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Anacharsis

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Everything posted by Anacharsis

  1. ​Has anyone from the church come to visit him? If it's a loneliness issue, perhaps the easiest way to point him in the right direction is to get him friends his own age.
  2. The mouth is a complicated place. In an effort to get people to do something, sometimes things are over-simplified. For instance, take tartar -- the process of fossilization that creates tartar kills the bacteria in the plaque; does that mean it has a protective effect against cavities even as it damages the gums? :) ​ ​Mouthwash is an effective way to fight gingivitis -- but its long-term use may increase the risk of oral cancer. Does that make it good or bad? ​ ​Sometimes it's hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all answer.
  3. That sounds rough. :( Ideally he is a recovering sex-offender. If it were my neighborhood, I would do my best to treat him sort of like a recovering alcoholic -- avoid inviting him to things that might cause a relapse, be vigilant against signs, but recognize that it is in both his and my best interests that he become reintegrated into the community. ​ ​Since sex offenses don't carry life imprisonment nor the death penalty, they have to go somewhere and do something after they get out of prison. In some ways the social penalties are more severe than for murder; we don't usually have murderer registries, after all.
  4. ​A fairly simple one (although I'm not sure where it would be listed on a website) is whether they know Chinese. A lot of traditional Chinese medical texts and modern TCM research never make it into English; a doctor who knows Chinese is likely one who has a good working knowledge of both traditional and modern practice. Related to this, having spent any time during their medical training as an exchange student at a traditional Chinese medical college. ​ ​If their medical school was in California, likely their training was a bit more rigorous, as California's acupuncturist licensing standards are the strictest in the country at the moment, if I remember correctly. On the other hand, teaching to pass an exam is not always the same as teaching for skills, so your mileage may vary with this approach.
  5. The Unitarian Universalists might be helpful. Historically they are Christian (Unitarian, in that they reject the Trinity, and Universalist in that they believe in the idea of Universal Salvation), but they took an unusually wide open-door stance towards different religions and welcoming the nominally religious, perhaps due to the Universalist impulse. In many deeply Christian areas, their church has become a low-pressure place for the non-religious or differently-religious to go on Sundays when everything else is closed. :)
  6. I've met a few Satanists before. In my experience, they are more likely to be militant anti-theists rather than neopagans or even occultists -- the ones I've met have usually been from religious families or communities that treated them poorly. Whether that makes them more or less dangerous from a Catholic perspective I don't know. I say anti-theist to distinguish from atheist, because I've found atheists who were simply raised in irreligious environments are harmless; they have no personal stake in religion, and are no more likely to harass Christians than non-baseball players would be likely to hang around at Little League games trying to convince children that baseball was a cruel and nasty sport. They have no personal wounds related to Christianity, which removes much of the motivation to do something which is very time-consuming. Maybe this can be part of a difficult conversation about how churches and their communities sometimes fail their members, and how to reconcile the teachings of the Bible with its imperfect followers.
  7. Use shoe trees to keep the tips from bending up, and (if untreated wood) to keep the insides dry. If the shoes get muddy, allow the mud to dry, and then brush off with a shoe brush before doing the usual cleaning. ​ ​To clean them, use saddle soap, then condition them with either a shoe paste or polish -- the difference being whether you want a shine. You can use a neutral polish, or one with dye in it. The one with dye will cover up scuffs and wear discolorations, but it can be hard to match the color unless the shoes are black. ​ ​If the shoes are leather lined, you can use saddle soap on the insides if necessary; just allow them time to dry. (No polish, of course.) If they are fabric lined, use a foot powder; this keeps them dry and scent-free. However, this will cause the insole to wear out eventually, after which you will need to replace it with a new one.
  8. I prefer two-bowls, maybe due to washing dishes that way during an old high-school job. The idea is that the first sink is your wash sink (usually the one with the garbage disposal), and the second is your rinse sink. ​​ ​In commercial kitchens they usually add a sanitizing sink, but other than that, this is the idea: ​ ​
  9. If they are applying for a particular job, no objective is necessary, as most would assume the objective is to be hired for that particular listed position. If they are fishing, in an "I'll do anything for your company, but ideally I'd like to do this" sort of way, an objective might be useful, but that style of job-hunting really only works with small owner-operated businesses where there are so few employees that each one holds multiple roles.
