Posts by richard
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
And how is that different from the dozens of fairly graphic accounts of surviving sexual abuse I can walk into Borders and purchase? Some people get their stories published in a book. Some people post them on the 'net. If it works for them, fine. But you can't condemn one without the other.
I didn't condemn it. I just said that I have trouble feeling any particular concern.
And presumably the defendant in this case is not a survivor of murder?
-
The charges related to material on the site which depicted the assault, rape and murder of children.
For some reason, I am not feeling the outrage on this one. It is one thing to write the story as "therapy", it is a different matter again to post it on the internet.
You seem to be making a "slippery slope" argument, one no more compelling than the usual squawking from the religious right that (say) doing away with legal discrimination against homosexuals will bring about the end of the world as we know it.
-
His version of a hood is quite funny in its way, and taking the hoodies' slogan to its logical conclusion ... but where using an image of the Klan is concerned, people are into knee jerk territory, so non-Kapiti readers would fail to make the connection. Guess liberals still have some taboo topics for humour.
Uh. no. The point of the hoodie campaign is that not everyone who wears one is a potential criminal (and statistically speaking, this is certainly true -- especially for those who wear the hoodies Ron Mark sells). Whereas, by any reasonable standard, anyone who wears a Klan hood for real is a criminal -- it was (and is) an organization whose entire existence was predicated on subjugating African Americans (and other minorities), and routinely tortured and murdered in furtherance of its aims. It is akin to dressing up as a death-camp guard, and then trying to claim you just need to get to know the person in the uniform.
You might argue that gang patches could close to being as intrinsically offensive and intimadatory as a Klan hood (and even that would be stretch) -- but hoodies are a long way short of being gang patches. This is not about liberals lacking a sense of humour -- Evans' prank is ignorant and reprehensible.
-
Speaking of the Quiz Machines, there was one shining period of a couple of months where several people in Christchurch paid most of their living expenses out of them. One of them turned up in the video game room of the students association. I was walking past, and saw it, and arrived 5 minutes late for a lecture with something like $10 worth of 20 cent pieces in my pocket (this in a year when rent was something like $50 a week).
Fairly soon a group of university challenge alums would spend a couple of lunchtimes a week driving round the city to known locations of the machines (and I seem to remember buying jugs of beer for people who tipped us off about new ones). There was one at the airport, and several in bars in town -- and I remember occasions when we had well over a $100 to divvy up, all in coin (and that is after buying a few jugs, and giving the driver a few dollars for petrol).
The machines had two dispensers in them, and would make an enormously satisfying "chunka-chunka-chunka" sound as they paid out -- you could hear a gap as it switched to the second cylinder, after which you knew it was on its last $20, and a big win would then cause it to "green screen".
They fairly quickly reprogrammed them, but it was good while it lasted :-)
-
I know this is some complicated revolving fund, but it is a lot of money, however you slice it -- but for my $0.02, I would like to see the Government (any government!) lift the Marsden Fund by a factor of four of five. There is a huge number of good ideas going unexplored because such a small faction of Marsden proposals get funded -- and in many cases, these projects take advantage of existing infrastructure (either physical or intellectual), so increasing this fund would also do a wonderful job of better utilizing many existing resources in the university and research sectors.
I am a New Zealand scientist working in the US, so I have seen both systems from the inside (very much from the inside, as I have participated in the process of handing out money by the NSF [National Science Foundation], and regularly review proposals for other agencies). Whatever other failings the US may have (and however much my American colleagues may grumble about the tight competition for money) New Zealand could do much more to fund the sort of open-ended research the Marsden is designed to support.
The fraction of successful applications for Marsden funding is currently tiny, and doubling or tripling the fund would not significantly lower the quality of funded applications, and adding more money would draw more applicants in from the sidelines, many of whom have good projects, but do not apply since the chances of success are so low.
-
I remember my office mate downloading the source code to Mosaic and compiling it on a Sun 3 workstation. I think it must have been late 1993, as I was close to the end of my PhD -- it was enormously cool, even if there was nothing much to see...
But it sure beat the vt100 interface the web had before then.
Those were the days :-)
While Russell is working out how much he would pay for his 60GB a month habit, he might also work out what a brand new MacBook Air would have set you back ten years ago -- and how it much it would have weighed.
Actually, all I really need to know about the MacBook Air is a) whether I can buy a padded sleeve for it that looks like the yellow US Letter internal mail envelope that shows up in all the adverts and b) how long it will be before I can buy a single platter hard-drive that holds more than 80GB of data for the thing. I am a little worried I will run out of room, but am trusting that Moore's law will solve the problem before it becomes painful.
-
Between the Superbowl and Super Tuesday, suddenly everything round here is all suped-up, as it were.
The primaries came up at lunch today, and many people who usually know exactly what they think were saying they had simply no idea what they would do tomorrow (well, those of my colleagues who are US citizens rather than merely US taxpayers). But some previously rock-ribbed Clintonites were beginning to waver, so if my small and very unscientific poll of scientists is any guide, there is a good chance tomorrow could be a very interesting day.
-
This solves the airport problem:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=108044
The MagnumMac problem can presumably be adjusted by threatening to ridicule them on your widely read blog :-) -
That string of Herald columns really is laughable -- Inhofe is a gold-plated clown, and seeing Owen McShane on his list of "experts" takes me back to Owen's regular laughable forays into climate skepticism on soc.culture.new-zealand back in the 1990s. He was vigorously fisked then, but does not seem to have leant from the experience.
As to the sudden news that water vapor is a greenhouse gas, this has been known for 100 years, and was even discussed by Arrhenius -- this is simply embarrassing. As someone has already pointed out, the issue is whether or not that CO_2 is the dominant greenhouse gas, but that its concentration has been rising rapidly, almost certainly as a result of anthropogenic forcing (we know how much oil and coal gets burned every year, and about half of the resulting CO_2 stays in the atmosphere, the rest being absorbed by various sinks) and that the problem is then to figure out the consequences of this.
If I can't think of anything else to do tomorrow, I may even try my hand at a letter to the editor.
-
It is a shame for Santa cultists that the name "Santeria" is already taken, I guess.
But speaking of the jolly red gentleman, the equations at the bottom of this Norad Tracks Santa video describe the increase in mass of an object moving close to the speed of light, which is something of a rebuttal to this piece of cynicism.
On the other hand, who knew that Santa flies low over Iraq delivering precision guided presents to all and sundry??