Do you want just to be sane or do you want to be happy? Martin Seligman is a clinical psychologist researching what it takes to be happy. He is interviewed here.
I'm not going to give away a placebo, but let me just say a couple of things about it. It turns out we've already found out that several of the things that have been proposed — from the Buddha to Tony Robbins — don't work. We've got them up there on the website, people do them, and we find that there's no lasting change in either lowering depression or raising the level of happiness. But they're plausible; they're things that you or I would think would work, but because some of your viewers are now going to jump to authentichappiness.org and get into the placebo I don't want to give away what the placebos are. The interesting thing is that some of these things actually lastingly make people happier, and others don't. The aim of science is to find out what the active ingredients are.I spent the first 30 years of my career working on misery. The first thing I worked on was learned helplessness. I found helpless dogs, helpless rats, and helpless people, and I began to ask, almost 40 years ago now, how do you break it up? What's the neuroscience of it? What drugs work? While working on helplessness there was a finding I was always brushing under the rug, which was that with people and with animals, when we gave them uncontrollable events, only five out of eight became helpless. About a third of them we couldn't make helpless. And about a tenth of them were helpless to begin with and we didn't have to do anything.
About 25 years ago I began to ask the question, who never gets helpless? That is, who resists collapsing? And the reverse question is, who becomes helpless at the drop of a hat? I got interested in optimism because I found out that the people who didn't become helpless were people who when they encountered events in which nothing they did mattered, thought about those events as being temporary, controllable, local, and not their fault; whereas people who collapsed in a heap immediately upon becoming helpless were people who saw the bad event as being permanent, uncontrollable, pervasive, and their fault. 25 years ago I started working on optimism versus pessimism, and I found that optimistic people got depressed at half the rate of pessimistic people, that optimistic people succeeded better in all professions that we measured except one, that optimistic people had better, feistier, immune systems, and probably lived longer than pessimistic people. We also created interventions that reliably changed pessimists into optimists.
Alex Tabbarok has a fascinating article on making organ donation more attractive.
A plot by Al Quaeda to use chemical weapons from Syria in Jordan is foiled.
So, though the facts are murky and subject to change, what we tentatively have so far is (1) chemical weapons originating from Syria aimed at killing tens of thousands of people in the Jordanian capital (though the Jordanians haven’t said what kind of chemical weapaons they are); and (2) one of the top Al-Qaeda honchos setting up these terror operations in Iraq, after the Afghanistan war, but apparently before the Iraq war. Which further suggests that it was not the U.S. occupation of Iraq that inspired the Al Qaeda people to rush to Iraq to kill American GIs and insufficiently pious Moslems; Al Qaeda was already working on its devilish deeds in Iraq before we invaded. We thus tentatively have an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection, and a WMD-Iraq connection, constituting the very triangle of Iraq/WMDs/Al Qaeda which was our chief reason for toppling the Hussein regime.
Lee Harris has a great article in Slate reviewing Arab anti-Americanism since the 1950's.
Anti-Americanism is how Arab leaders play the Arab people and the United States against each other to preserve their own hides. There is no incentive to be anything but anti-American, and it is very dangerous not to follow the pack. In Iraq, Arabs who work with Americans to rebuild their country are targeted for death. Anti-Americanism is the coin of the realm and has been for many years now. It is not growing. When Americans talk about rising Arab anti-Americanism, we are saying we do not understand how Arab regimes work. In effect, we are collaborating with dictators who will not allow Arabs a voice in their own governance.
[...]
For instance, a Syrian friend CCs me on e-mails he writes to U.S. Embassies or to American officials here in the States. This came from him last week after Ted Kennedy compared Iraq to Vietnam:
Dear Senator Ted Kennedy,
I am ... from Syria and I am 56 years old. I still remember when your brother was assassinated in 1963 and we all cried. He had a dream for the whole world not just for America. We suffered under totalitarian regimes in the Middle East for the whole of our lives. We look for America as our Savior. Please Mr. Kennedy you have to know that America has a burden in freeing the other peoples of the world from tyranny. I have no right to comment on internal U.S. issues but as a citizen of the world I have the right to ask the American legislators to help other peoples in the world because this is the principle that America stands for.
Arab anti-Americanism is easy to get used to—it's been around for close to half a century. What's hard is living up to the Arabs' best expectations of America.
I had the following dialog (via email) recently with a very anti-Iraq-war friend with whom I've been debating for ... years:
Him: no, i think you're irretrievably blindsided on pretty much every political issue.Me: It would help if you expressed some observable standard for judging ANY political issue aside from...faith.
Him: i give up. it's not even worth it.
Me: Hmm. Thats an interesting way of putting it. What would make it worth it? What would you like to achieve?
Him: what would make it worth it? you shutting up about this. it's a wasted effort to talk to you about this stuff. you're so inherently wrong about so many of the issues that it is impossible. you want pointless, empty academic discourse? try [mutual friend]. i get mad.
