The author also provides an index, as well as an impressive bibliography, reflecting his extensive research on the topics. In addition, the author invites readers to join Freedom Force, an organization dedicated to increasing liberty in the United States, curbing federal totalitarianism, and abolishing the Federal Reserve -- all through peaceful participation in government, and the shaping of public policy starting at the grassroots level.
On second thought, maybe not the impartial history of the role of currency in American society, nor the impartial review of a new book, that I was looking for.
In any event, thanks for pointing out the author's agenda in the review.
I was a lit major in school but often found myself led stangely enough to the subject of money, currency in particular, as it's a subject that seems to have had much more relevance in people's everyday life in that past than it does now. I find the Federal Reserve, especially the institution of FDIC after the Great Depression, one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century. As Milton Friedman points out, it effectively ended the terrible plague of bank runs that wracked economies in the past.
To get a sense how invisible money as an instrument is to most people in modern stable economies, you can look at the plays of Shakespeare and all the reference to coinage and especially "debased" currency during the period. One of the most insightful history books I've read is E.C. Challis's The Tudor Coinage. It really gives you a sense of how much we take a stable currency, as the bedrock for a stable economic system, for granted.
Anyway, if you have any curiosity about that subject at all, you can check out this article:
But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know.
I hear you. I actually had an idea the other day that I thought would be perfect for Yahoo Pipes. The thing was, the web page that was the source for the key data to be mashed-up, though a classic HTML data table, didn't offer an RSS feed. And Pipes doesn't seem to offer even the most basic page scraping utility. (If it does, I couldn't find it.)
After playing around with Yahoo Pipes for a half-hour trying to make it work, I realized that with my knowledge of PHP, I could do this just as easily on my own. And have much more control over the process and end product.
The conclusion I came to: anyone who is capable of imaginatively using these tools is probably more than capable of just rolling their own mashup using open-source scripting tools. I don't imagine most ordinary users are going to be able to create anything more inventive than a regurgitated RSS feed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyone have any interesting examples of something produced with this kind of pre-packaged mashup tool?
Wouldn't it be enough to give the enemy AI's a few basic styles/options and what to do when they run out of ammo?
And have million of NPCs representing every variation of those options fighting each other in the background, then have only the Nth generation winners of those battle show up to fight you.
This was the approach taken by one baseball sim game.
But he could have ignored it. Or tried harder to spin it.
I thought the most interesting part of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's last book, The Black Swan, was what he referred to as the Scandal of Prediction, the Expert Problem, and the Tragedy of the Empty Suit. This is more relevant to analysts and self-professed pundits than journalists perhaps. But as he points out, whatever the field, paid experts are rarely held to account for bad predictions. He cites one study that attempted to empirically measured the accuracy of experts:
The only regularity Tetlock [the researcher] found was the negative effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than those who had none. (p. 151) I guess this could serve as another data-point within that cluster.
I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.
An international cartel of oil/gas producers perhaps? An auto industry focused on short-term profits at the expense of long-term economic and environmental (which is effectively the same thing) viability? A corrupt state power beholden to lobbyists of the previous two groups.
Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.
An established cartel of successful food producers? An agro-industrial complex focused on, &c.
To bring a popular example around here, who wouldn't want a better, more secure operating system at a cheaper price?
Why is the microelectronics industry not subject to the same market manipulation by established powers as other industries? The answer is obviously complex, but an important factor seems to be the fact that it has not yet descended into the sort of cartel-ishness that seems to be the natural tendency in completely unregulated markets.
I guess I agree with your answer -- the physics is a big part. But your analogies don't really make sense to me. And I don't think any new industry matures into a stable business sector around the physics. If does so around the market and the type of market the state shapes.
If you eliminated the economic incentive -- some minimal level of competition -- I wouldn't expect Moore's Law to magically continue because Mother Nature makes it possible.
Whoops. Just noticed that this story was about AdSense, not AdWords, so strike the last comment about how this affects small advertisers.
That it's adsense make me wonder if this isn't really a measure designed to control or attack people abusing the API to propagate things like blogspam and link farms. It doesn't make sense to me that Google wouldn't really be able to accommodate smaller publishers since I'd guess that the majority of API resource usage is concentrated among the largest qualifying publishers.
