Archive for January, 2008
Today’s Almost One Paragraph Blog: The Stall Point
How do you decide when to throw out your code/idea and sleep on it/do a rewrite? Most people intuitively know when they’ve gotten stuck. Suddenly, after plowing through mountains of work, returns suddenly diminish dramatically. People who program late at night will recognize this phenomena; coding turns from an art to a masturbatory exercise in [...]
Encoding a diff in legalese
Building on Chris’s previous post concerning legalese I came across the following: Military Commissions Act of 2006 SEC. 8. REVISIONS TO DETAINEE TREATMENT ACT OF 2005 RELATING TO PROTECTION OF CERTAIN UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT PERSONNEL. (a) Counsel and Investigations- Section 1004(b) of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (42 U.S.C. 2000dd-1(b)) is amended– (1) by [...]
Today’s (almost) one paragraph blog – perceptions
We usually assume that people calculate things rationally in economics. If we shop for a car we look for the best value; if two pizza places are equally good, we lean towards the cheaper one. Some economists have noted that sometimes, people don’t make these perfect calculations. For example, humans tend to exaggerate fears — [...]
Pollution for sale!
Pollution is one example of a Tragedy of the Commons.* Everyone loses if we all pollute, but no one person or factory individually wins if they stop. Is there a way to get a large group of people to all act at once?—- Let’s say I create a futures contract. This is a contract is [...]