Kelandon

If you've figured out SDFs, then you use them for anything that you don't want to bother setting an SDF for, because it's meaningless outside the state that you're messing with right now. An SDF is for something that you might check later; a variable is for something that you'll never check again. If you haven't figured out SDFs, figure out SDFs first.

[insert meme here]

There are contexts when, among friends, people can make fun of each other in good humor for whatever traits they may possess. It's easy to imagine that this is one of those places, and sometimes it is. And some people think they're funny or not really serious when they don't come across that way in writing (lack of tone of voice, facial expressions, etc.). So if someone says something offensive or stupid or offensively stupid or stupidly offensive, it's generally best not to flip out. Explain why it's not okay to say that and move on. I tend to think that we won't have moved past prejudice until the comments that are today offensive are tomorrow confusing or funny. Let's try and get there a little faster by not taking offense.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Hey dudes, this thread started because Student of Trinity decided to be a sexist ass who knew more about sexism than Lilith who is, you know, a woman. Why the hell are you all encouraging him and giving him praise? He's like the textbook example of how not to go about attempting to end sexism. Even if this were a factually true statement about the original post (which I don't think it is), this would not be the way to deal with it. Don't crap on someone who is making a genuinely good-faith effort to talk about a problem and fix it. That's your ally. The only effect that you're going to have is to polarize the discussion into most people who don't want to talk to you and a much smaller group of people who already agree with you. This makes your side lose. If someone is wrong, explain why and lead that person to a better understanding of the issue. Don't just crap all over the person. You may satisfy your anger, but you hurt your cause and thereby hurt everyone else who cares about this issue. Also, your reasoning is grossly flawed and offensive. Some men do in fact know more about sexism than some women. That's not surprising; a women who hasn't discussed or studied the issue would have access to only her anecdotal experience, whereas a man who had discussed the issue extensively and studied might have access to the experiences of many, many people. Obviously, all other things being equal, a woman would know more than a man about the issue, because one experience is more than zero, but saying, "You're a man, so you can't even have a differing opinion than the women you're talking to," is itself egregious prejudice. In the great words of Judge Kozinski, "The parties are advised to chill."

Applying generalizations about demographic categories (even statistically valid ones) to individual persons is the very definition of prejudice. The fact that men commit violent crimes more often than women does not lead to the inference that any given man should be viewed as a violent criminal (even a potential one), any more than any given women should be. ShieTar has graphically depicted the logical consequences of such a view above. This did not start there. It started with the point that if someone earns more money than someone else, that person might in principle be allowed to take that money and run. This is a statement about our divorce laws. I haven't studied family law (and hope never to), but my impression is that a male breadwinner can't simply leave behind a wife penniless and unable to care for herself. Thus, even that point might not be valid, depending on jurisdiction and the details of the law.

If all of this stuff about tenure, etc., is actually true, why is it different in the humanities? I don't know about the social sciences, so I can't speak to that, but my impression — totally anecdotally — is that there's nothing like the same disparities in the humanities, and the pressure to publish, etc., is the same.

I didn't know this until I came to law school, but this is a problem in law, too. The traditional gold standard (which is problematic for a number of reasons and is changing) is to go to a big law firm after you graduate and eventually make partner. In a studies of grads from my school, women, who on average had done better than men in college, on average did worse in law school, were hired at firms less often, and made partner less often and slower when they did go to firms. If I remember the results right, women went into some kinds of public interest work in about the same numbers as men, and public interest work (while socially valuable) pays a lot less than firms do, with the result that the income gap between men and women, which we see in many professions, is extremely pronounced in law. Disentangling the factors causing this is a nightmare. Whether it's even a bad thing is a little unclear, since big firm work is definitely not the only path in law, but the gender gap in other legal careers also exists, so it's not just firms. Firms are the main reason for the massive income gender gap among law grads, though. It's clear that the gender gap comes from some combination of: * Overt discrimination and harassment (I'm not sure exactly how common it is, but it clearly occurs with distressing frequency) * Disparate impact discrimination (people who are not explicitly trying to discriminate against women nonetheless adopt procedures that disadvantage women or that allow for subconscious biases to affect decisions) * Personal choice (a desire for children, etc., which isn't very compatible with the 70-80 hour weeks that firms usually require) * Historical factors (e.g. my law school didn't admit women at all until 1950 and didn't admit more than 6 or 7 per year until I think the 1980's) * Lack of female role models, mentors, and peers (because firms are so male-dominated, they have a tendency to stay that way) and probably a whole bunch of other things. I'm not really sure what we do about it. People have lots of suggestions. The discussion parallels the problem in science, with a few differences.

