I recently cited Jonathan Haidt’s piece on the differences between liberals and conservatives. I also recommend watching his TED Talk:
Haidt focuses on his various facets of “moral” psychology, when a big part of the difference, especially between libertarian conservatives and progressive liberals, comes from seeing fairness in equity versus equality.
I wouldn’t call it Intel's secret weapon, since they’re publicizing it, but fresh air seems to work just fine for cooling servers — something I’ve wondered about for a long time:
Fresh air could save millions in datacenter cooling costs, Intel has claimed, after a successful experiment in the New Mexico desert.Replacing air conditioning by piping in outside air saved power costs with no appreciable increase in server failure rates, the company concluded in a research paper. Despite a lot of dust and major temperature changes–both long considered undesirable in datacenters–the equipment wasn’t affected, said Intel.
“Servers… were subjected to considerable variation in temperature and humidity, as well as poor air quality; however, there was no significant increase in server failures,” said the paper. “If subsequent investigation confirms these promising results, we anticipate using this approach in future, high-density datacenters.”
Intel estimated an annual cost reduction of approximately $143,000 (£79,000) for a small, 500kW datacenter, based on electricity costs of eight cents per kWh. In a larger 10MW datacenter, the estimated annual cost reduction was $2.87 million.
Intel used a normal air filter that took larger particles out of the air but not fine dust. While the 32 servers and racks became coated in dust, and humidity was monitored but not controlled, the failure rate was 4.46 percent, compared with a 3.83 percent failure rate in Intel’s main datacenter over the same period.
The experiment was run for 10 months, between October 2007 and August 2008. Server units with over 900 blades, used for production design, were split into two compartments. One of the compartments was air cooled, with temperatures ranging from 18 to 32°C. The other compartment was cooled using air conditioning, and used as a control.
Frankly, I think more homes could use fresh air for cooling.
Unsurprisingly, a college panel calls for less focus on SATs — and more focus on, well, I think you can guess:
Mr. Fitzsimmons’s group, which was convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, also expresses concerns “that test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.” The report calls on admissions officials to be aware of such differences and to ensure that differences not related to a student’s ability to succeed academically be “mitigated in the admission process.”“Society likes to think that the SAT measures people’s ability or merit,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “But no one in college admissions who visits the range of secondary schools we visit, and goes to the communities we visit — where you see the contrast between opportunities and fancy suburbs and some of the high schools that aren’t so fancy — can come away thinking that standardized tests can be a measure of someone’s true worth or ability.”
What’s amusing is that they attack the SAT, because students spend so much time “gaming” it, and recommend using the so-called achievement tests, which aren’t gamed as much, as a substitute — ignoring the fact that any alternative will start getting gamed as soon as it replaces the SAT.
Physics Proves It: Everyone Should Shoot Granny-Style — or, rather, they should probably shoot free throws underhand:
Using lots of trigonometry, Brancazio calculated the optimal angle of the arc from the free throw line. If tossed at 32 degrees or less, the ball will most likely hit the back of the rim. “That doesn’t mean it won’t go in, but it will certainly bounce off the metal and reduce the chance of success,” Brancazio says. At angles greater than that, the ball has a chance of making a nice swish. The optimum angle for the shot, he finds, is 45 degrees—plus half the angle from the top of the player’s hand to the rim. “The shorter you are, the steeper that angle has to get to give you the best chance of making the shot,” he says. Of course, lobbing a ball very high so that it comes down nearly straight into the basket would be the most efficient technique, but a shot like that “is almost impossible to aim,” Brancazio says. Instead, he says, his formula makes it possible for a player to shoot with the largest possible margin for error.
In The Tell-All Campus Tour, Jonathan Dee explains how Jordan Goldman got his Web 2.0 company, Unigo, off the ground:
With no money, no contacts and no business education whatsoever, Goldman began where any 21st-century self-starter would: “I Google-searched ‘business plan,’ and I found one and just plugged my own words into it. Then it wound up that Wesleyan has an alumni database, and so I looked for people who worked in finance and who graduated 10 or more years before I did. I e-mailed about 500 people, and I just said: ‘Look, I have this idea. What do I do now? What comes next?’ It was a fairly untraditional fund-raising process.”Actually, with the exception of the bit about Google, it was as traditional as can be, but given that he was 23, Goldman can be excused for thinking that he discovered the Old Boy Network. About 50 Wesleyan alums answered his e-mail messages, and one of those replies — from Frank Sica, a former president of Soros Private Funds Management — was the stuff of drama.
“He said, ‘I live in Bronxville,’ ” Goldman recounted. “ ‘At 7:30 I order my eggs at this diner. I’m done by 8. Come up to the diner and tell me about your idea, and I’ll give you until I’m done with my eggs.’ ” Armed with only his idea and the ability to talk a blue streak about it, Goldman set his alarm and took a train to that diner. No one who has ever met Goldman would have any trouble guessing that by the time Sica was finished with his eggs that day, he was on his way to becoming the young man’s lead investor.
Now Goldman goes to work every day on Park Avenue, in an office with an interior window through which he can keep tabs on his 25 employees, nearly all of them even younger than he. This month his Web site, called Unigo.com — a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families — went live for the benefit of tens of thousands of trepidatious high-school students as they try to figure out where and how to go to college. Not coincidentally, it also aims to siphon away a few million dollars from the slow-adapting publishers of those elephantine college guidebooks that have been a staple of the high-school experience for decades.
Entrepreneurs hope to save the world one baby at a time — which sounds like a fine idea:
Chen and her colleagues are finalists in the American Express Members Project contest to fund socially important programs. Their project, Embrace, is an innovative low-cost, low-tech incubator they invented that can help save premature babies in developing countries. The top five finalists will share $2.5 million, with the winner receiving $1.5 million. That would be enough for Embrace to become a self-sustaining enterprise.Embrace was the result of an innovative entrepreneurship class at Stanford University — Design for Extreme Affordability. Business school and engineering students are given a task to devise an “extremely affordable” solution to a significant societal problem. Chen’s team was challenged to create an incubator that cost less than 1% of a traditional incubator, around $20,000.
“We did research in Nepal and India,” Chen said.
They discovered that the most important issue in the survival of low-birthweight premature babies was maintaining a constant body temperature.
“We realized that the majority of deaths were in places that had no access to electricity. They needed something extremely affordable, easy enough for a mother to operate with no training, that could be used in a home or clinic setting, since most births in these areas are in (the) home.”
They came up with a device that looks like a very small sleeping bag, in which the mother inserts a pouch containing a type of wax that, when heated in boiling water for only 15 minutes, can maintain a constant 37 degree Celsius temperature for about four hours. A mother or caretaker in even the most remote village could use it properly and safely. They named it “Embrace” because it also enables a mother to hold her infant close to her body, unlike the mechanical incubators in Western hospitals.
Something so simple. So easy. So smart. That solves such an important problem. Most importantly, it would cost less than $25 — and can be used over and over again. You can learn more about Embrace at www.embraceglobal.org.
Sadly, this ignores the Malthusian conditions in “developing” countries, which haven’t grown their economies as quickly as they’ve grown their populations. Saving a premature baby, in such conditions, means adding one more mouth to feed, in a place where there may not be enough food to go around. In the short term, saving a baby is so obviously good, but, in the long term, it means more misery. At the very least, it probably means that that family cannot afford to raise the next, healthier child to come along.
Sometimes it really does look like the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
QuantLib is a free/open-source library for quantitative finance:
Finance is an area where well-written open-source projects could make a tremendous difference.
That’s how you know the developers are approaching the problem from an academic point of view.
Michael Phillips notes that government bailouts are a U.S. tradition dating back to Alexander Hamilton and cites Alex J. Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute:
“If you would like an empirical law of government behavior, it is that in a panic or threatened financial collapse, governments intervene — every government, every party, every country, every time.”
