So, the US has finally removed Nelson Mandela from its list of terrorists. It says a lot about the law, that Mandela was on the list in the first place. Anyone, other than a government, who uses violence for a political end is classified as a terrorist.
After over five years of living in Colombo (the capital of Sri Lanka) we have had enough and are moving to Galle. Colombo has become less and less pleasant to live in, we are not quite ready to go back to Britain, and we really like Galle.
Willem Buiter’s blog post on the arbitrariness of racial classifications are spot on. I wonder if he is too decent to realise that the whole point of the concept of race is to divide people; to provide people with a sense of belonging to a tribe. Race is purely whatever society defines it to be. Both the countries I know well, Britain and Sri Lanka, show this.
I never enjoyed school, but I enjoy, and have always enjoyed, learning. I would undoubtedly have done better if I had been simply taught to read and given a large pile of books, rather than being sent to school — even the extremely good school I went to.
In an interview with Psychology Today, Robert Epstein discusses his view that adolescents are harmed by being restricted and infantilised. This strengthens some of my views about schools and over-protective parenting, which I mentioned in my post on the lies we tell children.
After having a go at Paul Graham yesterday for writing outside is area of (considerable) expertise, I am eating my words a little by responding to just such an essay by him. It is true that many people do lie to children. This is what I think we should do.
Paul Graham’s essay, Hackers and Painters, is very popular with some programmers. I just found a hilarious refutation of it, called Dabblers and Blowhards.
The interesting thing for me is that Paul Graham’s audience are just as enthusiastic (if not more so) when he writes rubbish about things he knows nothing about, as when he writes insightfully about things he is an expert on.
Like Oliver Steele and his family, we have a No TV. I have had one so long that I find it hard to imagine life without it, so I find it harder to assess the benefits than he does.
The easy assumption that both The Guardian and Relate make when faced with men who have lost interest in sex have a medical or psychological problem seems to be to be forcing people into a mould of “normality” that is just as bad as Victorian behaviour that we would now find appalling.
MySQL’s decision to produce proprietary add-ons to its highly successful open source database has been widely misunderstood, and in some cases spun to produce the impression that it is a failure of open source.
As much as I dislike Microsoft Internet Explorer, and as much as I wish that people would make their own lives and those of website developers better by using better web browsers, I have always taken supporting it as a necessary evil. It is bundled with Windows and most people take whatever it suits MS gives them.
Brain Caplan thinks markets work fine despite having to wait 19 years to be able to a product with a tiny marginal cost of production: i.e. he spent 19 years waiting on the supplier’s whims just to buy allowed to buy some music.
This is old news, but I only just found someone even stupider than the woman who refused to believe that -6 is higher than -8. Even stupider than Jerry Taylor, City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, who threatened to call the FBI because he could not understand how to configure his computer. The record breaker: another small American city that came close to banning items made using dihydrogen monoxide.
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
My second daughter Nisha Clare Pietersz was born day before yesterday.
She has one older sister, Lucy Tarika.
If you know the derivations of the names (or their Latin and Sanskrit roots) you may notice a pattern. Both mother and baby are well and full of life.
I usually enjoy reading Economic Logic, but this post defending tax havens seems badly wrong headed to me. It misses the essentially fraudulent character of tax havens.
I noticed that most people downloading Mandriva One using bit torrent were using Windows clients, but almost everyone downloading Arch Linux seems to be using Ktorrent. The latter is to be expected, but the former surprised me.
Alan Sugar has called for “enterprise lessons” in schools. While a capitalist economy may benefit from there being some people like Alan Sugar, I see absolutely no evidence that we need more of them.
The Economist’s coverage of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has apparently been written by someone who thinks that Yahoo is primarily a search engine. It has been written in complete ignorance of both the competition concerns and the major difficulties of integrating the businesses.
Having previously complained about how consumers are too confused to choose complex technology, I am doing my bit to improve the situation with a little explanation, and some useful links.