  10. The dollar store can be a good place to learn about supply chains -- a lot of those generic products have interesting histories. For instance, the local dollar store carries something called "Chef Ernesto's Battered Mushrooms": Chef Ernesto is actually named Sanjiv Kakkar, and his battered mushrooms are from a frozen food factory in Paonta Sahib, a rural town of about 19,000 in the Himachal Pradesh region of India. A couple pictures from inside the factory: ​ ​(Mushroom growing) ​ (Mushroom processing) ​ Sanjiv goes into how "Chef Ernesto" came to be in an interview: ​ The dollar store is full of stories. :)
  11. Lab notebook guidelines were traditionally low-tech because you didn't want anything malfunctioning during an experiment that you might only get to do once. This is similar to how field scientists in remote areas were long-time technophobes, since a broken laptop if you are thousands of miles from anywhere to repair it can be a big problem. Of course, for less extreme circumstances, there's really no reason to ignore the convenience of recording your experiment. It's sort of like the decision on whether to do math by hand or with a calculator; it's good to know how to and be able to do it without one, but once you've got that down, the convenience factor of a calculator is pretty significant. :)
  12. Daybreak in Udi might be interesting. A film about Nigeria from the British perspective; good for providing context to postwar British colonialism. It won an Oscar and a BAFTA award: The UK National Archives did a write-up on it that goes into some of the background and provides a link to a higher resolution copy. Maybe contrast and compare with a modern Nigerian perspective.
  13. ​ The first step is to decide on an approach. If identifying what is not allowed is most important, then a dress code is indeed the way to go. If identifying what is allowed is most important, than you will be better served by a uniform policy. Focusing exclusively on one or the other is easier for making judgments -- with uniforms, the answer becomes "Nothing is allowed unless it is on our list", while with dress codes, the answer becomes "Everything is allowed unless it is on our list". Maybe Nathan Essex's ​School Uniforms: Guidelines for Principals might be a helpful place to start?
  14. ​ Moroccan style gunpowder green tea.
  15. The Wilson Quarterly had an interesting article on the subject that I thought I'd share. I wonder, how much of this changing attitude has to do with the increasing financial stakes that surround a college education? It seems to me that students fear controversy because a controversial class could lead to a controversial grade -- which can have immediate consequences in the case of GPA-based scholarships, and longer-term consequences if poor grades prevent graduation or make it difficult to get high-paying jobs that filter candidates by GPA. With rising tuition costs, being stuck with student loan debt and no degree or limited job prospects is the worst of both worlds. I imagine that professors fear controversy for similar reasons -- the job market for academics without tenure seems very tight, and anything that might cause negative evaluations carries a financial risk. Perhaps if they are new enough, they are still paying off student loans of their own?
  16. A place to start might be Elizabeth Wood's paper, Working in the Fantasy Factory: The Attention Hypothesis and the Enacting of Masculine Power in Strip Clubs. If I understand her correctly, strippers make men feel more manly, so are more popular in areas with stricter gender roles where men constantly compare themselves against the traditional markers of masculinity. It looks like she studied people who go as their own idea, rather than as part of a company outing or to a friend's bachelor party. I would try to explain the difference between being physically a man, and the set of cultural ideas that people hold up about what it means. I guess the closest parallel I can think of is Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, which talks about this from a woman's perspective. From a classical education perspective, Lord Chesterfield talked about this in Letters to His Son:
  17. The old reason is a belief in Enlightenment principles; the idea that if someone holds a belief that is wrong, it cannot hurt you if you know the truth, and that if you hold a belief that is wrong, it will be banished away through exposure to the truth -- so encountering the widest number of ideas possible can only be a good. As post-modern thinking has developed, people have started to resign themselves to the fact that this view is not entirely accurate. There are many ideas that are as virulent or even more virulent than the truth, and knowing the truth is not a vaccine -- many virulent ideas focus on worldview, the lens that allows our dim eyes to see the truth in the first place. :) As power in the human sphere is often based on people's reactions to the facts rather than the facts themselves, a lot more effort has gone into that aspect of conversation rather than a simple uncovering of facts. The modern reason for exposure to other ideas is avoiding "monoculture". The person who decided that in English the word for a system of human attitudes and what happens when bacteria finds a food source should be the same word had a very insightful mind. While worldviews are often resistant to a wide variety of influences, every so often a fatal weakness is found -- if there are no symbiotic worldviews that are resistant to the attacker, this can lead to a catastrophic culture shift. Some have argued that this was a problem faced by the classic Great Books curriculum in the face of the World Wars. A philosophy that teaches that you cannot control that you will die but you can control how you will live is one that does not fear war -- in a world of mustard gas and gatling guns, that was a very dangerous view. In a world of atomic weapons and computerized weapons systems, that is a world-ending view. If it wasn't for symbiotic worldviews, the curriculum would not have survived. The balance is in finding worldviews that are different from your own, but which can form a symbiotic relationship that will not have one attacking and overwhelming the other.
