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Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers recommends learning one language a year (although probably doesn't himself) What's the next one you're interested in learning? While I'd really like to learn Lisp or Scheme, I think the next one I'd really like to learn is O'Caml. At one point I tried to learn plain vanilla ML, the language that O'Caml's ancestor CAML is based on. O'Caml was created by functional programming wizard Xavier Leroy, and combines modern declarative FP approaches like pattern matching with an extremely fast runtime. O'Caml has seen extensive use on Wall Street for stock market analytics, and was also used extensively by VMware for virtual server management.

I recently went through airport security attending a trade show... carrying with me a prototype device which had an exposed circuit board and wires!!! One time through was fine, but on the return trip they pulled the device out of the X-Ray and examined it with a terrified look in their eyes. They shouted "TSA!!!" (even though they were wearing TSA uniforms... I guess there's a real TSA and a fake TSA) I was taken aside, the device swabbed with chemicals before being handed to another TSA officer who spent several minutes scrutinizing it. The contents of my backpack removed and my laptop was swabbed with chemicals. They brought over a dog to sniff me, I was frisked, and they passed a wand over my body. Then they proceeded to ask me a lot of weird questions like "What is your parents' country of origin?" Guess my last make has too many vowels or something. They had me show them my laptop was real and actually functioned, and after about a half hour of that crap they released me with just barely enough time to make my flight. Ugh. Now, I'm sure, were the same device placed within a housing no one would've cared. But... BARE WIRES! Must be a bomb.

Philosophy, not a particularly practical degree, but possibly one of the most interesting

Go ahead and name a few. I'll tell you the OS X counterpart I use instead. In terms of the apps I use day-to-day, I can't think of any that don't have a native port to OS X or a superior OS X counterpart. Quantity != quality Try Aperature. I happen to like iPhoto. I run Firefox X11 has shipped with OS X since Tiger. There's no need to install it. There's a few X apps I use which have no real counterpart, namely Wireshark. Yep, however there's not a lot of non-native applications I want to run. I've been running OS X since 10.0. Apple has raped me on several occasions, but I keep going back, which is probably the canonical story among their customer base. I'll admit that OS X and Apple hardware in general has been fraught with stability problems. On platforms where a single vendor controls both the hardware and system software, I'm typically used to stellar stability. This went for Sun, SGI, HP, and Digital/Compaq. Not so with Apple. In the past year, I've experienced 2 bona fide kernel panics (one related to the Airport Extreme driver), 2 spontaneous reboots, and a gradual reduction to nothing but a spinning beachball. I've also experienced a sporadic boot failure, which was fixed by a long series of hard resets. In the same time I've experienced a single X11 freakout (fixed by ctrl-alt-backspace) on Linux and zero blue screens of death on Windows. The Linux desktop experience has always paled to OS X, IMO. The lack of quality commercial software is a huge minus, and ports to Linux are generally inferior to the counterparts on Windows / OS X (e.g. Flash, Skype, Google Earth, Picasa [go Wine!]) What's a decent Linux counterpart to ProTools or Logic? Or Avid Xpress Pro or Final Cut Pro? How about InDesign or Quark? Illustrator? Photoshop? (if you say the Gimp I'm going to have to slap you)

http://www.slate.com/id/2177249/fr/rss/ Why are we doing this? This country harbors the former head of the international nuclear black market (A.Q. Khan). He supplied nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea, and Al Qaeda, but the exact extent of his activities is unknown because Pakistan refuses to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency or the US to interview him. This country remains a terrorist haven. But hey, throwing money at the problem will solve it. Why exactly are we giving them $10 billion?

I already made a thread about this in the politics forum, and actually provided more than just a link: http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=29475

