February 2012
2 posts
5 tags
January 2012
6 posts
9 tags
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Britain's computer science courses failing to give... →
Loads of interesting issues raised by this article. It’s description of pre-uni education matches my experience, but if there are unis and colleges churning out unemployable graduates, Edinburgh University isn’t one of them. However, everyone I’ve spoken to who has interviewed for software engineers have complained about the amount chaff they have to sift through.
I don’t...
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Rands In Repose: A Bag of Holding →
In case you need more musings on backpacks, here is Rands’ recent explanation of why he picked his new bag.
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More thoughts about my old backpack than anyone...
My old Jeep backpack is wearing through at the bottom, far less waterproof than I’d have hoped, I’ve had to replace one of the zippers with a paperclip and the clasp on the waistband has broken.
Its large main compartment easily fits my 15” Mac Book Pro and a few days of clothes, and it extends under the secondary compartments which is just enough space to hold the can of...
7 tags
December 2011
8 posts
End artificial scarcities to boost productivity
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BufferBloat: What's Wrong with the Internet? - ACM... →
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New Statesman - The true threat is not a... →
Laurie Penny’s musing on the 10th anniversary of that unfortunate event. Bit late to the party on this one.
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L'Hôte: the resentment machine →
He’s wrong in interesting ways, and I do love that posts like these are exactly what he’s upset about.
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World building 201: Heuristics →
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Creating the Innocent Killer →
Critical analysis of “Ender’s Game”. His thesis is that Card has constructed as straw man argument for a morality where only intentions matter, allowing Ender to become a virtuous, innocent hero, despite personally killing three children and destroying an entire species.
November 2011
7 posts
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“Yesterday, then, allows us to look at the real structural problems and...”
– BBC News - 29/11/11 - A turning point in British history
Paul Mason’s analysis is pretty good. IANAE but that last bit sounds somewhat Keynsian…
Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ →
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George Monbiot – The Self-Attribution Fallacy →
Moonbat discusses Kahneman’s finding that many financial analysts perform no better than random chance, and the willingness of individuals to attribute their success to their skill and experience, even when they have evidence which refutes this.
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The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog) →
Criticism of the current approach towards social graphs and social networking in general.
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Evil social networks →
Charlie Stross explains why Klout is an illegal social virus you should probably opt out of. I set up a klout account years ago when it first began in the hope it would provide some useful insight into my social media usage. It never did, and most of the new features introduced lately have either been wildly inaccurate or frustrating. Reading this, I can’t see any reason to keep using it, so...
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This One Hurts « Dr. Walter Bortz's II's Blog →
Interesting eulogy of John McCarthy from his doctor.
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Supercut.org — Home of the Obsessive Video Montage →
A collection of videos which, themselves, collect various instances of things from tv shows and series. For example, here is every time the Professor announces the Good News in Futurama. Cool.
October 2011
15 posts
8 tags
What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie? - New York... →
A history of America’s problematic relationship with fat, carbohydrates, diets and obesity. Food for thought.
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The Rands Test →
Rands does his own spin on Spolsky’s famous software company test. His is a bit more strategic and concerned with communication and flow of information however.
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Notes on Nationalism | The Orwell Prize →
George Orwell muses on the matter of Nationalism, which he defines in a broader sense to cover partisanry of any sort. Apart from a few anachronistic references, it reads as if it was written this year. Good stuff.
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“As the neutrinos leave the first lab and move towards the lab in Italy, from the...”
– Einstein’s Theory Still Safe
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BBC News - 'Occupy' is a response to economic... →
Some interesting speculation on the Occupy movements and what it suggests about the direction of modern politics and the yoof of today.
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“I hope in the long-run, as this grows and builds, that power users may actually...”
– The Locker Project: data for the people - O’Reilly Radar
From what I can tell a locker is like a safe for your data. The obvious stuff you put in it is your content: tweets, blog posts, photos, videos. However, what it’s really geared for is stuff like your social graph, your search...
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Irony & Sarcasm marks, part 2 of 3 →
This is about how a russian spy invented an alphabet. I think.
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Jettison →
onethingwell:
Jettison eliminates the hassle of manually ejecting external drives before you put your MacBook to sleep. With Jettison, you just close your MacBook, unplug and go!
Mac App Store
Handy, though it’s a bit galling I have to pay £1.50 so I don’t have to do OS X’s job for it.
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The Curse Of Tina →
Somehow Adam manages to tie together Thatcher, Hayek, Friedman, Sartre, Screaming Lord Sutch and Are You Being Served via piracy (of both sorts), monetarism, and the rise of the political Think Tank. Well worth watching all the clips if you can find the time.
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I lied →
Wherein Andrew muses on the nature of modern political discourse, discovers it mostly consists of button pushing keywords glued together by noise and decides to quit paying attention to politics altogether.
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Jas Obrecht Music Archive » Blog Archive Eddie Van... →
Eddie’s first interview, ever. Cool.
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September 2011
6 posts
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The Unintended Consequences of Cyberbullying... →
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Guilt Through Algorithmic Association →
I guess this is the flip side of the wisdom of crowds: sometimes the crowd is completely wrong and despite these searches generating negative results, the mere question is enough to cause trouble. The wisdom of mobs?
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Annals of Entertainment: Anchor Woman : The New... →
An article about Tina Fey, written in 2003 when she was still head writer at SNL. I can’t count the number of 30 Rock plots that are foreshadowed in it.
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We Need An Identity Re-Aggregator →
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Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? →
Spears and other researchers argue that this sort of decision fatigue is a major — and hitherto ignored — factor in trapping people in poverty. Because their financial situation forces them to make so many trade-offs, they have less willpower to devote to school, work and other activities that might get them into the middle class. It’s hard to know exactly how important this factor is, but there’s...
August 2011
10 posts
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A Is For Atom →
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USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the... →
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Top Gear's electric car shows pour petrol over... →
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pushd and popd
onethingwell:
A pair of very useful commands, pushd saves the current directory and (optionally) changes to a different one; popd returns you to the saved directory:
$ pwd
/home/you/directory
$ pushd /somewhere/far/away/in/the/filesystem
$ pwd
/somewhere/far/away/in/the/filesystem
$ cd /somewhere/else
$ cd /yet/another/place
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/you/directory
I use these constantly but it...
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BBC - Adam Curtis Blog: EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY →