Never serious danger that I recall. Once I waded out into a swamp toget pictures of a mute sawn on its nest, and got close enough that the swan was pretty angry (and they're capable of breaking ones and such with blows from their wings), but that wasn't really mortal danger.

Of course, standing next to the cassowary, the most dangerous bird in the world, was interesting, but it was very unlikely that it would attack.

Oh, and of course there was sleeping out in the open in what turned out to be the path of smugglers coming across the Mexico/Texas birder, but I was quiet and they never saw me.

And I once drove 1252 miles in a day (out and back) to see a bird (a kelp gull), which I suppose was slightly dangerous because I got pretty sleepy. (I had an agreement with my ex, by which I mean ex-whatever, K's mother, that I would only take day trips to go see birds... and I sort of stretched the day concept, leaving right after midnight and arriving about fifteen minutes before midninght...).

And going out in the crazily unsafe fishing boat with the huge outboard motor, in ten to fifteen foot waves, off Tobago, looking for seabirds that turned out not to be there.

But I guess really no. Sort of disappoints me, come to think of it.

is there any way i can determine the sex of my quaker parrot without a blood test?

Many, many agnostics are not weaseling at all - but many more tat I encounter are.

The reason I'm focused on that is that on the Match.com site, one of the fields one fills out is religion — except it isn't a fill-in, there are about a dozen choices (on which one can then expand in a text field). I have always chosen atheism. In my experience by far the most common choices of those I might otherwise consider dating (but see below) were "agnostic" and "spiritual but not religious". And while each of these choices actually has meaning, in practice I found when talking to these people that "agnostic" actually meant "atheist, but don't want to antagonize people" while "spiritual but not religious" was actually a lot closer to genuine agnosticism.

I am not a fan, at all, of misrepresenting the truth — I think everyone gets that by now. And misrepresenting something so fundamental as what one believes... that's something I can't respect at all.

Oh, re dating and religion: In Texas, which is where I lived for most of my Match experience, just about everybody I encountered was either Baptist or Methodist, and for a majority of them, my atheism was a dealbreaker. I do respect that, as it really is important — I think it says a great deal about how one thinks, how one weighs the importance of the known versus the unknown and of received versus found evidence. I do believe that it isn't dispositive for me, and one person whom I believe I could have stayed with if I hadn't been an idiot about other things is quite Christian, but it's a major hurdle.

That said, I also believe that a majority of those Christians who wouldn't date me were thinking not that it was reflection of how we approached the world, nor of something mundane like how we'd spend Sundays or what we'd tell the kids, but of something reflected in your comments above: they truly did believe that someone with no spiritual grounding cannot be relied upon to be a good, moral person. This, I had a problem with. I will put my sense and right and wrong next to anyone's, and think I'll be found lacking occasionally but it won't be often, so it would seem that in my case anyway that's bunk.

I will admit, otoh, that in the West the prevalence of Christianity is pretty important to who we tend to be as a culture. It is pretty clear that, despite our numerous collective faults, Western (really I guess I mean US, but much of this applies elsewhere) culture teaches a greater respect for individual human life than is generally taught in various (though not all) other parts of the world, and I think it would be shortsighted not to recognize that our largely Judeo-Christian religious tradition has something to do with it — we're pretty selective in how and when we choose to care about "Thou shalt not kill", for example, but it least most of us think it's important enough to give serious thought to. In my opinion the genocides of Rwanda or Cambodia really couldn't happen here (and yes, Hitler managed to convince a lot of Christians that slaughtering millions of people was a good, moral idea, but I think it would have been easier for him to do had there not been some religious basis for the society [but see below]). This still works in areas that are becoming less and less Christian, such as western Europe, because the values that go along with religion are passed from generation to generation and don't change rapidly.

Cleaning up a few loose ends from above:

First, I do believe that organized religion is very, very often a force for evil also, so the advancement of a sense of value of human life needs to be balanced against the divisiveness it all engenders. Millions upon millions of people have died because of differing visions of what god looks like or says, and that phenomenon shows no signs of fading into the oblivion it deserves. I think that human society is mature enough now that we would be better off if tomorrow everyone woke up with no religious beliefs at all — but I recognize that my sense of the balance could be wrong.

Another loose end: I do recognize that some cultural traditions value life more than ours; goodness knows I don't think we win this one outright.

And finally: I recognize that much of Western culture for the past few hundred years has not been driven by Christianity, and that the United States' Christian tilt wasn't always so evident, but I think that the views of eighteenth century humanists, for example, were still informed by the largely Christian beliefs that had held sway for many generations before than This is hugely oversimplifying the matter, yes; I'm just saying that it matters a ton in practice.

