Author: geoff

Twitter Updates for 2009-03-28

  • OK, this is amazing. At the end of last season, Honda was a joke. Brawn buys the team, and now they’re P1&P2!! Hamilton’s car breaks… #
  • @jimgris just read a story from India about the priest who was conducting a wedding taking two cellphone calls during the service!! #
  • The arrangements for next week’s trip to the Bay Area are coming together nicely. Still a couple of breakfast and dinner slots, though. #
  • @DMular I use Skype out to call family in the UK all the time. Works a treat, no matter where I am – home, on the road, overseas. in reply to DMular #
  • Check out the pics of plume lightning at The Volcanism Blog http://tr.im/hVGE #
  • OK: I’m settling in to watch the Australian GP. Will it be a Brawn 1-2? Unlikely… but the last two days have been extraordinary. #
  • @lindseyfowler Count me skeptical. What was demonstrated was very different from the old “cold fusion”, so this still needs confirmation… #

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Twitter Updates for 2009-03-27

  • Watching the Australian GP practice…. this is going to be a topsy-turvy kind of season. Any bets on when the first KERS battery explodes? #
  • Joe Gregorio: “The ultimate destination of programming language evolution is lisp-without-parentheses.” http://tr.im/hU8i AARGH!! #
  • Settling down to watch qualifying for the Australian GP – will Ferrari and McLaren make it to the last 10? This is going to be weird… #
  • First session: the brand-new Brawn team 1st and 2nd, Hamilton squeaking through in P15!!! #

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Uncanny prescience

Congress approved landmark legislation today that opens the door for a new era on Wall Street in which commercial banks, securities houses and insurers will find it easier and cheaper to enter one another’s businesses.

The measure, considered by many the most important banking legislation in 66 years, was approved in the Senate by a vote of 90 to 8 and in the House tonight by 362 to 57. The bill will now be sent to the president, who is expected to sign it, aides said. It would become one of the most significant achievements this year by the White House and the Republicans leading the 106th Congress. […]

The opponents of the measure gloomily predicted that by unshackling banks and enabling them to move more freely into new kinds of financial activities, the new law could lead to an economic crisis down the road when the marketplace is no longer growing briskly.

“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota. “I wasn’t around during the 1930’s or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980’s when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness.”

From the New York Times issue of November 5, 1999. I guess that Republicans will complain that Dorgan was grossly inaccurate, because his prediction was a whole year off. You can see Rachel Maddow’s recent interview with Dorgan here.

Encore une fois

Back on April 8, 2006, I wrote about how I was tackling life after Sun:

First, information gathering. I’m going to talk to many colleagues — ex-Sun, still at Sun, never at Sun — about the state of the computer business: who’s hiring, what’s hot, and how they see things shifting between on-shore and off-shore, US and international, full-time and contract, in-house and consulting, and so forth. At this point, I’m trying to keep an open mind about almost everything. As part of this, I’m flying out to California for a few days at the end of the month.

And three years later this is what I’m doing again. I’m in the middle of two weeks of extensive discussions with friends, colleagues, and contacts here in the Seattle area; then on March 30th I’m flying down to SFO for a week of networking in Silicon Valley. If you’d like to get together while I’m down there, drop me a line….

Time to dump the New Scientist

I’ve always thought that a few British journals were outstandingly good at conveying complex ideas in an accessible and well-written manner. The Economist did it for economics – even if they have lurched to the right politically – and the New Scientist did the same for science.
How have the mighty fallen.
The once-respected New Scientist has gone completely off the deep end. First, they ran their misleading/pandering “Darwin was wrong” issue. Next they run – and then censor – a perfectly sensible piece on the agenda of pseudo-scientists. And now they’re trying to use their recent “image” as part of their self-promotional material – to say, in effect, “this is who we are”. As Jerry Coyne suggests, it’s time for a boycott to register our disapproval. PZ agrees:

When New Scientist ran their misleading “Darwin was wrong” cover, we hammered at them and pointed out that they were doing us no favors — they were giving ammunition to creationists who would never read the contents, but would wave that cover at school board meetings. And they did. We chastised the editor, Roger Highfield, and we had the impression that he was penitent, but it turns out we were completely wrong.

New Scientist is now using that same cover again in their promotional material to flog magazines.