botwerks

i had this in my instapaper favorites from my reading queue a few months back. with the recent santorumism in the news as of late, this popped back into my noggin.

• Rightist extremism: My right to say abhorrent things | The Economist.

the real nuggets here are in the linked research and the robin hanson posting which is referenced in the body of the article. both are worth the read. in short, hanson surmises that you have a lot fewer opinions than you think and that a lot of shit is just made up on the fly.

personally, this reinforces the notion that you have to work really hard to avoid confirmation bias. the knee jerk reaction being to simply ack what you’re surrounded with or you’re brought up with or what you surmise is the right solution. subjecting information to scrutiny, and your opinions as well, is hard. further, it’s consistently uncomfortable.

perhaps a better (but psychologically more difficult) response is to just say, “i don’t know.”

i wonder how much better off we’d be if we just copped to our individual and collective ignorance and thought really hard about stuff before opening our word holes.

this is possibly the best reasoning i’ve seen someone use to argue for the use of android - Scripting News: Why I use Android.  personally, i find the OS and the devices running it to be something of a petri dish and for and element in my life that i depend on, as much as my phone, i’m not quite to the point where i’m willing to tolerate the nature of the OS and its corresponding apps marketplace.

however, there’s a need to have a competitive counter to iOS and something that’s open source provides a strong rationale.  the ability to manage and sandbox the phone in the same manner as a PC is still in its infancy.  i simply don’t have the confidence in the android marketplace right now in terms of device and app validation.  i’m left to puzzle it out as a consumer and most consumers simply aren’t there, or in my case, willing to invest the time to vet applications and their operation.

right now, i’m at a place in my life where i need things to work so i can focus on the problems at hand.  i lack the time to hack together the dependencies to make my phone workflow as seamless as i imagine you can get with android; nevermind working through the diagnostics to resolve conflicts.  you won’t see me ragging on android, i find it a compelling alternative, but i’m not willing to make that tradeoff at this point.

if you have to deal with big ass arrays of IP addresses in perl and you’ve been sorting.  i recommend reading the following paper.

A Fresh Look at Efficient Perl Sorting - if you’re looking for a  portable means to do an efficient multi-subkey record sorts this is a great run down on the machinery within perl to make it faster.  acquaint yourself with the Schwartzian Transform. it’s a good thing.

yes, i know, you could just use Sort:Key:IPv4.  but that’s not very portable and self-contained, now, is it?

october 2011 is turning out to be the month we lose some giants.

dennis ritchie died – he gave us UNIX, we all learned C from him and we stood on his shoulders to build the internet and tools we have today.