21 June, 2005
What would you do with a piece of paper?
Curse me for generalizing but, what happens when you give a piece of paper to someone?
If you give the paper to a married man, he'll most likely start doodling on it, or set about constructing something in three dimensions like a paper plane. His wife will see this as a waste of both time and perfectly good paper.
Give the paper to a married woman and she'll make a list of things to be done, and then hand it to her husband. He, on the other hand, will see this as a reminder that there's a stack of paper somewhere and go off to make a paper plane. Before he's finished he will have forgotten that the list ever existed!
Is there a moral in this tail? Well, if you're a woman don't bother making lists for anyone else but yourself and if your a man, don't think your wife will be impressed by what you can make from a piece of paper.
If you give the paper to a married man, he'll most likely start doodling on it, or set about constructing something in three dimensions like a paper plane. His wife will see this as a waste of both time and perfectly good paper.
Give the paper to a married woman and she'll make a list of things to be done, and then hand it to her husband. He, on the other hand, will see this as a reminder that there's a stack of paper somewhere and go off to make a paper plane. Before he's finished he will have forgotten that the list ever existed!
Is there a moral in this tail? Well, if you're a woman don't bother making lists for anyone else but yourself and if your a man, don't think your wife will be impressed by what you can make from a piece of paper.
08 June, 2005
There's no such thing as common sense...
...at least not in absolute terms. I get fed up of people who use that term as though 'we' should know what 'they' mean. How can we know what they mean. We're not them. We haven't had their background, their education, their life experiences.
I honestly don't think you can attribute, in absolute terms, common values to any particular subject. If the group you are addressing share, along with yourself, a common frame of reference for discussing a subject then you can construct truths relating to that subject and they could be described as common sense. But those truths only hold for that group and can/should not be forced upon outsiders who may have little or no idea of where you are coming from.
'Common sense', is a term used by people who are too lazy to take the time to understand yet too quick to pass judgment on why someone did something differently to what was expected.
I honestly don't think you can attribute, in absolute terms, common values to any particular subject. If the group you are addressing share, along with yourself, a common frame of reference for discussing a subject then you can construct truths relating to that subject and they could be described as common sense. But those truths only hold for that group and can/should not be forced upon outsiders who may have little or no idea of where you are coming from.
'Common sense', is a term used by people who are too lazy to take the time to understand yet too quick to pass judgment on why someone did something differently to what was expected.
