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War in Iraq: predictions
I used the following argument in discussions about the possibility of success or failure in the war in Iraq: As long as our losses are less than 3000, American public will keep supporting the war. The number 3000 is not random--it's the number of victims of 9/11. The reasoning is that losing more American lives to try to prevent the recurrence of 9 ( Read more... ) -
Technocrati
I just added this journal to Technocrati. I guess "technocracy" means "the rule of technology". Or is it the rule of people who develop and understand technology? The "technocrati".
Well, it's better then being ruled by religious fanatics. -
Inflation basics
I started a discussion in Wikipedia about Penrose's criticism of inflation and I must say it's an interesting experience. You would think physicists should be cold and detached and use logical arguments. Instead I see a lot of trend-following, personal likes and dislikes, and even personal attacks (they don't like Penrose there ( Read more... ) -
Deflating the Inflation
I'm reading Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality"--a book every physicist should read. There are very few physicist with such depth of insight and the ability to "say how it is". So Penrose is now my second favorite after Feynman. (I still think Penrose's ideas about human consciousness are embarrassing, but that's a different topic altogether ( Read more... ) -
Simplifying code
I can't stress enough how important it is to immediately follow any extension of functionality with a refactoring and simplifying step. We've learned it at Reliable Software the hard way ( Read more... ) -
Top-down and test-driven development
I've been always advocating top-down approach to software development. This was based on my experience. Bottom-up leads to impedance mismatch problems; top-down creates clean architecture. I know I'm right, but how do I convince others ( Read more... ) -
Fight Net Censorship
I've been thinking for some time about adding content to our web site www.relisoft.com that would trigger censorship. The idea is that if valuable resources (and our web site is a pretty good source for C++ training) were made unavailable by censorship in countries like China, their government would risk stifling economic progress. Of course, for ( Read more... ) -
Complex Harmonies
The study of music offers a very good perspective on the struggle between simplicity and complexity ( Read more... ) -
The Mechanics of Free Will
t'Hooft makes a good point about quantum theory vs. determinism. Let me elaborate a bit.
Quantum physics can only predict probabilities of events. To many physicists (including t'Hooft) this is very disconcerting. Is it really true that the state of the universe cannot be fully predicted from moment to moment? Or is this a shortcoming of our ( Read more... ) -
Access complexity
In order for one software component to interact with another, it has to have access to it. Modern languages give programmers control over access, and for a good reason. A very important question in software development is, "Who are the clients of this object?". "What objects can modify the state of this object?". The rule of thumb is to design the ( Read more... )