get a little old after a while.
BS
I cannot quite follow…
Someone posted this on one of the other pages: the Global Atheist Convention has sold out – even with no help from any level of Australian government.
The sad thing is, of the two major parties it is the slightly less right-wing one that is in at both national and (my) state level. I’d like to vote against them to indicate my disgust but doing so risks putting the even more scumbag bunch back in.
LOL!
The ones I wanted didn’t want me, and the ones that wanted me were creepy.
that’s not downtown. that’s about half the town right there. The other half is at the photographer’s back and includes Minot State and Minot AFB. Downtown is that small, tree-free part in the middle.
Also, I can totally see my house :-p
Okay, Lynna, my
comfortably off old white malewidower’s mite has gone off into the æther.*headdesk*
Block
Quote
Failure
I meant the whole point of moving here has now been accomplished, so I no longer have a good reason to stay here. I now make enough that I won’t have to get a McJob in Fargo either, for that matter.
So he wasn’t arguing with Laden? I must say that I really don’t understand many things about the other SBs. I was on Chu-Carroll’s blog and that just went way over my head. I guess I’ll stick with PZ’s, Yong’s, and possibly Brayton’s blog.
Makes sense. I should have gone to bed long ago (I’m not quite healthy at the moment).
David, how is Opera working out as your browser?
Lynna,
Don’t be embarrassed. We, as a country, should be embarrassed that you can’t get the medical care you need.
I sent you an e-mail from my RL name and email address. I would greatly appreciate it if you don’t mind keeping it to yourself.
Not there, no.
Well, that’s a different kind of complicated. :) (They seem very nice, though. Once I stopped over there to ask if someone could come by here and clear up a math question, and they did! Were very patient about it, too.)
There are a number of good ones. It’s good to go to the Sb home page once in a while, or click on some links on the right of this one.
SC said…
Yah, mine, too.
Heh, that ship has sailed in my case, hasn’t it? Though with some of the stuff I’ve posted about porn in the other thread, I’m beginning to wish I were anonymous!
Yes, please do!
BTW, PL wrote…
Yup. I was delighted to contribute to Project Diagnose Lynna ™, but I would’ve been happier still to pay the same amount, or even 10× as much, in higher taxes so that neither you nor anyone else would have to face a crisis like this.
The bit about the whips, chains and lemon cream pie was a bit risqué
Has anyone else seen this study on sex education for 6th and 7th graders?
Efficacy of a Theory-Based Abstinence-Only Intervention Over 24 Months
They report a lower prevalence of self-report of initiation among the ‘abstinence-only’ group than the two groups that include sex-ed and the control group (health class, no sex ed).
No difference was found as far as condom usage between the groups, but the abstinence only instructors were specifically told to give accurate information about condom effectiveness if asked. There’s no indication whether or not these questions were asked in the groups.
Do any health researchers here have experience with this type of study? I’m wondering about the accuracy of the self-reporting. Does the abstinence-only group have a stronger incentive to misreport (perceived — there’s no indication that there was a real incentive to do so)? How are such things controlled for?
The designs in this study were carefully responsible: the abstinence education does not disparage sex or characterize it was ‘wrong’, the truth is told about condoms, etc. What they did is not what is typically “abstinence-only” education.
What is the chance that we can move the “abstinence-only” advocates towards this model and prevent the study result from being used as justification for sin-based abstinence education?
Jadehawk:
Gee, here I’d been thinking you just got off on big airplanes and throbbing missiles hauling nukes! ;^)
But seriously… mindful of everyone’s concern for maintaining anonymity, is there any way we could see samples of your work? And am I right in thinking that in addition to your commercial work, you’re also a fine artist? I stand ready to be an adoring fan!
the commercial art is googleable via “jadehawk” (i seem to take up the majority of google images under that handle :-p). The fine art isn’t really present on the internet much, especially since I haven’t had the time or motivation for that in years… all I have is my old Elfwood account;
Dang, found the fried ribbon trace in my old iPod. No wonder there was a burnt smell.
Miki Z:
I don’t mean to be snarky to you, Miki, with that FTFY, but really, by what definition is a 6th/7th grade sex ed curriculum that neither demonizes sex nor discourages condom use considered “abstinence only”? I suspect most curricula advise kids that age that they should delay sexual activity; AFAIK, what distinguishes curricula as “abstinence only” is precisely that they do identify premarital sex as “wrong” and they do withhold information about safer sex practices, including condoms.
The study authors consider this quite carefully. A name search on them turns up a lot of other published research, and JAMA has got a good rep. The thinking seemed to be (and this is my own reading) that the way “abstinence-only” is taught now is dangerous and running a study on that would be unethical (i.e., worse than nothing, since they had a “nothing” group).
Their abstinence only group was focused on the possible consequences of sex (pregnancy, disease) and on techniques for turning down sex. If the children asked about condoms, etc., they were given accurate information.
This is why I ask specifically about how we move “abstinence-only” as it’s “taught” now to the model used in this study. The authors are careful to note their skepticism that this model would work at all for older children; the mean age for the study was 12.2 years old.
I’m concerned that the sinful-sex folks will grab at this study and try to use it to justify continuation and expansion of the sinful-sex and bad-info program. From the other research done by the authors, I’d be surprised if they weren’t concerned by the same thing.
I bought that book because it seemed to be the only one in the store that was about what I was after, read the first 50 pages and threw it away.
It irritated the crap out of me that she treats jesus and god as actual historical figures and biblical stories as facts.Her writing style makes it obvious that she has no doubts that all those accounts are historical facts.
I just couldn’t stand it.
So, any others ?
I like Greg’s blog, but he (and Stephanie Zvan btw) get this wrong all the time and then cry and scream when it is pointed out to them.
How annoyingly and irritatingly stupid to confuse emphasis on content of messages instead of tone with poo-flinging and stupid talk of the kind Gee or our creobots commit .
Jadehawk:
This and other images (fabric patterns? computer wallpaper? whatever; they’re really cool) at us.123rf.com are yours? Also sci-fi/fantasy illustrations at Elfwood? This and others at dreamstime?
I love it all!
Well, there’s shmuck (prick) and TL or tuchus-lekker (brown-noser). The Acura TL never ceases to amuse me.
Really, I think shmuck best expresses the idea of a “self-absorbed, arrogant waste of humanity”, but I am open to being corrected on that.
Man, Jadehawk, I am drooling over your art deco.
I have a lot of trouble with Greg’s blog. Sometimes I like what he writes, other times I want to smack him, and when he and Isis fight they both seem entirely wrong.
I had notice that Good Math, Bad Math had been on the “most active” list and I went there to see if I could join in. It just reminded me of why I hate math. (I thought I should explore other online communities. After reading my post on Towleroad, I realized raven was rubbing off on me.)
Lynna, I made a small donation. Hope it helps.
yup, that’s mine :-)
speaking of Henry Gee…
this was his last post on the blogwarz thread on NN:
seriously?
He’s gonna take his ball and go home?
who the fuck does he think he is, Eric Cartman?
I don’t understand how someone who is supposed be a “good” communicator and editor can have such thin skin.
Frankly, I’d be sorely tempted to call him on his bluff.