Google does in various ways, too. I run a couple adword campaigns for fun (bids all under 5 cents) and the only place where my ads show up as I far as I can tell are weird site like this:
Ok, not blogspam, but a linkfarm. But wouldn't be surprised if Google run a few hundred thousand spam blogs, too. (After all, they do own Blogger which, as much as I like it, is from a certain perspective little more than an extensive backwater of blogspam.)
In response to an email I sent them, a Google rep acknowledged these are Google sites. Fine, they provide an advertising space for cheapskates like me who wish to pay 2 cents a click. But I found it interesting that they don't identify these as Google-run sites, or even put the usual 'Ads by Google' tag with the ad blocks. And as their response shows, they don't make it exactly easy to disassociate yourself from this stuff if you're running a budget campaign:
Thank you for your email. I apologize for the delay in responding to your email. Please note that the site icanhascheezburer.com is not necessarily a link farm. This website is a part of our AdSense for domains program. AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to display AdWords ads on their websites. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google's semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names. Note that ads shown on an an AdSense for domain site need not display the 'ads by Google' label. Ads on such sites only display the 'Sponsored links' label.
Please be assured that parked domain sites are included in the Google Network because of the value they add to both users and advertisers. Our internal data show that parked domain sites typically convert at rates equal to that of search and content pages.
We do realize that advertisers may not want their ads to show on such sites. Please note that turning off the Content Network will cause your ad to stop showing on all the sites on the Content Network including AdSense for domains.
Not sure if the API gives you any finer control over where your ads appear, but if it did, one effect of removing it from small advertisers might be consigning their ads to more wastelands like this.
I'm a TD Ameritrade account holder, too, and contacted them last month after I noticed I got some penny-stock spam addressed to me with a TD Ameritrade subject line right after I got my monthly email statement. This was the response:
Thank you for taking the time to address your concerns to Executive Management. I very much appreciate your concern and would like you to know we are conducting an internal investigation regarding the complaints you have disclosed in your email regarding the SPAM. While I will not be able to relay any specifics or update you on the findings, I wanted you to know that we are aware of the situation and are making the necessary corrective actions to remedy the issue.
Citing your inquiry regarding account safety, your assets held with our company are protected by our Asset Protection Guarantee. This safeguards your account from any loss due to fraudulent activity. If you have any further questions regarding this policy please contact our Client Service Representatives at 800-669-3900. They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, excluding market holidays.
Warm regards,
Adam Triplett atriplett@tdameritrade.com Senior Research Analyst Office of the President Private Client Division TD AMERITRADE Holding Corporation
At least, it wasn't a bald-faced denial.
It's reached the point that I just assume that sooner rather than later all my private information will be stolen, loss, and compromised -- if it hasn't already. (As a UC graduate, I think I've been party to two other well-publicized identity-theft cases.)
Luckily, I have several different internet identities. So as soon as one is stolen, I move on to the next one. (If only it were that easy...)
Really. If they need my click so bad, why don't they just click the ad for me? If they don't think my personal preferences regarding the viewing of their ads are particularly germane, why is my personal inclination to click or not click on an ad any more sacred? Just click it for me already and cut me, the gratuitous middle man, out of the equation all together.
Like a lot of others here, I didn't bother with adblock until the ads started actively interfering with my browsing.
That said, I think this whole issue is just a troll for the purpose of, naturally, driving more traffic to another fluffy ad-laden website.
Last year Earthlink rolled out wi-fi in the city of Anaheim with much (well, a bit of) local fanfare. I was leasing a small office for myself for part-time use in Anaheim and it sounded like a pretty good deal, esp. compared to what AT&T was offering for a small business package (which was basically the poorest home broadband package at 3x the price.)
I signed up on the year-contract to get the best rate. Service was very spotty. Aggravating at times, but generally ok for my purposes since I was using my access now and then to check email and to research any questions that came up in the course of my work. Most my work was being done offline.
What really turned me off the service is that Earthlink offered no email support -- you had to call their support line (off-shored) and wait on hold for an indeterminate amount of time to get simple questions answered. Also, I was never able to pick up a signal from my laptop's wireless card. I needed to be cabled into their ugly little wireless modem. Even from the Starbucks at the epicenter of the coverage area (across the street from City Hall), I couldn't get a signal on my wireless card directly.
