Viewing profile — william-newman

"Trimming facts off at the first few levels of details makes everything feel, well, oversimplified." But it's not just oversimplification of collective action, the plot was overblo…

Good advice would be "so be particularly careful to check whether their arguments are logically sound and properly documented;" the original advice to skip past the quality of argu…

When I was in high school, I travelled by city bus while holding two different ultra-low-end programming jobs. I think you are underrepresenting the advantages of having a car. If …

The math in computer science may not be much like the usual idea of science, but neither is it what people ordinarily mean when they say "pure mathematics." It's much more nearly "…

I have no particular sympathy with any anti-vaccine activism that I know of. But I wonder how, other than by not being an important faction in the appropriate big political tent, "…

It depends on what point you think you're making. (And perhaps you should make that point explicitly, so that I don't need to guess it before criticizing it, but if I'm guessing wr…

For a more academic-economics-oriented article on the same theme by the same authors, see http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html , from _Journal of Law and Economics_. Incide…

You write "first, they are anecdotal." Fictional, in fact: "once upon a time..." And you write "second, why are the programmers not taking control of management positions if they k…

I agree that his point is valid for computers built on the ordinary substrate of classical switches (whether relays, tubes, or transistors). There are two very influential ways of …

I don't think amateur-vs.-scientist-vs.-genius is a very good set of names for the distinctions he is trying to make, especially if you're going to reach back to Herschel's time. T…

Stepanov (i.e., Mr. C++ Standard Template Library) has said some comparably strong things about the expressiveness of C++ templates for the kinds of things expressed in STL, and he…

It is seldom a good idea, or even sane, to choose to machine something out of titanium (or beryllium). But sometimes there are reasons. I think C++ does a decent job of being as lo…

You write "in mathematics, Andrew Wiles and Gregory Perelman solved more vexing problems than Einstein did in physics." Wiles and Perelman are rightly honored for solving problems …

Skip lists seem to be a powerful way of thinking about the problem, anyway. Note that they lead nicely to the very nifty multidimensional generalization, skip quadtrees, www.ics.uc…

"Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way." Pretty is often good. Ugly is even more often bad. It has often been that way, and it will often be that …

I am not as sure as giardini that the money is ill-spent --- poking around in a new regime is an interesting gamble, not necessarily an albatross. But the article does seem unusual…

I think the EM field properties are somewhat peculiar even before you get to experimental results that force you to quantize the field. Granted, the EM field is not so weird that u…

It is not sufficient simply not to target growth. But not targeting growth removes what is otherwise one helluva tough design constraint for a filter system. Imagine writing a spam…

Of course since I didn't take offense at being accused of making a "major strawman" argument, I won't mind being accused of another dishonest rhetorical tactic. At least it's not m…

If I had misrepresented Myers as making the most best arguments the AGW folk have, and knocked his arguments down and proclaimed victory, you could honestly say "major strawman." B…

Here's a nice example of equating AGW skeptics to creationists, one that I vaguely remembered, but had trouble digging up: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/hello_stan_pal…

The creationist comparison shows up other places, too. I've encountered it several times before, and you can Google "denialist creationist" to find more. Me trying to refute martyt…

"Why choose any examples at all? The only point of the comparisons is to make an emotional argument, which has no foundations in logic whatsoever." The only point? I think not. One…

I agree that Crichton's analogy to eugenics is really inflammatory and offensive, and even that that's likely part of his reason for choosing it. But in his defense, it might not b…

It is true that objections to global warming are all over the map, including some embarrassingly silly objections. E.g., it's not just anonymous trolls on internet who claim not to…