I’ve had IT lecturers who were fresh from getting their PhDs and were quite a bit green, I’ve had other IT lecturers who had 20-30 years of industry experience and could code like it was breathing.

If there were a way to reliably know what the crowd was like at bars and clubs before you decide where to go, I’m guessing a lot of people would be interested, not just douchebag pickup artists. In fact if the data was good enough it would segregate the douchebags and douchegirls into their own bars and clubs – something that happens anyway, of course, but unless you’re intimately familiar with all the venues in town it’s hard to tell before you go even if you read Yelp reviews etc. because the crowd can vary wildly night to night.

And, yeah, basic information like how crowded a place is right now would be quite useful. Goes for restaurants and the like too, not just bars.

At universities, the people who are good at research are published frequently and get a lot of grant money and so on – and they teach maybe one course a semester, if that. Some people aren’t that great, ultimately, at doing research. They get the bulk of the teaching work to the point where many hardly have any time for research. Assuming they even got to the research university level in the first place – many end up, disappointed but hopeless, in schools without much of a research focus.

Your own analysis points this out – you say the best doers are the best teachers. Except they’re busy doing all the time and don’t have much time for teaching, so the less-talented doers do most of the teaching. Hence the cliche you’re replying to.

As for pickup artists… considering how intrinsically scummy the entire idea is, I do wonder how successful they actually are as individuals (especially since “success” is defined as a one-night-stand with the kind of woman who is susceptible to pickup artists). Considering who I presume the clientele for this type of class is it must not be that difficult to convince them to pay you money even if you’re just making shit up and never get laid yourself.

If they had said “women” instead of chicks it would be less sexist.

But in this case using a diminutive, animal term in reference to women is sexist.

I honestly don’t know if it is transphobic to want to make sure a woman is a woman if you are generally attracted to women and are going to spend time getting to know someone because you feel attracted to them.

I didn’t hear anything that was derogatory towards transgenered people in the comment, just that the person would like to make sure the person is a woman because in this case the person is attracted to women.

However, given the general disregard for people as real, full human beings as evidenced by the sexist comments, I wouldn’t be surprised if the person was also homo- and transphobic.

You could do that without a camera. A microphone sampling the general conversational murmur for douche-like sub-banter might work.

Or just a chemical sensor for the miasma of semi-predatory despair.

Or UV sampling for evidence of the relentless masturbation of the doomed.

Last summer, my family bought me an appliance from Japan that makes toast… and turns into an aerial drone to take photos of *your* wife and kids.

The fact it takes photos of your wife and kids is still creepy enough to be worthy of commentary, no matter what fantastically crisp and even toast it turns out.

That’s a very unsettling feature for any appliance to have, no matter what else it does, and IMHO it’s fair to describe it as “that stalking machine” rather than “that toaster”, no matter what the Engrish on the box insists its primary function is. :)