And, as if to taunt me, the Heritage Foundation and Family Research Council have already released statements lauding the scientific backing of their abstinence only programs and calling for an end to programs “promot[ing] high risk sexual-behavior” (FRC) which “didn’t affect youth behavior at all.” (Heritage)
These are not even factually correct: the study found a statistically significant but modest decrease in the likelihood of multiple partners among those who received the “safe sex” education. This decrease was not seen in the “abstinence-only” group.
Miki:
As the quickness of my initial reply no doubt indicates, I haven’t read the study. As you describe it, though, I think the best way to “move ‘abstinence-only’ as it’s ‘taught’ now to the model used in this study” would be to call the study model something other than abstinence only. This model would not satisfy the existing abstinence-only advocates, and calling it that will torque off everybody else.
So the goal is to get preteen middle-schoolers to delay initial sexual activity until they’re teenaged high-schoolers? I’m OK with that… but I’m still surprised that it’s any different from current, non-abstinence-only programs. Are current curricula really not already suggesting that 11- and 12-year-olds should wait a few years before they start boffing each other? Sounds like I should get myself back to middle school! ;^)
I’ve had people laugh out loud when I tell them how low my mortgage payment is. Living in the rural outskirts of an Idaho town has allowed me to pursue my goals as a writer. Cheap digs are essential. Of course, I travel with my brother Leland so much for book research that I don’t feel restricted, and it’s still not Minot. This Nowhere where I live is actually well-placed as a home base for adventure travel … lot’s of wilderness within my range.
‘Tis Himself, your mites are welcome. (That sounds like I am accepting a shipment of bedbugs.)
Bill, thank you. BTW, if everyone paid into a universal health care service like any other sensible first world nation, it would cost you less, not more, to help people like me. And there would be a strong possibility that I, as a tax-paying citizen, would also be a contributor to my health care. I don’t know why people vote against their own best interest.
Pygmy Loris, I will keep your info private. However, I will give you public thanks and hugs here. Orgy of mushiness!
btw, that’s a very juicy thread, if you’re so inclined:
http://network.nature.com/people/U6E5B2CE1/blog/2010/01/26/nature-network-blogs-receives-50-000th-comment
a great poke at Henry:
again, the true Henry becomes exposed.
there’s such a thing as abstinence plus, which is pretty much what this study seems to describe: emphasis on “don’t do it!”, but you still get all the actually useful and necessary info.
those are the ones that often score the highest marks on keeping teens healthy and non-pregnant.
Lynna:
From your fingertips to FSM’s ears!
shatfat:
Is that literally something like butt-licker, or am I turning lekker into a false cognate?
Hugs for you too, Lynna. I hope you can get to the bottom of what’s going on. Any little bit us Ebil Atheists can do is well worth the disrepute that comes from doing good ;)
I don’t have a car, but my wife does, making us car-lite. I usually ride a bike to work… yeah, hypocritical of me as a bus driver, but hey, I need reliable transportation. Actually, in all seriousness, somebody has to show up before the first bus leaves or to leave after the first bus comes in… and that would be me. I can walk to work, too.
Cold weather is just fine (layers, batting gloves), but I can manage in heat, too. Mild rain is okay and I’m working on being able to bike in heavier rain. (The problem with cheap bikes is that they don’t take fenders. Boo! Hiss!)
I draw the line at wind and lightning.
Oh, and guys? You can totally bike to/from the grocery store. Use a backpack, cold packs from the freezer (if you lack these, just buy some frozen peas) and those thermal bags you can buy at the grocery store for your dairy and whatnot. Giant cranberry juice jugs and 50lbs of cans are probably off the menu, though. ~_^
Hell, when I lived in Worcester, MA and worked in Boston, I just picked up fruit from the vendor outside South Station on my way to the train and everything else from the Lebanese grocery on my way home from the Worcester commuter rail station. So, okay, occasionally I went to Price Chopper, but I walked there too. I know there’s a bus in Worcester (“The” RTA) but I never rode it once!
Dirty secret: fruits and vegetables go bad if you buy them in bulk once a month, anyway. *index finger to nose* Just sayin’.
Richard Galliano is the hippest accordion player in the world.
You think that’s oxymoronic? You haven’t heard Richard Galliano.
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=34082261076
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3627127952358176719&ei=pX5nS6bIC4WUqwLop4TuCg&q=richard+galliano&hl=en#
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=2036479454
Well, he apologized, but of course it was their fault:
Flying into a rage and becoming physically aggressive is like totally understandable. I mean, he was confronted with unfamiliar and hostile viewpoints.
His hypocrisy aside, he actually scares me a little. He did when he was here as well. Bull, indeed. I’m very glad I have no need to submit anything to Nature.
*I looked at her profile, by the way. She’s 23.
From what I’ve read of Dr. Gee, my armchair psychological evaluation is the guy has some real anger problems.
SC,
Do you think when Henry said this:
But it could be that my work here is done. I certainly have better things to do.
in the post i quoted earlier in thread, he really meant it?
Or is he just being a petulant child, as usual.
I do get the distinct impression that several other regular bloggers at NN were attempting, discretely, to distance themselves from him.
maybe that’s what he meant by his “continental drift” comment?
Could we be seeing Henry shooing himself out?
It occurs to me that SEF and Henry Gee have the same psychological problems.
SEF: “A group of people criticising/mocking me are gang-rapists !!
Gee: “A group of people criticising/mocking me are genocidal Nazis !!
Hm.
Has anyone ever seen them together?
I received what would probably be categorized as abstinence-plus sex-ed in high school. Our health class, book and videos emphasized abstinence as the only sure-fire way to prevent STIs and pregnancy, but birth control options were described. Discussion of condoms focused on the fact that they’re the only birth control method that also protects against STIs.
I also read YM and Seventeen magazines back then. They regularly ran articles that listed various methods of birth control, their efficacy rates, how to get them, and whether or not they were effective against STIs.
maybe that’s what he meant by his “continental drift” comment?
nawww, looking back on it, I think he was referring to the slowness of NN to adopt viewable stats.
SC:
Just sit back, relax and grab some popcorn.
—
Lynna:
Sorry for my undue curiosity, but would that be littlemy as in Little My?
I do not doubt that behind that is a can o’ worms, but wtf?
This does not sound like any of the (many, believe me) pompous left-leaning academics I know, many of whom, y’know, are Jews.
So… how long have you lived in the USA?
It occurs to me that SEF and Henry Gee have the same psychological problems.
so did that “Nancy” person, IIRC.
Didn’t she threaten to sick her pet anthropologists on us at some point?
Giant Squid Invasion!!!!!
No idea. The “better things to do” bit was really respectful of his readers/commenters/fellow bloggers, though. Stay classy, Henry.
Hm.
Oh, possible. I found that totally cryptic.
Just sit back, relax and grab some popcorn.
just read that…
ROFLMAO
perfect.
Regarding Gee, I hadn’t read much of his stuff here, always thought it was just the usual religious cult persecution complex of a group that via lobbying and direct political representation actually has a large amount of political and social influence.
Like, with all the other religious kooks.
But yeah, he does seem to have anger management issues.
Btw, I noted that SEF commented in some thread yesterday, rehab already completed ?
