dissenter

The media has been placing the blame for the imperfect oath on the Chief Justice, but the fault appears to be with the President.

In the clip of the Vice Presidential oath the first phrase is "I [name] do solemnly swear..." Both the Justice and the Vice President get it right. In the clip of the Presidential oath, the Chief Justice attempts to speak the full first phrase, but is interrupted in the middle by the President.

The President is the one who starts the deviation. The Chief Justice then goes on to mangle an important line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5VB4LgOH58

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EHOHe-_uQg

You're approaching it from the wrong perspective. English is the lingua franca. If your colleague were really nice, he would translate his message into Hindi, but that isn't an effective use of time. Neither is writing in Simple English.

Let the recipient use a dictionary. After a while he won't have to anymore.

On a related note, whuffie is not a new invention. There is no difference whatsoever between whuffie and money. They are perfectly synonymous. I get the feeling the author, and many of his readers, seem to believe that he has created something distinct from money (from the Wikipedia: 'Whuffie has replaced money...'). Whuffie, as a currency, is no more different from the dollar than the króna is from the euro.

As a descriptor of currency in an inconsequential economy it is somewhat useful. I happen to prefer the word "karma."

Really? I take your point to mean that two smart people can communicate better using obscure vocabulary when they are communicating only between themselves. High baud necessarily implies higher average information throughput, so there would have to be a significant number of these words in the communication.

Could you point to some examples of letters between two famous people using this method?

Most notable people seem to prefer simple vocabulary, and in fact, many of them go so far as to recommend it. The people who prefer complex vocabulary (cultural studies journals, intellectuals) do not seem to accomplish anything of value, and indeed they are routinely accused of being obscurantists.

(Ground rule: scientific jargon excepted, since it is not a part of the vocabulary. But, feel free to look at letters by Newton, Einstein, Godel, Hilbert, anyone really.)

Wrong answer. (Though a true statement.)

The tests are scaled differently. That's all there is to it.

http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/gre_0809_interpreting...

Funny, I heard a rumor that the only people who got 800s on the verbal section were foreigners. (Read: people who can't speak English.) The explanation was that they were the only ones willing to invest enough time to form-fit the ETS's method of verbal testing.

In my own experience the verbal section of the GRE was entirely nonsensical. The vocabulary was difficult and exactly the type of vocabulary I would use if it was my goal not to be understood, but at least I could see how it might be a useful and reliable differentiator.

Nobody uses these words often enough for them have any statistically meaningful shades of meaning. If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?

The reading comprehension made less sense. I don't think it's possible to select a passage that has an unambiguous meaning and yet will be misunderstood by a statistically meaningful number of ambitious, college-educated people. So the question-making process must necessarily be corrupt.

I recall many questions which wasted much of my time. Several possible responses, none of which are obviously wrong. I know which one I feel is right---or maybe I do. Which one does the GRE feel is right? Even on sample tests, where I could see the supposed answer, I would read and reread the passages, and understand little about what the correctness or incorrectness of the responses had to do with the meaning of the passage.

I don't think you can presume to have an objective and clear-cut A or B answer as you might on the SAT. The granularity of college-level material is simply too fine. The only thing you can measure is how well you have matched yourself to the GRE's way of thinking, and that is not a particularly valuable expenditure of time.

Yes, and let's not forget that a generalized test is still useful at the graduate level, for a variety of reasons. The one that comes to mind when you mention subject tests is that people sometimes switch disciplines. I have several friends who went from math to physics and vice versa. They intended to research problems which are closely related to what they've done in their own department but that just happen to be worked on by professors in the other. Does it make sense to hold a math major up to the standard of a physics major taking the physics subject test? No way---he couldn't possibly compare, even though he may be more ably suited to tackling a problem that's being worked on in the physics department. So having a generalized quantitative/analytical section is helpful in at least this case. If the physics professor looking at your application knows nothing about what his colleague is doing (your intended advisor), at least he has a reasonable indication you aren't a dunce.

Airline recap: entirely focused on operations, always on the brink of collapse. Operations consist largely of optimizations problems, so lots of attention is paid to these problems (peanuts vs. pretzels). For whatever reason customers are not insulated from the volatility (pretzels, bag fees, route duration, availability, etc., in addition to price fluctuation).

