Category: Random

Insurance works if You have a sufficiently large population of people at risk of some loss. Otherwise, the insurance company can’t get started, since it can’t earn enough in fees to pay off the loss when it happens. The loss is large enough that most people are unable or unwilling to take a chance on…

It’s been a year. I’m back. I don’t have much new to say, but I’ve been starting to write blog entries in my head, so I might as well write them here. I’ll be aiming for three posts a week for now. I’ll start with a few quick comments that came to mind as I…

I’ve gone over a year of blogging most weekdays, but I’m running dry. I think my posts are starting to repeat themselves and I think they are generally less interesting. I’m going to put the blog on hiatus for a while, probably a couple of months, and see what seems like the right next step.…

I like the system beep on my laptop. I’m used to hearing it for file completion and in emacs. I seem to be the only person who does like the system beep, though, considering how difficult it was to turn it on on a brand new Fedora 9 installation. Previous Fedora installations have not had…

George Friedman has a good short analysis of what happened in South Ossetia from the Russian perspective. He doesn’t have an explanation from the U.S. perspective, and I don’t either. It seems possible that Saakashvili ordered the invasion of South Ossetia without any support from the U.S., and that the U.S. felt obliged to support…