Who Were the Sea Peoples?

is nearing completion . Comments welcomed!

<a href=“ https://12factor.net/config ”>Here</a> we find:  “ and unlike custom config files, or other config mechanisms such as Java System Properties, they are a language- and OS-agnostic standard.” Programmers are prone to grab words from fields where their knowledge is shaky and apply them to software engineering. An!example I have mentioned before is “technical debt,” where what is really being discussed is not debt, but a failure to maintain one’s capital stock. I have regularly seen the term “agnostic“ similarly misused. Strictly speaking, “agnostic“ about languages in operating systems what to mean that one believes what language or OS is in use is “unknown or unknowable” (Wikipedia entry on agnosticism). But that’s not what the person writing the above quote means. They mean that this part of the system should be indifferent to what language or OS the system is using, not that these facts are unknowable! PS: My apologies for the lousy link display at the start ...

At least not according to scripture: 'Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?' '“Collect no more than you are authorized,” [John] answered.' -- Luke, 3:13 Nowhere in scripture, that I'm aware of, does a prophet advise listeners to commit just an authorized amount of adultery, or worship false gods just so far as the state asks them to.

I saw a movie in which Wesley Snipes used a ferris wheel as his getaway vehicle. 

has been accepted for publication by Palgrave, and should be out within the year. Here is the project website : comments welcomed!

"the overall life of the polis... itself has to be understood... as existing for the sake of that in human beings which links them to the divine" -- Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 142 Just so: Aristotle's philosophy is oriented upwards: the physical is important as the basis for the living, the living as the basis for the conscious, the conscious as the basis for the moral and political, and those as supporting our connection to God. So encountering someone like Rand, who claims to be a follower of Aristotle, except for that God stuff, is like meeting someone who says they love modern chemistry, "except for the bits about atomic theory," or is a fan of evolutionary theory, "except for the idea of natural selection."

At about 1:37 in the video below, Professor Roger Bowley begins to recount the "history" of the number zero: The problem with Bowley's account is that, like with so many scientists, he apparently thinks it is A-OK just to make up history as you go along. First of all, he can't even get the little facts right: the Muslim author he wants to cite was "al-Khwarizmi," not "al-Khwazimi," and he was a Persian living in the Middle East, not North Africa. But the heart of that passage is how the Catholic Church fought against Fibonacc's introduction of Arabic numerals, since it was the time of the Crusades, they were Muslim, the "work of the devil," as a result they were banned in Florence, etc. This seemed like typical invented-from-whole-cloth anti-Catholicism, and so I immediately wrote Thony (an actual historian of mathematics), who responded: "No, I have never come across anything like that in all that I have read about ...

I just received an email from a colleague telling me, "The great computer scientist X has passed." My response was, "OK, but did he pass by value, or by reference?"

I saw that in the bathroom. I have no idea what it is, but this is a clarifying post: I mentioned how the "We need to remove the stigma on X, because it hurts the stigmatized person" argument is generally a failure. If X is morally fine, then it shouldn't be stigmatized, whether or not it hurts the stigmatized people. If X is immoral, then usually having a stigma attached to it is a positive. (The "generally" qualification is there because there are times when the stigma might be out of proportion to the immorality of the act: spitting your gum on the sidewalk may be bad, but we probably would consider the death penalty a it too harsh a punishment for that transgression.) I received two curious responses: One reader wrote, "I don't think it is true that everything stigmatized is immoral." That response just seems like the person hardly bothered to read the post, which never said anything like "All stigmas are justified." I really ...

We hear this frequently in relation to many traditionally disapproved activities: single motherhood, abortion, polygamy, etc. "People  who engage in X suffer from the social stigma attached to that behavior: therefore, we must remove the stigma." The argument really doesn't work. Why? Well, if the activity isn't immoral, then it shouldn't have any social stigma attached to it, whether that stigma makes people suffer or not. But if it is immoral, then the stigma is a good thing , as it will discourage the behavior. Notice that nobody ever uses this argument in regards to, say, how the poor neo-Nazis are suffering from the stigma attached to Nazism.

They’ve done it with cough medicine, decongestants, allergy medicine, and more. But they have missed a whole category, And I know I can hit it big with this one: Non-drowsy sleepy aids ! I think I am going to call it Awake ! TM . 

I just found this gem: "# if flds[LEVEL] is not a number, say 'a' or '!'," The person writing this evidently thought the reader might not know what it would mean for something to be "not a number," but felt that if they just put in "say 'a' or '!'" all would become clear.

You can now buy a "package" of Lyft rides, perhaps $169 worth of rides in a month, for a 5% discount per ride. Here's my question: Since Lyft pricing changes moment-to-moment, how are you supposed to know you received a discount?

and abandons ideology .

