I take a lot of notes in my own personal wiki. For general knowledge subjects, I often copy a few paragraphs from the Wikipedia lead, and then trim it down to just the bits I care to remember.

There's a few things that I almost always redact from articles concerning people: Day and month of birth. Nobility and rank. (Even FRS.) These blatantly elitist and self-promotional Seminal J. J. Tractatus or Timothy Erasamus Highbrow or Jagadish Q. Deepocket professorships. (I even trim mention of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics.) If I named my toenail clippings, it wouldn't pass notability in Wikipedia. Why then do the names of these blasted chairs pass notability? It's not obvious to me.

I would seriously propose making the display of these ridiculous named professorships a user preference, so that for those of us who choose to unclick the Ivy League Liberace flag, the article just says that Donald Merlin is a professor of psychology at Harvard University, or something plain-spoken and useful of that general nature.

Those who actually work at a university and don't wish to make a career-limiting faux pas by not knowing this vital data or who harbour strange dreams of becoming a named chair themselves can leave their Ivy League Liberace flags alone.

(My apologies to Liberace, who never once—so far as I know—actually named the piano bench he perched upon.)

The insight Smith had that greedy assholes actually produce beneficial outcomes for society.

Not if they can help it. When they can get away with it, they produce terrible outcomes for society. Ironically, it was a lot harder for them to get away with it before everyone started parroting Adam Smith for Dummies as tautological.

Turns out Adam Smith's insight lacked an intriguing quality of meta-robustness. When you feed it back into the system as an assumption, as we started to do beginning with the Reagan–Thatcher–Greenspan–Rand cult, it ceases to remain valid.

I sure hope the lesson for future chairmen and -women of the Fed is "trust, but verify". When you allow greedy assholes to have the run of a giant black box, pretty soon you find yourself underwriting a trillion dollars.

I have a different version of the question.

Has the general public set aside empiricism as a standard against which to judge funding appropriations in the name of fundamental scientific progress?

I say no.

The public has not set aside empiricism as part of the social contract through which public money is directed at research institutions. Once the public understands how tenuous empiricism has become among research physicists, the tiny trickle we already provide will only get smaller.

So here's my message to all the modernist physicists out there ready to bury Karl Popper (there were one or two in this year's Edge question): speculate all you want about the non-falsifiable multiverse, but use the Templeton Foundation to fund your chalk supply, and whisper sweet nothings on bent knees so that they also fund your chalk boards, bean bag chairs, and baloney sandwich cafeteria.

It's not like public research funds have nowhere else to go. Proteomics, as difficult as it is, has not yet broken free of its empirical yoke (the complexity of this field begins with the water molecule, and ramps up from there).

We should start with the auto-immune diseases which ought to be simpler systems—if, in fact, they are indeed auto-immune diseases after all.

There really ought to be an entire chapter in Kahneman's next book devoted to the human psychology quirk through which an otherwise sensible person willingly exchanges ten of twenty free physical parameters for 10^500 fiendishly complex initial conditions and calls it a good deal.

Wow, just wow ... after scanning this thread all I can say is "wow" — the same part of the brain that parses "freedom" (as in not beer) has a second function, heretofore unsuspected.

When you're dealing with some obstreperous functionary who is leaning on status and authority rather than knowledge or competence, it will no longer be possible to think to yourself:

this asshole, too, will soon be departed

With the loss of life's great equalizer, about the first thing to happen is that the entire population goes into legacy mode.

It'll be like all those crappy ISA cards with jumper blocks in the back of your ugliest junk drawer that you never get rid of because, technically, they still work perfectly fine.

Only it will be the humans with ugly jumper blocks (slavery, racism, sexism, elitism, ageism, gated-community-ism) that live to be 10,000 years old and never "get with the times" because "the times" themselves have shuffled off their mortal coil.

If I wanted ritual in my life, I would have become a priest and pursued my career with extreme political ambition so I could vote for the freaking pope.

I guess you've never read an article in your life about mobilizing the voters who are too lazy (or metabolically downtrodden from their Cheetos and Coke diets) to physically show up at a polling station?

Paper is a physical token. Reliably obtaining exactly one unambiguous, untamperable physical token with confidentiality from each adult member of society—the vast majority of which are collected on the same day—hasn't exactly proven to be an easy problem, especially when broadened to include public trust—that every voter understands and believes the process to have all of these properties (to at least a substantial degree).

Electronic voting vastly reduces the complexity on the collection side, but then the tamperability problem looms supreme, but this could almost be solved with enough crypto cleverness, except that the public trust story then requires a tiny bit of numeracy beyond grade six math.

