People who think that conspiracy theories are cool definitely should read Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Twice. It's not the conspiracies that are dangerous.
And on that subject, do have a look at his latest, The Prague Cemetery. Very scary stuff.
(Speaking of FP, if your trip takes you anywhere near Paris, make sure to visit the Musée des Arts et Métiers! You can see the working Pendulum in the church next door; plus, the museum itself is Nerd Heaven, and the nearby Métro station is a brilliant bit of steampunk décor.)
Also, this week's edition of The Economist is the double Christmas issue, with all kinds of random but fascinating little stories, plus year-end news wrap-ups and so on. (No, I don't work for them.)
Well, the argument is that it does add liquidity to the markets, and tightens bid-ask spreads, which are useful functions for investors and traders both large and small: your orders are more likely to get filled quickly, and at a better price.
However, high-frequency trading (HFT) does lead to some very interesting, um, emergent phenomena. Check out the beautiful graphics produced by Nanex, dissecting the Flash Crash and other assorted HFT weirdness.
Well said. A good way to think about and to organize your sanity checks is to follow Bertrand Meyers' practice of programming by contract. If you check preconditions and postconditions in your code (even if only during test runs), you'll catch all sorts of misbehaviour early.
Good points, and I'd agree that the Internet has a certain "liberal" bias -- but in a classical liberal sense. I certainly don't see that it "tugs to the Left", or to the Right either. If anything, it seems to have a very individualistic, small-l libertarian flavour, being opposed to interference from governments of all political stripes, however well-intentioned or hostile. Let's hope that that continues, and that your prediction turns out to be wrong.
Glad to see someone else mention this. Everyone knows about his work on fractal geometry, but few people realize that since the 1950s he was interested in the financial markets as well, being one of the first to apply computer technologies to market data. I highly recommend his very readable book, "The (Mis)Behavior of Markets".
I'm tempted to ask, "So who wrote all of those chat programs, then?"
Unfortunately, not all programmers are thoughtful, philosophical sorts who will refuse to work on even much more objectionable technologies. Thus, we have spam, RFID-equipped drivers' licences, voice- and face-recognizing surveillance systems, and MS Outlook.
Also, even if they were, it's usually the case that the full effects of new technologies will not be apparent until after they've been implemented and adopted widely. Think of all the ways in which cities were redesigned to accommodate cars, for instance. (It may be a bit out of context, but "Tools for Conviviality", by Ivan Illich, might be relevant here.)
First I heard of it was in connection with one of the earliest (1970s) expert systems, built by DEC to help their salespeople and technicians configure VAX systems correctly. It was named "R1", supposedly because of a similar quote from its creator; something along the lines of, "Last year I didn't know what a knowledge engineer was; now I...".
As it happens, I was reading the Wikipedia article on the split infinitive just the other day. (Yes, I know, should have looked up "life" while I was at it...)
According to the article, wanting English to be "just like Latin" is not the reason for many people's distaste for the split infinitive. Apparently, "[i]n Greek and Latin, it is impossible to split infinitives because these languages never use their infinitives together with a preposition/particle". Therefore, even if we accept the Latin way of doing things as the one true way, it gives us no information as to how an English preposition and infinitive should or should not be arranged.
And linguistics may be as descriptivist a field as you say - but if you really think that "[n]ative speakers automatically speak perfectly correct English", I invite you to come and spend a few days in Singapore. It'll make you beg for a strictly prescriptivist Académie Anglaise...:-)
I don't know what it has to do with the "recent change in Congress", but I do know that the current US-VISIT fingerprinting scheme doesn't apply to Canadians, at least not yet.
I'm a Canadian citizen, and passed through the U.S. on my way to Canada a couple of months ago. When I saw this fingerprinting crap going on I was just about ready to turn around and get straight back on the plane to Japan, but then I found out that Canadians were not required to submit to this intrusion. (Unfortunately, we do still have to stand in the endless immigration queue while everyone else gets fingerprinted.)
It made me sad, really. It's certainly the last time I'm booking a flight that happens to stop in the U.S.; and I don't think I'll be spending a lot of holiday time there either, not until after the current wave of paranoia passes. I'm as pro-American as any Canadian you're likely to meet -- but who the hell needs to be treated like a criminal just for passing through a freaking airport in your country? Your government sure is doing a good job of alienating even your closest friends.
