Waste and irrationality. I think many among the rich would be far more willing to pay a larger portion in taxes if they believed it would help. They don’t believe it would, and I don’t either. San Francisco and California in general are good examples of this. We pay top-end taxes yet San Francisco is riddled with potholes,…
Archives for 2010
Learning Without a Purpose: Building a Book
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about goals. We all know that spending hours a day reading reddit or whatever is a waste. But what about other types of reading? What about newspapers and books and such? Why are they any better? It seems to me that all input is a waste unless it is put to use…
Blogging: Categories vs. Tags
I recently attended a company blogging conference call where the topic was how to properly categorize and tag posts for company blog posts. Despite a significant effort being made during the call to differentiate categories and tags, no distinction was actually drawn. When the presenter asked if anyone had any questions, the only sound was crickets. My guess…
Beyond SSH Bookmarks
I tripped over an article this week on creating “SSH Bookmarks”, which are basically aliases for hostnames within your ~/.ssh/config file. I think this is pretty cool, but I’ve been doing something I think is superior for a while now: Bash aliases for the entire SSH command. So while the SSH Bookmark idea has us typing the following:…
Republicans Are Much Better at Politics Than Democrats
The amazing radio show This American Life recently had a segment about the political process and how Republicans are more skilled at it. One of the things they said in the show is that Republicans are just more organized and on-message. Apparently every morning, a talking points memo goes out to influential Republicans at all levels of government:…
Who Wants to Date the High-powered Female CEO?
Maybe the problem with women in high-power senior management positions is that they require a person to act “like a man”, and when people see women acting like a man they tend to distrust and/or dislike it. Another way to look at this is to imagine a powerful, respected “classical” CEO. The image of a man comes to…
Unhealthy Happiness
A post over on Hacker News reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while, which is the concept of “bad habits” like excessive shopping or overeating really being happiness problems. The quote that triggered my thought was: Obesity is the result of finding your happiness in food. The reason I did my own…
Ubuntu: aptitude > apt-*
For those who use Ubuntu or Debian and still use apt-get and apt-cache search, you might want to start thinking about using aptitude instead. Two reasons include: It handles dependencies better. apt is pretty good with dependencies, but from my research it seems clear that aptitude is far superior You you can just just one command. aptitude is…
Parent to Child Propagation of False Meaning
I have many smart conservative friends who take pride in two things in their lives: Having a mainstream, corporate job, and raising their children well. When we have conversations about life’s meaning, however, where I commonly express my belief that literature and art and history are the true pursuits in life, and that the corporate life is empty1,…
A Brilliant Insight into Ownership
Coveting possessions is unhealthy. All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free. When I want to take something out of storage, I just pay the for the storage costs for that particular…
Chrome Passes Firefox on TechCrunch
Well, I called another one: Chrome has just ousted Firefox as the top browser used to hit TechCrunch. And it only took two years from launch time to get to that point. It took a little longer than anticipated, but Chrome has now passed Firefox as the browser most often used to visit TechCrunch. For the month of…
Beauty Queens and Battling Knights
In this study we explore the relationship between attractiveness and aggressiveness in chess. We examine whether people use more aggressive (i.e. riskier) strategies when playing with attractive opponents, whether this affects performance, and whether there are gender differences in the reaction to an attractive opponent. We also investigate if attractive people are more aggressive and thus more risk…
Home for One Year
Sometime around this week marks one year that I’ve been back home in the Bay Area. It’s been the best year of my life. My work is going well, I now live around 30 miles from two of my sisters and just around an hour and a half from my parents, I’ve finally cleaned the house, I have…
Green Machine
This is me pwning on a Green Machine.
ADD is a Child-rearing Culture Problem
I have a theory that’s probably wrong. It’s built on anecdotal hyperbole, e.g. I met this one guy one time, and he better than making theories than anyone. Anyway… — ADD is created by liberal / new-age child rearing. It comes from allowing children, during a critical formation period, to do whatever they want, and, similarly, to stop…
The Simple Reason New Year Resolutions Are Crap
New Years resolutions are supposedly for people who plan on making changes in their lives. But they really aren’t. They’re actually for people who only talk about making changes and never do. People who actually make changes, like losing 20 lbs., or getting back into a favorite hobby, just wake up one day and decide to do it.…
I Just Created the/r/webappsec Subreddit
If you guys are familiar with Reddit you’ll know that it works based off of subredits, i.e. mini-communities of a particular interest type. Some examples include politics, philosophy, network security, etc. I’ve just created another one for web application security, called webappsec. You can find it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/webappsec Come participate.
New Tumi Brief
I replaced my Tumi briefcase I’ve been carrying for around four years with a T-Pass model, meaning I can keep my laptop in it while the bag goes through security at the airport. So excellent. Here’s what it looks like:
Sexism and the Moralistic Fallacy
I have a friend who’s brought the topic of sexism to the discussion table a number of times, and it’s been on my mind as a result. I believe I have a concise way of explaining the cause of our existing sexism problems: Up until around 50 years ago–i.e. for the last tens of thousands of years–women have…
Disappointing Liberals
So I had one of my posts make the front page of Reddit on Friday. I ended up taking around 30,000 hits to the site and the ensuing conversation has been both maddening and enlightening. The post was on the topic of education, and the basic premise was that the problem with American kids doing poorly in school…
Plato’s Ultimate Argument Against God-given Morality
If someone says morality comes from God you must ask a simple question: Is there a reason he made certain things right and certain things wrong, or does it merely depend on his own ruling? For example, if he were to say the rape and torture of children is ok, would that make it true? If you say…
The Alien Social Scientist Test for Meaning
I have a basic test I put myself through when I think about whether my work and/or my life has meaning at any given moment. Consider what would happen if you were visited by alien scientists studying life forms from across the universe. They basically go from galaxy to galaxy, system to system, finding all the advanced cultures…
Sam Harris’s Talk in Berkeley Last Night
So I got to see Sam Harris speak last night in Berkeley. It was stellar. A few things stood out: Adam from Mythbusters was there. I spotted him first standing in the line and walked up to him. I said, “So, you either look like the guy I’m thinking of or you are that guy. Which is it?”…
The Rise of Chrome Usage on my Site
I’ve been on about Chrome pretty much since it launched and have predicted a hockey-stick rise in its adoption all along. That appears to be the case worldwide, but it’s especially true on my site. Check out these stats from the last two weeks of visitors to the site: It’s stunning what this browser has done for my…
Table Tennis: The Relationship Between Relaxation, Aggression, and Power
So my #1 issue in Table Tennis right now is getting angry, which results in a tightness that precludes the possibility for power. We see this in many sports where there is a primary swinging motion: If you are tense, you can’t get a full range of motion and can’t generate speed. The other issue with being tense…
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