Month: May 2008
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Disastrous Government
The recent natural disasters in Myanmar and China have led to terrible suffering. I know that many people are doing everything they can to help the people who have been hurt. My comment is that it is clear that there were significant governmental failures in both cases. In Myanmar the government appears to be actively…
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Oil Speculation
I’ve seen some arguments that the current spike in the price of oil is being driven by speculators. The general argument seems to be that people are betting that the price of oil will rise in the future, and are locking in prices now via futures contracts. They plan to sell those contracts in the…
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Why Blog?
An article in the New York Times Magazine this week discusses why people blog. It is by Emily Gould who used to work for Gawker. She describes herself as an “over-sharer”, and attributes her blogging, and the problems that resulted from it, to that. There are blogs in which people mainly discuss their personal lives,…
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Indiana Jones
I’ve always mentally grouped Raiders of the Lost Ark with another early-80’s film: Buckaroo Banzai. Both films represented a new approach to action and SF films, and they were both influential. They all had precursors, of course, but they still stand out in my memory. Raiders was less ironic and self-aware than the othe, of…
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Multithreaded Garbage Collection
Garbage collection is the traditional solution to the problem of managing memory. Multithreaded programming is the current wave of the future. I’ve written about the difficulties of multithreaded programming before, but people are going to do it regardless. In which case: how do we garbage collection in a multithreaded program? Let’s assume that we don’t…