DavidV

"Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error." - Ayn Rand

Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke. — Will Rogers (1879-1935)

"Programmers have a tendency to want to model every possible business reality, rather than the specific one that the business requires. ... When we create a domain model that isn’t constrained to match the domain being modeled, we miss the opportunity to gain any real insight in the business processes. And in the future, we end up representing changes in business processes as awkward corner cases in our elegant but overly-abstract metaworld. Constraints are not limitations. They are insights...

"I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves." – Harriet Tubman

Perhaps my greatest achievement ever: pushed for a critical business system to be designed with modern web standards and therefore to require IE8 or above. Bugged IT for over a year until all 5000 pc's were upgraded from IE6 to IE8. Finally, blocked IE6 users from using the system at all, so they have to upgrade even if they want to use it from home. And did this in China, which has half of the world's IE6 users.

// naive version of string reverse: public static string reverse(this string target) { int length = target.Length; char[] result = new char[length]; for (int i = length - 1; i >= 0; i--) { result[length - 1 - i] = target; } return new string(result); }

public static int[] QuickSort(int[] array) { if (array.Length

"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." -- Frank Zappa

I'm surfing Facebook in China with no VPN! Someone's going to get in big trouble over this.

"History is made by minorities—or, more precisely, history is made by intellectual movements, which are created by minorities. Who belongs to these minorities? Anyone who is able and willing actively to concern himself with intellectual issues. Here, it is not quantity, but quality that counts (the quality—and consistency—of the ideas one is advocating)." -- Ayn Rand “What Can One Do?”

A calculator that requires you to estimate before it gives you the answer!

Many invertebrate species engage in "traumatic insemination" where the male stabs sperm directly into the female body, inside which the sperm navigate to the ovaries. This presumably evolved as a way to bypass mating plugs and/or female selection ability. In some species, the females attempt to evade insemination by evolving bodies that are hard to grasp or mimicking male appearance. Perhaps this is why we also observe traumatic insemination of males as well. In Xylocoris maculipennis, t...

When the apocalypse comes, the tree hugging hippies, the ones who studied liberal arts, who never learned a useful trade, and who think that nature is a fairy tale, will be the first to go. (The lawyers will be next.)

Tax day again. Even though I live in China and pay taxes to the Chinese government, I also have to pay IRS on my worldwide income. The IRS graciously provides an exclusion up to $95K for overseas income, but not for my self-employment income. The complexity of overseas filing means I have to pay $600+ just for the paperwork. The USA and North Korea are the only countries that can tax overseas residents - the USA because it has military bases all over the world, and North Korea because it...

Here is the tentative outline for my "Introduction to Objectivism" talk that I will give at the Shanghai Austrian Economics conference in July. Instead of an outline of Objectivism, I will explain a few key points in detail. Because I will speak to a non-Western, non-native English audience, I will avoid any cultural context and "translate" the text into Basic English. Introduction: What is Objectivism? Do we need philosophy? Reality is an objective absolute Reason is a tool for discoverin...

Energy is the potential for work. Energy is equivalent to mass, which means that mass is contained energy. Mass is a property of matter just as energy is a property of systems. But if energy is not a "thing" then neither is matter. Which means the universe is "made out of" change! If this doesn't blow your mind, nothing will.

"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is. We do not have a picture that energy comes in little blobs of a definite amount." - Richard Feynman

AT&T users, I need a favor. AT&T is unlocking iPhones that are out of contract. However, I no longer have an AT&T number, so I cannot ask them myself. If you have an AT&T account, can you ask them for me? There is no cost. You just need to go to http://www.att.com/esupport/ sign in your with your # and ask via online chat: Can you unlock my iPhones? The ETF was paid for both of them. The IMEI are: 01 233700 0741381 01 215800 0621898

I just tried to post a Facebook comment and got: "Are you sure you want to post this? If your comment is irrelevant or inappropriate, you may be be blocked from commenting on public posts. Please review your comment before posting." Has anyone else gotten these warnings?

A predator is a set of genes that collectively tends to produce a phenotype that is successful at using meat-based resources in a specific environment to reproduce. An herbivore is a set of genes that collectively tend to produce a phenotype that is effective at using plant-based resources to reproduce. An omnivore is a collection of both kinds of genes. Every cell and protein in every life form on earth is there because it contributes to the successful reproduction of the genes that code f...

"Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one." — Richard Dawkins

"An idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all its details and in experimental situations, may in fact not be paradoxical." – Richard Feynman

‘In evolutionary theory, a gene could be defined as any hereditary information for which there is a favorable or unfavorable selection bias equal to several or many times its rate of endogenous change.’ - Williams (1966, p. 25) In other words, a gene is a DNA fragment which replicates at least several times before it is changed by chromosomal recombination (meosis). By contract, a chromosone is not a gene because it (normally) changes during every instance of meosis. A single nucleotid...

"Natural selection can cause changes in frequency only at nucleotide loci that are heterozygous in the population. If there are large intervening chunks of nucleotide sequences that never differ among individuals, these cannot be subject to natural selection, for there is nothing to choose between them. Natural selection must focus its attention on heterozygous nucleotides. Natural selection must focus its attention on heterozygous nucleotides. It is changes at the single nucleotide level tha...