Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I think it was partly just that they could.
I agree. They were possibly hoping to shake out some kind of incriminating team bail out with a boot load of guns. I imagine their choppers had infrared capability too, so the bush-bail would be even more obvious.
I agree with Russell that it's kind of a pity that much of the evidence probably will never come out. But it's more of a pity for us than a pity for the <insert appropriate name for the arrested parties>. Their rights are actually protected by this. I mean do you really want the whole country to hear your drunken rambles and tough talk to your mates? Or laugh at your lame training?
-
And I thought tapped out in that title referred to his having typed something.
Heh, me too, the visual metaphor of the satisfied worker tapping the logout buttons.
WWF (now WWE) has mushed your brain! He said 'tapped out' which means (colloquially) out of ideas/new things to say.
Possibly so. The tapping of the floor in martial arts seemed to me the clearest derivation of the term.
Not WWE, btw, where they seem to tap out and the other guy is allowed to keep going, hit them with a chair, throw them out of the ring, throw the referee out of the ring, throw himself out of the ring, throw the guy back into the ring, tag his buddy, who then repeats. At some point, for dramatic purposes, the victim of all of this comes to and reverses the situation. Having gained the moral high ground he is clearly then allowed to transgress every rule, with the crowd roaring for him to continue. Pretty funny, a few times. They're parodying Hollywood. I favour UFC style, where the tapout really is the most dramatic moment, moments before the tapper lapses into unconsciousness or dislocates something. It's usually a very bittersweet moment.
I guess the distinction I'm agonizing over is that a tap out means you lose. Whereas a tag out reserves the right to come back, and anyway it's a team sport, we haven't lost yet. You might tap out because you're gassed, but you don't get to come back. So if we see Russell on this topic again, it will make it clear just what kind of tap out it was. Maybe it's a Ken Shamrock tap out "I wasn't tapping, it was a breakfall". Yeah right Ken.
-
I hope they play "Struck", cos that was my favourite tune to get drunk and miserable to in the mid '90s.
Heh, I also have happy memories of being drunk and miserable, both states now only being nostalgic reminiscences for me. I'm not actually sure which is more addictive, misery or alcohol. They both feed each other.
-
I never claimed that. I talked about "understanding the world", not understanding each fact, ie that each known fact contributes to a body of knowledge, the various elemants of which enhance understanding of each other.
Sure, that's why I only suggested it was a word play, rather than insisting. But I think there's still some verbal sleight of hand going on - it seems your idea of "understanding the world" still involves amassing a body of facts. You're just making some stipulations about the facts, that they should interrelate. And I don't clearly see the difference. OK, the fact that the battle of Borodino was fought in 1812 doesn't have much to do with the English translation of the Treaty of Waitangi. But they're still snippets of knowledge that tell you something about some piece of the world at some time. As such isolated snippets amass, you often do get a general picture, and a very, very wide picture at that.
Obviously it is also good to go into greater depth in areas, just to experience what going into greater depth is all about, and to know more about that subject. The snippets of fact become less isolated, the picture more detailed. But there's even more learning of facts going on than before in this scenario. The memory is still being engaged heavily. But try doing it for all of history (something that I think it is well worth having a picture of). You can't, it's too big. That doesn't mean you should ignore it, it just means your knowledge will be sketchy and will boil down to isolated facts.
I admit there is a danger in thinking that knowing a particular fact in isolation means you know a lot about something. There's also the danger that the list of facts chosen can show only one perspective. You could cherry pick only native uprisings for all your knowledge of historical warfare and conclude that natives start all wars. But that's a fault of the choice of facts, not the learning of facts in general. Even with only that body of knowledge, you still know a lot about native uprisings, something quite worthwhile.
The other danger with facts is insidious. The knowledge of them is easily testable. Other kinds of mental powers, like reasoning skill, or originality, or fluency, are nowhere near so simple. The answer to this is simple though. Facts are not everything. But I dispute that being able to amass them is not an important skill, which should be constantly developed. For many subjects, like foreign languages, they are the most basic building blocks, without which absolutely no progress can be made.
-
Curious about the post title: 'Tapping out' usually means 'submitting', much like 'throwing in the towel'. Wondering if this was a wrestling malapropism, and you really meant 'tagging out' like in tag team wrestling, which is more like subbing, handing the floor to those who've still got some energy.
Or was it that the week has beaten you into submission?
-
Leo's picks rock. Can we get a regular Friday selection? I gotta get me that Tesla coilz gizmo mounted on my car. Kitty song's choice too.
-
Meanwhile, somewhere other than Planet Lad, a female filmmaker was among those arrested (and later released), not to mention a considerable number of females whose rights were pointlessly violated in the co-ordinated publicity stunt of nationwide raids.
Sure. I only used the word Lads cause I got sick of 'the accused' (they haven't been formally accused yet), 'the terrorists' (that one is now obviously a misnomer), 'those Maoris' (not all of them are Maori), 'the Ruatoki 17' (which sounds like a Bader-Meinhof cell), 'Tame Iti and his buddies' (I have no idea how high up he was, or how well he knows the others), 'Te Quaeda' (quite funny, but old), 'The 17 people arrested during the raid on said date' (too long). 'The Lads' is about as inaccurate as all of those, and I like it cause it connotes some naughty boys doing something silly. But sure, there's some females too.
