09.04.10
Posted in General, Ideas at 10:14 am by Michael
The reason why additional taxes get shuffled onto the rich has little to do with who “needs” the money most. The real reason: there is an 80/20 distribution of wealth but not of votes. Therefore it is politically much safer to anger the highest-earning 20% than the bottom 80% in our winner-take-all elections.
This inequity can be solved by simply allowing people to choose how their tax dollars are spent. No taxation without representation, right? Well it follows that those who are taxed more should be better represented…
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12.29.09
Posted in General at 12:10 am by Michael
Edge cities tend to spring up radially around larger population centers, leading to population distributions that tend to be proportional to the population in the host city and inversely proportional to the distance from it.
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11.22.09
Posted in General, Ideas at 5:11 pm by Michael
The fundamental dilemma of cartography is attempting to project a 3-dimensional structure (the Earth) onto a 2-dimensional map. This is mathematically impossible to accomplish losslessly, so distortions are invariably introduced. Several standard projections exist, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, but one thing I’ve never seen was a context-aware projection: one which maximizes distortion in the least significant parts of the map (based directly upon the data being mapped) in exchange for minimizing distortion in significant areas. Something like PCA.
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07.25.09
Posted in General, Ideas at 6:41 pm by Michael
It’d be interesting if there were a restaurant themed around the works of Dr. Seuss (called “Green Eggs and Ham”?) They could host birthday parties, have foods inspired by the stories, get people to prance around in costumes, post witty made up words on the menus… and oh, the places they’ll go for delivery!
My imagination is wandering today. If anyone’s feeling zany, feel free to run with this 
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07.24.09
Posted in General, Sociology at 10:22 am by Michael
They occur in humans fairly similarly as they do in dogs: that is to say, they’re mostly psychological challenges to the dominance of the current leader, exhibited before the entire group. The social dynamics of humans and dogs actually strike me as quite similar in many other respects as well.
Anyone aspiring to group leadership pretty quickly finds that it’s no picnic, though. It’s a *huge* responsibility.
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07.15.09
Posted in General, Ideas at 9:49 pm by Michael
A single quarter is more valuable than one million bills if you’re looking for change for the parking meter.
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02.20.09
Posted in General at 9:48 pm by Michael
In the absence of internal motivation, students will still study for exams, but will put little additional effort into a course.
So an absolutely brutal means of motivating these students is to give 10 exams and keep only the lowest 2 (or drop the lowest and keep the next two up).
They would study because every exam would count. They couldn’t afford to slip up.
It’s the sort of thing that I wish I didn’t even have to think about. In an ideal world, all students would be motivated…
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02.11.09
Posted in General at 11:56 am by Michael
Beware of self-defeating philosophies and the people who hold them. They are parasitic.
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01.21.09
Posted in General at 3:53 pm by Michael
I stumbled upon this article:
http://exp-platform.com/semmelweisReflex.aspx
And found an interesting extract from it:
“According to Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (p. 69) an 1856 publication in a prominent Viennese medical periodical, Viennese Medical Weekly, by Jozsef Fleischer, a student of Semmelweis, showed success of chlorine washings. However, the editor for the periodical wrote at the end of the report “We believe that this chlorine-washing theory has long outlived its usefulness. The experiences and statistical results of most maternity institutions protest against the views presented above. It is time we are no longer to be deceived by this theory.”
Vienna continued to ignore his recommendations. In 1861, he published a book, but the community rejected his doctrine. In 1865 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital, where he was beaten by asylum personnel and died. It took another 14 years for the discovery to be accepted, after Louis Pasteur, in 1879, showed the presence of Streptococcus in the blood of women with child fever. Semmelweis is now recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy.”
First of all, I’ve never heard of Semmelweis before this, but I certainly have heard of Pasteur. Second, Semmelweis’ work had literally no impact in the scientific community because it was ignored until Pasteur replicated the findings (upon which everyone suddenly started paying attention, and probably attributed the discovery to him for quite some time).
Finally, and most compelling, taken from Semmelweis’ perspective, this was an utter loss. He found a way to save lives and greatly advanced medical practice (even if he wasn’t quite aware why), and for it, he was variously ignored, denounced, and vilified to the point of his own death. So what if he is now remembered? What good does posthumous recognition do him?
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01.11.09
Posted in General at 4:14 pm by Michael
Perhaps technology is just maturing, but the questions installers and other computer programs ask for “advanced users” have decreased significantly in difficulty. Whereas 10 years ago, an “advanced user” may have been expected to manually specify IRQs of legacy devices such as soundcards in something as simple as a game, there are a number of installers today whose “advanced” options simply allow the user to specify the installation directory.
Much of the complexity is being hidden within the operating system as well; with every new version, Windows hides more and more of what is going on under the hood. This is fine as a setting; it is extremely annoying (to people who understand what is going on) as a standard way of doing things. Windows 7 Explorer no longer even shows you which folders it is copying files from when performing a recursive copy or move.
I can’t help but think that the end result of this is something out of “Idiocracy”, where the only requirement for being a “computer technician” is knowing what a directory is and everyone stares in amazement at simple file system navigation.
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