I enjoyed this old (2004) piece on The Seed of Apple's Innovation, in which Jobs explains what happened to Apple while he was away:
You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to much. That’s what was missing at Apple for a while. There were bits and pieces of interesting things floating around, but not that gravitational pull.People always ask me why did Apple really fail for those years, and it’s easy to blame it on certain people or personalities. Certainly, there was some of that. But there’s a far more insightful way to think about it. Apple had a monopoly on the graphical user interface for almost 10 years. That’s a long time. And how are monopolies lost? Think about it. Some very good product people invent some very good products, and the company achieves a monopoly.
But after that, the product people aren’t the ones that drive the company forward anymore. It’s the marketing guys or the ones who expand the business into Latin America or whatever. Because what’s the point of focusing on making the product even better when the only company you can take business from is yourself?
So a different group of people start to move up. And who usually ends up running the show? The sales guy. John Akers at IBM is the consummate example. Then one day, the monopoly expires for whatever reason. But by then the best product people have left, or they’re no longer listened to. And so the company goes through this tumultuous time, and it either survives or it doesn’t.
Jobs is an unusual CEO:
Look, I was very lucky to have grown up with this industry. I did everything in the early days — documentation, sales, supply chain, sweeping the floors, buying chips, you name it. I put computers together with my own two hands. And as the industry grew up, I kept on doing it.Not everyone knows it, but three months after I came back to Apple, my chief operating guy quit. I couldn’t find anyone internally or elsewhere that knew as much as he did, or as I did. So I did that job for nine months before I found someone I saw eye-to-eye with, and that was Tim Cook. And he has been here ever since.
Of course, I didn’t tell anyone because I already had two jobs [CEO of Apple and of movie maker Pixar Animation Studios] and didn’t want people to worry about whether I could handle three [jobs]. But after Tim came on board, we basically reinvented the logistics of the PC business. We’ve been doing better than Dell [in terms of some metrics such as inventory] for five years now!
Mencius Moldbug recently cited Walter Millis‘s Road To War: America 1914-1917, which offhandedly refers to one Colonel House, a figure I don’t think I could make up:
Edward Mandell House (July 26, 1858–March 28, 1938) was an American diplomat, politician, and presidential advisor. Commonly known by the purely honorific title of Colonel House, although he had no military experience, he had enormous personal influence with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as his foreign policy advisor until Wilson removed him in 1919.
This is the especially good part:
In 1912, House published anonymously a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, in which the title character, Dru, leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, becoming the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms which resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.
So, Wilson’s foreign policy advisor was a colonel with no military experience, who wrote a novel about a progressive dictator saving America. Hmm…
When you claim that yours is the The Flag of Humanity, well, that’s not necessarily good news for everyone else:
If you heard a Hitler say: “the swastika is the flag not only of Germany, but of the world,” you would doubtless be a little concerned. You might think, gee, this Mr. Hitler doesn’t mind sounding like he wants to conquer the entire friggin’ planet.But when you hear that the Stars and Stripes “is the flag not only of America, but of humanity,” you have a slightly different reaction. And not because you’re a gun-totin’, God-lovin’, truck-drivin’ red-state American. Quite the contrary, in fact.
That’s Mencius Moldbug talking, and he goes on to cite Woodrow Wilson, from July 4, 1914, describing the policy that now bears his name:
My dream is that as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.What other great people has devoted itself to this exalted ideal? To what other nation in the world can all eyes look for an instant sympathy that thrills the whole body politic when men anywhere are fighting for their rights?
Mencius adds his thoughts:
Note the particularly charming phrase “unless it feels that it is engaged in…” What Wilson really means is that [no government] will ever fear America unless [America] feels that [that government] is engaged in some enterprise which violates the rights of humanity.In other words, [the US government] will judge the world. In other words, [the US government] will govern the world. In other words, [the US government] will rule the world. In other words, [the US government] will dominate the world.