Typically you see finely-tuned optimization in old and evolved markets, e.g., cola, where it makes sense, and where customers are insulated from changes in the product or service. Here though it reeks of over-optimization and misapplied attention. Nobody makes a fuss about boarding the bus. When the price of corn goes up I don't have to use a can-opener on my soda.

What's wrong with airplanes? Why don't they work like buses? Let's try to figure this out. Investors have long recognized airlines as a valuable service but a terrible business.

1.) We really like to fly but our technology is behind the curve?

2.) Irrationality of consumers has created government controls which muck too much with an already fragile system? (security lines, shoe removal, bomb sniffing, personal searches, over-training of pilots, too-expensive pilots, burdensome safety regulations, burdensome inspections, all of these perpetuated by expectation)

3.) The average passenger does not fly enough, and so he is inefficient?

4.) Dependent on fixed-location airports? And their regulation?

5.) There's no clear cause and effect, it's simply a manifestation of the system?

6.) ?

7.) Demand for flight is very volatile but the capital which supports it is very expensive and illiquid?

(one red-herring: fuel efficiency, planes appear to be more fuel efficient than driving alone)

(another red-herring: this google hit http://www.brookings.edu/testimony/2005/0928business_morriso... states the obvious but does little to explain what makes the airline industry any different from anybody else dependent on large capital investments. sure they have to buy planes. and cola bottlers have to build plants.)

It's bad scholarship. A political ideal is an extremely complex object. All he's done is cherry-picked five filters through which to view it. He's taken a very big n-dimensional object and inspected a handful of the shadows it casts.

Does he think he's pinned it down with these five criteria? This is why people make fun of the humanities. Sloppy, runny thinking. You could select just about any value and the two political ideologies would fall somewhere on either side of it. Those on which they aren't opposed aren't worthy of mention, and so aren't. You could play the same game all day. In fact, you might even argue that it is a defining property of a two-party system.

Sure. Here's the execution tree necessary to "Hello World" in Cocoa---at least as given in the Apple tutorial I followed. It's possible to cut it down, but only after you've digested all of the material Apple lays in front of you.

  main()
  |
  -> UIApplicationMain()
    |
    -> Info.plist (Never referenced by name!)
       |
       -> MainWindow.xib (Interface Builder. Contains no code!)
          |
          -> HelloWorldAppDelegate .h/.m (Not clearly indicated)
            |
            -> didFinishLaunching()
              |
              -> IBOutlet UIWindow *window
              |
              -> *myViewController
              |
              -> ControllerView (IB Nib, needs dragged connection)
              |
              -> Etc.
              |
              -> HelloWorld ?

rationalization / post-hoc. If you were setting out to make the next MySpace or Craigslist, would you consciously decide to make it ugly as a competitive advantage? Ugly designs happen by accident [re: neglect] and in spite of the underlying site's success. By the time the site is successful it's too late/unnecessary to change it.

Having just learned Cocoa, I can tell you that you are not stupid, the design of Cocoa is stupid.

Design patterns are stupid, hence baking them into a language is stupid. And Interface Builder is very stupid.

Fortunately Objective-C isn't as stupid as C++, so once you've covered most of what makes Apple's design stupid, you can trowel over the gaps in logic with cement and forget about them.

Most platform and language designs are stupid. Sometimes I think it's an emergent case of a desire to ensure job security. Other times I just think the designers were stupid.

Programmers, who supposedly like to question authority, have a really hard time questioning the sanctity of the platforms they work on. I think many would be surprised to learn that their platforms have serious design flaws. Of course you should initialize Function A first using unrelated Function B. How else would you do it?

Part of the reason designers make bad designs is because they have to respect a history of bad designs. People are used to XML. Consequently, it's used in plists.

The antidote for worrying about whether you are stupid is to identify and express why the design of something you're working with is stupid. The next step is to realize that, whatever it is, it's there, and you have to deal with it. That's work, and that's programming as it is today.

Any material that requires only 5-10 minutes of unbroken concentration is too superficial to be worth your time.

If you can, take something else, if you can't, consider taking a bad grade and focusing on something else anyway.

