Subject: PKF: A reintroduction
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 23:20:16 +1300


Hi, its been a long long time since I have even thought about this list, I
subscribed to it originally for a brief period in 1998 and I recall a lot of
fun discussions on all sorts of matters during that time. I enjoyed it all
immensely. 

Sitting at my desk today for some reason I started thinking about my
previous life as a would be academic and how joining this list was my
attempt to keep in touch with that past self during a period when my life
was changing and you know what, I thought heck why don't I go back and just
see what's happening on the list. Well! Looking at the archive I think the
answer is not a lot for quite a while.

First question, I know from my brief browsing of the archive that David
Geelan is still active from that time, but who else is still around from
then?

I know this isn't a typical introduction but if you want to know a bit more
about me and weren't around then, have a browse through the archive starting
about mid 1998 for my first introductory post it's still a pretty accurate
summery.

Anyway down to business lets have some fun! 

10 points to the first person who can tell me who wrote the following
paragraph.

"… my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths,
falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no
meaning whatsoever. (Sadly, there are only a handful of the latter: I tried
hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration,
I just didn't have the knack.) I also employed some other strategies that
are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre: appeals
to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as
established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that
sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the
technical and everyday senses of English words."

10 more points to anyone who can convince me that the points the author was
orginally trying to make (A) have no basis, or (B) are no longer true.


Cheers
Mike Eathorne-Gould
meathorne-gould-AT-business.otago.ac.nz


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