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
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:…
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,…
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…
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.…
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?”…
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…
Blog Spam’s Latest Technique: Flattery
Over the last few months I’ve been noticing a trend in blog spam: The use of nice comments and outright flattery. Here are some examples: I find this interesting from an evolutionary biology standpoint. If you’ve read any of the literature on this fascinating topic you might be familiar with the question of: Who wins long-term battles for…
Random Thoughts on Religion
(cleaning out some notes I had jotted down. Now I’m putting them here instead) Religion needs to die because people don’t look for solutions when they think they already have one. We need to accept that we are all on a rock together, hurdling through space, and that we are alone save each other. It is this realization,…
The Beverage Approachability Paradox
Anyone who’s tried to learn to enjoy coffee, beer, or wine after not liking their first encounters with them has probably come up against the phrase, “You just have to learn to like it…” We are taught to believe there is a linear scale of difficulty from cheap to expensive, i.e. you have to learn to tolerate the…
Free Market Fanboys
I was reading the blogroll over at Overcoming Bias and, naturally, encountered quite a number of economics-focused blogs. What struck me was how overtly anti-Obama and anti-regulation they were. One after another they kept railing against regulation and government intervention designed to control human greed and stupidity. The answer was always the same: Let the market work! I…
Why America is Falling
My favorite thing to do is determine why complex things happen. Some examples include why over half of American’s deny evolution, why women prefer men that act a certain way, or why Scandinavian countries have such low crime rates and such high suicide rates. One thing I think about a lot is why America is falling. Specifically, I…
Happiness, Struggle, and Options
I think a lot about why people aren’t happy. I’m reading a book now by Bertrand Russell that offers a compelling theory: Modern people are unhappy because we have too many options and we don’t truly have to struggle for anything. To summarize: In the past (when we didn’t live in massive cities and have everything provided to…
Getting Back Into Table Tennis
After being dormant for many years in my favorite participation sport, I found my new Table Tennis club on the peninsula. It’s called the Peninsula Table Tennis Club (simple enough), and it’s located in Burlingame–right on the bay. I went this evening for the first time, and it was a stellar experience. The people were very inviting and…
Existing Bookstores Should Become Front-ends for Amazon
The bookstores are dead. Amazon won. gg. But people still enjoy going in and looking at books. And drinking coffee. And doing book signings, and poetry reading, etc. So, bookstores are good too. That’s why Amazon should buy them. They should become the bookstore interface to Amazon. They could even sell a bunch of other top-selling items that…
Two People Who Show Me How Lame I Am
You make me want to be a better man. Salman Khan Salman Khan is the creator of the Khan Academy, a free, open education project of epic proportions. It a man giving his time to truly educate people on a myriad of topics, all for free. He’s been offered millions to go big with the project and he…
Shallow on Purpose
I am nearly to the point where I can accept someone who decides to be shallow after seeing what it means to be deep and deciding that it’s too depressing. I don’t think many shallow people have done this, to be clear, but I think I see the point of those who have. The search for true meaning…
What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republicans? I’ll tell you what they did …
Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions ……of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act. Liberals passed the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act. Liberals created the Clean Water Act. What…
Summarized Differences Between iPhone and Android
This is an attempt to show the differences–not without bias, but without hate. Functionality The iPhone focuses on doing a few things in a very polished way, while Google stresses being able to do as many things as possible. As I mentioned when the iPhone launched, the iPhone will focus on how relatively few features are implemented, not…
Searching Google Bookmarks from Chrome’s Omnibox
When Google first launched Google Bookmarks a few years back I immediately stopped using del.icio.us and migrated everything to it. It was a controversial move at the time, as Delicious was so well established while Google was just throwing services at the ceiling to see what stuck. But it paid off. It is now possible to search all…
The Zero-Control Argument Against Free Will
I have, over the last few years, put out a number of arguments against the possibility of free will. My most popular so far has been that of my Two-Lever Argument, which can be found here. I now wish to make a separate, distinct argument argument against free will called the Zero-Control argument. The Zero-Control argument asks one…
Hitler, The Christian Warrior
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter.…
Huxley vs. Orwell: Whose Dystopia is Winning?
