• 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.

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.

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?

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.

bufferbloat

you know how stuff zooms up to incredibly high xfer rates and then just stalls.  this is an interesting journey down a series of passages all twisty, not necessarily all alike.  this stuff is not for the faint of heart, but there’s definitely some interesting work going on there.  jim gettys’ has been doing some interesting work here and while the knobs available for turning are a little arcane, following these lists will get you to poke at your OS’ networking stack in new and novel way to see what happens.

of perhaps even more interest here is the BISmark project over at GA tech where there’s some interesting instrumentation work afoot. i’ll handily step aside from the various political and service provider motivations around measurement, deriding measurement, etc..  (these machinations hit acutely close to home for me.) but i will point out that measuring the performance and the characteristics associated with a beast as unwieldy as the internets is incredibly fascinating … as an engineering problem.

LISP

i’ve been poking at LISP in some form or another for the past couple of years.  as it’s matured and is starting to see more enterprise applications and deployment i’ve been finding all sorts of novel uses for this.  if my october weren’t so packed, already i would have my ass glued to my seat for the upcoming NANOG session discussing the various map-n-encap flava’s that are floating about.  i can’t quite put my finger on the appeal here.  still, it’s fun.

fwiw – the lispmob folks just shipped a reasonably useable implementation of the mobility functions that LISP provides.  worth reading the docs and reviewing the use cases if nothing else.

DIY book scanner

when we were at the maker faire in NYC i checked out this guys stand.  he had a remarkably slick book scanner assembled and was demonstrating it.  the design is slick and the speed with which you can do the scanning is pretty impressive.  they’re talking about being able to scan 1000 pages / hour.  every library should have one of these.  there doesn’t appear to be one of these at the twin cities hacker space either.

do-it-yourself ikea

more stuff from  the maker faire.  these folks have a few designs that you can download and tweak.  subsequently, you get someone to laser cut it and you assemble it into your custom, one of a kind furniture.  bespoke household items and one-off manufacturing was a persistent theme at the maker faire, and these folks seemed to have some of the most polished stuff in the mix.

stephenson alludes to the reason for stagnation as being certainty and something of a litigious environment. but i can’t help but wonder if the reason is simply laziness. as we’ve become accustomed to the ease with which we can get novel new things or fat with the artificial abundance that we load our fridges with have we lost some drive? is it simply easier for the corporations to tell us what we need? as we spend ourselves into oblivion is the big stuff simply too expensive for us to care about if the corporations keep the price just on the right side of painless enough? *

note, this grabs the phone number to dial from your system clipboard. (note the use of the pbpaste command. users of non-OS X platforms should adjust to something appropriate. i seem to recall the gnome had something similar.

in the interests of posterity.

vonage dial