2006-07-29 at 4:29pm
I missed this news, but my ex-alma mater has decided that 21% counts as a pass mark.
I just read the article in today’s Times about Second Life - it’s here. A certain Koz is in there. “;->”
Ha ha ha!
Looks like the furry types are petitioning to get the word “yiff” in the OED. Retards. Words are added to dictionaries when their use is prevalent. You have to consult the dictionary maker to see when words are put in. You can’t petition them. They base their decisions on a certain corpus of reading - such as newspapers, magazines and so on. See? Plus lexicographers don’t discriminate - they are equal opportunity linguists.
If you want to get a word in to the dictionary (which is a bullshit idea anyway - dictionaries are descriptive examples of language, not normative - the lack of a word in a dictionary does not mean that the word is not a proper word, it just means that it hasn’t been put in the dictionary), you have to simply get it in a number of different printed souces. I’d reccomend newspapers and magazines. Writing a petition to OUP will not change anything. Dipshits.
Philosophy of Religion exam
Man, that exam was pretty difficult. Still, I struggled through, despite my body conspiring against me (damn my throat and back pain). Four pages on Dostoevsky. Not something I thought I’d be writing as part of a philosophy class, but, hey. Life throws unexpected stuff at you.
In a little while, I’m going to Simon Blackburn’s guest lecture. In the meantime, go and read this. Admittedly, I haven’t read it. But that’s because I have certain tingling pains all over this body of mine and a mind that really needs sleep (tis aspiring towards the Form of rest… just a little joke!).
I might have to cancel my trip to Southall’s mosque this Saturday, since my grandparents are coming over. And, despite their humoured reluctance towards my atheism, I think the thought of me visiting a mosque might just send them over the edge! Heh heh. All in the name of Enlightenment, I say. Anyway, the weekend also has the Darwin Day lecture on Friday night. James Moore and Richard Dawkins talk about Darwin’s legacy with special regard to religion at the LSE.
Sunday is my birthday. If you have a desire to buy me something, here’s my Amazon.co.uk Wish List and here’s my Amazon.com Wish List. If you want to send me some money, PayPal it. Okay, begging over. I’ll be 20. Which gives me the exclusive privilege to slag off ‘teens’ with impunity, since I won’t be one.
I also have Tuesday and Wednesday off next week. As of tommorow, I’ve got a six day weekend. Ownage. In that time, I have an interesting decision I have to make. Say no more. It may involve renegotiating on a moral principle that I hold fairly dear. Long time blog readers may be able to guess what it is. But everyone else will have to wait.
On Friday night, Infidel Guy has got Nick Matzke from the NCSE to talk about evolution and the fundy challenges to the teaching of said subject. Should be interesting. Make sure you tune in and join the chatroom.
Thanks to my Tripod visitors!
I’ve just had an email from Tripod about an account on there that sits virtually untouched from back in 2003:
Dear Tom Morris,
During the last 30 days, your website on Tripod (—URL REMOVED—) achieved 62 pages impressions. This makes your site one of the most popular of the Tripod community in United Kingdom.
[…]
Best regards,
The Lycos Tripod Team.
Dear Tom Morris,
During the last 30 days, your website on Tripod (—URL REMOVED—) achieved 62 pages impressions. This makes your site one of the most popular of the Tripod community in United Kingdom.
[…]
Best regards,
The Lycos Tripod Team.
Wow, sixty two page impressions in a month, and my site is one of the “most popular”! Fantastic!
Government adverts are enough to put anyone off teaching
I saw those horrifying adverts the other day to try to recruit people to the teaching ‘profession’, and it kind of confirmed my belief that teaching was really not a very smart career move (even if you are one of these strange people who thinks that the government aren’t a bunch of criminals and that working for them is immoral in the same way as living off the profits of a Mafia protection racket is immoral). The advert showed children to be consistently happy, smart, cheerful and intelligent. Dolan Cummings sums up my feelings brilliantly with this paragraph:
What’s really depressing is that anyone attracted to teaching by these adverts, anyone persuaded that working with kids really is ‘better than any anti-ageing cream’ is likely to have very little to offer schoolkids. It’s bad enough that TV should be dominated by a cult of youth and the celebration of banality. Is it too much to ask that schools should encourage pupils to aspire to something more?
Yes, frankly it is. Aspiration is a dangerous thing. When you are a body that wants to micro-manage every aspect of citizens lives, and use their money to fund this purpose, you don’t want anybody aspiring to anything good like the pursuit of intellectual goals. Of course, this is the problem. The type of teachers that schools need are exactly the types which aren’t going in to the profession because they think (rightly) that it sucks buttcrust. Of course, some of us have things like impatience and short tempers, so we kind of avoid teaching altogether (I’m not sure I could stand a day working with brats - whether the real life ones or the cartoonish depictions in the Teacher Training adverts).
Which brings me to what I am currently doing. I’m trying to write an article called “What is inclusion?” which I hope will be a beginner’s guide to a lot of the problems with education and society (and, of course, the relation between the two). In this little ditty, I’m going to cover all sorts of things. I’ve been reading a fair bit about these crazy initiation classes they have in American universities to encourage a kind of faux-tolerance. The strangest bit actually was the part about how they had these lectures on diversity training, trying to get new students to embrace and include students of all races (whatever a race is - nobody has given a true description of any biological difference bar some fairly naive anatomical differences such as skin colour or some quite arbitrary defintions such as nationality), by getting them to go to separate classes based on race. What better way to inculcate tolerance and colour-blindness than get all the people of different classes to go to different classes?
