The whole skin colour / gender thing is a red herring. The difference between living in America and Africa is not. If fifteen elite athletes from North America and Europe cross the finish line in a clump on their titantium carbon-fiber wonderbikes and then some Congolese kid crosses the line a few seconds later on a second-hand paper bike how do you score the merit function? The African boy has nothing but guts and determination. No world-class coaching, no decent bike. Useless.
One has to step back from merit to at least look at what a person a accomplished on the foundation of what they've been given.
I count an Ethiopian Ruby developer who writes a small Ruby application to manage the coffee trade as worthwhile diversity, even if far less competent as a Ruby specialist than other available speakers. I really don't give a damn if he or she is black or any other pigment.
The main difference between men and women has nothing to do with aptitude. It has to do with the higher willingness of men to immerse themselves in their expertise at the expense of everything else in their lives. He who sacrifices accomplishes more. And this derives directly from reproductive variance. Low status males face the worst reproductive odds. It's just not possible for a woman to squeeze other women out of the gene pool the way Ghengis Khan squeezed out a quarter of the men in all of Eurasia.
Merit-based promotion doesn't encourage balanced lifestyles. It tends to mainly reward fanatics. Women complain about this, and well they should, but it's no trivial matter to decide which man who sacrificed more should be excluded to the benefit of a women who sacrificed less, but did so within a rich and balanced lifestyle (raising children, being active in the community, etc.)
I also think that if you don't invite people from around the fringes to participate, the fringes tend to stagnate.
There are other risks run by the whip-snappers of inclusion. Statistically, small conferences run more risk than large conferences of getting busted by the diversity police.
So they did something seemingly very logical â" they looked at which schools have the highest test scores. They found that the schools with the highest scores were small, which makes some intuitive sense because of smaller class sizes, etc. But this falls into a sampling trap. The next question to ask is: which schools have the lowest test scores? The answer: small schools. This is exactly what you would expect from a statistical viewpoint since small samples have large variances.... This is more than a case for a statistics class. Education reformers proceeded to spend billions of dollars reducing the sizes of schools.
If the book is anywhere near as good as his interview, everyone rush out to buy a copy. (I'm no shill. Try to find an imperatively worded endorsement in my previous 1000 posts here. There might be one, but I can't think of such an occassion.)
There's something not quite right about these benchmarks. A huge margin in FFTE is completely reversed on Apache. Often you can normalize this a bit by knowing which chip has how many cores and whether the floating point unit sucks or doesn't suck.
This discrepancy is more extreme than normal. Usually you find out that one chip or the other was hobbled by software indigestion, then the discrepancy dissipates in subsequent rounds.
The last time I installed Windows over an open source operating system for my own purposes was to play the first version of Quake.
If I had a time machine, I would go back and tap myself on the shoulder. Look dude, Quake rocks, but the skills you could be learning in Linux or BSD will serve you forever. I also quite liked Age of Empires at the time.
Dual booting wasn't a viable option. Around that time I think I paid $600 for a 6GB SCSI disk drive, thinking it would pay for itself in time saved in my software development work. Maybe it did, but I suspect it didn't.
The other problem is that you could install Windows on some cheap ass disk drive, but the installation process was long and tedious, and you had to ask what value you placed on your immortal soul sitting there feeding borg cookies into the 3 1/2" borg infection port.
I seemed to recall NT never told you about the mistake in your LUN assignment until digesting _all_ the borg cookies. More cookies, please!
But even then I had a deal with myself that I would multitask cleaning the bathroom with every large Microsoft application installed (or re-installed). Dev Studio kept my pipes clean. DLL hell polished my chrome.
I'm older and wiser now. I can clean the bathroom just because it needs to be done.
There was a girl in my class in middle school who was first rate at figure skating, and never got picked on at all. There were kids who were good at art and other things... no hassles. Precious athletes, for the most part, exempt from the social tax on excellence.
There was a girl hideously deformed in the jaw and neck who showed up one day. No one said a word for two months, then the dam burst. I'd been in a children's hospital down the hall from a burn unit. I wasn't having any of it. Most of the adults who came to visit were so green around the gills to step onto that ward you almost needed a bucket in the hallway.
Sam Harris says we grant religious beliefs too much automatic deference. I think this also extends to our little rotters. There's something terribly vicious in young children that we neither discuss nor study to the extent warranted by their appalling capacity for social cruelty.
Not my little angel! Well, I suspect your little angel has become adept at emulating attitudes learned at home.
The social violence of little angels should be news. Today and every day. Do people think it just goes away, or does it merely mutate into more mature forms? I'm not trying to stamp out scorn or derision. That's a fact of life, man. But I do think that the use of "gay" as a generic adjective of derision should get the little rotters shuffled onto a short bus for the social learning disabled.
High time "gay" went the way of DUI, where nearly everyone looks at you funny, like you're charting a life course for a wall-mounted chrome toilet with no lid.
Back when DTMF dialing was a newly introduced technology, Bell Canada in Ontario, where I was a student, had three different rates for basic service: the incumbent rate for existing pulse dial phones with a dial, a higher rate for new-fangled DTMF phones with a keypad, and a higher rate still for hybrid pulse dial phones with a keypad.
It hadn't been all that long that the consumer could buy their own phone from the local discount mart. If your phone generated DTMF phones, it wouldn't work without paying Bell more money for the "advanced" service. But you could buy a phone with a small micro-controller where you dialed with a keypad, but it pulse dialed over the line to impersonate the old phone you used to have. Usually there was a small slide switch on the bottom to select the dial mode. Of course, DTMF completed the dialing a little faster than the pulse setting.
Bell had no way of knowing that you had a keypad phone generating pulse dialing on the line, but if you allowed their technician into the house and they caught you with such a phone, they would convert you to the highest basic service rate of all. It was like another $5/month, which for a student, was super annoying.
Bell PHB: this is new fangled so we have to charge more, but it saves us money to deliver the service by allowing us to retire the old and slow and decrepit line cards, so we need to promote moving people to the new technology as fast as our bean counters can waggle their abaci, while also simultaneously incentivizing the change-over with higher fees.
If I made 50 calls per month at 4 bytes per call, it worked out to something like $5 / 0.2 KB or $25,000 / MB.
Russ Roberts has been trying to sell me on the Hayekian virtues of the private sector for about 150 episodes now. But I remember Bell Canada, and I know the private sector will charge you more for the benefit of saving them money at the drop of a pin, if they can get away with it.
Oh, yes, the solution is to deregulate. I got the memo. That's why I'm presently so much in love with my cellphone service, and I bet you are too.
and we are left wondering, would proprietary companies that get broken into so forthcoming?
No, we are not left wondering (unless one thinks that FreeBSD has a patent on especially leaky SSH developer keys) so instead we pretend that we are left wondering to justify hanging around and scribbling on the bathroom wall.
If Apple can't keep their mitts on an iPhone prototype and Google can't keep their mitts on a Nexus prototype, do you really think these butter-finger organizations have any better control over their developer's SSH keys?
The US government spends 19% on defense, and refunds 19% on social security and 20% on healthcare to recipients among whom many have past contributions in excess of benefits received in total. (This is the nature of insurance, you know. Insurance is a communist plot.)
Wait, I lie. The government probably takes a 20% management cut on the 40% refunded to tax paying Americans, maybe it's closer to 32%. The private sector would refer to such a management cut as a healthy value-add. The same overhead in government is 100% waste. (Not a single private sector corporation has ever wished to misspend revenues received from the government and been obstructed by a beady-eyed civil servant actually doing his job. Every one of them, parasitic to the core.)
But just keep counting every dollar as it crosses the government turnstile as if there isn't any difference, if stupid floats your boat.
If I show up on slashdot and finger dump my scorn and derision for ten frantic minutes to clear the pyschological slate to continue wrangling with aramid gloves the glass shards of a fragile technology stack (lets say Meteor on top and OpenCL on the bottom) for another long six hour half-day and in my flurry to vent I end two sentences in the same paragraph with "rapidity" I consider myself to be in bad form.
But I can understand the male psyche permuting the words "frightening rapidity" over and over and over again. Really, I can.
Other words: aspiration, modest, abject failure, carpal tunnel nightmare, scream market acceptance, tighter integration, abandon[ment], gushing, clueless, intransigent, and myopic
Carpal tunnel. That's so true. If you can't perform, your wrists take a beating.
I just hate it when you start tugging up your pants, then you immediately realize with the shift in abdominal pressure that there's more to squat than you suspected.
I'm reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. While I don't find his presentation compelling in every paragraph, I'm reserving judgment as yet of the big ideas. He lays out early his belief that our propensity to take the environment into our own hands is the only our species survives in this hostile biosphere. Who among us survives for long in naked solitude? Mainly the chronic sociopaths. He who survives naked is only fit to live naked.
This stupid fascination with eugenic sentiments seems to dovetail with our deep suspicion that taking the environment into our own hands was a suspect venture right from the get go.
And it's true. With every decade arrives whole new classes of threat. The drone build-out on continental America. The escalating capacity for government surveillance (and our distressing capacity to sell our intimate particulars to scratch a prurient itch). Privatization of the warehousing of social misfits, undesirables, and activist hippies (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother).
This whole mastery of circumstance digression in the proper unfolding of our rightful evolutionary destiny is a perpetually suspicious business.
We tend to think of progress as extending into the future like a ribbon beneath our feet and ignore how much progress leers at us from our six o'clock. Always a new face, hatching a new plot.
One more thought... on a purely statistical basis, the solution to the decline of measured IQ is to measure everyone's IQ and the erase the bottom quartile or thereabouts, being careful not to measure IQ again, lest you discover how quickly the distribution regresses to the norm, discounting test score inflation, which would run rampant. Sardines at $300/lb? Extract of rhino horn is a wank irrelevancy when the guillotine has your name on it.
With the recent developments in the Human Genome Mapping Project and the new technologies that are developing from it there is a renewal of concern about eugenic applications. Francis Galton (b1822, d1911), who developed the subject of eugenics, suggested that the ancient Greeks had contributed very little to social theories of eugenics. In fact the Greeks had a profound interest in methods of supplying their city states with the finest possible progeny.
I guess it's true. Every good idea, the Greeks had first.
But the ancient world loved eugenics; in fact pretty much everybody in every time period loves the idea... right up until it gets implemented. After that only the rulers and their lickspittle toadies love it.
That's so true. How intensely the weakest link seems most brittle and undeserving when it's not you.
At any crowded poker table there is a lamb. Everyone knows about the lamb. And there is also the lamb elect. Only the sharpest players realize how thin the boundary is between lion and lamb elect.
Completely fresh install (new virtual machine setup) this time selecting "Debian 64" instead of "Ubuntu 64" as the base version. Same disk space and memory selections.
This time, another installer crash, much sooner, but with a traceback. It's running in ubiquity/debconffilter.py and I've got "OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory".
Maybe 512MB of vbox memory is not enough. Another attempt with 768MB is now swimming along, rather tediously.
My host is Mint 12 with VirtualBox 4.1.2_ubuntu. I've been running an LMDE guest just fine.
This installation made it past the language pack downloads into a testing hardware, then put up a notice that the installer crashed. I tried to repeat the exact same installation, and this time I get a message during disk setup that "The creation of swap space in partition #5 of SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed." I didn't reboot the virtual machine between attempts.
There's gobs of free disk space on the host OS. I had configured 512MB of system memory on a 12GB virtual disk.
So the installer crash corrupted the virtual disk hardware? Hmmm, interesting.
Let me sort this out for you. Mint is now becoming what Ubuntu might have been had Canonical not become afflicted with hubris, delusion, trendiness, and indifference.
They go right ahead and ruin everything I've done to set up a comfortable work process--all for the sake of jumping onto the tablet revolution--without so much as a kind note:
Dear Alpha Geek,
As a dual-head power user with nine desktops we know you're going to hate Unity with the sidewall taskbar worse than a rectal fissure, so we've arranged an LTS release on the last usable version of Gnome2 which we hope will tide you over until Unity matures into a viable environment for the hardcore user.
