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Post by Pacmanite on Jul 31, 2013 2:38:19 GMT -5
Congrats Kozma! And I agree with the other two, it's awesome that you've hung around here all this time, and your posts have all been great and interesting to read. I especially like your Corner of Cuteness thread - that always makes me smile.  Here's to another thousand! |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jul 30, 2013 20:15:52 GMT -5
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Post by Pacmanite on Jul 30, 2013 19:29:22 GMT -5
I love the headdresses on both of them. And I love the male's base colour combination of dark metallic grey and blue.
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Post by Pacmanite on Jul 30, 2013 19:23:23 GMT -5
FIRST
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Post by Pacmanite on Jul 29, 2013 7:49:42 GMT -5
I recently started a blog themed around classics and medieval topics. I hope this goes well. So far it's been very fun to update. I especially like this post about illuminated manuscript illustrations of a mother bird feeding chicks her own blood, and this one about why ancient scrolls didn't have wooden handle thingies.  Are there any other NTWF bloggers out there? Share it here! The last general thread of NTWF bloggers was made in 2006, and I'm curious to know who might be blogging now. |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jul 6, 2013 8:53:12 GMT -5
Galeoncin the Chocolate Bruce is UFA PM if you want him. He's delicious.\ edit: adopted! |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 29, 2013 22:18:26 GMT -5
Oohhh! Ooohhh! *facepalm* I didn't know college football was a revenue raiser for the colleges! Ahhh it makes so much more sense now. Feeling a little jittery at being repeatedly called judgmental because I hadn't seen this point from the start, but now it fits together. Call me an ignorant foreigner. I didn't know your colleges could make money that way (Australian unis never do sport things on that scale). But now I do. So thank you, and sorry for derailing the discussion.  |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 29, 2013 2:38:18 GMT -5
Ah, I didn't really take into account the longer term effects of a sporting career. Thanks for giving a bigger picture. On the judgement thing. I think you think that I was trying to say that all funding of sporting activities was inherently a waste. I don't think that sport funding is a waste per se. I was thinking college sporting scholarships was a waste because it seemed like sporting players were being paid for taking courses which weren't relevant to their sporting career. But you've shown that it actually is relevant to encouraging a sporting career. So thank you for that. And yes, I have approached the topic from a university culture which is not identical to your own. For whatever reason, sporting scholarships for universities don't exist in Australia, even though we are big fans of sport too. Maybe there's just way less scholarship money all around. Maybe various other institutions have taken up the role of sponsoring sports. (*cough* and maybe it's because Australian universities don't have sporting rivalries with each other  Mostly because of the geographical separation of the major cities and major universities). Whatever the case, there's probably some large number of factors I haven't considered as to why one country has this system and another doesn't. So, I will try to put my cultural baggage aside, but this takes discussion and learning and understanding. I can't simply will away culture in a vacuum. I can't do it without interacting with other views. I need an external opinion to tell me where I'm wrong. So I have another question... if I ask it of you, then you can enlighten me with your perspective.  And I appreciate it. I've got an American friend who almost got a sporting scholarship for his swimming ability, but what he was most passionate about was science, and he would have been really happy if a prestigious university had given him a sporting scholarship so that he could study science there. Now since he's my friend, I would root for him and be really happy if he got into studying science at that prestigious university. I don't care what methods he uses to get in there, I'd just say, "go get it boy" But putting aside the friend thing, doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of a sporting scholarship? In this case, sport was irrelevant to his true ambition, and it's not going to encourage him to make a career out of sport, since he wouldn't want become a competitive swimmer anyway. But how many people who get into universities on a sporting scholarship actually just use it to get a leg up on competition for no reason which is relevant to their actual skills in the subject they want to study? Why should a science applicant with swimming ability be privileged over other science applicants? My hypothetical answer: The colleges want to fill up their sporting teams to beat other colleges for reasons of pride. Feel free to disagree, of course! |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 29, 2013 0:28:41 GMT -5
Okay, okay. I'm sorry I sound so judge-y.
If I want to be a lawyer, I study law at university and most of my subjects will be under the subject heading "law".
Same with any other university course. Including fine arts.