Screwed up the link in #364… this Little My.
Did you click through to the TV report linked from that article? I had no idea there was any such thing as sportfishing for squid, but the story was all about charter boats going out full of clients and catching these by the hundreds.
Why? Are these Humboldt squid edible? I had the impression that the bigger the squid, the less tasty; not so? If they’re not edible, what’s the allure? Do they fight like finny gamefish?
<HeadScratch>
That’s my impression, yes.
All of y’all are blithely ruining your reputations as Ebil Atheists.
21864
Think I’ll nip down to the bar for a beer or two (Rev–they’ve got Brooklyn Black Chocolate on draft this month!)
hold down the Thread
Hrm…
Well, it does occur to me, having read a bit of the Gee stuff, that I may have failed to follow broadcasting code guidelines re adequately frequent repetition of my standard position statement…
So without further ado…
(Clears throat)…
I think Judaism is incredibly fucking stupid…
I also think Christianity is utterly fucking moronic…
And you’d have to be completely fucking brain dead to buy a word of Islam…
Oh, and Hinduism, Mormonism… All pretty much spectacularly fucking stupid, too. Just what do you people take us for, anyway? Gods ‘n demons? Right. Tell us another one. I mean, have any of you checked the calendar lately? Here’s a hint: it says ‘2010’ somewhere in there. Get a fucking life already.
And this has been your hourly call sign identifier.
Oh, also, for the record: I have no interest in sticking either Mr. Gee nor any member of his family (nor any member of any other spectacularly moronic religion, whatever it might call itself) in a gas oven… Tho’ I might just feel compelled give Mr. Gee some noogies or somethin’ if he won’t stop it with the obsessive-compulsive Godwinning bit of his already…
Yeah, that’s right, baby. Mad noogies. And I will feel no pity. And I will not stop until you have a brand new bald spot. That’s just the kind of sick, demented, Reichstag-burning psychos we New Atheists™ are, see…
(/Oh, and that Godwinning shit was pretty fucking stupid, too. Thankew and good night.)
Thanks, SC! I went ahead and sent you one anyway. :)
Yes, it’s literally arse-licker. My bad if I spelled it wrong. (Actually, all American orthography of Yiddish is a kludge. It’s properly written in Hebrew letters. It also went through a major phoneme shift. Medieval Yiddish can be accurately rendered with German orthography, but 19th century Yiddish is a significantly different beast.)
I’m aware “lekker” means “interesting” in Dutch, but Yiddish owes more to medieval Hochdeutsch (Southern German), as well as Polish.
IIRC, the Netherlands were inhabited by significant communities of Sephardic Jews. In some Hanseatic cities there were both Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities.
Okay, this is just logorrhea at this point. I’ll stop. I wish my damn browser’s idiotic spellcheck would realize that Sephardic is SO a word, though. Sephardic, sephardic, sephardic. Happy now, Firefox?
And while this thread is on-topic:
Greetings, Janine! Meet you in Brest. I’ll bring vodka.
Lynna:
Just followed the link in your profile to your website. I need more time to poke around, but I’m very impressed.
If you’re ever in Connecticut and can stand the company of an aging tenderfoot, let me know and we can take a little stroll on the AT.
Replace “Jew” with “rabid right-wing authoritarian Zionist” and you will have accurately described academia since 2001.
The fear factor has dropped off considerably since 2001, but let there be another “oh shit” moment and this group will be back with a vengeance.
(This group is not exclusively made up of Jews. As we all know there are extreme nutty Christian evangelical groups who make common cause on this issue.)
shatfat:
No, brown-noser is probably a perfectly good idiomatic translation: It means essentially the same thing as butt/ass-licker would, and is probably in more common usage. I was just curious about the literal translation. Thanks.
OK, that was pretty good.
Say it ain’t so!
(Superficially, I find her “rules” and their rationale a bit, well, totalitarian.)
***
windy, can you remember where it was that you asked Gee about the earlier conversation here – when che called Pharyngula a rough bar?
Sven @357:
Thanks for those links. Amazing!
You always know when you hear people say “I don’t like [insert instrument] music,” what they really mean is “I don’t know how to listen to (hear?) music.”
Also, it should go without saying, but doesn’t for some folks, so I will point this out: not all Jews are anywhere close to be reactionary Zionist right-wing authoritarian fucks.
In fact there have been for many years liberal Jews fighting for the recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people.
What *is* true is that Jews, as a group, tend to be paranoid. This is completely rational. In the early 20th century, the idea of Germany committing genocide against Jews was as outlandish as the same thing happening in the United States would seem today. It’s not paranoia if they really ARE out to get you.
So after 9/11 every Jewish institution under the sun was convinced they were next. I was at Brandeis at the time and was told in all serious that Brandeis was “Israel in America” and the terrists were coming for us next. There were anthrax scares. (Never mind that ‘Deis had a bio lab with anthrax in it already!!! Don’t let science or logic get in your way, people!) People turn into right-wing authoritarians when they get scared. I never got scared so it looked like everyone just collectively went nuts.
You can only shit your pants repeatedly every day for so long, though, so eventually people moved on to other, everyday fears, like where their next paycheck was coming from. Even my wife’s neurotic mother (all mothers of a certain age are neurotic), who went full wing-nut after 9/11, voted for Bush (“he’ll protect Israel”), yadda yadda, eventually got over Hillary losing in the primary and has started supporting Democratic candidates again.
I gave up reading Greg Laden some time ago when he jumped down my throat when I pointed out errors in one of his posts. “I was wrong” apparently isn’t in his vocabulary. At least he hasn’t been around here
blog-whoringlately.BS
actually, fishing for humboldt squid is fun, up to a point;
the problem with cephalopods, and the reason fish are still masters of the sea, see, boils down to one simple fact:
Hemocyanin is not as efficient as Hemoglobin at delivering oxygen to tissues.
so, while you do indeed get a nice initial fight out of a big squid, they tire much more rapidly than a similarly sized fish would.
as to edibility?
oh yes, quite tasty. However, it takes some extra preparation over regular squid:
from:
http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/sports/outdoors/20050129-9999-lz1s29squid.html
Take care, Lynna. I sent what I could.
We can’t afford to lose our Morridor connection.
@Bill
The profanity of the expression is probably why you’re more likely to hear “TL”.
If you want really weird, the Yiddish slang for a gay man is feygele, which means “a little bird”. (Equiv. to the English slang “fairy”?) To American ears, however, it sounds like you just called someone a “fag-ele”.
Mel Brooks got away with saying it in “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” in the 1980’s, but I don’t know if it would pass today.
The grocery store in my neighborhood has a dry ice machine. You buy refrigerated goods, and you can get the ice for free. Bags cost extra, though — they really want people to bring their own.
Windy @364
oops, your Little My link doesn’t work. It’s the Little My from the Moomintroll books: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moomin There’s a picture of my daughter in the 9/11 blog entry.
MikeG @389
lol. That’s what I figured. I’m a rarity, an atheist at the jello potluck.
Bill @381
Damned good thing — otherwise you’d be wanting your money back. :-)
I’d love that! My daughter lives on the East Coast, so it’s not too unlikely. Besides, I loves me some tenderfoots because they like to take a lot of breaks — you know, stopping to look around. And that’s exactly what the writer in me needs.
