that someone who doesn’t even understand the issues can amble on down to the local elementary school and wipe out your vote, and it’s even harder to understand that the system is designed to work that way.
It really is next to impossible to find any way of talking about this as a flaw that doesn't get one flamed into a small pile of cinders, but that doesn't mean that it might not actually be a flaw.
As an Irish citizen I have the same vote every other Irish citizen has, for the Dail and for Presidential elections; as a Trinity College graduate I also have a Senate vote. I use these accordingly, and it does not seem to have crashed the country yet.
I have mixed feelings about well-roundedness. On one hand, I had to do a fair amount of stuff at school that I found really hateful; on the other hand, I still get envious when I hear people talking about USAn university courses that let you do things from all sorts of areas, I spent quite a bit of time as an undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin wishing I could have audited a course or two from the Joyce/Beckett mafia in the English department instead of doing all science all the time; on the other hand again, I'm damn glad not to have had to do any coursework during my PhD.
And where all this has left me, at thirty, is with a skill set that maybe a dozen people in the world share, in a field where I got lucky enough that it got really big at the right time - there are piles of people around now with the same sort of background and experience on the biology/computing interface I had three to five years ago, but I have that time advantage. Of the people who do have those skills, I get the strong feeling that most of them are happy to work five times as hard for three times as much money, and not many of them are interested in the sort of quiet sitting in the corner developing stuff thing I want to do. I'm not sure what the moral of this story is; feeding your obsessions can get you into a position where you don't have to do the really hard things like people stuff ? It's worked for me.
I could wish taxonomy were stricter in practice; there are close on a dozen examples in the NCBI taxonomy database of the same name being used in different branches of the overall tree, so that genus Xenia, for example, exists both in cnidarian worms and in plants.
The nomenclature is not in a state of chaos, by any means, but it's in a state that needs some wrestling with to get it to behave rationally.
I'm told that Sasha was deeply horrified when they sang 'Clementine" in school, and had to have it gently pointed out to him that the Ode to Joy was not the original tune for those words.
W.S. Gilbert's "Etiquette" goes very nicely to "The House of the Rising Sun". And "Stairway to Heaven" is the only tune I've yet heard to which it is possible to sing sonnets without utterly mutilating them.
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| 2003 | 4 |
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