User talk:Armondikov/Now

Well damn. Usually they're interesting. Тy talk 02:07, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * The point is that if I write this shit down I can stop thinking about it. So therefore it frees up time to think of other things instead of circulating the same idea over and over. So in one respect it's working. Scarlet A.pngnarchist 10:59, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

ADK
Because I am lazy. Тy talk 17:17, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
 * This is what I thought. No one likes typing out things in full, even if it means holding down the shift key. Scarlet A.pngnarchist 17:18, 22 November 2011 (UTC)
 * And A is just too short. I call ListenerX LX, Ace McWicked Ace, and called MordantMaenad MM. See? Laziness. Тy talk 17:20, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

What.
"Aaha!!!" screams some artsy type. Probably with an ironic nose-ring. "But art is about creativity!! If you were drawing like that you may as well take a photograph. TRUE art comes from within. You shouldn't draw what you see because that's BORING and so MUNDANE! Feel it!" Fair enough, I say, but I'm not the one wasting my money on New Age cures and homoepathic remedies and stuck on websites putting down "spiritual but not religious". Just saying.

I am coming to seriously believe that you have a developmental disability or are missing the right hemisphere of your brain. -- 19:11, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I have no sympathy at all for what is politely called "art" these days, but that post is implying far too narrow a view of art. It does take a lot of skill to be able to draw what you see, but if one only drew real scenes, it would completely waste art's potential to render the impossible. 19:26, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * And since when does abstract art mean New Age, quackery leanings? That actually falls under prejudice--  19:30, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I think I'm going to call parody on this. Also, Brx, get edumacated -- don't perpetuate left brain/right brain woo. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 19:35, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You're right, Nebuchadnezzar. However, in this case my offense was not so egregious: I was exaggerating.  Hemispherectomies have shown no noticeable changes in personality, but I was merely commenting on ADK's history of being disturbingly obtuse.--  19:44, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh no, my first comment was addressed at ADK's little nugget of "wisdom." Because, as we all know, real scientists would never peddle quackery. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 20:22, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I enjoy people getting irate over hyperbole. Scarlet A.pnggnostic 22:24, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Ha! That's rich.  Weren't you part of the crowd that freaked out over the Cordovan Jews metaphor I had made?  At least I had the decency to explicitly point out that to hold them as though they were exactly comparable would be a gross exaggeration.  You don't get to say stupid things like that and then shrug it off as joking without explaining yourself a little better.--  22:05, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * You truly are an idiot. Scarlet A.pngnarchist 22:08, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * If you want to call someone an idiot, you must explain why. You can't win just by insulting people, you know.--  22:16, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * "TRUE science comes from logical thinking and rigorous experimentation. You can't just make stuff up as you go along!"
 * Fair enough, I say, but I'm not the one who thinks he's a soulless, deterministic robot that communicates in binary code. Just saying. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 22:43, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * 01001111 00100000 01010010 01001100 01011001 00111111 Scarlet A.pngbomination 22:49, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * FTFY. Тy talk 22:57, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Binary solo. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 22:59, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Flight of the Concords FTW. 01:30, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Someday, someone will explain "art" to me. personally, I think everyone is full of it.  If you like it, it's probably art.  If you don't like it, it's probably not.  ;-)  [[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot   I hate sluts 22:15, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The thing is, the point was never about art in the first place. Scarlet A.pngpathetic 22:17, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Sayeth Zappa: "The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a "box" around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?" Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 22:21, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Ohhh, I love that. and sorry to hijack your thread, but the 'art' issue was more interesting than whiny rants of various people.  There is a UK show called Black Mirror, that I watched the first ep of, yesterday.  spoiler alert Someone kidnaps the princess and forces the PM to have sex with a pig on camera for the world.  Turns out it's an artist who claims to have made "the most real art ever" or something... Which always makes me stumble, cause what some people call "performance art" others call life.  It's very strange blurred line on the extreme.  I know people who write tech papers, or articles for wikis that are so fluent with the language, so creative in the way they use words that it is both "like art" and "art" to me.  Same with very skilled signers.  Their daily conversations take on an artistic side.  Zappa is right.  for different reasons for me, than perhaps what he intended, but he's very right.