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Tae Kwon Do
My daughter, who is six years old, recently earned her yellow belt in tae kwon do. I practiced tae kwon do for eight years, stopping about fifteen years ago with a second degree black belt. I didn’t encourage my daughter to take it up, but she knew that I had done it in the past…
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Persuasion
Many years ago I believed that if people could just discuss issues calmly that they could resolve them. I no longer believe that. I now think that the best one can reasonably shoot for is that everybody will agree that the other people are not idiots. The basic problem is that people don’t change their…
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Homeopathic Water Reclamation
The theory of homeopathy is that the adding something to pure water gives it a pattern of some sort. That pattern remains when more water is added. Thus diluting the solution does not change its effect. This is, of course, nonsense, although homeopathic remedies are sold in every drugstore and supermarket. If we believe the…
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GCC Inline Assembler
GCC’s inline assembler syntax is very powerful and is the best mechanism I know of to mix assembly code and optimized C/C++ code. It lets you take advantage of assembly features like add-with-carry or direct calls into the kernel without losing optimizations. I don’t know of any other approach which supports that. That said, the…
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Iraq
These are things I wonder about Iraq these days. Things are clearly improving in that fewer people are being killed. How much of that is due to completion of religious cleansing of neighborhoods? How many mixed neighborhoods remain? How many people are returning to Iraq from abroad? At one time millions of Iraqis had left.…