it's complicated
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I wonder how long it would have gone on had that other car not forced the solution on her.
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This is so unsettling
Quote from: Rufus on January 05, 2015, 12:46:46 PMThis is so unsettlingCan't wait to see the sex applications
There is a town in that band that I call home, so I say my “wh”-words in the traditional way. I never thought twice about it before coming to New Jersey. Here, my peers make a spectacle of it. “Say Cool Whip,” they’ll tell me, in reference to the Family Guy gag in which one character pokes fun at another for his /hw/ pronunciations. I’ll say “Cool Whip.” They’ll repeat it back to me with exaggerated emphasis on the /h/. I’ve been pulled into this conversation several times now, and each time I grow a bit more self-conscious. Very few people like to have their speech mocked.Now, I am sure the others never mean their offense. Therefore, I will play along and let them have their laugh. You wouldn’t know it from my columns, but I avoid confrontation when I can. Besides, this is not very important to me. I am a male and I am white, so I get less than my fair share of discrimination. I am ashamed to say that I have complained when I have had such fortune, but I must confess that I did. A friend of mine whom I quite like had put me through the “Cool Whip” routine, so I waited awhile and texted her this: “Making fun of regional speech is a microaggression.”Again, I am ashamed of that text. But I learned a lot from her response. “Better put that on TM,” she said, referring to the Tiger Microaggressions page notorious for posting inoffensive “aggressions.” There came no apology or retraction. She really did not understand that she had caused any offense, even after I had plainly told her so. That is fine with me, and I don’t blame her one bit. If I were her, I am afraid I would not have understood either.I mean it when I say I am afraid. I am afraid that I have spent eighteen years not understanding when I have said something offensive. I am afraid that I have unwittingly hurt the feelings of people so accustomed to microaggression that they did not bother to speak up. I am afraid that I would not have taken those people seriously if they had made a stand. And I am afraid I will do it all again. I am afraid because microaggressions aren’t harmless — there’s research to show that they cause anxiety and binge drinking among the minority students who are targeted.To become more aware of my own shortcomings is a debt I owe to others, so please send me a message if I have ever hurt your feelings. I will do what I can to make it up to you. In the meantime, I ask that my readers try doing the same. You might be causing people offense without intending to. Understanding how others feel is hard for those of us who do not suffer discrimination often, but with a little conscious effort, we can start correcting our mistakes.Newby Parton is a freshman from McMinnville, Tenn. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.
In 1964 the eminent physicist Richard Feynman served on the State of California's Curriculum Commission and saw how the Commission chose math textbooks for use in California's public schools. In his acerbic memoir of that experience, titled "Judging Books by Their Covers," Feynman analyzed the Commission's idiotic method of evaluating books, and he described some of the tactics employed by schoolbook salesmen who wanted the Commission to adopt their shoddy products. "Judging Books by Their Covers" appeared as a chapter in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" -- Feynman's autobiographical book that was published in 1985 by W.W. Norton & Company.
Judging Books by Their CoversRichard P. FeynmanI was giving a series of freshman physics lectures [in 1964], and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, "You oughta see what's happening to mathematics in schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff!"I didn't pay much attention to what he said.But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer here in Pasadena, Mr. Norris, who was at that time on the State Board of Education. He asked me if I would serve on the State Curriculum Commission, which had to choose the new schoolbooks for the state of California. You see, the state had a law that all of the schoolbooks used by all of the kids in all of the public schools have to be chosen by the State Board of Education, so they have a committee to look over the books and to give them advice on which books to take.It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called "new math," and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we're trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks.I must have had, by this time, a guilty feeling about not cooperating with the government, because I agreed to get on this committee.
We came to a certain book, part of a set of three supplementary books published by the same company, and they asked me what I thought about it.I said, "The book depository didn't send me that book, but the other two were nice."Someone tried repeating the question: "What do you think about that book?""I said they didn't send me that one, so I don't have any judgment on it."The man from the book depository was there, and he said, "Excuse me; I can explain that. I didn't send it to you because that book hadn't been completed yet. There's a rule that you have to have every entry in by a certain time, and the publisher was a few days late with it. So it was sent to us with just the covers, and it's blank in between. The company sent a note excusing themselves and hoping they could have their set of three books considered, even though the third one would be late."It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! They couldn't believe it was blank, because [the book] had a rating. In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating.
Man she's hot, who is she?
Quote from: Death Ghidorah on January 07, 2015, 11:59:52 PMMan she's hot, who is she?No idea if truly NSFW but spoilering because she's no Bob Ross*.spoiler (click to show/hide)[close]*spoiler (click to show/hide) r.i.p. in peace[close]
Quote from: TVC 15 on January 09, 2015, 12:43:59 AM
http://imgur.com/gallery/y3yuDpNspoiler (click to show/hide)[close]
