Hopefully Interesting

Many people (myself included) tend to do charitable giving at the end of the year.  If you're ever wondered "Gosh, I want do to as much good as possible with my money but how do I figure out which cause gives the best result?" then I have some good news for you. The good folks at Givewell have recently re-analyzed  this very topic with a good amount of rigor and I'll be going with their recommendations this year.  Except I'm trying to be a bit more clever tax-wise this year so I'll be donating January 1st and December 31st of 2015, then those same dates on 2017, etc.  That should interact better with the US tax system since there's a standard deduction and I don't have a mortgage or anything like that.  Oh, and I took the Giving What We Can  pledge to donate 10% of my income to charity each year.  You could too! Scott Alexander wrote a very good post on why outrage feeds on itself so well in online discussions.  Earlier this year I was pretty o...

It occurred to a little while ago that a lot of the problems some people have with drones would more or less go away if drones were less anonymous.  Like perhaps the FAA wouldn't be  so restrictive  if it were easier to determine who the owner or operator of a drone was.  It's hard to imagine how our traffic systems would work if it weren't for licence plates.  I'm not sure, as a practical matter, what form identification for drones would take.  A drone already has to have a wireless connection to it's operator so some sort of challenge/response could be workable if there were some way to direct the request easily.  Nothing says that a drone would necessarily answer, but nothing says that a car has to have a licence plate either. Is this really practical?  I can't say but it seems like drones are going to be accepted more slowly if it isn't.

Here  is a really nice article about someone's project putting some smarts on a model plane.  The author explains things well and does the whole multi-media thing very well. This  is one scary chemical reaction. For a while Hong Kong had a block that was essentially a lawless zone backed full of people regardless of any sort of zoning.  Here's an awesome cross section someone put together of it. The roundworm c. elegans is remarkable for being the creature with the world's most studied nervous system.  Which was relatively easy since it only has a few hundred neurons.  Well, some scientists simulated those neurons and put them in a robot body .  Uploading here we come! Boston is apparently  in the running  for the 2024 Olympics.  I hope we don't end up hosting it. Many people have complained that Indian Jones isn't a very good archeologist but Max Gladstone weighs in to support him . Apparently humans and dolphins can hunt ...

As longtime readers will know (all three of them) one of the things I worry about regarding government is  complexity .  There are a lot of ways that government can be more complex than it has to be with various sorts of detriments to democracy's ability to control that government but one that annoys me out of proportion is taking some new tax or other revenue stream and saying that it has to be used for some particular purpose. There was actually a ballot measure in Massachusetts that did this by dedicating the unclaimed deposits on cans and bottles to conservation; as well as increasing the variety of containers subject to deposits. Why not just put any money that comes in into the same general fund and then take all expenses out of that fund?  Well, it seems that while voters generally think the money the government spends is wasted in general, they  also think  that for things the government spends money on it's doing a good job.  That means that t...

Fantasy style  map  of Boston. I've always sort of thought it was odd that the one place in the galaxy that Kryptonians were least adapted to was their home planet.  Julian Sanchez comes up with some interesting  explanations , which I hope some story uses. So we've all heard the phrase "To gird one's loins" right?  I once had no idea what that meant, but  now I do . If Nigeria can successfully  contain an Ebola outbreak  I'm pretty sure the US doesn't have much to worry about.  Better to panic about the flu becoming deadly instead. The Metamorphosis cast with  a robot. When bad things happen to good robots. Raccoons are  getting smarter . So recently the ESA launched a probe to investigate a comet.  And it's been taking some really cool pictures . There's been this Gamer Gate furor going on recently.  I was going to write a post about it, but Ken at Popehat wrote almost everything I wanted to say. ...

