Posted in Uncategorized on February 15th, 2007 1 Comment »
Here’s a wonderful excerpt from a book review written by Daniel Dennett, in which he paraphrases Rapaport on how to argue constructively.
Serious argument depends on mutual respect, and this is often hard to engender when disagreements turn vehement. The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on January 2nd, 2007 No Comments »
Set him on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
Tip of the hat to Quinn.
Posted in Uncategorized on December 21st, 2006 No Comments »
I just read some notes from an entertaining talk (one that’s surprisignly accessible, even if you’re neither a computer scientist nor a string theorist) that Scott Aaronson recently gave at Stanford, and came across this gem:
But what could NP-hardness possibly have to do with the Anthropic Principle? Well, when I talked before about computational complexity, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on December 20th, 2006 No Comments »
“Uh oh. I’ve drawn the attention of the shetland pony riders of the apocalypse.”
Posted in Uncategorized on December 4th, 2006 No Comments »
I was shocked to read this evening about a local family that became snowbound for days in the mountains of southern Oregon; three of the four family members were rescued this afternoon. (This has apparently been big news around here, but I’m afraid I don’t follow the local news much.) The husband, James Kim, left [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on December 1st, 2006 No Comments »
I’ve used blosxom for a few years to manage my blog, and while I appreciate its simplicity and “Unix nature”, it’s not actually very usable. It’s difficult to extend; the code is impenetrable; and it’s been orphaned by its author, who has gone on to better things. For example, as I couldn’t find a simple [...]
Posted in Uncategorized, software on November 8th, 2004 No Comments »
I stumbled out of bed at 4am this morning, and bleared my way onto a two-hop flight from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, to start getting ready for this year’s Supercomputing Conference.
So far, my seven-hour experience of Pittsburgh has been mixed. On the one hand, the weather was beautiful today, and the Best Festerin’ that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on October 6th, 2004 No Comments »
I just noticed that Geoff Pullum contributes frequently to Language Log. One of the first books I read after coming to the US was his The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which is fabulously entertaining. My lasting impression was a goggle-eyed “gee, Pullum must be smart, and stuff.” Until tonight.
Pullum wonders where the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on October 5th, 2004 No Comments »
Sent by soldiers who served, or are serving, to Michael Moore; published in today’s Guardian. I’m sure Moore was selective in his choices of letters to publish, but it’s still depressing.
I know someone who had two members of the Reserve company he commands airlifted home due to injuries sustained during the first week of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on September 29th, 2004 No Comments »
I was talking to my coworker Jane today, who mentioned in passing that her car has over 480,000km on the clock. My first response was, “Hey! Just another 110K before you hit its second light second!” Drop the “light,” because it’s assumed, and you can quote your car’s odometer in seconds.
This got me [...]