Category: Random

Is there such a thing as irreducible complexity? Our current society is some orders of magnitude more complex than a hunter-gatherer society. What I mean is that the basic requirements of life: food, water, shelter; are provided by organized systems which require the labor of thousands of people and which no single person fully understands.…

Parents want to be able to tell which elementary and high schools will be better for their children. Society wants to be able to reward good teachers and move bad ones into different roles. I don’t know how we should do that effectively, but I do know that what we’re doing now is a bad…

I’m sure I am not the only person annoyed by the overuse of the phrase “perfect storm”. The phrase first appeared with the book and movie of that name, referring to a real storm in 1991. I lived in Massachusetts at the time, and it was indeed a notable storm for me, as a very…

There was a pretty good article about Pakistan in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It was mostly about the relationship between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Pakistan’s northwestern province. It didn’t say anything terribly new, but I found it helpful to see everything laid out. I’ve never been to Pakistan, but from…

My laptop’s disk crashed while I was away. I’ve reformatted the disk, reinstalled an old OS I had actual CDs for, restored my files from backup, and ordered a new laptop. What a pain. I was enjoying watching birds flying. I’m not a bird-watcher at all, and all I know about these is that they…