Philosophical Geek

Power. Electricity. The Holy Grail of modern technology.
I say this because the information revolution completely depends on electricity, whether it’s batteries, hybrid motors, or the grid. Everything we do depends on converting some naturally occurring resource into power to drive our lives.
I was thinking about power recently while watching an episode of Star Trek: The [...]

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Anybody who’s taken high school or college mathematics know how phenomenal exponential growth is. Even if the exponent is very, very small, it eventually adds up. With that in mind, look at this quick-and-dirty chart I made in Excel, plotting the growth in hard drive capacity over the years. [source: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/hist-c.html]

Ok. it’s ugly, but notice [...]

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On my drive into work this morning, I heard an interesting story on on WAMU (sorry, can’t find the specific story link) about a Korean-American adopted by white American parents. While initially struggling against her Korean heritage, she eventually came to appreciate and be proud of it. The commentator, himself an adopted Korean in the same [...]

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I recently started following Bruce Schneier’s blog about security and security technology. He makes LOTS of excellent points. Too bad the powers that be don’t educate themselves sufficiently on this type of stuff before passing bad laws or taking drastic, pointless actions.
I especially like his recent essay on over-reacting to rare events. Right on.
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If you haven’t read Steve Yegge, you owe it to yourself to do so. He only writes about once a month, but every single article is worth reading, whether you agree with him on everything or not. His latest is fascinating and incites some interesting pondering about the future of software…I’m going to have to [...]

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This is an issue that has been discussed many times previously–so many that I won’t even bother to link to those discussions. By now it’s well-understood that blogs carry a power stronger than most in the media initially assumed possible.
Not just blogs, but the entire “Web 2.0″ phenomenon–MySpace, YouTube–the whole rotten bunch. Would Patricia [...]

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Though the danger to life, civilization, and future of all that is good and beautiful was greatly oversold, Y2K was still a pretty big deal. It required the detailed analysis and updated of millions of lines of legacy code in all sectors, levels, nooks, and crannies of computer civilization.
We survived, somehow. Planes didn’t fall out [...]

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Has anyone else ever had the experience of typing code in such a way that you build up an actual rhythm, patterns, a definable velocity punctuated by occasional flourishes? 
I found that happening today. I’m coding up a well-understood pattern in this application and so I can type quite a bit in long spurts. I find [...]

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Is it just a coincidence that humans require roughly the same amount of sleep as there are hours during the night?
In other words, is the amount of sleep that is “healthy” for us the result of long centuries of nurturing and tradition or is it biological?
In other words, if the day were 30 hours long, [...]

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The problem with multiple choice/true-false tests is that the more you know, the more answers become “that depends.”
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Tags: philosophy

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