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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.…
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The Golden Age
My father’s father bought a new car every year. He and my grandmother had two cars. Every year he traded in the older one and bought a new one. There were two car dealerships in town, and he alternated each year. One measure of the wealth of a society is what it can afford to…
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Multi Debugging
Many programs these days are written using multiple threads, multiple processes, and multiple languages. Our current debugging solutions don’t cope particularly well with any of those. gdb supports multiple threads. However, the interface is hard to work with. You have to select which thread you want to look at. Threads are referred to using numbers…
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Planes on the Plains
All the major U.S. airlines, other than Southwest, are losing money, mainly because of high oil prices (Southwest is an exception because they cleverly hedged their oil purchases). The airlines have been cost cutting for years; I assume that they can’t run their services significantly more cheaply than they do today. Therefore, on routes which…
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Gould vs. Dawkins
It took me many years of reading Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins to really grasp what their disagreement was. I’ll try to summarize it here. They both, of course, completely accept the standard story of evolution as descent with modification and natural selection. Their disagreement is about the degree to which species will change…