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Nuclear Irrationality
I was recently thinking about my college studies of nuclear warfare. At the time it seemed like a relevant topic, and I took two courses on it. Like everything, the more you look into it the more complex it gets. The depth of the thinking in nuclear warfare planning was both impressive and appalling. One…
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Sudoku
I’ve been playing Sudoku on Google+. i’ve more or less mastered the easy and medium levels, but it takes me about 30 minutes to do a hard level, and I haven’t tried expert yet. Sudoku is a fairly dumb game in some ways; as a colleague of mine pointed out, it’s trivial to write a…
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Pay Voting
New plan: let’s let people pay to vote. Everybody gets one vote free, just like today. You can also pay, say, $1000 for another vote, then $2000 for the next one, $3000 for the one after that, etc. Also, you can sell your vote, so a cheaper way to get more votes is to pay…
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Voluntary Foreclosure
The otherwise completely forgettable movie Larry Crowne had one scene I found quite interesting. The eponymous protagonist, played by Tom Hanks in his blandest mode, is presented as an all-around good guy. He is gentlemanly, helpful, considerate, and in fact has no flaws except for the rather minor one which starts the little action there…
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CVS SSH
Sorry for the long posting hiatus. I have enough readers now that it’s hard to write the usual random nonsense. I was recently reminded of an old problem using CVS over SSH, which was an interesting example of various different instances of reasonable behaviour adding up to a bug. It’s possible that this bug has…