The suggestion in the article is awful. It is far more important to work hard at concentrating for long periods of time. All this method is doing is conditioning you to be scatterbrained. We get enough of that already.

1. Rerolling the dice is still a faster (and thus better) way of solving this problem.

2. He could've used the time he spent writing that article to release a free dice rolling iPhone app that implements his special Settlers roll. It could even keep track of when to stop rerolling sevens. There are several similar apps already in the store. It would be trivial to write one that auto-rerolled sevens. This is something that might actually be of use to people, though, then again, maybe not.

To me it looks like the author wasted his time.

Writing this I actually had the Nobel prize for Literature in mind, which I feel, along with the Pulitzer, has been largely coopted for political reasons. Were I to suggest to a person of average talent the surest way to a Nobel prize (in other words, how to hack it) I would recommend they take up writing, and especially that sort of writing which is unabashedly anti-establishment.

If you were to read through the works of the recipients in the last ten years, you would find the following trend: low quality, combined with the sort of multicultural leanings popular in US academics. This is to simply point out that the prize is no longer rewarding quality work and is instead promoting a political agenda, something that devalues the prize and tarnishes the legacy of past deserving winners. People like Kenzaburo Oe, Dario Fo, and Imre Kertész, while they are respectable writers, fall far short of what I would consider "outstanding work." The only conclusion you can draw then is that their awards were based on their political ideology, or the ideology they represent. Kertész's award, for instance, caused a stir, and rightfully so, since his body of work is small and not particularly good, even in the better translations. It is not even particularly notable among its genre, other than for the fact that it has now received a Nobel prize.

I was one of the early comments in the thread, and thought the thread might evolve into a discussion on ways to Hack the Nobel, a topic I thought of more lasting interest than a clever way of concealing gold. In terms of work done for effect achieved, it seems much easier to take up writing, or to become a politician and branch over into some tumultuous area, than to devote your life to the quiet pursuit of science, which I feel is much more difficult, less rewarding, and largely responsible for the reputation the lesser Nobels feed off of.

I never spent much time thinking about Al Gore's award since to me it indicated an open-and-shut case of bias, typical of the Nobel committee these days, and unworthy of further reflection. I didn't intend to refer to it specifically when I made my initial comment (provoking a reaction from supporters of his ideology), since I could think of many instances to which the comment applied, the recent Peace Prize being just one instance among many.

These days the best way to get a Nobel is to devote yourself to liberal politics.

OK, I'm going to send you a list using XML.

Now how do you propose we do that?

This is entirely the problem. The XML didn't solve anything. We still have to negotiate the terms of the transfer. We've agreed to use XML, true, but we are still at square one.

XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers something recognizable to fiddle with, however irrelevant to the problem it may be.

Most religious wars in computer science hinge on matters of taste. If you prefer emacs to vi, maybe that's just your style. If you prefer PHP to Ruby, there may be several good reasons why.

There is no such ambiguity in the case of XML. If you prefer XML to anything but XML, you don't know what you're talking about. You should have no say in anything that affects other programmers.

We're in this mess because of the unforeseen popularity of the web. When the web was created, its designers chose a simple and not particularly good markup language. Then the web grew, and instead of everybody recognizing the language as bad and replacing it, we turned a blind eye to its faults and kept it around.

The immense popularity of the web has glossed over all the deficiencies present in markup languages. People can't imagine that anything that built the internet might have something wrong with it. The internet is good, so anything that built the internet must be good as well.

Markup language was ill-conceived. Generalizing it into XML was folly.

How can you possibly take XML seriously? How do you squeeze an entire blog post out of it? Have you never bothered to look at the technology? The author is obviously capable of writing a coherent, well-thought out essay. Did he never stop and look at what he was doing and go, "This is a whole lot of shit!"

Generations from now our scholars will be lumped in the same category as alchemists and geocentrists---much to their discredit.

The bubbles represent the size and importance of the field. This is an accurate depiction of what science is like today.

Science and Nature are filled with articles about medicine and biology and chemistry and physics and so on. These are what scientists think of as science. Rarely does a math or computer science paper slip in, except in the case of groundbreaking new work. And yet most CS professors would give anything to have a paper of theirs published in Science. So you can see how the rest of science values our contributions: every once in a while we contribute something interesting, but for the most part we are not noteworthy. And this is the way it should be. Bipartite graph algorithms and topological manifolds are not as important as Gardasil and alternative energy.

