Month: October 2007

  • Sequential Thought

    It is the common wisdom these days that future processors will have increasingly many cores but will not run at significantly higher clock rates. The constant drive for increased performance will come by letting the processor do more at one time, rather than by making it run faster. Along the same lines is the increased…

  • Environmental Politics

    Blog Action Day is asking blog authors to write about the environment. Since I’m a fan of communal action, it seems appropriate for me to participate, even though I have no idea what good it might do. This is hardly an original observation, but surely the strangest thing about the environment today is that it…

  • Religious Government

    Various people have argued that religion is hardwired into the human psyche, that most of us can’t help but believe in something larger than ourselves. Sometimes people go a bit farther and argue that some sort of religion is actually necessary for a healthy society. (Sorry I don’t have useful references here, I’ve forgotten them.)…

  • Crafty Programmers

    I think of a programming as a craft, like making furniture. Despite the names that people use, it’s not science, it’s not engineering, and it’s not art. Since programming is a craft, it doesn’t advance the way that science and engineering do. Instead, we see waves of fashion, and we see adustments due to changes…

  • Historical Time

    One of the things I try to teach my daughter is how to live in historical time. By this I mean something in between deep time and the present. I try to regularly explain what is new in our environment and what is old. “When your mother and I were young, nobody had cell phones.”…