Neopoleon - `` There's a place in downtown Portland called "Pioneer Square" - It's just a city square; basically a meeting place for business people, chess players, prostitutes, drug dealers, and politicians (but the cops have been doing a good job of keeping the politicians away - Pioneer Square is a much safer place now than it was ten years ago). Anyway, it's made out of bricks. I say "made out of" as though to imply that it was some massive undertaking on the scale of the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame or something, but it wasn't. What really happened is that the mayor stopped one day and said, "We have a whole bunch of extra bricks. Why don't we stick them all in the ground somewhere, and then give that ground a nice name which will attract business people, chess players, prostitutes, drug dealers, and politicians." ''#

Via Brad Delong is The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science - ``2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.''#

Michael Feldman links the God Detector - ``How many times have we heard it said, "Oh, Lord, give me a sign!" Alas, too often the reply is vague and ambiguous: the phone rings at an opportune time, a feather falls from out of the blue, a water stain appears that resembles a religious image. We all want to know if God exists; maybe He just needs a reliable method to let us know He's here.''#

Via Yeti Suit - Something to make Women feel better#

Yeti also has written advice - ``A philosopher with a heavy dose of religious upbringing might say that all things come from the wellspring known as God. What you know can not always be put into words. Those who attempt to do so find themselves limited to the extent of what they've been taught. Those who learn to listen to themselves soon become cognizant of a vast melody originating in the hearts of their fellow human beings. The joy in your note, in your voice, is recognizing that what you are looking for, everyone is looking for.''#

Piers Cawley writes about Trust and Agile methods. - ``That's why it's so refreshing to read about Agile methods. Trust is hardwired into them at such a deep level that almost nobody bothers to mention it. It's why they seem like such radical ideas, they are so far removed from the standard view of how organizations work. Much of the (remarkably vehement) criticism (and subsequent failure to communicate) that I've seen seems to stem from the fact that the critics are worried about the downside when trust breaks down and the advocates are just getting on with trusting each other because it works. '' - Most design methodologies and standards assume that programmers are untrustworthy and need direction, rules, and sticks to punish them. Agile methods differ. - Piers also write this, ``I've come to believe that people repay trust with trustworthiness. I was delighted to read in the New Scientist about an experiment which seemed to back up my intuition. In an experiment, randomly selected people were asked to give up to $10 dollars to a person who was unknown to them. That other person would receive 3 times as much money as the first person gave, and could then return any amount of money to the first person. (The subjects didn't know who the other party was, the 'game' was handled by software). Economic theory, in the shape of the Nash Equilibrium says that the rational thing to do is for the first person to give $0. The second person's rational strategy would be to keep all money they were given and to return none of it. This is not what happened. It turns out that 50% of the first subjects sent some money, and of those who received money, 75% returned some.'' - Cool.#

Via Nova is an article about Pulstar stars possibly being "interstellar becons" - ``One of the most interesting articles of the year proposes a new theory that pulsars are extraterrestrial beacons of some sort. According to the author, a number of odd characteristics of pulsars are best explained by intelligence, not physics. This article is an absolute must read. [...] Now the question is, suppose that the author is correct and pulsars are beacons that transmit intelligent signals. What are they saying? One proposal is that they are intergalactic warning beacons -- cosmic lighthouses to warn of recurring galactic superwave explosions. However, I doubt this -- why would these beacons exhibit short-term variability if all they were there for was to issue alerts for explosions that only occur on multi-million-year timescales? It seems to me that the resolution of information-change is quite high leading me to suspect that these "beacons" -- if that is what they are -- are being used to transmit data on an ongoing basis. One possibility is that they are used to measure gravitational distortions over long distances -- perhaps some advanced civilization uses this technology to graph fluctuations in the shape of space for some purpose. Or perhaps these beacons mark wormhole jump-point locations, and quality readings. Another possibility: Are they some sort of cosmic GPS network that enables a sort of universal coordinate grid for navigation? Or are these deep space data relays -- perhaps beaming news reports between galaxies? An interstellar Internet? Another possibility: Are they intergalactic Blogs? If so, why aren't they listed in Syndic8 yet?''#