@372, Yes! That Little My. Though my daughter is not an angry, aggressive little being. We both love the truth-telling aspect of Little My. And her ability to cause mischief is admirable. ~:) We can fix our hair to look like that. Little My is notably not afraid of adventure, she revels in it. Big forces of nature come in small packages.
You might want to read that again. Which part of being paranoid is rational ?
Is it understandable after the Holocaust ? I guess.Christians have mastered that art since roman times.
Is it widely used to godwin any argument a jewish person sees as being in danger of losing ? You betcha.
Ring Tailed Lemurian @ 267,
Wow. Sounds like you had some wild times up North.
I just pulled the 3:1 figure out of my arse. I have no idea what the ratio really is. 25:1 is amazing, though.
How do you think that evangelical family will go up there?
Google knows all, tells all…
It also brought up this amusing paragraph in the thread linking to there:
Not by a single Jewish person I am acquainted with offline. Honestly I think this impression is driven by a very few very loud professional advocates for the state of Israel — high profile on op-ed pages, but not significantly representative of the norm.
Addendum: When the on-topic discussion is actually the legitimacy of the state of Israel, expansionist political Zionism, etc., then fears of future anti-Semitic persecution do fly more freely. But as Israel was founded in part for this purpose in the wake of the Shoah, that doesn’t count as Godwinning.
Honestly I think this impression is driven by a very few very loud professional advocates for the state of Israel — high profile on op-ed pages, but not significantly representative of the norm.
does Henry Gee count as one of those?
Thanks, Owlmirror!
Ichthyic, I can’t remember – have you seen the post Owlmirror just linked to?
Hm yeah, I was over-generalizing there.Some of my jewish collegues do have that habit, fwiw.
I really have no idea who Henry Gee is, nor any interest in finding out. The idiot Stuart did something similar here last month: “leftists are throwing Jews under the bus, etc.” When prompted for examples post-Stalin, he had none.
But these people apparently spend much of their time trolling the Internet looking for the opportunity to have fights about Israel. Through this advocacy, we come to know them, and there’s the opportunity for selection bias. Most Jewish people have, you know, other shit to do with their time.
Lynna,
Re project Diagnose Lynna, is there a snailmail address to send donations to? (Though I won’t be able to follow through ’til after the 15th. Oh, to be independently wealthy!) Maybe I could email the Art Meets Adventure address, and you could sorta slip me an address?
No doubt there are a few. They have to live and work somewhere in order to support that Internet trolling habit.
I’m somewhat suspicious of Stuart’s claim to be Jewish, though I could be wrong.
Neither has Gee. Doesn’t seem to stop him:
He also asserted flat-out in the comments on his blog that “The Left hates Jews.”
Zuska and others have asked what was said that was antisemitic (not that it would be reasonable to jump from a single comment to such wild claims), and I haven’t seen an answer from him yet.
er. no offense, but how many other accordion players have you heard?
…that second video was pretty good though. So OK, maybe he’s the ‘hippest’. But I’d say there are plenty cooler accordion players:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8–FQM8rwGM&feature=related
Of course the real trick is making a polka sound cool…
Perhaps Lynna could send her address to PZ and PZ could pass it on to those regulars that ask?
Hi, cicely @403, go to artmeetsadventure.com and click on the Work History & Resumé link. That should do it.
In other news, Janine has started a bar fight on “Numbers herein..” thread.
Owlmirror, that was a great link, not to mention a tremendous demonstration of google fu. From the linked comment:
Posted by: Henry Gee | September 17, 2008 4:16 PM (I realize that I didn’t really need to identify Gee, as he identifies himself quite well.)
Ichthyic, I was so pleased to see that you had been hurling abuse and making outrageous attacks.
I take exception to the description of myself as someone who hasn’t “had a good time”, and I am even more insulted by the claim that I don’t want anyone else to have a good time either. Bring on the vibrating lingerie.
Jadehawk, thank you, and thanks to David M, too, for your comments.
I don’t (start accusing, I mean). The reason I don’t may sound silly, but that’s what it is. I have grown up with quite a few Muslim friends, and looking back, I have never found any of them to conform to the stereotype that exists today. Therefore, I have had no reason for any animus towards Muslims as a group.
In the Eastern part of India, people of my parents’ generation – who were subjected to Islamist atrocities in Bangladesh, then known as East Pakistan – hold quite a different view altogether, but our generation was born in an independent India, and we have grown up with the idea that all religions are to commingle freely.
The irrational bias (that I am afraid of, that I am trying to avoid) has to do with the current events and ideas that I now come across. These have forced me to rethink, and reevaluate my understanding of Islam as a religion, and I have found it at odds with what I have so long known.
And it is not specific to Islam; Christianity (in all flavors) has the exact same issues. Looking at the present state of world (not just in the US, but in other countries as well, including India), it appears to me that these religions explicitly decree absolute faith, sanction violence, and breed insularity and ignorance.
But I do realize that these problems are not isolated or restricted to just these two. Other religions also do these more or less. That’s why, as an atheist, it is all the more important for me to stay rational and avoid bias in the comparative evaluation of these beliefs that many of my fellow human beings hold.
Daily dose of sanity = one of the many reasons I come to Pharyngula.
Not that it isn’t fascinating in a train-wreck kind of way, but should we be wasting all this effort psychoanalyzing you-know-who?
See, their morals, their “code”… it’s a bad joke, dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these “civilized people”, they’ll eat each other. We are not monsters. We’re just ahead of the curve.
For the record (and I believe I’ve noted this before), the person who brought up book sales and whom Gee instructed not to be “so fucking impertinent” was not Ichthyic.
I’m not sure that’s a good idea. It’s already stretching the limits of PZ’s hospitality to air my troubles here. Asking him to participate when he’s already battling whole armies of trolls, spammers, and pints of Guinness… nah, that’s beyond the pale. He’d put me in the dungeon. (If you do put me in the dungeon, PZ, please fill the cell with oranges.)
Just for fun, here’s a wee bit of prose from Kevin Barry:
Oh, that’s offensive all right. If you’re not going to discuss accordionists civilly then I’m not going to discuss accordionists with you.
um…
Look, I hate to break it to you, but those people are not “cool” by any reasonable definition of “cool.” Oh, I mean, sure, they’re Finns and everything, and I guess Finns are generally sort of “cool,” at least when they’re not sweating in the sauna and, like, whacking each other’s naked backs with birch branches and shit like that.
But musically, even the one you posted twice is not “cool” by any reasonable non-Finnish criteria. Sorry.
Those guys are master technicians and very well-practiced and all that, and even musical, but improvisation at the level that Galliano can improvise is way, way beyond any stupid polka shit in coolness, hipness, and neat-o-daddy-o-itude. srsly.
Just a suggestion. I do not have nor want a credit card. Just wanted to have a way to send a few dollars. Sadly, seeing that I do not have much, it would be just a few.
As opposed to wasting it how? Because, make no mistake, I am fully dedicated to wasting my efforts. I will not be deterred from my path of procrastination.
