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Are women more honest than men?
The journal Science recently published a fascinating article from Alain Cohn et al, which looked at cultural proclivities for civic honesty around the globe. They employed a rather ingenious method: they “lost” wallets all over the world and recorded when the receiver of the lost wallet attempted to return the wallet to its rightful owner. […]
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Getting the most data speed out of your cell phone
You may have noticed there have been very few posts here. There’s a reason for that. The first and foremost is that sending my rants in to the void has not been as personally cathartic as I’d hoped. My other goal for the blog, which actually has been somewhat successful, was to simply provide a […]
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Accelerating code using GCC’s prefetch extension
I recently started playing with GCC’s prefetch builtin, which allows the programmer to explicitly tell the processor to load given memory locations in cache. You can optionally inform the compiler of the locality of the data (i.e. how much priority the CPU should give to keep that piece of data around for later use) as […]
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Zen and the Art of Linux Maintenance
Linux provided me with the illusion of feeling useful and productive on a regular basis as it required me to put my knowledge to work fixing the never ending litany of problems.
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How to make a left-wing progessive media statement
In the interest of giving fair time to all opinions, I’ve decided to step aside and table my regularly scheduled rabid wall-punching right wing diatribe. Instead, today’s post has been guest written by a member of the Green Party in Cambridge, on the topic of how to give a proper media statement. How to make a […]
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The Great Hudson Arc: A 250-mile-wide mystery
(Click for a larger view.) It’s nice to find out that there are still mysteries left in this world, let alone ones that are visible from space. On the southeast corner of Hudson Bay, the coast line traces a near perfect arc, roughly concentric on another ring of islands in the bay. So, what caused […]
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The Boston Symphony on a weeknight: Death is gaseous and awesome
People pay $5000 for a stereo system, and yet for $26 you can hear the temporary assemblage of the greatest sound system ever concieved and built: the live combined efforts of 300 people who’ve trained a lifetime to play the work of a genius on instruments honed over centuries in a hall built for the purpose. Western civilization is worth keeping around. Perhaps they could even afford to raise the ticket price a bit.
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Studies show reading this essay will make you smarter
Thus, by focusing on studies that seek to overturn existing belief, there may be an inherent bias in the medical profession to find false results. If so, it’s possible that a significant percentage of published studies are wrong, far in excess of that suggested by the published significance level of the studies.
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How modern art can be so horrid
I think the basis of the decline of visceral appeal in modern art of all types is the intellectuallization of something that can not, and should not, be treated as such. By replacing the true but inarticulable beauty of real art with the falsely eloquent self-referential theories of academic art, they broke it free from its only real basis: human reaction.
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Digital camera buying tip from an engineer
Last week my digital camera (Canon A610) died, after only two years of light service. (It turns out that a large batch of cameras made by Canon late 2005 had a bad CCD connector which tends to die after a year or two.) While I was obviously frustrated, part of me was also secretly happy […]