-
the rednecks will see the native savagery they're inclined to see; the moderates will see the healthy triumph of democracy and the rule of law; and anyone with half a brain will see manipulation of prejudice aimed at complacent acceptance of the status quo.
Wow, I see all three. That makes me a redneck moderate with half a brain.
Get real. While journalists never reveal their sources, the only place these claims could have come from was the police.
Or the accused or their mates, or it could indeed be made up by journos. I'm still unsure, not ready to take a punt, could end up looking silly.
I'm personally glad the TSA isn't being used. I can scarcely imagine how such an Act could be of any value over and above existing criminal law, without being in any way intimate with the actual Act. The ridiculousness of trying to separate terror out as a different class of crime is patently obvious. I really don't think it matters squat what the intentions of the people who knowingly commit a crime are, whether they are political, racial, financial or personal. Crimes are just crimes, regardless of motives. The pettiest of motives is no better or worse than the most grandiose. Having no motive at all doesn't change the criminality of a crime.
Why did the cops ever have anything to do with it? It can only be to test out their new powers. For the purposes of public safety they've already met their goal by arresting the lads and taking their guns. And they've immediately found the limit of their powers, which is that a toothless set of laws (on account of being so fundamentally stupid) has robbed them of some evidence in court and given them no extra charges that can be laid. But it also gave them the evidence outside of court. I imagine they do strongly believe they've helped the public interest with this inadmissible evidence which convinced them, if no one else, that these lads were serious about using the guns illegally.
Probably when the dust settles this one will be chalked up as not worthwhile to repeat. OK they probably scared some people off being terrorists. They also probably incited some people to it. They may have foiled some illegal activity, can't be sure, because that activity never happened. They've certainly come across badly, particularly from the extended remand of guys on eventually quite minor charges. The ninja suits definitely didn't go well. The actual grievances of the accused have received massive free coverage. Possibly several of the accused are feeling 'mission accomplished' about the whole thing. They may think differently from the inside of a prison cell later.
-
General knowledge - indeed any knowledge - is not just a big list of facts. It's about building an ever-growing understanding about the world, etc.
That's a highly disputable point. It could just be a word play where you claim 'understanding' a fact is somehow different to 'knowing' a fact, without there actually being any discernible difference other than when you 'understand' you know more facts about the fact in question.
For example, I 'know' that gravity pulls you to the earth. But do I 'understand' it? What's the difference? Perhaps I know more about gravity, how it seems to be a property of large masses, how it exerts a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects etc. But aren't these just facts that I also know?
I'm going here on the assumption that rules can be facts too. They can usually be described or encoded that way. Exactly how we remember them may not be as a verbal description (and almost certainly isn't in most cases), but that doesn't stop them being facts.
I don't seriously hold to this point of view myself, since I'm undecided whether we know any facts at all. Maybe we only have opinions, and the facts will be forever uncertain.
Perhaps you missed my point about long division. I never said I didn't learn it. I just said I never mastered it. That seemed to me a real waste of time. I know how it's done, and I can do it slowly. More importantly, I know what it's for. The same may go for general knowledge - putting some preponderance of digitally encoded fact into our naturally analog brains seems like an incredibly laborious process. Perhaps our aim should always be to get the overview, and then look up the details. Even in our areas of specialty.
For instance, there's no way I can remember all the computer code I'm supporting. I only know the outline. But I'm the guy who knows how to look it up the fastest, having written it. That's why I say that Googling may be the general knowledge of the future.
-
what it characterised as some innate ability to make snap decisions was in fact the fruit of experience -- or, to put it another way, the inscription of neural pathways.
It's plausible. Likely even. One of my childhood poems:
What is reasoning but step by step intuition?
What is intuition but thousands of reasons?But we don't need a model of the brain to tell us that knowing something is quicker than looking it up. Clearly so, since the outcome of looking it up is the knowing of it in the end, but has the extra step of the lookup. And the lookup can be lengthy.
I'm quite skeptical about the concept of 'reasoning rather than remembering' even in maths. People like to think they're 'deriving' stuff, but the method by which they solved the problem is usually something they've drilled into themselves. If they haven't, there's bugger all chance in an exam that they'll work it out. I'm sure there are exceptions to that, odd savants, but the bulk of people just go on experience. They remember the 'outline of the proof'.
The level of understanding goes through several stages. First there is rote rule/fact learning. Then there is the completion of that task. Then there is the massive improvement of speed of recall. When that's happened the rules can start to be combined in ways that haven't been seen yet. Finally, strangely, mysteriously, there seems to be a total giving up of the rules. This is mastery. How many of us consciously follow the rules of English? Indeed how many of us would even know them?
People who solve problems a lot reason intuitively. The actual recourse to logic/rules is really a double check, or a means of communication if the answer is doubted by, say, a customer, or a student.
Is it the role of school education to give mastery? Seems unrealistic to me. Students will find what they want to be a master of, and a good school will let them, give them resources to, guidance from people who may have followed a similar path. If they don't know what they want to master, then being a generalist of a lot of stuff is sensible, just to find that thing which they are really good at.
It's a very hard job to decide how to educate people. In itself it is a skill that requires mastery. And I think that is usually not entirely transferable, it's limited to educating people within the teacher's own subject of mastery. There are no general life teachers. Just people who claim to be, who will appeal to some and not others.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 999 1000 1001 1002 1003 … 1066 Older→ First