(Seriously, it’s been an annoying day, with Gee, Stephanie, Zuska’s post, and now this Mooney nonsense. Gah.)
Janine, much love from me to you. I figure if PZ knew me personally, that would be different.
I am saddened and heartened at the same time by your few dollars. I dislike the whole credit card industry, so don’t patronize ’em I say.
Here’s a wee bit more prose from Kevin Barry (for Janine, change the pronouns: “him” to “her” and “he” to “she” for maximum effect):
Firk-Ding-Blast! Name things all ate up, as usual, so I’m Badger3k.
Lookin’ for comments. I listened to the Point of Inquiry podcast, which was good, even if DJ soft-pedaled some things some time. Now Mooney is going to be a host (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/02/01/im-now-a-podcast-host-for-point-of-inquiry/) along with Robert Price and Karen Stollznow. I like the other 2, but Mooney … I’m not sure I could take his sucking up and pearl clutching. Should I drop the podcast in favor of Randi’s new one (not sure if it’s out yet) with DJ at the helm, or do I have to edit my podcasts?
Anyone have comments?
Lynna, please don’t apologize for providing a way for us to do what we wanted to do all along . . . help you get a diagnosis. We want you safe, whole, and happy!
My contact info is included with the money I sent this evening. DO NOT HESITATE to email me if the fund comes up short or if further tests are needed.
Love,
Leigh
Leigh!
Oops, copy-paste error. This was meant to be the second cool one, not so much Maria Kalaniemi.
PS. Bigot.
Maybe I just have a different idea of the concepts ‘cool’ and ‘hip’.
And Galliano may be supreme as jazz improvisateur, but it doesn’t immediately leap out at me as the most amazing use of accordion qua accordion ever. Sorry. And if you had heard much stupid polka shit, maybe you could tell the difference between a “master technician” playing polka shit and an artist playing polka shit (guess which one was which).
Anyway, how about this:
http://www.minnaweurlander.com/eng/
Yay! The atheist conference is getting some press down here in Melbourne. The religion blog of The Age newspaper has a thread on it:
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/the-religious-write/2500-people-with-nothing-to-talk-about/20100202-naam.html
What’s Mooney done now?
Mooney is going to be one of the new hosts of the Point Of Inquiry podcast.
Hmm. Now I have to decide if I will listen to Mooney on POIP U.S.
I mean, sure, they’re Finns and everything, and I guess Finns are generally sort of “cool,
i don’t have a credit card either, hence the usefulness of a paypal account, which doesn’t require you to have one.
I’m in a holding pattern while I wait for the confirmation code from paypal, but I’ve caught SIWILH (Something is Wrong in Lynna’s Head) syndrome, and I’ll try to help fix that asap.
Hi, Leigh.
Someone else spotted another consequence of low standards of English (quite near PZ).
China warns Obama about meeting with the Dalai Lama or there will be “corresponding action”. (source)
I wonder what this will be? Maybe the Chinese president will meet with these guys.
You folks can argue about “cool” accordionists and polka all you like; but without a doubt, Astor Piazzolla is the best bandoneón player, EVAR. I know I’ve posted several of his videos before, but here’s another: Otoño Porteño.
ambulocetacean #395
Craziest place I’ve ever been, without a doubt, and the only place I’ve ever been raped (by a woman!) Wild, and virtually lawless once you left town. (Well, it was, and still is, a Territory, not a State.) ALL The people I worked with would regularily have 6 beers for breakfast, and then carry on drinking all day.
If it hadn’t been for the local magic mushrooms I don’t know how I would have survived my time there.
No idea. Haven’t been back since. I imagine that things are very, very different now, post Typoon Tracy and almost 40 years. Probably much like any other medium sized Australian town now (except with a worse climate).
Let’s hope those evangelists are stupid enough to go for a swim :)
So who came up with the idea that whether or not it was sunny at the beginning of February indicated future weather, and who thought that a groundhog would be the best arbiter of said amount of sunlight?
And who said it had to be a real groundhog?
BS
No groundhogs here, but February 3 is bean throwing day in Japan.
SEF: It took me 2 tries, but I got it:)
BS
OK, that one was cool. (but not exactly “qua”)
uh, duh. Kind of the whole point of my comment (I’m really not a bigot…those were the jokes.)
Oh, lighten up. I said they were “musical,” and that’s what I meant. I play the fucking box myself, OK? I can tell musical artistry a mile off.
Seriously, though, and I don’t really know how to express this without appearing to be condescending to non-musicians, but there really is a world of difference between artistically playing something that you have practiced extensively exactly the same way (and ws usually composed by somebody else) and the kind of spontaneous self-expression that is possible in improvisation. There really is.
If it’s accordion qua accordion you want (assuming that doesn’t mean polka-shit), pick up Galliano’s solo Paris Concert. Holy mackerel that guy can play. (He’s also badass in the context of Piazolla-style tango nuevo).
Might already have been posted but:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/02/02/meet-the-mormon-man-with-239-grandchildren-115875-22012171/
In the article:
(The Daily Mirror is one of the red top tabloids – not quite in the Wall Street Journal class. Possibly more like the National Enquirer.)
More people to thank this morning: I see I get to both thank and congratulate Leigh. Mucho bowings in your direction. The Molly awards to both Leigh and John Morales were well deserved. For you guys, a line of congo rats wearing sparkly outfits.
Thanks also to Miki Z!
There are more contributors, and I’ll get to that soon. Gotta go to work now so that I’m also contributing to the fund.
Lynna:
I’m signed in on Paypal right now, but I haven’t seen the option to choose a ‘Diagnose Lynna’ or ‘What the hell is wrong with that woman’ account. Does it matter? I’m sure I have the right email, since Krystl’s name is brought up.
Sorry for the delay!
Mr. Fire
MrFire (@443):
I think the procedure is to go ahead and send money to Krystl (cool name, eh?), and put the Diagnose Lynna in the subject line of the system-generated e-mail that goes with it.
At least I hope that’s the procedure, because that’s what I did!
Now for a couple conversation starters:
About frickin’ time, eh?
…and…
I don’t quite know what to make of this: On the one hand, piercings for cats strikes me as (as my wife might put it) the outside of enough. OTOH, if it’s not cruelty to pierce a human child’s ears, why should it be a crime to do it to cats? I know there’s an issue of consent, but worrying about consent sort of flies in the face of the whole concept of pet ownership, and pets are regularly subjected to cosmetic/elective surgeries — bobbing of ears and tails, declawing, etc. — far more involved than decorative piercings. Not that I would get my cat’s ears pierced (she’s not declawed, either), but is it really a crime?
A little help, please.
About a year ago I managed to dislocate my kneecap. I couldn’t bend the leg at all and walking became almost impossible.
I was staying over with a friend and her roomate was very into crystals and their, apparently, magical energies. She insisted that her crystals could fix my leg and that I wouldn’t need to go to any hospital.
I was a little surprised – after the crystal waving – to discover that the leg could, once again, support my weight and was capable of being slightly bent (at least enough to allow me to walk a little more steadily). I’m sure, however, that that’s more to do with the support bandage that was immediately wrapped around it rather than the crystal waving itself.