Via Nova - ``Paul Ford has been thinking about the Chinese Room thought-experiment, John Searle's famous refutation of the strong-AI hypothesis. As Paul points out: programs have syntax, minds have semantics, syntax is not the same as semantics, therefore computers are not minds.''#

Jen Chung - ``Renee Zellweger has agreed to play Bridget Jones once again for the sequel, and she will indeed pack on the pounds: The Age reports that on top of her $15 million salary, Renee will get another $225,000 per kilo she adds to her weight. Gothamist has mixed opinions about this. We feel that her performance in Bridget Jones was brilliant, but since she's gone totally anorexic post-Bridget Jones, we're concerned that she'll starve herself so much after making the sequel that her kidneys will fall and she'll be walking around with an IV drip''#

Bayesian Categorization is like DEVONthink#

Joe Marshall -#

``Finding arguments against Java is like trying to make a
teenager depressed.

How about:

1. No syntactic abstraction (macros)
2. No multiple inheritence
3. Single dispatch
4. C-like syntax
5. Verbosity
6. Expressions and statements that are not interchangable
7. In general, no tail recursion.
8. Dichotomy between primitive types and class types
9. No MOP

Any of these can be `killer' problems. It certainly makes Java useless
for some of the projects I work on.

But there is a wonderful refutation to all of these:
`Hey, at least it isn't Perl.' ''

Joi Ito meets with a person who he never thought he would. He realizes that much of his opinion was based on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. - ``I asked Yoshigo-san to explain Soka Gakkai to me. Soka Gakkai is Buddhist sect and their core principles are very much in tuned with the teachings of most Nichiren Buddhists. Soka Gakkai was originally set up as an educational institution and has worked very hard to try to make society a better place by actively participating in it, unlike many more "passive" sects. I think it is the active participation in politics that causes those in power to fear Soka Gakkai. Yoshigo-san said that they teach people to question authority, think for themselves and be very active. These are also my core principles. Although Soka Gakkai has a large organization with "management" he said that they do not control the thinking of their members and have quite a diverse group of people. They do not worship their founder, nor do they teach people to blindly follow.'' - Their definition of evil is pretty great, praise life and to destroy it is evil. - And Joi has this to say about Japan's spirituality in general... ``When I visited Koyasan, a monk told us that during the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese government visited most of the European countries in power those days and realized that they were able to use religion as part of the State and used it in war. Japan took the decentralized animist religion, Shinto, and centralized it under the Emperor. When Japan lost WWII, they lost their religion. Similarly, the student uprisings in the 60's and 70's were squashed. Images of young soldiers dying for their divine Emperor as well as the images of youths wearing helmets and fighting with the riot police are considered silly and quite unfashionable to youths in Japan today. Young people in Japan today believe that fighting for a cause, either religious or political, is stupid and un-cool. This lack of spiritualism and activism makes Soka Gakkai's role quite clear.''#

Dave Pollard on the Seven Deadly Sins. - ``I blew up today. I mean, I got really mad. People who are unreasonable can do that to me. So can people who are unfair, cruel, dishonest, greedy, intolerant, or relentlessly negative. I suppose those are my seven deadly sins of other people, the qualities I just can't bear in those I deal with personally or professionally. I won't bore you with the trivial details, except to say I got threatened with bodily harm, threatened with arrest, and almost run over by a tractor.''#

The very cool Gender Genie thought the above paragraph was written by a female. Perhaps it needs more text?#

Richard Tallent on the PDC. - ``I'm not sure that the PDC would be worth my hard-earned cash. I'm still dragging my clients kicking and screaming into ASP.NET, SQL Server, 1024x768, and IE6. Heck, some days I'm lucky to have them considering silicon over dead trees, or moving them past anything shuffles electrons that doesn't end in "xls", "mdb", or (shudder) "nsf". Yukon, Longhorn, web services, IIS 6, and rich client interfaces may as well be the City on a Hill.''#