Noted here : "He could have saved middle-class homes with a New Deal-style mortgage bailout, dramatically reducing economic inequality, but further enriched the 1 percent instead." Right: our great "egalitarian" president had a choice (given he was going to bail out someone!): Bail out mortgage holders: the banks would survive, and struggling people would keep their homes. Bail out the banks, and let them seize the homes of the people whom they had duped into taking on ridiculous mortgages. And, my friends, which option did our great "man-of-the-people" choose? The large number of counties that swung from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to supporting Trump in 2016 didn't do so because these voters, who had supported a black man for president against a white man, had suddenly turned "racist" and... backed one white candidate against another white candidate? Nope: they realized that Obama had completely sold them out to keep th...

At our Python Meetup today, my friend Aaron Hall asked for examples of good OOP practices. I said, " DRY ." "TRY?" Aaron asked. "No, DRY." "Ah," he said, "don't repeat yourself!" "You can say that again!" I responded.

Is online here .

We were discussing the DevOps offerings of (Very Big Tech Company) the other day, and we had a rep from the company at class, along with some of their official slides. In several of the slides, we were warned about "Loosing our source code" or "Loosing track of what packages are in a build." What is going on with that word? 1) I never saw that mis-spelling 20 years ago; and 2) It is clearly a form of "lose," and I have never seen anyone mistake "loose" for "lose." Any ideas?

Because I was too tired to get home any other way. Not kidding: I was up working on the proofs I had to present today until about three in the morning. I was up at seven to give a lecture at nine. The rest of the day was full of coating, meetings, and another lecture. When I finally left at 5:30 PM, I thought of taking the subway. But I was too tired to fight with the crowds for space. Then I thought I might get a cab. But I was too tired to look around to find one and lift my arm up to hail one. Lyft? No, I was too tired to deal with my new Lyft app. So I just walked. It was the easiest thing to do. 

“Never mind the astronomical prices: every item is well worth it!” “No finer place to shop on this earth!” Etc. 

I am not one to shout "cultural imperialism" at the drop of a hat. But nature documentaries drive me nuts: pretty much every person who is not from a first-world country speaks something called "native language" in the closed-captioning system. French people speak French, and German people speak German... but even people from the Faroe Islands speak Faroese, a language that is used by only 70,000 people! Meanwhile, in Assam, the elephant herders speak... "native language." Dear documentary captioner, let me venture a guess that they might be speaking... maybe... Assamese ?! That wasn't that hard, was it? You could bother figuring out that the egg hunters on the Faroe Islands speak Faroese... but Assamese, a language with roughly 200 times the speakers, that was too hard to look up?

Do you think these interactions are just novel to the researcher in question, or did electrons recently decide that the same old interactions with molecules were getting boring?

But more nature documentary nonsense: “The macaques friendly social behavior is caused by the abundance of their environment.” But, there are lots of other animals in the same environment, and, in fact, the macaques are extraordinary for just how gregarious they are. If we could really assign evolutionary causes in this simple-minded way, every single animal in that environment who have to be similarly gregarious.

David Attenborough presents himself as a serious naturalist, yet he is willing to narrate a nature film about some raptors preying on some bats by saying: "The enormous number of bats emerging from the cave defeats the efforts of the raptors, so that most of the bats survive." He talks as though the bats were the raptors enemy , and the raptors' goal was to wipe out the bats. Of course, the bats are not the raptors' enemy, no more than chickens are humans' enemy, and the raptors no more would like to wipe out bats then we would like to wipe out chickens!

"It's a human right" is what you say when you favor some political position but don't have any good arguments handy for it: You want universal healthcare? "It's a human right!" Free school lunch? "It's a human right!" I encountered a perfect reductio of this tendency recently when I was told that "The students receiving a syllabus that clearly lays out grading rubrics is a human right!"

People often think the job is about telling people what to do. Occasionally, but much more often, it is about smoothing out workflows.

When you first become a corpse, it will be new to you, and you might get a lot of things wrong. And that could produce high levels of customer dis-satisfaction. So here are some tips that have generally been found to work... although it is important to remember that everyone is a corpse in their own way! There is no "one-casket-fits-all" approach! When you're a corpse, your main job is to just lay there. So don't up and walk around... please! When you're a corpse, you can't see. So don't look at things: you won't see them anyway. When you're a corpse, you won't have feelings. So no laughing or crying! When you're a corpse, you won't have mental health problems. Cause you won't have a mind. So don't start acting all crazy and shit. When you're a corpse, don't try doing drugs. It won't turn out well. If you're unhappy with how you're being embalmed, don't get all "up in the embalmers face....