I had a suspicion that the service was going to be a colossal failure. I canceled just last week as soon as my year was up. Hadn't even used it the last three months I paid for it. Interesting now to see these agreements crumbling left and right. I get the impression that it's much harder to deploy reliable city-wide wireless service than it looks on paper. (I saw crews installing the little wireless transponders on lampposts across the city -- how much has to be put in maintaining these things? Bird shit a factor?)
And with the limited initial rollout area, I always wondered how economically viable it was going to be. It was supposed to be citywide by around this time, but even then I question how many people are going to sign up for this. Finally, I suspect it's much less viable for the high-demand media-rich content people are now coming to expect online.
It's too bad because the failure of wi-fi just reinforces the cable/telecom strangehold over broadband service. Is wi-fi actually succeeding anywhere?
Now if they had actually gone to their local Wal-Mart store and defaced that, I'd be more impressed.
I'd be even more impressed if they started hand-crafting their own dorm furniture from self-produced resources instead of just shopping at Target or Ikea instead.
On the larger problem, see today's New York Times article on China's (and soon, the world's) environmental problems.
Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's how the internet turned out.
True. It seems like most of what makes up the American (er, global) economy is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's what a free market churns out.
My grandmother was showing me the other day some of the junk she gets in the mail. She thinks its some kind of mistake that 6 different non-profit veteran's organizations are hitting her up for contributions by phone and mail. Especially after she's already given donations to two. She doesn't quite get the insidiousness of it all.
Anyway, I suppose one person's sleazy scam artist is another person's brilliant entrepreneur.
Joomla's admin controls definitely look slick, but I quickly noticed the inflexibility, too. Also, its lack of support for granular privileges was one of the things that turned me off of it. I think there's an extension, but I prefer Drupal's built-in support.
Thanks for the link to the CMS Matrix site. I'd been looking for something like this.
I purchased the book after reading this recent slashdot thread, where I believe Mr. O' Reilly mentioned it himself. My degrees are literature and poetry, so I probably have a slightly different aesthetic than most programmers. I'm leisurely working my way through the book and enjoying it. Most the examples provided don't strike me as breathtakingly beautiful so much as intelligent solutions to interesting problems.
One example I do find beautiful, after reading some of the explications of it, was this one mentioned a while back on slashdot:
It is true that this new explanation flies in the face of this classic study:
"At this rate, by the year 2100 there will be five smart people on Earth, swallowed whole by more than 12 billion mouth-breathers incapable of understanding the binary exponentiation that swamped the Earth with their like."
What it really stinks of is a disturbing lack of evidence.
RTFA. Then RTFB when it comes out. A number of experts in the field express reservations about the theory -- especially, the Darwinian elements. But they concede that it is a well-argued and exhaustively documented thesis that answers a question that hasn't been satisfactorily resolved. Which is a surprising sign of progress in the humanities (I note as a humanist). Usually, these kinds of unsettling ideas get greeted with pies in the face.
The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners.
I don't know how the inter-cultural numbers stack up, but intra-culturally speaking, I had learned to associate greater levels of education in modern industrialized societies with less children. But then I heard this story on NPR this weekend:
The newest status symbol for the nation's most affluent families is fast becoming a big brood of kids.
Historically, the country-club set has had the smallest number of kids. But in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent.
Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.
I'm sure Thorstein Veblen is smirking in his grave.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to have that tune in my head the rest of the day.
On second thought, maybe not the impartial history of the role of currency in American society, nor the impartial review of a new book, that I was looking for.
In any event, thanks for pointing out the author's agenda in the review.
I was a lit major in school but often found myself led stangely enough to the subject of money, currency in particular, as it's a subject that seems to have had much more relevance in people's everyday life in that past than it does now. I find the Federal Reserve, especially the institution of FDIC after the Great Depression, one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century. As Milton Friedman points out, it effectively ended the terrible plague of bank runs that wracked economies in the past.
To get a sense how invisible money as an instrument is to most people in modern stable economies, you can look at the plays of Shakespeare and all the reference to coinage and especially "debased" currency during the period. One of the most insightful history books I've read is E.C. Challis's The Tudor Coinage. It really gives you a sense of how much we take a stable currency, as the bedrock for a stable economic system, for granted.