Scoble links Rob Fahrni - ``Oh and one little note about your metrics Robert, what coder is slinging 100 lines of code a day? That's an exceptionally GREAT day of coding. Maybe it's copy and paste coding? I hope Microsoft doesn't expect us all to write that many lines of code per day? If it does that would go a VERY long way toward explaining security problems. Write ten good lines a day, if you can, that's my motto. In the past I've seen people rewarded for the number of bugs they fixed in a release cycle. Hey, if you don't code bugs to begin with you won't have to fix so many later. We all write bugs, it's inevitable, especially in complex systems. But we all strive to write bug-free code. A bug that causes a crash is a security problem, plain and simple.''#

Scoble links and explains Longhorn Sneak Peak pictures - ``Paul Thurrott has what he says are some sneak peaks at Longhorn's new user interface (code-named "Aero"). I don't even have access to the Aero stuff (these look like early demonstration screens, and not how Longhorn will eventually look -- the builds I'm using don't have the Aero interface, Microsoft really wants to make sure screen captures don't leak out.) The real "Aero" is one of Longhorn's biggest secrets -- I've seen it, but can't load it on my own machine and am locked out of the server where it's kept. I am not even sure they'll show it off at the PDC.''#

Krzysztof Kowalczyk links to sites that teach you about what different ways people try to bullshit are called. Good stuff.#

Ryan Mcgee continues the "Boof" discussion. - ``This real-life case study, illuminated through a series of self-help comments that ultimately culminating with ruminations of a Taco Bell-brand bed and breakfast, serve to illustrate what is a commonly known fact: if you're a Boof, you're almost always a Boof. It's incredibly difficult to remove yourself from that spot in the object of your affection's heart. It's like getting the crowd at the Apollo Theatre to applaud Ozzfest. Not gonna happen. The reasons are two-fold and semi-related. The object is inevitably going to not see you, The Boof, as anything but a cute but largely asexual being. You, for your part, do very little to dissuade their opinion of you, largely because you hardly ever express your true feelings for the person in a way that's credible.''#

Evan Williams - `` 'Is there any circumstance in which Google might buy Microsoft?' Sullivan said wryly, setting off laughter in the room. 'Or the opposite?' Brin said: 'There are a lot of liabilities in acquiring Microsoft.' '' - From an Article on Google.#

From Just a Gwai Lo is a George Soros essay title, America's Global Role: Why the Fight for a Worldwide Open Society Begins at Home - ``Because open society is an abstract idea, I shall proceed from the abstract and general to the concrete and particular. The concept of "open society" was developed by philosopher Karl R. Popper, whose book Open Society and Its Enemies argued that totalitarian ideologies—such as communism and fascism—posed a threat to an open society because they claimed to have found the final solution. The ultimate truth is beyond human reach. Those who say they are in possession of it are making a false claim, and they can enforce it only by coercion and repression. So Popper derived the principles of freedom and democracy—the same principles that President Bush championed in his February speech on Iraq—from the recognition that we may be wrong.''#

Via Just a Gwai Lo is Barbara Kay - ``If women are finally sexually equal to men, why was everyone obsessed with little-girl icon Britney Spears' virginity and not Justin Timberlake's? Now Britney and Christine look and strut like pole dancers. Compliant women servicing hungry men. Some role models. Some feminist progress.''#

Via Accordion Guy - ``The expert debugger never forgets that there has to be a logical explanation, no matter how mysterious the system's behavior may seem when first observed. [...] A banking system built in Chicago had worked correctly for many months, but unexpectedly quit the first time it was used on international data. Programmers spent days scouring the code, but they couldn't find any stray command that would quit the program. When they observed the behavior more closely, they found that the program quit as they entered data for the country of Ecuador. Closer inspection showed that when the user typed the name of the capital city (Quito), the program interpreted that as a request to quit the run!''#

