On a related note, why are all scammers in Nigeria? Has anyone received the scam emails from ANY other country? I'm frankly dissapointed with the criminals in other countries. Where are they and why aren't they trying to scam us too?
via Consumerist – It’s Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay – eBay.
Several months back, I wrote up a speculation about the granularity of what we call “reality”. Since then I have tended notice more those instances of a perceptual gap – where my mental record departs from the smoothly deductive model of reality.
(An odd trap, when deductions – of a sort – lead to speculation that perceived reality may not follow a deductive model.)
What do I mean by a “deductive model of reality”?
If I cannot find object, search repeatedly in all the locations I expect, and eventually find the object in plain sight in a place I looked many times before – I assume by deduction that the object was in fact there all along, and I somehow missed it. By somewhat-conscious choice the episode is recorded in my memory as “the object was always there, and I somehow failed to see it”. By choice I reject from recall an instance of “the object appeared where I had looked before” – as impossible.
Along the same lines – if you and I have different memories of an event, I assume that one (or both) of us were mis-remembering, and there was – by deduction – a single true objective reality of the event.
A good practice in science is to occasionally question (and re-verify) your assumptions. What could I expect if my speculation about a “granularity” of reality might be somewhat true? With that question in mind I now more often tend to mark the mismatch between memory and “objective reality”.
An aside – At one point I wondered if the deductive the model of reality was a learned behavior – and that question suddenly invoked a faint memory of adopting a choice of interpretation, as a child. Is the memory real? I do not know.
Again, without any sort of test, there is no reason to treat this speculation as anything more. To be clear, I most firmly believe in the deterministic model, and not the speculation. But I also now have this persistent ghost of a question….
In the process of converting a group of programmers to Subversion, I ran across a surprisingly awkward bit.
As a regular practice, before generating a build to go to customers, I always carefully review all the changes to the program sources since the last customer release. Using CVS the command line is simple (run from the root directory for the component):
cvs diff -t WIDGET_v301
Reviewing the differences helps both to write up a customer-oriented list of changes, and also helps insure that nothing unintended (say, left over experiments or debug code) makes it into the customer release.
With Subversion under Eclipse the equivalent comparison is easy – just select the trunk and tags/v301 and a compare gets the same result as CVS.
With Subversion on the command line, the equivalent comparison is ridiculously tedious.
svn diff http://hostname/path/widget/tags/v301
Um, hello? Subversion knows the http://hostname/path/ part. If I followed the conventional layout, Subversion can deduce that the current directory is trunk and from that the path to tags. Yes, I know the repository layout (in terms of branches and tags) under Subversion can be arbitrary (and this is all very cool), but optimizing for the most-common case is always good.
Figuring that I must have missed something, I went digging, and came up with this gem:
Branko Äibej – Re: svn diff branch woprking copy against mainline?
This seems to be a common misconception. The important thing to remember here is that there is no separate namespace for labels and branches in SVN, and that the layout of the repository is arbitrary. IOW, the fact that you have branches in /branches is a convention, not something imposed by the SVN server.
The writer is almost exactly wrong. There are a separate namespaces in the Subversion repository. The namespaces are established by convention. The recommended PROJECT/{trunk,tags,branches} can be recognized by default, and any local variant specified by user-set properties in Subversion. This is easy.
I expected Subversion to be a nearly uniform improvement over CVS, not stuck for years on how to cover simple usage.
Top Countries in Global Competitiveness: article, slideshow
An observation – a number of the small countries with outsize rankings are noted as having high taxes. So high taxes need not harm – and when the tax revenues are used effectively, may benefit – competitiveness (at least as measured by this group).
On a more speculative note, Britain is noted for “sophisticated financial markets”, and also as no longer in the top ten … and falling. Is there a correlation?