Social Game
As a result of some deep procrastination, I’ve been spending far too much time reading junk in the manosphere, which I only recently discovered. These collection of blogs promote topics such as MGTOW (men going their own way), MRA (men’s…
The Absence of Libertarian Countries
Salon has a rousing piece of claptrap provokingly titled The question libertarians just can’t answer. Fortunately, without building up any suspense (which would in this case be correlated with reader annoyance), the author, Michael Lind, comes right out with it:…
Distributed Defense
Recently there has been much brouhaha about 3D printed weapons. Mostly these reactions have been media-generated. Cody Wilson, an enterprising young lad has, for the past year, been perfecting the technical artistry behind the manufacture of a working gun printed…
Let’s have more Billionaires
I’ve recently come across another missive from Thom Hartmann, that reveals a lack of firm economic grounding. The very title of the article, “Ayn Rand’s Gospel of Selfishness and Billionaire Empowerment is Plaguing America” and it’s subtitle “The United States…
Chasing GDP
According to wikipedia, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) can be calculated a number of ways. I’d like to pick out (on?) the most common one for this rant. GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports −…
Born v. Greenspan
PBS Frontline has produced a show, The Warning which documents the CFTC’s attempt to introduce regulation to avoid a financial crisis brought about by the derivatives market. It cronicles how the three marketeers, Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin successfully shut Born…
Stack Storage and Garbage Collection
Recently, I ran across Mike Vanier’s page containing his opinions on Scalable Computer Programming Languages. I agree almost entirely with his list: garbage collection no pointers or pointer arithmetic a foreign function interface to the C language static type checking…
The Hyped Success of MOOCs
I tried to find an experience report written by one of the teachers, because I vaguely remember reading possibly reading one, but could not find any through google scholar. So, I don’t know about the logistics of running the course…
Financial Networks
According to The Great Revealing post at Divine Cosmos it seems that Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Zurich have released a paper [The network of global corporate control] which executes a version of…
Editor Wars
Normally, I use vi for most of my editing work. But, I’ve been hearing much about emacs and its ability to do a better job at syntax highlighting, code completion, spell checking, even a writegood-mode for detecting passive voice. Emacs…