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Comment Re: Her work (Score 3, Insightful) 1262

This is what she actually says - and is the only mention of testosterone in the entire thirteen minutes: (from her transcript)

They can start by deemphasizing the macho testosterone and the combat, and create universally appealing sets that include occupations and adventure scenarios for children of all genders.

I am struggling to understand how this is suggesting that testosterone is evil. She additionally - and correctly - notes how women do not appear in their advertising playing with lego. She most certainly does not suggest that fathers and sons playing together is a bad thing - she instead suggests that there is a very strong gender bias going on in the Lego world. And she is right of course - with an 18-1 ratio of male to female minifigs I fail to see how any other conclusion could be reached.

There was one thing that annoyed me though - she kept on referring to Lego as 'Legos'. Americans. Please stop doing this.

Comment Re:This is good! (Score 1) 528

Maybe they're just not that smart....?

Sorry.

Think about music. Learning the different scales by memory is important, but if you don't think about them in terms of intervals, and about those intervals in terms of whole-number ratios of frequencies, then you'll (probably) never become a great musician. Multiplication is interesting here, because there are lots of different ways of thinking about it, and when you come to do things like multiplying matrices, you see that it isn't always just repeated addition.

Perhaps they are behind where you were in terms of rote numeracy, but perhaps they have a deeper understanding of numerical objects than you did at that age?

Comment Re:This is good! (Score 1) 528

If your in line at a fast food restaurant, you need to be able to estimate if the $20 in your pocket will cover the order you plan on making or not. Combo is $7.99 round to $8, I need two of them...$16 tax is 7%.. round to $10... $1.60 tax... $17.60 total; ok I'm good.

Don't care. Use an eftpos card. Who carries cash? And why don't they put the tax up on the price list anyway? As an occasional visitor to the US, I hate that.

Comment Re:This is good! (Score 1) 528

No, I can't. Or at least, not any pair of single digit numbers. And I certainly can't do the same with division. Addition I'm okay at, but sometimes make errors.

I do have a degree in mathematics though, and a job that requires the use of that mathematics almost every day, so perhaps its not that important generally. And in any case, estimation I would propose is a more important skill. And an understanding of the relative orders of magnitude. Like, for instance, how many a million really is. Kids are interesting in this respect, they're always grasping for larger and larger numbers (a thousand million billion days!!), yet they don't even really understand how many a hundred is.

Anyway; Once upon a time, it would have been considered a serious educational detriment to be unable to cut a quill pen from a feather. Today, we have biros. Ah... progress!

Comment Re:Fuel and H20 (Score 2) 191

Fights break out over fuel - that was a surprise to me.

A surprise to me too. I live there, experienced the quakes, lost power and water for weeks, dug a loo in the back garden, etc etc etc. But I didn't see, or even hear about, fights breaking out over anything. Is your source that terrible 'docudrama' made by some people from Auckland who had apparently never visited Christchurch before?

Water did take a long time to show up, eventually water trucks turned up in the streets. Had the water supply been affected in a more widespread way (parts of the city were more or less unaffected, as mentioned elsewhere it's the ground conditions that really matter) we would have been in real trouble.

Comment Re: Would be awesome (Score 1) 727

That's a very good point - and the argument that word and excel can't be replaced in a business environment is increasingly untrue. Not that they'll be replaced with behemoths like libreOffice - we've pretty much replaced them with google docs and an installation of confluence. I haven't opened word to write a document for quite a long time, and I certainly don't miss it.

Comment Re:The three made some mistakes (Score 2) 231

I know that blacks...

This remark betrays a deeply held racism that you really need to take a good hard (non-agressive) look at. Seriously.
No, you do not 'know' anything about 'blacks' (whatever that term might actually mean? Africans? Ghanians? Nigerians? African-Americans? People who like wearing a lot of black?). You hold prejudices about people who are not white.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 748

Not liking gays is pretty much a lot like not liking, oh I don't know, redheads for instance. And then defending that position as being a "valid political position". And then getting into arguments over whether people who have red hair have it through choice, and whether or not dying one's hair red is an equally indefensible act.

It's just completely and totally silly. If that guys over there wants to do nasty things to that other guy, and they're both grown-ups, then get the fuck over it bucko and move on. Also if that girl over there wants to do some other things to that other girl, and they're both grown-ups, then get the fuck over that too. Except, like most anti-gay people, you're probably not nearly as anti-that as you are anti-the-other. Right?

Fact: none of these things are any of your business.

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