This does end up having an on topic point: misusing the word Fascism is bad for political discourse.
Right; we're going to need some sort of Godwin's Law equivalent soon.
Thanks for the interesting comments on Japanese history. As for the European varieties of fascism, their fundamental characteristics have been dissected in detail by the inimitable Umberto Eco, in a 1995 article called Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
I have a former boss who would agree. His theory was that employee loyalty depended largely on how many of the "five Ms" a person had: marriage, mortgage, motors (car payments), monsters (kids), and money (that is, the need for it).
Maybe not, but it doesn't exactly make for an enjoyable flying experience.
A bit OT, but... I recall reading a newspaper article about an Australian flight on which a child was bitten by a taipan, one of the deadliest snakes in the world. Fortunately, the child survived. Unfortunately, it had proved impossible to find the snake, even with the help of trained dogs. (Story here.)
Problem was, I was reading this story while sitting on a flight from Sydney up to Cairns. Kept looking under the seats for the rest of the trip...
Thanks for posting that. It's one thing to read about "the Iranians" building nukes, or "the Iranians" aiding Iraqi insurgents; quite another to read a first-hand account of what daily life is like for the unfortunate Iranian people themselves. Hope things improve for you soon, my friend.
And the next time the rest of us hear anyone criticizing anonymous speech on the Internet -- or, worse, proposing restrictions on it -- please point them at the parent post.
(Finally, I sure hope the Slashdot servers are secure. Slashdot tech guys, please take this stuff really, really seriously.)
Exactly. Value judgements like this beg the question, "Of value to whom, and for what?".
I realize the very mention of her name is likely to start an off-topic flame war here, but I have to point out that Ayn Rand wrote in some detail about this in The Virtue of Selfishness.
Now, arguably he casts too wide a net in his diatribe against "environmentalists". I very much share his preference for technological and free-market solutions. But writing from Singapore - currently blanketed with an unhealthy level of smoke from Indonesian forest fires started by unscrupulous plantation managers and ignorant savages practicing slash-and-burn farming - I have to wonder whether there's a point at which pollution moves from being a tort, to a crime, to an act of war.
Slashdot Mirror
People who think that conspiracy theories are cool definitely should read Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Twice. It's not the conspiracies that are dangerous.
And on that subject, do have a look at his latest, The Prague Cemetery. Very scary stuff.
(Speaking of FP, if your trip takes you anywhere near Paris, make sure to visit the Musée des Arts et Métiers! You can see the working Pendulum in the church next door; plus, the museum itself is Nerd Heaven, and the nearby Métro station is a brilliant bit of steampunk décor.)
Also, this week's edition of The Economist is the double Christmas issue, with all kinds of random but fascinating little stories, plus year-end news wrap-ups and so on. (No, I don't work for them.)
Well, the argument is that it does add liquidity to the markets, and tightens bid-ask spreads, which are useful functions for investors and traders both large and small: your orders are more likely to get filled quickly, and at a better price.
However, high-frequency trading (HFT) does lead to some very interesting, um, emergent phenomena. Check out the beautiful graphics produced by Nanex, dissecting the Flash Crash and other assorted HFT weirdness.
Well said. A good way to think about and to organize your sanity checks is to follow Bertrand Meyers' practice of programming by contract. If you check preconditions and postconditions in your code (even if only during test runs), you'll catch all sorts of misbehaviour early.
Good points, and I'd agree that the Internet has a certain "liberal" bias -- but in a classical liberal sense. I certainly don't see that it "tugs to the Left", or to the Right either. If anything, it seems to have a very individualistic, small-l libertarian flavour, being opposed to interference from governments of all political stripes, however well-intentioned or hostile. Let's hope that that continues, and that your prediction turns out to be wrong.
Glad to see someone else mention this. Everyone knows about his work on fractal geometry, but few people realize that since the 1950s he was interested in the financial markets as well, being one of the first to apply computer technologies to market data. I highly recommend his very readable book, "The (Mis)Behavior of Markets".
I second that. Stroud's books are excellent for getting (back) up to speed on your math. Look here for more.
And don't forget these folks... :-)
Sorry, but the Yahoo chart is adjusted for splits. (Otherwise, you'd see a sharp drop on the graph at each split.)
