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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Peter Foster on gambling and banking

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/01/16/peter-foster-from-gamblers-to-bankers.aspx

Peter Foster reviews the new book A World of Chance, written by Reuven Brenner, Gabrielle A. Brenner, and Aaron Brown.

A delightful quote:
Sir Ernest Cassel, the private banker to King Edward VII, is quoted in the book as saying, with arresting candour, “When I was young, people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all the time.”
Read the whole thing!

Responding to TigerHawk on academics and business

Note: I wrote most of the post below on Jan 17th, but didn't get around to finishing it until now (Jan 25th). It's an elaboration of a comment I left at Tigerhawk.

http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-do-professors-deplore-enterprise.html

I'm half-listening right now to a science show on radio. What strikes me is how enthusiastic the scientists are about their cool discoveries, insights, etc. There are a tremendous number of discoveries being made in quite a few fields right now, due to access to data (via sensor networks, robots, etc) that simply weren't available before -- on the ocean floor, on Mars, in large trees, etc. Similar in engineering and business. Any market is being challenged by the ongoing tech revolution, encouraging people to try to do impossible things with occasional success, and to do possible things better. This is fun!

OTOH post-modernism it seems to me has run out of ideas. It's shallow, it's not fun. Academics have to argue that their variant of a speculative theory is better and the other variants are worse. It's rhetoric not substance, and all the big ideas have been picked apart ad nauseum. No fun, just backbiting. Perhaps some of the anti-business bias (not to mention snobbery and disdain) is due to resentment.

I hope that academics in the humanities and social sciences throw out their frameworks and rediscover the joys of poring over and puzzling out the data in their fields. As a side-effect of having more fun in their own fields, they would probably see the fun in other areas -- such as business -- as well.

Texan computer techs need PI licence

My comment in SDA:
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/010539.html#c350809

Friday, January 16, 2009

Blogger Tips and Tricks - Recommended

I'm a novice blogger (though longtime lurker) and just learning how to set up and configure blog stuff. I want a blog roll that I can control, so I searched on Blogger Help, and found Peter Chen's very nice blog, and specific info on how to set one up. Thanks Peter!

HTML/Javascript gadget for blogroll

The Road to Serfdom

Downloadable Reader's Digest version (pdf).

h/t Classical Values

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Cringley on Intel's approach to parallel processing

Parallel Universe
By Robert X. Cringley

Cringley's article brings back fond memories of my past studies of parallel computing. I could give comments, background info, and explanations to most paragraphs. Here though, I'll stick to (and criticize) the following:
That may well set a practical limit on the multicore strategy long before we start buying hundred-core PCs.
Does it matter, though? While there may be applications that demand the power of many cores, most people aren't using those applications. Other than hard-core gamers, few people are complaining that their PCs are too slow.
Of the top of my head, I see two major uses for more desktop processing power via multiple cores:
  1. indexing files (names, tags/keywords, contents of documents, images, videos, sounds, etc.) in the background without slowing down user apps (this will drastically reduce the need to create subfolders and the stress of wondering where one stashed that important doc whose name one doesn't quite remember...);
  2. speech recognition, which will permit routine accurate dictation.
These are both available on Vista, but are compute-intensive and are only now becoming somewhat useful on desktop machines.
No doubt there are many more, but it seems to me that on laptops and desktops they will mostly be used to make it easier and more pleasant to create, find, and manage documents, images, videos, etc.

The pervasiveness of slavery

I've been reading Wikipedia's articles on slavery and piracy.  This started with wishing to know more about the Barbary pirates.  

What strikes me is how normal it was up to only a few centuries ago to live knowing that at any moment some group of armed men could come by, loot and destroy your community, slaughter most of the people you know and take the few survivors as slaves.  Having a strong army and lots of reliable allies was good for one's survival and prosperity.

Many of us in the West have forgotten this.  It's become normal here, now, to live on the coast or on the plains or anywhere else in our countries and not have to consider that some group will attack my community to rape, plunder, murder, enslave.  It's just not done here anymore.  And I fear that many of us have forgotten why it's not done here anymore.


A quote from Wikipedia's Barbary Pirates article:

In 1785 two ships (the Maria of Boston and the Dauphin of Philadelphia) were seized, the ships and cargo were sold and the crews were enslaved and held for ransom.[13]

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson, then the ambassador to France, and John Adams, ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, a visiting ambassador from Tripoli. The Americans asked Adja why his government was hostile to American ships, even though there had been no provocation. They reported to the Continental Congress that the ambassador had told them “it was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave,” but he also told them that for what they considered outrageous sums of money they could make peace.[14]