Also dumb? asking someone to call on the cell phone and not charging it ... so it dies when they call.

Stephen Fry has a new, long post to his blog: [link] Anyway, this bit struck me:

In casting my mind around for a subject for a blessay I have come up with one that was forced to my attention the other night when I participated in a regrettable and unhappy verbal spat with an American gentleman. I shan’t give details about him, it wouldn’t be fair, so let’s call him Jim and leave his statehood, profession and other details unventilated. I will try and be as fair to him and as scrupulously honest about myself as I can be. It was an upsetting evening and I wish it hadn’t happened, but I suspect evenings like it are taking place everywhere around the planet.

We must begin with a few round truths about myself: when I get into a debate I can get very, very hot under the collar, very impassioned, and I dare say, very maddening, for once the light of battle is in my eye I find it almost impossible to let go and calm down. I like to think I’m never vituperative or too ad hominem but I do know that I fall on ideas as hungry wolves fall on strayed lambs and the result isn’t always pretty. This is especially dangerous in America. I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle. Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust. Yes, one hesitates ever to make generalizations, but let’s be honest the cultures are different, if they weren’t how much poorer the world would be and Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

I really don't have the experience to say that this this true or not. Anyone else?

Now, THIS is offensive to women

Ugh. I read about that on a football board. The Pat's fan in me said "It's the Jets' fans, I'm not terribly suprised". Still incredibly vile (and sadly may go on at other stadiums as well - I'm reading a history of the Pats and during the pre-Bob Kraft era, Foxboro was a scary place to go to games, and not just because the old stadium was a dump).

I really don't have the experience to say that this this true or not. Anyone else?

Certainly wasn't true in my family. But I've gotten into trouble with being too bulldoggish arguing about what I think is RIGHT and PROPER in work situations.

I really don't have the experience to say that this this true or not. Anyone else?

Tommy, I don't know if you can characterize a whole nation like that. i have friends on both ends of the spectrum, ones that can debate passionately for the sake of debate and not take any arguments personally (one of them is actually American by birth, even if he's Canadian bred) and others who take even the slightest disagreement personally.

I'm not mentally fast on my feet enough to enjoy debates, so I usually stay out of them.

Interesting blog post:

What's your favorite example of quantum chicanery?

By "quantum chicanery," I mean somebody using the language of quantum theory to make wildly unrealistc promises of magical results. Examples abound-- Bob Park got several months' worth of "What's New" out of some guys who claimed to be able to generate free energy by putting hydrogen in "a state lower than the ground state." My personal favorite was a guy I heard on a talk show (I was stuck in an auto repair place) claiming that the secret to eternal life was to simply concentrate on measuring yourself to be healthy and happy, which would collapse your wavefunction into that state.

Someone posted this on homeopathic stuff: [link]

Introduction: Within the developing theoretical context of quantum macroentanglement, a mathematical model of the Vital Force (Vf) has recently been formulated. It describes the Vf in terms of a hypothetical gyroscope with quantized angular momentum. This enables the Vf's state of health to be represented in terms of a "wave function" derived solely from secondary symptom observables produced in response to disease or homeopathic remedies. So far, this approach has illustrated the biphasal action of remedies, resonance phenomena arising out of homeopathic provings, and aspects of the therapeutic encounter.

OK.

Dude needs a Star Trek series to write technobabble for.

I had no idea that the serial comma was thought to be old-fashioned. I think it is just, you know, correct!

tosses editorial glitter over lisah

I embrace the apostrophe in this sort of situation only when it makes things clearer, as in "There are 6 I's in the first clause of this sentence."

gets some on Teppy too.

From The Onion: This Is The Point In The Blow Job Where I Have To Be Careful What I Say

My coat is out for delivery! I hope that I will be able to pick it up this evening.