[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot   I hate sluts 22:26, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I am yet to watch that so I refused to read passed the word "pig"... Scarlet A.pngsshole 22:28, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * It's not animal cruelty, it's art! Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 22:32, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I"ve actually thought about that case a lot. As well as cases of news photographers taking pictures of horrors going on in front of them.  One famous picture is of a starving child in somewhere like Ethiopia, who is clearly being followed by a carrion feeding bird.  if you see it, take pictures of it, even touch it - are you obligated to fix or try to fix it?  and if it's one animal you rescue from thousands, does that make the overal "it" any better?  and if the intent is to bring awareness, is that better than an attempt to photograph the moment of death? This all rambles in my head.  a place there are never any answers, just more questions.[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]Godot   I hate sluts 22:36, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Hence the popular solution to morality: "God/the gummint/big boss man/my pappy said so." Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 22:41, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I'd be more fussed by the starving dog if the people protesting it lifted a finger to save all starving dogs, not just the one that was brought to their attention. Alas, as humans we're forever going to be swayed by salience. Scarlet A.pngd hominem 23:59, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Just noticed this on RC.
Good stuff there. and for what it's worth, I stopped wearing a poppy years ago, and people can take their scorn and shove it. PintOfStout Talk Good people drink good beer. 00:50, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'm not against the poppy per se, just against the social enforcing of it, as that's the number 1 way of stripping any symbol of its meaning. And when people pour scorn on you for mentioning this... well, they're really just reinforcing the problem. Scarlet A.pngmoral 00:53, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * As someone who has had a bit to do with the RSA over the years, and knowing that the sale of the poppies is the main source of income they have for looking after veterans in their old age, I have no issue with a culture of social enforcement. It's a brilliant marketing strategy for a wonderful cause.  --DamoHi 00:59, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure where the "wonderful cause" comes in, but in part I'm looking at the situation through a particular lens, that being the political pressure that the Canadian legion used to force the Canadian War Museum to soften its approach to presenting the difficult history of Allied bombings of civilian populations during WWII. That, and the glorification of war and warriors turns me off. Also, if we're going to have veterans, raise taxes to get the funds to take care of them. It shouldn't rely on charity. PintOfStout Talk Good people drink good beer. 01:06, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * If your acceptance of "social enforcement" is financial, then you should probably petition for taxes to be raised and directed to it (As Pint points out). I would actually have little issue with this, at least it's honest. If your aim is for people to truly think and remember, then "social enforcement" is the very last thing you need to do, ever. You can not legislate people into thinking, indeed you risk turning what should be a notable cause in which people should put a lot of care and attention into something done "just because". "Just because" is never a good reason. My mother recently spent a full day wrapping parcels to send of to Afghanistan for Christmas, she has hosted more of my brother's squaddie friends at her house and fed them when they were on leave than I can count, she's done a lot of fundraising for help for heroes and regularly uses the BFPO to send things out. Yet, people would judge her exclusively on whether she wears a cheap piece of plastic and paper for a few days of the year. Scarlet A.pngpathetic 01:15, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I would say that from what I understand, both the "stop and think" and the "make money" points of poppy selling are pretty important to the RSA, with the profit motive just shading (not that they would admit this in public). Don't know who these people who judge people exclusively on whether they wear a poppy or not, or why anyone would pay any attention to them.  I do take your points though, perhaps we haven't got to that state of affairs in NZ quite yet.  DamoHi 01:27, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, there's the one where they're demanding that the England football team be allowed to wear them in a game (even though this hasn't been an issue), there's a yearly pillorying of Jon Snow for not wearing them, and then the sparkly expensive ones you get on the reality TV shows. It's getting out of hand. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>gnostic 14:15, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I remember feeding poppies to sheep in my grandma's neighbor's farm in the hopes of getting them high.--68.230.64.189 (talk) 02:16, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Debate
You wrote: "What people seem to try to mean is this: Let's have an open discussion where alternative views on the evidence can be aired freely." I highly doubt that this is what people mean most of the time. What they probably mean is, "Let me convince you why you're wrong, possibly in a way that will allow me to show off in front of a bunch of other people." A lot of "debates" are about dominance contests, not open exchange.

Even so, in the cases where the other person really does want an honest discussion but then it devolves into a shouting match, this failure was not a result of them using the word "debate." It's just a result of cognitive biases and other errors. (How do I know? Because if you had asked this person to taboo "debate," they would describe an honest discussion.)

