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Synthetic Food
In the modern industrial food system, a cow is a chemical factory which converts corn into beef or milk. This is inefficient and unsafe in several different ways. Cows can not be maintained in sterile environments, so E. coli and other bacteria from their feces can contaminate the meat. Cows evolved to eat grass, so…
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Thread Sanitizer
I recently ran the gold linker under Thread Sanitizer. It’s a nice plugin for Valgrind which looks for race conditions in multi-threaded programs. To describe it briefly, it builds Happens-Before relationships based on mutex operations and warns when it notices a write and a read/write to the same memory location without a Happens-Before relationship. This…
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Biophilia
E.O. Wilson’s notion of biophilia, which is slightly different from closely related to the newer idea of evolutionary psychology, posits that humans can not be healthy without some access to the natural world. The argument basically amounts to saying that we have evolved in a world which is not completely under human control, and we…
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iPad
It’s taken me a while to understand the point of the iPad. I can type on a keyboard faster than I can press keys on a screen, so the iPad would not be useful for me as a computer. And it wouldn’t fit in my pocket, so I wouldn’t carry around the way I carry…
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After the Apocalypse
Coincidentally, I saw the movies The Road and The Book of Eli just a few days apart. They are two different and yet oddly similar visions of what the world will look like after civilization collapses. Men will be predators. Women will suffer. Roads will be left covered with cars. Cannibalism will rise. People will…