Inherently wrong. I interpret him to mean that there is no possible way for my position to be correct on e.g. invading Iraq. That there is no fact, that, if proved true, would make my position correct. It sounds more like he is talking about
expressing religious faith than determining good policy.
I'll fully admit that it is much more fulfilling to express heartfelt religious sentiment than it is to assess the relative merits of various policy choices. I'll further admit that it is maddening when people say things that threaten such feelings of fulfillment. Although I tend to view policy through the lens of (social) science -- where the goodness or badness of a policy is measured against an ability to achieve some goal, It is clear that many people are religiously attached to particular policy choices or the belief that all policy choices of some group are inherently right/wrong -- where goodness or badness of a policy is measured against its acceptibilty to some social group.
The nice thing about the religious/political perspective is that it feels better and, in the end, one can hope that the has to arrive at a good policy (because it has to align with the actual interests of the group members). However, as Clay Shirky has brilliantly noted A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. Groups engage in behavior that preserves the integrity at a substantial cost to its members:
Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?
[...]
Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of
members.
[...]
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. [e.g. Bush is a dumb/evil liar conspiring to ... etc..] So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
[...]
He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren't very good for getting things done. Unless their mode of operation changes, groups flounder at the point where people tire of 'just talking' and want to do something more. Because the larger movement in most cities is as unstructured as individual rap groups, it is not much more effective than the separate groups at specific tasks. The informal structure is rarely together enough or in touch enough with the people to be able to operate effectively. So the movement generates much emotion and few results. Unfortunately, the consequences of all this motion are not as innocuous as the results, and their victim is the movement itself.
Note for those paying attention: Yes this contradicts my diatribe against the Enlightenment. There is probably a balance. I'm just not yet sure how to achieve it.
So it turns our that UN Oil For Food Money was used to fund Iraq's WMD program AND Al Queada AND to bribe UN officials and member states to do nothing about it. Could the anti-war folks have been more wrong? The only remaining argument is whether we would prefer to be dealing with an increasingly well-armed (with WMD) Saddam perhaps providing these weapons to terrorists and continuing to oppress/murder Iraqi civilians than the disorder we face in a few Iraqi cities today. Note: The main fighting is in Falujah which is a town created specifically to support Saddams illegal programs (see here).
"Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'" A line of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit." "Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N." In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program" [see "Documents Prove U.N. Oil Corruption," April 27-May 10].
[...]
Shoshana Bryen regularly escorts groups of retired U.S. military flag officers (admirals and generals) to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli political and military leaders, as well as intelligence officials. "We went to Israel just before the war and just after," she tells Insight. "Both times, Israeli intelligence officials told us, yes, WMD were definitely in Iraq, and that they had been sent to Syria." The Bush administration was trying to downplay these reports, she believes, "because if Iraqi weapons are in Syria, we're going to have to do something about it, and they don't want another war."
This article consists of an interview:
Four young British Muslims in their twenties - a social worker, an IT specialist, a security guard and a financial adviser - occupy a table at a fast-food chicken restaurant in Luton. Perched on their plastic chairs, wolfing down their dinner, they seem just ordinary young men. Yet out of their mouths pour heated words of revolution."As far as I'm concerned, when they bomb London, the bigger the better," says Abdul Haq, the social worker. "I know it's going to happen because Sheikh bin Laden said so. Like Bali, like Turkey, like Madrid - I pray for it, I look forward to the day."
"If we want to engage in terrorism, we would have to leave the country," he says. "It is against Islam to do otherwise." Such a course of action, he says, he is not prepared to undertake. This is why, Sayful claims, it is consistent, and not cowardly, for him to espouse the rhetoric of terrorism, the "martyrdom-operations", while simultaneouslylimiting himself to nonviolentactions such as leafletting outside Luton town hall.
Update: The New York Times has a more threatening version of the above type of feature. The above article made if clear that these folks were not active because of the "covenant of security. According to the NYT, failure to acceed to Osama constitutes a breach of this covenant.
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce — provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months — Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
[....]
Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" — communications among people suspected of terrorism and their supporters — has markedly increased since Mr. bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning for another strike in Europe is advanced.
"Iraq dramatically strengthened their recruitment efforts," one counterterrorism official said. He added that some mosques now display photos of American soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside bloody scenes of bombed out Iraqi neighborhoods. Detecting actual recruitments is almost impossible, he said, because it is typically done face to face.
Mainstream Muslims are outraged by the situation, saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to be singled out for surveillance and making the larger population distrustful of them.Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque here, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque here and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.
"We may be caught up in the target as the people of Manhattan were," he told them.And he warned Western leaders, "You may kill bin Laden, but the phenomenon, you cannot kill it — you cannot destroy it."
"Our Muslim brothers from abroad will come one day and conquer here and then we will live under Islam in dignity," he said.
