Glen Eric Reed - being a hopeless coffee devotee, I was being really selfish by keeping your excellent brew-thread to myself - hoping nobody would notice... sorry.

A small correction: it's not tomorrow morning here any more. It's this morning still, although, according to the times given here, it's yesterday today! And here are the winning Lotto balls: pink, blue, a sort of muddy yellow one, red, another red and a really dreadful one with strange chocolate dragons painted on the side. (Feline! Stop playing with the Lotto Machine!!)

Re your nickname... I thought Glen Eric Reed WAS your nom-de-plume. Come on admit it, your real name is something like OkK9%!!^#$... come on, it's true isn't it? I'm sure I know your cousin *7%%>/?73.

Elf, the book by its self is unlikely to help

however, hopefully it will give you more insight into how males (and females) tend to think, and the differences in how men and women tend to me.

i do feel that you two need to start comunitating more. talking isnt always the same thing, especially if you are not making your feeling about this situation clear.

you dont seem to have any real idea of what he thinks and feels. i suspect this uncertanty isnt helping you to feel all stable, wanted and loved

Glen Eric Reed - and "millenia" and "immediate" in the last one.

(Have I mentioned I make my living as an editor? )

this reminds me
another thing i am going to do once galactic conquest has been achieved is to get the spelling of the English language fixed!
obviously my spelling is suitable, since people understand what i am saying. therefore the dictionaries should be updated to reflect this new understanding

Loid... I think my point was we're all hopeless coffee devotees here (or several of us, at least), and this thread had a coffee bent to it for a while. And I'm still confused about the time difference, but I've placed my bet on your lottery recommendations.

I guess "Glen Eric Reed" will be as close as I come to a nom de plume here, at any rate. On the plus side, any pseudonymous stuff I've done elsewhere remains generally unknown. On the minus side, I can be stalked crazy skin fanatics. OkK9%!!^#$ indeed.

feline... Sorry, screwy as it may be, the English language has its rules, and needs no fixing per se. Of course, on here we have a conglomeration of British English, American English, and Australian English. I suppose adding Felinian English won't hurt any.

And the "people understand what I'm saying" excuse works great. All other things being equal, however, it makes you appear less intelligent. (And please don't take that remark as me implying that you're not intelligent ... in your case, all other things aren't equal, and you're coming off at least reasonably intelligent to me.)

Okay, anyone else I can insult?

Glen Eric Reed - confused about time differences...

Aren't we all! But basically what ever it is there, it probably isn't here (but that depends on where there is and if here is here, there is there and where everywhere is at a given point in time there (or here). Hope that clears it up. For the record, it's Thursday morning here, a little past 10 am. But elsewhere it isn't.

I have a great little app called "World Clock" on my rig which tells me days and times anywhere on the planet. Each time I go on line it automatically sychronizes with an "Atomic Clock", so I'm always accurate. It also chimes the sounds of Big Ben every quarter hour, which I find soothing for some reason.

Er, tempus fugit a bit - it's now 10.13 am... better hit submit or I'll be here all day!

Ahhhh, and I return again

Been a rather odd day. I haven't slept much, probably about 5 hours, and woke up when Rob called me.

hmm..his keyboard is sticky..I wonder why.

Got out today finally, and got some decent food at a Japanese Restaurant. Went grocery shopping (well yeah.... I ate all the food...which isn't much....the past five days).

In the process of watching AI, and the movie is pretty depressing. It just proves yet again how un-accomidating and how un-feeling the human race can be. Besides it reflecting in the way that a woman, being so damn sentimental, can't accept a little robot because... it's a robot, and it has so much more to learn. It makes me wonder. Mothers always want a child who's keen on learning, on being good, and when the chance comes up... she throws it away. That... pisses me off

And being a child? The movie used a bunch of morons to portray the young population. I was actually pretty insulted by one of the child "nerds." Hehe.

Coffee? Nahhhhhh. Hot Chocolate is the way to go

Loid... aha, the time situation is now clear. Of course, that's only because you said what day and time it was in your post, but the day and time posted correspond to my local time. Therefore hence, I now know you're 16 hours ahead of me... so it's now about twenty after midnight there.

Of course, none of that works if I actually look anything up. I guess I could just do it the easy way and hit the "Sydney" button on the clock that's sitting on my desk. That tells me it's twenty after 11. Meaning it's still today there. Which explains why I didn't win the lottery yesterday.

Elfy... not enough caffeine in hot chocolate. Granted, it's tasty, but I'd either fall asleep during the day or be awake and cranky with a killer headache.

Glen Eric Reed - And the "people understand what I'm saying" excuse works great. All other things being equal, however, it makes you appear less intelligent.

this is actually quite an interesting "observation".

it is very human, and initially it makes sence. however, the real point is, what group of people are you speaking for?

the reason i ask is that when i did maths at university (not actually proof of inteligence) it was observed that most (all?) of the maths and physics students had several traits in common:
a) there spelling of english was considered appauling
their grammer was often off the wall
c) hand writing was normally totaly illegible
d) they all had an unnateral fear of essay writing

so, in this group of supposedly inteligent people, a "lateral" approach to spelling was considered normal, and didnt reflect on your perceived inteligence.

now i work with computers, which complicates matters more. i live in england, but the computers normally require american spelling of various "basic" words, including color and centre.

this is just the begining of the fun though. a lot of the code i deal with has been written by other programmers, some of whom have spelling nearly as "interesting" as mine. combine this with the inate lazyness of most programmers (leading to the shortest possible words being used) and leaving out half the letters of some words becomes required english usage

drifting back more torwards my personal take on english, there are a couple of interesting points to bare in mind.
i was quite good at chemistry, even with the lovely long chemical names i had to spell. the thing with them is that they are logicaly structured.

"fixing" my spelling is actually something i have given up, since MS Office 2000 (probably several hundred pounds worth of software) is quite useless at working out what i am trying to spell. i have a 6 year old pocket sized electronic dictionarry (worth about 5 pounds) that does a far better job. its just to slow for regular use.

"english doesnt need fixing" - i like the observation (i forget where i first saw it), an inteligent child goes to school, and the teacher tells the child that enuf is spelt enough. the child concludes that the teacher doesnt know what they are talking about, and ignores then


stepping back from this circular discussion, what is actually ment by "perceived inteligence" anyway? what do you mean by inteligence?

What? I've been missing out on all this good Dear Abby stuff!

/me tries to get all caught up here...

Elf, the book by its self is unlikely to help
however, hopefully it will give you more insight into how males (and females) tend to think, and the differences in how men and women tend to me.
by feline - 3/6/2002 12:04:44 PM

Elf don't waste your time in a book regarding trying to understand ppl, no book on earth can explain ppl and their individual personalities, not one! you cannot catagorize ppl, each one is different...

you just need to follow your heart, it's that simple, and if you and Rob are having probs this early on, your heart should not feel right, don't make a mistake and waste precious time on something that ain't right move on, mistakes cause wasted time...

mistakes cause wasted time

and wisdom...

/me is very wise... hehe

and has wasted alot of time... hehe

okay maybe you should not even listen to me =/

/me listens to Doreen
/me beleives in trying to learning from wise and knowledgable people

you do have a point about books, but at least they are always there for you, and it may give you some ideas / insight

/me notes: reading this thread from the bottom upwards makes no sense

Reading this thread from the top down doesn't make much sense either

feline... Wow, that was quite a lot to say there. I'm not speaking for any one group of people, except, I suppose, for those who recognize misspellings and bad grammar. Obviously, no one appears less intelligent to people who actually ARE less intelligent.

My background is diverse enough that I've attended classes or worked alongside people in everything from math to computers to science to linguistics to literature to creative writing. My strengths always tended toward math and computers, which is part of why I ended up as an Editor with a Liberal Arts degree -- I prefer being challenged.

The point is, there are rules of grammar just like there are rules of coding. Imagine poor grammar as a poorly-written HTML file. Yes, most browsers will parse the file and present a reasonably viewable page to the end-user. But there's always a browser out there that will generate an error since it won't know what the hell you're talking about. Hence the arguments for cross-browser compatibility, and one of my gripes about the WC pages (but I digress....)