In fantasy, the only one that comes to mind is Paksenarrion. I don't know how successful the books actually were as far as "household name" status, but they were good and sold well. People dismiss Dragonlance as pulp, but maybe Usha from Dragons of Summer Flame? I feel as though Laurana, Kit, Crysania, etc. were all "second banana" in the earlier books, but Usha was as central to Dragons of Summer Flame as, say, Palin or Steel. And it was a bestseller. (The War of Souls trilogy also had Mina, but eh. Neither of these are exactly Nancy Drew, in terms of names that anyone would recognize, though. This is a little strange because there are a fair number of very great fantasy authors who are women.

Oops, duh, download the new file at the same link and let me know if that does the trick. Also, in general, providing the EXACT error message (rather than your paraphrase) helps in troubleshooting.

Just so it's clear what we're talking about: is there anything objectionable about the women portrayed in those four images side-by-side other than the excessive cleavage? Or is the excessive cleavage what we're talking about here? I'm just not good with this kind of visual analysis, which is why I ask.

Originally Posted By: Speed-O-Fie Hyper v2.1 Hi Spidwebbers, Yesterday, I've been facing a bug playing Exodus. (Surely, this bug is for Kelandon) So, the bug comes where my party goes to the Thanopolen Tower and fights the War-Chief when Ethass becomes the Goddess for the 2nd time. When I defeat that 2 mages and the war-chief, the special encounter come normally as they are programmed, But! When the messages end. Unhandled Exception comes! And I can't forward the story even my party is a non-god party. This Sucks. Awwwww. Download this file: http://kppp.webs.com/t44Tower.txt Replace the equivalent file in the Exodus folder with that one. Tell me if it fixes the problem. If not, tell me the LAST MESSAGE you get before the Unhandled Exception occurs. As a Mac user, I've never been able to replicate this error, but I do think I figured out what was causing it, and the file should fix it.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter Kreador, you have to be the first person, aside from myself, who sees the value of studying Latin with the goal of better understanding this amalgam we call English. Back in the first few decades of the 20th century, when Latin was dropped from most educational curricula in the US, this was actually the argument that most Latin teachers made in favor of keeping it mandatory. "But they'll never learn grammar if we don't teach them Latin!" was essentially the gist of most pro-Latin arguments at the time. Of course, they lost, but it was a valiant effort. My writing developed most significantly at two points in my life: first, when I was taking a summer class between 7th and 8th grades, in which we learned grammar and parsed sentences seriously, for the only time in my life; and second, in around third year of college, when I was reading a bunch of Latin and Greek and Shakespeare all at the same time, and I saw both how the ancients wrote in other languages and how writers of English adapted it to more or less our modern tongue. I hardly even had to practice writing in that year of college; I learned more by reading than anyone could've ever taught me if I had simply tried to write over and over again.

Originally Posted By: Spires and Tunnels La mesa. The noun is masculine or feminine, and articles and adjectives must agree with it. The only exceptions are nouns that can be masculine or feminine, which are mostly nouns that refer to entities that actually have a sex or gender. My favorites are the ones that have the wrong grammatical gender for their letter ending, such as "el dia." (This is a descendant of the Latin dies, which was even then the wrong gender for its declensional paradigm.) Originally Posted By: Lilith By the way, it's believed that grammatical gender began as a way of marking the distinction between living things and inanimate objects, and evolved into its current bizarre state through linguistic drift. Originally Posted By: Aʀᴀɴ Originally Posted By: Spires and Tunnels German has a neuter gender, I believe, although I have no idea if it's used for unknowns. It's not: We have to contend with "s/he", "he or she", as well, with the added inconvenience that most person nouns (chiefly professions) are implicitly male unless "-in" ("Lehrer" / "Lehrerin") is appended, which would be like having to say "teacher / teacheress" in English. Just to put these two together: the German neuter is used in a fashion parallel to "it" in English. You don't use "it" to refer to people; you use it to refer to things (as an ancient descendant of the animate/inanimate distinction that was the origin of what became grammatical gender in Indo-European nouns). I was rather astonished to learn that Germans try to maintain some level of gender inclusiveness in their language, because it's as heavily gendered a language as Spanish, and Spanish-speakers, as noted, have utterly given up. But for true gender/language problems, try Polish. In the singular, there's a masculine/feminine/neuter distinction. In the plural, you can have a masculine animate vs. masculine inanimate distinction or even a masculine personal vs. masculine non-personal distinction. (Note: I may not be remembering this exactly right.) EDIT: For nonsensical genders of inanimate objects, one of the classics in Spanish is skirt (feminine) vs. dress (masculine).