I can’t get my friend to accept that it was the bandage, and not the little pink crystal, that gave me back some use of my leg. She insists there’s no actual proof that bandages are of any help other than to prevent infection entering open wounds.
I’ve tried searching online but all I find are companies selling support bandages and no-one actually giving any kind of proof/detailed description as to how they support damaged muscles/tendons etc.
Does anyone here know where I can find any article proving the point?
Thanks :)
CaseyAllan (@445):
I’m no expert, but I’m struggling to understand why this requires one: When you’ve got a dislocated body party, and you supply mechanical support to correct/maintain its location, it strikes me that any claim on behalf of some suggested alternative reason you feel better is the one that requires proof.
Jus’ sayin’….
Thanks a lot, Bill Dauphin (cool surname, eh? :D)
Lynna-Aid now has somewhere between zero and infinity dollars from me.
Thanks, Bill, for giving out instructions. I am so bad at this. I should have had Jadehawk organize it.
1. go to paypal
2. select the “Send Money” option
3. fill in the email field to send money to with this email: littlemy at rcn dot com
4. fill in amount, your email and so forth
5. put “Diagnose Lynna” or something similar in the subject line
In happier news, dino tail feathers were similar in color to Conan O’Brien’s hair: http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-IN-Dino-Tail-Feathers-were-Carrot-Colored-012910.aspx
Bill Dauphin, OM (@#446):
Ah, good point. I’ve just been trying to convince her that it wasn’t the work of the little pink crystal or the positive thoughts from the person waving it.
I should turn the argument around and have her provide the proof on the workings of the crystals. Thanks :)
I’m a little embarrassed at not thinking of it from that angle, actually. My only excuse (lame though it may be) would be my over-focusing on one side of the disagreement.
A broad range of thanks (somewhere between zero and infinity) goes out to MrFire. And by way of MrFire, to MrsFire (in whom all decisions reside, may she flourish).
To add to the “how to use Paypal” – it’s only after you put in the email address and amount and go ahead and click “submit” (or continue, I forget which) to get to the next screen that you can then verify that you did the email right and click on it to get Krystl’s registration info up. There’s still another click or so after that before the donation is final, so don’t worry on the first page that you’re submitting right then and there to what you hope is the right email.
I haven’t read this whole thread, much less every thread so maybe this has been discussed already, but…Baptists kidnapping Haitian kids under the guise of “aid” to Haiti. Apparently, they wanted them for cheap adoption fodder for another Christian organization. Scary.
The use of “sniny” always brings to mind the use of the word “slithy” in the poem, The Jabberwocky, by (the Rev.) Lewis Caroll:
* Jabberwock – any relation to Jadehawk? We never see them together!
Several of the nonsense words now appear in the English language. Pity the word “slithy” has been corrupted but perhaps it’s American English.
The story has been getting quite a bit of coverage here in the UK, generally unsympathetic to the child-stealing American religious idiots.
The Baptist kid thing came up in some thread or other – I linked to this post which is a nice dissection of the intersections of privilege and racism and whatnot that are going on with the whole “save the Haitian babies” concept.
I saw something on the news about it and it’s weirdly complicated in this instance – the guy who’s the titular head of the orphanage is based in the US, and he said it was ok for them to go get the kids, but paperwork wasn’t done right, and not all of the families were told what was going on, and the ones that were weren’t necessarily told it was permanent, and so on.
I’m unsurprised, in the Baptist kid bit, to see, again, that these folk we’re doing ‘God’s work’…
There’s somethin’ about that phrase always makes me check that my wallet remains where I last left it. And I just as regularly find myself, hearing said claim, thinking Johnson might have misspoke a smidge about patriotism.
As in: patriotism may only be the second to last refuge of scoundrels. The ‘I was doing God’s work’ bit is just as often the last.
I find that there is a great deal of racism in missionary work altogether. The kidnapping Haitian baby scandle is one such example.
#445 CaseyAllan
It almost sounds like sympathetic magic. Someone must have read that there are “dislocations” in cystals so if you wave a crystal full of energy over the kneecap it will give up some of its energy and absorb the dislocation into its own structure. I’m surprised the crystal didn’t fall apart as a result!
Evidence?
Perhaps X-ray crystallography will show how there are a lot of dislocations in the crystal after she used it on you. That it proves it works!
Every quack* should invest in rose quartz wands, available here and at many other suppliers:
http://crystal-cure.com/symbol-rosequartz-wand.html
/sarc
(* Aplogies to any ducks reading this.)
Alan B (@453):
I love that poem; I actually <totalgeek>used to read it at high school speech tournaments</totalgeek>. Now here’s a key conundrum:
I’ve always pronounced slithy (both in my head and while reciting) with a long i sound (i.e., the same vowel as in
shinysniny), but I’ve also heard others pronounce it as a short i. Discuss. (And we’ll pass right over the issue of whether the th should be voiced or unvoiced.)Similarly: gyre and gimble… hard or soft g? The same for both, or split? And is this the same gyre Yeats was talking about?
It’s not like I think these questions are as important as, say, cat piercings, but surely y’all can scare up an opinion or three? ;^)
#458 “Aplogies” also to anyone who thinks I can type korrectly.
Apologies.
I’ve always pronounced slithy (both in my head and while reciting) with a long i sound (i.e., the same vowel as in shinysniny), but I’ve also heard others pronounce it as a short i. Discuss. (And we’ll pass right over the issue of whether the th should be voiced or unvoiced.)
Similarly: gyre and gimble… hard or soft g? The same for both, or split? And is this the same gyre Yeats was talking about?
You’re undoubtedly right about slithy. Both Humpty Dumpty, in Ch.6 of Looking Glass, and Carroll himself, in a hand-lettered “periodical” called Misch-Masch, written for his younger siblings when he was 23, define it as compounded of “slimy” and “lithe” – which also indicates that the “th” is voiced. In Misch-Masch gyre is derived from “gyaour” or “giaour”, and means to scratch like a dog, while Humpty Dumpty defines it as “to go round and round like a gyroscope”. While Dumpty could be wrong about the meaning, Carroll would surely not have put into his mouth a meaning that suggested an incorrect pronunciation – so in gyre, the “g” is soft. In gimble it is hard, since both sources link the meaning to that of “gimlet”.
These are of course matters of great significance, as it is known that Jabberwocky is actually a set of instructions for travel in a fourth spatial dimension (see Lewis Padgett: Mimsy Were The Borogoves). Get the pronunciation wrong, and you could end up in Tumbolia!
Alan B:
If she suggests heating you to high temperature to anneal out the dislocation, run the other way. Er, if you can.
Bill Dauphin (#444)
Well, I’d be worried about the cat damaging itself by scratching at the piercing site or getting caught up on sheets or bushes or whatnot and tearing the piercings out. Most people use breakaway collars on their cats for this same reason so it makes me wince to think of a cat with piercings having to rip its own skin apart to get unstuck.
Crystals are, like, magical, you know. When they form, order appears from disorder by natural processes involving randomness without any directing intelligence!!! As is well known, this violates the second law of thermodynamics.
/IDiot
Unlike Safari, it’s too stupid to cooperate with the character table*, so I need to undertake complex copypasta movements whenever I want to comment on a blog other than this one. And while just about all of Unicode is displayed, Cyrillic letters are spaced very widely apart in most fonts, which is completely baffling… though I haven’t needed that this far.