A substantial number of doctors doing useful research these days are, surprise, Medical Doctors. If you want an eye opening experience, take a trip over to the nearest medical library and spend some time going through the journals. It will radically change your opinion of what science is and how your field fits into it. Discrete Math is a pretty cool journal, but it's kind of embarrassing to hold it up to The New England Journal of Medicine. Even Annals of Math is, well, pretty irrelevant.

There's a long tradition of specialists taking myopic views of the world. Computer Scientists think the world is one big computer (http://focus.aps.org/story/v9/st27), chemists think life is one big chemical reaction, stone-cutters think everything can be explained in terms of stone-cutting (The Stone Diaries). Rarely is that the whole truth. You have to be careful to step back and take your own bias into account.

It's obvious, to me at least, that hygienic macros are generally preferable to unhygienic ones. It's also clear to me that macros are an atypical way of thinking about programming. And yet I have a hard time seeing what advantage they yield over code that employs dynamic typing and proper composition of functions.

I have seen lots of examples of macros used to do things like square numbers. These are just minimal demonstrations of the technique, so you expect the code to be longer and make less sense. But the same thing appears to happen when the problem is more involved. The code makes less sense, and it's longer than the code I would write for a more traditional solution.

I know little about Lisp, but I wonder if Lisp programmers aren't conflating the advantages of macros with the advantages you get simply by building up functions in an intelligent way. Macros are neat, granted, but I've yet to see an instance where they actually increase productivity.

If this hypothesis is wrong, I would love to have someone point out why. I have been wary about approaching Lisp precisely because the preoccupation with macros seemed to me to be unjustified (and thus symptomatic of a culture more preoccupied with doing things the computationally interesting way rather than the more powerful way, e.g., using recursion when a for-loop would be shorter and faster).

There is still debate over whether slaves worked harder even than other paid farmhands. The last great volley (slaves do) could be said to have won its author a Nobel Prize.

There are two common ways to justify patents:

1. They help the public by encouraging inventors to publicly document their inventions

2. They protect and encourage inventors by giving them control over intellectual property

You've taken Position 1, which I find to be a very weak argument in favor of patents.

The world owes a great debt to Einstein and Godel, for relativity and incompleteness, but it is widely recognized that without them the same results would still have been achieved only a few years later. That's the way science works. It progresses along a linear track, and the best minds are only a few years, and more often a few months, ahead of the pack. The literature is rife with examples, but here are a few more good ones to chew on: Newton-Leibniz, Cook-Levin, Knuth–Morris–Pratt, Williamson-Diffie-Hellman, and Cocks-Rivest-Shamir-Adleman.

Though Williamson and Cocks are special cases because of the secrecy granted to government institutions, the point is clear: it is almost certain someone else would've arrived at the same ideas around the same time. Ideas are precipitated by conditions. These citations make this explicit with conflicting dates. You usually don't get this type of evidence because you usually don't get to publish the same idea twice.

For Position 1 to make any sense, it would have to take me longer than 20 years to reverse engineer your idea. Most patentable ideas could be reverse engineered in a day, and more to the point, most patentable 'flashes of genius' are repeated by other people in a vacuum, that is, without any knowledge of the original. Conditions are such that nowadays most people have the same idea within weeks of each other.

With an environment like that, patents are not working to bring new ideas to the public. The public is already having these ideas. What the patent is doing is preventing competitors from entering the market, when competition is almost universally good for the public. You can make the argument that the patent serves the interest of the patenter, and that would be true, but any argument that makes the claim that patents support the public---except in the circuitous way that they help inventors---is specious at best.

I know a lot of people who've dealt with the patent system (software). I'm in the process of filing two myself. I don't know anyone who looks at the patent database as a 'treasure trove' of ideas they can put to use. Most people think of it as a 'minefield' of ideas that are already taken. The patent database is boring, and all of its contents are written specifically to hold up in court battles, not to explain ideas to people who might put them to use. That's a pretty good empirical argument that the patent system is not working according to the guidelines in Position 1.

