links for 2008-04-07
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Reassuring that cities installed red light cameras for all the right reasons.
Archive for the 'Links' Category
links for 2008-03-25
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“What is it about the word ‘quantum’ that sucks the brains out of otherwise reasonable people? There has to be some sort of Heisenberg-Sch[r]ödinger Credulity Principle that makes all the ideons in their brains go spin-up at the same time, and I’m quite sure that the Many Worlds Interpretation of it has the most merit.”
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“Overwhelmed with words and imagery, harangued with opinion, beset by twaddle, my brain hungered for simplicity and found it.”
links for 2008-03-18
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“It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”
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“Historical linguists have, it seems, opened a new chapter in the human epic by establishing the first-ever verifiable links between the indigenous languages of Siberia and North America. … For the first time, linguistics has set a firm foot on the “land bridge” that lies sunken beneath the Bering Strait.”
links for 2008-03-13
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Very nice intuitive explanation of Ricci flow (the key tool in Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré Conjecture) by Terence Tao.
links for 2008-03-08
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“And that’s the lesson of Kosovo for the Serbs: we always fight better than our miserable enemies, and yet every time we get screwed.”
links for 2008-03-06
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“[A] closer inspection of the cases brought by Joint Terrorism Task Forces reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything.”
links for 2008-03-04
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“In the wide, nasty family of authoritarian political ideologies, Islamism and fascism are not even first cousins, let alone identical twins. To speak as if they were is to blur factors that are morally and politically distinct.”
links for 2008-03-02
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“Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill.”
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“Over the decades, evidence concerning cognitive deficits in brain-damaged patients has accumulated, and researchers have concluded that we have a sense of number that is independent of language, memory, and reasoning in general.”
links for 2008-03-01
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“Does anybody really believe that in every other country around the world except the former Soviet Union, journalists never die from car crashes or suspicious suicides, never have untimely heart attacks or other fatal illnesses that can be connected to their work?”
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“In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both.”
links for 2008-02-27
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“Democracy is at a huge advantage over dictatorship or monarchy when it comes to handling the organized succession problem, because the entire system is predicated on the possibility of non-violent succession and an amnesty (or at least amnesia) for the former rulers.”