Cambridge Is A Small Town, And Word Gets Around
Tony Pierce talks about hot hot chicks. Hot ones.#
hot chick at work sits at the front of our office and isnt really a receptionist but she knows everything, so i tell her everything. usually about chicks. today i was telling her something and she said, oh, can you do me a favor and go through one day without talking about girls or women or sex or anything like that? ok. thanks.
Joi Ito talks about how many seek to understand cultures through movies and the responsibility that that implies.#
My sister is teaching a class on how cultures are portrayed in movies and we talked yesterday about how many American movies are about Americans going to foreign cultures and "conquering" them. Even Kill Bill, which was one of my favorite movies this year, might have been more fun if it focused on the American obsession with oriental things, rather than setting it in Japan where the American triumph over the Japanese ended up being more highlighted.
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Cultural understanding is one of the biggest problems facing us today and movies have a huge impact on how we understand culture. Movie makers, more than ever, have an opportunity and responsibility to help us understand each other.
Joel Spolsky has this perfect method of pointing at shit that people do to their customers. If I used PCs, you can bet I would buy all of FogCreek's stuff.#
For some reason, Microsoft's brilliant and cutting-edge .NET development environment left out one crucial tool... a tool that has been common in software development environments since, oh, about 1950, and taken so much for granted that it's incredibly strange that nobody noticed that .NET doesn't really have one.
The tool in question? A linker. Here's what a linker does. It combines the compiled version of your program with the compiled versions of all the library functions that your program uses. Then, it removes any library functions that your program does not use. Finally, it produces a single executable binary program which people can run on their computers.
Tyler Cowen links to some very interesting experiments with choice in the market, and offers his thoughts.#
Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study, Ms. Iyengar and Mr. Lepper found that shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on display as when 24 are on the shelf.
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My take: No doubt, choice confuses the hell out of us, much of the time. That being said, the question is not whether more or less choice is good. Instead the question is what kind of choice-restricting and choice-regulating institutions we wish to have. Markets, in reality, are the best known institutions for limiting our choices as well as expanding them. When I go into a (good) restaurant, I like to simply tell the waiter that I don't want to look much at the menu, and he should simply bring me what is best. If he asks what that means by "best," I (sometimes) respond by telling him I am an aesthetic Platonist and that best is best. Or I will ask the waiter to imagine it is his last meal on earth and to bring me the relevant dishes he would order. [...]
[...] And if you reexamine the experiments mentioned above, they are all about ways in which people voluntarily limit their own choices. Maybe you don't wish to run your own cancer treatments, but you wish to choose the doctor who will.
That restaurant thing is incredible.
La-La-La-Language!#
Kuro5hin.org talks about a Czech publisher's punishment for publish Mein Kampf.#
1) Does the act of publishing Mein Kampf really promote Nazism?
At this point Mein Kampf is a historical document, and the publishing of such a document shouldn't necessarily imply the promotion of the ideas within. I contend that the meaning of a text is as much about the context in which it is read as the words that are on the page. If I published a collection of pro-slavery writings from the 1840's, would I be promoting slavery, or would I be promoting the study of environment in which slavery thrived? If I published the Torah, and a group of Nazi's read it and twisted the words to support their hatred of Jews, did my publishing of this sacred text promote Nazism? If so, should I be prosecuted for the ignorance of my readers?
I know the rules. I don't accept them.#
Alex Tabarrok gets advice about jobs from his friend Tyler Cowen.#
should behave. Certainly, I'd never tried to use the theory to guide my own choices. Tyler remarked that even most economists don't take expected utility theory seriously but most people could nevertheless benefit by quantifying their choices. So I took his advice and sat down to think hard about the probabilities and utilities. Surprisingly, I found this very helpful. Once I had some numbers on paper it became clear which was the better choice and I made that choice confidently and without feeling conflicted. As it turned out, the choice was good ex-post as well as ex-ante. Thanks Tyler!
Tony Pierce: "dear kids of america, and canaduh. learn how to play the damn guitar."#
Daniel Davies is a racist, fascist, ist-ist, blah, blah, I'm a PC-Fag.#
There's a wide spread of political opinions at Crooked Timber; as you can tell, we run the gamut from social democrat to democratic socialist. All sorts, I tell you. But I think that there's one issue which divides us neatly into two groups. Or rather, into one group consisting of me, and one group consisting of all the others. And that's the fact that I'm a nationalist. Horrible to admit it but it's true. I genuinely do believe that, according to my standards (and who else's standards might I use?), Britain is the best place to live that there is, and the British are the finest people in the world. After that, Irish, Turks, Czechs, Danes and French in that order, and after that there's quite a steep drop-off. Sorry, where was I? Anyway, yes, the British are best.
Jane Natural-Disaster writes about speed dating and how you stop being a chump in front of women.#
What do you say to the twentieth man who asks wearily, "So what do you do?"
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Don't ask me that. Nineteen other men have already asked me, and I've exhausted the possibilities. Ask me how my day was. Ask me what the last trip I took was. Ask me something more specific than general. Ask for descriptions rather than lists. Or on second thought, don't ask me anything. Talk to me. Tell me about yourself. Compliment me on something. I can't tell you, guys, how flattering this is. Nothing lewd, just something like "That color looks nice on you" or whatever. It breaks the ice and makes a girl feel good. And then let's go from there.
Chip Gibbons has a perfect take on this comment about the German cannibal, Armin Meiwes.#
CNN's Walter Rodgers said: "Most Germans are aghast yet fascinated at the idea of a cannibal in their midst. This is not supposed to happen in a tidy, democratically ordered German society. And yet it did."
The Holocaust happened in a tidy, democratically ordered German society, too, didn't it? The premise of democracy is mob rule and submission to the mob; the premise of socialism is self-sacrifice to the collective. Should we really be surprised when two people sexualize those premises, taking them a little too literally?
Dave Pollard writes about ExxonMobil and why you should probably boycott them.#
One week's revenue. That's what a judge, and a jury, have three times decided is a fair price for ExxonMobil to pay for the Exxon Valdez disasterfifteen years ago, one of the worst ecological catastrophes in the history of the world, which resulted in the permanent destruction of one of the world's most beautiful and fragile ecosystems. And now this week for the third time the corporation, with its army of high-paid lawyers, has vowed it will again appeal these paltry damages, essentially waiving any and all responsibility for this despicable atrocity. Their lawyers confidently predict they will eventually 'prevail' and will end up paying next to nothing. In America, if you have money, you can get away with anything, even, it seems, a holocaust.
I didn't realize they haven't been punished yet.
Oliver Willis posts a really cute picture of Paris Hilton.#
Jack Hodgson posts notes from the last Berkman Meeting that I couldn't be at.#