That was a surprisingly good summary of what I've concluded from my own readings. I guess there are two types of nerds: speedy nerds and slow nerds. Generally what passes for intelligence here is News for Speedy Nerds.

For really short people, you basically have to be obese to be "normal" and for really tall people, you basically have to be emaciated.

I'm in the second group. I'd have to check myself into the Ally McBeal foie gras buffet emporium if I ever got down to the bottom end of my "healthy" BMI bracket using the dumb old formula. I used to weight about that much during my growth spurt, despite devouring large meals between larger meals. Strangers standing beside me in elevators used to worry whether my body could withstand the acceleration, and suggest to me that I eat more. On one work term there was a one-plate lunch buffet restaurant I used to frequent where I discovered the technique of using the sturdy vegetables and lettuce to cantilever the plate's diameter. I was a serious eater, and still I had no shadow.

Here is an equally simplistic BMI that works better at the extremes: Ponderal index. It works for me because I eventually filled out into a "scaled up" normal person with no (recent) African genes for shedding heat.

After taking a closer look I concluded that some individuals are such a bad fit for the regular BMI, the use of BMI in the medical setting with these individuals amounts to borderline malpractice. How many people are taking a cholesterol drug because their BMI factored into their GP's uncritical perception?

Anyone else remember the old expression: garbage in, garbage out? Coefficient 2.0 of the BMI formula needs a serious make-over.

Contrary to the story summary, the recipe is not quite that easy. There needs to be at least some effort to disguise the act of speaking our of your ass.

There are seven layers of straw men between this outrageously overblown mathematical quibble and the true nature of human cognition.

He strikes me as being more like David Helfgott and less like Rachmaninoff.

To a large degree in mathematics, infinity is used to invoke the limiting configuration of an unbounded process (where there is always a next step). This isn't precisely the same thing as believing in infinity itself, or any of its many discrete fragments.

Meaning in Classical Mathematics: Is it at Odds with Intuitionism

I suspect the majority of the people feel the same way.

Not even close, unless you also think that the majority of people who suffer in silence all fret over the same life issue.

Apathy has at least a dozen different root causes at the level of kingdom and phyla. Some people dislike how their computer turns into a vat of sticky molasses right after the anti-virus software gets installed. They didn't know you need twice as much bare metal to eke out a tolerable user experience once the protective condom—prosthetic cylinder—is superglued onto the pink skin under the hood. When you find a male user whose entire panoply of defences are on the floor (or around his ankles), one suspects the anti-virus software was interfering with a cherished late-night hobby.

The entire anti-virus program was misconceived to begin with. It's not ultimately impossible to write secure code, but it will remain impossible until we've exhausted every other dodge.

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else. — Winston Churchill

Note that by "secure" I don't mean "flawless". A better proxy is that once a flaw is discovered, it takes far longer to work up a successful exploit than it does to fix the problem and test the patch, assuming both lines of development hear the same gun.

I've been reading security threads for at least two decades. There's always someone who pipes up with the view that because the travelling salesman problem is NP-complete, you might as well plan your route by flipping coins. This is the strange and not-so-wonderful archaea kingdom of the apathy tree. Brain the size of a planet, and all these people can manage is to cop a snivel. These people have their edge enhancement (aka paranoia) dialed up so far, the entire universe looks like a chessboard in the movie Tron. I'm guessing that the evolution of intelligent life is also NP-complete, yet somehow it happened. Hard to notice this if your giant brain perceives itself as living on planet Tron.

At the end of the day secure code has no hope of survival in a winner-take-all market with a short little span of attention (winner take all, until it's all siphoned away by a Chinese triad). It probably boils down to prisoner's dilemma—until there's a sea change, and secure code gets the girl.

The answer lies in a systems theory analysis of human mating-instinct time horizons. This is a different difficulty class than NP-complete, founded on the technique of proof by partial induction: well, we're still here.

It took a long time (ten years?) to get just a basic 32-bit protected mode operating system out to people at large after the hardware (80386) was out.

Double facepalm!! That's one version of the story. In other news, the day after the first Prius was available for sale, there was a global recall on internal combustion engines—the kind of recall where they don't give back.

The hump where protected mode starts to drive real productivity benefit is somewhere above a 486SX/25 with 8 MB of RAM and a 120 MB disk drive. I had a Gateway 2000 laptop exactly like that (monochrome). It even had NetBSD for a few days. Simply not worth it. It had relatively fast video, but not VLB. I didn't even try X Windows.

Later I converted a 486DX/100 with 16 MB of RAM and a 200 MB disk drive into a BSD crash box. That system ran not bad, if you were patient enough. It really could usefully multitask.

Then I upgraded my main system to a P6/200 with 32 MB of RAM (not cheap) and a 640 MB SCSI hard drive (about a dollar per MB) and pair of 19" monitors (about $1000 each) running an early version of NT. This was exactly the point where I said to myself "I'll never go back".

This was not a software issue. The delay in widespread adoption of protected memory operating systems was in large measure caused by a DRAM price cartel.

DRAM price fixing. The American company Micron was the ring-leader as I recall it.

In December 2003, the Department charged Alfred P. Censullo, a Regional Sales Manager for Micron Technology Inc., with obstruction of justice. Censullo pleaded guilty to the charge and admitted to having withheld and altered documents responsive to a grand jury subpoena served on Micron in June 2002.

