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Funny
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More NSA
So now the NSA is under fire in the media for using cookies? Speaking as a web developer it’s difficult to do anything interesting without using them.
On a more troubling note, it seems to have occurred to no one in the punditsphere as to why should the NSA eavesdrop on Americans at all? I recall reading somewhere a while back that there was a reciprocal arrangement with the British version of the NSA that would allow the NSA to eavesdrop on Britons and the Brits would eavesdrop on Americans? It was all nice and legal, and accomplished the same objective.
As I said before, I had just assumed they were already doing this.
Two reasons come to mind as to why not:
- They didn’t want the British to know, which doesn’t really seem that likely
- They’re using, if not a new technology, then a new technique to determine who to wiretap, and they were applying it retroactively to already recorded conversations. Also they’re monitoring patterns more than anything. This would allow them to profile effectively, without actually saying the word profiling, which makes everyone happy.
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This is interesting
Sacco and Vanzettis look even guiltier! And Sinclair Lewis knew!
Actually that isn’t that interesting, but notable none the less.
Actually I thought it was assumed by everyone that Sacco was guilty, and Vanzetti probably wasn’t. Now it would seem they both were guilty, according to their lawyer.
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A blog for Dave
New Donkey, a Democratic blog that avoids most of the thing I dislike about democrats. It even reads a bit like it’s written by Dave Henson.
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Merry Christmas!
And
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White Heat
I just got done watching White Heat for the first time. Not quite a film noir, but still excellent. I recommend it highly.
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Christmas a day early
David Friedman is now blogging! Now if we can only round up Michael Sheaur we’d have a very thought provoking internet.
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A good interview
With Markos of the Daily Kos. It seems his personal style is a lot like his writing style.
Via Althouse.
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It’s as if the internet is all about Nick
I cruise on over to Marginal Revolution, and I see Why people don’t like Wikipedia (and blogs) which references The Probabalistic Age over on The Long Tail
When professionals–editors, academics, journalists–are running the show, we at least know that it’s someone’s job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we’re depending more and more on systems where nobody’s in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren’t perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They’re designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
But how can that be right when it feels so wrong?
There’s the rub. This tradeoff is just hard for people to wrap their heads around. There’s a reason why we’re still debating Darwin. And why Jim Suroweicki’s book on Adam Smith’s invisible hand is still surprising (and still needed to be written) more than 200 years after the great Scotsman’s death. Both market economics and evolution are probabilistic systems, which are simply counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. The fact that a few smart humans figured this out and used that insight to build the foundations of our modern economy, from the stock market to Google, is just evidence that our mental software has evolved faster than our hardware.
RTWT
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Changing people
- Photo retouching – a nifty tutorial in flash on how one can photoshop people
- A creepy form of surgery for women.