Posts by Kracklite
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You'd have to ask a civil engineer, and in this case, a traffic engineer and urban designer as well.
You do put your finger on a crucial point - much transport design is very narrow-focussed, for example looking at shoving bypasses through without considering either alternatives or the overall urban pattern and habitation - as Prenderghastly did here in Wellington.
Architects are trained to co-ordinate across disciplines and just putting an engineer in charge of this bridge in the middle of a city (as opposed to the French countryside) without involving good architects with expertise in urban design would be naive at best.
To be fair to Jasmax (much as it galls me - despite the very nice Whangarei library, I still haven't forgiven those bastards for Te Papa), the bridge is a concept not a finished design and should be taken as such. If built, it would almost certainly end up looking very different.
Not knowing much about the specifics of Auckland's situation, I probably couldn't say much more.
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Ow, wouldn't want to think of the bending moment in the slanted pier... Not the most logical approach, no, and likely then to change - expensively - through the engineering design process.
6) Why get rid of the present bridge? It is not falling down.
Yet. Metal fatigue.
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This I agree with. Dyslexia as it happens, can actuate enthusiastic pros writing.
We get a lot of dyslexic people in the design fields, I find... which they can find a real problem when they discover that certain core papers require essays.
It does seem to correlate with good verbal, social and visual/spatial composition skills, I've found.
I remember hearing Kim Hill or Katherine Ryan interviewing Jackie Stewart, who is dyslexic, and he said that he thought of non-dyslexic people as "clever", versus himself whom he thought to be relatively unintelligent. I found that rather sad as surely you can't succeed as he has done without having other - and excellent -perceptual and cognitive skills.
It's cases like that which have given impetus to the paradigm of multiple intelligences - the view that thinking is a collection of skills, not just a raw, monolithic mass of generalised brainpower.
Getting a bit OT here, I suppose. Maybe I could go on about my musical tastes... minimalism, anyone? The more reptitive the better.
(Re the student needed - OK)
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Ladyhawke (Pip Brown) is a great ad and role model for Aspergers. She's from the new generation who are OK about it, and talking about the 'difference' it means growing up.
If you're at the high-functioning end, for sure. I certainly view it as an advantage and would not want to be neurotypical by any means - I'd lose so many connection and pattern-recognition skills that I value and enjoy.
There's quite an advocacy movement and at least among Canadian researchers, it's been characterised as an example of "cognitive adaptive radiation" - ie, supposed "disorders" turn out to be advantageous in certain contexts. I've seen some slightly tongue-in-cheek discussions about the usefulness of sociopaths in certain professions...
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A: There is one? Kewl! My submarine has clearly been cruising at too great a depth lately for me not to hear of it.
B: There is one? Shit! Just when I get my credit card account under control!
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Gawd. I just finished reading that last week! I don't especially recommend it. Godwin's a classic "rogue professor," and he has a certain gift, both here and in the Theosophical Enlightenment ,for making the esoteric seem really, really dull.
Too late.
I had to read some Frances Yates to recover.
Then I read Patrick Wright's book on the history of tanks, called, funnily enough, Tank . The connections between Aleister Crowley and British Army armoured warfare expert J. F. C. Fuller are... interesting.
Then it was Theweleit's Male Fantasies and that's OD-ing on the bad craziness.
It all relates to my PhD, you see.
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Welcome to the world of my PhD thesis.
Looks fascinating.
As an aside, I was surprised - and then not surprised - to find that Joscelyn Godwin, who had translated the intricate mannerist allegory, the Hypnerotomachia , also wrote a study of fringe science/conspiracies, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival .
The all-encompassing fringe science and conspiracy theory is a kind of mythology that is cognitively empowering in a way. I suspect that we have an irrepressible instinct to make such cognitive maps and scepticism is a useful brake on its excessive. Without that mapping, we wouldn't be able to function or plan ahead, but too much of it...
Well, there's a nice quote from Richard Feynman on the role of the scientific method as a brake on paranoia: "Science is the art of not fooling oneself".
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Thanks, HORansome. I'll look that up. I just reached for the nearest text on my desk (well, bedroom floor, which is more or less the same thing). Norman Cohn is quite interesting, but I'd better leave it at that...
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you posit a grand Conspiracy, your grand Conspiracy gets shown to be unlikely or even impossible, so you focus on some related matter, hoping to claw back the debate
One definition of a conspiracy theorist is some who claims that it will rain because of an insidious conspiracy and when it doesn't rain, they take it as proof of an ingenious insidious conspiracy.
I'd admit that there are real conspiracies, but the fact that conspiracy A exists is not in any way proof that Conspiracy B exists. A causal link has to be demonstrated, otherwise it remains only a non sequitur.
The sign of a flake, going by the example of the rain, is endless persistent elaboration of a theory in the face of inconvenient evidence. Most genuine conspiracies have been simple, complicated only by their botch-ups. A basic engineering principle is that the more bits there are, the more bits there are to go wrong and any real conspirator abides by this. Grand visions of all-encompassing plots relying on too many variables and risks in a fantastic Heath Robinson-like mechanism are almost by definition incredible.
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I really recommend David Aaronovich's Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History as a good journalistic investigation and analysis of conspiracy theories. It liberally quotes from a damned good bit of fiction too - Eco's Foucault's Pendulum of course.