You take a very sympathetic view of Intellectual Ventures, but to me they don't look like a particularly benevolent company. If they're so intent on licensing new inventions to the public, why isn't there any link to their inventions on their website? Why aren't they pushing a product? There isn't even a basic search link to the USPTO that fills in their name in the assignee field.

The fact that this company raised "hundreds of millions of dollars" indicates to me that a lot of very intelligent people view this as a very profitable field. It is worth keeping in mind that Intellectual Ventures, as a company, aims to produce no product. They only seek to amass a portfolio of rights granted by the US Government to seek injunctions against others using ideas to which they've laid claim.

Now I suppose it is possible that Intellectual Ventures could come up with useful inventions and license them to the public at a fair price, but that is not the impression I get in their case. It seems to me that, their contributions to national defense notwithstanding, they've created a humongous patent troll, and that they intend to front-run intellectual development in this country. They only have to pay a stable of experts to stay a few months ahead of the state of the art, and they don't have to pay a dime for product development. Whether or not they turn into a patent troll, this is in fact what they are incentivized by the market to do. Companies with unregulated, government-granted monopolies rarely charge fair rates for their services.

Public understanding will almost certainly be advanced short-term by Intellectual Ventures, but the question is whether they are deserving of this money, producing no product themselves, and whether they won't harm us in the long run by stymieing the progress of someone who might. Remember, without the protections of patent law, this company wouldn't exist. My concern is not with the people who start a company like Intellectual Ventures, but with the patent laws that make it so enticing for a company like Intellectual Ventures to behave in a counterproductive way.

>This might be better titled "Chronic sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor"

The original title is better. It makes perfect sense. It expresses the same meaning. He is clearly referring to the phenomenon of sleep deprivation and not to a single instance. It's clear from the title, and the article even explicitly points this out.

He isn't writing legalese. He doesn't have to gird every sentence against being taken out of context and nitpicked. To do so would be bad English (as your example demonstrates).

I know we live in a fast food, sound bite time. I know we expect headlines to be clear and to the point. His is. And it uses better language.

The last thirty years have placed a tremendous strain on the language. We have lots more to talk about and not many more words to do it with. The solution isn't to pile on more and more qualifiers. You can never attain absolute precision. The solution is to realize that as the number of things we have to talk about increases, the expressiveness of the language expands to account for them.

You can't fit everything into a sound bite. If it's worth talking about, it's worth explaining at length. And if it's worth explaining at length, you might as well use good English.

I once read this suggestion and was very surprised by the result when I applied it. My 'equity valuation' of someone was often in direct contrast to my 'general appreciation' of them as a person, and to such an extent that it was difficult to keep two such incongruous ideas in my head at the same time.

What was surprising was not the overriding tendency to appreciate people for economically unrelated traits, but the gross effectiveness with which I could evaluate someone as soon as I viewed them purely in terms of financial opportunity.

I was reminded of the experience I had had with the Socratic method. When first presented as an idea---"You just ask questions"---the Socratic method is comically simple, almost ripe for derision, and easy to dismiss. But applying it, and seeing it applied, you notice that it has a powerful effect. The thoughts we arrive at on our own are immeasurably more meaningful than the thoughts pressed on us by others.

By the same token, this method of evaluation was unexpectedly effective. As long as I was thinking critically about who I would buy stock in, I had a clear picture of who the most valuable people were. But just as soon as my own assets faded from consideration the ordering became very different.

Times change, and America is much more corporate than it used to be. When a market becomes saturated innovative people will look elsewhere to make their mark.

I don't want to spend my life managing a business. I want to make some money and do something else. I have no doubt that I would make a fitting CEO. But the hours are long and the work is unappealing. There aren't any CEOs I want to be like. Apple's CEO, maybe, but what price does he pay to do what he does?

I really get the feeling that anyone ('anyone') could be a CEO these days. I feel like the CEO is a reward that keeps everyone else on the corporate pyramid. Maybe I'm wrong. I could be. But I haven't seen the argument that debunks that idea. (And I have seen a lot of instances of CEOs who didn't deserve what they received.)