Other than that small nitpick, I agree with the rest of what you said. In fact, I almost always use the word "discussion" instead of "debate" to express the kind of conversation that I want, and I also include a handful of disclaimers similar to the flowchart on your userpage. 15:19, 4 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I suppose it could be better if I'd said "what people aspire to mean...". I see your point about dominance contests, that is probably closer to what the main problem is and possibly why I always prefer "discussion" to "debate" too. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>pathetic 15:38, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

Sexism today
It's simply a case of what I like to call "discrimination denialism." Allow me to plug Sebesta again: "The public’s concept of a racist is a stereotype. They think of some belligerent person, perhaps wearing strange or unusual clothing, screaming hostile slogans of white supremacy and anti-African American hostility, some uneducated lower-income Halloween character lacking good middle class decorum." Anyone who thinks discrimination just disappears after nominal legal equality is living in an ahistorical fantasyland. The tropes live on in a more muted manner, but are still present. Often, they draw on the "benevolent" or "paternalistic" bigotry of the past. The last two parts of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve and D'Souza's The End Of Racism (this is an expert dissection of D'Souza's pseudohistory) pretty much encapsulate all of these tropes, in the former positing biological differences and the latter positing "civilizational differences." Both are essentially ways of saying, "Look, black people were made for the ghetto and if you try to help them out, you're actually hurting them. But we're not racist, we believe in legal equality!" Or in the words of Bob Herbert, "a genteel way of calling someone a nigger." And you know what I think on the sexism front. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 00:50, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I view this as the more difficult part to shake. Undoubtedly they're just the death throes of the more explicit "stereotypical" -isms that will go away with time, but this will still be an arduous task and more difficult to spot. More importantly, though, I don't think this can go away with the ghetto-isation that we've currently got. It's more deeply ingrained than we care to admit; we're even thinking of it in terms of who is "different", which is simply wrong. While I don't think that we're 100% there yet we need to realise that the goal of organisations like the "National Black Police Association", movements like "Women's Lib" and even the entire concept of "LGBT" (or "LGBTIQQAGHAKAIKNCXXXLG") itself need to be there to put themselves out of a job, and that one day they simply won't be needed. If you can't envision a future where that's the case then what is the point? It's possibly the only way we can get away with this non-stereotyped -ism precisely because the legal equality only gets us so far. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>postate 09:32, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree to some extent on the "ghetto-isation," but that's in part due to the fact that activist organizations can only handle so many issues and it's a waste to duplicate efforts. The more explicit "-isms" are now just pushed outside of "polite society," but go free behind closed doors, e.g. Wells Fargo's "ghetto loan" programs for the "mud people." I also can't believe I forgot one of the most egregious memes of the past few years -- the self-congratulatory Village idiot wank over "post-racial America." Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 15:11, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I think this Cracked article proves that there definitely isn't a "post-racial" America. It's very much alive and kicking. But one day, perhaps, we'll be at a point where we have to start being inclusive with activism. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>sshole 18:14, 5 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry bout that. I whited it out.  as long as you don't look in the edits.  don't have any idea how to white those out.[[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]<font face="Estrangelo Edessa"><font color="Blue">Godot   I hate sluts 22:32, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Monopoly is not like economics
Now we're eating boiled Monopoly money just to stay alive! Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 20:35, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Hehe. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>pathetic 20:48, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Even if you can't counterfeit it, Mr. Bubbles will be there to throw money at you. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 21:05, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
That's H.L. Mencken, who is otherwise a jackass. Makes sense to me. I'm not going to spend my time stirring shit and pissing people off because of some misbegotten sense of intellectual superiority (it kills me to have to keep doing this, but inb4 etc. etc.- I'm different, etc. etc.- let's stay on topic, please). Yeah, there are some really crappy beliefs out there. But that doesn't it's all crappy. Some of the nicest people I've ever known were Muslims. No affiliation to Al Quaeda. I had no fear that they might become "radicalized," either- just like I have no fear that you'll decide to pull a gun and apply scientific principles to society the hard way. You're saying "That's absurd!" but I'm blowing it right back into your face: supposing I actually did interpret your beliefs in such a fashion, it wouldn't be any different than you interpreting every Muslim as a potential terrorist. Doesn't matter what you gleaned from the Koran, too. The lesson you need to take from this little spiel of mine is that you don't get to decide the terms of someone else's beliefs. That's right. The Koran might say to put all infidels to the sword but it's not up to you to decide if all Muslims want to follow the Koran to the letter. Let me tell you, I've never had a Muslim stick a sword through me, despite my being an atheist. Because the Muslims I've known don't adhere to that kind of Islam. Finally, why don't you go tell Martin Luther King Jr. that religion is bad (thanks for that one, PintofStout). Go right ahead.-- 15:01, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * MLK *knowingly* used religion to his advantage. He chose his words to intentionally manipulate whites and blacks into doing what he felt was right and justified, by hitting hot buttons in religion.  He talks about this openly.  He writes about the potential misuse of religion as most people are not critical thinkers and if you tell them "god says so", they will follow.  it's good that what he did was peaceful.  It's a weak ass argument, anyhow.  Bit like saying "hitler liked X, therefore X must be bad".  "MLK was Y, therefore Y was good".  