We care!
yours truly, Dept. of hard decisions
I don't hold anything against Canonical for deciding it was time to set a new course and a new direction. What I hold against them is failing to show up and knock on the door to explain the news with decency and mutual respect.
What they've done once, they'll do again. That's how the trust relationship works.
I don't really care if Mint is not anything more compelling that what Ubuntu might have been. It doesn't have to be better. It only has to be not Ubuntu. You're darn right. You act as if there's something wrong with this political logic. There's nothing wrong with this political logic. This is how people with self esteem behave in the aftermath of callous and unnecessary disappointment.
"Almost infinite" could serve as meaning creating new varieties faster than we can detect and sequence the little bastards, for a pessimistic extension of Moore's law.
Here's a second good candidate for "almost infinite":
The latest research shows that even the most powerful future experiments (like SKA, Planck) will not be able to distinguish between flat, open and closed universe if the true value of cosmological curvature parameter is smaller than 10^-4.
Q: How big is the universe? A: Physicists believe the universe is infinite, almost.
Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but I sense you weren't hanging out with the smart set. But it's not your fault. You were one of the flipper kids born without pinky fingers.
Let's see, here.
the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs (Strunk and White and many partisans).
Many people reads as "Many people[who?]" (Wikipedia).
Ignores is both a straw man and a cliche (Martin Amis, The War on Cliche).
completely ignores the fact that reliance on adverbs of degree does not compel (Writing in the Sciences with Kristin Sainani).
(Welcome to online education, pal.)
But these are merely matters of form. What about your central idea? Can we salvage that? It strikes me that your idea is an ode to Survivorship bias. You're not earning my vote.
The truth here is that education/teaching/learning are much studied, yet rarely dented. We know that one great teacher can have a disproportionate impact, if situated in exactly the right circumstance (the nature of this circumstance seems to shift or to depend on factors as yet unknown). Lucid teachers can improve grades in the short term, but studies of long term retention (more than three years) between these teachers and calculus professors who mumble through thick accents doesn't show much difference. Most good students report having a course that "really changed my life" but there's little pattern to it. Right course at the right time, so far as we can tell. Maybe the student was high on endorphins from first love. Maybe the class wasn't scheduled at 8:30 in the morning for a person with DSPS.
Yes, I'm deeply invested in the business of "ignoring" plain matters of fact.
After Francis Bacon killed himself stuffing a chicken full of ice, we had a 400 year setback in the inquisition of common sense. Recently we have the new tradition of Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine (and many others like him). Cooking cutlets, more oil equals less grease (Leidenfrost effect). When pan frying, flipping your meat multiple times achieves more uniform heating (at the risk of forgetting your flip count). In the soup pot, finely-chopped mirepoix extracts faster (who would have guessed?)
Two months ago I learned a new method to cook pasta (it might surprise people that I did not attend a brick and mortar course seminar to obtain this profound nugget). In this method you use half as much water, stir vigorously after adding the pasta until the water returns to boil, then pop a lid on and turn off the pot. The samizdat also recommends stirring again one minute into the cooking process, but I haven't found this necessary. My pasta never sticks (to itself or to the pot), always comes out the way I like it, uses about 1/3 as much electricity, doesn't make my kitchen swelter in the summer months, and the pot can be moved to any available ring if I need rings of certain sizes for other cooking tasks. And it only took 400 years to puzzle this out. I guess smart young minds were preoccupied paying off their educational debts.
I think it's high time we take Myhrvold's laser cutting apparatus to the ivy walls of higher education. It's a frightfully expensive system when half the undergraduate class can not reliably string
Ethiopian Harar is a lovely coffee. It's not often found even at the high-end boutique roasters in town. More often I find pricey coffee from the other side of the Bab-el-Mandeb. There is a spectacular variety of coffee in Ethiopia, and small premium growers who know what they've got. Roasters can travel to Ethiopia and buy the coffee. The problem is that it takes a whole different skill set to actually get the coffee out of the country in the prized condition you found it, and this skill is not in the business lexicon of the fair-trade organic save-the-earth types. So much of this coffee goes undiscovered by the rest of the world. On the other side of the Bab-el-Mandeb one conducts business with less grease and more body armour from the stories I've heard (over the last decade this trend has mainly been going in the wrong direction).
While we're here, why don't we debate the earth's biodiversity in the year 2800? It's roughly the same distance away, give or take a fractal coefficient. I guess by 2080 there's somewhat less chance that a five-mile band along all world's coastlines will be World Heritage Parks patrolled by the U.N. Nature Police.
The average person will be brewing yeast-of-Harar in one gallon jugs while using mechanical printers to print disposable micro-osmotic coffee filters. And there will be a thriving commune on Facebook devoted to adding back all the nostalgic imperfections of topside cultivation.
I recently configured my first virtual host under VirtualBox to run LMDE, as my desktop Mint was behind the times on some packages I needed for a online course on big data. I didn't want to convert my main desktop to LMDE without some miles under my belt. There are many package management problems I can fix quickly enough, and just as many that leave me dead in the water. This was my "straw poll" installation.
I made a huge blunder allocating only 8GB for the system disk. I hit the disk full condition installing some small packages right after obtaining the latest Update Pack. There were package errors. Gnome keyring now constantly tells me about some missing directory. Related? Who knows. Once you've hit disk full, you're guessing until the end of eternity. The storage problem was due to 1.2GB of retained deb files in/var/cache/apt/archives. I ran a command line tool to increase the size of the disk image, but this didn't show up as extra disk space inside the OS.
Some package management command at the command line to gather a list of installed packages decided to spawn a GUI view window (I didn't expect this) which immediately punted my window manager, leaving my console windows tiny and immobile. Related? Who knows.
Overall it's been 98% pain free. The other nee Sun product I recommend is ZFS. I could really get into this snapshot business in a big way.
To me a PC is really just a smartphone in another form factor.
I think we need some expert analysis on this one.
