It is kind of like people complaining about GM selling SUVs. They sold SUVs because that is what people bought. If people bought small fuel efficient cars then they would have made them. Rule one. Don't expect companies to make you do the right thing. Rule two. Don't expect a company to care more about something than you do.
Yet another dangerous grain of truth.
Detroit has long sold large, steel battering rams on the image of safety: good for you, bad for anything else you happen to impact.
There would be less escalation to large steel battering rams if people weren't made to feel unsafe by their copious production. Detroit manipulated demand more callously than most. Nice to be Krupp alternating upgrades to opposite sides, since no one wants to have last year's targeting distance in an African square dance.
Rule three: Expect a corporation to arrange for you to care most about staying ahead of the Rommels.
There's no way I want to even think about attaching a BGA socket on a board by hand.
Well, times change. The kit everyone is demanding these days is the handy-dandy DIY BGA oven.
With a bit of ingenuity, Heathkit could come out with an entire DIY benchtop SMT line, with stereoscopic pick-and-place. A low-intensity X-ray laser would be a nice upgrade, if it could image BGA pads in under 15 minutes per pin.
But then again, they'd probably apply the HP pricing model to the custom DIY BGA oven almost-lead-free solder-paste to the point where it would be cheaper to purchase finished boards from a distant continent.
Chances are that power plant was there already when you purchased your property originally, which was not designed to survive a 100-year event, unless you also believe that skyscrapers designed in the 1960s were pancake-immune to aircraft impact.
I also live on the Pacific rim, and when the 400-year event arrives (presently tending toward overdue), I won't be expecting to sell any real-estate for a long while. I'm not looking around at any major infrastructure thinking it will still be there because the government said so. I live on Vancouver Island. Until recently, it was comforting to know we had the Sea Kings standing by (also known as "flying coffins"). Requiem for the Sea King
The Sea Kings require 30 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight, and they are unavailable for operations 40 per cent of the time.
It's an interesting tidbit on the intertubes that people with the clearest perception of risk tend to perform worse rather than better. Here's the version by the dulcet duo: Lying to Ourselves
After the KHL crash, NHL players everywhere are being quoted about their gut response to the surprising fact of mortality. From Ryan Smyth, the epitome of a blue-collar multimillionaire with his feet on the ground: "You see how easily things can be taken away, so you can't take anything for granted when you leave your family and your friends behind." It was true yesterday, and it will be true tomorrow, yet the high-performance types tend to batch process with lightening bolts of grief comprehension.
Here's why I'm not planning to transact after the big one, regardless of whether it's overblown in the media, or not: Thomas theorem If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
If the situation was as overblown as you make it seem, you would make tons of money investing in land around the area, yet no one is buying
And this is precisely what a rational person expects, if you're depressed enough to see this ahead of time. Sharp investors don't invest on value, they invest on timing. While grab an illiquid, under-priced asset when you can buy a slightly less illiquid asset for roughly the same price a year or two into the future? If you've read articles about the recovery in New Orleans, this is what eventually happened. In the interval, all you are buying is red tape.
It won't cheer you up, but it will make matters clearer in your mind if you imagine the accident as spewing a cubic terabecquerel of red tape with a half-life of five years.
Where government tends to fall down in risk management is grandfathering what came before instead of applying the mothballs when clearer heads prevail. Industry shows up with pole axes in fine hone whenever the government threatens to revoke a sunk cost, even when the sunk cost is poised over a gaping chasm with tonsils wagging.
Once upon a time, long long ago, it was perhaps possible to satisfice on the simplifying notion that for the tiny, compact Linux kernel, in vitro benchmarks were an excellent proxy for in vivo performance.
Phoronix did a little bit of work to conduct an in vivo benchmark comparison (as opposed to benchmark analysis, which for in vivo benchmarks is a mountain of work for not necessarily much return).
The sad fact is that for the vast majority of Linux users these days, the crappy in vivo benchmark protocol comes closer to the reality that people experience.
You can almost say that the gold-standard in vitro benchmarks are a better guideline to tweakability than anything else.
The only known cure to what ails any system catering to the multitudes is to ditch the multitudes. That said, not every case of catering to the multitudes is equally bad, witness Windows Ebola with the daily retrovirus cocktail and plenty of bed rest (er, system reboots).
A small group of people banded together thinking we were immune. Sad, really, but entirely viable if you hold every Linux benchmark effort to higher standards than the Surgeon General.
You're over-estimating the value of liberty if you're multiplying social cohesion by zero. People who hate the government love "the government" and can't stop spewing it out as the fulcrum in every see-saw.
Maybe the underlying idea is that anything we understand is abused absolutely. So rather than discuss the merits of balance concerning liberty and cohesion (the un-Rawanda) we talk about liberty, and cohesion is left as an exercise for the invisible hand. We don't know how the invisible hand actually works (and often it doesn't), but if at any point the hand becomes less than entirely invisible, it's held up as a beacon of totalitarianism.
Of course, the invisible hand would never fail us if we only got entirely out of its way, whatever than means, if it is even possible to do, as world population approaches 7 billion.
I get extremely tired of these lucid defenses of abstract principles over actually understanding how the world works, as a true geek should.
One thing that otherness has to teach us is that being different than we are doesn't automatically lead to a stampede of self-interest terminating with the Aryan ideal. Amazingly, there exist cultures with greater or lesser cohesion where liberty remains a defining principle. It would be nice if the term liberty automatically excluded mayhem, but it doesn't. Not all liberties are created equal. It might actually be a fit topic of conversation if we set the airhorns of ideology aside.
You're advancing the right-thinking view that in a progressive coordinate system all definite integrals are apocalyptic. Yet transform the problem to one where liberty and cohesion are arrived at from a purely historical boundary condition (that no one fully understood at the time), multiple solutions invent themselves and don't immediately vanish in a puff of social self-immolation.
Sometimes it seems to boil down to the effect that the only restrictions on liberty any society accepts are the ones imbibed with breast milk, or paid for with blood. Any other possible constraint is like snatching guns from a baby large enough to use one.
Proscriptive progressivism is political nitroglycerine. Anyone who is trying to think hard about the problem already gets that, but then it's also possible that nitroglycerine is nowhere near the top of things to worry about on little blue marble coated with 7 billion mutinous specs of paint. We're navigating a river of certain danger.
If my inkjet prints 1,000 dpi, and I spray an 8x10" block of HP's finest on every page, it will have squirted a little dot of liberty for every human somewhere around page 88. Hanging a hundred pages of liberty.pdf on your wall is a lot cheaper than travel. Examine closely. They all want liberty brewed with different malt and hops.
If that doesn't work, Kevin Kelly might have a point about getting out more. Stick a pin in Uganda and chum around with Idi Amin. Remind yourself that every time you write "the government" you could have written "charismatic, paranoid, psychopathic asshole" instead.
I live in an area which has had no recorded crime in two years, but I pay for the police.
"But" is a funny conjunction for this sentiment. I spend a lot of time thinking about the entitlement ratchet of the human mind, which tends to hide behind small words just like that one. Your statement is consistent with major acts of terrorism in America 9/10/2001. Should America have been investing more or less?
In this case I think what you meant is "but prudence dictates continued vigilance nevertheless". That's a lot to ask for from a small word which usually conveys "shafted again" if sifted through the large mental mesh of an unfair world.
For me, at least, by the time I burst up to 120 wpm, there's not much left of my brain. Somewhere around that speed, it becomes like electronic circuit design once you hit a signalling frequency where you have to take into account transmission line effects. I think the brain has to begin sequencing physical motions in key clusters, like modems that modulate multiple bits per baud. I also think that if your hands don't stay extremely close to home position, just a small amount of sway from side to side is enough to induce typing mistakes at 120 wpm. This is over ten keystrokes per second. You're not making conscious adjustments for every keystroke.
I also learned on a heavy old Underwood. Thing was so heavy, it cost me about a word every time I used the shift key. Never got used to the feel of the Selectric at home and I never wanted to type at my accurate speed, so it was yards of white-out ribbon per page. Typing at my accurate speed on that machine was like driving 30 kph in a school zone; you're so much safer while you survey the evolution of architectural styles from 1890 through to the present.
I don't get this idea that something better will evolve for English language input short of a technology that figures out what you actually meant from your inarticulate gestures and grunts. Composing over the keyboard I get 90% of my plurals, possessives, and possessive plurals right at 90 wpm. There seems to be a lot of people out there whose tick marks are applied by a chef with a nutmeg rasp for plate appearance: just sprinkle them in to a pleasing density.
There are only twelve letters in the Hawaiian alphabet, plus the Êokina for the glottal stop, which is considered a consonant.
Steve Jobs is a funny man. He loves fonts, but hates keyboards. Qwghlm is well suited to a 4x4 keypad for typing madly with one hand like an accountant. Would Steve like that?
From having a program fix your inarticulate gestures and grunts to what you actually meant, it's just a short hop to having the program fix what you actually meant to what you everyone else wishes you had actually meant. Our devices will be having witty conversations on our behalf, and we'll be none the wiser, so long as the likes keep pouring in.
There's a reason the SFPD doesn't know about it. It never happened. The entire incident, from the loss to the "search" is a story designed to generate hype for the iPhone 5.
