erdos2

"But the essay causes concern. I worry that lots of small ISVs will read his article and believe that they need to hire great hackers."

Why does this rise to the level of concern? If these small ISVs take what the author considers misguided advice, they will be less competitive and his dreary SourceSafe-based business will do even better.

The author Elliott is miserable, negative, hateful, boastful and self-righteous. Don't forget (now there's a patronizing phrase, as if anyone forgets the obvious) that the article is entitled, "MY, MY, MY (not someone else's: MY) Interview with (that god damned) murderer Hans Reiser." The article is about Elliott's feelings, primarily. Who cares? Elliott has the psychological insight of a paramecium.

To be fair, Elliott's hatred of Reiser is a little further up the phylogenetic tree, at least on the invertebrate branch. Other than that, the article doesn't say much about the crime or the trial, about Reiser's marriage to a venal Russian bride, or much of anything else. What we do learn is that Elliott is an opportunist who hung around Reiser's trial, managed to get an interview, and gets miffed because Reiser didn't give him what he wanted. The whole purpose was to give readers enough of a bad taste to purchase his book. Elliott is so unsympathetic, he unintentionally forces the reader's identification with Reiser when he turns his back to Elliott and asks the guard to be returned to his cell.

1. Zero

2. Infinity

3. It fails to maximize your expected utility while minimizing everyone else's.

The author misses the point that PG's essays are not intended to be understood literally, but as literature, to be appreciated on an aesthetic level only.

The idea of a static mindset is itself limiting. One needs to have a mindsheaf, which could be a time-varying sheaf of mindsets. This would be a contravariant functor F from the real line, with its usual topology, to the category of sets. The value F(U) for an open set U of the real line would be one of the mindsets of the mindsheaf. Of course, other topological spaces are possible, and the functor could have values in other categories. I mention only one possibility to illustrate the primitive inadequacy of the notion of a static mindset.

Saul Kripke is an example of this. Terrified of publishing in case he doesn't live up to his immense talent.

The Times is usually scrupulous about fact checking--except when it comes to supporting Imperial adventures and warmongering.

It's expensive to raise a family in the United States. The economics and the culture are against it. Add to that the cost of raising a family with someone who turns out to be the wrong person: your expected income after marriage must be reduced by the probability of divorce times the cost of divorce. Children necessarily complicate matters.

The problem would be alleviated somewhat if more and more people owned their own businesses, instead of the situation we currently have, of numerous workers employed by a wealthy class. At some point, these workers should simply refuse to work for anyone substantially more wealthy than they are. The value to an employer of having a large pool of interchangeable labor is calculable. Who created that value? Not the employer: the people. And it is the people who should and who must demand that value they created for themselves.

The article claims that "...a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites."

This is false about Noam Chomsky: there were no "voting drives" on chomsky.info or zcommunications.org, where Chomsky has a blog. Chomsky has never paid any attention to the Foreign Policy vote. I wonder what possible motive Foreign Policy has for making this false claim.

This is Objectivism gone awry. A society of Ayn Randians will ultimately face challenges that leads to its collapse.

Thanks--I hope the experiment works also. It seems as though it should, based on my experience. It's also an opportunity to record the results of an experiment in Google docs, using their fancy spreadsheet gadgets.

I've had lifelong problems maintaining anything remotely resembling a normal, consistent sleep schedule, coupled with chronic insomnia. Two sleep studies several years apart and a CPAP machine have done nothing. Scientific findings of a "food clock" that can override the circadian rhythm for sleep leads me to experiment. For the next 30 days I won't eat 16 hours before I intend to wake. On waking, eat breakfast. I hope this works.

Exactly.