OT: Don't let Peanut Die For Nothing

Any further insults to add before I begin ignoring your posts again, Bill? If I continue to bandy words with you I shall incur the wrath of a certain Mr. Larkin and we can't have that.

It does seem to be trait that nobody imagines that they embody. Since my reaction when somebody says something nice about me is to look out for the nasty job that they are about to lumber me with, I imagine that I'm probably not a narcissist, but I could be wrong.

PLEASE stop feeding Sloman. He is a major contributor to driving people away.

Sigh... Yes, I will. However, you *really* should lead by example here and stop feeding him yourself. I've noticed you provide him with a pretty rich diet. So I'll do a deal with you (not that the last one concerning a burger and fries got me very far, but still) if you cease to respond to Bill's barbs, I'll do likewise. Agreed? In the interests of group harmony, please consider making the sacrifice along with me.

Two points here, Bill: when does *anyone* *ever* say anything nice about you? Secondly, narcissism is a hallmark of psychopathy. Get someone to check you off against Dr. Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist and you might learn something unusual about yourself you're currently unaware of.

It happens, if not all that often.

It's a character defect. Dignifying it as one of the many forms of psychopathy is a bit of a stretch. It doesn't seem to mess people up enough to prevent them living more or less normal lives, so it isn't pathological.

Probably not. My wife worked as a psycholinguist and I got to hang out with a lot of psychologically sophisticated people - I once got told off by Uta Frith for making a joke about being on the autism spectrum - I'm not, but it made for a neat punch-line.

In the sense that I don't give John Larkin the flattery he feels he deserves, which leaves him feeling insulted, so he figures that everybody else feels equally hurt.

Feeding him?

I had been trying, roughly once a year, to engage him on not-personal issues, like electronics even, but it doesn't help. He keeps getting nastier.

Haven't you noticed that he insults everyone? Badly.

It wasn't about "crime" it was about an animal bite. There are no non-fatal tests for rabies in humans or animals

Not that he can be bothered to cite an example. I hypothesise that he imagines that my unwillingness to flatter him reflects a malicious unwillingness to recognise his imagined brilliance, and he's thinks I'm being equally unkind to everybody else.

I've actually been known to say nice things about Phil Hobbs, but John won't have read them.

John's here to get flattered about his own work, and doesn't care about anybody else's, beyond seeing it as an opportunity flaunt his own expertise (such as it is).

His limited vocabulary kind of lets him down on that front. Perhaps in the old days it was more expansive, I can't recall. Anyway, let's agree to just not respond to him. Both of us. Let's just not feed him any more. Deal?

Can you not see that you're projecting (as the pyschiatrists call it) here, Bill? You are assuming that JL needs flattery to feel validated when in reality that's your own need coming through. Go back 25 years. Be the Bill Sloman of back then. Then you might just get the sincere appreciation you clearly crave.

Cursitor Doom thinks that it would take a large vocabulary to characterise his character defects. He's fooling himself. It takes a small, if specialised, vocabulary. If he had the wit, or the inclination to read more of my output he been exposed to a wider range of words.

Of course they would both have to give up posting fatuous nonsense to get the effect Cursitor Doom seems to want. That would be a big ask. They'd have to learn how to identify fatuous nonsense first.

Yes.

You may like to think that, but "projecting" is a term that's popular in popular psychology which shows up in your newspaper next to the astrology column. None of the psychiatrists I've known - not a prepossessing bunch - have used it.

Really? Your insights have all the depth of a puddle of dirty water.

Not a practical project.

I don't post here to get sincere appreciation - I post here to be entertained. I have published papers in the peer-reviewed literature - here's an example

Sloman A.W., Buggs P., Molloy J., and Stewart D. “A microcontroller-based driver to stabilise the temperature of an optical stage to 1mK in the range 4C to 38C, using a Peltier heat pump and a thermistor sensor” Measurement Science and Technology, 7 1653-64 (1996) – nineteen citations so far, only two of them by me.

Getting cited is a form of fairly sincere appreciation, but at least two of the people who cited me hadn't read the paper all that carefully, so their sincerity might not have been all that it should have been.

There you go, that wasn't so hard. The group will be very thankful for our efforts! :-)

Hey, CD, should we ignore JP too? He has invited me to.

May as well. We can read the silly science web sites ourselves.

No, I need cool circuits to feel amused.

Fine by me! Saves time, too.