But sport... requires me to study something else full time. Something unrelated (/only tangentially related) to sports like law or science.
Why?
Why fund sport people to study things unrelated to sport or their sporting career?
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 29, 2013 0:17:56 GMT -5
Sure thing. I'm fine with people sponsoring sporting players, so that they will have a socially demanded sporting career. But why put them in super prestigious universities? That is to say, why put them in universities geared to deliver the best science/arts/medicine/etc. courses possible, rather than in more specialised institutitions/other avenues for furthering a sporting career? Isn't that wasteful?
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 29, 2013 0:02:45 GMT -5
It's entirely off-topic, but I demand you on logical basis defend that it's wasteful. The only reason it seems that way is society tells you that it is. That intellectual pursuits are more noble, more important, than atheletic. But really, there's a demand for athletes just as much as there is for workers in other pursuits. Defining that pursuit as inherently worse than another is really extremely judgmental for no logical basis. It's no worse than having coffee shops, breweries, automobile manufacturers, pet stores, art galleries (and artistic scholarships! There's an argument for waste if we want to go that route in a "logical" way), television studies, or even reality tv shows. Market demands it. People demand it. I'd make the outright assertion that an athletic scholarship has a higher Return on Investment for the giver and society than a bank or government giving a loan for an English major (or scholarships, but those are rarer for English majors). My point is that really, if you just sit back and question that judgment, you'll really have to dig down deep to think about it. Think beyond what culture or society has conditioned you to think, and question the premise. Is there are a reason to look down on athletic scholarships? I'm happy you're asking me to put down my cultural preferences and not to look down on anything. But the prestige given to sports in our society is due to cultural preferences. If we're meant to be culturally blind, why aren't the colleges giving just as many scholarships to jugglers and circus performers? Why are they giving scholarships to stand up comedians? Or aspiring TV show script writers? There is (and always has been) a societal need for entertainment, and sporting, circus performance, comedy and TV are all popular forms of entertainment. And why only team sports? Do horse jockeys get sport scholarships too? (I actually don't know this, so maybe I'm wrong on this point. But the sports scholarship thing does seem to be geared to fill college football teams rather than necessarily to reward sport "for its own sake") But if it's about raw talent in any given area, why not also grant a scholarship for knowing ancient languages or for memorising the phonebook or for being a world champion at "Magic: The Gathering"? Sporting prowess is an ingrained cultural ideal. A "win" at a game with balls and bats is considered something powerfully meaningful for entirely cultural reasons. So for all that, I still don't see why sporting players should be given more scholarships into prestigious universities than any other socially entertaining skill. The only reason that seems apparent to me is college pride at wanting to beat another college at a game. And the cultural status of sport. Edit: Also, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that pursuing a sporting career was a "worse" choice than any other. And I am aware that art is also "logicially" unnecessary. But I wanted to see them all as part of a larger phenomenon of (for want of a better term) entertainment, which is beneficial to society, and it's clear that certain forms of sport are given privileges that other forms of entertainment don't enjoy. But no one considers it odd that sporting scholarships put sporting people into prestigious universities while they're focused on getting a good sporting career and not on the law/medicine/arts/science studies which the university teaches. |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 28, 2013 21:41:38 GMT -5
I'm being a little tangential here but... what's the ethical basis for athletic sponsorships? They never give them out in my country, which is probably why it looks odd to me. But it doesn't seem particularly fair. I always thought that university was about academic excellence and competency in subjects like science, liberal arts, medicine, and what have you. I assumed uni was about being good at the subjects you're actually taught. From an outsider's point of view it just looks like colleges want to beat other colleges in sports for reasons of pride. What's that got to do with university education and giving everyone a fair go? In Australia, there are alternate options a person can pursue to be a sporting player. It just seems more efficient that way than putting them into a prestigious college if they're only interested in swinging a bat.
*shrugs* Cultural differences, but it seems wasteful.