All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
The PC is used to create content. A smartphone is used to consume content. The PC functions autonomously (in a pinch). The smartphone is permanently welded to its cloud-nipple. The PC brings you smart ideas in shabby attire. The smartphone brings you shabby ideas in smart attire. The PC discourages walled gardens. A smartphone never leaves home without one.
Wake me up when my smartphone comes with a holographic projector capable of conjuring up 40" of viewing pleasure at a comfortable focal plane, and either a haptic keyboard (gravitational hologram?) or a brainstem feed a million times better than Swype.
Next we'll declare that mopeds and Harleys are the same form factor because there are more Asians than balding fat men. Clearly a modped is more like a Harley than a smartphone is like a PC.
Did someone tell this guy that an asshat was the cure for baldness?
We are actually witnessing fewer patent suits per patent issued today than the historical average.
With the number of patents issues and the escalating cost of justice, for this to not be true would pretty much double-down on the trillion dollar a year fiscal cliff.
Sorry dude, we invaded Iraq. There just aren't enough litigation dollars free for the taking, so either the ALP (average litigation price) or the ALR (average litigation rate) has to go down. Teach a lawyer to fish, he buys himself a drift net. If the net is to heavy with fish to pull into the boat, he doesn't fish with a smaller net, he makes the holes bigger. Whales, we call them. The whales eat the small fish, and we eat the whales.
Don't tell the Christians. For some reason they decided to ignore the exit pole and think for themselves. Or did I get that backwards? Back at the ranch, the Jews were left investing in Bernie Madoff. I think that speaks for itself.
That makes no sense. Raising the prices actually preserves the supply. In either situation, a lot of people won't be getting gas. But with gouging, you at least have the option.
Most of us must know the old aphorism brought to us by Laffernomics: To a man with a compass and straightedge, every gradient is a straight line, where one end is labeled "stupid" and the other end is labeled "what we were going to do anyway".
The willingness-to-pay utility curve is ugly on both sides. On one side the clueless and unprepared grouse far more than any person with self-respect ought to be caught dead doing. On the other side, one must proceed anecdotally.
You are alone in a dark, inner city alley and you feel cold hard steel pressed against your temple. Your willingness-to-pay lands on A) zero, it's just a bluff; B) contents of wallet, but not what you've also got hidden in your shoe; C) a quick net-present-value calculation factoring in the boundary condition "you can't take it with you".
You are crossing between two tall buildings through a walkway tunnel when global warming causes a floor tile to pop out--your reactions are quick and now you are hanging there by both hands, twenty floors up in the air, without the strength to pull yourself back in through the hole. A quick-thinking lawyer happens to walk past just then. He immediately whips out a pen and a title deed, which he proffers first to your white-knuckled right hand and then to your wobbly left hand in a gesture of good-will and Samaritanism, fine print attached, which you presume will terminate your mortgage.
You are among the huddles coping with the failure of major public infrastructure and you haven't tasted a sip of fresh water for more than two days. Furio Giunta saunters past with a gym bag, offering 1 liter bottles of Evian for $1000 a pop, cold cash only. Elite huddlers in tattered alligator shoes coalesce into cliques pooling cash resources for some sliver of sustenance. Furio conducts a roaring business, clearing 50 big ones in an afternoon. The trucker who was assigned the task of bringing Evian to the masses awakes in the gutter with only a small concussion and not very much pneumonia.
A block away a young computer whiz sells water for $500 a bottle after prudently stockpiling supplies. How could this people be so stupid! Such a simple matter to hack the department of meteorology, fix a few glaring errors in the weather system model, then fire off a covert day-long simulation until the accounting flag for doubly nested black-op (so secretive that nobody who can admit he exists will ever see the expense report). He makes enough cash to pay four years of tuition at state college (where most of this will go to the football coach and the director of athletics). Unfortunately, a day later he takes a "bad fall" in front of Satriale's Pork Store (as he reports his condition to police). Despite being unable to explain to the IRS where his windfall has gone to, he's awarded a national medal of honour for saving more lives at less cost than Soliris.
Enough anecdotes? By the time that the pimps and mobsters and hustlers and assholes amount to a larger share of the relief effort than the police, the firemen, the coast guard, and the reserve there's a case to be made for quelling the entrepreneurial straightedge.
But 100% of his >50%-confidence predictions came true. In the future, he should be more sure of his predictions.
I'm not sure that I agree with you a hundred percent on your policework there, Lou.
The national polls were showing strength for Romney, but when you drilled down, the models predicted victory for Obama. Whether the errors moved together (broad correlation) or not (independent precinct variation) determines whether you can apply "skill" with skill.
Cosh is an erudite and formidable writer, which a background in French literature, and a redneck persona right out of the donut shop sketch on Canadian Air Farce. (I'd really like to see that sketch redone with Cosh vs Hitchens. Then the camera pulls back to show Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Atwood at the next table engaged in banal chitchat.)
In this case I'm not going to nod and slurp my double-double jumbo Timmies and cuckoo "you got that right" after every punchline.
Nate actually wrote up a postmortem piece on his bungled UK election call where he discusses the use of exit polls to apply a uniform swing (broad correlation) to the election as a whole, by which means the BBC outperformed his own predication. When you break it down, the R^2 values on vote shares weren't all that different. In that election, the best prediction came from a group which split the difference, applying swing to broad regions (such as Scotland, which behaved differently than the rest of the UK).
Silver goes on to argue that the UK should adopt more detailed exit polls as we have in America. I don't understand this, because I don't understand the incentive of people to A) participate, or B) tell the truth. If I have a vested interest in the outcome (let's just say I'm opposed to organized religions lacking the basic dignity to concoct their miracles *prior* to the invention of the printing press). Why shouldn't I just say or do whatever I believe serves my interest every step of the way? Every politician does this. It's his job to lie, and ours to tell the truth? Blow me.
The more exact psephology becomes, the easier it becomes for Joe Donut to play the game alongside the pols. This is not a feedback loop that converges to a good place.