Thought you'd continue like this

I don't think so — though it occurs to me that there's lots of genetic materia besides bool. In theory there could be labs testing parrot saliva or some such thing, but in practice I doubt it.

Birds don't have external sex organs, and what they do have is pretty much identical across sexes, so it's not like probing around you could find something that answered the question. If their plumage is the same across sexes (which I believe is true for your species), and the size doesn't vary either (some birds are tremendously sexually dimorphic), then it's blood test or nothing.

Just decide what you want him/her to be, and it shall be so — after long enough you may even forget you don't actually know.

Pretty much every woman I know, myself included, has dyed her hair red at some point. Blondes, brunettes, it doesn't matter, we all want to try red at least once.

us too

Very interesting bird — a pinyon jay (unless it's a really off-color Mexican jay, but I doubt it). Nomadic and irruptive, among North American (by which birders usually mean north of the US/Mexico border) birds they're a pretty unusual combination of theoretically common/hard to find. they'll disappear from large areas of the country for years at a time, and then come back. (I saw my first one at Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, I believe, and in that area they're pretty much always around, but in general what i said is true.)

As for your other questions, I'll get to them. Never one for brevity, I am sort of teh suck at this well thing.

Do you all realize that most men (certainly with exception) don't like it?

Atak,

Great well. I'm sure I'll have more personal questions as the well goes on and probably followups for these, but for now:

1) Why did you leave Princeton Review?

2) Is there much money (for the teacher) in test prep? When you were test-prepping fulltime, what was your standard work week? What was your approximate salary?

3) Favorite structure over 2 openings? over 1N?

Wait, we don't???

Yes, certainly

depends on the girl imo

maybe the shade of red, too

Generally we do it when we want a change. That often includes men, unfortunately. Mostly it's not a permanent thing.

In my experience, guys pretty much never want you to change the way you looked when they first met you. Don't change your haircut/style/color, lose/gain weight, start/stop wearing makeup, etc. But every woman needs a little change every so often. The trick is to get a little change in while still allowing your guy to think you're smoking hot.

Also, good call on the bird.

Eyes glued shut, and chuckle inwardly at having duped whoever imposed it. Sometimes I walk around in the dark, inside and out, with my eyes shut (for some reason I don't do this in the day) for long periods just to work on my other senses. When I lived in rural Pennsylvania I went walking in the woods at night most nights, and my night vision got very sharp — but on monnless or cloudy nights, sometimes it was impossible to make one's way by sight, and I learned not to run into trees by listening for the echo of my breathing (I think it was). It also sharpens the other senses. So having my eyes glued shut wouldn't even by bad, it would be a new adventure.

It was on one of those night walks, pretty recently, that I found foxfire, i.e., bioluminescent fungus. (This isn't really rare, but it was new to me.) It was so dark that I could not even see the trees silhouetted against the sky — but as I walked along the (dirt) road (which I was following by theose echos, and by the change in the feel of my footsteps as I worked my way from shoulder to middle of road and back), about a half mile from the farmhouse, I saw something glowing in the sky. It turned out tobe a little constellation of fungus of a decaying branch.

I had no idea what if anything I would find that night — I was just walking. Much of life is like that.

Indeed, usually the hair dying happens around the time they're getting antsy in other ways, in my experience.

As for the smoking hot thing — in my experience as long as she cares whether her guy think she's smoking hot, things are good. It's when she takes it for granted, or thinks that he should like her for other reasons and it doesn't matter how she looks, tat we know things are sliding downward. No one is driven entirely by physical attraction, but no man really considers it unimportant either, and (at least in my experience, and through my age) taking it for granted it a kiss of death for a relationship. That's why change in such regards is so bad from the man's perspective: by hypothesis he thought she was hot when they got together, so change is more often bad than good, as there's only so much farther one can go up, but it's always possible, and usually easy, to look worse.

we do, don't worry

Most.

I think there are a minority of men who think it's very hot, and a majority who think it's an interesting novelty but are more attracted to one or usually both of the other options. I could be wrong, though.

Frankly, I think men care far less about color than about other things, and far less about it than women think they do. With hair, hair texture is so important (OK, now I'm talking about me) — silky smooth hair that seems to want to be stroked is so attractive, it could be fuchsia and I'd be fine with it... and I'd spend a lot of time stroking it, and with my fingers twined in it (in a somewhat dominant way, a lot of the time).

On Match, I found that an enormous number of women thin that their eyes are their most attractive feature, and that the color of those eyes are critical. Whatever. We mostly don't give a damn. Facial structure is important, very important, but plug in dark brown or piercing blue or hazel or whatever and a lot of men won't even notice. I've certainly seen beautiful eyes that I loved gazing into more than others, but it's just not high on the priority list.

