Month: January 2008
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Moral Instinct
Steven Pinker wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this Sunday. I’m not a big Pinker fan. I think he tends to simplify a little too much, and sometimes falls into the classic error of evolutionary psychology: thinking that a plausible explanation is the right explanation. This was a good article, though,…
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NPG
Population growth must stop. Regardless of what we believe the resource limit of the planet is, it is clear that there is a limit. If population growth continues, we will hit that limit. As the saying goes, anything which can not go on forever will stop. Fortunately, the rate of growth of population is slowing.…
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Article about Books about Iraq
A depressing article about some books about Iraq, written by soldiers and a journalist who were there during the initial invasion. Of course war has huge human costs, but it’s hard to be unmoved by these stories about a war of choice. And it’s very hard to reconcile them with our goals and our inability…
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Fermi Forge
I recently reread Greg Bear’s SF novel The Forge of God, after coming across it in a book. It’s a novel about the destruction of the Earth. I may be too pessimistic, but I find it to be one of the most convincing explanations of the Fermi paradox. Assuming our civilization doesn’t collapse, it’s going…
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Signed Overflow
The C and C++ language standards say that overflow of a signed value is undefined behaviour. In the C99 standard this is in section 6.5. In the C++98 standard it is in section 5 [expr], paragraph 5. This means that a correct C/C++ program must never generate signed overflow when computing an expression. It also…