I'm going to be starting to collect links and post them every month.  I've only been collecting these for a couple of weeks, so there'll probably be more next month. Calvin and Muad'Dib , quotes from Dune as illustrated by Calvin and Hobbs.  It's pretty hilarious. Guardians of the Galaxy as a short tabletop campaign .  I just discovered Max Gladstone's blog (thanks Brian) and I've been enjoying it.  He also wrote a book that was very good.   Oh, and apparently Gostbusters is the best comedy ever made about the limits of the Lovecraftian worldview. I've always thought that augmented reality is a much cooler idea than virtual reality, and it looks like people are continuing to work on making the dream a reality . India's Mar's mission arrived  and is in a stable orbit.  This was impressive both because they managed to succeed on the first try unlike certain other space agencies and also because it cost of the movie Gravity.  I ...

I'd sort of been meaning to write about Red Plenty  at some point, a book about the dream and reality of the Soviet economic planning system.  It was very well done and actually made me more sympathetic to the people who believed in Communism back in the day.   Well, it looks like Scott at Slate Star Codex has put together an excellent  review  that said everything I was going to say and more so just go read that. One of the things I reconsidered after having read the book was the precise role of incentives in explaining the later problems with Soviet planning.  In certain cases, Russians were  very  well-incentivized by things like “We will kill you unless you meet the production target”. Later, when the state became less murder-happy, the threat of death faded to threats of demotions, ruined careers, and transfer to backwater provinces. And there were equal incentives, in the form of promotion or transfer to a desirable location such as Mos...

I recently heard someone talk on Facebook about the old " duck and cover " drills that school children used to do in the cold war and how obviously that wouldn't protect you from a nuclear bomb.  I've actually heard that same thing several times, so I thought it would be good to chime in in support of the civil defense planners of yesteryear.  Duck and cover was actually a pretty reasonable way to reduce one's risk of dying in the event of a nuclear explosion. To simplify a bit, there are basically four ways an atomic bomb can kill you.  When it goes off there's a flash of heat and light that can cause burns and fires.  There's a shock wave that can crush you directly, or which can collapse buildings and throw things into you.  There's a wave of ionizing radiation that can kill you through radiation poisoning.  And then there's any radioactive fallout that might kill you much later. Someone who is standing directly under a big atomic explosion ...

China has been urbanizing quite a bit, and one important reason that this hasn't happened even faster is the  internal passport system  that restricts who can move to the city.  Usually when you have some poorish country undergoing urbanization and industrialization you find that people in the cities are being paid about twice as much as they would earn in the countryside, since that tends to be what's required for young people to leave the only life they've ever known in large numbers.  This is still a pitiful amount by Western standards, though, the masses still living out in the countryside who are willing to move to the city at that price prevent wages from getting any higher until urbanization has run it's course.  And of course rural wages tend to start increasing at the tail end of this because the amount of land in the countryside available per person goes up. Except that in China, the government has slowed the rate at which people leave the countrysid...

Cutting edge blogger that I am, I'd like to share some thoughts I've been having on the hot new thing that everyone was talking about last December when the price peaked and then crashed: bitcoin.  There have been a lot of people talking about bitcoin taking over from regular currencies or simply failing horribly.  I do think that failure is a possibility, but it seems to me that if bitcoin or some other crypto-currency does end up succeeding it will be beside conventional state-backed currencies instead of replacing them. Money is something we all use, and for several different purposes.  You can break out money's main functions as being a medium of exchange, being a unit of account, and being a store of value.  A medium of exchange is something that passes value from person to person, whatever you use to pay someone for something or settle a debt.  A unit of account is what we use to measure prices.  You can imagine a world where everyone expressed pric...

My parents have a boat and for basically my entire life I've spent at least a week each summer on it with them, sailing along the coast of Maine.  But this post isn't about that, it's about all the books I managed to read when I wasn't steering, fiddling with sails, putting down anchors or so on. The Rhesus Chart  by Charles Stross.  I think this book is now my favorite from the laundry series, and it nails the interplay of office politics and supernatural danger.  I also thought it did a very good job of playing with expectations in one place. Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths  by Harry Conolly.  A short story collection I got access to by backing his  Kickstarter .  Fairly entertaining, but read his excellent Twenty Palaces trilogy first. Technology in World Civilization  by Arnold Pacey.  An interesting book on comparative technological development and the transfer of technologies back in the old days. The Origins of Politi...