Via InstaPundit - ``BILL WHITTLE HAS A NEW ESSAY: It's on responsibility .'' - ``If, on the other hand, there is something about being human that transcends Skinner's box and his wire frame monkeys, if we do indeed, through the unique capacity of self-awareness, have the ability to see how actions we commit that harm others could be unpleasant because we can imagine them being done to us, then we indeed are ourselves responsible for our actions. If this is true, then in the moment of the act of murder, or rape, or torture, we are presented with the most heartfelt pleas for mercy and hideous cries of agony, and nevertheless make the decision to continue our barbaric actions. If this is so then we, alone, bear the responsibility for what we have done, and while childhoods of horror may have steered us to that moment of decision, they do not absolve us from the consequences.'' - ``Those on one side see individuals as rafts on that river of culture, swept along inexorably downstream, perhaps capable of a weak paddling, displacing our paths a few feet from side to side. I on the other hand, and others like me, see human potential as a powerboat, a nuclear-powered hydrofoil, one capable of cruising side to side at will, as easily able to race against the current as with it. I don't believe people are rafts adrift in the destiny of their culture. I think all people have propellers, whether they use them or not, and rudders too. And rather than commiserating with people about the rapids that they endure and the battering that is their lot in life, we should be teaching them how to start those engines, take the wheel of their own futures, and steer themselves wherever they damn well please.''#

Via Dave Winer - Kevin writes, ``We have to confront the reality: either email is broken, Microsoft's email software is broken, or those two statements are the same. If it's the middle statement, Microsoft and other vendors can close holes and improve filtering in their products. Email itself isn't going to change. It's too widely deployed. I still think a combination of steps will tame the spam epidemic, but we're not there yet.''#

Via Dan Gillmor is Bruce Perens dissecting the SCO "copyrighted" code. - ``In the early 1990s, ATT's Unix Systems Labs (USL) sued BSDI, a company vending the BSD system, and the University of California, over this and other code in the BSD system. The claims that SCO is making are very similar to the ATT claims. ATT lost. It was found that ATT had copied heavily from the university without attribution, and thus ATT settled the case. In the settlement, the University agreed to add an ATT copyright notice to some files and continue to distribute them under the BSD license. ATT agreed to pay the University's court costs. [...] The ATT code that was subject of this lawsuit survives into SCO's current system. SCO's "pattern analysis team" found this code and correctly concluded that it was identical to code in Unix. But they didn't take the additional step of checking whether or not the code had been released for others to copy legally.''#

From Instapundit is an Op-Ed article by a Marine about Iraq. - `` "Bush good, Saddam bad!" many Iraqis tell us emphatically--and repeatedly. I'm not sure how George W. Bush is faring with the American public, but he's got a lock on Al Hillah. Iraqis routinely ask me to "thank Mr. Bush for freeing us of Saddam" and tell me, "We are very grateful, because you have freed us of our worst nightmare, Saddam Hussein." (A lot of Iraqis speak surprisingly good English because most studied it in primary and secondary school.)'' - And, `` "We are very glad that you are here and we hope you never leave," Zaid, a 31-year-old mechanical engineer, told me. "If you leave, then there will be more trouble. The Bath Party thugs will take over." Zaid makes a decent living selling pirated American movies. He enjoys sophisticated dramas like "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Saving Private Ryan." But most Iraqis, he notes, prefer action-packed adventures starring Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Mr. Van Damme especially is quite popular with Al Hillah children.) ''#

Ryan is on the lookout. - ``Freshmen move-in days have been tantalizing since I was a freshman moving into the campus myself. Girls sweating - wearing minimal clothing to try and say cool while lugging their yaffa blocks full of spring water up 30 flights of stairs to a swealtering paradise. And all the while, we watch. The collective campus males, choosing our targets while they toil away.'' #

Jarno Virtanen doesn't like it when fields are prefilled with strange values. - ``URL fields, that have a pre-filled 'http://', like the ones in Feed Validator and Internet Archive, slow down users and have no compelling advantage over completely empty fields. Let me explain why. Typically, you copy the target URL to clipboard and therefore you need to first clear the input field to paste the URL to the field. Depending on your particular interface, this might be a real annoyance. ''#