Makes me shudder to contemplate what Exxon might get up to someday to create demand for their products. Actually, Apple once had an executive with expertise in selling a product the world doesn't actually need, rather than a product that fuels its own demand, and that didn't work out so well.
It's a nice marketing ruse that plays on core emotion: create a subconscious association between Apple-disguised police officers and the jailed iPhone application market and your gated community will swell to billions and billions. It has such global appeal that Canada even puts our taser-happy state police on postcards.
Moral of the story: Reach slowly for your iPhone 5 in the Vancouver airport. Exactly the publicity Apple was seeking.
If you didn't get the joke at the time, let me spell it out for you:
Evil, however, refuses to heed Number 2's advice and has often made Number 2 suffer for his insolence, claiming that his strategies in bringing in legitimately-obtained income are insulting to the ideals of an evil empire.
It's a satire of spy-era cloak-and-danger cynicism. Wow, that must blow your mind.
Wherever hype is found, trolls are sure to follow.
Now they graduate with a 3.something gpa despite having no critical thinking skills.
Coming from you, that's a small box indeed. Seriously, in an economy that is increasingly knowledge based (you have noticed?) what are you proposing: bottom entile of the workforce trained for manual labour, top entile of the workforce trained to rappel the jello stack, and the middle 1-2*entile (as en goes to zero) trained to do nothing at all?
The best credential is the one where you find yourself at the 25'th percentile of the super elite. Make the hurdle with enough clearance to bask in the glow of those people even brighter than yourself (hard to believe), yet not quite far enough at the back of the pack to be voted off the island at the first scapegoating. It kind of bugs you that you're now at the 90% percentile of your credential, whose value is diluted by all those wanna-be-employeds.
If my response seems harsh, demonstrate those critical thinking skills instead of talking about them. That's what they always say in screen-writing school. In any case, you're a lot brighter than any of the posters making jokes about the bail-out that will or won't happen without identifying who the creditors are.
... when I looked at Lehman's bankruptcy filing, its largest creditors in that filing were overwhelmingly Japanese and Asian banks.
I don't recall if it was this podcast or a different one, but Bear Sterns is reported to have had more internal, American creditors.
No chance the creditors are bailed out if they mostly live in China, but I'm not counting on our chances of pulling the same stunt twice.
In market theory, it's the creditors who are responsible to exercise adult judgement, unless the near-certain prospect of a juicy bail-out frees them from bearing this obligation of prudence.
Wow, this is not a topic which brings out the best thinking skills.
There was a time in a galaxy near you when homosexuals were regarded as inherently criminal, due to the prominence of newspaper headlines that read "Homosexual man slays..." compared to the shocking dearth of headlines reading "Straight man slays..."
Some of the headlines read "Hell's Angel slays..." but somehow our bucket brains don't make the daring inference to file this headline also under the bucket "straight man slays..." leading to the conclusion that there are a lot of gay killers prowling the neighbourhood.
We all know about the Streisand effect, I suppose because it's the simplest effect to understand, and takes the least effort to invoke: the fact of its mention in loud conversation makes it true--can't get any less risky than that.
How about the Turing effect? Now pay attention, this one is more difficult. Take a society that is so hung up on mother nature connecting positive to negative (and not any other way) that it conducts criminal proceedings against a war hero for what I would describe as a victimless crime (as compared to drinking and driving, or failing to abide by food safety regulations). Where was Winston Tippler Churchill when Turing needed a strong character reference? There's a crime for you, in my opinion. As a result of the criminal proceeding--in which no one mentions that Turing contributed more to the war effect than any ace fighter pilot--Turing is forced to undergo therapy which causes him to grow breasts (not cruel, not unusual) and then he kills himself. Why does no one who knows anything come to his defense? Well, we've got these secrets, you see, and it's better if no one knows anything. In fact, it's policy. Makes the world a better place.
I would venture to guess this did not bring out the best side of human nature in the homosexual population who skulked around feeling paranoid, ostracized, and excluded lest they become the unwitting center of attention in a pagan ritual of social uptightness. And furthermore, the morally uptight consist entirely of law-abiding do-gooders who would never threaten pagan outcomes in acts of social extortion.
If you're inside the intelligence establishment, this is all pretty cool. By applying the right kind of pressure, your target might just self-destruct in a puddle of stress and paranoia and improbable denials. Even by that standard, I'm coming around to the opinion that Assange is an asshole. He was assisted in arriving at this place by other assholes, who will forever remain dark shadows where the secrets lurk.
Turing took the honorable way out. He was persecuted by the state, none of his friends showed up to defend him, he grew breasts, then killed himself. He never passed a single secret to Julian Assange. Just like the witch tossed into the river who drowns in a way that proves she wasn't a witch in the first place.
But what if some future Alan Turing takes the growing of breasts the wrong way and slips an embarrassing state secret or two to the likes of Julian Assange?
Two options for the intelligence establishment: A) Admit that persecuting a war hero for a victimless deviancy was pretty fucking stupid. B) Double down on the need for secrecy and the portrayal of anyone who favours a system of checks and balances as suffering from moral turpitude (coming right up, on the silver platter of the bell hop of dirty tricks).
These geniuses of deceit have trouble with option A. Funny that. But think about it from their side: the Soviets might try to extort Turing into cooperation by threatening to spill his deviant acts to a socie
Hell, I'd love a car that goes 8 years without maintenance.
Ah yes, but you forgot about the 10/365.25/86400 OnStar support contract with guaranteed 1e4 response from the OFD (original fine designer) if the PhD answering on the first ring doesn't buzzer out a fix faster than God on Jeopardy.
Or maybe you're entitled to the freebie after gifting the JPL enough to found an entirely new campus.
In Science Fiction, a trilogy is a book written in four parts. Once more to the fray.
Another symptom of failing to get the syntax problem is the premature evaluation of Perl 6. It could yet fail, but it's still too soon to tell. Maybe you can live with syntax after all.
Perl 6 is also a cultural experiment that couldn't have been tried in earlier decades: what comes next when you have a large pool of greybeards? Obviously, a wonderkind language needs to be out there and evolving before the wonderkind wears off. Most of our languages were either designed by wonderkind, or committees of sober realists (famous paper not yet written: Realism Considered Harmful). Perl 6 asks the question, "After gorging on the Tree-of-Life, what comes next?" One attribute of the Pak Protector is a longer-than-human attention span.
The vision for Perl 6 is more than simply a rewrite of Perl 5. By separating the parsing from the compilation and the runtime, we're opening the doors for multiple languages to cooperate. You'll be able to write your program in Perl 6, Perl 5, TCL, Python, or any other language for which there is a parser. Interchangable runtime engines let you interpret your bytecode or convert it to something else (e.g., Java, C, or even back to Perl).
Whether YAVM is worth anything seems to depend on other pieces of the puzzle. The sentiment is noble--that's the worrying part.
As for line-noisy, Perl 6 will remove or mitigate many of the usual suspects. For example, the majority of the punctuation variables are gone, and the regex syntax has been considerably sanitized. However, much of what Perl's detractors refer to as "line-noise", we prefer to call "the actual syntax of the language". Complaining that Perl is "noisy" is like complaining that English is "wordy": all those confusing pronouns and gerunds and prepositions and conjunctive adverbs, etc. making it hard to read.
The only thing Lisp ever says about syntax is "you can always change your mind". Syntax is like a woman. You can change your mind, but you might choose not to. Some of the syntax in Perl 5 was clearly the wrong syntax. When Perl decided to upgrade on the domestic front, the self-reflection went a little deeper than Tiger's template: 99 bundles of blonde on the wall....
Perl's fundamental philosophy in that area isn't going to change, so Perl 6 will still have a rich grammar in which distinct components are specified using distinctive syntactic forms.
Perl 6 is aiming to become everything that Lisp isn't. Hardly surprising it's taking a decade or two. Perl 6 is answering the question "what would happen if you embraced syntax with a whole lot of worldly experience under your belt?" This isn't much appealing to a generation of programmers operating under the sentiment that syntax is like flavours of ice cream.
In the process, Perl 6 has drifted so far away from the careerist rabble, it might die on the vine. However, I think it's an important question: is there room in computer science for a sober rethink?
I'm sure I'm mentioned this before in a slashdot screed. Long ago, around the time I was first exposed to Lisp, I was reading papers on the philosophy of mathematics, including one I recall as Hilary Putnam on the syntax of the integers.
As we all know (speaking at least for the fifth row), Dedekind is famous for the line: God made the natural numbers. Everything else is the work of man.
This is very nearly the only statement about god I believe in, as a Kolmogorovist in good standing. Computer scientists should perk up their ears.
What Putnam did is introduce two different set theoretic foundations of the integers (which you could think of as dressing the integers up in the syntax of formalism). Both formalisms captured every property of the integers we regard as god-given.
However, both formalisms introduced other decidable statements that were far from god given. In one formalism, j < k implied j was a subset of k. The set construction looked a bit like tail recursion. In the other formalism, you didn't have all the Russian dolls, so this tautology was not in effect. I recall Putnam was arguing toward the point that no matter what set theory apparatus used to dress up the integers, these irrelevant man-given tautologies spring to life.
