Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I've heard Yanis's idea before, that in a society in rural-urban transition (like modern China) having brown skin is a mark of being part of the "primitive" rural masses rather than a "sophisticated" urbanite. It would be interesting to see if this was the case in 18th Century Europe, for instance.
And earlier. It was very big in the court of Elizabeth I to use white makeup.
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Exactly. 12-year olds are intractable and break things. 13 or 14 year old's are much better workers.
Now you're just being silly. They can't fit up the chimneys after about 8, so just send them out to beg for themselves.
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I never could see how burning carbon-based bio-fuels could claim to be much better than burning carbon-based fossil fuels. Yes, you have an added degree of energy independence, but nothing to do with climate change in any significant way.
Biofuels are a carbon sink while they grow, they convert the CO2 out of the atmosphere back into Oxygen. Oil doesn't do that.
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This is bollix, has nothing whatsoever to do with science communication and is just an example of how low even our science centres will go to be patsies for the government in order to keep the grant dollars flowing. It does you no credit to report it when it is no better than an emotional outburst you may read in a tabloid.
The Centre for Science Communication is funded by private donation, not by government science grants.
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cost benefit equation that thinks (bizarrely) that tertiary arts/humanities education has created too many professional artists (writers/actors) etc will remedy this by reducing tertiary arts courses.
Which I find somewhat ironic. Surely, if we're going to adopt a market approach to education, then the control point is when there aren't enough audience/buyers of the products that various artists make/produce, to support them. If theatre graduates suddenly put on three times as many professional shows, there won't be the audience to support them all enough in the public, and the market will make sure that less shows are put on next time. That'll flow through to students who will be well-informed that there are fewer jobs for theatre graduates, and will study something else.
If we try and control things at the graduate supply end, we should shut down a couple of law schools. We produce way too many law graduates in NZ than we have need for lawyers, and many go on to use their broad-based legal education in other fields. What's the problem with half the graduates of film and theatre studies taking their broad-based arts education and going off and doing something else for their life?
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I hope things were handled better for the staff.
Probably not. In 1997 Otago University was cutting back in the arts - Russian was disestablished, and German and Classics suffered staff losses. The final proposal went to a University Council meeting, and students and staff were protesting outside.
When the affected staff went back to their offices after the council meeting had made the decision, they found letters from HR informing them of the loss of their jobs, a decision that had only been made in the meeting that had just attended. A disturbingly prescient form of efficiency.
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All three videos are no longer available on youtube.
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Emma,
I'm not sure if Hamish reads here regularly, but he does write a regular cricket blog on stuff.co.nz, so you should try there.
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Every time people talk about "Mr Brown" on this thread my first thought is always "man, people are being really rude about Russell today" and then I suddenly click (again) that we're talking about a different Mr Brown.
I worry that people lecturing others about what they should or should not think doesn't help, and in most cases only drives people to keep their thoughts to themselves and to feel anger because they cannot express their thoughts or fears, and where these fester and becomes potentially much more unpleasant.
I don't think you change people very often by lecturing at them. Sometimes maybe, but unlikely. Whether or not they become worse if people keep them in... I dunno. The converse is to say that maybe by showing how they're unpopular, we discourage group think and peer pressure for them to come out in bad ways. One person is probably less likely to express their thoughts as violence than half-a-dozen people who back each other up.
I think some things in people only change generationally. I think part of the reason that the world is largely more enlightened in a number of areas - gender, race, sexuality etc - than it was 50 years ago, is that people who held those old ideas have died off, and that newer generations (even the children of the people who have held those ideas) are more enlightened in those areas. It's a slow way of changing the world, but laws can't often change how people think.
That being said, if someone is a racist bigot, then I'd much rather as a general rule, that they kept those thoughts in their head rather than having them spill out into public. It's not a better world, but it'll probably feel better for those people that are the targets of it.
And I think if you're the subject of some bigotted asshole, then it's nice to have someone else step in and say "hey shithead, don't be a bigotted asshole', rather than having to defend yourself all the time and feel like you're alone in that.
I've been thinking about this a little as this morning at 2am while my girlfriend and I were walking towards my car, some cultured 'yoof' with some boy racer car made a comment about me and then a rather explicit one about my girlfriend as we walked past. I would have liked to have a quiet chat with them about how they're just being really rude, but they were just looking for trouble, which is why they started on me first, so I just ignored them. I would have felt better about that if a couple of other people had told them off however.
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To clarify: suggestion that anti-immigrant sentiment being tapped by Mr Brown is generated by an innate racism of a substantial number of New Zealanders is one of them "massive and unsubstantiated generalizations about groups of people" that should not be made.
I don't think the claim that 5-10% of NZers have some sort of racism is out of line. I know several... in fact, I think if I explored the issue with a bunch of people, I could probably get to double figures out of a couple of hundred acquaintances.