Posts by Stephen Judd
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I always felt a defining moment in my maturation was the transition from identifying with Bart to identifying with Homer.
-
Their lazy pigeon holing of the riches to be found on this site doesn't auger well for them.
Yes, they should have drilled down a bit further.
*boom boom*
-
It's pretty typical for my ride in Wellington. I have a scary moment probably every other ride. Scary for me that is - if you were in a car, seeing what Josh's video shows, it'd be annoying but not life-threatening. Which I think in the end is why motorists feel that they're not really as bad as all that, while cyclists think that motorists are dangerously careless bastards.
I've been brooding about this off and on for years now, and I have finally come to this conclusion:
When I was a kid, biking to school, there were lots of cyclists at school rush hour, rather than the school run. And motorists expected them to be there, and drove accordingly.
Nowawdays this isn't true. Cyclists are rare, and so motorists don't look out for them. And I now believe they never will. Why would they? Cyclists are rare. No amount of awareness campaigning will get people to pay attention to a hazard that they don't encounter frequently. Cyclists are rare.
In the days when cycling was common, there were certain factors that contributed. 1, cars were relatively more expensive. 2, car traffic was less dense.
Neither of those factors is true now, nor will the current car density and cheapness change in the next couple of years. Therefore, I don't see us getting back the conditions that led to lots of safe, salient cyclists out there.
I am resigned to things being as they are now until we have cities which deliberately, a la Copenhagen or Amsterdam, seek to reverse the dominance of the automobile. (And that has taken decades to achieve in those cities, from a base plan that predates-automobiles). Or when oil prices become high enough that car ownership is prohibitive for the less well-heeled again.
Basically, I expect to pootle around in safety on my bike when I'm in my 60s.
-
Josh Campbell is a teacher in Chch who bikes to work every day, and that's a montage of the, er, highlights from his handlebar-mounter camera.
-
Biking in Christchurch:
-
Oh, and can someone write me a script to replace all instances of "your mum" with "a mainstream consumer"?
Why not go for "Mum and Dad" or "your grandparents" or "the less demanding punter" or something?
-
Not Freud, Sapir and Whorf (and yes I know that's a contentious hypothesis).
-
Apropos of what Hansel said: my late mum would have given you an earful for that, which I will now channel for you.
It precisely in trivial language that sexism manifests, and it is precisely its trivality and commonplaceness and consequent direct route to our unconscious that make it important to combat it.
No, you can't control it, but you can point it out.
Another point about stereotyping is that sterotypes need not be incorrect to be troublesome. If ethnic group X figures disproportionately in the crime figures, it is nonetheless wrong to speak as though Xes are all criminals.
If I had said what Russell did where Mum could hear, she would have looked at me sternly and said "how do you know I wouldn't want high-speed broadband? That is very presumptuous of you." Russell is lucky she is not around to be a PAS poster any more. And she would have applauded (as I do) Joanne for having pointed it out.
-
most times when they're being asked to set up a system for someone with no tech nous, it's a woman.
... but when you're asked to fix a system that's been really rooted, it's for a man who should have asked for help earlier but didn't.
As an ex-ITsupport person for a university I know whereof I speak.
-