The Grue Paradox, some implications, and my take on it

What started out as one article in an obscure journal turned in to a very deep and far-ranging debate, known as the Sokal Affair. I encourage a sequential reading through all of the articles. The debate gets deeper and more interesting as it goes on. Taken together, this is one of the most fascinating things I've read in months.

loop quantum gravity

"The young dolphin gives a quick flip of her head, and an undulating silver ring appears--as if by magic--in front of her. The ring is a solid, toroidal bubble two feet across--and yet it does not rise to the surface! It stands erect in the water like the rim of a magic mirror, or the doorway to an unseen dimension. For long seconds the dolphin regards its creation, from varying aspects and angles, with its vision and sonar..."

"In Ellul's conception, then, life is not happy in a civilization dominated by technique. Even the outward show of happiness is bought at the price of total acquiescence. The technological society requires men to be content with what they are required to like; for those who are not content, it provides distractions -- escape into absorption with the technically dominated media of popular culture and communication." --Robert K. Merton, 1964

Of Botflies and Men and a very icky picture

"There is, in a word, far less understanding at the top than successive leaders have claimed, and domestic politics and short-term factors play a much greater role than they will ever admit. The world and now the American people cannot afford U.S. foreign policy's opportunistic and ad hoc character, its wavering between the immoral and amoral in practice but which official speech writers portray as rational and principled" --Another Century of War? by Gabriel Kolko

Dr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht., DAPA

Using genetic programming to emulate the cooperative food collection behavior of ants

"There once was a man who feared his own shadow and who hated his footprints and tried to escape from them. The more he lifted his feet, the more tracks he made. As fast as he could go, his shadow remained with him. Thinking he was still going too slow, he streaked like an arrow until all his strength was spent, and he died. He didn't realize that sitting in the shade of a tree would do away with his shadow, and living quietly would leave his traces to fade away." --Chuang Tzu

The dangers and effects of nuclear, earth-penetrating weapons

Just fixed the blog archives. A lot were missing, but now they're back. Browse around... have fun.

Savagery, ignorance, and hypocracy in the persecution of Salamon Rushdie

World Food Program

What "Homeland Security" really means.

New cannabis study

Strange quark matter

"the United States [is] both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists... the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments to observe international law."

MILITARY AND PARAMILITARY ACTIVITIES IN AND AGAINST NICARAGUA: (NICARAGUA v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA)
Contains the full text of the judgement against the United States by the International Court of Justice, where the US is found guilty of conducting large-scale terrorist actions against Nicaragua and ordered to pay massive reparations.
The United States maintained the court had no jurisdiction in the matter and contemptously refused to even attend the trial. Of course, no reparations were ever paid.

"The young people of today love luxury. They have bad manners, they scoff at authority and lack respect for their elders. Children nowadays are really tyrants, they no longer stand up when their elders come into the room where they are sitting, they contradict their parents, chat together in the presence of adults, eat gluttonously and tyrannise their teachers." --Socrates, 470-399BC

The Campaign To End Genocide

Noam Chomsky interviewed in India

"Combat situations in Iraq will be lightning fast... with Special Forces coordinating aircraft. It's not going to be large divisions and brigades moving laboriously across the sands of Iraq. It will all be happening before we know where or when it's happening, and the reporters will all be mesmerized at the briefings, and that will be it. It will be total information management and the real reporting will be done in Washington, not on the ground."

"The Washington press corps is complicit... The game that's played in Washington—and it's always been played this way—is the trade- off of access for patronage. If you agree to sing their song, you'll be invited for an audience."

--The state of censorship in the coming Iraq war--

I took out the comment code. It was just slowing down the blog.

Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial

The murder of civilians on a massive scale during WW2, by the "good guys".

disk based caching library
cdb: a fast, reliable, simple package for creating and reading constant databases
freecdb
PureDB
QccPack: Quantization, Compression, and Coding Library
Shaman library provides - Portability, Resource management, Language support, Caching
Ubiqx: list, trees, arrays, db, caching libs
TLTools: large library of misc functions
BetterC: library to help debugging
Mark Malloc: more debugging help
More...

US fears World Court will prosecute Bush for war crimes

NJAMD: Not just another malloc debugger

Truly excellent talk on Iraq by Scott Ritter, former Chief UN Weapons Inspector

Mirror matter

Oranisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

Everything you always wanted to know about why Microsoft sucks, but were afraid to ask.

Hackers

Raven Graphs: graphs of the first stanza of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven, made with txt2graph and GraphVis

"LZO implements the fastest compression and decompression algorithms around."

The Church of Euthanasia

"CONS is a replacement for MAKE. It is not compatible with make, but it has a number of powerful capabilities not found in other software construction systems, including make."
Opt "is a subroutine library which facilitates the convenient input of parameters to a C or C++ programs"
gitty-gitty "is able to generate an already compilable, very sophisticated "hello world" program, written in C or C++ and constituted by a main program, two internal modules (classes), one static and one shared library and one shellscript. All these sources exept the shellscript contain a full set of possible doxygen-comments. And this complex documented "Hello World" is already fully embedded into GNU autoconf/automake."
"Kazlib is a collection of program modules portably written in ANSI C. There is a dictionary module based on red-black trees, an extendible hashing module, and a system for emulating exception handling."