[This post is basically a holding page for a discussion that started on Twitter but quickly spiralled beyond 140 characters per point.]

I think that the term "privilege", as used by feminists and other equality-campaigners, is unhelpful. I think the concept to which it refers (which I attempted to explain here) is extremely helpful and important; ( Read more... )

You know when you idly think "I wonder..."?

Cut that out! You don't need to do that any more. Thanks to the Internet, search engines and Wikipedia, we now have instant access to a huge fraction of the world's knowledge; the chances are good that the answer to your question is both known and easily found out. So don't wonder, look it upAs an ( Read more... )

[Everything herein will be extremely old hat to many regular readers, but it's new to me and so I thought I'd share. Consider this part of my ongoing project of self-education.]

Charlie Stross, in the comments to his most recent blog post, posted a link to the site Derailing for Dummies. The conceit is that it's a guide to arguing with members of ( Read more... )

Go and read the post Ugh Fields on Less Wrong. To take the author's own tl;dr version: Pavlovian conditioning can cause humans to unconsciously flinch from even thinking about a serious personal problem they have, we call it an Ugh Field. The Ugh Field forms a self-shadowing blind spot covering an area desperately in need of optimization, imposing ( Read more... )

It occurs to me that "douche" is the perfect term for that breed of forum inhabitant that attacks others (especially newbies) for spelling, grammar, minor violations of forum etiquette, misuse of formatting commands, and the like. Sure, they're trying to clean the place up, but they're unnecessary and they ultimately make everything smell worse.

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

-- Donald Rumsfeld
[Via Slate and Jeff Atwood.]

Suppose you have a choice between buying Item A, which is has quality 100 and costs £100, and Item B, which has quality 80 but costs only £50. Now suppose that you are buying these for Application C, which demands quality of at least 90. If you buy Item B, you have not saved £50 for a marginal reduction in quality; instead, you have completely ( Read more... )

All the way back in 2006, I wrote about the problem of the philosopher's axe: if you replace the shaft, and then later you replace the head, is it still the same axe? So as you can imagine, I was delighted to discover the existence of the Helko modular axe system.


( Read more... )

In the comments on my last post, I mentioned that My favourite example of spectacular theorem failure is flight: in a perfectly inviscid fluid, it's impossible (no viscosity means no starting vortex which means no circulation around the wing), but it is possible in a fluid with viscosity > 0, no matter how small.
It's a rather beautiful result, I ( Read more... )

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith MP, is currently on the radio arguing that she shouldn't have to resign over a £10 expense claim for porn films for her husband. In my view, she's quite correct: she shouldn't have to resign over such a trivial thing. She should be beheaded and have her head impaled on a spike on Westminster Bridge for her ( Read more... )