On this day, ten years ago, at about 8am my little brother was killed. Arthur was going to work in heavy traffic on the west-bound 91 freeway when he was bumped by a car. Whether the fault was his or the other driver, there is no way to know. Because my brother was riding a [...]
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Ten years
10-Feb-09Mathematics is Metaphor
08-Feb-09From Shut up and calculate: I advocate an extreme “shut-up-and-calculate” approach to physics, where our external physical reality is assumed to be purely mathematical. This brief essay motivates this “it’s all just equations” assumption and discusses its implications. Yet our ability to answer other questions has surpassed earlier generations’ wildest expectations: Newton would have been [...]
Just enough “Security”
07-Feb-09This is brilliant. Munich’s Metro Stressful, But It Goes Everywhere | Autopia from Wired.com Riders purchase tickets at self-service kiosk priced by zone — a ticket covering most of the inner city costs €2.30 ($2.95) — and before boarding, stamp them with an old-school time clock. It's possible to score a free ride by “forgetting” [...]
KCRW – Jewish Public Radio?
05-Feb-09Earlier I had noticed an apparent over-representation of Jewish issues in NPR coverage. What I heard over the air on Monday pretty much removes all doubt. KCRW, a local NPR affiliate, is holding a fund drive. Nothing unusual in that, up until a particular story ran on NPR: Abuse Scandal Plagues Hasidic Jews In Brooklyn [...]
Elegant distributed applications
03-Feb-09“Elegance is the attribute of being unusually effective and simple” Heard this first applied to theories in Physics. Any not-over-complicated theory that effectively explained the facts was – as I understood – considered an “elegant” theory. (My original interest – and college degree – was in Physics. I wanted to build starships.) Came up, long [...]
Long-term compatible protocols
02-Feb-09Prompted by this article: Lightweight versioning for lightweight protocols Yes, this is a many-times-solved problem – though not always well solved. Seems like most everything I’ve done in the last twenty-odd years (or more) has had a network in the middle. From that experience, a few guidelines… Guidelines for network protocols used in distributed applications [...]