Yes indeed, syntax sucks. Can't live with it, can't live without it.
I've been trying to get the fascination with Lisp for twenty years, and consistently fail. APL was the first high level language I enjoyed using. It was beautiful and ugly at the same time and I found it instructive. As an array language R sucks in a way that APL never did. The beauty of APL lies in its regularity. The mathematical identities are wired so that you rarely code a special case in an elegant formula.
In either the APL or Lisp case you run into this little difficulty that the human brain has a parsing stack not much bigger than the 8087 coprocessor. Top level programmers are supposed to be different because we can store nine working objects in short term memory instead of five to seven. Maybe the reason only the four sigmas ever liked the Lisp language is that you need an eleven element parenthesis mental stack to get to the point where those damn parentheses aren't the only thing you think about.
The story I like about this was some HOF baseball player (whom I remember as Mays) tried to become a hitting coach, but had little success. When his charges asked for advice, he suggested "just watch the seams as the pitcher releases the ball; if the seam is here, it's a curveball, if it's there, it's a fastball". Some people have trouble reading the seams in the blink of an eye on a baseball from 60 feet as released at 90 MPH, even your average MLB cleanup hitter. It wasn't a coachable skill, so his advice was useless.
I suppose we could inject a drug to show the four sigma Lisp programmer what those damn things look like to your one sigma script monkey. Ethanol might work. You should be able to erase three sigmas with one bottle of Jack. When the Lisp person returns to sobriety, the response will most likely be "How can you live!" not "Humanity is unfit for S-expressions!" Intelligence is a weird thing, you get to a certain point, you become so smart you're stupid.
At one point the software integration engineer was giving his presentation and listing all of the things that were going wrong. Someone (I don't know who) interrupted him and asked if he could change only one thing to make things better what would it be. His answer was: get rid of Lisp.
The integration manager is clearly in a world of hurt, and somehow the golden child was at the nexus of pain. I perked up waiting for this brilliant JPL Lisp programmer to dig into how this could be. But no. Integration manager is daemon spawn, and we return to the original blind devotion. Yet again, I wander deep into the campfire of the illuminated, and come back having learned nothing. In the Lisp world, ripe for a teaching moment equates to "you don't get it already, clearly you're not one of us".
For the record, J makes my eyes bleed, but if I put in the work, I'm sure I would learn something. I think what Lisp has to teach me is that fundamentally syntax is a liability and not an asset. Except when it isn't. I got that long ago. When Kurzweil unveils Vitamin Booster Dust, this amazing nugget of truth will suddenly become useful to me.
You think I'm joking?
[With Javascript] given the difficulty in changing simple things like making 010 parse as 10 and not 8 indicates that at some point it will stagnate.
That's a neat compensation. Since we can already guess at the wise things we'll all say after Vitamin Booster Dust hits the store shelves near you, just start saying them already. Or, for bonus points, solve two equations of compensation simultaneously: if we're suddenly that smart, our big mess will be refactored faultlessly in no time, so why are we wasting our time projecting a future that will take care of itself?
He cites the Javascript with statement for special scorn. Check out the guy with 185 up-votes demonstrating an interesting use case.
I missed one perfect beat: After "Replication is King." add "That's the male view." I know, amending a slashdot post is like adding an extra syllable to a haiku.
That's like saying the ten commandments are not restrictive because you never wanted to sleep with your neighbour's wife in the first place, though you wonder after he wanders off on a three year sea voyage whether he is similarly disposed toward the marital customs of half-naked illiterates. The GPL must be the world's first moral code offering nothing to adhere to.
I don't give Linux much credit for pioneering open source. Yes, and Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built his own hands. There's a reason why Linus rather than Steve Gibson is responsible for the Linux kernel: Linus had the wits to build on what came before him. At a minimum this included GCC/binutils, the TCP/IP network stack, Perl, TeX/LaTeX/Metafont, and the X Windows system, all of which claim greater precedence for pioneering in the collaborative space.
Linus was more like the Larry Wall of collaboration: he was gifted for the task of polygamous union. As it turns out, Perl wasn't the only way to do it. The great progenitors always leave a stamp of their gifts and weaknesses. While we're at it, let's give America full credit for the invention of democracy, and ignore any role the establishment of the British parliament might have had in this story. Let's forget Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, Hume, and Smith. There weren't there at the beginnings of the one true metropolis.
The GPL solves a problem in game theory concerning the forward gifting society which facilitates cooperation by replacing the technicalities of forward gifting with the established custom of a broad social institution. It's an eigenvalue in the game theoretic matrix of cooperation/competition. There are other eigenvalues, too, such as the BSD model, and the proprietary model.
I often read that there's enough food in the world to feed everyone; as soon as we distribute this food so that everyone eats, we can cross proprietary off the list as a gruesome expedient of our savage past. Proprietary is also a distribution model, but you can see the cracks already. The last three winners on Survivor all signed a blood bond in the first episode to honour the GPL.
Sometimes I think the GPL came to Stallman in a flash of insight while watching A Taste of Armageddon back in 1967. The whole system would be so much more efficient if we just flipped a coin to determine those who will starve. If you're going to subject yourself to a coin flip about stepping into the suicide booth, you want to first examine the source code. If the booth were provisioned by Diebold, it could be a gruesome end. No one would take that risk, and nirvana would die on the drawing board. Seriously, that whole episode makes you think deeply about the provenance of the source code. Spock muttered "fascinating" but the crew had learned by then not to ask.
That episode should have been titled "An Eigenvalue Too Far", but this was before Slashdot and the four digit user ID, so there was no-one to get it.
I also think Stallman was influenced by some of those 1970s PBS series on the origins of life in which replication puts the yin/yang hammerlock on metabolism. Source code is replication. Metabolism is everything else everyone contributes to pushing the source code around. Metabolism does not function in the role of the one true eigenvalue, so it was quickly discarded on the road to manifesto. Putting all your eggs into the metabolism basket as Ubuntu tends to do is kind of risky for the long term concerning those mysterious failures of the uniform distribution of metabolic inputs from our savage past. Replication is king.
After all that, what is this guy actually saying? You might stray into metabolism, but sooner or later you'll succumb to the blinding light of the one true eigenvalue and return to the flock?
The curious thing, though, is the tendency of the one true eigenvalue to wink out like a dying star, only to be replaced by an even b
Swearing at my GP was actually helpful this time around, so I now have one positive swearing result out of N as N goes to infinity concerning this medical interaction.
I've got the data set under my thumb to show the man the back of my hand, but it's technically tricky to precisely fit negative attestation data: my FF stream tells me when I'm awake and clicking but not when my cheek is lolling on the Z key.
I just realized I can score each moment in time by linear distance to nearest click (painting my life with a snore to shore metric) and then use the R package FDA (Functional Data Analysis) to fit the data on a Fourier basis using the harmonic acceleration penalty to smooth the curve.
Harmonic acceleration makes my furrow my brow. It's defined as: L = omega^2 D + D^3 where D is differentiation. Don't completely grasp why this works and haven't tried it out yet.
Ramsay, Hooker, and Graves mostly use it to fit precipitation data. On my personal weather channel, there would be the daily peregrinations of the sand man: the sun will be rising hours before summoned and hang in the sky much longer than usual due to an extraordinary ideation wave, followed by not very much for a day or two. Same old same old. Why do I even tune in?
No it isn't. Stop watching the graphs and you won't even know.
I once had a doctor just like you. I've had a sleep issue for twenty-five years, during which I've become more adept than your average goat at noticing certain details of my physiological state. This particular doctor implied that I was so naive about the scientific process as to verge on creationism and that I matched any wacky hypothesis to reality with no regard to observation. He told me I had no data.
Actually, what I have is an R workspace with an 80,000 line CSV file extracted from Firefox showing my browsing activity over about a year period during which the white band of "away from my desk" appearing roughly once every 24 hours migrates diagonally on the circadian plot with a one hour daily drift. I've managed to treat this subsequently with carefully timed melatonin administration and have reduced the period to roughly 24.15 hours. Miss just one sunrise control pill and I'm an hour pregnant the next morning. And since I've never had a reverse gear on this hasty blue marble, that adds up to a week of night shifts sooner or later.
The other aspect of 80,000 Firefox page requests over a one year period is that I have actually noticed Firefox being one of the worst GD memory pigs of in all of god's creation without consulting system monitor, so STFU about the system monitor. Maybe I installed too many useful extensions, but then if I didn't want the extensions, I would use Chrome instead.
With 200 tabs open in eight FF clients spread over nine desktops, after about ten days, I can often type half a dozen words during frequent FF gcgag stalls (garbage collect gag) before my text blurps out. Whenever FF virtual memory climbs to over a gigabyte, I pretty much have to close my eyes while typing, as the feedback loop in the HTML input box causes me more distress than assistance. I participated heavily in a FF beta a couple of years ago where memory usage was three times worse than it is now. I was restarting FF every few days just to clear the constipation. This on a Linux system with 4GB of memory since upgraded to 8GB.
Thanks for giving my asshole GP a nice pat on the back in his self-satisfied assessment of the observational powers of his hapless sleep-deprived clients.
Schindler: There's no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I can see now it wasn't me that had failed. Something was missing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure. Emilie: Luck. Schindler: War.
Steve was ahead of his time in the 1980s. He was a trendy gadget maker stuck in the PC business. His early attempts to gadgify the PC mostly lead to vanity art, and vanity will only get you 10% of the market, unless you can pull it out of your pocket in public display.
On his HID aesthetic, it turns out the mouse had a correct solution: one button for selecting, a second button to summon a menu of actions (where your eyes are already looking), and a wheel for scrolling in between the two buttons. This is simpler than your telephone, simpler than your steering wheel, simpler than your stereo/VCR/TV/digital alarm clock/wrist watch. Hardly anyone who wasn't suffering post-traumatic Luddite syndrome would have found such a mouse difficult to operate, even in 1985. He directed his wrath at the mouse, when he should have directed his wrath at the worthless scroll-bars, which mostly take up valuable space to little effect, though we have a lot more of that now. He was always catering to "out of box" comfort zone, rather the comfort zone people grow into when they finally figure out how to make the hay fly. Just what everyone in the 1980s really needed: a good $4000 in-store experience for ten minutes, followed by three years of window thrashing.
Way back, I had an opportunity to visit Parc and sit in front of what I recall as a Xerox Dorado (which I vaguely recall as consisting of $50,000 of ECL circuitry--I've recently done some LVPECL design work, and I *know* what that implies on the global warming front). The mouse had three buttons and was hideously complicated during my first ten minutes of grokage. I can understand why Apple didn't replicate a three-button Jack-in-the-Box for your average consumer.
But for Jobs, far enough was never far enough until it was too far. Step two: defend the decision as if moral rectitude and reproductive fitness hangs in the balance. The winning conditions for Steve Jobs was a device that fits in your pocket which costs roughly $1000/year to operate. This was the business he was really building in the first place, long before this model was right for the world.
Jobs paced himself more or less the same way as Andre Agassi's father. Andre had a rough patch, but seems to have recovered, for the most part, and there was much success along with the hardship. Jobs never wanted the PC to have a healthy adolescence, in which order arises from chaos. Which is fine, but he scorned the people getting on with what needed to happen, which is far less OK.
In the larger view, perhaps it takes twenty years of demanding too much too soon to suddenly discover you're the man of the decade. Jobs did a fair amount of damage to common sense with his premature vision of appliancehood. But like Schindler, when the winning conditions finally arrived he acquitted himself at a level rarely achieved in life.
I'm no fan of his bullshit years, though I admire his crowning achievement (which I'm tempted to cite as clang/LLVM, but that's just me).
Blocking Jon Katz accounts for more than half of all the customization I've ever done here. It might have been my finest tick-box moment ever. Thus Spake Zarathustra poured into the sound-track of my life as I executed the triumphant mouse click.
Later on, somewhere else, I stumbled over a piece by Katz on Border Collies, maybe a book excerpt, that was actually not half bad. These days, it's just too easy not to give a guy a fair chance. Can't say I miss the adolescent boarding-house memes. I was never here for the antics, and I've never seen a piece anywhere that made me rethink "hot grits".
My brother loves the investment maxim "leave a nickle for the next guy". In other words, don't try to ride it up until the apogee of detonation. That always seemed to be the editorial philosophy around here: don't make it too perfect at the outset, nobody shows up to intervene noisily over a bike shed that doesn't swoon like a leaning tower. But hey, it worked.
Let's find the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in a sample of dry air at sea-level. Sea-level pressure averages 101,325 Pa. As of this year (2008), carbon dioxide makes up 0.000385 of that (385 parts per million) by volume. The partial pressure of carbon dioxide should then be Pi = 0.000385 x 101325 = 39.0 Pa.
In the red trunks, weighing in at 9 MPa, planet Venus Greenus Galore. Weighing in a 39 Pa, planet earth, moving up from former weight class of 31 Pa during the sockhopocene, planet earth looking mighty flush, greenhouse pretender or greenhouse contender?
Mann's paper was hugely leveraged as the smoking gun at the bottom of the haystack by the IPCC. Failure to include a statistician in the original peer review is inexcusable for a paper pressed into service at the biggest dog and pony show in Broadway history. The normal course of a dusty statistical study on tree rings in to languish in obscurity for 50 years, after which the retrospective wisdom of peer review shines forth.
These smug bastards need to man up.
The actual debate here is whether the earth was poised to topple from one macro dynamic climate state to another with the insignificant (in absolute terms) addition of a few ppk CO2 to the atmosphere, and whether we should take a dramatic risky and unproven course of action to intervene in the outcome. Anyone who thinks that intervening in biological organisms competing for sustaining resources is a risk free undertaking needs to think again.
Unlike the CO2 record, which has been much higher than present levels, we have no historical record of any biological organism curtailing metabolic activity on a purely political consensus. It would be the first time ever, in the history of earth's biology.
Time to pop the precautionary cherry? Perhaps. But I'd rather not have these smug self-investigating bastards doing a remake of the pie fight that landed on Dr Strangelove's editing room floor.
How about some scientists of gravitas at the helm who take peer review seriously enough to include a statistician among the original peer reviewers of a paper pushing subtle statistical claims?
Next they will be calling people who own digital TVs "techies". McCoy had all those fancy salt shakers, yet he was far from being a techie. The more Trekkie, the less techie.
How many characters who carried The Guide around would qualify as techies? Zaphod? Once or twice? Or were some of those characters carrying around the print edition, and Douglas never bothered to mention this inconvenient detail?
Some day I'd like to ask, "Zaphod, what's your median opinion on the great book?" And he would answer, "A fine coaster to protect my beach towel from PGGB sumpage, but I always stow a Wet One at third pocket, just in case."
This makes me wonder, is there a Touch Pad beer coaster applet, where the touch screen extrapolates libation intercept? I always thought the touch interface was a bit dorky, but maybe I didn't give it a chance. Plotting libations is about as close as a Touch Pad will ever get to astronomical pursuits.
I place the Bible roughly on par with what I remember about my childhood between the ages of three and five. The scraps I remember seem disproportionately important relative to much clearer memories from later on, yet also clouded by unbridgeable differences in mental perception and layers of reremembering.
Memory and Forgetting has some interesting content about the act of remembering rewriting memory. As usual, they sidle up to some really interesting stuff and gawk amusingly.
On the other side, memories of my later childhood and adult life are far less problematic having passed through the formative miracle of cognition and personality.
As I've matured my interests have changed. This double helix thing makes for fascinating reading. It's a great time and era to let the mists of time alone for a while; it's almost as if we lived on a clouded planet, and then one day the atmosphere cleared up and we could see the heavens for the very first time. Amazing as this development is, it doesn't seem to stop many people from rehashing starless origin stories, blind to the twinkle of a new cosmic perspective.
This also reminds me of conquest stories. The displaced tend to be the last group of people who lived somewhere without a writing system, regardless of how many other pre-literate peoples were chased off before them. An oppressor is any society with a written history. Amazing how that works.
It's quite the illusion to treat the Bible as a beginning point. Before I was four years old, I was two or three years old. Of this time I have essentially no memory at all. Neurologically, a lot of water has already passed under the bridge by the time you start recording conscious memories accessible (barely) to your adult mind.
Well, maybe you shouldn't spend so much time blocking banner ads? Were you really that surprised that it will just move sites to use other ways to make money with advertisements, or move them to pay model?
That gives me a good laugh. Insightful in the modern world is colluding against the least colourful guy at the poker table as if he isn't even there.
Now if I were to disable my putrid content blocker, the first thing that happens is that I become less effective at my day job, because my mind has trouble filtering anything that blinks, flashes, throbs, or scrolls. The visual edge and motion detector is part of the predation reflex. My predation reflex is robust and immediately recruits part of my brain that would otherwise be earning me income.
Ignoring that, my conscious response to advertisement is to make a mental note that the vendor isn't competing on merit. I win most of my battles at the store rather than in front of the fridge. I lose all my battles in front of the fridge. If I put it in there, I'm allowed to eat it. Hallelujah!
In order for advertising to be effective, they need to turn the world of consumption into a giant fridge of immediate pickle and prosciutto goodness. For example, PayPal and online ordering with credit credentials liable to go walk-about. But the goods arrive quickly, so no matter.
In the store, having set aside a block of time just for this purpose, I'm able to recruit the whole of my rational brain to the task of rational consumption. As unreliable as rationality is in human affairs, there is in fact an on switch, should you choose to use it.
I choose to use it. Which means that the advertising to someone like me has little upside for the vendor, either. I'm not claiming I'm not influenced by advertising. What I'm claiming is that I make my decisions when the influence is counterbalanced by more powerful forces, of which I happen to have some.
The advertisers don't consider this argument worth much. For the small percentage of the population that successfully defects, the vast majority eventually (after say 100,000 to 1,000,000 lifetime ad impressions) falls into learned helplessness. The cable TV companies all know this. For a month they offer to part for free on your front lawn a giant white truck full of 500 salty snacks ranging from 100% MSG on down. Even after you narrow down to the five channels with more carbohydrates than smut and jiggle, it gets pretty easy pretty quickly to reach for the salty chips in any moment of weakness.
The credit cards with the points system is pretty much the same thing. They're cultivating you to believe you're getting something for free. No, not even slightly. You're basically just ripping off the guy who does business in cash, by having a rule that if a vendor takes CC the vendor can't offer a cash discount for not providing the CC service which therefore must have zero actual value. Costs the retailer a lot for zero value, I must say. But you might score a free flight to destination tropical chip truck. This is for when the truck on your lawn hasn't shaken out enough of your loose coin.
The average person starts to rationalize as if this "something for nothing" actually exists. Most people engage in impulse purchasing, so it becomes easy to rationalize "I was going to do it anyway, I might as well collect me some perks" such as free downloads from Joe's Ziphouse Emporium.
I don't engage in impulse shopping. I'm not willing to pay the impulse shopping tax (watching any of 99% of the Flash content ever produced) for a trivial economic perk.
Anyone here with a compact ID whom you convince to turn off their ad-blocking to help the finances of download.com is not going to do anything for the finances of people who pay money to advertise there. You're just shifting the chump. In theory, we're all chip-truck addled morons. In practice, a few of us take exception.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet another dangerous grain of truth.
Detroit has long sold large, steel battering rams on the image of safety: good for you, bad for anything else you happen to impact.
There would be less escalation to large steel battering rams if people weren't made to feel unsafe by their copious production. Detroit manipulated demand more callously than most. Nice to be Krupp alternating upgrades to opposite sides, since no one wants to have last year's targeting distance in an African square dance.
Rule three: Expect a corporation to arrange for you to care most about staying ahead of the Rommels.
Well, times change. The kit everyone is demanding these days is the handy-dandy DIY BGA oven.
With a bit of ingenuity, Heathkit could come out with an entire DIY benchtop SMT line, with stereoscopic pick-and-place. A low-intensity X-ray laser would be a nice upgrade, if it could image BGA pads in under 15 minutes per pin.
But then again, they'd probably apply the HP pricing model to the custom DIY BGA oven almost-lead-free solder-paste to the point where it would be cheaper to purchase finished boards from a distant continent.
Chances are that power plant was there already when you purchased your property originally, which was not designed to survive a 100-year event, unless you also believe that skyscrapers designed in the 1960s were pancake-immune to aircraft impact.
I also live on the Pacific rim, and when the 400-year event arrives (presently tending toward overdue), I won't be expecting to sell any real-estate for a long while. I'm not looking around at any major infrastructure thinking it will still be there because the government said so. I live on Vancouver Island. Until recently, it was comforting to know we had the Sea Kings standing by (also known as "flying coffins").
Requiem for the Sea King
It's an interesting tidbit on the intertubes that people with the clearest perception of risk tend to perform worse rather than better. Here's the version by the dulcet duo:
Lying to Ourselves
After the KHL crash, NHL players everywhere are being quoted about their gut response to the surprising fact of mortality. From Ryan Smyth, the epitome of a blue-collar multimillionaire with his feet on the ground: "You see how easily things can be taken away, so you can't take anything for granted when you leave your family and your friends behind." It was true yesterday, and it will be true tomorrow, yet the high-performance types tend to batch process with lightening bolts of grief comprehension.
Here's why I'm not planning to transact after the big one, regardless of whether it's overblown in the media, or not:
Thomas theorem
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.
And this is precisely what a rational person expects, if you're depressed enough to see this ahead of time. Sharp investors don't invest on value, they invest on timing. While grab an illiquid, under-priced asset when you can buy a slightly less illiquid asset for roughly the same price a year or two into the future? If you've read articles about the recovery in New Orleans, this is what eventually happened. In the interval, all you are buying is red tape.
It won't cheer you up, but it will make matters clearer in your mind if you imagine the accident as spewing a cubic terabecquerel of red tape with a half-life of five years.
Where government tends to fall down in risk management is grandfathering what came before instead of applying the mothballs when clearer heads prevail. Industry shows up with pole axes in fine hone whenever the government threatens to revoke a sunk cost, even when the sunk cost is poised over a gaping chasm with tonsils wagging.
Once upon a time, long long ago, it was perhaps possible to satisfice on the simplifying notion that for the tiny, compact Linux kernel, in vitro benchmarks were an excellent proxy for in vivo performance.
Phoronix did a little bit of work to conduct an in vivo benchmark comparison (as opposed to benchmark analysis, which for in vivo benchmarks is a mountain of work for not necessarily much return).
The sad fact is that for the vast majority of Linux users these days, the crappy in vivo benchmark protocol comes closer to the reality that people experience.
You can almost say that the gold-standard in vitro benchmarks are a better guideline to tweakability than anything else.
The only known cure to what ails any system catering to the multitudes is to ditch the multitudes. That said, not every case of catering to the multitudes is equally bad, witness Windows Ebola with the daily retrovirus cocktail and plenty of bed rest (er, system reboots).
A small group of people banded together thinking we were immune. Sad, really, but entirely viable if you hold every Linux benchmark effort to higher standards than the Surgeon General.
You're over-estimating the value of liberty if you're multiplying social cohesion by zero. People who hate the government love "the government" and can't stop spewing it out as the fulcrum in every see-saw.
Maybe the underlying idea is that anything we understand is abused absolutely. So rather than discuss the merits of balance concerning liberty and cohesion (the un-Rawanda) we talk about liberty, and cohesion is left as an exercise for the invisible hand. We don't know how the invisible hand actually works (and often it doesn't), but if at any point the hand becomes less than entirely invisible, it's held up as a beacon of totalitarianism.
Of course, the invisible hand would never fail us if we only got entirely out of its way, whatever than means, if it is even possible to do, as world population approaches 7 billion.
I get extremely tired of these lucid defenses of abstract principles over actually understanding how the world works, as a true geek should.
One thing that otherness has to teach us is that being different than we are doesn't automatically lead to a stampede of self-interest terminating with the Aryan ideal. Amazingly, there exist cultures with greater or lesser cohesion where liberty remains a defining principle. It would be nice if the term liberty automatically excluded mayhem, but it doesn't. Not all liberties are created equal. It might actually be a fit topic of conversation if we set the airhorns of ideology aside.
You're advancing the right-thinking view that in a progressive coordinate system all definite integrals are apocalyptic. Yet transform the problem to one where liberty and cohesion are arrived at from a purely historical boundary condition (that no one fully understood at the time), multiple solutions invent themselves and don't immediately vanish in a puff of social self-immolation.
Sometimes it seems to boil down to the effect that the only restrictions on liberty any society accepts are the ones imbibed with breast milk, or paid for with blood. Any other possible constraint is like snatching guns from a baby large enough to use one.
Proscriptive progressivism is political nitroglycerine. Anyone who is trying to think hard about the problem already gets that, but then it's also possible that nitroglycerine is nowhere near the top of things to worry about on little blue marble coated with 7 billion mutinous specs of paint. We're navigating a river of certain danger.
If my inkjet prints 1,000 dpi, and I spray an 8x10" block of HP's finest on every page, it will have squirted a little dot of liberty for every human somewhere around page 88. Hanging a hundred pages of liberty.pdf on your wall is a lot cheaper than travel. Examine closely. They all want liberty brewed with different malt and hops.
If that doesn't work, Kevin Kelly might have a point about getting out more. Stick a pin in Uganda and chum around with Idi Amin. Remind yourself that every time you write "the government" you could have written "charismatic, paranoid, psychopathic asshole" instead.
"But" is a funny conjunction for this sentiment. I spend a lot of time thinking about the entitlement ratchet of the human mind, which tends to hide behind small words just like that one. Your statement is consistent with major acts of terrorism in America 9/10/2001. Should America have been investing more or less?
In this case I think what you meant is "but prudence dictates continued vigilance nevertheless". That's a lot to ask for from a small word which usually conveys "shafted again" if sifted through the large mental mesh of an unfair world.
For me, at least, by the time I burst up to 120 wpm, there's not much left of my brain. Somewhere around that speed, it becomes like electronic circuit design once you hit a signalling frequency where you have to take into account transmission line effects. I think the brain has to begin sequencing physical motions in key clusters, like modems that modulate multiple bits per baud. I also think that if your hands don't stay extremely close to home position, just a small amount of sway from side to side is enough to induce typing mistakes at 120 wpm. This is over ten keystrokes per second. You're not making conscious adjustments for every keystroke.
I also learned on a heavy old Underwood. Thing was so heavy, it cost me about a word every time I used the shift key. Never got used to the feel of the Selectric at home and I never wanted to type at my accurate speed, so it was yards of white-out ribbon per page. Typing at my accurate speed on that machine was like driving 30 kph in a school zone; you're so much safer while you survey the evolution of architectural styles from 1890 through to the present.
I don't get this idea that something better will evolve for English language input short of a technology that figures out what you actually meant from your inarticulate gestures and grunts. Composing over the keyboard I get 90% of my plurals, possessives, and possessive plurals right at 90 wpm. There seems to be a lot of people out there whose tick marks are applied by a chef with a nutmeg rasp for plate appearance: just sprinkle them in to a pleasing density.
The real technology is to fix our language.
Hawaiian language
Steve Jobs is a funny man. He loves fonts, but hates keyboards. Qwghlm is well suited to a 4x4 keypad for typing madly with one hand like an accountant. Would Steve like that?
From having a program fix your inarticulate gestures and grunts to what you actually meant, it's just a short hop to having the program fix what you actually meant to what you everyone else wishes you had actually meant. Our devices will be having witty conversations on our behalf, and we'll be none the wiser, so long as the likes keep pouring in.
Makes me shudder to contemplate what Exxon might get up to someday to create demand for their products. Actually, Apple once had an executive with expertise in selling a product the world doesn't actually need, rather than a product that fuels its own demand, and that didn't work out so well.
It's a nice marketing ruse that plays on core emotion: create a subconscious association between Apple-disguised police officers and the jailed iPhone application market and your gated community will swell to billions and billions. It has such global appeal that Canada even puts our taser-happy state police on postcards.
Moral of the story: Reach slowly for your iPhone 5 in the Vancouver airport. Exactly the publicity Apple was seeking.
If you didn't get the joke at the time, let me spell it out for you:
It's a satire of spy-era cloak-and-danger cynicism. Wow, that must blow your mind.
Wherever hype is found, trolls are sure to follow.
Coming from you, that's a small box indeed. Seriously, in an economy that is increasingly knowledge based (you have noticed?) what are you proposing: bottom entile of the workforce trained for manual labour, top entile of the workforce trained to rappel the jello stack, and the middle 1-2*entile (as en goes to zero) trained to do nothing at all?
The best credential is the one where you find yourself at the 25'th percentile of the super elite. Make the hurdle with enough clearance to bask in the glow of those people even brighter than yourself (hard to believe), yet not quite far enough at the back of the pack to be voted off the island at the first scapegoating. It kind of bugs you that you're now at the 90% percentile of your credential, whose value is diluted by all those wanna-be-employeds.
If my response seems harsh, demonstrate those critical thinking skills instead of talking about them. That's what they always say in screen-writing school. In any case, you're a lot brighter than any of the posters making jokes about the bail-out that will or won't happen without identifying who the creditors are.
Vincent Reinhart on Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the Financial Crisis suggests that bail-outs mostly have to do with protecting the right kinds of creditors.
I don't recall if it was this podcast or a different one, but Bear Sterns is reported to have had more internal, American creditors.
No chance the creditors are bailed out if they mostly live in China, but I'm not counting on our chances of pulling the same stunt twice.
In market theory, it's the creditors who are responsible to exercise adult judgement, unless the near-certain prospect of a juicy bail-out frees them from bearing this obligation of prudence.
Wow, this is not a topic which brings out the best thinking skills.
There was a time in a galaxy near you when homosexuals were regarded as inherently criminal, due to the prominence of newspaper headlines that read "Homosexual man slays ..." compared to the shocking dearth of headlines reading "Straight man slays ..."
Some of the headlines read "Hell's Angel slays ..." but somehow our bucket brains don't make the daring inference to file this headline also under the bucket "straight man slays ..." leading to the conclusion that there are a lot of gay killers prowling the neighbourhood.
But wait, just in, the human bucket brain sometimes makes errors of judgement:
Murder charges may unfairly tarnish military's reputation
We all know about the Streisand effect, I suppose because it's the simplest effect to understand, and takes the least effort to invoke: the fact of its mention in loud conversation makes it true--can't get any less risky than that.
How about the Turing effect? Now pay attention, this one is more difficult. Take a society that is so hung up on mother nature connecting positive to negative (and not any other way) that it conducts criminal proceedings against a war hero for what I would describe as a victimless crime (as compared to drinking and driving, or failing to abide by food safety regulations). Where was Winston Tippler Churchill when Turing needed a strong character reference? There's a crime for you, in my opinion. As a result of the criminal proceeding--in which no one mentions that Turing contributed more to the war effect than any ace fighter pilot--Turing is forced to undergo therapy which causes him to grow breasts (not cruel, not unusual) and then he kills himself. Why does no one who knows anything come to his defense? Well, we've got these secrets, you see, and it's better if no one knows anything. In fact, it's policy. Makes the world a better place.
I would venture to guess this did not bring out the best side of human nature in the homosexual population who skulked around feeling paranoid, ostracized, and excluded lest they become the unwitting center of attention in a pagan ritual of social uptightness. And furthermore, the morally uptight consist entirely of law-abiding do-gooders who would never threaten pagan outcomes in acts of social extortion.
If you're inside the intelligence establishment, this is all pretty cool. By applying the right kind of pressure, your target might just self-destruct in a puddle of stress and paranoia and improbable denials. Even by that standard, I'm coming around to the opinion that Assange is an asshole. He was assisted in arriving at this place by other assholes, who will forever remain dark shadows where the secrets lurk.
Turing took the honorable way out. He was persecuted by the state, none of his friends showed up to defend him, he grew breasts, then killed himself. He never passed a single secret to Julian Assange. Just like the witch tossed into the river who drowns in a way that proves she wasn't a witch in the first place.
But what if some future Alan Turing takes the growing of breasts the wrong way and slips an embarrassing state secret or two to the likes of Julian Assange?
Two options for the intelligence establishment:
A) Admit that persecuting a war hero for a victimless deviancy was pretty fucking stupid.
B) Double down on the need for secrecy and the portrayal of anyone who favours a system of checks and balances as suffering from moral turpitude (coming right up, on the silver platter of the bell hop of dirty tricks).
These geniuses of deceit have trouble with option A. Funny that. But think about it from their side: the Soviets might try to extort Turing into cooperation by threatening to spill his deviant acts to a socie
Ah yes, but you forgot about the 10/365.25/86400 OnStar support contract with guaranteed 1e4 response from the OFD (original fine designer) if the PhD answering on the first ring doesn't buzzer out a fix faster than God on Jeopardy.
Or maybe you're entitled to the freebie after gifting the JPL enough to found an entirely new campus.
In Science Fiction, a trilogy is a book written in four parts. Once more to the fray.
Another symptom of failing to get the syntax problem is the premature evaluation of Perl 6. It could yet fail, but it's still too soon to tell. Maybe you can live with syntax after all.
Perl 6 is also a cultural experiment that couldn't have been tried in earlier decades: what comes next when you have a large pool of greybeards? Obviously, a wonderkind language needs to be out there and evolving before the wonderkind wears off. Most of our languages were either designed by wonderkind, or committees of sober realists (famous paper not yet written: Realism Considered Harmful). Perl 6 asks the question, "After gorging on the Tree-of-Life, what comes next?" One attribute of the Pak Protector is a longer-than-human attention span.
Whether YAVM is worth anything seems to depend on other pieces of the puzzle. The sentiment is noble--that's the worrying part.
The only thing Lisp ever says about syntax is "you can always change your mind". Syntax is like a woman. You can change your mind, but you might choose not to. Some of the syntax in Perl 5 was clearly the wrong syntax. When Perl decided to upgrade on the domestic front, the self-reflection went a little deeper than Tiger's template: 99 bundles of blonde on the wall ....
Perl 6 is aiming to become everything that Lisp isn't. Hardly surprising it's taking a decade or two. Perl 6 is answering the question "what would happen if you embraced syntax with a whole lot of worldly experience under your belt?" This isn't much appealing to a generation of programmers operating under the sentiment that syntax is like flavours of ice cream.
In the process, Perl 6 has drifted so far away from the careerist rabble, it might die on the vine. However, I think it's an important question: is there room in computer science for a sober rethink?
except that porcupines are allergic to raisins...
The craggy looking dude is the JPL integration manager. The demilobular fellow is the Lisp programmer in training.
But wait, there's more.
I'm sure I'm mentioned this before in a slashdot screed. Long ago, around the time I was first exposed to Lisp, I was reading papers on the philosophy of mathematics, including one I recall as Hilary Putnam on the syntax of the integers.
As we all know (speaking at least for the fifth row), Dedekind is famous for the line: God made the natural numbers. Everything else is the work of man.
This is very nearly the only statement about god I believe in, as a Kolmogorovist in good standing. Computer scientists should perk up their ears.
What Putnam did is introduce two different set theoretic foundations of the integers (which you could think of as dressing the integers up in the syntax of formalism). Both formalisms captured every property of the integers we regard as god-given.
However, both formalisms introduced other decidable statements that were far from god given. In one formalism, j < k implied j was a subset of k. The set construction looked a bit like tail recursion. In the other formalism, you didn't have all the Russian dolls, so this tautology was not in effect. I recall Putnam was arguing toward the point that no matter what set theory apparatus used to dress up the integers, these irrelevant man-given tautologies spring to life.
Yes indeed, syntax sucks. Can't live with it, can't live without it.
I've been trying to get the fascination with Lisp for twenty years, and consistently fail. APL was the first high level language I enjoyed using. It was beautiful and ugly at the same time and I found it instructive. As an array language R sucks in a way that APL never did. The beauty of APL lies in its regularity. The mathematical identities are wired so that you rarely code a special case in an elegant formula.
In either the APL or Lisp case you run into this little difficulty that the human brain has a parsing stack not much bigger than the 8087 coprocessor. Top level programmers are supposed to be different because we can store nine working objects in short term memory instead of five to seven. Maybe the reason only the four sigmas ever liked the Lisp language is that you need an eleven element parenthesis mental stack to get to the point where those damn parentheses aren't the only thing you think about.
The story I like about this was some HOF baseball player (whom I remember as Mays) tried to become a hitting coach, but had little success. When his charges asked for advice, he suggested "just watch the seams as the pitcher releases the ball; if the seam is here, it's a curveball, if it's there, it's a fastball". Some people have trouble reading the seams in the blink of an eye on a baseball from 60 feet as released at 90 MPH, even your average MLB cleanup hitter. It wasn't a coachable skill, so his advice was useless.
I suppose we could inject a drug to show the four sigma Lisp programmer what those damn things look like to your one sigma script monkey. Ethanol might work. You should be able to erase three sigmas with one bottle of Jack. When the Lisp person returns to sobriety, the response will most likely be "How can you live!" not "Humanity is unfit for S-expressions!" Intelligence is a weird thing, you get to a certain point, you become so smart you're stupid.
You think I'm exaggerating?
From Lisping at JPL
The integration manager is clearly in a world of hurt, and somehow the golden child was at the nexus of pain. I perked up waiting for this brilliant JPL Lisp programmer to dig into how this could be. But no. Integration manager is daemon spawn, and we return to the original blind devotion. Yet again, I wander deep into the campfire of the illuminated, and come back having learned nothing. In the Lisp world, ripe for a teaching moment equates to "you don't get it already, clearly you're not one of us".
For the record, J makes my eyes bleed, but if I put in the work, I'm sure I would learn something. I think what Lisp has to teach me is that fundamentally syntax is a liability and not an asset. Except when it isn't. I got that long ago. When Kurzweil unveils Vitamin Booster Dust, this amazing nugget of truth will suddenly become useful to me.
You think I'm joking?
That's a neat compensation. Since we can already guess at the wise things we'll all say after Vitamin Booster Dust hits the store shelves near you, just start saying them already. Or, for bonus points, solve two equations of compensation simultaneously: if we're suddenly that smart, our big mess will be refactored faultlessly in no time, so why are we wasting our time projecting a future that will take care of itself?
He cites the Javascript with statement for special scorn. Check out the guy with 185 up-votes demonstrating an interesting use case.
I missed one perfect beat: After "Replication is King." add "That's the male view." I know, amending a slashdot post is like adding an extra syllable to a haiku.
That's like saying the ten commandments are not restrictive because you never wanted to sleep with your neighbour's wife in the first place, though you wonder after he wanders off on a three year sea voyage whether he is similarly disposed toward the marital customs of half-naked illiterates. The GPL must be the world's first moral code offering nothing to adhere to.
I don't give Linux much credit for pioneering open source. Yes, and Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built his own hands. There's a reason why Linus rather than Steve Gibson is responsible for the Linux kernel: Linus had the wits to build on what came before him. At a minimum this included GCC/binutils, the TCP/IP network stack, Perl, TeX/LaTeX/Metafont, and the X Windows system, all of which claim greater precedence for pioneering in the collaborative space.
Linus was more like the Larry Wall of collaboration: he was gifted for the task of polygamous union. As it turns out, Perl wasn't the only way to do it. The great progenitors always leave a stamp of their gifts and weaknesses. While we're at it, let's give America full credit for the invention of democracy, and ignore any role the establishment of the British parliament might have had in this story. Let's forget Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, Hume, and Smith. There weren't there at the beginnings of the one true metropolis.
The GPL solves a problem in game theory concerning the forward gifting society which facilitates cooperation by replacing the technicalities of forward gifting with the established custom of a broad social institution. It's an eigenvalue in the game theoretic matrix of cooperation/competition. There are other eigenvalues, too, such as the BSD model, and the proprietary model.
I often read that there's enough food in the world to feed everyone; as soon as we distribute this food so that everyone eats, we can cross proprietary off the list as a gruesome expedient of our savage past. Proprietary is also a distribution model, but you can see the cracks already. The last three winners on Survivor all signed a blood bond in the first episode to honour the GPL.
Sometimes I think the GPL came to Stallman in a flash of insight while watching A Taste of Armageddon back in 1967. The whole system would be so much more efficient if we just flipped a coin to determine those who will starve. If you're going to subject yourself to a coin flip about stepping into the suicide booth, you want to first examine the source code. If the booth were provisioned by Diebold, it could be a gruesome end. No one would take that risk, and nirvana would die on the drawing board. Seriously, that whole episode makes you think deeply about the provenance of the source code. Spock muttered "fascinating" but the crew had learned by then not to ask.
That episode should have been titled "An Eigenvalue Too Far", but this was before Slashdot and the four digit user ID, so there was no-one to get it.
I also think Stallman was influenced by some of those 1970s PBS series on the origins of life in which replication puts the yin/yang hammerlock on metabolism. Source code is replication. Metabolism is everything else everyone contributes to pushing the source code around. Metabolism does not function in the role of the one true eigenvalue, so it was quickly discarded on the road to manifesto. Putting all your eggs into the metabolism basket as Ubuntu tends to do is kind of risky for the long term concerning those mysterious failures of the uniform distribution of metabolic inputs from our savage past. Replication is king.
After all that, what is this guy actually saying? You might stray into metabolism, but sooner or later you'll succumb to the blinding light of the one true eigenvalue and return to the flock?
The curious thing, though, is the tendency of the one true eigenvalue to wink out like a dying star, only to be replaced by an even b
Swearing at my GP was actually helpful this time around, so I now have one positive swearing result out of N as N goes to infinity concerning this medical interaction.
I've got the data set under my thumb to show the man the back of my hand, but it's technically tricky to precisely fit negative attestation data: my FF stream tells me when I'm awake and clicking but not when my cheek is lolling on the Z key.
I just realized I can score each moment in time by linear distance to nearest click (painting my life with a snore to shore metric) and then use the R package FDA (Functional Data Analysis) to fit the data on a Fourier basis using the harmonic acceleration penalty to smooth the curve.
Harmonic acceleration makes my furrow my brow. It's defined as:
L = omega^2 D + D^3
where D is differentiation. Don't completely grasp why this works and haven't tried it out yet.
Ramsay, Hooker, and Graves mostly use it to fit precipitation data. On my personal weather channel, there would be the daily peregrinations of the sand man: the sun will be rising hours before summoned and hang in the sky much longer than usual due to an extraordinary ideation wave, followed by not very much for a day or two. Same old same old. Why do I even tune in?
I once had a doctor just like you. I've had a sleep issue for twenty-five years, during which I've become more adept than your average goat at noticing certain details of my physiological state. This particular doctor implied that I was so naive about the scientific process as to verge on creationism and that I matched any wacky hypothesis to reality with no regard to observation. He told me I had no data.
Actually, what I have is an R workspace with an 80,000 line CSV file extracted from Firefox showing my browsing activity over about a year period during which the white band of "away from my desk" appearing roughly once every 24 hours migrates diagonally on the circadian plot with a one hour daily drift. I've managed to treat this subsequently with carefully timed melatonin administration and have reduced the period to roughly 24.15 hours. Miss just one sunrise control pill and I'm an hour pregnant the next morning. And since I've never had a reverse gear on this hasty blue marble, that adds up to a week of night shifts sooner or later.
The other aspect of 80,000 Firefox page requests over a one year period is that I have actually noticed Firefox being one of the worst GD memory pigs of in all of god's creation without consulting system monitor, so STFU about the system monitor. Maybe I installed too many useful extensions, but then if I didn't want the extensions, I would use Chrome instead.
With 200 tabs open in eight FF clients spread over nine desktops, after about ten days, I can often type half a dozen words during frequent FF gcgag stalls (garbage collect gag) before my text blurps out. Whenever FF virtual memory climbs to over a gigabyte, I pretty much have to close my eyes while typing, as the feedback loop in the HTML input box causes me more distress than assistance. I participated heavily in a FF beta a couple of years ago where memory usage was three times worse than it is now. I was restarting FF every few days just to clear the constipation. This on a Linux system with 4GB of memory since upgraded to 8GB.
Thanks for giving my asshole GP a nice pat on the back in his self-satisfied assessment of the observational powers of his hapless sleep-deprived clients.
Schindler: There's no way I could have known this before, but there was always something missing. In every business I tried, I can see now it wasn't me that had failed. Something was missing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it, because you can't create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.
Emilie: Luck.
Schindler: War.
Steve was ahead of his time in the 1980s. He was a trendy gadget maker stuck in the PC business. His early attempts to gadgify the PC mostly lead to vanity art, and vanity will only get you 10% of the market, unless you can pull it out of your pocket in public display.
On his HID aesthetic, it turns out the mouse had a correct solution: one button for selecting, a second button to summon a menu of actions (where your eyes are already looking), and a wheel for scrolling in between the two buttons. This is simpler than your telephone, simpler than your steering wheel, simpler than your stereo/VCR/TV/digital alarm clock/wrist watch. Hardly anyone who wasn't suffering post-traumatic Luddite syndrome would have found such a mouse difficult to operate, even in 1985. He directed his wrath at the mouse, when he should have directed his wrath at the worthless scroll-bars, which mostly take up valuable space to little effect, though we have a lot more of that now. He was always catering to "out of box" comfort zone, rather the comfort zone people grow into when they finally figure out how to make the hay fly. Just what everyone in the 1980s really needed: a good $4000 in-store experience for ten minutes, followed by three years of window thrashing.