Unfortunately, not all programmers are thoughtful, philosophical sorts who will refuse to work on even much more objectionable technologies. Thus, we have spam, RFID-equipped drivers' licences, voice- and face-recognizing surveillance systems, and MS Outlook.
Also, even if they were, it's usually the case that the full effects of new technologies will not be apparent until after they've been implemented and adopted widely. Think of all the ways in which cities were redesigned to accommodate cars, for instance. (It may be a bit out of context, but "Tools for Conviviality", by Ivan Illich, might be relevant here.)
First I heard of it was in connection with one of the earliest (1970s) expert systems, built by DEC to help their salespeople and technicians configure VAX systems correctly. It was named "R1", supposedly because of a similar quote from its creator; something along the lines of, "Last year I didn't know what a knowledge engineer was; now I...".
Only if you run out of cold spray.
Ivan Illich, is that you?
I don't see it. But what is this "fnord" thing?
The English version I've seen goes, "Kill 'em all and let God sort them out".
According to the article, wanting English to be "just like Latin" is not the reason for many people's distaste for the split infinitive. Apparently, "[i]n Greek and Latin, it is impossible to split infinitives because these languages never use their infinitives together with a preposition/particle". Therefore, even if we accept the Latin way of doing things as the one true way, it gives us no information as to how an English preposition and infinitive should or should not be arranged.
And linguistics may be as descriptivist a field as you say - but if you really think that "[n]ative speakers automatically speak perfectly correct English", I invite you to come and spend a few days in Singapore. It'll make you beg for a strictly prescriptivist Académie Anglaise... :-)
I don't know what it has to do with the "recent change in Congress", but I do know that the current US-VISIT fingerprinting scheme doesn't apply to Canadians, at least not yet.
I'm a Canadian citizen, and passed through the U.S. on my way to Canada a couple of months ago. When I saw this fingerprinting crap going on I was just about ready to turn around and get straight back on the plane to Japan, but then I found out that Canadians were not required to submit to this intrusion. (Unfortunately, we do still have to stand in the endless immigration queue while everyone else gets fingerprinted.)
It made me sad, really. It's certainly the last time I'm booking a flight that happens to stop in the U.S.; and I don't think I'll be spending a lot of holiday time there either, not until after the current wave of paranoia passes. I'm as pro-American as any Canadian you're likely to meet -- but who the hell needs to be treated like a criminal just for passing through a freaking airport in your country? Your government sure is doing a good job of alienating even your closest friends.
Right; we're going to need some sort of Godwin's Law equivalent soon.
Thanks for the interesting comments on Japanese history. As for the European varieties of fascism, their fundamental characteristics have been dissected in detail by the inimitable Umberto Eco, in a 1995 article called Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.
Courtney Love explained in some detail how record industry math works, here.
I have a former boss who would agree. His theory was that employee loyalty depended largely on how many of the "five Ms" a person had: marriage, mortgage, motors (car payments), monsters (kids), and money (that is, the need for it).
A bit OT, but... I recall reading a newspaper article about an Australian flight on which a child was bitten by a taipan, one of the deadliest snakes in the world. Fortunately, the child survived. Unfortunately, it had proved impossible to find the snake, even with the help of trained dogs. (Story here.)
Problem was, I was reading this story while sitting on a flight from Sydney up to Cairns. Kept looking under the seats for the rest of the trip...
Well, he's got that part right, anyway.
As for the rest, the mind boggles. Do people go to some special school to learn how to talk like that?
Er, it has been around for copying and pasting for some time already. Thank Cory Doctorow for this one.
And the next time the rest of us hear anyone criticizing anonymous speech on the Internet -- or, worse, proposing restrictions on it -- please point them at the parent post.
(Finally, I sure hope the Slashdot servers are secure. Slashdot tech guys, please take this stuff really, really seriously.)
I realize the very mention of her name is likely to start an off-topic flame war here, but I have to point out that Ayn Rand wrote in some detail about this in The Virtue of Selfishness .
Also, Michael S. Berliner wrote an essay called Against Environmentalism on this subject.
Now, arguably he casts too wide a net in his diatribe against "environmentalists". I very much share his preference for technological and free-market solutions. But writing from Singapore - currently blanketed with an unhealthy level of smoke from Indonesian forest fires started by unscrupulous plantation managers and ignorant savages practicing slash-and-burn farming - I have to wonder whether there's a point at which pollution moves from being a tort, to a crime, to an act of war.