Anyway, if you have any curiosity about that subject at all, you can check out this article:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-0117(196712)2%3A20%3A3%3C441%3ATDOTC1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H
I've been looking for a good stimulating non-fiction read. I think I'll pick up G. Edward Griffin's book. Thanks for the review.
He's like the Andy Kaufman of the US legal system.
Someday REM will sing a song about him.
But for some reason, this newfangled web doesn't seem to appeal to me, my friends, or anyone I know.
I hear you. I actually had an idea the other day that I thought would be perfect for Yahoo Pipes. The thing was, the web page that was the source for the key data to be mashed-up, though a classic HTML data table, didn't offer an RSS feed. And Pipes doesn't seem to offer even the most basic page scraping utility. (If it does, I couldn't find it.)
After playing around with Yahoo Pipes for a half-hour trying to make it work, I realized that with my knowledge of PHP, I could do this just as easily on my own. And have much more control over the process and end product.
The conclusion I came to: anyone who is capable of imaginatively using these tools is probably more than capable of just rolling their own mashup using open-source scripting tools. I don't imagine most ordinary users are going to be able to create anything more inventive than a regurgitated RSS feed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Anyone have any interesting examples of something produced with this kind of pre-packaged mashup tool?
Wouldn't it be enough to give the enemy AI's a few basic styles/options and what to do when they run out of ammo?
And have million of NPCs representing every variation of those options fighting each other in the background, then have only the Nth generation winners of those battle show up to fight you.
This was the approach taken by one baseball sim game.
But he could have ignored it. Or tried harder to spin it.
I thought the most interesting part of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's last book, The Black Swan, was what he referred to as the Scandal of Prediction, the Expert Problem, and the Tragedy of the Empty Suit. This is more relevant to analysts and self-professed pundits than journalists perhaps. But as he points out, whatever the field, paid experts are rarely held to account for bad predictions. He cites one study that attempted to empirically measured the accuracy of experts: The only regularity Tetlock [the researcher] found was the negative effect of reputation on prediction: those who had a big reputation were worse predictors than those who had none. (p. 151) I guess this could serve as another data-point within that cluster.
I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.
An international cartel of oil/gas producers perhaps? An auto industry focused on short-term profits at the expense of long-term economic and environmental (which is effectively the same thing) viability? A corrupt state power beholden to lobbyists of the previous two groups.
Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.
An established cartel of successful food producers? An agro-industrial complex focused on, &c.
To bring a popular example around here, who wouldn't want a better, more secure operating system at a cheaper price?
Why is the microelectronics industry not subject to the same market manipulation by established powers as other industries? The answer is obviously complex, but an important factor seems to be the fact that it has not yet descended into the sort of cartel-ishness that seems to be the natural tendency in completely unregulated markets.
I guess I agree with your answer -- the physics is a big part. But your analogies don't really make sense to me. And I don't think any new industry matures into a stable business sector around the physics. If does so around the market and the type of market the state shapes.
If you eliminated the economic incentive -- some minimal level of competition -- I wouldn't expect Moore's Law to magically continue because Mother Nature makes it possible.
Whoops. Just noticed that this story was about AdSense, not AdWords, so strike the last comment about how this affects small advertisers.
That it's adsense make me wonder if this isn't really a measure designed to control or attack people abusing the API to propagate things like blogspam and link farms. It doesn't make sense to me that Google wouldn't really be able to accommodate smaller publishers since I'd guess that the majority of API resource usage is concentrated among the largest qualifying publishers.
Google does in various ways, too. I run a couple adword campaigns for fun (bids all under 5 cents) and the only place where my ads show up as I far as I can tell are weird site like this:
http://icanhascheezburer.com/
Ok, not blogspam, but a linkfarm. But wouldn't be surprised if Google run a few hundred thousand spam blogs, too. (After all, they do own Blogger which, as much as I like it, is from a certain perspective little more than an extensive backwater of blogspam.)
