Posts by Stephen Judd
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Hard News: What did you do yesterday?, in reply to Dave Waugh,
Cheers for the suggestions Dave. I'm in Christchurch now, where Cycle Traders and Around Again Cycles seem to have a good stock of parts and know-how. But it's good to have another source of rare bits up my sleeve!
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To be honest, the Clark angle is affecting my estimation of Clark more than of Holmes. I'd be interested to know how that friendship started.
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Hard News: What did you do yesterday?, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
we have a ladies version of the Hercules, with original chain guard and leather wheel skirt. How old would it be?
Mine, or yours? Either way, I don't really know enough about them. I think mine must be postwar though because the hub is a Sturmey Archer -- before then, Hercules made their own hubs. Unfortunately, successive owners have stripped/modified enough bits on mine that I doubt it's possible to date with any accuracy anyway. My aim is not so much to make a perfect restoration, as to do a good enough rebuild to get a distinctive looking and rideable city bike out of it again.
That leather wheel skirt sounds like something though!
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Thanks for the mention! I was moved to write that because I spent a good chunk of the day glued to Twitter getting crosser and crosser. I don’t know why. Just walk away Stephen, walk away.
I also managed to spend the afternoon (eventually) successfully fitting a new Sturmy Archer gear cable to my old Hercules which I’m doing up. I learned a lot of things in the process:
- there are some amazing online resources on ancient bike tech
- you really must read those resources before you get all excited and just pile in
- the previous owner had removed a number of useful and necessary fittings before repainting and then put them back in the wrong place or not at all :-/
- the reasons I was so crap at metalwork at school are all still there, namely lack of patience, an inability to put things in a consistent and logical place (how did that nut end up in a fold of my tshirt?), tendency to maniacally thrash at things without stepping back to ask why they’re not working. -
Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Russell Brown,
OK, I’m surprised, and indeed Karen seems well tough enough to deal with some shortlived media attention. But would you admit that it *is* surprising? It could have gone badly.
Perhaps I’m over-sensitive.
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Hard News: The Next Act, in reply to Russell Brown,
I called it four days ago. But what a shabby, repellent thing to do. Whatever Karen really needs, it isn't national media exposure.
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I am more troubled by the potential of unbreakable encryption to be used by paedophile rings
1. Unbreakable encryption is already freely available to anyone who cares to use it.
2. Any encrypted thing must be decrypted by an end user to be useful to them. There will be traces on any end devices where this has happened. A user sufficiently clueful to eradicate such traces is a user already in the group of people identified in 1 above.
3. The real enabling technology for socially harmful information of this kind is not encryption but recording. I cannot understand the logical grounds on which people whose go-to objection to new tech is the child porn angle tolerate the free availability of cameras.
4. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN.
5. After at least 20 years of child porn, bomb making and other internet scares, haven't we had enough, for fuck sake? -
Is my page with Mega's ads injected into it an unauthorised derivative work, I wonder?
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Russell Brown,
it’s also really important to steer clear of the idea that women and men are biologically and neurologically different and their responses to their environment may consequently differ, even though that’s an uncontroversial fact anywhere outside the humanities. ... It will likely cause a a shitfight. It’s really only safe to talk about gender as a social construct
It would be a bit less likely to cause a shitfight if we could rigorously use quantifiers like "some" and "many". Lots of indisputably biological differences (for example height, upper body strength) are only differences in an aggregate, statistical sense, and we shouldn't erroneously extrapolate out that I'm taller than Danielle.
I personally feel on safer ground talking about masculinity whatever that is than speculating about the experience of a group I don't belong to, but maybe that's down to my upbringing by a stern 70s feminist ;-)
In the present case, where we are talking about antisocial behaviour that skews strongly male, it's not clear to me how labelling its cause as neurological or biological actually would shape a reasonable policy response -- it seems to me that a response aimed at shaping culture will be hard to tell from a response aimed at blunting innate behaviour. I just don't think it's as helpful as it is interesting. And it may be that the biological basis for spree killing is not testosterone driven status aggression alone. Perhaps the biological fact of having a penis makes it much more likely that you get a particular kind of socialisation which is also a prerequisite.
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