The thing I don’t get is how American universities, and let’s be fair, it is mostly American universities who have these ridiculous initiation things, need them. I don’t think there are any real equivalents on campuses here in Britain - sure there are some silly initiation ceremonies (when I started, we had to play a silly memory game to try and learn each others names and some interesting facts about one another, and we had some morsels of advice like “don’t piss your loan away!” and “Hi! We’re the chaplains, and if you need spiritual advice, we are here!”). We don’t have these discrimination lectures, and yet, we seem to get on just grandly. We can get together with people of all the different nationalities, “races”, genders, creeds (political, religious or otherwise) and go and have a few drinks or have a heated philosophical argument in the pub. We don’t need to be diversity-trained. We can quite easily get on with one another without squabbling or resorts to our base instincts of “Ooh, they be different, let’s pick on them!”. That is because we are, to all extents and purposes, adults. (Okay, I may just be a rambling fool with a weblog, but I like to think that my colleagues - most of which are younger than me - are mature adults).
Most thinking people will have disagreements. If we all have different and complicated ideas on fiscal policy or the workings of the human mind or the current world political situation or the free will/determinsim problem, and we can still get along - and academic life has shown how it is possible for people with so many different intellectual committments to get along productively - then why on earth are we going to pick on arbitary things like gender or nationality or ‘race’? I don’t care if you are black or white, or you come from England or France or Zimbabwe. Those things aren’t important. But if you want to have a nice debate about philosophy, be my guest.
The point is that I can’t really think of how this has been inculcated. Of course, I’m probably wrong - it probably was inculcated somewhere. But it seems so damn natural. The idea that you’d have to teach that is so ridiculous. The only possible reason I could think that something like this would take off is if someone had a desire to micromanage, Big Brother-style, people’s thoughts.
Recipe for Success
1. Find mildly effeminate gay man.
2. Find straight couple.
3. Get gay man to help straight man smarten up, get their life in order.
4. Show process and results on national television.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!!!
No offence to effeminate gay men or ‘retrosexual’ straight guys (retrosexual is good), but seriously. What in the names of all things sane is this all about? What a message you are all sending out to the world. God damn it. Life is about more than expensive tailoring and hairdressing. Just stop it, television producers. The world is going to be destroyed if there is anything more about male grooming. No. Just no. Please, damn it, stop it. Something is profoundly wrong, and I want to get off this crazy train. Where’s my Prozac gone?
Would you like to buy some lifestyle?
Or to have delivered some quality logistics? Or maybe you want to do a course on contemporary post-modern lens-based media studies?
Alternatively, you could buy a new car, hire a lorry to do some road haulage or study photography. But due to the fact that some foolish middle management needs to feel cleverer than they really are, some brand spanking new words have arrived - so get ready to use them kids!
If you can’t sell a product based on it’s merits, all you need to do is sell it on it’s ‘lifestyle’. If you have a company that doesn’t really do anything, just sell ‘solutions’. If you don’t want to write that horrid phrase ‘road haulage’ on the side of your brand spanking new lorries, you can just write ‘logistics’ and if you don’t like saying photography - it sounds too common for your company / university / college - then you could just write ‘lens-based media’.
But what about if you used a pinhole camera - which has no lens. Would you not be able to include the use and study of pinhole photography as part of your dissertation / project because it’s not ‘lens-based’?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m just off to enjoy a lifestyle beer solution that covers my needs pub-to-pissed and browse some contemporary lens-based pornography on the Information Superhighway. Now, about that Synergy we spoke about the other day…
Stupidity is a disease.
So says James Watson, the scientist who discovered the stucture of DNA. And I’d agree. But I find that stupidity as a disorder can be solved using the steel-toe cap boots and a tube of epoxy resin.
America’s down - where to next?
The excellent Plastic ask their community… America’s gone to the dogs. Where to go next? Suggestions include Canada, Tuvalu etc…
How about you - where do you find a nice alternative to the totalitarian Bush regime?
Teens spend more time online than watching TV.
According to a survey in AdAge, teenagers are spending more time online than they are watching TV. Well from someone who is technically a teenager, I’d like to say this… the reason I spend more time online than watching TV is simply because TV sucks. It insults me, treats me like a moron and ‘humours’ me with advertising aplenty. I can log on to the Internet, and I’m insulted by real people, not treated like a moron and can filter pop-up adverts. In fact, a few of the advertisers are getting around to realising that when it comes to advertising “less is more”. Simple and straight ads with your message in text are best. None of these multi-million pound flashy campaigns with “punch the monkey”. Simplicity rules, especially when you’re trying to sell me something.
I’ve been tuned out and missed the BBC Weather thing. Ben Metcalfe posted a load of RSS and JSON feeds from BBC Weather. Ian Betteridge described him as Web 2.0’s asshole. Then Ben pulled the feeds. Wow.
