brainstorms

Sunday June 25, 2006

canadian diversity study

toronto star saturday edition is dedicated to a groundbreaking study of canadian diversity. this is a welcome dose of reality; there has been some heated "editorial" commentary and tension around this topic as a result of the recent arrests of would-be terrorists.

not to have a mind is being very wasteful

there are certain bombastic, spit-in-your-eye and rip-your-tongue-out kinds of claims that can render some knowledgeable people giggling while others speechless. if this sort of thing happens early and often, the claimant is rightly ignored as a street corner megaphone crank. if it gradually develops in the right atmosphere with large doses of nastiness, fanaticism and wood pulp, the claimant becomes a "best selling author" and a whispered embarrassment to his or her causes:

Liberals’ creation myth is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It’s a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist’s laboratory or the fossil record - and that’s after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn’t still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals think evolution disproves God.

[related entertaining reading: william dembski, christian theodicy in light of genesis and modern science, version 2.0, may 06]

[charlie stross's note]

Thursday June 22, 2006

r6rs syntax-case macros

scheme continues to improve on the only worthwhile syntax extension mechanism (macros) ever devised for any programming language. the srfi-93 [just issued] is a description of the draft r6rs syntactic abstraction system from the current scheme standardization process.

the hygiene condition:

A binding for an identifier introduced into the output of a transformer call from the expander must capture only references to the identifier introduced into the output of the same transformer call. A reference to an identifier introduced into the output of a transformer refers to the closest enclosing binding for the introduced identifier or, if it appears outside of any enclosing binding for the introduced identifier, the closest enclosing lexical binding where the identifier appears (within a syntax template) inside the transformer body or one of the helpers it calls.

Tuesday June 13, 2006

recently noted quotes

the principle of commensurate care: the care taken in each aspect of a development should be proportional to PxD where P is the probability that it will go wrong, and D is the size of the disaster if it does. -- michael jackson [software requirements and specifications: a lexicon of practice, principles and prejudices]

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. -- sam harris [an atheist manifesto]

We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace. -- california state appeals court [decision]

It's one of the great tragedies of life, something always ... something always changes. -- gregory house [the honeymoon]

the only thoughts and ideas i borrow from are those of my own. -- ludacris

Any feature added to any system has to pass a basic test: If it adds complexity, is the benefit worth the cost? The more obscure or minor the benefit, the less complexity its worth. Sometimes this is referred to with the name “complexity budget”. A design should have a complexity budget to keep its overall complexity under control. -- ken arnold [generics considered harmful]

Either the transportation of a Catholic saint/goddess directly to the sky without passing GO and without collecting $200 was a verifiable fact of history, or it did not happen. -- William R. Harwood [from the amazon review of science and religion: are they compatible?]

Monday June 12, 2006

recently noted books

richard dawkins, the god delusion
goetz et al. java concurrency in practice
gerald m. weinberg, weinberg on writing: the fieldstone method [he has a related blogspot] [reviews]
sam harris, letter to a christian nation
edward tufte, beautiful evidence
james morrow, the last witchfinder
charles stross, glasshouse

[i consider dawkins, tufte, and harris essential additions to my library. i was very pleased to stumble across weinberg's considerable insights on writing. goetz book appears to be the kind of book no serious programmer [with or without java] should do without. morrow and stross need no elaboration.]

Thursday June 08, 2006

elements of style: unix as literature

just came across thomas scoville's 1998 piece elements of style: unix as literature through a friend's email.

The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious [...]

[musical selection: tbd]

random 10 [meme]

A Ballad	Stan Getz [The Artistry Of Stan Getz, The Best Of The Verve Years]
Logos Part One (B)	Tangerine Dream [Dream Sequence - The Best Of Tangerine Dream]
Just To Hold My Hand	Big Boy Myles [Creole Kings Of New Orleans]
Sitting On Top Of The World	Howlin' Wolf [Chess Blues 1954-1960]
Jeep's Blues	Duke Ellington [Ellington At Newport 1956]
Moustahil	Natacha Atlas [Halim]
Who You Fighting For?	UB40 [Who You Fighting For?]
La Chute	Yann Tiersen [Le Phare]
La mamma morta	Maria Callas [A Night at the Opera]
See Ruby Fall	Johnny Cash [The Essential Johnny Cash 1955-1983]

Tuesday June 06, 2006

what is wrong with ruse?

michael ruse, that lucyle t. werkmeister professor of philosophy, thinks the best kind of philosophical engagement is the exposure of private exchanges in an unintelligible crank's website. evolutionblog has the story with interesting commentary.

[for the record, i happen to have ruse's early and interesting taking darwin seriously which i will keep. evidently two decades can be hard on a philosopher's brain; his relatively recent pulp [and yellowing] effort darwin and design is in the junk pile.]