  18. Generally the most important thing to remember about recruiters is that unless you personally are paying them (like an agreement to a percentage of your salary), they are not working for you or looking out for your interests, unless they coincidentally happen to coincide with their own. Another helpful thing to remember is that many people end up as recruiters accidentally, rather than through formal training. They don't necessarily have any magic bullet, other than perhaps a knack for sales. Not all recruiters are alike; they tend to divide out based on their tactics: There are the spear-fishers, who generally specialize in luring already employed and not-looking employees from one company to another. This type of recruiter exists because companies that are terrified of risk or blame see the person working an identical role at a competitor who is not looking for another job -- and would not unless coaxed -- as the safest of all hires. (Whether this is true is not certain, but that is the idea.) There are the Comic Book Guy rustlers, who noticed that in certain fields (especially tech fields), there are people who have extremely strong skill-sets but who would be instantly rejected in a traditional hiring process -- usually because of a combination of poor understanding of business norms by the candidate, and poor understanding of the skill-set by front-line HR staff. This leads to a principal-agent problem where the candidate seems like a risky hire to front-line HR (who due to organizational issues ultimately doesn't care if the best candidate is hired, only that the worst candidate is not) because they showed up to the interview wearing socks-and-sandals and spouting what sounded like gibberish and internet memes, but was actually a very strong demonstration of a high-demand skill-set explained in a very informal way. :) I see these as being the most beneficial recruiters, since usually the result is a genuine win-win. There are the toxic workplace coaxers, who are charged with luring people into a workplace that those locally familiar with avoid like the plague. A lot of them rely on people's guard being down when it comes to job websites. People who would never fall for a phishing email find themselves surprisingly uncritical of their LinkedIn equivalents. There are the "outsourcing specialists", who mostly exist to allow companies to minimize their legal risk; like maybe some of the employees have ambiguous work visas, or something a little off on their background check, but since they work for the outsourcer rather than the company directly, it isn't their problem. (This is moving more into the blurry area where recruiters meet staffing agencies). It's a wide world! :)
  19. A modern translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius might work. It is basically a copy of his diary during a stressful period in his life; it's mostly little reminders to himself, mini-conversations about coping. Sometimes he is hard on himself in a way that might be a little stressful to read, depending on their circumstances, but many people in the past have found him inspirational.
  20. I think it depends on the context. For instance, some people prefer to keep some money in a home safe in addition to their bank account. Perhaps the safe is even hidden from obvious view to deter thieves; does that necessarily mean the money is there for sneaky purposes? Perhaps they had older relatives who talked their ears off about what happens during a bank failure. It's important to look for more detail.
  21. It may be part of an effort to avoid an anxiety feedback loop, where she becomes anxious over being anxious over being anxious. By stating upfront that she is shy, she can say, "Everyone already knows, so that's one less thing to worry about."
  22. I try to buy shoes that can be resoled, as it seems cheaper and less wasteful in the long run. In hindsight, I also should have bought 2 pairs whenever I found some that I liked -- with outsourcing there is no guarantee that a pair of shoes made tomorrow will be made in the same factory, by the same people, or to the same quality as shoes made yesterday.
  23. Dreams generally follow "dream logic" -- your responses are plausible, but within a framework where certain things that the waking mind would instantly realize are imaginary are seen as normal. Anxiety over an unexpected guest -- maybe how you would react in real life, but with the mind instantly accepting that the dead visiting is possible and plausible. False awakenings are also fairly common. The best way to determine if that is what is happening or if you are actually waking up is to keep a notepad at your bedside, and to write something down briefly about the dream. If, when you wake up in the morning, the pad is empty, then it was likely a false awakening.
  24. I can talk from an American perspective... "American" is sort of seen as a placeholder identity within the country; in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, America is a country of "hyphenated Americans". There is also a very old subculture within American identity that believes in "the melting pot"; an idea that identity should be based on shared belief rather than shared ancestry. Traditionally, this shared belief was the unique culture of an individual state. Someone was a Virginian-American, regardless of ancestry, rather than a Scottish-American in Virgina. However, those who most strongly promoted state identity as a thing were also generally on the wrong side of the Civil War; the victors were New England Federalists, who saw states as administrative units rather than sovereign cultures. With the nationalization of media and commerce, many of the unique parts of the states started going away anyhow; everyone watched the same national TV, shopped at the same national stores, etc. America has always had rootless Americans, primarily those whose roots were taken away from them through slavery. Moving into the 20th century, they were joined by those who were rootless because of the choices of their ancestors -- they had renounced their ties to the Old World in favor of a melting pot ethos, but political changes had taken away their ties to the New World, where being a Virginian or a Georgian didn't mean anything anymore. People struggling with this grasp at what they can. Some try to reach out again to the Old World, even if the connection is tenuous. Ireland's tourism industry is largely supported by those they nickname derisively "Plastic Paddies" -- those with distant Irish ancestry who are desperate for a connection that those living in Ireland don't believe exists anymore. Some reach out to an imaginary past that they believe is purchasable. Maybe they focus on cowboy culture as seen in the movies, or preppie culture as glamorized by Ralph Lauren. Some focus on race, maybe seeing the positive impact that Black Power had on uniting the African-American community. I guess the strange thing is how few people focus on America itself. I wonder if maybe this is due to bitterness over Cold War propaganda -- in an effort to protect against the criticisms of the Communists, America was presented as a place very different than it actually was; maybe this lead some to decide that the reality of America was no more worthwhile than the fantasy, and to go looking elsewhere for roots...
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