"To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course still rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problem of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use." -- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue , p. 64

This kind of thing ought to alert people to the difference between a mathematical formalism and reality; instead, it seems to lead them to claim that reality is paradoxical! Or maybe that's not what they really mean, but that's the way they talk , e.g.: In the Ross-Littlewood supertask, each step (starting at some time before noon) is performed in half the time as the previous step: "This guarantees that a countably infinite number of steps is performed by noon." Sure, within the formalism it "guarantees" that. But it's not as though any process could really be done in this fashion! So our formalism has assumed something impossible: at that point, of course it will lead to paradoxes: if we assume A = !A, anything at all follows. And the whole rest of the "problem" arises simply because we've started out by assuming an impossibility. We put 10 balls in an urn each "turn," and take out 1: how many are left at "the end...

Much of the discussion about actively gay Catholic clergy have centered on the question of "What has gone wrong here?" Some answers have pointed to the decline in sexual morals in our modern age while others indicated that the real problem lies with the antiquated rules of the Catholic Church. But this morning I was struck by an orthogonal question: "How do actively gay Catholic clergy themselves understand what they are up to?" After all, they are the public face of an institution the doctrines of which stand adamantly opposed to their lifestyle. A few of them, like James Martin, publicly reject those doctrines. And a few of them are probably merely cynical: "Hey, I've got a decent job, and I get access to lots of guys!" But I am suspicious that we might find a form of esotericism at work in many cases, where there is a (sincere) belief that the doctrines of the Church are, indeed, sound for the masses , while those who truly understand the con...

When you say that mankind is made in the image of God, we are directed to look at each and every particular person to see how exactly they bear that image. It's an invitation. The policeman establishes order in the world for reasons of X, Y, and Z. My grandmother's cookies is an expression of generous-loving kindness. I see God in that. When you say that someone bears a right, say equality, we are directed to look at an abstraction that all people bear in common. A mask of "equals" appears before the person, and no longer do you see the person, but rather the abstraction of "equals," which tells you nothing on how to relate to this particular person. The policeman is the same as my grandma. Which frame of mind do you think is more rich and productive in giving good judgements about people?

My talk at StackOverflow:

I was asking students in my discrete mathematics lecture, "What is an irrational number?" The answers I got were along the lines of, "It is a number whose representation after the decimal point never repeats or terminates." (Yeah, they did not put it quite that formally.) OK, but... I really think that understanding is inadequate, because it begs the question of how the heck we know that the decimal representation of, say, π, never repeats or terminates! Certainly, no one has ever calculated that representation out to infinity and found no repetition or termination. (Yes, I know, the very phrasing of what I am saying in the previous sentence is ridiculous: but that's my point!) To really understand why some number is irrational, one has to grasp why trying to represent that number as a ratio sends one onto a never-ending spiral of closer and closer fractional approximations of the irrational number. And once students get that, they can understand that an...

When it is pointed out that liberalism* is not some value-neutral arbiter of the political/social scene, but is itself a value-laden position, we often hear the above response. (Apparently liberals' supposed love for "original thinking" is not as strong as they imagine.) I have pointed out before this assertion is essentially meaningless, because what it comes down to in practice is "I will call positions/actions/speech acts I don't like 'intolerant,' so that then I do not have to tolerate them!" Let us look at a simple examples: consider a Muslim who tolerates arranged marriages for children, but not cartoons mocking Mohammed. A liberal will refer to that Muslim as "intolerant" of free speech. But the Muslim can just as correctly assert that the liberal is intolerant of arranged child marriages. Of course, the Liberals will protest, "What nonsense! A cartoon mocking Mohammed is just someone exercising their right to self-expressi...

My department is moving to a new building, and all of the faculty got ask for their furniture orders. I put in a request for a chair like this:

'The liberal order, like Assyria or Babylon of old, obliterates alternative traditions and brings to an end the "order of free and independent nations, each pursuing the political good in accordance with its own traditions and understanding."' More here .

My review of Mary Morgan's book is now available here .

Utilitarianism is one of the many desperate attempts to replace a moral reality grounded in cosmic order (the Tao, the Dharma, Maat, the Way of Heaven, etc.) with one invented by humans. The calculations it suggests we should perform are absolutely impossible. Even if it were possible to quantify "utility," in a way that allowed interpersonal utility comparisons, the utilitarian calculus supposed is still ridiculous: an agent would need to know exactly how their action would impact every single other person in the world, for the rest of time, so long as the world exists, to correctly calculate whether their action "maximized utility" across all humans (or all living beings, if one is an animal rights sort?). Pretty obviously, no one can actually perform anything remotely approaching such a calculation: in fact, no one can even perform such a calculation even if we (artificially) limit the calculation to "How will your proposed action impact your (family / n...