I think I mentioned I finally found out how to turn off the spellchecker. There’s only one word I need to have spellchecked, lbockqutoe, and it didn’t know that one…
* That of the Mac anyway. At home, where I have Windows, I keep IE!
I wish my papers were this easily appreciable ;-)
:-D
Yeah, they’re both a bit strange. I only read their blogs when some interesting post title turns up in the Top 5 Something…
No – even though the correspondence of /k/ to /k/ is not regular.
<pft> They reject almost everything anyway. :-) Many a manuscript goes through a multi-stage process: submitted first to Nature, then to Science, then to PNAS (or Cell where appropriate)…
I’ll never understand that attitude. When I want a fight, I don’t need to go kill something. I just walk over to my little sister and let her teach me some Wing Tsun the hard way. (…Or so I think, till she tells me “I’d have poked you in the eyes 20 times already”.)
And before she got that far, I got more fights than I wanted anyway, because my brother gets aggressive when he’s scared, and he’s usually scared.
“403 Forbidden
Access to this resource on the server is denied!”
Now, isn’t that interesting.
:-D :-D :-D
But, seriously, that’s just the spelling. The w in whore isn’t even etymologically justifiable.
I think it should be.
Pope Rat has been interfering in UK politics, specificaly objecting to The Equality Bill currently going through parliment, he objects to the catholic church having to treat all people as equals rather than discriminate on gender and/or sexuality grounds. I was reading the comments on the Telegraph website and came across this,
My question is is this our AlanB?
If so Excellent!
Tayschrenn
Squidus Christ.
I finally started listening to POIP when Grothe was made prez of JREF. Very nice bloke, indeed.
I even listened to Mooney and that director/producer fella whose name I can’t recall. Not as bad as I’d expected, but certainly not someone I’d like to listen to regularly.
Ah well, the Guardian just told me that the Royal Society has a podcast of their own. Time to switch.
He [Ratfinger] says that “the effect of some of the legislation … has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs.”
He’s right, you know. Just as the legislation against murder imposes unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to slaughter heretics and unbelievers.
KG (@461):
Now that is why I love this place so much! ;^)
One of my very favorite SF stories! Sadly, what I read about the movie version released a few years ago so disappointed me that I didn’t bother seeing it.
A. Noyd:
I hadn’t thought about the scratching issue. But really, that sounds like an engineering problem, potentially solvable by breakaway jewelry, or jewelry carefully designed to avoid snagging on claws (and, of course, declawing would make it moot… if declawing weren’t an horrific practice). Mind you, I’m not in favor of the practice — quite the opposite — I just thought charging the person with animal cruelty was a bit of a disproportionate response. A regulation banning the practice in future might have been better advised, IMHO.
David M:
That’s a whole ‘nother discussion!
My Lovely Bride® doesn’t have pierced ears, and had no intention of getting my daughter’s ears pierced… until she begged for it (@~7 yo, IIRC). Of course, after the first ear, she also begged to be allowed to leave the second one unpierced, but my wife (and her mother) insisted on symmetry. AFAIK, she’s now very glad to have the extra holes in her head… but she has not shown any interest in getting stabbed anywhere else. The relationship between pain and the quest for beauty is a complex one, no? ;^)
…as far as you know…
From here…
“16 English spelling doesn’t need a reform – it needs a bloody revolution! (See under Spelling Reform.)”
And while I am at it…
“04 Noam Chomsky should stick to politics, Roger Penrose should stick to interior decorating, and Andrew Lloyd Webber should stick to the ceiling if hurled aloft with sufficient force.”
ROTFLMAO!
Since someone mentioned Mooney taking over 50% of the upcoming PoI podcasts, here’s what Ronald A. Lindsay, President and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, had to say in response to Russell Blackford’s post questioning the choice:
And my response:
Looks like the CFI president and Mooney have a lot in common. Let’s start with a penchant for unsunstantiated assertions:
Chris’s depth of knowledge on issues of science and public policy is almost unmatched among science journalists — as evidenced by his best-selling books and successive fellowships at Princeton and MIT.
Book sales don’t show depth of knowledge, especially when one cannot defend the viewpoints when challenged in anything approaching an intellectually honest manner.
Now equivocation between NA’s and fundamentalists:
Can’t we leave dogma to the relgionists?
Unfortunately, our misgivings on Mooney are based on past evidence, namely the way he plays fast and loose with the truth in the media when it comes to selling his point of view. Dogma has nothing to do with it. We welcome inquiry, but it’s telling when your choice of inquirer seems to prefer the role of inquisitor.
Next, apparently poor reading comprehension:
The second is that Chris may put some of his guests to the test and force them to defend their views.
The issue isn’t having to defend one’s views. The issue is the concern that the interviewer will be pushing a certain agenda and taking what you say out of context. For fuck’s sake, Mooney has in the past tried to pass off the words of a commenter on Pharyngula as something PZ himself said. Talk about taking things out of context. While one has to expect this sometimes, when a formerly honest and amiable interviewer is replaced by someone more interested in selling something one is less motivated to speak with them.
Now, I am not personally familiar with the President of the CfI. But while that statement might have been suitable for a press release where one expects unflinching support of what is being done, it is completely out of place as a comment in response to a blog post, where one would expect engaging with the actual substance of the post instead of just copypasta of press copy. Just figured I’d toss that out there for anyone who is in any way interested in the ongoing Mooney saga.
That’s something else.
(Though, isn’t 7 a bit early?)
re Knockgoats @461:
Answers.com disagrees:
Not to be authoritarian about it, just adding another data point for the discussion. Personally I think it sounds better with both having a hard “g”, but that’s just my opinion.
Nah… my wife likes to chat with her while she’s taking a bath. Leaving aside the manifest unfairness of the fact that this opportunity for unguarded conversation is forever forbidden to me, it does mean that if any new body mods had shown up, I’d’ve heard about it.
Jebus, David (@473), this is my daughter we’re talking about!! ;^)
SteveM (@474):
I like the alliteration with both hard gs as well, but I don’t assume what I like necessarily matches the author’s intent.
#459 Bill Dauphin, OM
It has alreadt been pointed out that i know nothing about the science of language or grammar but since this is pronunciation (not pronounciation) …
“slithy” I have only heard with a long i. As in shiny and, I have assumed, sniny.
“gyre” and “gimble”: again I have only heard as a hard g. Since you raise it, “jimble” (soft g) seems wrong but “gyre” could be either in the OED. I have only ever heard “gyrate” as a soft g sound. “Gimble” is not in the OED. “Gimbals” (different word) is given as a “J” sound but I have never heard anything other than a hard g.
Because of alliteration, as long as both g’s are the same, I would guess you could have either.
Actually, both “gyre” and “gimble” are pronounced something like “throatwarblermangrove.”
Hope this helps.
While perusing the non-credit course catalogs of two local community colleges, I discovered to my dismay and disgust that they both offer a fairly extensive list of classes in woo and pseudoscience including: Ghost Studies; Awaken Your Purpose through Numerology; Dowsing for a Healthy Home; Soul Coaching; Healing with Gemstones and Crystals; Past Life Regression/Future Life Progression; and Develop Your Psychic Ability.
