Month: March 2003

Emigration to europe

I wonder how many Americans have applied for resident visas to European countries claiming political asylum from the current US administration. I certainly can’t be the first person in this country to think of such a radical departure from the norm. How many non-resident aliens will decide that America really isn’t the place they want to live in for the rest of their lives? How many will suddenly start looking at other countries if the US goes into another Great Depression, as some economic scholars are predicting? What will this mean for US-born citizens and their children? I mean, who wants to be from a country that is beginning to be so universally hated simply because the political administration is so damn clueless about foreign policy?

and then there is stuff like this.

zealots

the biggest liability for open source projects are neither software patents nor the “enemy” microsoft, but zealots. these people feel that they somehow have the moral legitimacy to read from the open source scripture, and rip others a new one. by spewing their zealotry, they do triple damage:

  • they drive reasonable onlookers away
  • they waste everyone’s time
  • they fail to contribute with code

as the saying goes, verba volant, scripta manent.

elusive interactions

i had a follow-up to my ROI discussion today. fortunately i was able to put things right with the person i had the discussion with originally (i love that person very much). i still crave intelligent conversations, and people to quench my intellectual curiosity. people that do not tire from my relentless drive. where to find these most rare individuals? the search continues.

Algorithmic beauty

  • Judy rarely compromises speed/space performance for simplicity (Judy will never be called simple except at the API).
  • Judy is designed to avoid cache-line fills wherever possible. (This is the main design criteria for Judy.)

it is rare that you get in touch with basic algorithms as a software engineer these days. lo and behold, there is still scope for fundamental improvements to very basic algorithms, such as trees. ah, such beauty. if i only had the mental staying power to fully appreciate it 🙂

mr. melvyns murder

Mr. Melvyn was known to his best friends as Lucky Mel, and he was indeed no stranger to luck and good fortune. Numerous casinos and low-down back-alley joints had witnessed Mr. Melvyn cashing in big time, and on this night – the big fight night, he was sure to make no mistake: he’d been saving up for years and put his entire fortune on Tyson vs. Sure Shot.

the inimitable k10k guys done it again, and bring us this wonderful short story.

Davos of the mind

They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global warming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottom line foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender.
Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.

such starts an inside account of a WEF participant. the account is rather different from just 3 years ago. much gloomier. we learn that

The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, “Yeah, it’s bad, but recovery is right around the corner”. This year “recovery” was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable — fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were “deflation”, “long term stagnation” and “collapse of the $”. All of this is without war.

on the brighter side

Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations. And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and support for entrepreneurs with minimal state regulation.

time to add some analytical blogs to my daily dose. such as british think tank demos, novelist bruce sterling, and of course, former WEF co-organizer lance knobel.
apologies to lance for the blatant title rip-off.