In any case, Lou, I think you should sign up for a MOOC entitled Discussing "Skill" with Skill. This broadly means writing down the necessary preconditions (such as: x not equal to zero when dividing by x; x has a known sign when multiplying both sides of an inequality; infinite series converges; variables are i.i.d. in a variance summation).
Another potential source of nationwide "correlation" is electronic voting fraud. 90 to 95% predictions would be my personal ceiling in any American election until the last closed-source voting machine is on the downward escalator in some deep ocean trench.
Are you going to apply the i.i.d. assumption in a state government by Jeb Bush? If so, you're a brave man. May the votes be with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Until it has ass recognition, it will remain blind to Freemasons everywhere.
The whole skin colour / gender thing is a red herring. The difference between living in America and Africa is not. If fifteen elite athletes from North America and Europe cross the finish line in a clump on their titantium carbon-fiber wonderbikes and then some Congolese kid crosses the line a few seconds later on a second-hand paper bike how do you score the merit function? The African boy has nothing but guts and determination. No world-class coaching, no decent bike. Useless.
One has to step back from merit to at least look at what a person a accomplished on the foundation of what they've been given.
I count an Ethiopian Ruby developer who writes a small Ruby application to manage the coffee trade as worthwhile diversity, even if far less competent as a Ruby specialist than other available speakers. I really don't give a damn if he or she is black or any other pigment.
The main difference between men and women has nothing to do with aptitude. It has to do with the higher willingness of men to immerse themselves in their expertise at the expense of everything else in their lives. He who sacrifices accomplishes more. And this derives directly from reproductive variance. Low status males face the worst reproductive odds. It's just not possible for a woman to squeeze other women out of the gene pool the way Ghengis Khan squeezed out a quarter of the men in all of Eurasia.
Merit-based promotion doesn't encourage balanced lifestyles. It tends to mainly reward fanatics. Women complain about this, and well they should, but it's no trivial matter to decide which man who sacrificed more should be excluded to the benefit of a women who sacrificed less, but did so within a rich and balanced lifestyle (raising children, being active in the community, etc.)
I also think that if you don't invite people from around the fringes to participate, the fringes tend to stagnate.
There are other risks run by the whip-snappers of inclusion. Statistically, small conferences run more risk than large conferences of getting busted by the diversity police.
Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success
If the book is anywhere near as good as his interview, everyone rush out to buy a copy. (I'm no shill. Try to find an imperatively worded endorsement in my previous 1000 posts here. There might be one, but I can't think of such an occassion.)
Far too often social thinking is bad thinking.
There's something not quite right about these benchmarks. A huge margin in FFTE is completely reversed on Apache. Often you can normalize this a bit by knowing which chip has how many cores and whether the floating point unit sucks or doesn't suck.
This discrepancy is more extreme than normal. Usually you find out that one chip or the other was hobbled by software indigestion, then the discrepancy dissipates in subsequent rounds.
The last time I installed Windows over an open source operating system for my own purposes was to play the first version of Quake.
If I had a time machine, I would go back and tap myself on the shoulder. Look dude, Quake rocks, but the skills you could be learning in Linux or BSD will serve you forever. I also quite liked Age of Empires at the time.
Dual booting wasn't a viable option. Around that time I think I paid $600 for a 6GB SCSI disk drive, thinking it would pay for itself in time saved in my software development work. Maybe it did, but I suspect it didn't.
The other problem is that you could install Windows on some cheap ass disk drive, but the installation process was long and tedious, and you had to ask what value you placed on your immortal soul sitting there feeding borg cookies into the 3 1/2" borg infection port.
I seemed to recall NT never told you about the mistake in your LUN assignment until digesting _all_ the borg cookies. More cookies, please!
But even then I had a deal with myself that I would multitask cleaning the bathroom with every large Microsoft application installed (or re-installed). Dev Studio kept my pipes clean. DLL hell polished my chrome.
I'm older and wiser now. I can clean the bathroom just because it needs to be done.
There was a girl in my class in middle school who was first rate at figure skating, and never got picked on at all. There were kids who were good at art and other things ... no hassles. Precious athletes, for the most part, exempt from the social tax on excellence.
There was a girl hideously deformed in the jaw and neck who showed up one day. No one said a word for two months, then the dam burst. I'd been in a children's hospital down the hall from a burn unit. I wasn't having any of it. Most of the adults who came to visit were so green around the gills to step onto that ward you almost needed a bucket in the hallway.
Sam Harris says we grant religious beliefs too much automatic deference. I think this also extends to our little rotters. There's something terribly vicious in young children that we neither discuss nor study to the extent warranted by their appalling capacity for social cruelty.
Not my little angel! Well, I suspect your little angel has become adept at emulating attitudes learned at home.
The social violence of little angels should be news. Today and every day. Do people think it just goes away, or does it merely mutate into more mature forms? I'm not trying to stamp out scorn or derision. That's a fact of life, man. But I do think that the use of "gay" as a generic adjective of derision should get the little rotters shuffled onto a short bus for the social learning disabled.
High time "gay" went the way of DUI, where nearly everyone looks at you funny, like you're charting a life course for a wall-mounted chrome toilet with no lid.
Borrowing from the newest story, I'd have to add the 16 pixel image of MACS0647-JD to this discussion.
Back when DTMF dialing was a newly introduced technology, Bell Canada in Ontario, where I was a student, had three different rates for basic service: the incumbent rate for existing pulse dial phones with a dial, a higher rate for new-fangled DTMF phones with a keypad, and a higher rate still for hybrid pulse dial phones with a keypad.
It hadn't been all that long that the consumer could buy their own phone from the local discount mart. If your phone generated DTMF phones, it wouldn't work without paying Bell more money for the "advanced" service. But you could buy a phone with a small micro-controller where you dialed with a keypad, but it pulse dialed over the line to impersonate the old phone you used to have. Usually there was a small slide switch on the bottom to select the dial mode. Of course, DTMF completed the dialing a little faster than the pulse setting.
Bell had no way of knowing that you had a keypad phone generating pulse dialing on the line, but if you allowed their technician into the house and they caught you with such a phone, they would convert you to the highest basic service rate of all. It was like another $5/month, which for a student, was super annoying.
