Hopefully Interesting

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.

Enough public policy, time for more shiny technology.  For a while now I've been following some presentations Ivan Goddard has been putting on a series of lectures for this group called Out Of The Box Computing which has some seriously ambitious plans to totally re-think how computers work.  I'm afraid those videos (and the rest of this post) are going to get a bit technical, so fair warning. It's sort of interesting to see how little the base abstractions governing how we interact with computers have changed over the last 50 years.  Back then instructions executed one by one, taking however many clock cycles they took before the processor passed on to the next instruction.  First people pipelined computers so that though instructions were only started one at a time you could start a new instruction before a previous instruction had finished.  Then people created computers that could issue more than one instruction with each cycle of the clock.  Finall...

This is the result of a comment I left on Hacker News a while ago, which I thought might be worth expanding into a blog post.  We all know about the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant , and probably heard about all the many things that have gone wrong there.  I've often seen people use Fukushima as an example of why nuclear power is too dangerous for us to use, and that we have to move to other methods of generating electricity.  Some people have claimed that Germany is replacing their nuclear power generation with Coal after Fukushima, while others says that that's wrong and Germany is merely replacing Nuclear with renewables when it would otherwise have replaced coal with the growth in it's use of coal being merely incidental. But at the same time, how things get talked about by the media is often a poor guide to how dangerous things really are in practice.  So bad was the Fukushima disaster, really?  The Tsunami that hit Japan was a humongous disas...

People tend to spend a lot of time thinking about national politics and that only makes sense.  We, or people in my social circles, do spend most of our time consuming national news and the New York Times or similar papers aren't going to concern themselves about little old Cambridge.  Even the Boston Globe has barely mentioned the election.  Which makes sense, in a way, since any given local election will only effect a relatively small number of people. But there are some ways in which the cumulative effect of city council elections from around the country have large impacts on the world.  The most significant of these is probably decisions taken by the local government regarding building density.  People frequently talk about the local effects of decisions by the town or city government regarding new development.  It might increase tax revenue or increase the supply of housing on one hand, but it might overload transportation infrastructure or change ...

To grossly simplify policymaking, when there's a problem there are usually three options available to the government.  You can always ignore the problem.  You can raise money and pay someone to deal with the problem.  Or you can pass laws to force some third party to deal with the problem.  When phrased that way the last often sounds like a bad idea, but if pick a third party that is unpopular or that seems like maybe they ought to be helping with the problem anyway then the specific plans can sound quite appealing.  But I'd argue that there are a couple of reasons to resist the urge to do this even when it sounds like a good idea at first. The first is that by putting a burden on a specific group, you're creating an incentive for people not to join that group.  If you'd prefer that people didn't join that group then this is a pretty good deal.  But often you have a group like, say the people who employ poor people which you don't want to shrink....

Previously I've talked about RRAM, and how non-volatile memory is going to come in and cause lots disruption in computing.  The non-volatile part still looks to be happening but it appears I might be wrong about it being RRAM that does it, though, since now samples of the first standard memory sticks of non-volatile RAM are actually being sent out (PDF), and it's not RRAM like I expected. Rather, its MRAM or magnetic RAM.  That stuff has actually been around for a while, I used some back in '08 when I needed a bit of non-volatile memory I could write to very fast but didn't need a large amount of storage.  That last was the reason it wasn't in wide use, though.  MRAM was fast, and low power, and many other wonderful things.  But each individual MRAM cell was also very big, which meant that you couldn't fit very many of them on a chip.  And that meant that on a bit-by-bit basis it was very expensive.  But recently people have figured out a way to m...

There are lots of ideas and concepts from psychology that I wish more people knew about.  I was reading the first post  of a new blog recently, and I was struck by a thought.  The post talked about two propositions that were both pretty reasonable, but were seldom both believed by the same person because they had different implications for policy.  Someone only believing one or the other could go about their lives believing that their actions were perfect and had no downsides, but believing both meant that you would have to live with having made a trade off, whatever you did.  It occurred to me that this was a perfect example of what a psychologist would call  Cognitive Dissonance  and that since situations like this were so common that the human bias towards trying to resolve cognitive dissonance by changing one's beliefs was actually more problematic than I'd thought. So what is...