de gustibus non disputandum est
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:47 AM on July 4, 2008

lessons learned, actions to be taken?

If you didn't know it already, don't say one thing and do another. 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds' and all that, but consistency is rarely foolish for public figures.

There was some cross-site flaming and trolling. That's regrettable, though some of the worst offenders generally owned up to it (here at least) in the sober light of day.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 1:07 PM on July 2, 2008

I really miss Garrison Keillor's Mr. Blue column. I really tried hard to like his radio program because his advice column was spot on. But, no.

Repeated for truth, beauty... all ye need to know.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 3:07 PM on July 1, 2008

Does this mean if there's pro-choice ad sites, I can request for those to be blocked, too? Or any political add I disagree with?

Looks like it. And why not? mathowie doesn't have to grant your request.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:08 AM on June 19, 2008

I would just like to point out that the OED has no etymology for cervix: none at all. It's just the Latin word for neck, used analogously for other the 'necks' of other organs, and apparently it just sprang out of nowhere, fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

So disappointing.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:23 PM on June 4, 2008

I forgot to add: despite the creatio ex nihilo of cervix, there's clearly no relationship to vixen, from *fyxen (= MHG. vühsinne, G. füchsin), fem. of fox FOX. Cf. OE. fyxen adj. ‘of a fox,’ which the OED asserts that some scholars plausibly connect with Sanskrit puccha, "tail."

Unless neck = tail ? Hmmm. Shame on the OED for leaving us hanging on such weighty matters!
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:28 PM on June 4, 2008

There is no good reason to alter the word so as to incorporate mention of her chickly parts.... What does the perfix "cer-" then add? Dude. It does not add anything.

Geeks are good. Let us now celebrate their geekiness. This, however, has hopelessly confused the matter and I say we all just trade jokes. Here, I'll start:

A couple had two little boys, ages eight and ten, who were excessively mischievous.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 7:50 PM on June 4, 2008

So, what have we learned?

bitch = female dog :: vixen = female fox

cervix != deer (female or otherwise) :: cortexen != female administrator (giant donut or no)

Also, some posts are cooler the first time around, when they get deleted before any of the not-cool kids get to see them and mess them up with all their eye-juice, which can contain Phlogiston-Transmitted Diseases. Yuck.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 3:11 PM on June 5, 2008

In my opinion, tonic water has no place in a civilized OMG NO PUT DOWN THE BASEBALL BAT I WAS ONLY KIDDING.

But seriously, you're free to drink in my class, just don't annoy anybody and don't come looking for class notes if you black out. Philosophy and alcohol have gone together since at least the time that Socrates drank all his students under the table talking about love.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 4:57 PM on May 27, 2008

Well, I don't know much about greatness, but I know this: 10 Things I Hate About You is a hundred times greater than Kiss Me, Kate!
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 5:26 AM on May 29, 2008

I'm in, probably. We should be moving to DC the week before.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:19 AM on April 12, 2008

You know, Memorial Day is the 26th... any chance we could do another pickle picnic?
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 7:02 AM on May 5, 2008

Pickle Picnic.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 7:34 AM on May 5, 2008

My move was delayed and so I spent the meetup unloading. However, I'm hoping there'll be a repeat... and pictures!
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:07 PM on May 27, 2008

It takes an awful lot of chutspah to make a metafilter post with two links, then, when it's deleted, to repost those links on metatalk by way of j'accuse. And these aren't particularly interesting links.

That said, semmi has a pretty fantastic posting history and we should probably cut him/her some slack.

DaShiv saves the thread, though:

From the aggregate exit polls nationally: "Among voters who said... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:57 AM on May 17, 2008

Hey finite: send 'em a C&D....
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:25 AM on May 4, 2008

Actually, thinking about it, it's extremely unlikely that they didn't contact finite before they went to press. They've got a legal department for a reason....

However, if by some chance they didn't contact you, finite, be sure to treat them like they treated Walter Jon Williams.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:38 AM on May 4, 2008

Funny, looks like a classic case of overweening gall to me. Colossally stupid overweening gall, actually.