The money is a silly motivation. What am I going to do with $6 billion that I couldn't do with $6 million? Spend conspicuously? Raise a family of layabouts?

I would much rather become financially independent and begin doing the work I want to, when and where I want to. I like to make things, and I like to talk to creative people. I like to do small things really, really well. And I don't like to spend my time dealing with red tape. I feel like I have an obligation to society, but that I don't have to fulfill it by spending my time managing a large corporation. There a lots of other less flashy positions desperate for someone to do a really great job. I want to do something small perfectly, not something huge good enough. Does that make sense?

Calculus is designed as a gateway for all of our quantitative students, our future engineers and physicists in addition to our computer scientists, and so it's already forced to wear many hats. Changing it isn't something we can do lightly, as it's integral in everything from standardized testing to college admissions (in the case of high school students); and nearly every quantitative track (in the case of college students).

What good does splicing Big-Oh into the process do, when computer science enrollment is in steady decline, and understanding Big-Oh is pointless without first understanding the costs of polynomial algorithms? It would be nice if our calculus students knew Lebesgue integration too, but I would offer that the calculus sequence is not the right time. If the kids are in college, they can take Intro. to Comp. Sci., and if the kids are in high school, they probably shouldn't worry about Big-Oh at all.

The biggest revision high school math needs is 1. A course which instills students with a basic statistical fluency, so they can read the newspaper and endure advertisements with a critical mind, and 2. A course for advanced students which teaches discrete math and basic non-geometrical proofs, for our increasingly discrete world.

Whenever I read about Bill Gates's philanthropy I always feel slightly depressed.

I get the distinct feeling that he is using his money in a way that maximizes social approval, rather than in a way that maximizes benefit. I haven't spent very much time looking into ways to save the world, but I suspect, like in many other fields, the most effective way to do it is not the way that provokes the greatest emotional response.

> competition bad?

No one is saying competition is bad. The point is we don't need all our geniuses competing with PayPal---it shouldn't be that hard in the first place. Let someone else do it.

>You have very strong opinions on where other people choose to work and who should be able to hire them. It sounds like you just want a really bright person or group of people to assign all the tech grads to jobs. Similar things have been tried before, and the outcome wasn't too good.

On the contrary. I want really bright people to assign themselves in a way that isn't ridiculous.

Have to agree. The same sentence caught my attention.

I can only speak for the East Coast, and in microeconomic terms, but Google has definitely put a hurt on the market here. They are worse than all of the banks put together. The cream of the crop here---people who are too smart to veg out in a bank---are more than willing to go to Google, when they would otherwise be furthering some smaller and more important project, be it a startup, or just something else useful and in real need of a bright, computer-oriented mind. They're all funneling into Google. Google got them all right out of college, and they're probably going to keep them.

You cannot argue that we are better off this way. Google certainly is, but as a whole we are going to lose out. Clumping all those people together is not going to improve technology. It's going to make it worse, because there's a huge opportunity cost in taking all these people and sticking them in a mill. That's just how software works. If they were out in little groups in a lot of different areas, they could be making a huge difference. Google doesn't need 10,000 engineers who know Bellman-Ford and Knuth-Morris-Pratt and Miller-Rabin. It's too much overlap. And Google certainly isn't providing offerings in a quantity great enough to justify the overlap. They've hired well---too well---and now they're going to be having a great number of these people performing well below where they would if they were arbitraged out to somewhere else. The benefit of adding just one of these engineers to a smaller shop is incalculably higher than the benefit of giving him to Google.

That efficient asset allocation, and the providing of liquidity, have been grossly exaggerated in terms of their benefit to society in order to justify the poaching Wall Street does each year, is a truth generally acknowledged. Trading makes a few people much richer, but it does not make us richer, not in equal part. In fact, if you want to get nasty about it, the latest round of bailouts is costing us a great deal...

Now we've traded the Wall Street problem for the Google problem. Do we really need the top sliver of our graduates working on destructively taking market share from PayPal? Or fighting black-hat SEO fueled and exacerbated by the search-monopoly problem they created? Or contributing to an advertising arms-race at a growth rate much higher than that of the underlying market?

What project are they pushing forward that could possibly justify sitting on all this talent? I feel like if it was anything suitable I would've already heard of it by now.