Ritual, however, is accessible to a four-year old.

The same four-year olds who are unfortunately not yet equipped with fully functioning batshit detectors.

I don't want to abolish ritual. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

This is the same asshole who buys a pretty little property out in the countryside, and then after a year or two launches a farm practices complaint to shut down the neighbouring farms (which have only been there for two hundred years) because they smell like farms.

Then he shows up in town council explaining that only sociopaths raise farm animals.

What an incredible self-interest bullshit configurator this man possesses.

Get the fuck off my moral lawn.

The only assumption you should be making is that nothing is secure.

I'll file that right beside "In the beginning, God created the universe, and it was good."

In tech today if you dont speak english your dead in the water.

Emphasis on the word "speak".

It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming.

Simply not true, unless you believe that non-terrible code requires God himself to reach down and personally touch type.

I heard a bit of CBC episode recently, where a breathing consultant by the name of James Chambers argues that humans are terrible at breathing, and that with proper training (this takes about a year), we're almost competent (and then flowers bloom everywhere in an orchestral swell).

Breathe In, Breathe Out

One thing I will say is that a programmer is only as good as the API he or she programs against. In the spirit of Bill Maher, I hereby announce a New Rule: Garbage under, garbage above.

Most of the programmers with legendary reputations for writing correct systems have worked at (or fairly close to) the bare metal (or some POSIX-ratified virtual bare metal with extra starch).

Humans actually suck at just about everything. Programming is not especially special (modulo rampant innumeracy). All the greats in any discipline recognize and work within their personal limitations.

It's not constructive to become so bitter that you give up, or delegate the hard work to a tool that can only take you so far (perhaps less far than you wish to go).

Just the other day I listened to this Econtalk episode from six months back: Joshua Angrist on Econometrics and Causation

For the entire episode, Russ Roberts is trying to play the same pessimism card, effectively implying that humans suck at everything.

Joshua Angrist is having none of it. He directly refutes the posture of excessive pessimism time and again. It's a joy to hear Russ taking one on the chin for a change.

Now we just need an enterprising academic to self-subscribe to a personal mission to save us all from ourselves to come along and wrap up the whole of econometrics into a protective cocoon inside of which many of the basic errors simply can not be made.

Brave new world? Or cult of pessimism?

In my corner of the world, hard-baked optimists don't write unthinking rants anchored on assertions prefaced with "statement of fact". Wits on dial tone predicts no good thing.

If no-one could see it because it was too dim to see everywhere on earth, then we probably should describe the source object as "luminous" rather than "bright".

I actually waste less coffee, coffee filters, etc.. now that I own a keurig and I like that I can make a single cup of coffee in the morning without any waste.

I had the same feeling when I switched to single cup pour-over, without the blasted machine or the blasted machine politics.

Somehow, I always manage to find three minutes of work to be done in the kitchen while I pace three or four slugs of hot water. Must be some weird corollary to Murphy's law. Or maybe my cookware is telepathic.

So, there was no billing error here. The guy actually had his modem making long-distance calls for inordinate amounts of time. Doesn't seem like an AT&T error. Though it definitely sucks for the old man/woman!

No billing error? The entire billing system sucks balls at the largest possible frame.

There should be a legislative directive that all such usage-based billing plans provide an option for the end user to set hard spending caps, which are automatically enforced by the service provider.

Show me a corporation that doesn't—at least attempt—to enact hard spending caps enforced by automatic systems wherever and whenever possible. Heads roll in the gutters when a corporation loses $100 million because some trading desk manages to go rogue with respect to set trading limits. (By the Finnish system of traffic fines, a $100 million loss for AT&T is about on par with some old geezer tabbed for $25,000.)

End users are, of course, purposefully disadvantaged to have to police their own usage by manual vigilance, because everyone knows this is a lucrative fail mode for AT&T's revenue piracy service.

That this whole thing sucks balls right down to the bag root is the least possible diagnosis.

Canonical earned their black eye in spades by giving no advance guidance to their dual-head power users while knowingly ruining the dual head experience in the service of a reconceived user interface which might or might not be all for the best in the long run.

It was their blasted refusal to honestly inform their dual head power users that the dual head power user experience would be unavailable in Ubuntu for several releases so that we could plan accordingly that caused me to set the Canonical bit in my bozo register.

This is the most substantive bit I was able to find, a forum post by David Jian Wu from eariler today:

Thanks for the questions!

I can't even find a discussion of the winning games by someone who knows the game and its strategic evolution.

Interesting, but at present there's nothing much to discuss here.