xkcd explains correlation vs. causation. Not so easy, you might think, but here one is in just 3 panels and 22 words. Most impressive.
Of course, this is nothing, compared to its amazingly clear and easy-to-understand explanation of a SQL injection attack.
I’m glad I watched this video from recipients of school-choice scholarships in DC:
Good grief. A legislator from some backwater where people like to elect [name that party]s wants to ban Barbie.
Lileks nails it:
Now and then it seems that banning is all they can do. It’s all they seem to want to do. That’s the problem with a free nation: you can’t make yourself significant by granting freedoms, so you spend your time looking for freedoms to restrict in the name of a greater good, and there’s always a greater good.
Heinlein has a great description of what, for some people, would be the perfect society:
I had seen those luxuries Earthside. Wasn’t worth what they put up with. Don’t mean heavy gravity, that doesn’t bother them; I mean nonsense. All time kukai moa. If chicken guano in one earthworm city were shipped to Luna, fertilizer prolem would be solved for century. Do this. Don’t do that. Stay back of line. Where’s tax receipt? Fill out form. Let’s see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up to pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead — but first get permit.
(The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, chapter six, p. 85)
This post on NRO includes a reader comment:
Mr. Chait’s problem is that he doesn’t think like a businessman. The goal isn’t to maximize profits. The goal is to maximize return on investment and minimize risk.
Exactly. You don’t have to be a supply-side economist to understand this.
The question isn’t whether people can still make money with a greater tax burden. The question is whether they will find better things to do with their money. That is, will they put it to work by investing it, or will they not, by spending it on leisure activities.
The “stimulus act” (or more accurately, the “Enslaving Your Grandchildren for $8/wk Act”) is an abomination. Take a look at how the money is allocated and decide for yourself how much of it is “stimulus” and how much is payoff to Democrat-affiliated interest groups.
I’ve been looking for a software tool that would convert foreign characters into a poor substitute.
Call me Ugly McAmerican. I don’t care.
My language has been worn down — I would say, “polished” — like a river rock to the point where it doesn’t have a million characters or funny accent marks or any of that stuff. Now, I don’t mind if your language uses them. I don’t even mind if we have a common encoding. What I do mind is that none of my tools work with your stupid common encoding. When grep and sed and diff and ruby all know what to do with your ?q???????, give me a call.
In the meantime, I plan to go on working in ASCII as much as possible. Then, when necessary, I’ll use tools to convert ugly-quotes to pretty ones, or turn ... into ellipses, etc.
Amazon’s front page today is all about the version 2.0 Kindle. I have to admit, it looks pretty sweet. Choosing B&W rather than color was a good trade-off so you can up the pixel density.
I looked up three books I’m reading right now, and they were all available. Interestingly, they were also (slightly) cheaper on Kindle than on paper. In my experience, electronic versions are usually no cheaper than the hardcopy. This is especially true of bibles and bible-study materials like commentaries and lexicons. I understand why the BDAG is $150 in print (well, sort of) but there’s no reason they should charge that much when you spare the trees.
On the other hand, the Kindle costs $360. How many years does that buy you? That is, what price are you paying for your new “bookshelf?” And will the next version read your ebooks? (And if it reads them at all, will there be a media conversion “upgrade” fee?)
Another screamer from the incomparable Iowahawk:
Dead Hobo Reporting Glitch
Claims Another White House Appointee
(Kudus to Instapundit.)
Here are two articles I should look at more closely, both in the New Scientist. (I forget where I came across them, sorry.)
Born believers: How your brain creates God
The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief
The second title is a game attempt to make something arcane and abstract timely and relevant. The first title is better. Imagine if, instead, it said, “Born seers: how your brain creates a visual representation of the universe.”
(Updated; I forgot to give this a title.)
Sorry not to be updating this blog more. Partly it’s that I’ve been terribly busy the last two months (it’s sort of the busy season at work). And partly it’s because of microblogs like twitter and time-wasting walled-gardens like Facebook. But mainly, it’s been because of my DSL, which has been horribly unreliable.
I dare to think that it might have been resolved now.
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