Viewing profile — wam

Very interesting background in the last link, thank you. Informative comments in a discussion, in response to a question, are also often my friends.

This is what's interesting to me about one argument in favor of GM. On the one hand, the author seems to argue (here and in her books) that GM is merely an extension of what farmer…

I've been seeing this book pop up all over the place for the past year or so. It seems to be the go-to recommendation from friends to other friends who are frustrated at not findin…

It looks like the document is included in the article in a PDF viewer. Sometimes those don't show up because of ad-blockers. The Examiner does tend to cherry-pick, and it's definit…

Hey, likewise! Unfortunately there's no kickstarter for better bullying utilities. At least this does things that they might also want to do? Calculating: still for nerds. But imag…

Well, true, that's what we've grown up with: handles that are clever and reflect something about us (or deflect everything about us). But who wants to use john.basketball.expert@gm…

The namespace market is growing all the time. Something to consider when naming your kids.

Brooks's entire business model is getting people to respond to what he writes, however stupid it is. "Trolling for money" (a trite observation, but there it is). It's unfortunate t…

That's a good soundbite (honestly), but it doesn't jibe with my experience.

I think this campaign largely misses the more interesting problem, which is that we got to this point despite the fact that 1984 is a bestselling cornerstone of literature. It's be…

Whenever something happens that people want to explain away, some new technical term pops out into the public discourse. It's impossible to predict what the next phrase will be, bu…

Audio of Stewart Brand's recent Long Now Foundation talk about reviving extinct species: http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/may/21/reviving-extinct-sp...

A subject near and dear to my heart. In college I was briefly obsessed with cross-linguistic adverb ordering. I wish middle school science included some linguistics. The empirical …

That's true, but the comparison I'm getting at is the learning curve. The process of consuming an algorithm or procedure is more of a tabs-vs-semicolons thing, a language war. I me…

The discussion here reminds me of the longstanding debate over editors like vim/emacs vs (whatever you want to call the other editors). Or semicolons vs indentation, to make a slig…

That is fantastic.

That was on The West Wing.

This has nothing to do with parodies or hacker news threads. What's the point?

Is that the inverse? Would all programmers with side projects necessarily be worse than the programmers rdouble knows who don't have side projects?

Why does that matter?

What's the right thing? http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/19892/opening-website-...

No, problem exacerbated. You have 3 camps of people here. One camp expects to only open new tabs when they choose to. Another wants (and sometimes expects) links to open new tabs a…

"Well HackerNews, what say you? I dare you to increase your traffic and engagement." HackerNews [sic], I dare you to allow your users to choose how they want to open new links, eve…

Maybe the top prize could be that everyone has to read Difference and Dominance.

Learning about Arrow's theorem definitely changed the way I think about elections in the US. It also changed the way I think about election news coverage. I used to be an ardent "h…