namekuseijin <namekusei...@gmail.com> writes: > I have to say I'm always amazed how ad hominens can generate quite > strong responses to the point of making a lot of new faces (or mail > accounts) suddenly appear... ;)
Actually, I had just noticed that aspect as well. Is it just me, or does anybody else also think it rather curious how some of the new accounts all seem to share the same style of argument? Granted, I don't have anything the issue of arguing a point itself. However, it just seems rather unusual that many of the new faces all seem to share the same style of reasoning.... When I was a student at my college, one of the students once told me a secret about how a computer program ran by a professor for a course in introduction to systems programming checked to ensure that the students who were submitting homework assignments worked independently: the program counted the number of occurrences of each type of structure (for-loop, while-loop, if-then statement,etc.), and compared the counts for the types of structures among assignments between different students. The method was so effective that it was able to pinpoint one program among approximately thirty that was handed in by a student who had based his assignment on another program for the same assignment two years earlier, also among approximately thirty. A style of reasoning is like a fingerprint; it identifies the person making the argument. Of course, two people could have a very similar style of argument. However, the odds of this happening are less likely in a single thread. The odds of this happening are even less likely for three people in the thread. The odds of this happening are even less likely for three *new* people in the same thread at the same time.... -- Benjamin L. Russell -- Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list