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Article about Books about Iraq
A depressing article about some books about Iraq, written by soldiers and a journalist who were there during the initial invasion. Of course war has huge human costs, but it’s hard to be unmoved by these stories about a war of choice. And it’s very hard to reconcile them with our goals and our inability…
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Fermi Forge
I recently reread Greg Bear’s SF novel The Forge of God, after coming across it in a book. It’s a novel about the destruction of the Earth. I may be too pessimistic, but I find it to be one of the most convincing explanations of the Fermi paradox. Assuming our civilization doesn’t collapse, it’s going…
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Signed Overflow
The C and C++ language standards say that overflow of a signed value is undefined behaviour. In the C99 standard this is in section 6.5. In the C++98 standard it is in section 5 [expr], paragraph 5. This means that a correct C/C++ program must never generate signed overflow when computing an expression. It also…
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al-Sadr Truce
I watched the Democratic debate on Saturday night. There was a question about how things are going better in Iraq now, perhaps thanks to the surge, and what that meant to the candidates Iraq plans. There were some good answers, but I was surprised by an omission. Moktada al-Sadr, the head of the Mahdi army,…
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Separate Appliances
Why don’t people routinely make appliances which work together? The refrigerator generates heat; this should be routed into the oven. The oven generates heat; this should be routed into the hot water heater. This is probably not significant energy usage compared to cars; is it not worth doing at all? We need to keep working…