I got my teeth whitened today. Ah, vanitas vanitatum! “Have you done this before?” the esthetician asked me. “No . . . have you?” Read more →
April 2013
Good News, Bad News
Most days I park on Level 5 of the office parking structure because that’s where the open spaces are at the time I arrive.1 This morning I got a spot on Level 1! A guy was pulling out just as I was pulling in and I got the spot. 🙂 Unfortunately, when I went out for lunch, I walked up four levels out of habit and couldn’t find my car. 🙁 1There are actually a lot of open spaces on lower levels but they’re “reserved” for people who aren’t there, which is rubbish. If you’re really that important, you should be the first person in every morning and you can have any parking space you want. Related articles Parking: Tips for Finding the Best Space (allstate.com) Read more →
The Gettier Problem
What does it mean to say that you “know” something is true? According to traditional philosophical thinking, you can be said to know that some proposition P is true if and only if: P is true. You believe that P is true. You are justified in believing that P is true. These three conditions jointly form the concept of justified true belief (JTB). As an example, let’s examine my claim that I know Paris is the capital of France. Unless an edict to the contrary has come down in the last few minutes, Paris is the capital of France, I believe that Paris is the capital of France, and I’m justified in believing that based on available evidence. So according to the concept of justified true belief, I know that Paris is the capital of France. Gettier Problems Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say I wake up in the morning,… Read more →
Always Costly
In democratic societies, there exists an urge to do something even when the goal is not precise, a sort of permanent fever that turns to innovations (which) are always costly. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1831) Read more →
He Stopped Loving Her Today
Country music legend George Jones dies at 81 — CNN.com Read more →
The Lightning-Bug and the Lightning
This picture was taken just after I said to Mark Twain, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” And Twain said, “That’s a good one! I’ve got to write that down!” Actually, the Twain statue is just inside the main entrance of Doe Library at UC Berkeley. I asked the nerdy-looking Asian girl at the front desk, “Who’s the guy on the bench?” She stared at me for a second. “Kidding,” I said. “At first, I thought it was Albert Einstein,” she said, “so it doesn’t surprise me when people don’t know.” Read more →
Demonizing Bogeymen
From Salon, before the bombers were identified, captured and/or killed: Shame on everyone who assumed that the bombers were Muslims from a foreign land! Wait — what? They were Muslims from a foreign land? OK, never mind. Calling out “far-right extremists” for “demonizing bogeymen” is either hilariously ironic or depressingly symptomatic of American decline. Since Salon is not known for its satire, I have to go with the latter. Read more →
Who Farted?
Occam Has Mislaid His Razor
Silicon Valley Discriminates Against Women, Even If They’re Better — PBS NewsHour An academic says that Silicon Valley is “not a meritocracy.” He doesn’t offer any evidence to support that. He just looked around and noticed more men than women in the high-tech workforce. The fact that there are more members of Group A doing X than there are members of Group B doing X is not evidence that members of Group B are being discriminated against in their efforts to do X. In particular, he says that only 3 percent of tech firms in the Valley were founded by women, as though founding a tech firm is a fun thing that everyone should want to do. Founding a startup is an ultra-high-risk activity that requires insane amounts of time and sacrifice. Do you want to have friends? A social life? Do you have a family? Do you want to… Read more →
These People Who See Right Through You
These people who see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice. — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead Read more →
Seamless Integration
There’s an unwritten rule in the software business that any integration between two systems must be described as “seamless,” the result being that the word no longer has any meaning. My favorite seamless integration storyline took place years ago when IBM had a joint marketing pact with Vignette, and offered “seamless integration” between the WebSphere application server and the Vignette content management system. In fact, the two systems weren’t integrated at all by any definition of the word “integrated” that I know about. We had to write our own interfaces to move data between them. The funny thing is, that is seamless integration if you think about it, in that there’s no seam between two things that are not connected at all. For example, my shirt neatly integrates sleeves, cuffs, pocket, collar . . . but not seamlessly. There are seams all over the place. Whereas the shirt is seamlessly… Read more →
To be useful was the best thing the old men ever hoped for themselves, and to be aimless was their worst fear. — Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Staples: That Wasn’t So Easy
I was checking out at Staples with my new purchase of a spiral notebook. The checker scanned the barcode and I started to swipe my credit card. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t swipe it yet.” Time passed. “Okay, go ahead.” After I swiped the card, she said, “Can you read me the four-digit security code on the front of the card.” I read it to her. More time passed. “Can I see the card please?” she said. “I thought this was supposed to be easy.” “It is easy.” “Okay, sorry.” Along with my Staples receipt, I was given a coupon for 40 percent off a different, more expensive brand of notebook. I had actually looked at the other brand of notebook when I was in the store, but didn’t think it was worth the extra cost. If I’d had the coupon at the time, I might have used… Read more →
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. — I Corinthians 13:11
Opting Out
Best-educated moms are also more likely to ‘opt out,’ research finds — Life Inc. Opt out of what? It turns out “opt out” means opt out of the workforce. How is a mom staying home and raising her kids considered “opting out”? Read more →
Every New Feature is a New Failure Point
The TPMS warning light on my car dashboard is lit up, which, according to the owner’s manual, indicates a malfunction in the Tire Pressure Monitoring System, a system designed to alert me, via a different warning light, when the tire pressure gets too low. It’s a completely unnecessary system to begin with because I can monitor the tire pressure myself, as drivers have done since the invention of the automobile. Let’s add a completely unnecessary new system so when it breaks, the owner will have to pay to fix it. Can I just ignore the warning light? I don’t know. The worst-case scenario is that the TPMS not only breaks but creates a domino effect that knocks out a critical system that I actually need. Toilers in software development can draw their own analogies . . . Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Watch Out for the Gospel of the Times
everything is permitted absolute freedom of movement that is, without leaving the cage 2+2 doesn’t make 4: once it made 4 but today nothing is known in this regard — Nicanor Parra, “Watch Out for the Gospel of the Times” Read more →
But THIS Guy, He Might Be For Real
Riddle
Q: How do bananas get downstairs? A: They slide down the bananaster. Read more →
HW’s Movie Reviews: 42
Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball! Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already. You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.” When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities. You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now. Let’s move on already. Rating: Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco… Read more →