Many Blogs, part 1
Ok, ladies and germs, inspiration has come, courtesy of, among other things, Richard and Tara's comments in the last post. I now have four things to blog about, the first of which will be the shortest and in response to Richard's suggestion.
Personal experience is, as a wise professor once told me, a source of systematic error when relied upon to judge patterns or make generalizations. A real life example of this can be taken from my place of work. As regular readers will note, I work at a pawn shop in Bellingham, Washington. This experience has taught me that the primary uses of a tile and brick saw are to take up space and annoy pawnbrokers. Every day, we must wheel it out of the store (it always gets caught on the door frame) and chain it up around a column. Then, at the end of the day, we must unchain it and wheel it back in (it always gets caught on the door frame again).
And yet, just looking at the name of the object tells us that it must have a use beyond pissing us off. It's called a tile saw, or a brick saw, not a pawnbroker irker, or a Mike annoyer. It is clearly designed to cut bricks, tiles, and similar objects. This is why it is heavy and has a large, electric blade mechanism. And yet, in my experience, it has never done any cutting of anything. Thus, my experience is not reliable for judging the uses of a tile and brick saw.
Incidentally, the price tag on it is $905. Please come by, pick it up, and put it to its originally intended use. Please.
Personal experience is, as a wise professor once told me, a source of systematic error when relied upon to judge patterns or make generalizations. A real life example of this can be taken from my place of work. As regular readers will note, I work at a pawn shop in Bellingham, Washington. This experience has taught me that the primary uses of a tile and brick saw are to take up space and annoy pawnbrokers. Every day, we must wheel it out of the store (it always gets caught on the door frame) and chain it up around a column. Then, at the end of the day, we must unchain it and wheel it back in (it always gets caught on the door frame again).
And yet, just looking at the name of the object tells us that it must have a use beyond pissing us off. It's called a tile saw, or a brick saw, not a pawnbroker irker, or a Mike annoyer. It is clearly designed to cut bricks, tiles, and similar objects. This is why it is heavy and has a large, electric blade mechanism. And yet, in my experience, it has never done any cutting of anything. Thus, my experience is not reliable for judging the uses of a tile and brick saw.
Incidentally, the price tag on it is $905. Please come by, pick it up, and put it to its originally intended use. Please.
Labels: sociology/demography
posted by Mephisto at 7:23 PM
2 Comments:
hah, the theme of this post reminds me of how I recently heard that Pat Robertson recently changed his views on global warming , much to the annoyance of many other conservative Christians. Now, this in itself seemed a fine enough thing to me, but the reason for his change of mind was this unusually hot summer, not any of the array of scientific evidence regularly cited damn near everywhere. Personal experience has something to be said for it, but it shouldn't count for everything.
Haha, that's like changing one's mind to be against oil drilling in ANWR because they saw a baby caribou and it was cute. Or deciding that plate tectonics has some merit because they thought they felt the continent move a little. Or deciding that it might be a good idea to find some energy alternatives because they're new SUV takes $80 in gas at every fill-up. That guy deicided that maybe we should do something to stall or stop global warming because he's too hot. Science be damned!
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