Posts by BenWilson
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I'm sure they can be used as evidence. I just think the main value of them to police will be in clues. Don't like, btw.
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Rich, I don't think using them as proof is the idea. It's using them for clues.
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Call me a wet liberal pussy
Can I do it in a txt? ura wet libz puss.
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RIP Finn.
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Oh, and I'd also add that 'established maths' is even less disagreeable than both gravity and evolution, which are theories that could be wrong.
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Tussock, the minimum of zero and maximum of 100% are mathematical too, and you can't override those. I get that a lot of approximation formulas will sometimes do that, but that's because they are not 'pure'. They are approximations.
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To a greater or lesser degree, people on the spectrum lack the (as Kathy Sierra put it at Webstock) "spam filter" the rest of us take for granted. They experience everything with the same degree of intensity, at the same "volume". This is one of the biggest problems for AS kids in the classroom -- they're aware of human "noise" that everyone else simply ignores.
:-) ironic, since I write spam filters, and it was no easy task to program them to ignore the irrelevant, the way humans do automatically. "Look you stupid computer, it doesn't matter if there's a 1 instead of an i, or if there's some gaps in the words". "Oh yes it does". "Sigh". It took a fair old while for us to work out that instead of forcing something that doesn't process information the way we do to emulate our behaviour by writing rule after bloody rule, that we could actually leverage the computer's talent by getting it to learn it's own way. And surprise, surprise, the computer starts discovering extremely powerful spam features that we have trained ourselves to ignore, like the color used in an HTML tag, or just exactly how often spammers use some fairly common word. And the nice thing about that is it's much harder for the spammer to notice it either.
It would probably be more accurate to say that AS kids have different filters, rather than none. When they become absorbed in something, they probably are ignoring a lot of things. It's just hard to know exactly what they are ignoring. They may, for instance, be listening to the noise of talking, but ignoring what the talking is about, and focusing on the sound of it. Which might give them quite an acute perception of human communication on a totally different level, hearing emotion as conveyed in the voice, for example.
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That Baggs vid is amazing. She asks a hard question in "How many of you believe that I actually wrote this?". Being honest with myself, I find it hard to believe for exactly the reasons she says, that the non-language communicating autists have clouded my judgment. But then again, I was amazed by how many of the things she was doing that she called communication are exactly what my 2 year old does. Endless fiddling and playing with mundane objects, in ways that are quite ritualized. He also talks to them, so I can at least grasp that communication in the blanker slate of a child's mind is nowhere near as rigidly defined as is usually accepted.
From what I've read of very early religions there is a great deal of similar thinking going on there too - the Vedic rituals are all about preserving some perceived balances in the world for no purpose other than themselves.
Furthermore, I can honestly say I feel the same way about my own thoughts a lot of the time. Taking absorbed fascination in the mundane can be quite involving, even if it seems to others that you're just sitting there staring at nothing or fidgeting in an annoying way. Very often the fidgeting itself is an expression or even a part of the thought, and it can lead to conclusions all of it's own. The famous example of Sir Isaac Newton deriving a great deal of inspiration from observing an apple falling springs to minds. And Mozart relates that a lot of his music appeared directly to him in visual observations of the world.
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Che, you said
the maori seats were seat up in the aftermath of the land wars, as a sop to kupapa maori.
Which sounds very much to me like the sop was a reaction to the wars.
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there is no "hard-fought" political rights about it.
You don't think the land wars involved fighting?
Um, Ben, I'm sure there were plenty of Maori who weren't down with all this women's suffrage nonsense but I don't feel much regret that they were 'forced' to accept it.
I would feel worse about it if they had had no say in the matter at all. And I doubt that the majority against the idea was that overwhelming considering that half of Maori are women.
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