Bell PHB: this is new fangled so we have to charge more, but it saves us money to deliver the service by allowing us to retire the old and slow and decrepit line cards, so we need to promote moving people to the new technology as fast as our bean counters can waggle their abaci, while also simultaneously incentivizing the change-over with higher fees.
If I made 50 calls per month at 4 bytes per call, it worked out to something like $5 / 0.2 KB or $25,000 / MB.
Russ Roberts has been trying to sell me on the Hayekian virtues of the private sector for about 150 episodes now. But I remember Bell Canada, and I know the private sector will charge you more for the benefit of saving them money at the drop of a pin, if they can get away with it.
Oh, yes, the solution is to deregulate. I got the memo. That's why I'm presently so much in love with my cellphone service, and I bet you are too.
No, we are not left wondering (unless one thinks that FreeBSD has a patent on especially leaky SSH developer keys) so instead we pretend that we are left wondering to justify hanging around and scribbling on the bathroom wall.
If Apple can't keep their mitts on an iPhone prototype and Google can't keep their mitts on a Nexus prototype, do you really think these butter-finger organizations have any better control over their developer's SSH keys?
The US government spends 19% on defense, and refunds 19% on social security and 20% on healthcare to recipients among whom many have past contributions in excess of benefits received in total. (This is the nature of insurance, you know. Insurance is a communist plot.)
Wait, I lie. The government probably takes a 20% management cut on the 40% refunded to tax paying Americans, maybe it's closer to 32%. The private sector would refer to such a management cut as a healthy value-add. The same overhead in government is 100% waste. (Not a single private sector corporation has ever wished to misspend revenues received from the government and been obstructed by a beady-eyed civil servant actually doing his job. Every one of them, parasitic to the core.)
But just keep counting every dollar as it crosses the government turnstile as if there isn't any difference, if stupid floats your boat.
If I show up on slashdot and finger dump my scorn and derision for ten frantic minutes to clear the pyschological slate to continue wrangling with aramid gloves the glass shards of a fragile technology stack (lets say Meteor on top and OpenCL on the bottom) for another long six hour half-day and in my flurry to vent I end two sentences in the same paragraph with "rapidity" I consider myself to be in bad form.
But I can understand the male psyche permuting the words "frightening rapidity" over and over and over again. Really, I can.
Other words: aspiration, modest, abject failure, carpal tunnel nightmare, scream market acceptance, tighter integration, abandon[ment], gushing, clueless, intransigent, and myopic
Carpal tunnel. That's so true. If you can't perform, your wrists take a beating.
I just hate it when you start tugging up your pants, then you immediately realize with the shift in abdominal pressure that there's more to squat than you suspected.
I'm reading David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. While I don't find his presentation compelling in every paragraph, I'm reserving judgment as yet of the big ideas. He lays out early his belief that our propensity to take the environment into our own hands is the only our species survives in this hostile biosphere. Who among us survives for long in naked solitude? Mainly the chronic sociopaths. He who survives naked is only fit to live naked.
This stupid fascination with eugenic sentiments seems to dovetail with our deep suspicion that taking the environment into our own hands was a suspect venture right from the get go.
And it's true. With every decade arrives whole new classes of threat. The drone build-out on continental America. The escalating capacity for government surveillance (and our distressing capacity to sell our intimate particulars to scratch a prurient itch). Privatization of the warehousing of social misfits, undesirables, and activist hippies (read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother).
This whole mastery of circumstance digression in the proper unfolding of our rightful evolutionary destiny is a perpetually suspicious business.
We tend to think of progress as extending into the future like a ribbon beneath our feet and ignore how much progress leers at us from our six o'clock. Always a new face, hatching a new plot.
One more thought ... on a purely statistical basis, the solution to the decline of measured IQ is to measure everyone's IQ and the erase the bottom quartile or thereabouts, being careful not to measure IQ again, lest you discover how quickly the distribution regresses to the norm, discounting test score inflation, which would run rampant. Sardines at $300/lb? Extract of rhino horn is a wank irrelevancy when the guillotine has your name on it.
Greek theories on eugenics
I guess it's true. Every good idea, the Greeks had first.
That's so true. How intensely the weakest link seems most brittle and undeserving when it's not you.
At any crowded poker table there is a lamb. Everyone knows about the lamb. And there is also the lamb elect. Only the sharpest players realize how thin the boundary is between lion and lamb elect.
Completely fresh install (new virtual machine setup) this time selecting "Debian 64" instead of "Ubuntu 64" as the base version. Same disk space and memory selections.
This time, another installer crash, much sooner, but with a traceback. It's running in ubiquity/debconffilter.py and I've got "OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory".
Maybe 512MB of vbox memory is not enough. Another attempt with 768MB is now swimming along, rather tediously.
My host is Mint 12 with VirtualBox 4.1.2_ubuntu. I've been running an LMDE guest just fine.
This installation made it past the language pack downloads into a testing hardware, then put up a notice that the installer crashed. I tried to repeat the exact same installation, and this time I get a message during disk setup that "The creation of swap space in partition #5 of SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) failed." I didn't reboot the virtual machine between attempts.
There's gobs of free disk space on the host OS. I had configured 512MB of system memory on a 12GB virtual disk.
So the installer crash corrupted the virtual disk hardware? Hmmm, interesting.
Let me sort this out for you. Mint is now becoming what Ubuntu might have been had Canonical not become afflicted with hubris, delusion, trendiness, and indifference.
They go right ahead and ruin everything I've done to set up a comfortable work process--all for the sake of jumping onto the tablet revolution--without so much as a kind note:
Dear Alpha Geek,
As a dual-head power user with nine desktops we know you're going to hate Unity with the sidewall taskbar worse than a rectal fissure, so we've arranged an LTS release on the last usable version of Gnome2 which we hope will tide you over until Unity matures into a viable environment for the hardcore user.
We care!
yours truly,
Dept. of hard decisions
I don't hold anything against Canonical for deciding it was time to set a new course and a new direction. What I hold against them is failing to show up and knock on the door to explain the news with decency and mutual respect.
