August 2008
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Not from the Benevolence of the Pilot
Every time I have doubts about how safe flying is, I think to myself: It is not from the benevolence of the pilot that I expect not to die after crashing into a mountain, but from the pilot’s regard to his own interest. It amazes me how this line of reasoning seems to never enter [...]
Negative Items Left to Delete under Mac OS X Leopard
Until today I’ve felt that, at this point, Leopard has been patched enough to be relatively bug free. While transferring files across my home network today I changed my mind, because I found that the number of files left to delete that’s shown in progress dialogues can become negative. You can see what I mean [...]
Shipping American Products to Europe
My friend Harek and I were recently discussing the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons why both Amazon’s Kindle and Amazon’s considerable repertoire of e-books are not available for sale outside of the U. S.. I noted that there are many legal hoops one must go through before selling a product in the countries of the European [...]
A Lesson in Consequentialism for Jenny McCarthy
I generally take the strong consequentialist position that a person who causes A, which later causes B, must be held accountable for B, regardless of whether that person intended to cause B. In short, I broadly claim that factual casuality is moral responsibility. Therefore, if you stop your child from being vaccinated, I would assert [...]
Why Shouldn’t I Put You in Jail?
This snippet of court proceedings is amazing: “Why shouldn’t I put you in jail for contempt today?” Booth asked. “I told you twice.” “I’m sorry,” Arnold said. “No, you’re not,” Booth said. “I told you twice. I even fined you for being in contempt. Why shouldn’t I throw you in jail today? You apparently don’t [...]
G.K. Chesterton
After spending more than two years on the list of authors I want to explore, I’ve finally begun reading G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.” There is a brilliant passage at the start that I plan to quote in the future, but for now I thought I should quote this wonderful aphorism of [...]
No One Will Ever Want a Personal Computer
I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily [...]
Why You Shouldn’t Be Clever
Today I started reading the Ruby Snips website, which has a pretty good sample of interesting snippets of Ruby code on it. I was particularly intrigued by the following snippet from a post on Prime Numbers dating back to March 23rd, 2007: 1 2 3 4 5 class Fixnum def prime? (’1′ * self) !~ [...]
Not Exactly a Comforting Thought
From an article on The Volokh Conspiracy describing the role and traits of swing voters in the U.S.: The voters who know the least are the ones who tend to determine electoral outcomes.1 Ilya Somin : The Volokh Conspiracy : The Political Ignorance of Swing Voters↩
Heavy Metal in the Islamic World
Here is an absolutely amazing article on heavy metal bands in the Islamic world.