I posted here an absolutely brilliant and terrifying political cartoon. It’s about the way in which America (the West?) will fall. Will it be due to direct government prohibition of everything we enjoy (Orwell), or will it be due to the population becoming so overwhelmingly stupid that they cease to even think about anything worthwhile, like history, literature,…
Possibly the Most Important Political Cartoon, Ever
I tried to avoid hyperbole in this title. I failed. Take in this cartoon and you’ll see why. In short, this shows that it’s not the keeping of information from curious people that we have to worry about, it’s the inundation of information upon stupid people that’s much more dangerous. The risk is not that we’ll be unable…
The Decline of Reddit, Hacker News, and the United States
There is one pattern that we must learn to identify and guard against, and it goes like this: A small group of smart and progressive types set out to create something brilliant. They build a system that produces excellence, as long as the original concepts continue to be endorsed and nurtured by those who participate. The experiment is…
How to Use WPA-2 Enterprise in Windows 7
WPA-2 Enterprise is pretty sweet. It allows you to require an Active Directory (any back-end database, really) username and password in order to gain access to the wireless network. No more static passwords. And to manage access, you just manage Active Directory membership. Sounds great, but if you’ve tried this out of the box with Windows 7 you…
The Simple Truth About Religion That Liberals Ignore
I think it’s very odd that liberals feel the “right” way to be religious is to do so quietly. They seem to forget that religion deals, quite literally, with the fate of humanity’s soul, in the form of eternal suffering and damnation. It’s the kind of thing that prods believers into being somewhat vocal. And isn’t that the…
Operating Systems Used by DEFCON CTF Teams [Poll]
I was hanging out in the CTF room today at DEFCON enjoying the hilarious videos being projected when I suddenly wondered what OS most guys were running. A cursory glance revealed quite a spread, so I decided to take a lighting-fast poll. [ Note: these numbers are not really accurate. I got them very quickly while trying not…
Everything Wrong With Our World is Natural
Just a reminder: Our world is fucked up because nature made it that way. What progress we have made has been in direct opposition to that nature. There exists something called the Moralistic Fallacy, which states that the evil that exists in the world could not have come from nature. It gives us mistakes like: Because warfare is…
The List of Apple Trackpad Gestures
Apple just released a new, dedicated trackpad to be used with desktop systems. This reminded me that I always forget all the options available on my Macbook Pro trackpad, so I decided to put together a list of them. General Show the Desktop Swipe four (4) fingers upward. This invokes the Expose feature that shows your desktop. Show…
Restricting Access to Your Git Directory
One task you need to be sure to do when implementing git on a website is to make sure the .git directory isn’t available to the Internet. This can be done by placing an .htaccess file in the .git directory itself, but a better cleaner way is to place the following line in your main .htaccess file. RedirectMatch…
We Have It Backwards: Liberal Arts Should Guide Science and Technology
The term liberal arts denotes a curriculum that imparts general knowledge and develops the student’s rational thought and intellectual capabilities, unlike the professional, vocational, technical curricula emphasizing specialization. The contemporary liberal arts comprise studying literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science.1 I have been consumed lately by how little focus there seems to be in our country on…
Abstract/Distant Future Bias
All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits. Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core,…
Implement a Facebook Share Button Using a Single Line of Javascript
If you’ve messed with getting Facebook buttons on your site you know that there are a couple of ways to do it, but most of them involve using one of their various APIs. My issue is that I’ve been working on optimizing my site, so I didn’t want to invoke any external scripts at all. So I did…
Misuse of the Word ‘Irony’
Irony is one word that has been getting massacred more and more lately–mostly because it’s become in-fashion to use it to appear intelligent. The way most people are using it now is to reference any sort of coincidence with negative outcomes or potential: First Person: “I was running late for work today when I had a really important…
Left vs. Right-side Navigation: Which Big Sites Use Which?
I’m thinking about redesigning my theme again and I’m considering a few key design options: single vs. dual sidebars, and, if I go with a single, which side to put it on. First I started reading about the prominent opinions on the matter but quickly realized that I preferred the “what are people actually using” approach. One of…
Flattr, and Why It’s Brilliant
Flattr is an exciting new social networking / micro-payment service that allows you to set a donation amount that gets divided among all the different content you, um, flatter, online. You start by making a small static contribution with the service. This money is always gone at the end of the month–whether it’s to people whose content you…
Another Data Point in the iPhone vs. Android Debate: Re-sale Values
It’s pretty well accepted that one way to gauge something’s value is to see how it retains said value. One example would be, say, a BMW vs. a Ford Expedition: You can get into either one for around $35K, but after a year what will they be worth? The same goes for the mobile device market. I just…
Options as the Main Cause of Unhappiness
I’m reading a Bertrand Russell book right now that talks about happiness and how to achieve it in the modern world. One of his main points, which I think is excellent, is that modern, first-world people are unhappy because our basic necessities are met, and that the struggle for those (and the achievement of them) was what made…
A Bookmarklet That Displays HTTP Headers
I was looking for a Google Chrome extension that did something like Firefox’s Live HTTP Headers recently and tripped over this neat bookmarklet. It’s not quite as cool as a full Live HTTP Headers implementation, but it does pop up a small window with the current server’s HTTP headers in it. Just create a new bookmark and replace…
“I Don’t Care”
[ NSFW language ]
On Average, Mean, Median, and Mode
If you’re reading this you’re probably a bit geeky (like me), and you’ve no doubt been in at least 42 conversations about average vs. mean, etc, etc. So here’s a good summary of the basics for next time. First Things First: “Average” is a General Term If you’ve ever been lobbed the question of “what’s the difference between…
Standard Deviations Explained
If you read a lot but aren’t much into math you’ve probably heard the term standard deviation being tossed around, but didn’t know what it meant exactly. A standard deviation is a way to describe where someone (or something) falls on a scale, and, more specifically, how wide the range actually is. Bell curves are often presented when…
You Made it to the Belly Button
Anyone who wishes to make advances in a particular intellectual area have essentially two options: Be an uber-deathgod-genius like Newton or Einstein, or: Learn everything that came before you in that field, and then work to advance it. Wait, scratch the first one–both Newton and Einstein studied existing work extensively before making their contributions. Anyway, there’s one situation…
Nothing In, Nothing Out
High quality intellectual output comes from high-quality intellectual input. People who don’t consume ideas tend not to have any. And if they do have some, they tend to be either 1) poor ones, or 2) good ones that someone they’ve never heard of had hundreds of years ago. Simple take-away: If you want to have ideas, you need…