This was displayed on my exercise bicycle on my cruise ship, as I was biking some Tour de France course on the bike's display. My first thought was "What a weirdly specific number they chose to follow the vague word 'almost.'" My second thought was, "Oh, they made the same mistake as the people who stated that the average human body temperature is '98.6.'" What is the mistake?

And in other DevOps Cafe news, a guest mentioned, "people are our most expensive things, so we should optimize their productivity." I believe he thought he was demonstrating how much he cares about people!

On the DevOps Cafe podcast I was listening to today, one of the guests said, "this helps us to understand rich statistical observability." If you ever find yourself talking like that, take a year or two-long vow of silence to let the crud clear out before you speak again.

It is from Braun. You can see it for yourself on YouTube: I can't produce it at will, but I see it a lot. Some twenty-something guys are shaving while staring into their phones. The voice over says something about how Braun electric razors are so good that they leave you time for what is really important . And then you see the phone screen, and the guys are playing video games.

People voice this complaint about their paychecks from time to time. It is silly, because: 1) In the absence of the government your taxes pay for, your salary would be... well, you have no idea! If libertarian anarchists are right, it would be much higher. But what if communists anarchists take over? Your salary, if it is high, might be much lower. Or maybe social democrats are right, and we already have the perfect sized government that happens to be maximizing your salary already...? 2) But, much more importantly, you have no idea how much you are paying in taxes right now . What?! Well, let's hear from Ludwig von Mises: "It is the operation of the market, and not the government collecting the taxes, that decides upon whom the incidence of the taxes falls and how they affect production and consumption" ( Human Action , Scholar's Edition, p. 260). This is very important and I think the full consequences of this are rarely thought through, but it means th...

I am on a Carnival cruise as a matter of family obligation.  If I die in a state of mortal sin, the Lord will surely punish me by sending me on an eternal Carnival cruise. 

The half-educated love to show off the half they got. For instance, in Blue Bloods , Erin Reagan periodically mocks her working-class detective, Anthony Abetemarco's use of "double negatives." When he says, "I ain't got no problem with that," she tells him, "Oh, you mean you do have a problem with that?" This is utter silliness: sure, in mathematics or formal logic, something like − − 2 is equal to +2, but so what? Why should formal systems, especially since they are parasitic on natural language, get to dictate to natural language how it should be spoken? Reagan obviously knew exactly what Anthony meant. That she would insist he meant the opposite is simply a way of asserting that her social is higher than his.

I think people will start calling it "the m-word" soon. For instance, in this post , the author writes: "Beyond that, the authorities have changed the calculation methodology." If there is a more clear-cut case than this for the use of the simple word "method," I don't know what it would be. Nonetheless, the author adds three (here) meaningless syllables on because... well, because everyone else does!

Today, I saw an ad from Braun showing how their electric razors are so easy to use that... you don't need to stop staring into your smart phone to shave ! I don't think there was ever an ad showing how you could shave while reading the newspaper. We are witnessing what is far and away the most rapid change in human behavior that has taken place in our 300,000 years of existence... and no one has any idea where it is taking us.

I just got sent someone's Skype address, and I would just like to... you know, call them. Now, the number one thing people do with Skype is call other people . So the whole user interface should be focused on making it easy to call people. But instead we get: "Call" is grayed out, and there is no indication whatsoever of what one needs to do to ungray it. Yes, I know there is some way to do so, but this is about as bad as user-interface design can be.

There once were a people, the Carinaem, who found the sky and the objects they saw in it so beautiful that they worshipped it, and wove that worship throughout their culture, including their political life. In fact, for them, what we would call "religion" and what we would call "politics (as well as what we would call "culture") were not really separate things at all: they were just the people's social life, which was a whole. But gradually, a class of people, who called themselves the Narcien, raised themselves far above the common person of Carinae, instituting autocratic political rule as well as commandeering much of the wealth of the land. And naturally they used this worship of the sky to justify their position. So when a segment of the population finally became so fed up that they decided to overthrow the Narcien, they rejected everything associated with them, including the sky worship. They believed that all aspects of the society that had been...

The vast majority of students who go through computer science programs are training to be engineers, not academic researchers. And yet… I just had a masters student say how impressed he was that I was having my OOP students do C++ projects that stretch across more than one file . He said that in his entire undergraduate education, he had never compiled a program that used more than a single file. It is as though we were training civil engineers to build bridges, but only bridges that stretch across one-foot-wide ditches.

Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism , which should come out next year.

I was just giving advice to someone who isn't sure software engineering is for him. My idea here was to send him to some of the books that inspired me to improve as a software engineer, and see if any of these authors enthusiasm rubbed off on him. Below is the list I came up with off the top of my head: Donald Knuth, Literate Programming P.J. Plauger, Programing on Purpose , Volumes I, II, and III Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls and More Programming Pearls Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The Practice of Programming Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The UNIX Programming Environment Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger, Software Tools in Pascal James Coplien, Advanced C++ Mary and Tom Poppendieck, Lean Software Development What else would you add to the list?

recently tried to claim here that to admit that a being infinitely greater than oneself created the universe is an act of... hubris !... just the same as devotees of scientism claiming science is to get credit for the wonders of creation. (And of course, no devotee of scientism is actually going to outright claim that science created galaxies or deep sea fish or volcanoes. The way this sort of propaganda works is that they will continuously suggest that, but when challenged, will offer a shocked denial that they ever suggested any such thing. Just like my own dolts did.) Ed Feser nails such combox trolls: "Then there is the element of pride. You have to be smart to do natural science. Combox trolls usually are not very smart, but they think of themselves as smart, because they at least have the capacity to pepper their remarks with words like 'physics,' 'science,' 'reason,' etc. as well as to rehearse whatever science trivia they picked up from W...

Hans is running in the same direction with a rifle, and Eugen is also doing that. Methodological individualism says that is the way we have to explain Germany invading Belgium. But that is wrong. Sometimes explanations run in the other direction. A storm explains the movement of the molecules involved in the storm. And "Germany has invaded Belgium" explains what Johan and Hans and Eugen are up to.

Under this heading, one will be shown things such as luminescent fish, volcanoes, stellar clusters, Saturn’s rings, the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, etc. It is as though the person describing these things is trying to claim that these are the creations of science! These are not “wonders of science.“ They are the wonders of God’s creation. It is only the hubris of scientism that tries to claim them as our own creations!

I recall Bryan Caplan deliberately (I believe) insulting Israel Kirzner at the NYU Market Process colloquium as follows: I had asked Bryan, "Well, according to your paper, a 'reasonable' conclusion depends upon what premises we start with. So if my initial premise is, 'The Bible is the word of God,' why should I not prefer scripture over scientific findings, when they conflict?" Caplan, knowing full well that Kirzner is an orthodox rabbi, responded, essentially, "Who could possibly pay any attention to such stupid nonsense written by a bunch of desert shepherds several thousand years ago?" At the time, I was so nonplussed by Bryan's response that I don't think I said anything more. But... What I ought to have said was, "The work of these 'ignorant' desert shepherds is still being read several thousand years after they wrote it: do you think anyone will be reading a single thing you wrote in 4000 A.D.?" What is amazi...

I typed in some C++ code from Stroustrup's programming book. It is supposed to be the naive, inadequate first cut at addressing a problem. He offers some input that will show the shortcomings of the naive approach. I type in that input and... It works perfectly! Now I have to "re-bug" my program to determine why it is not failing like it is supposed to!

A few comments, especially from Prateek and Ken B, were being automatically marked as spam. I just went in the Blogger spam bucket for the first time in several months and found them. My apologies.

of the risen Christ." Response A: No it isn't! It is a ball of flaming hydrogen! "The Mona Lisa is a symbol of the mysteries of feminine beauty." Response B: No it isn't! It is a bunch of pigments spread across a canvas! Response A makes no more sense than Response B.

Pretend you are on one of those Guess-My-Line- style gameshows. Could you name the following person? "I have been referred to as inarguably 'the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced... because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating.' I was accomplished as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor, psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, book reviewer, dramtist, actor, short story writer, phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician, and metaphysician. I developed a cardinal arithmetic for infinite numbers years before Cantor, axiomatized natural number arithmetic before Dedekind and Peano, and set out axiomatized set theory before Zermelo. Fifty years before Shannon, I described how Boolean logic could be implemented in electrical switches. "Karl Popper descr...

So often I've heard this euphemism for "he's not very bright." As though a smattering of introductory courses plus a concentration, most of which are evaluated en-masse, are to bestow intelligence or wisdom.

We can now do minimum spanning trees . Next up: binary search trees.

