Monthly Archives: May 2006

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An Excerpt from Failed States

That Noam Chomsky and his wacky ideas. Doesn’t he know that might makes right and playing nice with others never gets you anywhere? Sheesh! One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like [...]

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Testing is fun!

Scott Sehlhorst writes a rather fine article on strategies for testing software that’s difficult to test. Telling is that he leads with a Kent Beck quote: “If testing costs more than not testing then don’t do it.” This certainly goes contrary to the “test everything!” mantra that — usually correctly — goes around the software [...]

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George Bush doesn’t like Science

I’d put off reading about el Presidente’s signing statements because, honestly, I’d rather just wait until the coronation to find out that he’s abolished congress and the supreme court and declared himself emperor for life. Anyway, this joyful little nugget appeared as part of the Boston Globe’s piece on W’s executive signing orders. Dec. 30: [...]

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Software Development Analogy

It’s funny because it’s true.

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The Scourge of the Drinking Class

Frobes published a wonderful battle cry for people with healthy attitudes about work and life. Every month, the U.S. Labor Department releases another jobs report that becomes fodder for the financial press. Yay, we created 138,000 new jobs! Yet nobody ever seems to ask if people actually, you know, like the jobs that have been [...]

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Site graphs

Hey look, an amusing tool to visualize web sites as graphs. Here are a few sites that I am or have been ascoiated with in one way or another over the years. Graphs are fun. Everybody likes graphs.

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Ozone recovery: good news and a puzzle

A study recently accepted to the Journal of Geophysical Research suggests that deliberate CFC reductions are responsible for partial recovery of the ozone layer. However, in certain circumstances, the recovery is more than can be explained by CFC reductions alone. What they found is both good news and a puzzle. The good news: In the [...]

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Fun with domestic spying

A former NSA analyst suggests that the Bush administration’s much-loved warrantless domestic spying program could be causing more harm than good. This scattershot attempt at data mining drags FBI agents away from real investigations, while destroying the NSA’s credibility in the eyes of law enforcement and the public in general. That loss of credibility makes [...]

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Helpful hints for students

Every student should learn from Alex Halavais’ How to cheat good. 8. Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text This is my Number 1 piece of advice, even if it is numbered eight. When you copy things from the web into Word, ignoring #3 above, don’t just “Edit > Paste” it into your document. When [...]

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SciFi Now!

We’ll never top that pesky Kahn if we don’t have cloaking technology! Two separate teams, including Professor Pendry’s, have outlined ways to cloak objects in the journal Science. These research papers present the maths required to verify that the concept could work. But developing an invisibility cloak is likely to pose significant challenges. Both groups [...]

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