Copy What You Like

This Paul Graham essay is very good.

LoganCapaldo: your welcome
LoganCapaldo: s/your/you're
LoganCapaldo: see Regexp's can fix grammar
lectrick: that's not regex, that's sed.
curi42: "your" was a regex
kreaturr: lectrick: you can make LoganCapaldo's example a bit more readable (like abolish the $& variable in it)
LoganCapaldo: yar
LoganCapaldo: but no one saw the _meta_ joke?
LoganCapaldo: where "Regexp's" was grammatically incorrect
LoganCapaldo: I give up
LoganCapaldo: I was obviously not meant for geek stand up ;)
curi42: oh. heh. i thought it had to do with grammers for languages being parsed with a regex based engine.
zenspider: geek humor is NEVER funny.
zenspider: it is a law of nature
curi42: yes it is!
zenspider: no, it isn't... ever.
curi42: People just sometimes don't laugh until the next day if the joke was O(2^N) or something.
zenspider: and it is grammars </peeve>
zenspider: curi42: you keep believing that...
curi42: my best joke ever people are due to laugh next year... :)
kreaturr: curi42: it got a chuckle, but it was somewhat immediate - so I guess it was low N.
curi42: hehe
lectrick: kreaturr: how to replace the $& to something more legible?
LoganCapaldo: { |same_as_funny| same_as_funny.scan ... }
lectrick: curi42: LOL

There's a new "scientific" study of the harmfulness of different drugs out. It looks pretty suspect with tobacco being ranked more harmful than ecstasy and marijuana more harmful than LSD.

I tried generating graphs of drug harmfulness using random numbers for experts. As you can see below, I got some with about the same shape as the study's graph.

[73, 71, 69, 67, 64, 63, 63, 62, 62, 61, 59, 59, 58, 57, 57, 52, 50, 49, 47, 47]

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[78, 74, 69, 66, 64, 63, 63, 63, 62, 62, 61, 61, 61, 60, 60, 60, 57, 54, 51, 42]

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And people, there is no way for a nuturer to win an argument with a nature-er and vice-versa, because the base position of each argument is so fundamentally different that it"™s like two people trying to have a conversation while one is speaking English and one is speaking Mandarin.

source

Here the (myth of the) framework argument is invoked, which says if people have different frameworks or foundations then discussion won't get anywhere. They won't be able to reconcile their different starting points.

What's amusing is that many of the analogies intending to prove the framework argument do a good job of proving it's a myth. This analogy says that people who speak different languages won't be able to make progress and come to understand each other and agree. But it's common knowledge that if you go to a country where you don't speak the language, that is a good way to learn the language. If you try a lot you can figure out what words mean and make progress, and eventually become completely fluent in the foreign language. So, by analogy, the nature/nurture people *could* solve their dispute.

Sleeping when not tired is like eating when not hungry.

I wore my Israeli flag yesterday (context). I walked a short ways through downtown Berkeley in public (and went to Jamba Juice), went to a TCS speech by Sarah Fitz-Claridge, and went into two restaurants in Fremont.

Nothing bad happened.

In Berkeley people said something from their car, but I couldn't hear what. They didn't look angry and I waved to them. However it was 9am on Sunday and not many people were around.

At the speech, someone asked why I was wearing a flag. I said that I support Israel, and that if I don't wear a flag no one will ask about it. She didn't say anything so I added that on Saturday Hezbollah was smuggling weapons into Lebanon and Israel sent commandos to stop this, so the UN said Israel broke the cease fire. She thought that was dumb :)

200 years ago, William Godwin wrote an essay telling parents that they should not restrict which books their children can read. For example, they shouldn't ban their daughters from reading any novels.

Why did parents hate books? Because their kids might get ideas, or be influenced. Kids are gullible, you know? But far too stubborn and resistant to new ideas for parents to control or advise them.

Now that there is an even larger threat than books (TV), parents have given up on keeping kids away from books, and actually encourage it so as to distract them from the TV. Television is a medium capable of expressing text just like a book, but also capable of conveying pictures and sounds, so it's quite a bit more powerful than books. And people like TV better, and want to spend a lot of time using it. When people really like something, that's called addiction, and it must be stopped.

I'm not joking. There's even "email addiction", and it's just like cocaine.

Here's Godwin's book, which is out of copyright and free.

I was interviewed about Ruby.

I wrote a Ruby script to figure out whether 4K or MYM is a better Warcraft 3 clan.

The odds I used:

Grubby = {:moon => 0.55, :lucifer => 0.90, :storm => 0.84, :susiria => 0.93}
Tod = {:moon => 0.60, :lucifer => 0.20, :storm => 0.60, :susiria => 0.50}
Fov = {:moon => 0.72, :lucifer => 0.50, :storm => 0.85, :susiria => 0.67}
Creo = {:moon => 0.15, :lucifer => 0.10, :storm => 0.37, :susiria => 0.15}

The results of 1,000,000 clan wars (players are matched up randomly for four 1 vs 1 matches):

4 points for 4K happened 46707 times.
3 points for 4K happened 306329 times.
2 points for 4K happened 430575 times.
1 points for 4K happened 190895 times.
0 points for 4K happened 25494 times.
Total wins if the 2 vs 2 match is 50%: 4K: 568323. MYM: 431676.

Here's the source code. Feel free to tinker with the odds and run it again.

As you can see, 4K is better :)

If Israel loses, the penalty is death. If Lebanon loses, the penalty is "humiliation".

Kofi says the blockade is also:

I see two possibilities:

One: Hezbollah is *not* an agent of Lebanon (despite being part of the government). In that case, in what sense is Lebanon sovereign if it can't control enemy militias within its borders? And shouldn't its primary complaint be about the huge threat to sovereign control over its own territory that Hezbollah poses?

Two: Hezbollah *is* an agent of Lebanon, in which case Lebanon has forfeited any right to sovereignty by murdering Israelis with rockets, abducting Israeli citizens, and so on.