The belief that judging is distinct from ruling, that one can “provide global governance” without “grasping world domination,” is not a Wilsonian invention. It is a fundamental part of the American political tradition — the separation of powers. In this case, the separation of executive and judicial authority. One can be an honest broker, without being an imperial overlord.
Rationally — if the term applies — this depends on the concept of “natural law,” ie, a theory of right and wrong which is self-evident to everyone honest. Since [the US government] is always honest, being democratic, it and and any other honest, enterprising government will always agree on whether the latter is “violating the rights of humanity.” And if they don’t, it is. Ergo, [the US government] is always right.
Thus, it is clear that when Serbia wishes to recover a seceded province, it is violating the rights of humanity, whereas when Georgia does the same it is defending them. The former fears America, and rightly so. The latter is helping it support democracy.
So [the US government], the universal democratic nation, may, indeed must, assert its jurisdiction over all. Which it just happens to have the military and financial power to enforce. And is this in the interest of America or Americans? Heaven forfend!
[...]
Lest the odor of cynicism become overpowering, let’s pause for a minute, and admit that there is evil in the world. More specifically, there are evil people. And it is a glorious thing, and good for all and sundry, to wrap a rope around their necks and pull the chair away.The trouble is that if we truly despise evil, we hope to minimize the amount of it in the world. Wilsonism is not inherently evil. A Petri dish is not inherently bacteria-infested. There is such a thing as a sterile Petri dish. But the combination of world domination and profound self-righteousness is a bath of nutrients as nourishing as evil has ever found. And bacteria are not in short supply.
Why would evil not go abroad in the mask of good? Satan has no fear of masks. Wilson, a deeply mystical man, thought of democracy as a sort of antibiotic which ensured that his Petri dish would always remain pristine. It has not, in my opinion, worked out that way.
But the combination of world domination and profound self-righteousness is a bath of nutrients as nourishing as evil has ever found.
Tesla’s Model S sedan will be made in Silicon Valley, because California offered $15 million in incentives:
That includes waiving rent for the first 10 years of the 40-year lease on the San Jose property and waiving state sales tax on $100 million worth of equipment. New Mexico was reportedly offering Tesla around $7 million worth of incentives.
Animal-rights activists suspected in attacks on UC Santa Cruz researchers:
The first bomb went off about 5:40 a.m. Saturday, destroying a car outside the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher. Authorities have not named the researcher.Three minutes later and less than a mile away, a second device exploded on the front porch of researcher David Feldheim’s home while he and his family were asleep. As the house filled with smoke, the scientist, his wife and their children, ages 2 and 4, escaped out a window and down an emergency ladder. Feldheim injured his feet during his escape.
Both devices were incendiary, police said, but it was unclear how they were triggered. Also unknown is how many people were involved in carrying out the attacks.
[...]
“Acts of violence and intimidation such as these are unacceptable, and they continue a troubling pattern seen at UCLA and other UC campuses that should be repugnant to us all,” UC President Mark G. Yudof said Monday. “These acts threaten not only our academic researchers and their families, but the safety and security of neighbors in our communities as well.”City officials joined in harshly condemning the bombings and urged members of the public who might have evidence in the case to contact authorities. They announced a $30,000 reward, including $2,500 donated by the Humane Society of the United States.
“The threats and attacks are shocking and abhorrent,” Santa Cruz Mayor Ryan Coonerty said. “We as a community are unambiguous in our condemnation of these actions. Let me be clear, this is not protest. This is terrorism.”
Jack Crenshaw explores the really early days of computing, including the first computers and early spreadsheets:
As in college, a lot of our output in those days were graphs, and again a large part of our skill was our ability to plot microscopic dots at the right places on a piece of log-log paper, and then fair a smooth curve through them. Back in college, we tended to plot graphs with anywhere from three to seven points on them, but NASA needed much more accuracy. So a lot of our time went into calculating the data for the many points to be plotted. And that’s where I learned about spreadsheets.These were the original spreadsheets, of course — real sheets of 14″ x 17″ paper, ruled into rows and columns. What we did was to organize the “input” data into one or more columns. Each subsequent column involved operations on previous columns. If you’ve ever used Excel, I don’t have to explain further.
