miscellany
One of the most natural inclinations people have is self-justification. Do something odd or questionable? No worries: your brain will happily develop some narrative about why it's perfectly reasonable or at least not your fault. This narrative can be particularly sticky if you're justifying some trait that you never consciously adopted but seemed to be always present. Of course, a good…
Well, actually not all of us, really just me (I?). I was listening to a vaguely interesting podcast this morning about David Bessis' book Mathematica, which (apparently?) emphasises the importance of intuition in mathematical thinking rather than logical proofs. In particular, the idea was that being a good mathematician is learning to train your intuition to agree with the reality, battering it…
One of my work colleagues has recently moved to Sydney, and was asking me about schools. Public? Selective? Catholic? Private? The second greatest topic of conversation in our blessed city after housing. There are no good answers; I think the most I can contribute is a biased, almost completely unresearched and probably fundamentally incorrect take on why it's such a mess. In the before times,…
I have more ideas than I know what to do with; sadly, this is not because I'm busy, but more that I lack motivation to make time for my own ideas. This is particularly frustrating for programming projects: I enjoy programming for the sake of it, I really want some things to exist, and I'm ok if I'm the only one who ever uses the program... yet usually I can muster at most 10 hours of enthusiasm…
I have a Fuji Xerox CP205 w. Which is a boring colour laser printer from many years ago, and like most laser printers it just keeps working. Unfortunately, it doesn't just work in Linux, so... I searched. Apparently, it uses a something called HBPL. There is/was a package that supported this that has recently disappeared from the internet made by someone who apparently had a few issues with linux…
A few years ago, I was on playground duty and a charming 17-year-old threw some of his rubbish on the ground. When I told him to sort it out his retort was 'I'm making sure the cleaners have a job'. And this is true, just as if you go and break windows it'll help your local glass company , but. you need to think a bit deeper, right? This kind of immature behaviour reminds me a lot of how Australia…
Because I was thinking about multi-member electorates , I couldn't help but jot down a few responses to common objections. This is not my first rodeo with off-the-cuff electoral reform proposals ( local copy ); hey, someone's got to be interested in voting systems! (1) By reducing the percentage of votes required to win a seat in parliament, the government will become less stable. Having…
One of the depressing moments in NSW politics last year was when the former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian, fronting ICAC over allegations that she had been improperly influenced due to a personal relationship, said: I don’t think it would be a surprise to anybody that we throw money at seats to keep them. Witness also the ex-Deputy Premier's bizarre pride in being known as Pork Barrelaro . You…
Short story: I'm going to be a Fusion Party candidate for Grayndler in the next Australian federal election. I even made a Facebook page and a Twitter account , and wrote a political ramble below. Regardless of what one thinks of Dunbar's number and the reasoning behind it, human brains evolved in the context of a small number of people. Maybe there were a hundred people in your group, and you…
I'm a capitalist. Why? I believe that money is the best proxy we've found for getting things done based on need. But I hate that it encourages companies to produce new goods constantly, and that this is a much more successful business strategy than trying to sell second hand goods. One of the curses of rich countries is that the overhead to fix/recirculate goods easily becomes too high relative to…
We recently went to our fourth carpet store today. This was four too many. But, now no-one can deny that I am qualified to rant about how their business model is broken and insane. Let me run you through how it works: Walk into store. Whoah, there are a lot of carpets on racks. They all look sort of the same. Mostly beige. There is no visible signage. No types of carpet, no pricing, no obvious…
One of my favourite ideas is that of a Local optimum , a mathematical concept that can be applied more broadly. If you've never heard of the term, it's that starting somewhere you may incrementally improve but never discover that a better solution exists. For instance, imagine you're in the 10th century, trying to develop the fastest means of transportation. The current state of the art is the…
As a programming father you need to be concerned about your budget. This means resisting the temptation to buy the most amazing hardware, and not running power-hungry CPUs all day. Ok, I lie - I'm not really that concerned about our budget, and I could afford to buy a new computer. I must admit to reading a pamphlet for our upcoming council election... and part of the reason I can afford a new…
Content warning: this is directed purely at programmers. At work we're deciding what configuration file format to use for a new piece of software, where the configuration will have to be produced or modified by non-expert users. Of course, as the developers of the project, it's always easy to forget about these, your most important users: those who won't have a deep engagement with your project…
A slightly amended version of this was subsequently published in the online version of the SMH I have a confession to make. I was one of the 394 candidates on the NSW Upper House ballot paper. And I want to apologise for its ridiculous number of boxes, more than any sane person should need to consider. It doesn't serve democracy to offer so many choices that are ignored. Last time we had a…
I'm happy that we're not all using COBOL and Fortran. Unfortunately, we're (almost) all still using some variant of the Bourne shell. There's no reason you have to... unless you want to worry about boring things like other people reading or running your code. So I've spent some time fiddling with es (it's a functional type shell with sane quoting rules; Jordan, you know you want it).
I often claim to live in the present; the past is a foreign land, and many will know how I feel about those. One of the many implications of this attitude is that I forget... and unfortunately, this includes forgetting 'ideas', which tend to blaze through my awareness only to fizzle in the atmosphere of my ongoing lethargy. When I went to write this post, I finally remembered a meta idea . Oddly,…
Ambiguity of the week: How do I get this banana to work?
I always had this idea that we were a trifle self-absorbed when we studied history. Spending most of the time on the last century or two seemed wrong, and what there was of earlier times seemed to have huge gaps in the narrative. (let's forget about nationalistic obsessions for now) But somehow - probably the influence of xkcd - I realised that our scale was odd. After all, if we measure in years,…