If I needed any reminder of why I’m not a conservative, the bizarre contortions that right-wingers have been putting themselves through lately in opposition to the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on gay marriage would provide one. Watching this has been almost as much fun as watching the left thrash itself to pieces in a futile… Continue reading Gay Marriage
The 2004 election is over
From the Telegraph: A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: “I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.” This is the quote that will re-elect George W. Bush president. Because after 9/11,… Continue reading The 2004 election is over
Racism and group differences
At the end of my essay What good is IQ?, I suggested that taking IQ seriously might (among other things) be an important step towards banishing racism. The behavioral differences between two people who are far apart on the IQ scale are far more significant than any we can associate with racial origin. Stupidity isn’t… Continue reading Racism and group differences
Comment policy
I removed a comment from my blog today. This is only the second time I have done so, and the first was just cleaning up an accidental double post. To whoever left the original comment #6 on Lessons of Libya: I won’t suppress a coment for being mindless, formulaic ranting. Nor will I suppress a… Continue reading Comment policy
Lessons of Libya
Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya’s dictator and long-time terrorist sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow international inspections. The NYT’s December 20th article Lessons of Libya, covering this development, is unintentionally hilarious. An honest account would probably have read something like this: When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared him… Continue reading Lessons of Libya
Sex and Tolkien
Yes, I went to my local instantiation of the all-three-LOTR-movies marathon on Tuesday, and enjoyed it immensely. The movies were a delight; Peter Jackson’s Return Of The King fully lived up to the promise of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. Despite minor flaws and some questionable omissions, Tolkien fans have reason… Continue reading Sex and Tolkien
Giving Up The Gun
In response to my post on The Last Samurai, one reader asked a question I should have expected: didn’t the Tokugawa Shogunate successfully suppress firearms in Japan? No. Actually, they didn’t. Many American believe they did because they’ve vaguely heard the argument of Noel Perrin’s book Giving Up The Gun, explaining that the Tokugawa Shogunate… Continue reading Giving Up The Gun
The Last Samurai
Hollywood has given us a run of surprisingly good movies recently. By ‘surprisingly good‘ I mean that they’re rather better than one might expect from their genre. Loony Toons: Back In Action, for example, could have been a mere merchandising vehicle, a repetition of clichés and tired sight gags. Instead it was a wickedly funny… Continue reading The Last Samurai
Ejected in Geneva
The organizers of the Internet Summit in Geneva have had Dr. Paul Twomey, the president of ICANN (the organization that’s chartered to administer the international domain-name system), ejected by security guards after he’d flown twenty hours to participate in the meeting. I was not especially surprised. The organizers of the Geneva summit seem to be… Continue reading Ejected in Geneva
Cthulhu and Christ
This parody below comes to us from an artist named Howard Hallis, to whom all credit is due. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it here because the design of his website leads me to suspect that this cartoon might be replaced by something else the next time he has a fit of artistic inspiration.… Continue reading Cthulhu and Christ
Da Big Snow
Yup, the blizzard is big. Here in eastern Pennsylvania we’ve had over a foot of snow and a lot of drifting today. I shoveled my driveway. I’m going to be stiff tomorrow.
Salaries are dropping. Time to celebrate!
So, the latest trend to hit the business magazines is falling programmer salaries. I can’t lay hands on the article just now, but it seems some CEO under pressure to outsource his programming to India had the bright idea of offering lower salaries (competitive with Indian levels, not U.S. levels) to programmers in the U.S.… Continue reading Salaries are dropping. Time to celebrate!
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
Re: My Photo
Thanks, all of you, for the compliments. The last thing I expected was to become a geek pinup! Cathy Raymond
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.
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?
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
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
Here’s what kept me from blogging
This is what kept me too busy to blog for months: To find out more about it, go here.
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