In response to an email I sent them, a Google rep acknowledged these are Google sites. Fine, they provide an advertising space for cheapskates like me who wish to pay 2 cents a click. But I found it interesting that they don't identify these as Google-run sites, or even put the usual 'Ads by Google' tag with the ad blocks. And as their response shows, they don't make it exactly easy to disassociate yourself from this stuff if you're running a budget campaign:
Thank you for your email. I apologize for the delay in responding to your email. Please note that the site icanhascheezburer.com is not necessarily a link farm. This website is a part of our AdSense for domains program. AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to display AdWords ads on their websites. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google's semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names. Note that ads shown on an an AdSense for domain site need not display the 'ads by Google' label. Ads on such sites only display the 'Sponsored links' label.
Please be assured that parked domain sites are included in the Google Network because of the value they add to both users and advertisers. Our internal data show that parked domain sites typically convert at rates equal to that of search and content pages.
We do realize that advertisers may not want their ads to show on such sites. Please note that turning off the Content Network will cause your ad to stop showing on all the sites on the Content Network including AdSense for domains.
Not sure if the API gives you any finer control over where your ads appear, but if it did, one effect of removing it from small advertisers might be consigning their ads to more wastelands like this.
I'm a TD Ameritrade account holder, too, and contacted them last month after I noticed I got some penny-stock spam addressed to me with a TD Ameritrade subject line right after I got my monthly email statement. This was the response:
Thank you for taking the time to address your concerns to Executive Management. I very much appreciate your concern and would like you to know we are conducting an internal investigation regarding the complaints you have disclosed in your email regarding the SPAM. While I will not be able to relay any specifics or update you on the findings, I wanted you to know that we are aware of the situation and are making the necessary corrective actions to remedy the issue.
Citing your inquiry regarding account safety, your assets held with our company are protected by our Asset Protection Guarantee. This safeguards your account from any loss due to fraudulent activity. If you have any further questions regarding this policy please contact our Client Service Representatives at 800-669-3900. They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, excluding market holidays.
Warm regards,
Adam Triplett
atriplett@tdameritrade.com
Senior Research Analyst
Office of the President
Private Client Division
TD AMERITRADE Holding Corporation
At least, it wasn't a bald-faced denial.
It's reached the point that I just assume that sooner rather than later all my private information will be stolen, loss, and compromised -- if it hasn't already. (As a UC graduate, I think I've been party to two other well-publicized identity-theft cases.)
Luckily, I have several different internet identities. So as soon as one is stolen, I move on to the next one. (If only it were that easy...)
Really. If they need my click so bad, why don't they just click the ad for me? If they don't think my personal preferences regarding the viewing of their ads are particularly germane, why is my personal inclination to click or not click on an ad any more sacred? Just click it for me already and cut me, the gratuitous middle man, out of the equation all together.
Like a lot of others here, I didn't bother with adblock until the ads started actively interfering with my browsing.
That said, I think this whole issue is just a troll for the purpose of, naturally, driving more traffic to another fluffy ad-laden website.
Maybe if they sold the naming rights to the city, they could get a big corporate sponsor to spring for all the costs:
San FranCisco Systems, CA?
Last year Earthlink rolled out wi-fi in the city of Anaheim with much (well, a bit of) local fanfare. I was leasing a small office for myself for part-time use in Anaheim and it sounded like a pretty good deal, esp. compared to what AT&T was offering for a small business package (which was basically the poorest home broadband package at 3x the price.)
I signed up on the year-contract to get the best rate. Service was very spotty. Aggravating at times, but generally ok for my purposes since I was using my access now and then to check email and to research any questions that came up in the course of my work. Most my work was being done offline.
What really turned me off the service is that Earthlink offered no email support -- you had to call their support line (off-shored) and wait on hold for an indeterminate amount of time to get simple questions answered. Also, I was never able to pick up a signal from my laptop's wireless card. I needed to be cabled into their ugly little wireless modem. Even from the Starbucks at the epicenter of the coverage area (across the street from City Hall), I couldn't get a signal on my wireless card directly.
I had a suspicion that the service was going to be a colossal failure. I canceled just last week as soon as my year was up. Hadn't even used it the last three months I paid for it. Interesting now to see these agreements crumbling left and right. I get the impression that it's much harder to deploy reliable city-wide wireless service than it looks on paper. (I saw crews installing the little wireless transponders on lampposts across the city -- how much has to be put in maintaining these things? Bird shit a factor?)