I’ve been ranting about this for the last three days on my eponymous blog Bastion of Sass. Drop in, read and weep, and leave some comments.
Next, I’m going to check the for-credit classes at these community colleges, plus the courses offered by other area universities and colleges. I want to find out if there’s more teaching of new-age nonsense, woo, and pseudoscience going on in my community.
SteveM@474 – yes, turns out they are right! Carroll says gyre (as well as gimble has a hard “g” in the Author’s preface to Looking Glass; which raises the question: how was “gyroscope” pronounced in Victorian England? Merriam-Webster online says in British English it can be pronounced with either a soft or hard g – I’ve never heard the latter as far as I recall, so that’s the source of my error. I agree it sounds better with a hard g.
In the same preface, he also says slithy is pronounced “as if it were the two words “sly, the”, and that “rath” should be pronounce to rhyme with “bath” – but as “bath” is pronounced with a long “a” in southern England and a short “a” in the north, that doesn’t help! Carroll was born in Runcorn, Cheshire (the north), but educated at expensive schools, where any northern accent would probably have been thrashed out of him. Come to think of it, “the” is pronounced differently before a vowel and a consonant, but slithy must surely have a final “ee” sound!
#459 Bill Dauphin, OM
Bill, while you are here, can you clear up a mystery? Are you indeed “The Lost Dauphin”??
I worked it out because you retain the family name (Bill) of two of the candidates: “Williams” and “Wilhelm”. DNA testing conducted in 1993 proved however, that Wilhelm Naundorff was not the Dauphin.
So, are you indeed descended from Eleazer Williams, a missionary from Wisconsin of Mohawk Native American descent? If so, may I be the first on The Endless Thread to acknowledge your rank – or do you still wish to hide behind your OM as being of higher merit?
Your people of France, indeed the world, want to know!
Hi, guys! I am back from behind the Pine Curtain, but still pretty tied up with working (now remotely, thank God). There is some small chance I may have to go to Oklahoma to help work the ice storm, however.
In another life, when I had a real job, I got to go to Rome and Chicago and L.A. and NYC. Now I go to East Texas and Oklahoma. How the mighty have fallen.
Bill’s more the Duke, I think…
#466 https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmHzDpTLP2mp-qpt639sa9q2J8Wl4QREfQ
We need an abbreviation for this …
No.
Signed: The REAL Alan B©
Delving back through the thread, I see The Jabberwocky has been up for discussion. Have you consulted the Michael Haynes recording? My favourite, and based on good Carroll scholarship I believe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBjOIVIGqY
#486
Nice one, Mr Batzrubble. Very much the way I was taught it at school and have heard since in the UK.
@ 485 The Real AlanB, the handle at 466 is awful so I go by the name Tayshrenn (only because Imperial Historian and Anomander Rake have been taken and Quickben would be ridiculous)*
The other Alan B’s comments on Pope Rat were still excellent. There have been suggestions that Rat should be arrested for crimes against Humanity when he comes to the UK. A similar attempt was made against an Israeli cabinet minister-she cancelled the trip in a high dudgeon as a warrent was issued.
*Go to TVtropes and look up Steven Erickson or Malaz Book of the dead-obligatory warning of serious time wasting potential.
IMO, it would be cruel to pierce a human child’s ears if the child did not consent. But if the child really, really wants her (or his) ears pierced, I don’t think the parents should deny this.
Piercing animals’ ears is a whole other issue, since the animal can’t consent.
Hey, I just noticed that one of my comments is next to Lynna’s entry on the Molly page.
That is all.
Except to say that Cuttlefish’s poem in the sold-out thread is a stunner even for Cuttlefish.
but it IS animal cruelty. too bad English (and therefore English-speaking societies; or vice versa) lack the concept of artgerechte tierhaltung (which I’m not even sure how to translate). You’re right that it should be forbidden; so should be declawing :-/
Anyway, all the talk about piercing body parts and children reminded me of the story a friend (now an evangelical christian housewifey type, but a runaway punk and later stripper in her youth) whose “rebellious” nephew was bragging about his nipple piercings and asking her if she wanted to see them, just to shock her.
To which she just shrugged and announced that it’s no big deal, she had them, too.
I would have paid a weeks income to see the expression on his face! :-p
oops that should be “Malaz Book of the FALLEN” at 488
oh shush. you get drooled at and over quite sufficiently around here; and not just by me, either
That’s complete nonsense. “Crimes against humanity” is a term with a very specific definition in international law. The most up-to-date definition is that contained in the Rome Statute, which is the international treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (to which the UK is a party).
Essentially, a crime against humanity is a widespread, systematic violent attack on a civilian population, such as the systematic murder, torture or rape of a particular group. Recent events in the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo perhaps qualify, for instance.
As much as I dislike Pope Benedict, and deplore his insane views on contraception (which are indeed causing massive amounts of suffering), nothing he has done amounts to a crime against humanity, within the legal definition of the term.
Yes, an arrest warrant was issued against Tzipi Livni, as a result of which she cancelled her trip to the UK. Though it should be clarified that this arrest warrant was issued for war crimes contrary to the Geneva Conventions, not crimes against humanity; they are different things. Also, to the best of my knowledge, she was a former, not current, cabinet minister; had she still been in office, she would have been exempt from the jurisdiction of the British courts under the principle of immunity ratione personae (as confirmed, inter alia, by the International Court of Justice in the recent case of Democratic Republic of Congo v Belgium).
Hi Leigh; there’s something waiting for you on the “Catching up with Molly again” thread.
I just looked at one at random, and have to say (with no drop of snark) that evaluating the lower stratigraphic confidence interval for a clade and using it to smack down ridiculous molecular diversification dates is hot. My fossilized little heart flutters every time gene jockeys claim they know more about major early group splits than paleontologists do and then get the data and their asses handed back to them.
(I know you do both, I’m just talking about the arrogantly wrong molecular biologists)
well, I don’t know Walton… IANAL, but his condom policy for Africa comes pretty damn close to:
don’t you think?
Alan B (@482):
I had written a tediously long answer that got lost in the aether when my MT sign-in timed out. Short answer: No relation. My mother traced the name back in this country to before the “lost” Dauphin was born.
Walton (@489):
A cat can’t consent to being owned, either, nor to any of the unambiguously beneficial veterinary treatments we subject them to (e.g., we just had to have several of my cat’s teeth pulled, because their decay was affecting her ability to eat).
The consent issue strikes me as a potential argument against the very concept of keeping pets in the first place (not one I’d agree with, but a plausible one nonetheless), but given that we do keep pets, consent per se doesn’t strike me as a valid argument against cosmetic body modification of pets.
That said…
…I would support the banning of declawing, and of cosmetic pet body modifications like bobbing ears and tails (I’ve never done any of these things to my cats, and never would)… but given that these things are currently not banned, and that we routinely do something similar to ear piercing to tag animals in the wild, it seems plausible that this groomer could have had a good-faith belief that the piercings she was doing were within existing standards of humane animal treatment.
IOW, I think this is something that needs to be corrected rather than punished.