What they've done once, they'll do again. That's how the trust relationship works.
I don't really care if Mint is not anything more compelling that what Ubuntu might have been. It doesn't have to be better. It only has to be not Ubuntu. You're darn right. You act as if there's something wrong with this political logic. There's nothing wrong with this political logic. This is how people with self esteem behave in the aftermath of callous and unnecessary disappointment.
"Almost infinite" could serve as meaning creating new varieties faster than we can detect and sequence the little bastards, for a pessimistic extension of Moore's law.
Here's a second good candidate for "almost infinite":
Q: How big is the universe?
A: Physicists believe the universe is infinite, almost.
Dude, I hate to break the news to you, but I sense you weren't hanging out with the smart set. But it's not your fault. You were one of the flipper kids born without pinky fingers.
Let's see, here.
the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs (Strunk and White and many partisans).
Many people reads as "Many people[who?]" (Wikipedia).
Ignores is both a straw man and a cliche (Martin Amis, The War on Cliche).
completely ignores the fact that reliance on adverbs of degree does not compel (Writing in the Sciences with Kristin Sainani).
(Welcome to online education, pal.)
But these are merely matters of form. What about your central idea? Can we salvage that? It strikes me that your idea is an ode to Survivorship bias. You're not earning my vote.
The truth here is that education/teaching/learning are much studied, yet rarely dented. We know that one great teacher can have a disproportionate impact, if situated in exactly the right circumstance (the nature of this circumstance seems to shift or to depend on factors as yet unknown). Lucid teachers can improve grades in the short term, but studies of long term retention (more than three years) between these teachers and calculus professors who mumble through thick accents doesn't show much difference. Most good students report having a course that "really changed my life" but there's little pattern to it. Right course at the right time, so far as we can tell. Maybe the student was high on endorphins from first love. Maybe the class wasn't scheduled at 8:30 in the morning for a person with DSPS.
I picked up a few of these tidbits from EconTalk, among other sources.
Hanushek on Teachers
Ravitch on Education
Paul Tough on How Children Succeed
Kling on Education and the Internet
Yes, I'm deeply invested in the business of "ignoring" plain matters of fact.
After Francis Bacon killed himself stuffing a chicken full of ice, we had a 400 year setback in the inquisition of common sense. Recently we have the new tradition of Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine (and many others like him). Cooking cutlets, more oil equals less grease (Leidenfrost effect). When pan frying, flipping your meat multiple times achieves more uniform heating (at the risk of forgetting your flip count). In the soup pot, finely-chopped mirepoix extracts faster (who would have guessed?)
Two months ago I learned a new method to cook pasta (it might surprise people that I did not attend a brick and mortar course seminar to obtain this profound nugget). In this method you use half as much water, stir vigorously after adding the pasta until the water returns to boil, then pop a lid on and turn off the pot. The samizdat also recommends stirring again one minute into the cooking process, but I haven't found this necessary. My pasta never sticks (to itself or to the pot), always comes out the way I like it, uses about 1/3 as much electricity, doesn't make my kitchen swelter in the summer months, and the pot can be moved to any available ring if I need rings of certain sizes for other cooking tasks. And it only took 400 years to puzzle this out. I guess smart young minds were preoccupied paying off their educational debts.
I think it's high time we take Myhrvold's laser cutting apparatus to the ivy walls of higher education. It's a frightfully expensive system when half the undergraduate class can not reliably string
Ethiopian Harar is a lovely coffee. It's not often found even at the high-end boutique roasters in town. More often I find pricey coffee from the other side of the Bab-el-Mandeb. There is a spectacular variety of coffee in Ethiopia, and small premium growers who know what they've got. Roasters can travel to Ethiopia and buy the coffee. The problem is that it takes a whole different skill set to actually get the coffee out of the country in the prized condition you found it, and this skill is not in the business lexicon of the fair-trade organic save-the-earth types. So much of this coffee goes undiscovered by the rest of the world. On the other side of the Bab-el-Mandeb one conducts business with less grease and more body armour from the stories I've heard (over the last decade this trend has mainly been going in the wrong direction).
While we're here, why don't we debate the earth's biodiversity in the year 2800? It's roughly the same distance away, give or take a fractal coefficient. I guess by 2080 there's somewhat less chance that a five-mile band along all world's coastlines will be World Heritage Parks patrolled by the U.N. Nature Police.
The average person will be brewing yeast-of-Harar in one gallon jugs while using mechanical printers to print disposable micro-osmotic coffee filters. And there will be a thriving commune on Facebook devoted to adding back all the nostalgic imperfections of topside cultivation.
I recently configured my first virtual host under VirtualBox to run LMDE, as my desktop Mint was behind the times on some packages I needed for a online course on big data. I didn't want to convert my main desktop to LMDE without some miles under my belt. There are many package management problems I can fix quickly enough, and just as many that leave me dead in the water. This was my "straw poll" installation.
I made a huge blunder allocating only 8GB for the system disk. I hit the disk full condition installing some small packages right after obtaining the latest Update Pack. There were package errors. Gnome keyring now constantly tells me about some missing directory. Related? Who knows. Once you've hit disk full, you're guessing until the end of eternity. The storage problem was due to 1.2GB of retained deb files in /var/cache/apt/archives. I ran a command line tool to increase the size of the disk image, but this didn't show up as extra disk space inside the OS.
Some package management command at the command line to gather a list of installed packages decided to spawn a GUI view window (I didn't expect this) which immediately punted my window manager, leaving my console windows tiny and immobile. Related? Who knows.
Overall it's been 98% pain free. The other nee Sun product I recommend is ZFS. I could really get into this snapshot business in a big way.
I think we need some expert analysis on this one.
The PC is used to create content. A smartphone is used to consume content. The PC functions autonomously (in a pinch). The smartphone is permanently welded to its cloud-nipple. The PC brings you smart ideas in shabby attire. The smartphone brings you shabby ideas in smart attire. The PC discourages walled gardens. A smartphone never leaves home without one.