And with the limited initial rollout area, I always wondered how economically viable it was going to be. It was supposed to be citywide by around this time, but even then I question how many people are going to sign up for this. Finally, I suspect it's much less viable for the high-demand media-rich content people are now coming to expect online.
It's too bad because the failure of wi-fi just reinforces the cable/telecom strangehold over broadband service. Is wi-fi actually succeeding anywhere?
(Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory)
Now if they had actually gone to their local Wal-Mart store and defaced that, I'd be more impressed.
I'd be even more impressed if they started hand-crafting their own dorm furniture from self-produced resources instead of just shopping at Target or Ikea instead.
On the larger problem, see today's New York Times article on China's (and soon, the world's) environmental problems.
Yea because the communists are known for their vibrant game publishing industry.
Obviously, you never played Poly Play. Arrogant bourgeois moose and squirrel.
And behind the iron curtain, we didn't waste time rootkitting kids' game. We rootkitted the whole goddamned society. Noobs.
That said, a disenfranchised employee with login credentials would be a possible risk.
Just be sure to confiscate their eyeballs before they leave the company.
Most of what is on the internet or comes through the internet is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's how the internet turned out.
True. It seems like most of what makes up the American (er, global) economy is an attempt to sell you something that you don't really want. Unfortunately, that's what a free market churns out.
My grandmother was showing me the other day some of the junk she gets in the mail. She thinks its some kind of mistake that 6 different non-profit veteran's organizations are hitting her up for contributions by phone and mail. Especially after she's already given donations to two. She doesn't quite get the insidiousness of it all.
Anyway, I suppose one person's sleazy scam artist is another person's brilliant entrepreneur.
I consider this a win-win.
Joomla's admin controls definitely look slick, but I quickly noticed the inflexibility, too. Also, its lack of support for granular privileges was one of the things that turned me off of it. I think there's an extension, but I prefer Drupal's built-in support.
Thanks for the link to the CMS Matrix site. I'd been looking for something like this.
"Irish by birth, French by sympathy, I have been condemned by the English to speak the language of Shakespeare."
/.
-- Oscar Wilde (translated from the French)
And spell it correctly on
I purchased the book after reading this recent slashdot thread, where I believe Mr. O' Reilly mentioned it himself. My degrees are literature and poetry, so I probably have a slightly different aesthetic than most programmers. I'm leisurely working my way through the book and enjoying it. Most the examples provided don't strike me as breathtakingly beautiful so much as intelligent solutions to interesting problems.
3 /aat/a_diop.html#diophant
One example I do find beautiful, after reading some of the explications of it, was this one mentioned a while back on slashdot:
Origin of Quake3's Fast InvSqrt()
I also find the algorithm here beautiful insofar as it elegantly solves a challenging problem that I was working on commonly faced by accountants:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Garage/332
By the way, for truly poetic code, see the works of Kay Ryan. Or Spenser's Faerie Queene.
It is true that this new explanation flies in the face of this classic study:
"At this rate, by the year 2100 there will be five smart people on Earth, swallowed whole by more than 12 billion mouth-breathers incapable of understanding the binary exponentiation that swamped the Earth with their like."
Study: Uneducated Outbreeding Intelligentsia 2-To-1
What it really stinks of is a disturbing lack of evidence.
RTFA. Then RTFB when it comes out. A number of experts in the field express reservations about the theory -- especially, the Darwinian elements. But they concede that it is a well-argued and exhaustively documented thesis that answers a question that hasn't been satisfactorily resolved. Which is a surprising sign of progress in the humanities (I note as a humanist). Usually, these kinds of unsettling ideas get greeted with pies in the face.
The fast majority of poor africans produce many more children than rich fat westerners.
I don't know how the inter-cultural numbers stack up, but intra-culturally speaking, I had learned to associate greater levels of education in modern industrialized societies with less children. But then I heard this story on NPR this weekend:
In Some Circles, Four Kids Is the New Standard
The newest status symbol for the nation's most affluent families is fast becoming a big brood of kids.
Historically, the country-club set has had the smallest number of kids. But in the past 10 years, the number of high-end earners who are having three or more kids has shot up nearly 30 percent.
Some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby making.
I'm sure Thorstein Veblen is smirking in his grave.