Viewing profile — 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 firs…

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 eff…

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 man…

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 i…

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 …

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…

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…

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 ob…

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 digest…

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 ha…

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 Inter…

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 ba…

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 iPh…

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 pe…

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 …

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 fiddl…

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 …