Way back, I had an opportunity to visit Parc and sit in front of what I recall as a Xerox Dorado (which I vaguely recall as consisting of $50,000 of ECL circuitry--I've recently done some LVPECL design work, and I *know* what that implies on the global warming front). The mouse had three buttons and was hideously complicated during my first ten minutes of grokage. I can understand why Apple didn't replicate a three-button Jack-in-the-Box for your average consumer.
But for Jobs, far enough was never far enough until it was too far. Step two: defend the decision as if moral rectitude and reproductive fitness hangs in the balance. The winning conditions for Steve Jobs was a device that fits in your pocket which costs roughly $1000/year to operate. This was the business he was really building in the first place, long before this model was right for the world.
Jobs paced himself more or less the same way as Andre Agassi's father. Andre had a rough patch, but seems to have recovered, for the most part, and there was much success along with the hardship. Jobs never wanted the PC to have a healthy adolescence, in which order arises from chaos. Which is fine, but he scorned the people getting on with what needed to happen, which is far less OK.
In the larger view, perhaps it takes twenty years of demanding too much too soon to suddenly discover you're the man of the decade. Jobs did a fair amount of damage to common sense with his premature vision of appliancehood. But like Schindler, when the winning conditions finally arrived he acquitted himself at a level rarely achieved in life.
I'm no fan of his bullshit years, though I admire his crowning achievement (which I'm tempted to cite as clang/LLVM, but that's just me).
Blocking Jon Katz accounts for more than half of all the customization I've ever done here. It might have been my finest tick-box moment ever. Thus Spake Zarathustra poured into the sound-track of my life as I executed the triumphant mouse click.
Later on, somewhere else, I stumbled over a piece by Katz on Border Collies, maybe a book excerpt, that was actually not half bad. These days, it's just too easy not to give a guy a fair chance. Can't say I miss the adolescent boarding-house memes. I was never here for the antics, and I've never seen a piece anywhere that made me rethink "hot grits".
My brother loves the investment maxim "leave a nickle for the next guy". In other words, don't try to ride it up until the apogee of detonation. That always seemed to be the editorial philosophy around here: don't make it too perfect at the outset, nobody shows up to intervene noisily over a bike shed that doesn't swoon like a leaning tower. But hey, it worked.
Thanks for the nice tutorial on the Laffer curve. Nobody with half a brain and a telescope ever denied that enough CO2 triggers the Venus effect.
The partial pressure of CO2 on the surface of Venus is about 9MPa.
From Barton Paul Levenson
In the red trunks, weighing in at 9 MPa, planet Venus Greenus Galore. Weighing in a 39 Pa, planet earth, moving up from former weight class of 31 Pa during the sockhopocene, planet earth looking mighty flush, greenhouse pretender or greenhouse contender?
Mann's paper was hugely leveraged as the smoking gun at the bottom of the haystack by the IPCC. Failure to include a statistician in the original peer review is inexcusable for a paper pressed into service at the biggest dog and pony show in Broadway history. The normal course of a dusty statistical study on tree rings in to languish in obscurity for 50 years, after which the retrospective wisdom of peer review shines forth.
These smug bastards need to man up.
The actual debate here is whether the earth was poised to topple from one macro dynamic climate state to another with the insignificant (in absolute terms) addition of a few ppk CO2 to the atmosphere, and whether we should take a dramatic risky and unproven course of action to intervene in the outcome. Anyone who thinks that intervening in biological organisms competing for sustaining resources is a risk free undertaking needs to think again.
Unlike the CO2 record, which has been much higher than present levels, we have no historical record of any biological organism curtailing metabolic activity on a purely political consensus. It would be the first time ever, in the history of earth's biology.
Time to pop the precautionary cherry? Perhaps. But I'd rather not have these smug self-investigating bastards doing a remake of the pie fight that landed on Dr Strangelove's editing room floor.
How about some scientists of gravitas at the helm who take peer review seriously enough to include a statistician among the original peer reviewers of a paper pushing subtle statistical claims?
Is that too much to ask? Really?
Next they will be calling people who own digital TVs "techies". McCoy had all those fancy salt shakers, yet he was far from being a techie. The more Trekkie, the less techie.
How many characters who carried The Guide around would qualify as techies? Zaphod? Once or twice? Or were some of those characters carrying around the print edition, and Douglas never bothered to mention this inconvenient detail?
Some day I'd like to ask, "Zaphod, what's your median opinion on the great book?" And he would answer, "A fine coaster to protect my beach towel from PGGB sumpage, but I always stow a Wet One at third pocket, just in case."
This makes me wonder, is there a Touch Pad beer coaster applet, where the touch screen extrapolates libation intercept? I always thought the touch interface was a bit dorky, but maybe I didn't give it a chance. Plotting libations is about as close as a Touch Pad will ever get to astronomical pursuits.
I place the Bible roughly on par with what I remember about my childhood between the ages of three and five. The scraps I remember seem disproportionately important relative to much clearer memories from later on, yet also clouded by unbridgeable differences in mental perception and layers of reremembering.
Memory and Forgetting has some interesting content about the act of remembering rewriting memory. As usual, they sidle up to some really interesting stuff and gawk amusingly.
On the other side, memories of my later childhood and adult life are far less problematic having passed through the formative miracle of cognition and personality.
As I've matured my interests have changed. This double helix thing makes for fascinating reading. It's a great time and era to let the mists of time alone for a while; it's almost as if we lived on a clouded planet, and then one day the atmosphere cleared up and we could see the heavens for the very first time. Amazing as this development is, it doesn't seem to stop many people from rehashing starless origin stories, blind to the twinkle of a new cosmic perspective.
This also reminds me of conquest stories. The displaced tend to be the last group of people who lived somewhere without a writing system, regardless of how many other pre-literate peoples were chased off before them. An oppressor is any society with a written history. Amazing how that works.
It's quite the illusion to treat the Bible as a beginning point. Before I was four years old, I was two or three years old. Of this time I have essentially no memory at all. Neurologically, a lot of water has already passed under the bridge by the time you start recording conscious memories accessible (barely) to your adult mind.
Before Adam and Eve there was Mom and Dad.
That gives me a good laugh. Insightful in the modern world is colluding against the least colourful guy at the poker table as if he isn't even there.
Now if I were to disable my putrid content blocker, the first thing that happens is that I become less effective at my day job, because my mind has trouble filtering anything that blinks, flashes, throbs, or scrolls. The visual edge and motion detector is part of the predation reflex. My predation reflex is robust and immediately recruits part of my brain that would otherwise be earning me income.
Ignoring that, my conscious response to advertisement is to make a mental note that the vendor isn't competing on merit. I win most of my battles at the store rather than in front of the fridge. I lose all my battles in front of the fridge. If I put it in there, I'm allowed to eat it. Hallelujah!
In order for advertising to be effective, they need to turn the world of consumption into a giant fridge of immediate pickle and prosciutto goodness. For example, PayPal and online ordering with credit credentials liable to go walk-about. But the goods arrive quickly, so no matter.
In the store, having set aside a block of time just for this purpose, I'm able to recruit the whole of my rational brain to the task of rational consumption. As unreliable as rationality is in human affairs, there is in fact an on switch, should you choose to use it.
I choose to use it. Which means that the advertising to someone like me has little upside for the vendor, either. I'm not claiming I'm not influenced by advertising. What I'm claiming is that I make my decisions when the influence is counterbalanced by more powerful forces, of which I happen to have some.
The advertisers don't consider this argument worth much. For the small percentage of the population that successfully defects, the vast majority eventually (after say 100,000 to 1,000,000 lifetime ad impressions) falls into learned helplessness. The cable TV companies all know this. For a month they offer to part for free on your front lawn a giant white truck full of 500 salty snacks ranging from 100% MSG on down. Even after you narrow down to the five channels with more carbohydrates than smut and jiggle, it gets pretty easy pretty quickly to reach for the salty chips in any moment of weakness.
The credit cards with the points system is pretty much the same thing. They're cultivating you to believe you're getting something for free. No, not even slightly. You're basically just ripping off the guy who does business in cash, by having a rule that if a vendor takes CC the vendor can't offer a cash discount for not providing the CC service which therefore must have zero actual value. Costs the retailer a lot for zero value, I must say. But you might score a free flight to destination tropical chip truck. This is for when the truck on your lawn hasn't shaken out enough of your loose coin.
The average person starts to rationalize as if this "something for nothing" actually exists. Most people engage in impulse purchasing, so it becomes easy to rationalize "I was going to do it anyway, I might as well collect me some perks" such as free downloads from Joe's Ziphouse Emporium.
I don't engage in impulse shopping. I'm not willing to pay the impulse shopping tax (watching any of 99% of the Flash content ever produced) for a trivial economic perk.
Anyone here with a compact ID whom you convince to turn off their ad-blocking to help the finances of download.com is not going to do anything for the finances of people who pay money to advertise there. You're just shifting the chump. In theory, we're all chip-truck addled morons. In practice, a few of us take exception.
All those millions of