[swoon]

Women don't tend to think of lips and cheekbones as features, although of course they are, and most of us hate our noses, so what's left?

QFT about the eyes. I don't even know the eye colors of people of good female friends I talk to every day (well, used to, in my old job).

The leaving TPR story is lengthy, and I'll tell it later.

There is absolutely not much money in it working for the majors. I made over $150K one year, but that was averaging 90 hours a week for most of the year, as literally the top-ranked teacher in the entire company. Some of the smaller companies pay far better, but the hours are seriously problematic — in most cities all you can get is three hours in the evening, because that's when classes are. Finding tutoring students that fit around those is tricky too.

(re what I made: that also included $55K in six weeks, as part of a special live-in MCAT program that I designed and ran. That was unique — after they realized how much I had cost them they were definitely never doing it again.)

The pay rate starts in the area of $17 an hour. I got up to about $40/hour while doing classwork, and $50/hour for training, but those numbers were practically off the TPR charts. When I tutored I got more — my time was billed at $200 to $300 per hour, depending on specifics, and I got a fair chunk of that.

I had a uniquely good situation in Austin. UT has more premeds than any other university in the country, and our classrooms were literally across the street from campus in a well-travelled mall. Also, we had a good repuation, which got better afetra couple years (part of that, though not all, was me), so I was able to teach four 2.5 hour classes per day (at 10, 1, 4, and 7 [the 7 o'clock class was sometimes a 3 hour LSAT class instead]), four or five days a week. I was also flying around the country to other offices to train new teachers, so that was occupying every weekend, usually for about 25 hours apiece. Basically, I was taking a half day Friday off every week. There's almost no place else in the country a test prep teacher can get even half those hours consistently.

Some of the smaller, boutique companies doing LSAT pay far, far better, and they would maka nice part-time job... but you absolutely can't get the volume, regardless what they promise you when you hire on. And there are no decent boutiques in MCAT land, as too much material is involved — LSAT prep is easy because you can just use the actual tests, three quarters of which they release to the public.




Over 2C, frankly I don't care a lot as long as we're not doing something stupid like automatically counting points or controls. 2H negative, 2D awaiting is about as good as any I know.

Over 1NT, I wish I could play suction (a weird, home grown variant of which I do play over artificial strong openings), but the ACBL thinks that would be too confusing. Just about everything else works fine. Among common ones I think Cappelletti is a bit weak, and prefer DONT to it (but not over 2NT, where I need my penalty double). And Landy, I think it is, is silly. A pro I used to play with (and the only person I've ever paid to play — I have paid as much total as I've received to play over the years,btw) used to advocate jump ball, but I admit I don't remember it.

+1

I like hair. A lot. If she has that sort of hair, it gets touched a whole lot.


See, they're totally missing it. We do think of lips as features, as probably more important ones than eyes themselves. Cheekbones and jawline define the face — they really are what make faces attractive. My mother has amazing cheekbones, and though that isn't what men think they're looking at, it's why she looks good. I got her cheekbones, though not quite as good, and that's what makes it so that my looks are above average (I think they are), even if my eyes are set so far back they might as well be in caves.

Noses — we don't like ours either. Mine, I have legitimate cause, because eits shape was changed rather dramatically, in a bad way, by my breaking it when I was a kid. (There's a story there, reminiscent of the line in This is Spinal Tap about how their drummer died in a "bizarre gardening accident"... but I digress, as I am wont to do.)

To continue the thinking about women's features, a story:

I dated, briefly (it was while we were both on a temporary work assignment; we lived in different cities) a woman who was outside my usual range. She was covered in tattoos (one entire leg and much of her upper body), and most importantly for this purpose, she had a largish septal (that's the nose) ring. This is very much not what I'm into, but she was pretty smart, very kind, and very fun, so I didn't think a lot about it. In fact, I barely thought at all about what she looked like.

One night before bed, she took out the nose ring for the first time that I'd seen... and I looked at her and realized that she was literally the most beautiful woman I had ever met. Not just because of the change — I mean she was traffic-stoppingly gorgeous, and I had had no idea. Her eyelashes were the longest and most perfectly shaped I've ever seen (no makeup ever, btw), her lips were perfect, her facial structure was perfect, her eyes were huge (brown, I guess, though it didn't matter) and perfectly shaped and positioned... and I had never seen any of this. When I had looked at her, I had seen little besides that nose ring.

Have you ever thought about starting and running your own test-prep company? What things would keep you from doing that? If the story about you leaving TPR has anything to do with it (like you never want to teach test prep again), I'm happy just to wait for the story.

I assume the largest barrier would be competition from TPR, et al, but maybe there are other reasons that you'd never do it.

edit: PS I like controls over 2C, but I can see the downside, too.