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Monday, August 06, 2001Economist.com Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse. Bjorn Lomborg, once deep green himself, argues that they are wrong in almost every particular
Tuesday, July 03, 2001The Times n the 1920s, Agatha Christie took the detective story into its next era, a sort of golden age, dominated by her and three other women writers, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. They set the stereotype for the “cosy” English whodunnit: a weekend in a country house filled with guests bearing dark secrets, and the lucky presence of an amateur sleuth able to conduct inquiries from the moment the first body is discovered in the library. It was a format that would become the template for decades and remains popular today. Never mind the poverty of characterisation; what mattered was whether the vicar could have made that crucial phone call at 2.35pm and still caught his train connection at 3.05pm.
Wednesday, June 13, 2001Craft Work - If it's beautiful, is it still modern dance? by Karen Lehrman In his performance last month at Aaron Davis Hall in Manhattan, Jones' company moved not just arms but legs, heads, and fingers in ways that induced enthusiasm, even passion. The dances were both aesthetically delightful and filled with ideas about love, loss, dependence, and purity.
Tuesday, May 29, 2001AlterNet -- The Culture War Against Kids Healthier Western nations recognize it's normal for an adolescent to experience depression, anger, lust, body image confusion, anxiety, sexy music, cathartic games, evil media messages, corporate pitches, dangerous temptations, free time with peers, consumer interests, all those untoward growing-up influences about which Americas kiddie-savers spread apocalyptic terror. Even if some kids get into trouble, modern remedies like curfews, Prozac, zero-tolerance, and mass lockup only make things worse.
Thursday, May 10, 2001I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the ``cathedral'' model of most of the commercial world versus the ``bazaar'' model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'', suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
Thursday, May 03, 2001TNR Online | Offensive Line by Lawrence F. Kaplan Good discussion on what we might gain from missile defense
Wednesday, May 02, 2001The Chronicle: 5/4/2001: Telling the Truth About Damned Lies and Statistics Telling the Truth About Damned Lies and Statistics By JOEL BEST The dissertation prospectus began by quoting a statistic -- a "grabber" meant to capture the reader's attention. The graduate student who wrote this prospectus undoubtedly wanted to seem scholarly to the professors who would read it; they would be supervising the proposed research. And what could be more scholarly than a nice, authoritative statistic, quoted from a professional journal in the student's field? So the prospectus began with this (carefully footnoted) quotation: "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." I had been invited to serve on the student's dissertation committee. When I read the quotation, I assumed the student had made an error in copying it. I went to the library and looked up the article the student had cited. There, in the journal's 1995 volume, was exactly the same sentence: "Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." This quotation is my nomination for a dubious distinction: I think it may be the worst -- that is, the most inaccurate -- social statistic ever.
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