On October 20, 2004, Infineon also pled guilty. The company was fined $160M for its involvement, then the third largest antitrust fine in US history. Hynix Semiconductor soon took the third position in April 2005 with a $185M criminal penalty after they also admitted guilt. In October 2005, Samsung entered their guilty plea in connection with the cartel.

I remember this extremely well because memory flat-lined at CDN $40/MB for about three years in the mid 1990s.

Of course this is not corruption. It's the invisible hand hard at work.

I am so ready for all new vehicles with fob starters to come with three fob sets, by default.

Then he wants to 'compress' the lasing cavity to *ahem* reach black-hole level of energy densities.

It seems pretty clear to me—I took that same first course—that a neutrino is just a white hole (moving at the speed of light) made up of photons which such a strong self-interaction they can't escape from themselves and thus refuse to interact with much of anything else.

This all seemed to fit with the gravitational contribution of the EM Stress Energy Tensor until I saw a post from Lubos on Stackexchange about the non-zero photon pressure and their Tii spatial components in GR, so I'm now back to looking for a different way to pretend I have a clue.

essentially blaming them after she behaved rudely to her family and friends

Apparently one person's "rude" is another person's common sense. (Invocation of "blame" is another red flag that common sense has left the building.) 100% of the rudeness here derives from unbalanced technology, because Facebook wants it that way.

Entire countries filter the internet. Yet as an individual, it's not practical for me to contract a public identity management agency which allows me to enact controls over what personal information I'm willing to see splattered into the public space on malign service hosts.

Nothing should go onto your social media pages that doesn't first go through your own appointed screening filter, if you choose to have one.

Had such an option been available, her personally appointed screening filter would have simply bouncing back a message to her uncle to the effect that "Janet doesn't wish to see her reproductive status conveyed on cloud services".

It's not rude. It's common sense.

Unfortunately, this entire line of argument sets a precedent for non-productive lines of argument. It usually turns out that the person advancing such an argument is rarely concerned with precedent after all.

The last standards-problem I ran into was that you can't template a class over a constant floating point value, only integer/boolean values

News update from planet math. You can template a class over an integer pair which provides a dense set over the Reals known as the Rationals.

If one couldn't do this, the argument at the standardization round table would have been a lot different.

Everyone knows 40% of C++. Unfortunately, it's never the same 40%.

What's the problem with that? It's been plenty good enough for religion for thousands of years.

Everyone knows 40% of the will of god. Unfortunately, it's never the same 40%, so far as we can tell.

I freely admit that the coefficient of groupthink in C++ is on the low end as modern programming languages go. That's what has always appealed to me about C++: that it was a larger church.

The value of having a larger church fluctuates in interesting ways, roughly akin to the Titanic. To the passengers on the upper decks, the rafts provided seemed more than adequate. A programming language takes a heavy toll in uncluttered vistas when it elects to support even the guy shovelling coal far, far below the fancy paint.

Comparing software engineering to regular engineering is an unfair comparison when regular engineering is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of years of experience.

Yes, and wherever that experience is lacking because the progress and rate of change are related by a differential equation, what type of engineer manufactures the expanding putty? The Roman engineer or the von Neumann engineer?

The reason an older programmer is slower than a younger one is because of the number of answers he has to the question "what could possibly go wrong?".

Young engineers heap success. Old engineers bleed failure.

After I buggered with the classic restorer and other bits, it's not killing me.

The underlying problem seems to be that the UX people pretend to represent a consensus, but we seem to constantly get a consensus of platforms, rather than a consensus of users.

This is far from a great interview, but the basic idea deserves some thought: Searls on the Intention Economy

The only way out of this mess is to create a marketplace of pull. When we have the capacity to advertise for what we really want in how our UX behaves, only then it will be fully revealed that there's no master ring to bind them all.

Claudia Caswell: Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?
Addison DeWitt: Because that's what they are

So then, why do all desktop UX updates since the adhesive iPad resemble psoriatic haemorrhoids?

Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered? Anyone ...

your Pebble watch will be ridiculously obsolete in less than 5 years

You doing it wrong. My Pebble watch is a substrate to run my custom watch face, which I need because my body runs a bespoke circadian rhythm. The equity here lies in the software, not in the physical object shackled to my wrist. Like every technology we've barely figured out how to build at all, it will shed some baby teeth before the permanent molars grow in.

If only the timer on my kitchen stove allowed me to reprogram it to mesh with my cooking practice. Once it goes off, it figures it needs to shriek at me once a minute until kingdom come, or thirty minutes, whichever comes first. I set it when I'm preheating the oven, then a call comes in and I'm tied to my desk, and it's off in the kitchen having a minute by minute hissy fit. Other times I have it set so that it's not more than two minutes ahead of the smoke detector. But the dumb thing doesn't know the difference, because in fine minimalist design tradition, one size fits all.

I suppose could use the timer on my wrist, but then anyone else who wanders into the kitchen is operating blind. A public timer works better in a shared kitchen. The real problem here is that the embedded stove timer is the wrong implementation of the right solution.

If the damn thing would shriek at first activation, then once every five minutes, and on the minutes != 0 mod 5 it would gently warble, we'd have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, it's a fixed-function non-reprogrammable device, which will probably outlive my tenancy in this abode.

Physical permanence is overrated.