Today’s SMH roundup:

Firstly, there’s this piece, on gender differences in humour, which I think is an excellent example of the sort of writing that gives the more social sciences a bad name. It’s filled with logical errors - including the common ‘ All truth is relative, except for the truth that all truth is relative.’, although this is more implicit than explicit. Another one is the self-confirming nature of many pronouncements - if you deny them, that only ends up confirming them.

Actually, now that I’ve written that down, I see it needs more explanation. The quote that really shows this problem is this:

the failure of some people to recognise the cultural shaping of perception, and to think that their way of seeing the world is normal.

Here, the assertion is that, unless you allow that your perceptions of the world are shaped by your culture, you are are wrong. But if you do allow that, then that’s just your culture shaping your perceptions about the world such that you think that it doesn’t. But that means that you’re espousing the doctrine you say you’re not, which means that you’re wrong anyway.

I think that this offers some explanation why many people who don’t like the idea of relativism really don’t like it - the position claims a moral high ground: I’m allowing for the validity of all views, while you are stuck believing that some views can be better than others. Because of this, you are making judgements about other human beings without ever having met them. I do not do this, therefore I am a better person than you.

Again, the irony here is that in holding this sort of position, the (admittedly extreme) relativist is caught in another paradox - by claiming a position that claims not to be making judgments about other people’s views, they then are implicitly believing that they are morally superior to others, which is in itself a judgement about other people’s views.

Update: Turns out there’s only one thing I feel like writing today - so the ‘Firstly’ is not correct English. Ah well, the question is, will anyone other than me care?

Yes, it’s true, I haven’t posted in aaaages.

After a very busy couple of weeks at work, I simply couldn’t summon up the energy to type out what’s been happening to me lately.

However, today I have had the best, most relaxing day in some time. After going out to Trang’s parents’ place last night to meet some of Trang’s relatives, we spent an excellent day lounging around at Trang’s place today.

After getting up reasonably early and going to the gym, we came back and slept for another couple of hours, and then we got up, and proceeded to watch Pride and Prejudice. All six hours. And I quite liked it. It’s just the right thing to watch with someone you love on a lazy day. And yes, I can see why there is much swooning whenever a group of girls watch it together. Mr Darcy indeed.

Well it has been a very busy week. Last Friday night I worked at LE from 6pm to 5am with an hour break for dinner. Saturday I did some washing and then headed to Animania to check it out and meet up with some of the Manifest folks. Had a nice evening of general geekery, with a dinner at the Korean BBQ place at Broadway to finish it off. Then it was home to bed so I would be fresh for Sunday, when one of the high-up chinese wu shu guys came to watch our class and to teach. Spent a nice evening with Trang, and then spent all of Monday fixing all the little things that got broken at LE when we upgraded the server. Monday night I got some rest, and then last night was another wu shu training session. One of the Beijing wu shu team showed us his spear form - definitely very impressive.

Tonight is the big demonstration - I’m pretty nervous, as there will be a lot of important people there, and I don’t want to stuff it up and embarrass Sifu. However, as one of the Beijing guys said last night, you can’t be too afraid to lose, or you won’t be able to do anything.

I can’t believe how busy I am this week. I’m helping organise a server upgrade and a software upgrade on Friday and Saturday, doing my normal job, and filling in for some of my manager’s jobs, as he’s away on holiday. And that’s just LE.

I went and had a look at some mugshots at Waverley police station today re the assault of last Thursday, and wrote down some impressions for the supervising officer to write up into a statement. Looking at mugshots is a strange affair - there’s some real characters in amongst the usual crowd of sullen thuggish crims. And I saw one person I knew vaguely from Uni.

PhD application is in the works, as are scholarship applications. Once I’m happy with the abstract-style ‘proposal’ that gets stuck onto the form, I’ll post it here for your edification, gentle reader.

Some more musings may be on the way due to my current reread of the Illuminati books - but don’t hold your breath.

Mega Yay! Trang is back and we spent a wonderful two days together. It is soooo good to have her back.

I am astoundingly busy in the next two weeks, with the three jobs, wu shu, Trang, PhD application, and so on and so on. Posting will most likely be infrequent.

Well, my day yesterday stayed about the same in the end…

After spending my lunch break going to one of the other places I do support for, only to find that the problem was fixed when I got there, I travelled to the third place, where their PCs were melting down because of a virus infection - the latest mass mailer, Bugbear.

However, just outside the building I saw a guy get knocked down, beaten and robbed by four other guys. I wanted to help, but realised that trying to take on four guys who could be carrying weapons by myself was stupid. The guys ran past me when they pissed off, so I got a good look at some of them.

The victim was pretty beat up, but it was mainly cuts that looked worse than they were, I think. After a while, the cops came and organised the ambos to come and take him to get his cheek xrayed - he got cut by his sunglasses. I gave a quick description of events to the cops, and they took my details. They said it was pretty unlikely anything further would happen as noone knew who the four guys were.

And then I had to stay at CPS until 7.30 fixing the virus infection.

But, thanks be to whoever is listening, Trang gets back this weekend. That’s a big enough yay to cancel all of this crap out, believe you me.

You know what I hate? People who log support calls without any description of the problem. Example: I get a call from someone who says ‘Our printer isn’t working.’ That’s it.

Apparently I am supposed to be able to tell the cause of the problem and the necessary steps to fix it simply by being notified of the problem’s existence. If this was the case, I would be either in government and the world would be a utopia, or I would be filthy stinking rich and would thus not be answering your support calls.

I hate their stinking insistence that computers are just too hard and so they shouldn’t bother to make the inference that because the support centre always asks them to reboot, they should try rebooting their PC before calling, instead of just complaining about the support centre not earning their pay because they always just say ‘reboot first’. Chances are pretty good the support centre is, instead, either dealing with other people’s idiotic queries or problems or are instead busy suppressing the urge to buy a large number of automatic weapons and fix the user problem once an for all.

I have a dream. One day, standard equipment for support staff will be an electric cattle prod, and they will be encouraged to use it on people who waste their time. And they will have a duty to use it on people who not only waste their time with their rampant stupidity, but then have the hide and the audacity to complain about how long it took to get to them.

I’m having a shit day, in case you hadn’t guessed.