An old but good meme.

I think that my writing got better in college, but almost by accident. I learned Latin and Greek. That did it.

Every now and then, I think wistfully about how very close I came to applying to graduate programs in astronomy. My selling point would not have been my depth of knowledge of math or physics or something; I was fine, but nothing exceptional. It would have been that I can write. I would've been a theorist and a popularizer, a sort of wannabe Richard Feynman. It could've been fun. But it was not to be. Frankly, the things that are most valuable to learn are the ones that are the hardest to teach, in any discipline. How do we teach core analytical skills? Law schools think that they know, and they think that they're doing it in the first-year curriculum. Most undergrad departments like to think (to the extent that they think about teaching at all) that they're doing it, too. Are they? Perhaps. That's why a lot of jobs want applicants to have a bachelor's degree in something, regardless of what. Uh, more directly on the topic of writing, I grade essays from pre-meds from time to time. I'm inclined to think that bio students, at least, do not learn how to write in college. If they know how to write, they learned it in high school or before.

Learning critical thinking and writing skills (as you should in an English major) is useful for a large number of things. An English major is eminently practical. The difficulty is that it doesn't lead to anything in particular (unlike, say, a degree in accounting); it's of fairly general application. This makes it harder to explain to anyone.

Originally Posted By: Darth RuPaula Ditto an undergraduate degree on the way to practicing law or medicine. Last I checked, a typical doctor or lawyer could expect to make somewhere on the order of $300,000 to $500,000 a year. Granted, that's after even more expensive education. And a lot of people who want to become lawyers or doctors don't make it. At least the doctors usually get screened out before medical school; the lawyers mostly get screened out after law school.* * Only a small percentage of premeds get into medical school, but virtually everyone who gets into medical school becomes a doctor. I forget the percentage of people who go to law school who become practicing lawyers, but I don't think it's even a majority. And even of those practicing lawyers, only a small percentage become partners at big law firms and make oodles of dollars. EDIT: Oh, and funded Ph. D. programs are standard at reputable programs regardless of discipline, I think. Unfunded Masters programs are common, too, though, so you can end up with a lot of debt from graduate school even so.

Total cost of attendance at my school for 2012-2013: $75,800.

I think the needle/ferrets originated with Stug in the RW cult.

I think this is the one to which Dantius is referring: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=206138 Topics like the one linked on PPP in my last post were common back in the day, but they tended not to lead anywhere. Still, they were interesting, at least as exercises in probing logic and fallacies, as well as some science from time to time. Jeff himself locked Alec's "Are You A Gay" topic in late 2006. The Mister Fox banning was around the same time. Slarty notes that the mods became a little firmer throughout 2007 and on, and I think Jeff's own comments to us in late 2006 were part of the reason. And we have much calmer, more family-friendly boards as a result.

Yes. You both have to release both of those scenarios.

Overwhelming's smug and self-righteous demeanor, total tone-deafness to the needs and desires of the community, and arbitrary stubbornness that you can read in that topic were characteristic of him more generally in the community. If my original message to him, which he quotes in part in that topic, seems abrasive, I offer as excuse that I was very annoyed with him based on previous incidents (one of several possible examples), and at the time, I did regularly update my scenarios (check my site history around January-April 2005, which was when I released Bahs, LP, and 9 Vars, with a whole bunch of updates following). Also, I would be being less than honest if I denied that I had other reasons to be underwhelmed by Overwhelming. In checking my old PMs (which I still have from that era), I saw that BSC — I forget what he originally registered as, but he kept the BSC acronym throughout — was another active poster at the time. He was a good dude, albeit not around for all that long. But I immediately remembered him as soon as I saw the name, which is something.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Dintiradan, WHERE are these things announced? I haven't seen them here, and of course SV is no more. ARE they publicized? No wonder BoA seems lifeless. They are announced in, e.g., topics like this one: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=262836 Or this one: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=241811 Or this one: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=237760 Or... well, you get the idea.

BtI is definitely Bob the Impaler. Rantallion is not what anyone called him, though that was the PDN of his last account. No one else went by BtI.