Religion, as an organized set of beliefs (not the actual belief in a god, or in Jesus, or in Karma) is bad, because it demands of people that they do not think, but rather that they put their faith in other "better minds" to do the thinking for them.  That is the danger of it.  I dont' know what article ADK wrote on that ticked you off, but I've never seen him simply bash religion, all religion in one set as you seem to be implying.  Do you have a link, and are you sure you understood his point?  [[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]<font face="Estrangelo Edessa"><font color="Blue">Godot   I live in the Infinite monkey cage 15:09, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * (EC) Godot said most of what I was going to say. And I'll add one more thing: religion still has negative impacts even when it doesn't create extremists, such as when a parent gives his/her child alternative medicine instead of a real cure, or when someone tries faith healing instead of going to the doctor. 15:16, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I'll write a less sweary version later, just in case the point was lost. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>bomination 15:35, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * And of course there are some benefits to individuals who believe. It's comforting; it's a source of social interaction; it's a source of community moral control; it's a source for dealing with grief and pain and suffering.  Our collective of human society would not be all the wonderful things it is or was, without religion.  But that does not mean it should be left without reproach for its misuse, or not studied critically for its lies, its demands, and its very control.  [[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]<font face="Estrangelo Edessa"><font color="Blue">Godot   I live in the Infinite monkey cage 15:38, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Godot, I'm kinda glad you brought this up...I seem to recall a study on prayer and belief that suggests that the actual practice of faith actually modifies your brain chemistry (or at least kicks in the chemicals that make you feel better about yourself; I dunno, I'm not a psychiatrist). Has this been discussed on this site?  Would make for an interesting article (a scientific explanation for why people might think that faith heals?) -- Seth Peck (talk) 16:01, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * I know the man you need to speak to about it, but he will almost certainly take issue with the conclusion. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>moral 16:09, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Haha, indeed. I might look for it anyway.  -- Seth Peck (talk) 16:24, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * ADK, what (which?) of your many essays, is Brick's rant related to? [[Image:Pink mowse.png|25px]]<font face="Estrangelo Edessa"><font color="Blue">Godot   I live in the Infinite monkey cage 15:39, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * EC "because it demands of people that they do not think, but rather that they put their faith in other "better minds" to do the thinking for them. " That's not necessarily true. AFAIK, there are Protestant traditions, for example, that are based on the idea that the individual needs to read and study and think about scripture on her own terms in order to come to a direct/personal/less mediated understanding of God. Also, some approaches to religious belief, like other ideologies, give people the intellectual tools with which to resist oppression--liberation theology, Christian anarchism, Christian pacifism, etc; that's something that I think is too easily discounted by the nouveaux atheists in their rush to claim some of the moral and intellectual high ground. FWIW, I don't believe in supernatural beings, but huge parts of the message/teachings of Jesus and the ways that people have used those ideas for what I see as sharp and relevant social and political critiques are becoming more and more important for how I understand the world. In terms of how it has the potential to give people a common way in which to understand their situations and to work together to resist and contest oppression, I have no problem with giving a healthy measure of respect to religious belief. PintOfStout Talk Good people drink good beer. 15:45, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The primary difference there is that we can examine Jesus' teachings as written in the Bible and make a decision based upon them. One can easily talk about what Jesus said, but he's by no means the only individual in the world to ever express such views and deserves no special consideration just because he was attached to a religion. We can derive morality and goodness through other means with equal validity. We can consider this aspect separately to other dimensions within religion because of that. My issue instead is very much with "faith", and the dangers associated with the meme that this is a virtue. After all, it's effectively believing something to be so - and potentially acting upon it - despite, and often because of, a lack of real-world effects and consequences. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>gnostic 15:57, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Judaism has a long tradition of skepticism. As far as theology goes, though, Mencken was right: "Theology is the effort to explain the﻿ unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 17:41, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * That's pretty much what it is. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>moral 20:50, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Or better: Robert Anton Wilson - £The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking." Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>sshole 20:52, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Faith is a virtue
William J. Bennett devoted an entire chapter of excerpts and quotes in The Book of Virtues to faith, if that's what you're looking for. -- Seth Peck (talk) 16:40, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Snowstorms
This: "If the representative terminology that you use cannot successfully conjure up the same thoughts and images in someone else's head, you've failed at communication. To solve this you need to replace your specialist terminology with what it actually represents." Reminds me of the "Minute Physics" Youtuber when he explained why most explanations of relativity were terrible (it's several minutes in, but the whole thing is well worth watching for a relatively in-depth discussion of what makes for good science communication). 02:56, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah, it's about 27 minutes in (sorry, that sort of thing is difficult to find on a mobile phone). But if you skip to that part, you'll miss his critique of of science Youtube videos starting at about 10 or 13 minutes in.   03:03, 22 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Bookmarked. This is the sort of thing I need to watch. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>pathetic 12:33, 22 December 2011 (UTC)

