Posts by richard
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I didn't get any of those. Is this a Fulbright thing?
NSF funded fellowship?? (Well, the NSF has just added a "scientific integrity" training requirement for all grant-supported students and post-docs. But not, oddly, principal investigators... But if the training had been in Berkeley I suspect people here would have grumbled less).
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The feminist community is not one that I consider to be feminist. I moved to wordpress because that is where the radical feminists are
People's Front of Judea. Splitters!
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See, what happens when you buy into this wholesale is the extremely frustrating conversations I had with feminists at university - the place where I stopped calling myself a feminist, and which might be relevant to Jolisa's question if I thought I could answer that without getting really angry. The most remarkable of these conversations took place in the letters section of Canta and if I knew I'd have to prove my creds I might have kept it.
I must admit, this is starting to sound a little a stereotype bolstered by anecdotal evidence ("Most X are lazy. I knew an X once, and he was very lazy") -- I mean, I can think of any number of annoying interactions I have had with sophomoric adherents to all sorts of points of view, but I am not sure I would want to use any of these as justifications for not now sharing those points of view.
F'r instance, thinking back to my own Canta reading days, I had several discussions with earnest young Christians - and while I do not now espouse the Christian faith, I hope it is because I find it principal tenets to be at odds with the actual nature of the universe, not because some clown once insisted that I decide whether the writers of the gospels were either mad, lying or communicating the inspired word of God.
And FWIW, I met a huge number of extremely nice and exceptionally smart feminists when I was at university. :-)
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On the other hand, I regularly get brassed off by PETA and the lunatic fringe of the green movement (both of which would disapprove of many decisions I make in my life) -- but I am happy to come out in favor of the environment and animal welfare.
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Regarding SATC2 - haven't seen it, don't intend to, because I'm not interested in spending $40 on babysitting in order to see it.
I am sure a truly pro-feminist husband would put the kids to bed while you went out and enjoyed this epic on your own :-)
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Russell:
Bart, you've got it easy. I know a cosmologist. He goes to dinner parties and people ask him if there's a God.
In America, mind.
In New Zealand too. (Unless you are talking about someone else -- it is very possible that Russell knows more than one cosmologist. Personally, I must be up to several hundred by now, but your mileage may vary :-)
Actually, people with a religious axe to grind are usually a bit more circumspect about it -- they usually start off by saying something like "Well, ahem, I suppose that's all very speculative, isn't it?" And then get nervous if I say "No"
Although at least one charmer has told me to my face that I am simply wasting my time, because it is clearly much too hard. So far as I can tell these individuals are not motivated by religion, so much as a paucity of imagination.
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I was also wondering what sort of mouth-breather pays ruinous airport internet fees to read the Perigo's, um, solo effusions.
So many questions, so little time.
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How funny -- looks like we now know how to make a bunch of libertarians inordinately happy, without excessively exerting yourself or (in the US, at least) going to the trouble of repealing the Civil Rights Act.
Like Keith, I very much suspect that this black list is the result of the owner of a piece of private property exercising his/her right to do whatever s/he wants with said property -- so Perigo and co should be thrilled to see this happen, and they should be thrilled in a HAPPY way, not in an o-my-stars-pass-the-smelling-salts-they-are-finally-taking-us-seriously way.
Poor lambs.
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It takes an amateur astronomer to know this, but actually the absolute latitude of Ithaca is lower than Christchurch.
In other words, the winter days are brutally shorter in Christchurch than Ithaca.
So you can multiply your Ithaca SAD by about 102 per cent to reach how lousy poor Emma is feeling...
Actually, David in the long tradition of internet pedantry, there is more to it than just latitude. Ithaca stands at the south end of a glacial valley, and from downtown (Cornell is "on the hill") this can shorten the effective period of daylight, as the sky does not subtend a full hemisphere to many observers, reducing the amount of direct sunlight experienced around dawn and dusk.
Secondly, Ithaca is well to the west of the boundary of Eastern Standard time, whereas Christchurch is closer to the leading edge of its time zone. Consequently, dusk and sunset can occur somewhat earlier in local time in Ithaca than in Christchurch, further increasing the apparent duration of darkness for those of us who are not to greet the dawn.
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Sorry. Posted twice.