Bill Mill

"If you have to lie to justify being a war criminal, you have to lie thoroughly. And you have to..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:19:09 -0400

“If you have to lie to justify being a war criminal, you have to lie thoroughly. And you have to destroy or amend any evidence to the contrary. That’s what Rodriguez has been doing, by destroying the tapes and changing the factual record. It’s called obstruction of justice. It’s also a crime.

But we live in a republic where the CIA is not considered governed by the rule of law - an alarming situation which has been legitimized by president Obama. In that sense, the CIA is a state unto itself.

”

- The Lies Of Jose Rodriguez - Andrew Sullivan
End the CIA.

"all the little bits of complexity, all those cases where indecision caused one option that probably..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:53:11 -0400

“all the little bits of complexity, all those cases where indecision caused one option that probably wasn’t even needed in the first place to be replaced by two options, all those bad choices that were never remedied for fear of someone somewhere having to change a line of code…they slowly accreted until it all got out of control, and we got comfortable with systems that were impossible to understand.

We did this. We who claim to value simplicity are the guilty party. See, all those little design decisions actually matter, and there were places where we could have stopped and said “no, don’t do this.” And even if we were lazy and didn’t do the right thing when changes were easy, before there were thousands of users, we still could have gone back and fixed things later. But we didn’t.

”

- We Who Value Simplicity Have Built Incomprehensible Machines - James Hague

Nicholas Nixon

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:28:41 -0400

Nicholas Nixon

"And at JP Morgan, just like at any other bank, the cheapest cost of funds is always deposits. JP..."

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:16:59 -0400

“And at JP Morgan, just like at any other bank, the cheapest cost of funds is always deposits. JP Morgan has hundreds of billions of dollars in excess deposits just because it’s too big to fail, and has an implicit government backstop. It’s bonkers that it should then be able to take the resulting ultra-low cost of funds, and turn it into eight-figure bonuses to people like Drew, all for taking that money and playing on derivatives indices in London.

As John Macaskill points out, the CIO, by its own faulty measurements, had for the past two quarters more money at risk than JP Morgan’s entire investment bank — and that was with a more lenient risk measurement and with a lower cost of capital. In reality, the CIO’s risk levels were vastly greater than those at the investment bank, as we discovered after the blow-up.

”

- Why JP Morgan’s CIO found it so easy to make money - Felix Salmon

The World Mapped By How Often People View Maps Of It - Stamen...

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:04:00 -0400

The World Mapped By How Often People View Maps Of It - Stamen Design

Europe and Africa are in the middle. For North America, Florida and the bi-costal densities are the only defining features. South America is absent.

Colorado Springs, from The New West, Robert Adams

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:01:01 -0400

Colorado Springs, from The New West, Robert Adams

"The center of your application is not the database. Nor is it one or more of the frameworks you may..."

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:15:09 -0400

“The center of your application is not the database. Nor is it one or more of the frameworks you may be using. The center of your application are the use cases of your application.

Here’s what an application should look like. The use cases should be the highest level and most visible architectural entities. The use cases are at the center. Always! Databases and frameworks are details! You don’t have to decide upon them up front. You can push them off until later, once you’ve got all the use cases and business rules figured out, written, and tested.

”

- NO DB — “Uncle” Bob Martin

Welcome to Life: A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:30:04 -0400

Welcome to Life: A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.

"What I’m saying here is, it’s disingenuous to live in the world of product and branding..."

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:15:21 -0400

“What I’m saying here is, it’s disingenuous to live in the world of product and branding and @KingJames six days a week and then get mad about loyalty and community on Sundays. But it’s as if we need the occasional issue on which to vent our subliminal resentment toward the Nike model just to remind ourselves that there is a loyalty-and-community dimension here, even if it mostly exists in memory and fantasy. Because if there isn’t, then what the hell is a sports team? Which is the question I keep coming back to, now that I’ve got one.”

- An open letter to Seattle SuperSonics fans from an OKC Thunder supporter - Brian Phillips

"We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:27:00 -0400

““We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn,” says Unz. “Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population…

“Perhaps 500,000 or more premature American deaths may have resulted from Vioxx, a figure substantially larger than the 3,468 deaths of named individuals acknowledged by Merck during the settlement of its lawsuit. And almost no one among our political or media elites seems to know or care about this possibility.”

”

- When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed - Alexander Cockburn

"what’s great for avoiding straightforward failures becomes a nightmare when your goal is to..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:50:05 -0400

“what’s great for avoiding straightforward failures becomes a nightmare when your goal is to guarantee that no undefined behaviour happens. The decoupling between raising of the exception and handling it, that makes avoiding failures so easy in C, makes it virtually impossible to guarantee that the program never runs info undefined behaviour”

- Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C - Martin Sústrik

"Matthew Crawford argues in Shop Class as Soulcraft that white collar work in general is hard to..."