Dave wonders about the best way to test websites you are working on. - ``I'd build sites in IE6/Win, and then 'hack' them to work in Mozilla. This only lead to problems down the line, since the original rendering relied on a buggy rendering engine (IE6) and created dependencies on it that better browsers won't handle the way you'd expect them to. ''#

Halley has a younh alpha male. He sounds awesome - ``I caught my alpha boy kissing his GI Joe's good night (in a rather manly way actually) and telling them to "hang in there."
'' - Little kids are GREAT.#

Obviously, Alan Cox is taking a break. He writes this, ``The 2.2 tree needs a new maintainer, someone who can spend their entire life refusing patches, being ignored by the mainstream (because 2.2 is boring) and by vendors (who don't ship 2.2 any more). ''#

Tim Bray reveals the origin of "Dranconianism" is a post about XML. - ``Dracon (c.659-c.601 B.C.E.) introduced the first written legislation to Athens. His code was consistent in that it decreed the death penalty for crimes both low and high.'' - Good to know.#

Godless from Gene Expression compares Sociology to Astrology because it doesn't accept a person is responsible for the outcome of their own life. - ``This is why sociology is to social science as astrology is to astronomy. I mean - even if we forget about IQ and so on for now...isn't it obvious that lazy and unintelligent people do exist? And aren't lazy and unintelligent people more likely to be poor? ''#

Godless also writes, ``Interesting thought just occurred to me. The far left idolizes Scandinavia because of its low income inequality and its socialist economics. The far right loves the Scandinavians because they're blond haired and blue eyed. Amusing, isn't it? '' - There is a comment with this text, ``The truism "blondes have more fun" should really read "good looking people have more fun", and this demonstrates the inherent unfairnesss of society.'' - Hah.#

Also from Godless - ``Asian girls dating white men are either gold-diggers or whores or gold-digging whores. Many expat women feel no hesitation in expressing these convictions openly and aggressively. God help the man who finds himself cornered by one or more of these women at a party. When I'm at mostly gweilo social functions, I am quite guarded about the fact that I pretty much date Asian girls exclusively now, lest I find myself being berated. '' - Read to free yourself from your assumptions.#

Tony Pierce - ``lets just say that good things happen to me and keep happening and then some bad things happen and then a lot of good things happen to make me forget about the bad things, and then other good things happen and then the ladies knock on the back door and then they come in and then they dont leave and then there they are in the morning and then more good things happen and then they drive me to the busstop.''#

Ted Leung points out that Tom Lord has a criticism of subversion on his arch mailing list. I like subversion, works much much better than CVS. I think a big part of the problem is a failure to see the purpose of subversion. It doesn't have the lofty goals of Bitkeeper/Aegis/etc - It tries to do CVS right, really right. So that it can be a viable "platform" for the other stuff. That's cool by me. But my opinion is irrelevant.#

Joel is funny++ - ``I'm back from a nice vacation in England and Norway (motto: "And you thought the English liked mayonnaise"). Over the next few days I'll be busier than a pair of jumper cables at an Alabama picnic catching up.''#

Brian Carnell filters the shit. - ``A lot of people are linking to Dennis Kucinich's whining and moaning about all of the security checks, etc. that he has to go through when he travels by air. Well, duh -- Kucinich voted for the final version of the Aviation and Transportation and Security Act that gives the TSA the authority to do so. ''#

Dave Hyatt explains what is wrong with Chris Lydon's blog. It's pretty awesome that he does stuff like this.#

Aaron Swartz writes about the P/E/A Wiki. - ``The genius of Sam's wiki was that there was no editor. Thought something was ugly? Change it. Think the text needed clarification? Clarify it. Sometimes disputes spilled out into separate pages but for the most part the process worked amazingly well. [...] As we've begun to write actual specs, things have gotten even worse. Joe Gregorio and Mark Nottingham have become traditional editors of the API and feed format respectively. Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim took control of the spec by declaring milestones and updating their validator accordingly. The Wiki was turned into a unavigable swamp of a discussion forum for the drafts edited by other people. It's less than clear how to be a real part of the core group.''#

Fear the Seasame Street Gang#

Movie-Mistakes.com - Neat.#