If you’ve ever played ‘Chinese whispers’, what comes out the end is usually gibberish, and more or less when we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Oldest English words’ identified
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 →
In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don’t want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn’t have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn’t have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 →
The first rule of reading a federal budget is this: When a round number such as $1-billion appears, it means the government (a) picked the number from the air, (b) doesn’t know how or where the money will be spent, or (c) doesn’t have a process for making that decision. A round number, especially a big one, means the government is flying blind.
globeandmail.com: Getting shovels into the ground and money into more brains
The best readers are obstinate. They possess a nearly inexhaustible persistence that drives them to read, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in.
Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking.
Physicists and mathematicians often stretch their imaginations by considering what the world would be like if some of their basic assumptions and principles were violated. This has led to new concepts such as non-Euclidean geometry, positrons, antimatter, and antigravity. At the least, violating basic assumptions is a useful mental exercise, but a surprising number of the resulting concepts have provided useful descriptions of the real world.
In this article, we explore the types of interfaces that could result if we violate each of the Macintosh human interface design principles. We focus on the Macintosh interface because it is a prime example of the current interface paradigm, and Apple Computer has published an explicit list of Macintosh human interface design principles.
So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one’s brains out for no sane reason.
The Arab states invest their oil fortunes in the craziest things, from the proposed Mile-High Tower in Jiddah to the indoor ski resort in dry-as-dust Dubai. Perhaps the craziest idea yet is Saudi Arabian wheat. Some 30 years ago, the lake- and river-less kingdom decided it should be self-sufficient in wheat.
It worked. But the subsidies to farmers at times approached $1,000 (U.S.) a tonne. Last year, the Saudis finally concluded that desert wheat made no more sense than Nunavut pineapples. The farms will disappear within a few years, after which the country will be entirely dependent on imports. But from where?
Answer: from any nation willing to sell or lease vast tracts of its farmland and-here’s the kicker-allow the Saudis to export most or all of the food grown there back home, bypassing the international market. Such “offshore farms” are a quiet, though burgeoning, form of neo-colonialism. And they have the potential to unleash a new food crisis.
CBC Tapestry interview of Sam Harris. He explains the dangers or religion, especially religious moderates. He’s always worth listening to.
The only agency that regularly finances large-scale science in Canada was shut out of Tuesday’s federal budget, putting at risk thousands of jobs and some of the most promising medical research, and forcing the country to pull out of key international projects.
For the first time in nine years, Genome Canada, a non-profit non-governmental funding organization, was not mentioned in the federal budget and saw its annual cash injection from Ottawa - $140-million last year - disappear.
globeandmail.com: Budget erases funding for key science agency
Scientists across America are celebrating the passing of the Bush administration as the end of a dark age, a bleak stretch in which research budgets shrank and everything — stem cells, sex education, climate change, and the very origins of the Grand Canyon — became a point of conflict.
But in Canada’s research community, Mr. Obama’s plans have sparked anxiety that if this country fails to keep pace, it will have a tougher time recruiting smart people and convincing talent not to flock south. In short, Canada could lose its competitive edge to the Obama advantage.
globeandmail.com: As U.S. emerges from dark age, Canada’s scientific edge fades
No one is suggesting Darwinism has all the answers to social questions. Indeed, with some, such as the role of hierarchies, it suggests there is no definitive answer at all—itself an important conclusion. What is extraordinary, though, is how rarely an evolutionary analysis is part of the process of policymaking. To draw an analogy, it is like trying to fix a car without properly understanding how it works: not impossible, but as likely as not to result in a breakdown or a crash. Perhaps, after a century and a half, it is time not just to recognise but also to understand that human beings are evolved creatures. To know thyself is, after all, the beginning of wisdom.
Darwinian answers to social questions | Why we are, as we are | The Economist
Ontario is taking its first baby steps to position itself for the coming revolution in electric cars by backing a California high-tech company that plans to build battery recharging stations. Better Place, based in Palo Alto, will unveil a pilot project at a news conference in Toronto today to build a recharging station in Ontario, sources said.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008 →
This country has an immense opportunity to reinvent itself with this budget and transform itself into a “green economy.” But if this metamorphosis is to take place, the budget cannot contain a bunch of giveaways to industry wrapped up in a nice green bow. Instead, it needs to hand out gift certificates with green strings attached that will help Canada’s economy grow while protecting its natural capital.
Yesterday I would have ranked country music as one of my least favourites. Now, thanks to CBC Radio 3, I’m a big fan.
Fantastic photos of the Sun, via The Big Picture
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
Michael Pollan describes the upcoming food crisis in an open letter to the next President of the United States.
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation.
The core of his solution is:
… we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine
But the Black-Scholes model is quite different. It uses a model of the future to describe the present. In the absence of this model, or some equivalent of it, present stock options have no reasonable assigned value. What then is the test of the model? Presumably, it is that if one uses it as a guide to buy these options and, as a result, goes broke, one will be inclined to re-examine the assumptions.
Without God - The New York Review of Books
Steven Weinberg provides a great overview of the tension between science and religion and a discussion of morality in the absence of God.
Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.
A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure - The New York Review of Books
A proposal to create a new institution to fund and co-ordinate infrastructure investments.
Thursday, September 18, 2008 →
Dan Gardner . Harper economics
Dan Gardner interviews Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw on climate change economics. The article is an interesting description of the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon tax policies.
So why is the cap-and-trade option preferred by almost all politicians? As usual, it’s politics. Under cap-and-trade, politicians can claim they are hitting “big polluters” while leaving the ordinary person unscathed. That’s nonsense, of course. Costs borne by big polluters will be passed on, so the ordinary person pays either way. But with cap-and-trade, unlike a carbon tax, the cost to the ordinary person is hidden.
The cycles in economic fashion show how far economics is from being a science. One cannot think of any natural science in which orthodoxy swings between two poles. What gives economics the appearance of a science is that its propositions can be expressed mathematically by abstracting from the real world.
kung fu grippe - Better
www.kungfugrippe.com/post/4858…
This is an excellent post by Merlin Mann and something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently.
Now that I’m halfway through my parental leave with Kelly and the kids, I’m wondering about all of the distractions I have opted into – especially on the internet. When I have a few free minutes, is refreshing my Twitter feed really a priority? It shouldn’t be. So, I’ve been cutting back, cancelling my Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Last.fm, etc. accounts and trying to be much more careful with my time and attention.
Senate Report on “Emergency Preparedness in Canada”
This report is well worth a read just for the direct – almost sarcastic – writing. Some of the report’s commentary on the bureaucratic replies to the senate committee’s queries is fantastic.
globeandmail.com: Half-truths and zingers on the campaign trail
www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s…
I wonder about this too. Why do politicians pretend to be “regular” people. Don’t we want extraordinary leaders?
The ’80s: Were They Really That Bad? : NPR Music
NPR’s All Songs Considered provides an entertaining discussion of ‘80s music. They play some classic bad '80s music, but also find some great songs from the decade.
Even before the writ has dropped, the Tory campaign has made clear its intention to portray Mr. Harper as a minivan-driving hockey dad from the suburbs. The Liberal Leader, Stéphane Dion, by contrast, is to be ruthlessly caricatured as a wimpy and elitist academic of the mad-professor type.
Is it really good for future generations - the alleged beneficiaries of this deluded parsimony - to pass down a clapped out wreck of a town in need of major repairs and upgrades, long-deferred works that become more expensive with every minute they are neglected?
globeandmail.com: Debt free in a clapped out wreck of a town
Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon.
Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down.
Medical Dispatch: Superbugs: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems