Posts by Terry 6

Ah yes. That makes sense. I've met a few of those. In education they rise to the top quite quickly, leaving a trail of broken careers, schools, kids, departments and even local authorities. And somehow it's never blamed on them. Even when they do actually have to resign from a post in failure they somehow seem to get seen as nobly taking the bullet for the department, which is left holding the disgrace. While they get a golden pay off and then pop up in a similar or better role before you know it. Just a few thousand quid better off. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard an incredulous "How the f*** did he get that job there?"

I guess the real question is; who is it that gives these knob-heads a free pass through life, and why?

Re: Losing my mother's marbles

B***er.

s open or for the camera in a product placement.

I hadn't realised why the marketing idiots wanted the logo the wrong way round so much. Now it makes (weird) sense. We all have to suffer the logo being the non-intuitive way round in (their) hope that it will appear in front of some hero in a big "movie". It wouldn't be Apple that came up with this ghastly idea would it. That seems to be the one we see most on the big screen, logo facing the camera.

Re: She was trying to open the hinges.

Absolutely. Our natural ( or at least trained from an early age) instinct is to expect writing/images to be the right way up as presented to us. So we tend automatically to position any logo etc. to be readable from our own side. The laptop isn't there to be seen by a third party, it is right way up for ourselves. But tell that to marketing idiots.

I used to have a PC that came like that. Red cable went into red hole etc. Can't remember the make.

Re: Which orifice??

THEY-DON'T-CARE

Re: She was trying to open the hinges.

Yes. That. I've still got to think this through when opening an unfamiliar laptop. Intuitively, to me the front edge is the one that I can read the logo from. I have to consciously remember that laptops open from the back of the logo, not the front. Just one more reason for my deep and abiding hatred of marketing people.

Re: Which orifice??

"Possible" It's bloody inevitable. Since there is no consistency on positioning of these things and labelling is either invisible, cryptic or both it's generally a 50/50 option.

Re: He had three degrees

And often persistence; Which is not always a good thing, contrary to common opinion. Persistence can mean to repeatedly keep on doing the wrong thing. There's a fine line between being persistent and being blind stubborn.

it is incomprehensible. As with all the other forced or tricked advertising. If the members of the public clearly don't want to hear about their product, why would they make the effort to bypass the boundaries.

Do they think their poxy cold-calls or nagging pop-ups will somehow lure the punters in through their hypnotic influence.

Paint was and is the built in Windows graphics package since forever. Paint 3D was a parallel replacement that MS brought in because they wanted us to all be buying big idiot glasses for VR. Almost no one does, so it became just another typical MS piece of stubbornness: They were determined that we'd all switch to it despite all the evidence to the contrary. Paintbrush was a totally different product. There have been a few programmes with variations on this name, but the main one is the Apple programme that presumably does much the same as Paint.

Re: Paint can be messy

Exactly. Paint was and is the ready to hand simple programme for doing simple jobs.

The idea that making it more complicated to use would somehow enhance its value simply indicates ( if we ever needed this) how out of touch Microsoft development are, for all their expensive focus groups and stuff.

Re: Street signs

And taxis. Apparently out in the colonies they have yellow and not proper black cabs.

Re: No gravestone for me

I'm often fascinated by the number of religious types who'll happily claim God to be omnipotent and omniscient, yet needing praise and help from us.

I could believe in God. I just can't believe in a God who's so needy .

Re: Romanes eunt domus

This is because;

Caeser adsum ex forte.

Re: Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph

Yep. There seem to be two strands here. Sometimes in a mismatched harness together.

On one side are bean counter lead decisions: use the cheapest materials, don't budget for any greater use than current, i.e.allow any "growing space", don't worry about the staff who have to work in there, don't plan anything to reduce the cost of future maintenance by spending a few extra bob now to make sure that things can be easily repaired in a few years' time.

On the other hand are the grandiose self-promoting builds; make sure that the architect has a famous name, make sure the building looks brilliant on the architects illustration, choose a design that looks unique, totally ignore the area around and whether your building fits in, don't worry about the staff who have to work in there, don't plan anything to reduce the cost of future maintenance by spending a few extra bob now to make sure that things can be easily repaired in a few years' time, make a token environmental and public service commitment easily side-stepped..

Re: Hobbits

Dear God! What was he thinking to take that gig>

Re: Struck off?

I have sympathy for you. Calling out "Big Pharma" however isn't that relevant. Small Pharma will do the same.

Re: Struck off?

The Puritans, persecuted n their native England, set the foundation for the culture in America..

Half right. It goes further than that, and in a different direction. The Puritans were massively intolerant of other Christian denominations at a time when tolerance was becoming much more accepted and went off to seek a land where they didn't have to put up with them. Less fleeing from persecution, more fleeing to it. And Puritan Christian intolerance seems to be a major foundation of some strands of American culture.

Re: Struck off?

Think this applies just to surgeons, harking back to the days when they also cut hair.

