Christopher Landry's Comments

I wonder if it would have gone differently if they'd used an objectively ugly girl instead. Would these seemingly charming boys hesitate to slap a girl if it wasn't even clear that the person beside them was really a girl? I don't mean just androgynous, since that by itself can actually be quite "pretty". I mean androgynous due to severe deformity or something. It would be hard to find someone like that who'd willingly put themselves in the situation, though, so I suppose I'll never know.

Imagining myself in the boy's shoes, I think I would have reacted differently at 8-11.

Director: "Now, slap her."
Me to Director: "Do I have to really slap her or can I fake it?"
Director: "Really slap her."
Me to Director: "On the face?"
Director: "Yes."
Me to Girl: "Are you alright with this?"
Girl: "Yes."
Me to Director: "How hard?"
Director: "As hard as you can."
Me to Girl: "Are you sure about this?"
Girl: "Yes."
Me to Girl: (SLAP!)

My parents taught me that the difference between a caress and molestation, or sex and rape, or friendly fighting and abuse, is consent. For instance, if a couple boxers get in the ring and beat each other bloody, they serve no jail time, a la consent.

Of course, I probably wouldn't have asked for consent before the caress, since she's so pretty I'd want to do that anyway. I'm not exactly sure why I would assume the girl consented in the case of a caress and then double verify consent before the slap, but it might be that one will incur less of a disciplinary action than the other if done without permission. That is, if I caress a random stranger on the cheek, she may be upset, but I probably won't go to jail for it. If I slap a stranger, I might end up in jail after a court hearing. Or at 8 yo, it may be the former would mean I get a verbal reprimand at to not do that, the latter and I get severely punished (grounded for a month or w/e).
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I'm gonna try this myself, but I feel it's worth noting that I'll have a couple disadvantages to overcome that the person in the video gets to bypass.

1. My gifts are all different sizes, unlike the uniform size-and-shape boxes in the video.
2. My gift wrapping paper is in long rolls that must be custom cut for each gift, unlike the pre-cut uniform shape gift wrap sheets shown here.

If I can get past those hurdles, maybe I can make this work. If only they gave us a cheat sheet for the geometry tricks used to figure out how to match up the 2D size of the cut sheet relative with the 3D dimensions of the box to be wrapped.
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I guess I'm a bit disappointed that so many people seem to still think that scaring people away from something actually works past the age of 4 or 5. Most people who are inclined toward such things get more interested in something if they hear that it's bad for them, or dangerous, or illegal. The excitement in doing that thing alone is a huge natural high, which is a large part of the reason that so many non-drug things can be addicting.
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The "environmentalists" need to realize a simple fact here: Stray cats ARE part of the local wildlife. This is an amusement park in a big city. Anything wild here is wildlife. Rats and mice, pigeons and finches, cats and dogs and snakes, too. They are all part of the wildlife there. It doesn't matter if the breed was once domesticated, it's wild now. That's pretty much what "feral" in "feral cats" means: no longer domesticated, gone to wild.
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That was beautiful. I only wish they'd shown the process through withdrawal and recovery, so that it would end with some hope instead of horror. But I guess that depends on whether the intent is to try to scare people away from drugs (which almost never works) or try to help give hope to people who are already addicted.
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I like his idea of an idealistic world. I just can't bring myself to believe that, in a world with no privacy, identity theft will simply cease to exist. I imagine that identity theft would be even easier in that world. Especially since the majority of things that require proof of identity don't check past the surface anyway.

That's the trouble with idealism, it usually doesn't take into account people doing bad things. Imagine a world without people doing bad things, even for good reasons, and you're not imagining any world that this world can become.
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I don't mean to imply that it's a good thing. Rather, that it may be something they are completely unaware is happening in their brain, as it takes place outside of conscious thought. It may be something they don't have any control over, and they wouldn't be aware it's happening unless someone teaches them to notice it, like change blindness.

That means it would likely take some careful training to teach their brains to work differently.

It also means they aren't being "sloppy" in the sense of laziness. They may be very attentive, in fact, but if some things entering their senses are processed out as garbage before they are conscious of it, they can't actively pay attention to that thing, regardless of their level of attentiveness.
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And she moves very slowly and carefully, indicating that the tracking software can't quite keep up with normal speed movements...

Unless both of those were done purely to give the audience a better chance to see the impressive digital mapping they were doing. What they did show, especially that second reflection scan, was amazing. I expect this will show up in some pop star's concert in the near future.

A longer tech demo with more projectors (360 coverage instead of the front-only they had here), more time with the eyes open, and the model moving at normal human speeds, would be truly awesome.
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I feel like I've heard of this before as a legit psychological concept, something similar to "change blindness" in some way. The drivers are focused on the road and themselves and might actually, legitimately not see anything else going on.

They should, but their brains are processing it out as garbage before they realize it's there.
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If one guy being reliable is so unusual, what does that say about the reliability of all the other 8000 weather stations that supposedly report an overall warming trend?

I've seen a lot of these records, and the usual case is for the records to have enormous gaps (decades long, in many cases), or records taken at the wrong time of day, or any number of other errors.

It's a good thing we started using satellite data in the last few decades, as that's a whole lot more reliable than people recording at ground stations. Only trouble is, that means our only reliable global coverage of data is only a few decades old, so not enough to establish whether we're actually trending in any particular direction yet.
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Profile for Christopher Landry

  • Member Since 2013/11/28


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