For simple problems with not too many entries, and for problems not needing great accuracy, we would use the good ol’ 18″ slide rule. For more complex problems, we would use the book of trig functions and the Friden.
For really long problems, we used Donna.
Donna was the department secretary, who doubled as a calculator operator. Donna supported some seven engineers, and had the patience of Job. She would sit there all day, day after day, crunching out those numbers, which we would then plot up and analyze. Donna prided herself on using 10-digit accuracy for everything, even if the input data was only good to three digits. If any errors were going to be introduced, it wasn’t going to be at her end.
One day I got a really big problem — one that seemed too big even for Donna to deal with, considering her other duties. I asked a colleague, “What do you do with problems that are too big for Donna?” He said, very matter of factly, “Oh, you take them to the Computer Room.”
You should have seen my eyes light up. I had been reading all about the “Giant Brains” — had even learned to program one in college, though I never saw it (the school didn’t actually own one). I couldn’t wait to see how the folks in the Computer Room dealt with my problem. Eagerly I got directions from my colleague, prepared my data and rushed over to the building he described. Following his directions, I walked down the hall until I arrived at a set of double doors, with a large sign proclaiming, sure enough, “Computer Room.” From the other side of the door came a satisfying clattering of high-tech machinery, hard at work.
Holding my breath, I eased open the door.
Inside was a huge room. There must have been 300 desks, all arranged neatly in rows. At each desk sat a woman, and on each desk was a Friden. The women were the computers! I kid you not (sorry, no men were there).
I found out later that their official job description was “GS-2, Computer.”
Once I had gotten over the shock, I approached the “head computer.” She explained to me how things worked. You used the same spreadsheet format we used — and still use today — except that each column only involved a single math operation. If, for example, the first two columns were the inputs, x and y, then the header for column three might read: (3) = (1) * (2).After all the calculations were defined, you turned things over to the computers who filled the numbers in. The foreperson assigned different parts of the job to different women, depending on the load. For a really big job, she would keep several parts running in parallel. The first multitasking, multiprocessing computer system, I suppose.
It all actually went quite smoothly. The computers rarely made a mistake, and they used redundant calculation to catch any errors. They would even plot the results up for me, although I rarely used that service. My boss grumbled that they used dull pencils and didn’t know how to interpolate. He and I both found that we could plot more accurately.
Sometime after they’d moved on to “real” (non-human) computers, Jack’s colleague came to him with an exciting idea:
He said, “Jack, I’ve come up with a neat computer program that I’d like you to take a look at.”“OK, John,” I said. “What does it do?”
“Well,” he replied, “Remember back in the good old days when we had to do computing by hand? Remember the way we used to make up those spreadsheets and turn them over to the computer ladies?”
I acknowledged that I had. We spent a little time congratulating ourselves for our progress, at having gotten away from such primitive methods.
John said, “Well, I’ve developed a computer program that works the same way. All you have to do is to define the formulas for each column of the spreadsheet and give the data. The computer does the calculations just like the computer ladies used to do and gives you a printout that looks just like a spreadsheet. I think it’ll be just the ticket for those people who don’t know how to program in FORTRAN. It will open up the use of computers to lots more people.”
I thought about it for all of 30 seconds, and said, “John, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
There was a moment of silence as John absorbed what I had just said. The sparkle in his eyes dimmed a bit. Crestfallen, he whispered, “Why?”
Now, in my defense you have to understand: in those days we were taught that computer time was precious — $600 per hour, at a time when $600 would buy more than a ticket to a rock concert. It was important, we were told, to keep the CPU busy doing productive work at all times. It was considered far more cost-effective to waste engineers’ time than computer time.