I've ran Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris as desktop systems for the past 12 years, and was an SA for a research group that used KDE primarily. For a long time I was a fan of WindowMaker, but after Ubuntu I started running KDE/Gnome. I run Ubuntu at home (Kubuntu to be more specific). I'm itching to ditch it and run OS X there as well. At the very least I should go back to Gnome... Kubuntu is a second class citizen and I've found KDE to be pretty aggrivating for day to day use. I really don't like any of the stock Gnome or KDE apps. They all get the job done but all have annoying deficiencies and typically lousy UIs. For example, let's look at instant messaging. There's Gnome's Pidgin, which I really hate for a multitude of reasons, stability being a big one (I had much better luck with it from a stability standpoint when it was Gaim, and I've run various incarnations over the years, including the one that only had AIM support). There's KDE's Kopete, which is actually pretty nice and has a nice UI, but it stores all my IM passwords in a KDE wallet. The KDE wallet makes you authenticate against it separately from logging in. On OS X, I have Adium, which is pretty much the best IM client I've ever used. It supports multiple networks and gives you a unified contacts list (unlike iChat) and many features like OTR out of the box (Pidgin and Kopete both need OTR plugins). Plus, Adium stores your IM network passwords in an OS X keychain. Keychains, unlike the KDE wallet, are authenticated by your login credentials at login. No need to login to your computer twice... That's not to mention the multitude of professional applications available for OS X for which there are simply no Linux counterparts. Linux is a 3rd class citizen, and all the niceties of cross-platform software are often lost on the Linux version. For example, the Adobe Flash player for Windows and OS X supports a fullscreen mode for video. This feature is not supported on the Linux version.

Yep, the 10th amendment is pretty useless when the federal government can blackmail states into passing laws they want by withholding federal funding. You want to keep your drinking age at 18? Guess you don't want the money to maintain your interstate highways!

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/11/cast_your_vote_for_real_scienc.php Conservative bloggers (more here) have helped push Steve McIntyre's pseudoscience blog http://climateaudit.org to the top of the vote for the 2007 Science Weblog Awards. Here's a writeup on some of the pseudoscience Steve McIntyre has tried to push, for those interested: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/the_mcintyre_factor.php Steve McIntyre is a former mining executive with no climate science background. His writing on climate science has thus far been limited to his blog and the non-peer reviewed conservative journal Energy & Environment: http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2005/aug/business/pt_wsj.html First, I'd like to encourage everyone to vote for a real science blog, such as Bad Astronomy. Second, why is it that these political blogs have taken an interest enough to vote a political pseudoscience site to the top of a poll about science blogs? Are these people scared of the conclusions of science? I think so.

This raises the question of who in their right mind would buy a Mac and run Vista on it

You must have an interesting definition of "good"

Even as a strong proponent of gun rights, I'm willing to admit I believe that the 2nd amendment is something I think would work better as a states rights issue.

Yep, they're virtual desktops... the same kind that I've been using since FVWM back in 1995. All the stuff you'd expect from a virtual desktop system is there: direct switching between desktops via keyboard shortcuts and dragging windows between desktops. What's new is the "birds eye view" (hit F8), allowing you to drag and drop windows between workspaces or even drag and drop entire workspaces to rearrange them. This also integrates with Expose, so hitting F9 while in the birds eye view does Expose on all workspaces at once. I'll admit many of the changes appeal mostly to developers (particularly in the Ruby world), but among others: Spotlight finds programs as fast as QuickSilver now (although it's still not a QuickSilver replacement), the entire OS (sans the kernel) is now 64-bit, and the best thumbnail generation I've ever seen is now completely integrated. Nope, although Parallels and VMware are two excellent 3rd party virtualization solutions. Parallels even has a "coherence mode" that lets you run Windows and OS X applications side-by-side without issue. That said I've installed Parallels before and never used it. I don't really plan on using Windows for anything.

Not as far as I'm aware, no Well, Alex Jones is something of an anarchist, so you can see how he'd favor Ron Paul over the other candidates...

I use Erlang. Ask Aeternus about Haskell. Lisp is actually among the oldest languages... Lisp (and most functional languages) map to Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. While Turing provided the conceptual framework for practical computation, it was Church who provided the theoretical basis for functional languages.

[math]suc0 + suc0 = sucsuc0[/math] proof:

As is my right to call Alex Jones an annoying conspiracy monger. The friction the 9/11 "truth" movement has brought to liberals everywhere has been devastating. 9/11 conspiracies shouldn't be part of the political discourse, and yet a movement with that idea at its base has thrust Ron Paul into the political mainstream. Perhaps I'm just disturbed by the number of infowars.com bumper stickers I see next to a Ron Paul sticker. It has nothing to do with Ron Paul himself. I like what Ron Paul is trying to do, I just question the movement behind him... Alex Jones is a pathological spreader of misinformation, and on infowars.com you can see the bullsh*t he serves up (including 9/11 conspiracies) juxtaposed with tons of Ron Paul promotion

Well, Leopard, the newest version of MacOS X, has been out for awhile now. Who's using it, and what do you think? I love Spaces, the new virtual desktop system, and from a developer perspective the operating system is great, particular a new developer-oriented feature called DTrace which lets you peek inside running executables, and the operating system itself.