It should be noted that Wired is under new ownership and management, for what it's worth, and that the new guys have long since settled amicably with WJW. Sadly, the new business model seems to involve printing a glossy advertisement with articles about how Steve Carrell is smart and Sarah Silverman is funny, which is something of a... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:49 AM on May 5, 2008

utterly absurd.

it's clearly: breakfast, check recent activity, metafilter, metatalk.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:43 AM on May 2, 2008

Since the thread was deleted, I've been stuck for a place to respond to this desperate untruth from benzo8:

Petty's first "Look at you all" after Prince's first 16 bars sounds like he was expecting to come back in, and Prince didn't let him. Like the true professional that he is, Petty then reproduced the line three more times in order to give the sheen of pre-arrangement

I, too, was initially swayed by the notion... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:36 PM on April 30, 2008

The question was not, should I go to law school? Nor was it, do you think I would make a good lawyer?

There ought to be a 'read the question' requirement for MeTa posts regarding AskMes. In fact, this thread ought to have been closed with no comment given this stinking idiocy at its core.

C&F exams are a tremendously stressful thing for many people with checkered pasts, not the least because of the massive debt law... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:40 AM on April 29, 2008

Get yourself a hook (we're YOUNG, IVY LEAGUE, and used to be HEDGE-FUND ANALYSTS!) and a sound bite (TRANSPARENCY IN GIVING!), add a saucy attitude and beat it to death, and everyone who loves concept morsels over sinewy facts will lap it up and beg for more. No matter what, apparently.

Hey taz, will you do PR for me? I believe these guys are pretty sleezy, but after reading your rendition, I thought they sounded cool for a second. Perhaps you should... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 5:05 AM on April 23, 2008

Also, can we get an activity page and clickable usernames?
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 2:20 PM on April 22, 2008

I do not think that IQ is a complete measure of intelligence. But it counts. It tells us something. If as I was being accepted into a hospital I found out that the entire administration had been replaced with a staff whose average IQ was more than one standard deviation less than the previous bunch, I'd be scared.

Even assuming this analogy, there are strong indications that the precursors of the the IQ testing gap are closely tied to being dominated... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:14 AM on April 19, 2008

lukemeister: That's why it's important that Zindi did non-verbal pattern recognition: it's still hard to extrapolate to general intelligence, (nor should we necessarily grant that such a thing as general intelligence exists) but you can't ignore it or attribute it to linguistic barriers in the same way. Since pattern recognition is a pretty basic skill, incapacities in that area will affect other kinds of reasoning, certainly mathematics, but also potentially logic and critical reasoning, which,... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:40 AM on April 19, 2008

The fact that every election ever in Zimbabwe has been corrupted or marked by terror and coercion suggests that these issue are a lot less important politically than they might be economically.

Quoting myself here, but it occurs to me that most elections in the US have been corrupted, too. (We know, for instance, that LBJ was gaming elections in Texas as late as the sixties.)
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:57 AM on April 19, 2008

The answers in an old askme of mine does a really good job of laying out the points in favor of IQ and general intelligence. I'm still a skeptic, but you can't go wrong by starting with the answers that parkerjackson and Paladin165 give there, and then reading wyzewoman's link to g: a statistical myth. BigSky's claim seems to depend on tying low IQ to something like the Condorcet jury theorem, which is one of the epistemic defenses of democracy: it argues that groups are better than individuals... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:29 AM on April 20, 2008

Racism is the exercise of power detrimental to one group by another. Racism is quite often backed up by institutional practices.

Just so we're clear: by this definition, whites in Zimbabwe are the target of racism because of land reform. I feel uncomfortable with this definition because it ignores basic questions of just distribution that might make actions 'detrimental' to one group a racialized but nonetheless necessary and un-racist state action.... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 11:48 AM on April 20, 2008

BigSky: I'll see your fifty experts in the Wall Street Journal and raise you an American Psychological Association Taskforce on Intelligence:

In a field where so many issues are unresolved and so many questions unanswered, the confident tone that has characterized most of the debate on these topics is clearly out of place. The study of intelligence does not need politicized assertions and recriminations; it needs self-restraint, reflection, and a great deal... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:21 PM on April 20, 2008

Sorry, BigSky, I know it's a longer document. Most of the interesting stuff is in the 'Interpreting Group Differences' section, especially contrasting the situation in the US with alternative caste systems.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:22 PM on April 20, 2008

Or maybe there's a country that white people once owned, where the land was taken from them by force by a non-white minority and then they were made to work on it for decades under situations resembling slavery, where every attempt made by them to get ahead was outlawed and violation of those laws led to torture, imprisonment, and murder?

Ireland?
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 12:18 PM on April 21, 2008

I think the British English are white, anotherpanacea.