I was alerted to the fact that this "naturalist" apparently doesn't care what nonsense they give him to read when I was binge-watching the "Wild [X]" (where X = "India" or "China" or "Indochina") series, and heard him describe a encounter between two red pandas as "a male driving off a male intruder," and in a subsequent episode, describe the exact same footage as "a male trying to attract a female." (I actually went and re-played the earlier episode to make sure.) In Blue Planet , Attenborough treats the viewer to such gems as: "Spring comes as the sun begins to climb higher in the sky." Nope, by the time spring comes, the sun has been climbing higher in the sky for three months! "It is now mid-summer, and the days are getting longer." No, mid-summer's day is when the days begin getting shorter. And if he means "the middle of the summer," the quote is even worse. ...

Here .

These days the progressive left talks continually about "racist dog whistles" being sounded by... well, any figure they don't like. Here's the thing about dog whistles though: only dogs can hear them! And that is the idea behind the "racist dog whistle" meme: this is secret, coded language that only racists can understand. But... That means the progressives pointing out these "dog whistles" would have to be... racists! Or else they couldn't hear the whistle, they wouldn't understand the code. Of course, what the charge really amounts to is, "I don't like that person's preferred policies, and while I can't point to anything explicitly racist that he said, I can instead smear him by claiming he's speaking in a secret racist code."

Here , from Zach Lowe: "There is no shame in that. Cousins can't make the Warriors much better because it is mathematically impossible for a team this good to get much better." Mathematically impossible? Does Lowe not realize there are an infinite number of positive integers, all of which it is mathematically possible for the Warriors to score? And that all of the Warriors opponents scored more than zero points in every game they played, so they could do much better on defense as well? I think what Lowe really might have meant was "statistically unlikely," but that doesn't sound as dramatic, does it?

Sports announcers current infatuation with statistics and probabilistic reasoning is only matched by their ignorance of any fundamental statistical principles. Consider this passage , answering how many championships LeBron James will win with the LA Lakers: " Pelton : If I had to bet on one outcome, I'd probably say zero. The Warriors are still around, and other challengers are forming. I still think going to the Rockets or the 76ers would have given James a better chance of winning a championship. That said, the average outcome for James is probably closer to one championship than none." So this gut thinks the "average" number of championships James will win is closer to one than zero, but he will "bet" on zero. You can bet he won't bet on this at all, and that he cites "statistics" just to look like a "modern" sportswriter who is all probabilistic and whatnot.

This was an early instance of "infrastructure as code." I am now rebuilding "PropArgs" in a new context, that of agent-based models . Here is the order I think we want properties to have precedence, from lowest to highest: The database: this is where to store fairly static info on the model being run, as well as server names, etc. Environment variables: allows overriding DB settings for dev / prod servers, or particular runtime environments, such as web, GUI, or command line. A stored property file: can create settings for particular runs, e.g., to do big batch runs of a program with specific settings. The command line: can override previous properties by invoking the program with a novel setting. Asking the user: the ultimate authority on what parameters to use for a model. Any thoughts? Any place to set these parameters that we've missed?

“Experience matters immensely when it comes to producing reliable programs...” — Bjarne Stroustrup, Programming: Principles and Practices Using C++ “Methodologies” are often rationalist constructions designed to circumvent the need for experience. They rarely deliver as promised. 

All of a sudden, my Github pages have more viewers from France than the US:

"They promised us AI. What we got was statistics." -- local CS professor

My review is online here . 

"Computers are dumb ." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

This summer, we're working on, among other things, animating algorithms on web pages using the HTML5 canvas. Here is an example .

Here . Let me know how I can improve it!

Back to Kirzner, after knocking off two other reviews and an essay. He writes: "Since individuals obviously differ in their entrepreneurial alertness, it is clear that opportunities for social improvement will tend to be exploited most fruitfully if institutional arrangements can be patterned so as to translate such opportunities into opportunities that will be encountered by those whose entrepreneurial alertness is the most acute, the most sensitive, and the most accurate." ("Knowing about Knowledge," Competition, Economic Planning, and the Knowledge Problem , p. 216) But what entrepreneurial alertness is alert to , per Kirzner, is profit opportunities, not "opportunities for social improvement." Now, one could protest that those opportunities are the same thing, but then what about an entrepreneur who is alert to the fact that the Internet offers a "better" way to deliver rape-fantasy videos to those who are titillated by the idea of ra...

Libertarians are not talking out their arses when they note that government often does things very inefficiently, that government projects typically fall short of delivering on their promise, at far higher costs than initially projected, and so on. But... There are exceptions. For instance, this program . The durned thing has now run for 55 times as long as was originally predicted. That's not too shabby.

is almost complete . Your comments are welcomed! (And since rob got me all ssh'ed up and sh*t, his comments be especially welcomed!)

"John McCarthy's B.S. was in mathematics... He is widely credited for inventing the term artificial intelligence and made many contributions to that field." -- Bjarne Stroustrup,  Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ Well, I'd say by far his most significant BS was the term "artificial intelligence"!

