dkimball

15 ms·

91.
by dkimball 17y ago
Very, very interesting -- and if I habitually wore a hat, I think I'd have to eat it at this point. :)
92.
by dkimball 17y ago
Another interesting thing is that birds represent an evolutionary road not taken. All modern birds are descended from a small theropod dinosaur, possibly _Velociraptor deinonychus_ itself -- a more plausible candidate for the star of "Juras
93.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think I know the answer that a market-economist or an American conservative would give to this; so I'd answer that answer by observing that, as a serious Catholic, I find this article's author to be closer to the truth than those who thin
94.
by dkimball 17y ago
I wouldn't imagine there's much of a market for small-arms design. It's an old-school, natural-monopoly sort of subject, one of those for which the slow, careful, bureaucratic model that Paul Graham (correctly!) condemns for software was or
95.
by dkimball 17y ago
I agree with those here who are observing that it failed because it was a lemon. No one should generate _that_ level of hype, especially not while the game in question is trapped in development hell to the point that they cut an entire "sta
96.
by dkimball 17y ago
"If anything, the power of witches has been lessening simply because of the nature of the net/web (just think how difficult it's been for even politically authoritarian societies like China to maintain a control over what people hear/see/th
97.
by dkimball 17y ago
One problem that I don't think the iPad's defenders are acknowledging is Joel Splosky's "Law of Leaky Abstractions" -- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm... . Of course, the ideal is to leak minimally; Apple has
98.
by dkimball 17y ago
From playing around with DuckIt, I agree, there's more information out there than I'd imagined -- it's just strangled by a thick forest of spam, which you have devised a superb method of clearing. My comment on the accuracy of zero-click in
99.
by dkimball 17y ago
I've noticed that these days, Google's answers to search questions are generally "why don't you try Wikipedia?" These days, the Web is somewhere between three and five titans plus a complex of secondary sites (specialist wikis, newspaper si
100.
by dkimball 17y ago
@jacquesm: At least from my perspective, "God wants everyone to go to Heaven" and "God wants some people to go to Hell" are further apart than "God wants everyone to go to Heaven" and "there is no God, and the universe developed through cha
101.
by dkimball 17y ago
It is true that small differences can mean large conflicts, but I think Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy is a better illustration of this. The only doctrine that the two denominations disagreed on was the exact way in which the Pope is hig
102.
by dkimball 17y ago
Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D... . It's a private theory of mine that the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods were so lively because "this is an excellent shoulder of pork" sounded exactly like
103.
by dkimball 17y ago
This is the comment where I spend entirely too much effort correcting that inaccuracy.
104.
by dkimball 17y ago
Very interesting. (Link: the main illustration of the different running gaits is at http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/3RunningBeforeThe... ). I'm surprised to see that they didn't find a difference in kinetic energy between heel
105.
by dkimball 17y ago
This sentence is the beginning of a long and tangentially relevant argument about the Crusades.
106.
by dkimball 17y ago
This sentence is an aloof expression of awe at the intensity of the reaction to an obvious troll. This sentence cites an obscure [Russian expatriate|investigative journalist|fringe physicist|absurdly cross-disciplinary|Eric Scott Raymond|Th
107.
by dkimball 17y ago
I'm not sure which is more amazing: that Watterson finally gave another interview, or that we're so eager to read it. "Calvin and Hobbes" has been discontinued for one and a half times the length of its run, and still we remember it with so
108.
by dkimball 17y ago
There were the Germanic invaders at first, against whom the late-Roman landholders organized; then there were the Vikings, against whom the mixed late-Roman landholders and Germanic invaders organized; then there were the Muslims (who were
109.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think the right approach is a negative income tax, not a minimum wage. Let employers pay no more than they find appropriate, then have taxes (which include taxes on that employer) make up the rest, bringing a household's income up to appr
110.
by dkimball 17y ago
The Motley Fool seems to have forgotten this, but rational-agent theory is a useful fiction, not a statement of reality. The best analogy I can think of is Skinner's behaviorism; rational-agent theory seems to fail in the same kinds of plac
111.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think the assumption is sound. The kind of content that doesn't need to be incentivized to be created, is the kind of content that is created for a purpose other than "to be good content of the type in question." We see how this works out
112.
by dkimball 17y ago
On the other hand, just as it's not really paranoia when they're really out to get you, a protection racket is preferable to being overrun by hordes of Teutonic Nietzcheans. :) Having the same structure doesn't always mean being the same th
113.
by dkimball 17y ago
This is an extreme nitpick, but the American Indians (most American Indians prefer this name over "Native American," but see Wikipedia for more details on the name question) weren't entirely happy with how they were living, as of the time o
114.
by dkimball 17y ago
I think the other thing is that governments rot: almost every state begins cohesive and ends decadent. The Mongols went from cohesive to decadent in less than a generation; the North African groups that ibn Khaldun lived among tended to las
115.
by dkimball 17y ago
I've read the book about this: _War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires_, by Peter Turchin. ( http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288... ) Turchin's model of asabiya is much more developed than the article'