[Gale Directory of Corporate Histories](http://www.answers.com/topic/bruegger-s)
[NYT iEconomy](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-taking-hold-in-electronics-factories-in-china.html?pagewanted=all)
[NYT iEconomy](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/signs-of-changes-taking-hold-in-electronics-factories-in-china.html?pagewanted=all)
[Thiel on legal tech](http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/37411481044/peter-thiel-on-the-future-of-legal-technology-notes)
[EY](http://lesswrong.com/lw/g0i/standard_and_nonstandard_numbers/)
The key thing here is that contrary to what people often say, there’s absolutely no empirical evidence that the planet earth is 4.5 billion years old rather than 4 thousand years ago. Take the standard scientific account of what the earth was like in 2000 BCE. Now imagine that God create the universe exactly like that 4,000 years ago. He put fossiles in the ground whose state of carbon decay was just so. There’s no “evidence” about this hypothesis one way or the other. Scientific materialism just incorporates as a baseline assumption that these kind of radical discontinuities in the nature of reality don’t happen. But maybe they do?
Do they? Of course not. I think that’s ridiculous. Just like it would be ridiculous to say that roasting toddlers for dinner is morally acceptable. But we can’t empirically prove that toddler-roasting is wrong, any more than we can disprove the “God is playing an elaborate joke on us with the fossils to test our faith” account of geology.
This is just wrong. There's tons of evidence that the planet is 4.5B years old rather than 4K years. True, none of the evidence is completely conclusive -- but no evidence is ever completely conclusive, we never know anything for sure. I think Matt's just got confused epistemology here.
[David Frum](http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/12/opinion/frum-conservatives-despair/)
A Libertarian Puzzle
Allow me to oversimplify. People disagree about ends: Some people want to promote broader human flourishing, others want to preserve the status quo. People disagree about means: Some people think unfettered markets will best promote broader human flourishing, others think unfettered markets will best preserve the status quo. We have a nice two-by-two: people who want to promote human flourishing and think that unfettered markets are the best way to get there (libertarians), people who want to promote human flourishing and think that unfettered markets are an impediment (socialists), people who want to preserve the status quo and think unfettered markets are the best way to get there (capitalists), people who want to preserve the status quo and think unfettered markets are an impediment (statists). Both libertarians and capitalists will go around saying that unfettered markets are great. And both of them will try to persuade their audience by telling their audience that unfettered markets will lead to the thing their audience wants. If the audience wants to preserve the status quo, they will emphasize how unfettered markets properly reward the dynamic innovators who create greatness in the world. If the audience wants to promote human flourishing, they will emphasize how unfettered markets give everyone the opportunity to succeed without the inhibiting force of government regulation. The trouble is, as an audience member, you can't really tell whether the speaker is actually a capitalist or a libertarian (or a libertarian who has been duped by a capitalist, or a capitalist who has been duped by a libertarian). Like any salesman, they'll tell you that their product is the perfect thing to accomplish your needs. Which leaves just one puzzle: why are there so few statists?
A Possible Explanation for the State-National Poll Divergence
[As Nate Silver observes today](http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/oct-30-what-state-polls-suggest-about-the-national-popular-vote/), there's been a significant divergence between the national and state polls. In the national polls, Romney is ahead. But if you poll each state individually and then weight the results by state turnout, Obama is ahead. What explains the discrepancy? Here's one idea: Let's say you're doing a poll of New York, so you call a bunch of random 212 numbers. Some of those people have moved their numbers to California -- either because they've taken their 212 cell phone to California or they've used the new number-porting feature of the phone system to redirect a 212 number to a California phone. When the pollster calls them and asks them if they're registered to vote in New York, they say "No, I'm registered to vote in California." [The pollster hangs up.](https://twitter.com/henryfarrell/status/263666551486554112) Meanwhile, the California pollster never calls them, since they don't have a California area code. The only time they appear in a poll is if a national pollster calls them and asks if they're registered to vote in the United States (they say yes). In other words, there's a group of people who show up only in national polls and not state polls. You'd expect this group to be much bigger than it was four years ago, since cell phones and local-number portability have gotten dramatically more popular. If these people were primarily for Romney, this would explain the discrepancy. (On the other hand, I'd intuitively expect mobile and mobile-using people to skew Obama.) You could test this by looking at whether there's a systematic difference between random-digit dialing (RDD) polls and alternative methods of sampling that would be immune from this problem.