Also, MS Office is a word processor, not a spelling processor or a grammar processor. It drives me nuts when people run stuff through Word's spell checker and grammar checker and assume they're fine when it's done. Those features are damn near useless.

And if I really need to define intelligence, perhaps I have overestimated you "Perceived intelligence" is just that -- how smart others think you are.

Wow.. rereading what I just wrote, I come across as REALLY pompous and self-important! Oh well... the more intelligent folks will figure it out

/me advices groc'ing the thread
it all makes sence then, with the possible exception of which colour grometric shape Elf becomes on alternate tuesdays

as for "inteligence", i think we are using different meanings for the word.

if you take IQ tests repeatedly then your IQ score (well, your test result at any rate) goes up.

this is why i ask what definition you are using. a lot of simple IQ tests i have seen are actually testing knowledge of english and maths. so i do quite well in the maths half, since i was taught most of the tricks at primary school in maths lessons. hence i have very little faith in these sort of tests

the other famous measure of inteligence is exams / qualifications. most of the exams i have been exposed to over the years are mainly testing your ability to recall piles of facts, and very little else. not really what i would call inteligence personally

as for rules of grammer, i would say i have a good practical grasp of "grammer", i am just not sure of the surounding punctuation and spelling

if word isnt a proper spell checker (sounds about right) then what is it? or more usefully, what is a proper spell checking program?

as for my spelling, it has been suggested to me that i am dislexic, although i am not sure.

but it does raise the question, for people who really are, what impact does this have on the question of perceived or real inteligence?

i saw an interesting program a while ago about modern building design. the architectural firm in it said they would only ever higher dislexic architects, since they produced far better 3D designs. they couldnt be trusted to produce written work what was spelled correctly, but that was considered a small price to pay.

just goes to show. perhaps inteligence, like beuty (<- one of those words i just never seem to spell, since its spelling looks wrong), is in the eye of the beholder

I took my eye off this thread for a couple days and it turns into a discussion on grammer, English and intelligence.

What happened to the Coffee???????
What happened to the Chocolate?????????
I'm eating chocolate Hostess HoHo's and drinking coffee...which is more fun than talking about grammer
Damn mint dragons keep dive bombing my head, though...

feline... Intelligence is intelligence, as far as I'm concerned. It's whether or not it can be quantified that's debatable. If someone takes the SAME IQ test repeatedly, scores would logically go up ... but on properly constructed IQ tests, scores would ideally be consistent. I think you're talking about the difference between intelligence and perceived intelligence.

As for your grasp on grammar, I'd have to argue that it's more tenuous than you're claiming. You have a more than adequate grasp on syntax, but grammar comprises not only syntax, but spelling and punctuation as well. To your advantage, the mixture makes you appear smart but less obnoxious than I do.

I agree that intelligence is in the eye of the beholder -- average people look smart to stupid people. This whole thing started because I figured less-intelligent people might regard your "felinisms" as lack of intelligence rather than just not caring.

Regardless of any of this, Java's right -- we're starting to make this thread boring! And I'm getting REALLY tired of sounding pompous, overeducated, and condescending.

All this because I thought the picture of a "tummy run" on cats was amusing!

Suddenly, I have a craving for a HoHo.

And strangely, a flashback to senior lounge in high school ... every morning I'd have a carton of iced tea and a 5-pack of mini chocolate donuts. I wonder why I don't way three times as much as I do now....

/me adds: intelligence = ability to learn + ability to apply the newfound knowledge

So the better you are at both, the more intelligent you are. That means that if you can learn well and know a dicitionary inside out, but can't apply that knowledge, you're not intelligent. But on the other hand if you only know a limited set of words but can express just about anything you want with it, you are.

Trouble with IQ tests is that they are context specific. They use cultural elements which means poele form said culture will score higher than those that are not.

/me thinks coffee discussions are boring

Interesting to see how my fingers type at different speeds, so while I may be wanting to type "people" but it will come out as "poele", because one finger is faster than the other.

Now there's a strong argument in favour of one-finger typing, no wonder Jafo "hardly ever" makes typos.

Also interesting to see how the mind reconstructs sentences as you type, which is why there's an excess "but" in there.

to many butt's?