Tebow
Excellent post! You've captured pretty much all of the errors in reasoning that people make when thinking about this kind of thing. (I say "almost" because I want to add one more: confidence levels inside and outside an argument.) And really well written, too! 04:14, 19 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, it's not difficult. It's just how probability works versus how people think probability works. Though that's an interesting post. The "there's a problem in our reasoning" is always an issue when calculating odds, certainly there's some flaws in how I calculated the Tebow thing, but I admit I pulled some things out of nowhere just to illustrate, I have about ~50% confidence (of which I have ~50% confidence (of which I have ~50% confidence (of which I have ~50% confidence ) ...) ) they're merely in the right ball park. Often we think about probability being 1 after the event, indeed that's how hindsight bias works... usually that infinitesimal gap between 1 and the real probability is "the universe is lying to us", meaning there's potentially a serious flaw in our reasoning - but how the hell do you go figuring that out? Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>sshole 13:00, 19 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Without testing the model against reality, I should add. Hence science, which I think is probably best described as not seeing how accurate our model is, but how confident we can be that it's right. The model is always right, it's a model, that's the point. But is it always right when placed next to reality? So, back to Tebow, the only way to be sure is to keep an eye on his career and see if 3:16 references come up again, then we'll be pretty sure (unless you beg the question a bit and assume two references in a row must be 1-in-a-million x 1-in-a-million therefore God) that our 1-in-a-million prediction is very much wrong, while the 1-in-30 is more than likely right. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>pathetic 13:05, 19 January 2012 (UTC)

