Posts by linger
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P.S. As it happens, my main bike got stolen from home two weeks ago. Like most mechanical contrivances my father has had a hand in, it was assembled from odd second-hand parts, repurposed materials, and a considerable amount of luck, but somehow it stayed on the road for decades, and I was used to its little idiosyncrasies. I heartily wish the thief personally experiences all of the mechanical breakdowns it’s overdue for. Though I suspect they’ve just stripped it for parts, which would annoy me even more.
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Possibly an idiot question, but given what "AA" actually stands for, it's not immediately obvious: how can one become an AA member if only a cyclist without any driver's license?
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How does the pendulum swing back from polarised politics and fragmented world views? This does not seem like something that can self-correct.
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Similarly, when setting up mental health support for victims of sexual harassment, it's probably desirable to create a safe space for women for that purpose; but that doesn't mean there are not also male victims.
In both cases, there may be some unintended consequences -- siloing, marginalisation of minorities, barriers to wider sharing of relevant experience -- but there are also important reasons for doing it that way.
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Up Front: The Real Victims, Here, in reply to Dinah Dunavan,
The reasoning appears to be that young males are less likely to talk, or seek help, about mental health issues, and so a safe space is being created for that purpose.
But yes, that doesn't mean that stress in medical workplaces is limited to men, nor that women should be expected to be better able to "just deal with it" without a parallel support network.
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N.B. there is a difference between knowing there is some risk,
and knowing how large that risk is (with an accurately-assigned probability).
In the former sense, the risk has long been known.
In the latter sense, the risk has increased (and may be expected to increase further, something that was not generally well-understood 20 years ago). -
"Hindsight" only in the sense that the current risk of extreme wind events in Auckland is higher than what would have been estimated 20 years ago.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to ,
time slowing down effect
N.B. the brain does not process information any faster in moments of stress than otherwise. Rather, our sense of time passing is distorted after the fact by the amount of processing time devoted to the moment afterwards (for obvious reasons, we spend more subsequent processing time on more stressful moments).
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Draper's story was intended as satire, but it's more than a little chilling to read:
The process of education consisted solely in learning how to tap the Rx for knowledge when needed. The position was well put indeed in a famous speech by Jzbl to the graduates of the Central Saturnian University, when he said that it was a source of great pride to him that although hardly anybody knew anything any longer, everybody knew how to find out everything.
... necessitating ...
a whole new branch of knowledge known as Ariadnology
(literally, web-study!)
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Up Front: Why a Woman is Like a Bicycle, in reply to ,
… ending with a plea for
recovery of that too-quickly-forgotten past of daily practices and long-term thinking: how we used to communicate, research, write and work. It wasn’t that long ago.
Even so, it may already be too late for intergenerational propagation of pre-internet information-processing systems. My current students have never known anything else, and seem genuinely puzzled by tasks requiring them to remember or combine information using wetware, or to skim text (or look through an index or catalogue) in order to find something out. And increasingly, information is only made available online.
(BTW, Hal Draper came very close to predicting this type of knowledge failure in his 1961 short story “MS Fnd in a Lbry”, though couched in pre-internet terms as a reference library in which indices of indices led back eventually to the information content … until the actual information records got lost in the mass of index files, rendering the entire system useless. Here it is.)