I update my main repos when I log in anywhere. This usually works fine, but some logins kick off two terminals at once, and then the updates in one would fail while the other worked. (And often they alternate failing and working: you see why, right?) This is really no problem... but it offends my aesthetic sensibilities. I should just be attempting these updates once, right? So I tried a very simple semaphor: #!/bin/sh export REPO_SEM="repo_semaphore" # let's update our main repos: if [ ! -e $REPO_SEM ] then # set a semaphore: touch $REPO_SEM cd $GDIR/algorithms; git pull origin master # more updates done here... cd $HOME; rm $REPO_SEM else echo "$REPO_SEM exists: another processes may be doing the update." fi This works... except when I really need it to, when the two logins kick off simultaneously. In the time between the existence test and the touch, both logins are able to proceed. What I would really need is for the if and th...

and I have a disk in my Mac's DVD drive. My desktop tells me so. The problem is, my Mac has no DVD drive.

I'm one of those people who, when I leave the apartment, am sure I left the burner / AC / lights on, and I have to run back and check. Or, at a show, I'm sure I have misplaced my ticket, and I have to check my pocket. And, most often, the fear proves groundless: the burner is off, and the ticket is right where it ought to be. Well, tonight, I left the office, got two blocks away... and had to run back, because I was sure I had forgotten to push my code to my GitHub repo . (This was important because I needed to do more work from home.) And, of course, I found I had pushed it. So now I've got this as well.

Spring 2018 party:

Another excerpt from my forthcoming review: Another form of metric fixation that appears in higher education is the desire to have some sort of "measurement" for all aspects of student learning. Courses should set out a variety of goals, and have a numeric score for how far the course went in meeting the goal. These "measurements" are then compiled, averaged, their spread measured, and so on. The joke here is that the numbers used as input are not measurements at all: professors are simply asked to pick a number between one and five, or one and ten, as to how close the class came to achieving the goal. Rather than being an actual measurement, the "score" is simply whatever number the professor being asked wishes to pick! It as though quantum physics were done by asking a bunch of physicists "How highly would you rate the attraction of leptons?" and then running calculations based on the results. In fact, what usually happens is that everyone...

As mentioned in a previous post , Israel Kirzner distinguishes between Type A and Type B knowledge problems. To quote that post: Type A problems involve undue optimism, and are self-correcting: if I think I can sell my programming services for $1 million per hour, I surely will be disappointed, and, if wise, I will lower my price. My very attempt to act on my over-optimistic beliefs reveals their falsity. Type B problems, on the other hand, involve undue pessimism, and are  not  self-correcting. I may believe that my current boss, who is paying me $50 per hour, is the best employer I can find. But, unbeknownst to me, just down the block is someone who would happily pay me $100 per hour,  if he knew of my existence . And I would happily go work for him,  if I knew of his . For type B problems to be "corrected" requires entrepreneurial action, perhaps, say, a job placement firm that will alert both the potential new employer and me to each other's presence in t...

People who regard themselves as modern typically bang on about how "empirical" they are, and how they recognize the importance of "evolution." That they are just paying lip service to certain shibboleths is demonstrated by how often they regard, as a conclusive refutation of some traditional practice or rule of morality, the "criticism" that "It's old-fashioned." E.g., someone says, "Well, I think people should get married before they live together." The "modern" person's response: "Oh, that attitude is so old-fashioned!" And they think that is a criticism ! Because a practice has survived for a very long time, and therefore the group that has adopted that practice has also survived for a very long time... therefore, it must be bad ! What a stunningly anti-empirical, anti-evolutionary claim! Now, simply because some trait has been existence for a very long time does not necessarily mean it aids ...

A key principle in DevOps is to not blame workers for failure. Instead, when failure occurs, the business is to identify the reasons behind the failure. (e.g. "Was the worker set up for failure? Or does the worker have defects that can be remediated?") At first face, this idea of "no blame" runs contrary to the idea of skin in the game. For if I am not punished for my failures, how am I held responsible for my actions? What actually happens is that DevOps redefines the game you have skin in. The game is no longer success, but improvement. So you are not held responsible for perfection, but for making things better.

CNN dumbwad editor-at-large Chris Cilliza here "refutes" President Trump's assertion at a recent NRA rally that "Can you imagine, if we ever called for a rally in Washington, DC? There wouldn't be enough room." "DC is -- give or take -- 68 square miles large. Thanks to this Reddit thread, I calculated that you could fit 947,865,600 people in DC if they were standing shoulder to shoulder. So..." So, apparently, Chris-the-brainless Cillizza thinks that the size of a rally that can be held in Washington is correctly determined by contemplating how many people could fit, "shoulder to shoulder," if we bulldozed the entire district and turned it into a giant rally site ! Because I've been in DC, and as far as I saw, a high percentage of those 68 square miles are covered by buildings. And a good bit more is taken up by public streets, which I don't think you are allowed to block with your rally. And another good chunk consists ...

