October 2011
Thursday, 20 October 2011
When did the giant impact that formed the Moon take place?
ars technica: “Recent evidence (probably published after this paper was in the works), has suggested that some of the Earth’s minerals were deposited by meteors after the MGI took place. That, in turn, would suggest that the modern crust might not be what they should be aiming for in their models.”
Friday, 14 October 2011
The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics
John Kay: “What Lucas means when he asserts that deviations are ‘too small to matter’ is that attempts to construct general models of deviations from the efficient market hypothesis – by specifying mechanical trading rules or by writing equations to identify bubbles in asset prices – have not met with much success. But this is to miss the point: the expert billiard player plays a nearly perfect game, but it is the imperfections of play between experts that determine the result. There is a – trivial – sense in which the deviations from efficient markets are too small to matter – and a more important sense in which these deviations are the principal thing that matters.”
Dennis Ritchie
Sutter’s Mill: “So this young upstart whippersnapper comes along and decides to try to specify a language that will let people write programs that are: (a) high-level, with structures and functions; (b) portable to just about any kind of hardware; and (c) efficient on that hardware so that they’re competitive with handcrafted nonportable custom assembler code on that hardware. A high-level, portable, efficient systems programming language. How silly. Everyone knew it couldn’t be done.”
Friday, 7 October 2011
Ad Campaigns Are Dead
DigitalNext: A Blog on Emerging Media and Technology - Advertising Age: “The social consumer is so much more multi-dimensional than a seasonal retail push.”
Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
Danger Room | Wired.com: “‘We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,’ says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. ‘We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.’” Skynet lives!
Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 89
NYTimes.com: “When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. When a doctor treating his head wounds marveled that he had not suffered a concussion, Mr. Shuttlesworth famously replied, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.””
Thursday, 6 October 2011
Steve Jobs Is Dead
Steve Jobs Is Dead: “But technology is only a tool. As with everything else he understood that great technology alone is not enough. It must be human to have an impact. Pixar movies tell stories. They make grown men cry. That was the impact of Steve Jobs.”