One of the issues in my thinking about this is that much of what has happened in the world surrounding the troubling issues of race basically mirror treatment of subject populations and low-caste people everywhere, but that there's the additional injury of writing the domination into 'science' in the eighteenth century with application of biological classification to... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:22 AM on April 22, 2008

I think my banhammer is broken, for one

Lando Calrissian: We've gotta be able to get some kind of a reading on that shield, up or down.
Nien Nunb: [speaks in Sullustese]
Lando Calrissian: But how could they be jamming us if they don't know... if we're coming?
[over comlink]
Lando Calrissian: Break off the attack! The shield is still up!
Wedge Antilles: I get no reading. Are you sure?
Lando... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:36 AM on April 20, 2008

Regardless of what else occurs here, (and I'd kind of like an admin to chime in at this point, too) can we all acknowledge that that conversation didn't belong on the blue? Sometimes I think people are so worried to seem like they're going crying to the community for resolution, and afraid of the no-holds-barred approach that predominates in the gray, that they seriously derail threads that really don't need to be derailed. In this, I am also at fault, so I apologize: but let's all try not to do... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 12:10 PM on April 16, 2008

In.

The last one, the 2007-only theme, was a bit -too- limiting. So let's not do that again, or worse a first-half-of-2008-only theme.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 4:38 PM on April 14, 2008

Did my taxes today. Turns out my casualty loss (stupid car accident, uninsured motorist) wasn't quite big enough to beat the personal deduction. Bastards.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 10:57 AM on April 10, 2008

Really, you can email your amusing comment to me and I promise to gibber over it appreciatively.

That is so totally going to get overused.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 12:32 PM on April 7, 2008

I got this question from a student the other day:

"If I start a religion based on pornography, would our advertisements and circulars be protected speech?'

God bless 'em, every one.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:16 AM on April 4, 2008

Shit! I hit the make-it-stop link, and now I want it back. What can I do?
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:58 AM on April 1, 2008

I'm so confused.

This morning I recieved an e-mail:

"Last night I dreamed that [your partner] told me 'In case you haven't guessed, [anotherpanacea] and I are swingers. We're in it for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.'"

Last night I slept the untroubled sleep of the just.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 2:44 PM on March 31, 2008

Oh my god please no.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 2:39 PM on March 24, 2008

*adds thread to recent activity*
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 7:41 PM on March 20, 2008

Boy Meets Girl
Boy Loses Girl
A Man Learns a Lesson
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:09 AM on March 16, 2008

Woops! Misremembered. It should be:
(Wo)man Meets (Wo)man. (Wo)man Loses (Wo)man. (Wo)man Finds (Wo)man. (Relationship AskMes)
A (Wo)man learns a lesson. (Help me write this paper! AskMes)
The Brave Little Tailor. (I'm going on an adventure! I've got a needle and thread. What else should I bring?)
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 9:22 AM on March 16, 2008

I take it they were all out of Lagavulin as well?
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 2:16 PM on March 15, 2008

I have this guy or his spiritual twin in a couple of classes. He's smart but he smokes too much pot and he always waits in line to ask me a long convoluted nonsense question after my lecture. He never does the actual reading for the class or takes any of my reading suggestions. Now I'm scared that his final paper may infect me with his schizophrenic memetic mind-worm ideas and drive me insane or damage my IQ permanently. Dear askme: how can I be rid of Mr. Pseudo Profundity? Nonviolent solutions... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 11:00 AM on March 13, 2008

argh. LH has a point. We wouldn't treat a confused soul this way if they were writing about something personal, and this is likely very personal to the guy, though it sounds strange and affected to us all. My apologies to Obvious for making fun.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 12:05 PM on March 13, 2008

it's my birthday.

Me too! Also, Albert Einstein and Billy Crystal.

What I said in the last thread trumps what I said here. Philosophy is partly an exercise in coming to communicable terms with phenomena; the arguments and proofs come after. We should be supportive when someone is fumbling their way towards those communicable terms.

What I worry about in your case, Obvious, is that you're headed in the... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 6:20 AM on March 14, 2008

You should tell that to SCOTUSBlog.
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 8:18 PM on March 11, 2008

Baby_Balrog's been working on the same novel for twenty years, hoping that the first line will cause its readers to stand and utter these words: "Hats off, gentlemen!"

shmegegge is a sixty-year old anthropologist, specializing in the Mayan and Incan empires. Her love skeletal jewelry is well-documented, though carbon dating has established that all her pieces are at least fifteen hundred years old.

jtron is a middle-aged private... [more]
posted to MetaTalk by anotherpanacea at 12:39 PM on March 6, 2008