Good Entropy

Tell the truth about benefit claimants and the left shuts you down

A senior editor of Nature, one of the leading academic journals, refused to consider it for review because she regards scientific research into the personalities of the long-term unemployed as ‘unethical’, and a sociology professor whom the publishers had asked to peer-review the book refused to do so on the grounds that any book linking benefit dependency to personality must be nonsense because personality is a ‘capitalist construct’.

That Time I Turned a Routine Traffic Ticket into the Constitutional Trial of the Century | Public Discourse

Laws that give municipal officials and their private contractors power to issue tickets via traffic cameras confer powers of both criminal and civil law while excusing them from the due process duties of both criminal and civil law.

Perhaps brilliance was in Francis Crick’s genes | SanDiegoUnionTribune.com

The most important and difficult challenge in science is asking the right question. This was Francis’ genius; (he) broadened my view, sharpened my thinking and made me a better scientist.

10 things I hate about Git | Steve Bennett blogs

“It’s easy, Granny. Just rev to 6000, dump the clutch, and use wheel spin to get round the first corner.
Up to third, then trail brake onto the freeway, late apexing but watch the marbles on the inside.
Hard up to fifth, then handbrake turn to make the exit.”

SQLite As An Application File Format

A clear, concise, and easy to understand file format is a crucial part of any application design. Fred Brooks, in his all-time best-selling computer science text, The Mythical Man-Month says:

Representation is the essence of computer programming.
…
Show me your flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious.

Rob Pike, in his Rules of Programming expresses the same idea this way:

Data dominates. If you’ve chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Linus Torvalds used different words to say much the same thing on the Git mailing list on 2006-06-27:

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Blaming Gerrymandering Has Its Limits, as Pennsylvania Shows – NYTimes.com

Partisan gerrymandering really does make a difference. It’s the difference between today’s noncompetitive House map and one where the Democrats would have a real shot to win in a decent year. It’s just not the whole story; the Republicans would be at an advantage either way.

If-You-Have-to-Hold-People-Accuntable.pdf

 

don’t know the whole picture.”

 

“If something doesn’t make sense, you

don’t know the whole picture.”

The Republic of Gilead Is Not Nigh | Cato @ Liberty

The outrage does make sense, of course, if what one fundamentally cares about—or at least, additionally cares about—is the symbolic speech act embedded in the compulsion itself. In other words, if the purpose of the mandate is not merely to achieve a certain practical result, but to declare the qualms of believers with religious objections so utterly undeserving of respect that they may be forced to act against their convictions regardless of whether this makes any real difference to the outcome.  And something like that does indeed seem to be lurking just beneath—if not at—the surface of many reactions. The ruling seems to provoke anger, not because it will result in women having to pay more for birth control (as it won’t), but at least in part because it fails to send the appropriate cultural signal. Or, at any rate, because it allows religious employers to continue sending the wrong cultural signal—disapproval of certain forms of contraception—when sending that signal does not impede the achievement of the government’s ends in any way.

Top Ten Skeptical Arguments that Don’t Hold Water | Watts Up With That?

There are some very good arguments for being skeptical of global warming predictions. But the proliferation of bad arguments is becoming almost dizzying.

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