So, for a long time I didn't really get H.P.Lovecraft , the author of a bunch of books and short stories set in a mythos  that has been used by many authors since.  Even if you've never read anything by him, I hope you've at least heard the name  Cthulhu  at some point.  The problem is that the sense of cosmic dread that he sought to convey in his works didn't really work with me.  I've grown up knowing of the vast voids between the stars.  I've always, for as long as I've known about history, known that history began long before mankind was around and that the time between the first campfire and the present day is just a small slice of all the time that came before.  All this familiarity means that I can't really appreciate his works the way that maybe people at the time could, familiarity breeds contempt. The first time I really got a taste of real cosmic dread was when I ran into the concept of Boltzman brain's .  To explain it simply, i...

Way back in 2011 I wrote a  fairly optomistic blog post  about the prospects of resistive RAM (RRAM), a new storage technology that could end up replacing both the RAM and main hard drives in computers.  Well, things haven't progressed as fast since then as I might have hoped they would, but there has been one interesting development lately.  Apparently HP (who owns most of the patents for the most promising take on RRAM) has been poring a huge amount of resources into building a machine to take advantage of it, as well as exploring a few other interesting technologies. The news reports I've seen have tended to exaggerate how radical this is a bit, and it's also been an interesting illustration of Paul Graham's  essay  on how corporate PR works.  But it looks like HP is doing serious systems level research into how new technologies can change computing.  As far as I can tell there hasn't been a lot of work done by people looking at changing bot...

I was talking with someone a while ago about political anarchy, the idea of people living without any government.  There are certainly anarchists around, though my sense is that the heyday of political Anarchism was in the late 19th and early 20th century, being just as much a specter as Communism in the US's  First Red Scare .  Societies without government aren't anything we expect to see anywhere in the developed world or in recent history, possibly barring Somalia, but over the course of human history it might very well be the case that societies we'd call anarchic outnumber societies with a government. A government is basically an organization that can force you to do things through the threat of violence.  This is practical with settled farmers, but it's a much more difficult thing to implement in a  Band Society  of hunter gatherers.  If you and your friends don't like what you're told to do, you can just go off and hunt elsewhere.  And if...

In decision theory there's a thought experiment called  Newcomb's Problem  or Newcomb's Paradox that goes something like this.  Some entity with very good judgement is offering a deal.  It has two boxes, and you are free to take both or either.  One box is transparent, and you can see that it contains $1,000.  The other box can't be seen into, and the entity might or might not have put $1,000,000 into that box. It's figured out what you are going to do and as put the million dollars in the box only if you are going to take the opaque box of unknown value and leave the transparent thousand dollar box alone. So, since we are assuming the entity's judgement is perfect one of two things is going to happen.  You might grab both boxes and find the second one is empty, receiving $1,000.  Or you might just grab the one mystery box and get $1,000,000. But the reason that people call this a paradox is that at the moment you make your choice the contents...

I don't really follow foreign policy as much as I could.  I mean, I think I know more about the larger world than most people and a fair amount about economics and the military, but I know that I don't really understand international diplomacy.  Thankfully there are people I know who are much better at this than I am. When looking at the Ukraine situation, amateur that I am, my inclination was to view the matter exclusively as a contest involving the leaderships of the Ukraine, Russia, and the US.  But there are other countries nearby that might have both opinions and capabilities to express those opinions, and as Erik Fogg points out that NATO's eastern members are very interested in the matter and have their own capabilities to intervene and potentially drag the rest of NATO in.  Which presumably plays into the calculations being made in Kiev and Moscow and Washington.