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Just More War
Nathan made a long series of comments on my earlier post on terrorism and Just War theory. I’m going to try to reset a bit. In that post I argued, I think correctly, that terrorism is not justified under Just War theory. But: is Just War theory applicable today? Do we believe that everybody should…
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Financial Complexity
The current news about bad management of credit risks by banks reminds me of one of my ongoing concerns about the modern financial markets. Modern finance is very large and very complex. Once upon a time financial markets were relatively straightforward: you bought stocks, bonds, future, options. These are not simple instruments, but it’s fairly…
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Blog Spam
One of the weirder aspects of writing this blog is that I get regular spam comments. The comments usually have just a few words, along of the lines of “great post, this will really help me with my essay,” along with a link to some commercial web site. At the moment I’m running about 40…
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Again, Parallel Programming
Yesterday’s post was on the incoherent side, even for me. Let’s take it again, a little more slowly. Our brains are inherently parallel processors. Our selves are composed of many impulses, actions, and proto-thoughts. However, our logical thought, the inner voice we forced to use when writing programs (or, for that matter, when writing blog…
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Sequential Thought
It is the common wisdom these days that future processors will have increasingly many cores but will not run at significantly higher clock rates. The constant drive for increased performance will come by letting the processor do more at one time, rather than by making it run faster. Along the same lines is the increased…