Wake me up when my smartphone comes with a holographic projector capable of conjuring up 40" of viewing pleasure at a comfortable focal plane, and either a haptic keyboard (gravitational hologram?) or a brainstem feed a million times better than Swype.
Next we'll declare that mopeds and Harleys are the same form factor because there are more Asians than balding fat men. Clearly a modped is more like a Harley than a smartphone is like a PC.
Did someone tell this guy that an asshat was the cure for baldness?
With the number of patents issues and the escalating cost of justice, for this to not be true would pretty much double-down on the trillion dollar a year fiscal cliff.
Sorry dude, we invaded Iraq. There just aren't enough litigation dollars free for the taking, so either the ALP (average litigation price) or the ALR (average litigation rate) has to go down. Teach a lawyer to fish, he buys himself a drift net. If the net is to heavy with fish to pull into the boat, he doesn't fish with a smaller net, he makes the holes bigger. Whales, we call them. The whales eat the small fish, and we eat the whales.
Don't tell the Christians. For some reason they decided to ignore the exit pole and think for themselves. Or did I get that backwards? Back at the ranch, the Jews were left investing in Bernie Madoff. I think that speaks for itself.
Most of us must know the old aphorism brought to us by Laffernomics: To a man with a compass and straightedge, every gradient is a straight line, where one end is labeled "stupid" and the other end is labeled "what we were going to do anyway".
The willingness-to-pay utility curve is ugly on both sides. On one side the clueless and unprepared grouse far more than any person with self-respect ought to be caught dead doing. On the other side, one must proceed anecdotally.
You are alone in a dark, inner city alley and you feel cold hard steel pressed against your temple. Your willingness-to-pay lands on A) zero, it's just a bluff; B) contents of wallet, but not what you've also got hidden in your shoe; C) a quick net-present-value calculation factoring in the boundary condition "you can't take it with you".
You are crossing between two tall buildings through a walkway tunnel when global warming causes a floor tile to pop out--your reactions are quick and now you are hanging there by both hands, twenty floors up in the air, without the strength to pull yourself back in through the hole. A quick-thinking lawyer happens to walk past just then. He immediately whips out a pen and a title deed, which he proffers first to your white-knuckled right hand and then to your wobbly left hand in a gesture of good-will and Samaritanism, fine print attached, which you presume will terminate your mortgage.
You are among the huddles coping with the failure of major public infrastructure and you haven't tasted a sip of fresh water for more than two days. Furio Giunta saunters past with a gym bag, offering 1 liter bottles of Evian for $1000 a pop, cold cash only. Elite huddlers in tattered alligator shoes coalesce into cliques pooling cash resources for some sliver of sustenance. Furio conducts a roaring business, clearing 50 big ones in an afternoon. The trucker who was assigned the task of bringing Evian to the masses awakes in the gutter with only a small concussion and not very much pneumonia.
A block away a young computer whiz sells water for $500 a bottle after prudently stockpiling supplies. How could this people be so stupid! Such a simple matter to hack the department of meteorology, fix a few glaring errors in the weather system model, then fire off a covert day-long simulation until the accounting flag for doubly nested black-op (so secretive that nobody who can admit he exists will ever see the expense report). He makes enough cash to pay four years of tuition at state college (where most of this will go to the football coach and the director of athletics). Unfortunately, a day later he takes a "bad fall" in front of Satriale's Pork Store (as he reports his condition to police). Despite being unable to explain to the IRS where his windfall has gone to, he's awarded a national medal of honour for saving more lives at less cost than Soliris.
Enough anecdotes? By the time that the pimps and mobsters and hustlers and assholes amount to a larger share of the relief effort than the police, the firemen, the coast guard, and the reserve there's a case to be made for quelling the entrepreneurial straightedge.
I'm not sure that I agree with you a hundred percent on your policework there, Lou.
The national polls were showing strength for Romney, but when you drilled down, the models predicted victory for Obama. Whether the errors moved together (broad correlation) or not (independent precinct variation) determines whether you can apply "skill" with skill.
There were many pieces on Silver recently. The most cynical was this one:
Tarnished Silver: Assessing the new king of stats
Cosh is an erudite and formidable writer, which a background in French literature, and a redneck persona right out of the donut shop sketch on Canadian Air Farce. (I'd really like to see that sketch redone with Cosh vs Hitchens. Then the camera pulls back to show Pierre Trudeau and Margaret Atwood at the next table engaged in banal chitchat.)
In this case I'm not going to nod and slurp my double-double jumbo Timmies and cuckoo "you got that right" after every punchline.
Nate actually wrote up a postmortem piece on his bungled UK election call where he discusses the use of exit polls to apply a uniform swing (broad correlation) to the election as a whole, by which means the BBC outperformed his own predication. When you break it down, the R^2 values on vote shares weren't all that different. In that election, the best prediction came from a group which split the difference, applying swing to broad regions (such as Scotland, which behaved differently than the rest of the UK).
Silver goes on to argue that the UK should adopt more detailed exit polls as we have in America. I don't understand this, because I don't understand the incentive of people to A) participate, or B) tell the truth. If I have a vested interest in the outcome (let's just say I'm opposed to organized religions lacking the basic dignity to concoct their miracles *prior* to the invention of the printing press). Why shouldn't I just say or do whatever I believe serves my interest every step of the way? Every politician does this. It's his job to lie, and ours to tell the truth? Blow me.
The more exact psephology becomes, the easier it becomes for Joe Donut to play the game alongside the pols. This is not a feedback loop that converges to a good place.
In any case, Lou, I think you should sign up for a MOOC entitled Discussing "Skill" with Skill. This broadly means writing down the necessary preconditions (such as: x not equal to zero when dividing by x; x has a known sign when multiplying both sides of an inequality; infinite series converges; variables are i.i.d. in a variance summation).
Another potential source of nationwide "correlation" is electronic voting fraud. 90 to 95% predictions would be my personal ceiling in any American election until the last closed-source voting machine is on the downward escalator in some deep ocean trench.
Are you going to apply the i.i.d. assumption in a state government by Jeb Bush? If so, you're a brave man. May the votes be with you.