Re: AntiVaxxers

Toni. Your last sentence is the truth of it. But not the rest We don't owe the USA an apology. We didn't tell them to let discredited anti-vaxxers who were struck off for fraudulent research claims swan around in their country hero worshipped by dim celebs who promote their nonsense.

Re: Strike out!

Add to this the facts that medical doctors do need to have a lot of factual information at their finger tips and that the exam systems of most countries (maybe all) are built around memorising and then regurgitating facts and you have a path to a medicine degree that is built around storing lots of data locally. While problem solving skills and reasoning may also be assessed the recall of information is paramount. Assessment systems built round course work rather than terminal exams are pretty much hated by politicians and denigrated to the public. To some extent with reason, since making these systems fair and rigorous requires investment of time and money. Or to put it another way, a dim slogger with a decent memory will go further than someone who's bright but with poorer decontextualised recall- especially if they have been able to get through the previous school years by relying on thinking rather than recalling.

Re: magnetic vaccines.

Medical professionals that are either cynical manipulators or just crack pots may simply choose not to knowledge what they were taught.

Re: magnetic vaccines.

That particular hare was started as a gag on Social Meedja. And was a totally faked joke demonstration.The young person who seemed to be sticking a coin to her magnetic arm subsequently admitted she'd licked the coin first. It seems to have been picked up rather eagerly by the crack pots and went err viral . Unlike her later admission. "A lie.......before the truth has got its boots on"

Re: Thermostats

Yes and no. In Local govt being accountable often means supporting whatever current line of thinking (I use the word loosely) is in vogue/comes from on high. And for those on high, or aspiring to get there, accountability for the consequences of their actions is side-stepped by the simple tactic of having moved on to some new pet project (of their own or their bosses') by the time the things go pear shaped. The can gets carried by those who had been tasked with running the now discredited project. Often bright young professionals who'd been seduced into the project by the claims and high up support it carried. Only to be disillusioned or even to have their careers wrecked when the support dries up. It doesn't actually matter whether the project itself was valid/worthwhile/successful or not btw. The outcome is always the same. Support from above withers as some new project becomes fashionable, decisions - especially hard decisions- aren't made, budgets wither and clients or whatever it was intended for evaporate because the parts of the council that were recruiting them scent which way the wind is blowing and stop referring

Career success in these shark infested waters depends on spotting what's ascending or descending and jumping astutely to the next ascender. It's kind of like playing Super Mario Goes Career Climbing..

Re: My suspicion

Yeah, my thought, straight away, was "delay mechanism".

Re: Wow

A great chunk of that applied to me too. Not the on the ASD spectrum bit. But the learning how to learn bit. I could do just about well enough at comprehensive school to stay in the top groups just by working out what the answers had to be, without bothering to learn anything much. But primary school was horrific. I had ( have) lousy handwriting* due it was later found out to having terrible hand eye coordination, am late Summer born and come from a working class background with parents who had limited formal education or qualifications.. I arrived in school with no real concept of what learning or educational progress was meant to look like, surrounded by a lot of middle class kids who were up to a year older than me, incapable of mastering handwriting or shoe laces and with no wish or need to work at learning. The fact that I could read like a dream just annoyed them more. At 5 I was "failed shoe laces" So I was categorised as too thick to teach. And ignored until I left. Which is why no one investigated why my handwriting was so poor until high school.

*I can teach it brilliantly. For anything else I need a computer.

Re: A bit bonkers

The upside of this story is that I volunteered to help younger kids in school with their reading. (I'd always been a really good reader myself). From which I discovered that I had an aptitude for working with kids with literacy learning issues, particularly emotional ones- including loss of self-esteem and low expectations due to poor learning experiences.

It was the foundation of my career for the next 30 odd years. (rather than going full time into computers which had been my original aim).

Re: I used to be a member...

I was in my youth, see above, in Mensa. I also failed to be a Bridge player at around the same time. I understood the rules. I failed to be capable of understanding why the "bidding" had to be a not-so-secret code to tell your partner what you had. And more to the point found it far too frustrating wasting precious bids by using them a a code.

Re: A bit bonkers

In my youth I was a member ( as in almost 50 years ago). I was, though not in a bad place generally, suffering from some very poor educational experiences (particularly at primary school) that had left me doubting my own abilities. I tried the first test, just to see if I could, potentially, get the score. And I did - so I did the proper test, passed and joined. It did help me to sort out my education a bit. It helped me to remain buoyant, get just about adequate 'O' levels to progress to 6th form and get just about adequate 'A' levels to get to uni...

It also helped me make my first visit to London, out of Manchester, age all of 16 and meet some very interesting ( interpret that how you will) people. I stayed at the home of a young couple in Hampstead, who had books everywhere, but which had never been opened ( some pages needed a bit of cutting through still). I'm not sure what it tells us about those Mensa members - or Mensa in general circa 1974. You can draw your own conclusions. I left a year or two later because, well, the conversation never lived up to the expectation.