william-newman

7 ms·

1.
by william-newman 16y ago
"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 overblown even at the level of purely individual events in individu
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by william-newman 16y ago
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 arguments and data to "so take their conclusions with a healthy
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by william-newman 16y ago
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 I expected to be earning and living on less than perhaps $12
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by william-newman 16y ago
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 "applied mathematics," like statistics or signal processing o
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by william-newman 16y ago
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, "anti-vaccine denial" ended up on this article's excrement l
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by william-newman 17y ago
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 wrong, I apologize in advance.) If you are arguing out that an
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by william-newman 17y ago
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_. Incidentally, I would be very interested in a pointer to a compa
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by william-newman 17y ago
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 know so much better?" That question is outside the scope of t
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by william-newman 17y ago
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 representing computation, the lambda calculus and the Turing
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by william-newman 17y ago
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. To pick some influential folk who fit into that period, consi
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by william-newman 17y ago
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 doesn't seem to be guilty of not investigating Lispy altern
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by william-newman 17y ago
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 logically expressive as practical while still supporting C-lev
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 that had been posed long ago and resisted any number of effo
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by william-newman 18y ago
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.uci.edu/~goodrich/pubs/skip.pdf . And, FWIW, they also lead to
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by william-newman 18y ago
"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 way. "If you don't make beautiful products, its probably bec
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 unusually asinine. "Leadership in the branch of science that delive
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 understanding the general properties of more tangible waves i
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 filter when you're being paid by beancounters whose bottom
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 major ad hominem, yay. When a discussion is devoted to tryi
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by william-newman 18y ago
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." But I am not playing that rhetorical trick. I already acknowl
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by william-newman 18y ago
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_palmer... . As I said, the controversy long ago became uncivi
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 martythemaniak may not impress you, but if when you first read tha
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by william-newman 18y ago
"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 other point which Crichton makes explicitly is "The past hi
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 be the main reason. Consider: How many examples of bogus expe
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by william-newman 18y ago
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 believe the Earth was in a warming trend over the 20th cent
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by william-newman 19y ago
"But, I now have a burning desire to learn it from the ground-up. What are the 'canonical' sources for math, both online and offline?" It'd be easy to spend multiple lifetimes studying math, so you'll have to set some priorities. Applied vs