I'd be ticked off, because as he is on the verge of his second win of the year, the sports site headlines read things like: "Tiger Woods cards 3-under 68, 9 shots back of Jason Day at Wells Fargo." Hey, I'm rooting for Woods in his comeback -- I'm like Frodo rooting for Gollum: "I've got to believe he can come back" -- but the coverage has been ridiculous: why does Woods, 9 strokes behind Day, come first in the headline?

At Mises.org !

I review it here .

In my school years up the my first undergraduate "run," I never heard the word mathematical pronounced with 5 syllables: it was always said "math-ma-ti-cal."''Now, I hear it said with 5 syllables all the time. I don't know how that got going, but I imagine the people who do this think it is "correct": "Just look at the spelling!" they might say. But I have never heard the word said with 5 syllables as it is spelled . Instead, people who say it with 5 syllables always say "math-the-ma-ti-cal": they double the 'th' sound.

"The core of managerial expertise was now defined as a distinct set of skills and techniques, focused upon a mastery of quantitative methodologies. Decisions based on sleep numbers were viewed as scientific, since numbers were thought to imply objectivity and accuracy... "Before that, 'expertise' meant the career long accumulation of knowledge of a specific field, as one progressed from rung to rung within the same institution or business... Auto executives were 'car guys' -- men who had spent much of their professional life in the automotive industry. They were increasingly replaced by McNamara-like 'bean counters,' adept at calculating costs and profit margins. "[This trend] morphed into the gospel of managerialism. The role of judgment grounded in experience and a deep knowledge of context was downplayed. The premise of managerialism is that the differences among organizations -- including private corporations, government agencies, and uni...

In "Knowledge Problems and Their Solutions," Kirzner makes the important distinction between type A and type B knowledge problems. Type A problems involve undue optimism, and are self-correcting: if I think I can sell my programming services for $1 million per hour, I surely will be disappointed, and, if wise, I will lower my price. My very attempt to act on my over-optimistic beliefs reveals their falsity. Type B problems, on the other hand, involve undue pessimism, and are not self-correcting. I may believe that my current boss, who is paying me $50 per hour, is the best employer I can find. But, unbeknownst to me, just down the block is someone who would happily pay me $100 per hour, if he knew of my existence . And I would happily go work for him, if I knew of his . For type B problems to be "corrected" requires entrepreneurial action, perhaps, say, a job placement firm that will alert both the potential new employer and me to each other's presence...

If we take the distinction between more subjective ("Vanilla ice cream is yucky!") and more objective ("Mongolia is in Asia.") beliefs as a genuine difference in kind , then we must, if we are to be logically consistent, admit that every assertion that something is an objective fact is, itself, a mere subjective belief ! "Well," you protest, "it is an objective fact that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun: it's been measured by scientists!" But did you "measure" your belief that the mileage has been measured? Because if quantitative measurement is the lodestar of objectivity, then your belief that the Sun-Earth distance is an objective fact is itself completely subjective: you can't measure the degree to which that fact was determined by measurement, or, even if you could, you would just be stuck in an infinite regress: you'd have to measure the degree to which the belief in that second measurement was a...

"Taylorism was based on trying to replace the implicit knowledge of the workmen with mass production methods developed, planned, monitored, and controlled by managers. 'Under scientific management,' [Taylor] wrote, 'the managers assume... the burden of gathering together all the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, formulae... Thus all of the planning which under the old system was done by the workmen, must of necessity under the new system be done by management in accordance with the laws of science.' -- Jerry Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, pp.32-33.

Well, now I have a problem: when I agreed to review Kirzner, I thought the book would be new material. No, it is good material, but 80% of it I had read before. So I am not plowing through it at the speed I thought I would be moving at. And meanwhile, Jerry Muller's excellent book, The Tyranny of Metrics , which I also am slated to review, arrived in the mail. So, I guess I am going to review Muller first... well, except I also just got asked to review a paper on WebAssembly , so... I don't know: maybe I should write a joint review, interspersing my take on all three together? In any case, let's start in on Muller: this book has a target, which Muller calls "metric fixation." Muller's critique of metric fixation overlaps my work on rationalism, as shown by his statement of one of the "key components" of metric fixation: "the belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numer...

My review of Nassim Taleb's new book is online at Modern Age .