Sounds like a severe case of confirmation bias

Nope, I don't watch TV, except for clips people upload to YouTube

Yes, that would be the Aristotelian model... the one the Church taught, and what Galileo claimed was wrong. However, many other things had been observed to the contrary: specifically the motions of planets did not fit a geocentric model. Furthermore, the Church taught that all things go around the Earth... but Galileo observed satellites orbiting Jupiter. Describing the motions of the planets from a geocentric reference frame is immensely difficult. That's why the Church initially hailed Copernicus as a revolution: he modernized the way they kept their calendar. Galileo had many arguments against the Aristotelian model the church espoused. Among them: All things do not go around the earth. The earth is not the center of the universe. In a geocentric model, the orbits are neither circular nor elliptical. They're odd circular spirals. Later attempts to make the Ptolemaic model work (in a mechanical model) started with circular orbits, but had to place all the planets on little spinning cranks that attached to the circles in order to describe their behavior. In order to accurately describe the motions of the planets in a geocentric reference frame, it would've taken hundreds of these little cranks. If the Copernican model is wrong, the Ptolemaic model is not even wrong Actually, as I mentioned earlier the Copernican model revolutionized calendar-keeping at the time, since it massively simplified the business of predicting the motions of the planets. Except the Ptolemaic model didn't accurately describe the motions of planets. While the Ptolemaic model described circular orbits around the earth, the planets did not behave in this way at all... they appeared to move back and forth around this circular (actually elliptical) path. This made predicting the motions of the planets immensely difficult. That's why the Ptolemaic model fell out of favor after Copernicus. Geocentrists jumped onto Tycho Brahe's boat, and remained there until the observation of stellar aberration and parallax demonstrated it to be unteneable. Kepler certainly revolutionized our knowledge of planetary orbits, however the Copernican model made predictions which were later borne out which are absent from all geocentric models.

I appreciate the sentiment of a viral Internet movement reaching out and shaking up mainstream politics. I do not appreciate the cooption of Guy Fawkes and his Catholic plot against a Protestant monarchy being correlated to some overarching anti-Bush movement, the result of overzealous fans of the V for Vendetta movie (not the Alan Moore graphic novel, which was infinitely superior), nor do I appreciate the fact that the main Internet coordinator for pro-Ron Paul activities is Alex Jones, one of the foremost 9/11 lies movement conspiracymongers... and proprietor of such ridiculous conspiracist spin factories as prisonplanet.com and jonesreport.com. All that said, I can't say I'm a fan of many of Ron Paul's political sentiments, particularly in regard to elimination of a number of federal government services.

Life is a self-perpetuating chemical reaction which improves its ability self-perpetuate over time In computer science terms, life is a busy beaver

Following your ostensible reference, Congress authorized the Iraq invasion, but that downplays the immense disconnect between what Congress thought they were authorizing and what Bush actually did. The Iraq war represented a culmination of lax regulation of executive war power by the legislative branch. I mean, don't get me wrong, Clinton was responsible for an increasing number of indiscretions in this regard, doing things like bombing Osama bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan without Congressional approval (oh, and Kosovo, and I just heard there's again a possibility of war in the Balkans, centering around: you guessed it, Kosovo). But if we're out to level a country's controlling power, hunting down its leader as a war criminal, and replacing its government, I think the Congress needs to feel sure enough about it to write down that they "declare war" and eliminate any possible ambiguities of language. If taking over a country, occupying its capital, disbanding its military, and hunting down its leader as a criminal isn't war, what is?

Is that the point that Severian is trying to make? As far as I can tell, he's saying that geocentrism can still be construed as valid in the light of modern knowledge and evidence. While I agree one can think about it that way, the Copernican model made predictions (later observed and verified) which geocentric models do not. What I'm really wondering is what Severian has to say about those. If the Earth is the stationary center of the universe with the sun whizzing around it at 10,000 kilometers a second, what is the cause of stellar aberration and parallax?