Categories Schmategories
Brilliant! I loved this one. As usual I agree with your conclusions about categorization, and your arguments about cross-cultural similarities and differences make sense to me (though admittedly I am but a mere ignorant American, so I don't really have enough information about other cultures to see if your categories work as well as I would expect). Also: you identify as an "aspiring rationalist"? :) P.S.: Your "Now" posts have become one of my favorite blogs. 22:43, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I always add "aspiring" to it, anyone who just says "rationalist" is probably lying. Anyway, I remember this sort of thing being brought up in Taleb's The Black Swan at some point, but I forget why, exactly. Though I think Taleb dismissed the similarities outright, I at least would put a more variable probability on it. So if you have Category X that consists of two properties, A and B, and A is effectively the membership test but only a certain percentage actually have B. Then it would be fallacious to assumed everyone has B or include B as part of the membership test - while denying it. I think nationalism is one of the better examples of it, because No True Scotsman in fact comes from a very nationalistic sentiment. So, if "Englishmen" are implied to be just men born in England, then you can't - on top of that - demand that they all must drink tea, even though 95% surely do. Then you start adding other properties that they "must" have and it becomes more complicated. This also ties into why stereotyping is wrong and why demographics just don't work. You tailor to a perceived "average" that posses all properties, but it turns out only a minority actually fit that profile. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>theist 09:28, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
 * When it comes to nationalism, many of these tropes weren't even derived from trends but fabricated wholesale. Nationalism essentially began as a large-scale military and social engineering project (e.g., Garibaldi, von Bismarck, etc.). And if you want to get even more cynical, some are products of admen and hucksters, such as the "all-American breakfast." Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 10:01, 15 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Yet even a wholesale fabrication, if believed by enough people, will become a trend. In fact, isn't that what a trend is? Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>theist 10:34, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Suggested distraction
Have you read Ignition! by John Clark? It is amusing enough for a non-chemist like me. There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole. It was published in 1972, but you can find it with a certain search engine if you limit the results to PDF files...--ZooGuard (talk) 20:07, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Got it, although at my usual reading speed I'll have it finished by September 2018. I got so far into The Disappearing Spoon before getting distracted by GEB, before getting distracted by Simon Pegg's autobiography... Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>sshole 20:33, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

May 15 2012
Grisly, not grizzly.-- 12:16, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * No, it's definitely grizzly :P. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>d hominem 12:45, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Have I mentioned how I type phonetically? Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>postate 12:46, 15 May 2012 (UTC)

Disjointed ramble on lab reports, research, and papers
My first two physics labs (Mechanics and E&M) where absurdly an did not have lab reports. Oh sure, there was a 1-2 page worksheet to fill blanks in but the labs themselves barely took 45 minutes of their allotted 3 hours. The third lab however (Modern), expected us to write lengthy lab reports that, thanks to the previous two courses, we had no idea how to write. As expected, the entire class did horribly and I and several others changed our majors. The teacher ratings were so bad that the instructor for the first two labs was replaced with the assistant chair. Likewise, we received no training whatsoever in poster making or paper writing. Despite this we had a poster to do in Optics which had to be cancelled due to time. For my independent undergrad research project I quite literally spent the first month trying to figure out what the hell to do during my lab time. Talking to my fellows, none of them had any ideas what to do either. It was not until my senior year that I received any instruction on how to write a paper, in a bloody Oceanography course I was taking to keep me a full time student. As for the humanities I once wrote a paper comparing two books I had never read but had paid attention to in class discussions about and still got a high B. I agree with you whole heatedly, and I had a single course where we did do this (Dinosaur evolution). Тy Bother me 19:35, 14 September 2012 (UTC)
 * To quote the guy who has been teaching me coding for the last two days (well, I say "teaching me coding", I mean "preaching about evidence-based education theory and modern liberalism in value-added education" (it's been the best 48 hours of my life!)) "When I rule the world..."
 * Actually, I've been saying "When I rule the world..." for a while (incidentally, on my laptop resolution, in wikicode, the three (or so) "When I rule the world..." references in this post indent exactly under each other. I'm so awesome. Could we try a "When I rule the world..." again? Yes I can! I should screencap this... anywho, I digress quite a bit. I mean "When I rule the world..." I'll fix this shit. I do know it's always the case that you have to learn as you go but "When I rule the world..." they'll actually get taught this. Properly. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>narchist silverbrain.png 00:03, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * So, where do I sign up? Тy Bother me 01:45, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * I think getting a p-value of < 0.05 is the equivalent of name-dropping in humanities courses. Fortunately, when I did my upper-level stats/research methods course, the prof was really good and kept us from drinking the Kool-Aid. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 00:15, 15 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Trouble with that is that alternative medicine practitioners are going to read it and say RCT results with no significance don't rule out that homeopathy works - when, of course, it does. Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>moral silverbrain.png 13:38, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

OMG
Also "Gobleshyou" when someone sneezes. I use the ruskie "Grow big"(albiet in Russian) instead. Evil fascist oh noez 17:16, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Update
Please? Ty JFBAA 17:10, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Some here Scarlet A.png<font color=#CC0033>gnostic 17:16, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
 * Nice icon. Ty JFBAA 17:19, 14 February 2013 (UTC)