Month: February 2008
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Sanctions
Are economic sanctions a good idea? Sanctions were applied to Iraq between the two Gulf wars. They had no obvious effect on the leadership. They inflicted significant harm on ordinary citizens of Iraq. We are currently applying sanctions to North Korea. Again, it is not obvious that the leadership is affected, and, again, the ordinary…
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Centralize/Decentralize
One way to read the progress of computer usage is as an alternation between centralization and decentralization. Once there were no permanent documents: you ran your job, got the results, and took them away; centralized. Timesharing was introduced, and you had your own access to the single shared computer; less centralized Minicomputers let different groups…
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Kid Theater
My six-year old daughter doesn’t like to go to movies in theaters. She does like watching them at home when we let her. Since I like going to movies, this seems strange to me. What seems even stranger is her reason: she says that at home she can pause the movie whenever she wants to…
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Jumper
Jumper, by Steven Gould, is among my favorite SF books. It’s a simple story based on a simple premise: a teenager discovers that he has the power to teleport. The book is both a bildungsroman and a revenge story, as he uses his power to strike back at his enemies (thanks to the one outrageous…
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She’s So Popular
There is some interesting research by Duncan Watts which seems to show that popular songs are popular because they are popular. He ran some experiments which showed that when people rank songs, the dominant effect is other people’s rankings. Thus even a small recommendation for a song by a couple of people can translate into…