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:…
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…
Less Than 10% of Women in Netherlands Work Full-time
From slate.com: Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the…
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…
Omnibox Instant Search Within Google Chrome Version 9
I just enabled Omnibox Instant Search within the latest version of Chrome. It is most excellent. I just cannot be more happy with Chrome as a browser–seriously. I’m on the developer track, and here’s how to enable the Omnibox Search: Go to Options in Chrome and click on the Basics tab. Then find the section seen below: If…
Android Gaining Momentum
Last month, Nielsen’s stats showed that Android was the preferred platform of new smartphone buyers, suggesting that big-budget marketing campaigns for devices such as the Droid lineup and HTC’s Evo were paying off.In fact, Androids outsold iPhones for the first time ever in the first half of 2010.Nevertheless, these stats still show iOS devices as the leading smartphones…
Google Contacts Personifies My Disdain For Android
I think Google is good at data and poor at presentation. I submit as evidence the experience of using Google Contacts. Every time I enable chat within Gmail I get a different experience. Some of my contacts show up, some don’t. Some are listed twice, others are shown as email addresses (many of which I don’t recognize). And…
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 Liberals
(this too is a collection of notes I have, which will possibly later become actual posts/essays) Liberals view a lack of education and a presence of superstition as an alternative way of life rather than treating these things as conditions that need to be eradicated. Education is fundamentally judgmental. The very idea admits of believing there are right…
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…
Being Efficient
Physical Fitness diet exercise Sleep Afternoon nap No food at night Limit light at night Limit hunger for stimulation Embrace idleness — Portion control: eat slow, eat to not be hungry, not to get full no food after 8pm; no heavy meals minimize “white” foods healthy snacks at work coffee breakfast @ home 30 minute walks, 3x week situps…
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.…
Finally Replaced my Luggage with Tumi
I finally replaced my quite-lame primary piece of luggage (a massive Samsonite bag of very low quality) with a medium-sized piece from Tumi’s ALPHA line. This is a purchase that I’ve been wanting to make for about three years now, and it actually does improve the travel experience now that I have. I do enjoy Tumi’s offerings, and…
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…
My Ideal Life
I think an ideal lifestyle would look like the following: Wake up and exercise for one hour. P90X, biking, treadmill, whatever. And some light weights. But every day–Monday through Friday. Cook breakfast. Real food. Natural food. With fire and steel. Spend four hours doing Open Coursework from a major university, like Harvard, Stanford, or CMU/MIT if I’m feeling…
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…