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 28, 2013 2:01:13 GMT -5
This might be a silly question... I've played this game in real life, where you can see when people are lying and you can deliberately try to tick them off xD But I wonder how you play it online where there are presumably fewer tells? And where no one see your body language as you type? |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 24, 2013 21:31:22 GMT -5
I wanted to weigh in on this one because I have a very strong opinion about police officers. My mom was a cop for five years. She's a short Filipino gal, 5'2" and lightweight. Was she less physically strong than some of the big guys? Sure. But in her academy she was also the fastest draw, the most accurate shot, and the best driver in the class. (Driving through an obstacle course, backward, at speed is a tricky thing to do.) And she was no slouch in the physical department either. She was really fit for her size. She was darn good at what she did. But you know why she quit? Because it was full of sexist pigs. It was only her and a couple other women in a force of I think 30ish guys. She was passed up on promotions by guys who had less experience, worse track records. Dealt with their sexist remarks and attitudes constantly. Considering how much stress an officer has to go through from their actual duties, the extra hostility didn't help. (Not to mention how crappily we pay officers. A secretary's job pays more.) If there had been more women on that force, maybe her and her fellow female officers wouldn't have had to deal with the A-type sausage party that was the police force. My mom quit the force, only a year short of being able to join the K-9 unit, which was her ultimate goal. Law enforcement is not all about being a big fist to push people around. It's not all about restraining hostile suspects. A majority of the job is being a presence of security to the public. (Though a lot of it is directing traffic and filing police reports. XD) It's about going to schools to talk to kids about drugs and safety, hosting free classes at the town center about how people can make their homes more secure. It's about dealing with people, getting victims and suspects and witnesses to trust you and talk to you. It's reasoning with wife about maybe seeking asylum from her abusive husband on the third domestic dispute call of the night. It's calming down the child who's gotten lost. It's dealing level-headedly with the drunk who is probably going to barf in the backseat of your squad car. It's a very, very interpersonal job, which I say women can do just as well as men, if not better. And if you want to go for men are physically stronger, I shall raise you with women generally have better peripheral vision, higher-frequency hearing, and a brain more capable of multitasking and remembering details. So perhaps you might lose a little in the sheer amount of weight your force could bench, but I would say that the added skillset makes up for it. So do I think law enforcement should have slightly different strength standards for women applicants than the men? Yes. Do I think they should be actively trying to balance the genders in the force? Yes. It'll probably never be 50-50, because significantly fewer women apply, but I still think trying to add more women can only be a benefit. Thanks, I honestly hadn't seen it from that perspective before. The example of women in the police force was something I found in a book that was arguing against certain types of affirmative action. But now it looks like there are a lot of other factors which make someone a competent police officer, beyond the amount of weight they can bench. What particularly stood out was your example of a police officer trying to reason with an abused wife about her options for finding help. And Yoyti, I too would hope that the selection process takes account of the broader skill set offered by each applicant, whether male or female. I also think that if the police department sees itself lacking some skills, like say interpersonal skills, it should give more weight to incoming applicants who have the skills it needs so it can intentionally improve the force's overall coverage of skills. |
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Post by Pacmanite on Jun 23, 2013 5:52:51 GMT -5
I'm generally in favour of affirmative action, but sometimes the application of it is tricky.
Consider the case of police forces wanting to artificially increase the number of women police officers so they can have more of a ~50/50 gender spread. Say they realised that men generally had an "unfair advantage" over women in the selection process, because they did better in tests of physical strength. So, in response, they lower the standards of physical strength required for women. This brings more women into the force but reduces the average strength of police officers who are actively patrolling the city. In times of danger, physically weaker police officers are more likely to pull out their gun. They are also more likely to fire shots, and accidentally injure or kill people they are struggling to restrain. So as a result of lowering standards to increase numbers of women in the force, the community suffers more accidental deaths at the hands of police officers.
So my question is: if the police force's selection process gives men an advantage because their general physical strength is higher, should the police force lower the standards for women at the expense of having a weaker force overall?
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Here's to another thousand!
Mostly because of the geographical separation of the major cities and major universities). Whatever the case, there's probably some large number of factors I haven't considered as to why one country has this system and another doesn't. So, I will try to put my cultural baggage aside, but this takes discussion and learning and understanding. I can't simply will away culture in a vacuum. I can't do it without interacting with other views. I need an external opinion to tell me where I'm wrong. 
And I appreciate it.