[Chuck Klosterman](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html?_r=1&sq=chuck%20klosterman&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all)
Originalist Indexicals
[From the Scalia-Posner fight](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-scalia-posner-fight-20120918,0,7108932.story): > As an example of originalism, Scalia said the death penalty was not covered by the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. At the time that clause was adopted, he said, the death penalty was a standard punishment for a felony. If people want to ban it, they must amend the Constitution or vote to abolish it at the state level, he said. This doesn't seem to be a claim about originalism, but a claim about indexicals. The Bill of Rights also says "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner". Imagine, after the Constitution was ratified, I purchased an old Revolutionary War barracks and made it into my house. Does Scalia believe that the government can quarter soldiers there because at the time the third amendment was adopted that was a standard place to quarter soldiers? Is the only way to fix this to amend the Constitution? This seems ridiculous. Clearly by "any house", the Constitution does not mean "any house existing at the time this Constitution is ratified". So why does Scalia think "cruel and unusual punishment" means "what's considered to be cruel and unusual punishment at the time this Constitution is ratified"? What matters is that it's a house _now_ and that it's cruel and unusual _now_, since _now_ is when the law is being enforced. **Updates:** Let's say, for the sake of argument, that "unusual" means "not habitually done" and house means "building inhabited by a family" both then and now. Then the meaning has not changed, there is no issue of original meaning to be recovered here. What has changed is the extension: there are different places in the world that meet the description "building inhabited by a family" and different acts that meet the description "not habitually done". Both my imaginary house and the death penalty weren't in the extension when the Constitution was ratified, but they clearly are now. (Of course, it's also possible that the ratifiers were _mistaken_: the death penalty was equally "cruel and unusual" then as it is now and they just didn't realize it. It's also possible they were _weak_: it was cruel and unusual then but they kept doing it because the laws weren't properly enforced.) Julian Sanchez (via Twitter) argues I'm making a type/token confusion. So instead of talking about that particular barracks-turned-house, let's talk about a class of houses. Imagine when the Constitution was ratified nobody lived in caves and now a lot of people do (it's a hipster thing). Obviously the entire type of "caves" was not considered to be in the extension of "house" when the Constitution was written, but it clearly is now. I think it's clear the third amendment would apply to people who live in caves, even though it obviously wouldn't apply to your cave when the Constitution was ratified.
[Bertrand Russell](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/russell-lecture.html)
[Bertrand Russell](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/russell-lecture.html)
[Bertrand Russell](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/russell-lecture.html)
[Bertrand Russell](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1950/russell-lecture.html)
[Michiko Kakutani](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/books/david-foster-wallace-biography-by-d-t-max.html?pagewanted=all), by which she means Mr. Max specifically disagrees with _her_ assessments of Wallace's novels and short stories.
The simple function call
In his post, "[The Plain Old Function Call](http://vvgomes.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/the-plain-old-function-call/)," Vinicius Gomes compares these two lines of code: # version 1 choose('color', ['red', 'black', 'green'], 'ie7') # version 2 choose('color').from('red', 'black', 'green').ignore('ie7').any In Python, at least, you can always provide names for your parameters, so we can rewrite his first idea: # version 1b choose('color', from=['red', 'black', 'green'], ignore='ie7') Gomes' argument is that version 2 reads better, but I don't see it. Version 1b has the square brackets, but version 2 has extra parentheses. Version 2 also has the weird `.any` at the end (I'm actually not sure what it's supposed to do or indicate). So I dispute Gomes' first premise: I find it hard to believe version 2 is significantly more readable than version 1b. But this just avoids his larger point: that we shouldn't sacrifice readability for ease-of-implementation. Anyone who's familiar with my work knows I heartily agree -- this is [the slogan](http://webpy.org/philosophy) of my own web framework, web.py. But I think Gomes (and the larger tradition in which he writes) has a problematically narrow view of readability. Take [this bit](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=988459) of Perl poetry: my $dear = "friends" . while () {} do { $give_me_a_call= "on"; my $cell = "+00 0000000000"; The poem is perfectly intelligible as English; it's just some standard English phrases with some very weird punctuation. Reading it as an English document reveals: my dear friends while i am gone do give me a call on my cell +00 0000000000 But it's not English; it's Perl. And reading it as Perl reveals utter nonsense. Take just the first line: set the variable "dear" to the string "friends" This doesn't mean anything (the variable isn't used elsewhere in the program); it's purely there because it looks good to English speakers. But this isn't English; it's Perl. A good programmer does not simply read the code as English. They build a model of it in their head and try to figure out what it's doing. That's impossible to do with this bit of Perl, because what it's doing is not at all the same as what it's saying. And the same is true of Gomes' version 2: What is the object `choose` is returning? And `from`? To understand the code, you need to know the implementation details of `choose` -- and, as Gomes admits, the implentation details of `choose` in version 2 are unusual and difficult. How does forcing someone reading the code to understand unusual and difficult things make the code easier to maintain? Compare this to a sample of web.py code: class hello: def GET(self, name="world"): return 'Hello, ' + name + '!' This code here is perfectly easy to read -- but as Python, not as English. We're creating a class with a method (`GET`) with an optional argument (`name`). What it says in English is exactly the same as what it says in Python. Gomes claims his version 2 "requires less mental mapping between the computational representation and the real world thing." I don't think that's true there, but it's certainly true here. Rob Pike [tells a story](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1941206) from when pairing with Ken Thompson. When they hit a bug, Rob would dig into the code, "examining stack traces, sticking in print statements, invoking a debugger, and so on. But Ken would just stand and think" for a bit, before announcing "I know what's wrong." > Ken was building a mental model of the code and when something broke it was an error in the model. By thinking about *how* that problem could happen, he'd intuit where the model was wrong or where our code must not be satisfying the model. I'm with Ken -- I don't think you can be a great programmer unless you can build a model of the software in your head. But this is precisely what today's magical frameworks make it so hard to do. It's next to impossible to build a model in your head of how a Rails program works -- Rails calls random pieces of code at random times while doing all sorts of different things behind the scenes. The result is code that reads very well -- but as English, not as code. If you try to understand what it's _doing_, rather than just what it _says_, it's next to impossible without some very deep engagement with the Rails internals. Under those conditions, you're not a programmer -- you're a prisoner.