So I explained, “John, now that we have electronic computers, we have to learn to do things their way. Anybody who plans to be an engineer in the ’60s is going to have to learn to speak to computers in their language. You and I have learned to program so we can do that. What you’re trying to do is to ask the computer to make up for the deficiencies of the engineer. You’re forcing the computer to do extra work, just because the engineer is too lazy or too dumb to learn the computer’s language. You’re never going to sell an idea that uses a computer so inefficiently!”
As I spoke, you could see John slowly fall apart. His jaw fell slack, his shoulders slumped, and he actually seemed to age by years, right before my eyes. Finally he turned and left, a beaten and broken man.
I never saw John again. He sent me an example of the output of his program (I recall that it could do automatic graphing of its results, which was quite an innovation at the time). I promptly filed it under “dumb ideas.” I heard through the grapevine that John kept trying for awhile, halfheartedly, to interest someone in his spreadsheet program, but as I had predicted he was never able to do so, and he faded into obscurity, along with his program.
And that’s why you had to wait 15 more years for VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel.
The US government supports Israel, right? Mencius Moldbug isn’t so sure:
At present, however — that is, in the real world, where [the US government] supports Israel — the expectation appears to be that all disputes will be resolved via Israeli concessions. The only dispute appears to be on the magnitude of these concessions. “Land for peace” is a fairly normal way to end a war — for example, France in 1870 accepted the proposition of “land for peace,” ceding Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. On the other hand, France in 1870 had been defeated. Whereas Israel in 1967 was, at least according to all reliable experts, victorious.So we arrive at a peculiar conclusion. On the one hand, [the US government] supports Israel. On the other hand, if [the US government] ceased to exist, at least for the purposes of the Middle East, Israel’s position seems as if it would become much stronger. A conclusion that would seem to indicate that [the US government] opposes Israel. But then, why would it give Israel billions of dollars and fancy weapons?
We are left to conclude that (a) [the US government] both supports and opposes Israel; (b) the magnitude of the opposition exceeds the magnitude of the support (implying net opposition); and (c) the support is overt and obvious, whereas the opposition is somehow… more subtle.
In other words, we are in the position of an astronomer who sees light being bent away from a large visible object. The astronomer must conclude that unless the laws of gravity are reversed in the vicinity of this object, there is an even larger non-visible object on the other side of the light. The latter can be detected only by inference, but the detection remains unambiguous.
Israel makes a great pons asinorum because in this case, the diplomatic dark matter is not at all hard to find. Perhaps it is best explained by the title of this book, which I saw in a window somewhere. According to the author or at least his title, [the US government] is acting as a “dishonest broker” in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Ie: “justice” in the conflict favors the Palestinians more than [the US government]‘s actions today reflect. Ie: [the US government] is pro-Israel, but not in the sense that [the US government]‘s interventions in the Middle East are a net positive for Israel. Actually, they are detrimental to Israel. But if “justice” were served, they would be even more detrimental.
So if I sue you for $100,000 and the judge awards me $20,000, I might say that the judge is biased in favor of you. Because you still have $80,000 that is rightfully mine. On the other hand, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the judge forced you to pay me $20,000. Which is $20,000 you’d have and I wouldn’t, if there was no judge at all. An interesting kind of support.
America, you see, is not really the vampire of the world. The analogy is inexact in two ways. One, a vampire is nourished by the blood of his victims. They grow weak and sickly, while he thrives in ruddy good health. Two, it is always easy to know that a vampire has been eatin’ on you, because there are fang-marks on your neck.
America is more the arsonist of the world. As well as the fireman. Wherever fires break out, Uncle Sam is there to pour gasoline on them. The fireman assures us, of course, that he is only setting a backfire to defeat the main blaze. But why is this always the right strategy? Why was he the first one on the scene? Why do his hoses always seem to get tangled, whereas his gas can never runs dry? And why have there been so many more fires since he came to town? But the TV audience sees none of this. All they see is the fireman, fighting the fires.