The Prudential interview

I’ve spent a lot of time and effort since 1997 developing effective propaganda tactics for reaching the business world on behalf of the hacker community — among other things, by popularizing the term ‘open source’. If you want to grok how this is done, read my October 15 interview with a bunch of Prudential Securities… Continue reading The Prudential interview

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Re: My Photo

Thanks, all of you, for the compliments. The last thing I expected was to become a geek pinup! Cathy Raymond

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Jack needs a girlfriend

“Free Love”, eh? Well, that would explain a lot. Jack must have been the dude I saw damn near run into a doorframe yesterday because he was checking out my wife Cathy so intently he forgot to watch where he was going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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What good is IQ?

A reader asks: To clarify, while I believe natural selection explains a lot I have caveats about IQ as a tool for testing intelligence. If you can’t measure the coast of France with a single number how can you do it with human intelligence? Easily. Human intelligence is a great deal less complex than the… Continue reading What good is IQ?

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Categorized as Science

Funny, but incorrect

From the November 12 “Kernel Panic”: In fact, this strip is incorrect. I did not coin the term “open source”; I only popularized it. It was coined by my friend Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. While it’s true that I more or less ran the brainstorming session and fortunately had enough of a clue… Continue reading Funny, but incorrect

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Categorized as Software

Selecting for intelligence

Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles: During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were many social pressures to do so).… Continue reading Selecting for intelligence

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Communism and the Jews

Uh-oh. I see another identity-politics double-bind coming. Eugene Volokh comments on the anti-semitic canard that Jews were disproportionally influential in the development of Communism. The sides in this kind of dispute are very predictable. One one hand, the anti-Semites, a disgusting crew of racist troglodytes with evil motives. On the other, the good-hearted and right-thinking… Continue reading Communism and the Jews

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Whose character are you?

I always wanted to be a Heinlein character when I grew up. Somebody thinks I succeeded… Robert Heinlein wrote you – your stranger in astrange land, you. Which Author’s Fiction are You? brought to you by Quizilla

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The desexualization of the American (fe)male

There’s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit’s essay The Pussification Of The Western Male. The single feature of the conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to Steven den Beste’s equally searing essay Anglo Women are an endangered species. Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful… Continue reading The desexualization of the American (fe)male

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Yee-ha! W00t! Excelsior!

I got email from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, about an hour ago. The bad news was, he turned down the short story. The good news was he accepted the fact article. I’m going to be published in Analog! /me does geeky victory dance OK, so this is one of those things where… Continue reading Yee-ha! W00t! Excelsior!

Possible outage today

The good folks at ibiblio.org are about to upgrade me from b2 to WordPress. There might be a short outage involved, and it’s possible the new CSS will garble my pages. Any problems should be transient and fixed within a few hours.

A rant — Why are CSS designers so utterly freaking clueless?

People who put absolute pixel sizes in CSS layouts should be lashed with knouts. I’ve tripped over this problem yet again while moving my blog; I’m using b2, and the default stylesheet shipped with it was obviously produced by some graphics designer who has failed to grasp the fact that there are lots of different… Continue reading A rant — Why are CSS designers so utterly freaking clueless?

The sleep of reason

I’ve had a copy of David Frum’s Dead Right sitting on my coffee table for months. I didn’t buy it, it was landed on my by an old friend who persists in imagining that I’m interested in reading conservative political theory. In fact, it’s been years since I found conservative theorizing other than wearily predictable.… Continue reading The sleep of reason

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Dehumanization

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist holdouts in Iraq werewolves, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify continuing to kill them. This question displays a… Continue reading Dehumanization

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Call them Werewolves

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent” or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we are facing. I have a candidate to… Continue reading Call them Werewolves

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The Whig Maneuver

VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what replaces it? The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it’s been going on ever since the New Left captured the party apparat in… Continue reading The Whig Maneuver

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