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Deaths in middle childhood
By far the leading cause of death for children ages 5 to 9 in the U.S. is automobile accidents, accounting for some 21% of all deaths (I’m looking at figures from 2002). After that comes cancer (18%) and congenital abnormality (7%). What surprises me is the fourth item on the list: drowning (5%). I’ve heard…
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Condensation Computing
It’s a frequent observation that computing has oscillated between centralized and distributed. We’ve gone from centralized computing facilities (which were effectively single-user, but only the administrators could use them) to time-sharing to personal computers to server farms. Data has moved from the card deck you kept in your office to the tape deck at the…
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Changing Minds
I’ve long felt that most people do not change their minds about things that are important to them, including areas like religion and politics. I think most people seem to pick a set of beliefs sometime in early adulthood or before and stick to them. It’s not that people are necessarily close-minded as such. It’s…
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Medical Side-Effects
My aunt died 12 days ago. I don’t want to write about my personal feelings about this, but I do want to write something about the events that led to her death. I don’t know all the details, but this is the basic story I heard as it evolved. Two or three years ago, at…
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Clever Machines
I’ve always found it easy to deal with machines, as I expect is true of most computer programmers. The interface to a machine is not always logical, but it is normally consistent in the sense that it always behaves the same way given the same inputs, and it is normally unambiguous in the sense that…