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:04:33 -0400

“Matthew Crawford argues in Shop Class as Soulcraft that white collar work in general is hard to objectively evaluate and that this explains why offices are so political. Employees are judged on their sensitivity and other nebulous attributes because unlike a welder, for example, they can’t be judged directly on their work. He argues that blue collar people workers greater freedom of speech at work because their work can be objectively evaluated.

Colleagues can identify great data analysts, DBAs, and others whose work isn’t on public display. But this isn’t easy to do through a bureaucratic process, and so technical competence is routinely under-compensated in large organizations. On the other hand, reputation spreads more efficiently outside of organizational channels. This may help explain why highly competent people are often more appreciated by their professional communities than by their employers.

”

- How do you know when someone is great? — John Cook

"An Apple programmer, apparently by accident, left a debug flag in the most recent version of the Mac..."

Sun, 06 May 2012 17:35:38 -0400

“An Apple programmer, apparently by accident, left a debug flag in the most recent version of the Mac OS X operating system. In specific configurations, applying OS X Lion update 10.7.3 turns on a system-wide debug log file that contains the login passwords of every user who has logged in since the update was applied. The passwords are stored in clear text.”

- Apple security blunder exposes Lion login passwords in clear text - Emil Protalinski
This is the state of software today.

"Do not feel absolutely certain of anything."

Sun, 06 May 2012 16:46:23 -0400

“Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.”

- Betrand Russell
via Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Teachers — Alex Tabarrok

"Nothing that Elsevier has said gives us any reason to end the boycott. They are behaving much as one..."

Sat, 05 May 2012 17:14:25 -0400

“Nothing that Elsevier has said gives us any reason to end the boycott. They are behaving much as one would expect: offering minimal concessions that will look as good as possible while keeping their profits intact. I realize that asking them to deal with the objections to bundling and exposing their journals to genuine competition is making a demand they are most unlikely to accede to, since their huge profits are based on stifling this competition. So instead, we must press on with the more positive step of developing alternative models, something I shall report on in the near future.”

- Elsevier’s recent update to its letter to the mathematical community - Tim Gowers

The lack of history in the post-Internet age - Jon Rafman

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:39:36 -0400

The lack of history in the post-Internet age - Jon Rafman

"Having met [Christian Joy] at the Perimeter Institute and at several conferences, I found something..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:49:28 -0400

“Having met [Christian Joy] at the Perimeter Institute and at several conferences, I found something poignant and even touching about Joy’s joyless quest. I mean, picture a guy who made up his mind at some point that, let’s say, √2 is actually a rational number, all the mathematicians having been grievously wrong for millennia—and then unironically held to that belief his entire life, heroically withstanding the batterings of reason. Show him why 2=A2/B2 has no solution in positive integers A,B, and he’ll answer that you haven’t understood the very concept of rational number as deeply as him. Ask him what he means by “rational number,” and you’ll quickly enter the territory of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. So why not just leave this dead parrot where it lies?”

- Bell’s-inequality-denialist Joy Christian offers me $200K if scalable quantum computers are built - Scott Aaronson

Calexico - Matt Gainer

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:36:00 -0400

Calexico - Matt Gainer

"They conclude, “We found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias.” But of..."

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:10:08 -0400

“They conclude, “We found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias.” But of course that’s the sort of finding regarding publication bias of findings on publication bias that you’d expect would get published. What we really need is a careful meta-analysis to estimate the level of publication bias in studies of publication bias of studies of publication bias.”

- Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias « Andrew Gelman

"The same tradeoff kills many proposals for fancy new ways to visualize code. Hundreds of papers have..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:33:01 -0400

“The same tradeoff kills many proposals for fancy new ways to visualize code. Hundreds of papers have been published about new ways to query and visualize code. They look pretty in cherry-picked examples, but they don’t work for the whole range and scale of real world programs. So why bother with the complexity of limited purpose features? Coming up with new general purpose code visualizations is actually very hard, especially if you are not allowed to change the language to help out.

The fundamental reason IDE’s have dead-ended is that they are constrained by the syntax and semantics of our programming languages. Our programming languages were all designed to be used with a text editor. It is therefore not surprising that our IDE’s amount to tarted-up text editors. Likewise our programming languages were all designed with an imperative semantics that efficiently matches the hardware but defies static visualization. Indeed it would be a miracle if we could slap a new IDE on top of an old language and magically alter its syntactic and semantic assumptions. I don’t believe in miracles.

”

- An IDE is not enough — Jonathan Edwards