- file under "misc".
Aaaand another, briefer book recommendation, this time fiction: Obsetrix by Naomi Kritzer . Obsetrix is a novella set in the USA in the near future, following the story of Dr. Liz from North Dakota, who encounters “a fundamentalist cult in desperate need of an OB/GYN.” The story is sharp and extremely tense in places, and although I’m not a doctor, it seems Kritzer paid a lot of attention to the…
Hello everyone! Today I want to share a great book I’ve recently read, The Psychology of Software Teams by Dr. Cat Hicks . The book should be very interesting to anyone working on software and also other types of knowledge work as well. Dr. Hicks is a research psychologist, and although the book is written for a non-science audience, it’s still 30% bibliography by weight. Everything she’s written…
Hi everyone! Today in "sci-fi things that have happened": an #AI #agent that was being tested without guardrails to find #security vulnerabilities, found a vulnerability in the closed sandbox it was running in, escaped it's environs, then hacked into another website looking for the solution to the challenge it had been set... Guardian article here , OpenAI explanation here , Simon Willison's…
Fatma is a nurse who's supporting a group of displaced people who are fleeing a militia that attacked them and burnt down their villages. Fatma has been travelling for days into the countryside in a Toyota Landcruiser to find this group and care for them. Before she left the capital, she was given a handful of cheap mobile phones. The IT officer had paired them all, so they could network with each…
The debate over immigration is often presented as being between people who want to let in 'some' immigrants, and people who want to let in as few as possible. This is an artificial framing that includes only a small spectrum of possible arguments. The book "Open Borders" by Zack Wienersmith and Bryan Caplan makes a 'radical' case in a comic book format. An introduction to the book is here. I found…
In this article, I'm going to explain why I think that ride-sharing & self-driving cars without 100% electrification and car-to-car coordination & fleet orchestration may be a recipe for gridlock and an impact in the wrong direction on climate change. First, what is the impact of ubiquitous ride-sharing on traffic in inner cities? Some research shows that as the cost of a car ride decreases, more…
“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” - John 3…
This book is billed as being for people who want to align their heads with the directions their hearts have already taken on the issue of same-sex marriage and the acceptance of non-straight people in general. Specifically, if you’re a committed Christian and believe in marriage equality, but can’t square this theologically with what you have read in the Bible or heard in Church, and are minded to…
I just finished reading God, Gender and the Bible by Deborah F. Sawyer , which I gave Bethan a few birthdays ago. It's a short but weighty look at how God and gender roles interact in the Bible. It's academic in its approach and uses, among other things, Judith Butler's theories of gender performativity and Luce Irigaray's ideas of memesis to dissect gender roles in several contexts - most…
Reading a story aloud every evening for months on end does strange things to your brain. Thus, after the third or fourth month of reading 'The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse' by Beatrix Potter to my little daughter, something clicked, or maybe snapped, and I suddenly realised that the story is actually about Communism and the secret police, and has a surprising moral that is relevant to these…
Heartbleed is no doubt the worst security bug to hit the Internet in a very, very long time, and this comes hot on the heels of serious SSL certificate checking bugs in iOS and OpenSSL. Bloomberg says the NSA knew of Heartbleed and said nothing. The ODNI forcefully denies this. Unfortunately the denial is difficult to accept, and here is why. Vendors often credit the people or organisations who…
So I was given this book as a present by my brother – thanks! – which presented a good opportunity to read a book I’d normally never pick up; due to (a) what I know about Objectivism, and (b) what people who like Rand seem to get up to: see Paul Ryan, the Koch brothers, etc. But! I will say this: to its credit, and taken as a book, considered apart from its philosophical, moral and political…
I'm sure there's a better way of doing this with only one scale operation, but I don't know the maths. This took hours to find, and so hopefully it will save someone else the time. The Java code I'm sure can be translated to other languages relatively easily. AffineTransform r = new AffineTransform(); r.rotate(Math.toRadians(90), width/2, height/2); r.scale(width, height); /* *…
I recently read that David Cameron said that he wanted to see a 100th Armistice commemoration "that, like the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, says something about who we are as a people" . Armistice was signed on Nov 11 1918, but the British blockade of German ports was only lifted in March 1919. The blockade killed some 800,000 Germans, mostly in the end phase, and the majority civilians. The…
Paranoia appears to be the order of the day, given what we know about the NSA and GCHQ thanks to Edward Snowden. Absent from the stories so far is any mention of Bitcoin . I find this odd - Bitcoin is the most cypherpunky of all crypto technologies, after all. I want to make the case, without necessarily endorsing it, that we should be much more suspicious of Bitcoin than we are at present. 1)…
So after spelunking through the Spring source, I found out that it was my fault, of course. Why: I needed a in my spring XML, even with nothing else, just to tell Spring to look for ${...}. My spring schema version was on 2.5, which of course doesn't have the global Environment stuff and assumes you don't want it. This lesson brought to you by many tram rides and a sleeping toddler.
Patterns of Refactored Agency : Not that I agree with all of it, but it's a very interesting to apply the refactorings to various aspects of life and see what happens: "I’ve found it to be a good general-purpose cognitive tool to try to see the world with agency located in unconventional places. Normally, we like to imagine ourselves as the chief agents in our lives – making choices, taking…
Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky : "It’s been interesting watching [napsterisation] unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup."
New Left Review - Rob Lucas: The Critical Net Critic : In this argument, what Carr termed ‘intellectual technologies’ in particular—map, clock, typewriter—both augmented our mental abilities and transformed them. Each carried an ‘intellectual ethic’, a hidden norm of mental functioning, that might be obscure to users—and even inventors—yet which shaped them nonetheless. As these technologies…
These links all contain spoilers. Ebert , The Guardian , and others will say this is Pixar being Disneyfied. But this post is not about them. The New Inquiry: " Just Another Princess Movie " on why Brave is not just another princess movie. On the other hand, Mr. Teacup says Brave is not brave , and that the central character is actually the Mother, for whom the message is "don’t play too much in…
With a full title of "Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States", this is a fairly old (1970) but nevertheless current and interesting book. Written by an economist making forays into political science, his first point is that 'exit' is not necessarily the only response to discontent, dispute or 'unsatisfaction', and that 'voice' - aka protest, causing a…
When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed | News | The Week UK : "Typical was the headline on a short article that ran in the 19 April 2005 edition of USA Today: 'USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.' During that one year, American deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation's population. Government health experts were…
I read about The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke on Tim Bray's blog and thought "that sounds interesting", and so it is. I'm about half-way through this impressively researched book - it's 1/3rd notes, references, and indexes by weight - and so far I find it both highly educational and deeply depressing. Every time I put down the book I take a deep breath and think "what a mess! ". And so it's a pleasure…
20120513:See update below Future tense, IX: Out of the wilderness by Charles Murray - The New Criterion : "Upon reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers many years ago, I became fascinated with the ebbs and flows of human achievement, and especially those points in world history that have been associated with a flowering of great accomplishment. The most famous are Athens in the Periclean age and…
LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | The Exegete: "There are, in fact, numerous ways to find a trail through this wilderness of crazed speculation. At one and the same time, the Exegesis is an expository prop to Dick’s later fiction, a kind of creative workshop testing out ideas that would find form in VALIS and The Divine Invasion ; the tortuous searchings of a remarkably resilient spirit mangled by…