Luxury!

When I was a lad me mum fed us bowls of computer dots and we didn't crap a valid Fortran deck by teatime she'd beat us about the head with an RS-232 cable -- if we were lucky.

I not only sent emails with bang path routing, at one point I actually figured out Sendmail.cf -- the Brainfuck of configuration files.

My teething ring was loop of 10Base5 cable. My see-and-say was a circular slide rule.

The bell bottoms and sideburns are a dead giveaway.

What I think is weird is her defense of her dismal performance at HP, which is that the company did really well after she left.

I mean, hole-ee cow, there's a woman who's away to see the fairies.

How much more "native" could I be?

By this I mean if you asked a typical person to picture a tree in his mind, he'd picture a green blob on a brown stick sticking up out of flat green space. Tolkien is the kind of person who'd picture an individual specimen of a specific species of tree growing in a place with unique and describable topography. And the concreteness with which he imagines this kind of thing shows in his writing.

When I was young I read and re-read Lord of the Rings for the magic. Forty years later, I re-read Lord of the Rings for the landscape. You can often orient yourself in a Tolkien scene; do a mental walk through imagining the slope of the land and smell kicked up by the damp grass and heather. There's nobody who writes landscape like Tolkien.

If you're a careful reader -- alright, an obsessive reader -- you can correlate scenes in different plot threads in time by the appearance of the sky and particularly by the phase of the moon. So you know what's happening to Merry and Pippin when we're in a Three Hunters scene, or how far along Frodo and Sam are inMordor during the Battle of the Pellenor Fields. That's a degree of attention lavished on detail beyond any reasonable marketing justification; it must have added years to the drafting of the manuscript. It's not even apparent until you've read the book a half dozen times or more.

That sense of exploring the details of a real scene in space and time would be familiar to any naturalist.

The thing is, nobody is co-opting any religious ceremony. What happens (or doesn't happen) at a church remains completely up to the church. What happens at the marriage license office at City Hall, OTOH, is not a religious ceremony, it is the signing of a legal contract. It is the latter that gay marriage proponents are changing, not the former.

It's time to clone the Mammoth. We've waited long enough.

My only question is if these new pages will have links to the super helpful articles on "New Law Passed In Your Area That People are Upset About" and "10 Celebrities Who Are Said To Smell Awful". I don't know how my life can be complete without thous ;-)

Err... really? Sixty million American Bison disappeared from the Great Plains because they were big? Then why did the passenger pigeon over the same period go from the most numerous bird in the world to extinct? It's true that the largest baleen whale -- the Blue Whale, is listed as "threatened"; but the smallest baleen whale, the pygmy right whale is either extinct or very close to it.

It's not as simple as big == headed for extinction. Sometimes bigness is a factor in extinction, sometimes it's a factor in survival.

Wow. Sunday, and we already have a winner for the week's most non-sensical analogy.

And you're telling me you and your friends never did anything stupid? When you were 15 you were as sober as a 30 year-old?

This is what is called a false dichotomy. You don't treat kids like adults who have misbehaved; you treat kids like kids who have misbehaved. Or do you think that a 12 year-old who starts a fire playing with matches should be treated like a 40 year who starts a fire playing with matches, because in the end they did the same thing?

What I'm saying is take the age of the offender into account in how you punish them. This isn't some kind of radical new liberal idea. It's how this country operated until the end of the 20th C.

Yours apparently has some way to go. Or maybe it's too far gone.

The brain isn't one big ball of mush. It has different parts that perform different functions. You get injured in your Broca's area and you won't be able speak or write. I've seen it in stroke patients; it doesn't matter that the rest of their brains is just good as new, they don't have any expressive language. Likewise if your orbital frontal cortex is damaged or not fully developed yet, you're going to act like an ass. Doesn't matter how smart or well-meaning you are.

Teenaged brains can be misleading, because in some ways they're at their lifetime peak. But at the same time they suck at certain things. A smart fifteen year-old can explain the difference between right and wrong, between a smart and stupid action. But he can't be trusted to act in accordance to that kind of knowledge, because among other things the OFC isn't finished yet. This is why parents get fooled into thinking their wonderful children won't do dumb things. You simply cannot expect a teenager to act intelligently because he has knowledge. The knowledge helps, but it does't determine behavior in a fifteen year-old as it does in a thirty year-old.

That's just a straw man argument. The actual problem with treating him as an adult is that that is contrary to fact. He is not an adult.

In the state of Georgia a fifteen year-old cannot vote; he cannot purchase liquor; cannot obtain a driver's license, cannot hold a full-time job. The rules we have for minors assume they're incapable of making adult choices. It's logically inconsistent to believe minors are not competent to make responsible decisions, but then claim we should treat them as if they can decide responsibly because they've failed to do so. When have you ever used reasoning like that for anything else? I had a housemate once who decided to become her own herbalist. She went to the herb store and bought a lot of herbal shit and promptly made herself sick. By your logic I should go to her for medical treatment because (a) I previously had reason to believe she was not competent to practice medicine and (b) her subsequent actions proved my suspicions correct.

You don't need some namby-pamby PC mumbo jumbo to know that most teenagers have a penchant for doing spectacularly stupid things, but that *most* of them grow out it. That's common sense, and the law should take that into account. And science actually backs up common sense here. Most people's brains go through a development spurt in their "executive functions" (acting according to long term plans, inhibiting impulsive actions, directing attention) when they're around fifteen. That means there's roughly a 50/50 chance someone under sixteen is neurologically incapable of not acting like a jackass.

So both science and common sense tell us that treating children as if they were adults is irrational and serves no useful purpose. That doesn't mean you do nothing when kids commit crimes. That's a false dichotomy. It means you do something different.