Much as I find the details of UNSCAM appaling (UN officials cooperating with Saddam to divert billions of $$ of money to bribes and terrorism), I don't view it as a reason to reject UN decision making (per se). If UN votes were just on the market like that, the US should simply have been able to outbid the Iraqis. If the UN votes were simply auctioned to the highest bidder that might be good. What makes the UN so much of a problem is not the corruption but that I it is not clear to me that the leaders of France, Germany, or Russia would have approved removing Saddam even if they had no financial reason to do so.
My friend J keep telling me he is more worried about right anti-semitism rather than left anti-semitism (especially in the US). My general take is that right anti-semitism is stable or declining whereas I see left anti-semtisim burgeoning (apparently traveling from Europe to here). Britains Independent provides another example of the modern alliance between the left anti-imperialism and far right Islamist anti-semitism:
The former cabinet minister Stephen Byers said yesterday that the "line is now being crossed from legitimate criticism" of the Israeli government into "demonisation, dehumanisation of Jews and the application of double standards".
[...]
Stephen Byers, a former transport secretary who chairs the committee on anti-Semitism, said that anti-Israeli criticism should not be used as "a cloak of respectability" for racist views. He said there was the danger of the development of an "intellectual argument" bolstering anti-Semitic feeling. "We need to be robust on confronting anti-Semitic views wherever these may occur," Mr Byers said.Mr Purnell said memories of the Holocaust had largely inoculated Europe against anti-Semitism for 60 years, but some people on the extreme left had allowed themselves to find "some extremely strange bedfellows" in their criticism of Israel. "During the anti-war protests there were some really terrifying pictures of individuals dressed up as suicide bombers holding banners with the Star of David and an equals sign to a swastika," he said. "This apparent embrace of such symbols by the anti-war left is absolutely astounding."
[Suppose the US were to send this message to the people of Felujah]
There are people residing amongs you who are killing innocent Iraqi civilians, kidnapping foreign contractors here to help rebuild your country, and attacking US troops here to maintain order. For the protection of the people of Iraq and the world, these people must be stopped. Since you are unable or unwilling to stop them yourselves, we need to do so. Please arrange to leave the city for the next week so we can eliminate them with minimal danger and inconvenience to yourselves. Those who fail to leave the city will be contrued either as enemies to be eliminated or hostages to be rescued (if the bad guys claim hostages).Though we are sorry that you are being inconvenienced by this request to leave, we are also sorry that these people have been killing so many and causing so much damage. We are also sorry to have to be risking our soldiers' lives resolving the situation. The fault lies with the evil people who are hiding amongst you, people who, you should be happy to know, will soon either be read or rotting in jails.
If the terrorists then threaten people with death if they attempt to leave the city, they lose all the advantages of claiming to represent the people in some form of insurgency. If the people of Feleujah fail to leave the city despite the absence of such a threat from the terrorists, they lose any moral claim to good and any deaths they suffer are the result of allying with badness, not different from the population of any enemy country in war.
The lack of free press, the Rwanda genocide, the alliance with Saddam, and now this.
WASHINGTON — Nearly 10,000 blank French passports were stolen in February, leading the FBI to warn U.S. law enforcement agencies to be on the lookout.
[...]
The Feb. 3 incident, the FBI said, also included the theft of 5,000 blank French driver's licenses, 10,000 blank car ownership certificates, 25 titres de voyages (Geneva Convention travel documents) and 1,000 international driver's licenses without any identification numbers.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,117200,00.html
Some backchannel feedback on my warriors=pacificists post denied that pacifists were fetishizing war, claiming instead that they are really more concerned with due process issues. The due process issues take two forms:
To me, both of these views are the sine-qua-non of war fetishing. The international law argument effectively says that there should be some higher power that should make these sorts of decisions so we don't have to. To these folks, whatever "international institutions" decide is correct BY DEFINITION -- regardless of the representative quality of international institutions with respect to the people's involved (are ethnic minority dictatorship's legitimate?) and without regard to the vulnerability of these intitutions to all sort of real world corruptions (oil bribes, threats of terrorism, etc.). Notably, the international law folks do not appear to be making efforts to create representative and trustworthy international institutions, they are just using these intitutions to wish problems away.
Civilian casualty pacifists never recognize that it takes two to tango; they hold the dangerous governments responsible for engangering their people and provoking war (e.g. they never protested Saddam's failure to comply with UN resolution 1441). Or, they refuse to recognize the obvious fact that real world people/governments have real world and substantive conflicts of interest. If these pacfists were truly interested in avoiding civilian casualties, they would have to make judgements about the relative goodness/badness of each of the two sides in conflict and make judgements about which side should back down (which outcome is best for the populations involved -- rather than their governments!). As above, the failure to make this sort of judgement is a failure to participate in the real world. It is simply a fetishizing of war and the responsibility for it that they don't want to take.
Belmont Club links to and covers this post document and reviewing French involvement with the Rwanda genocide.
The genocide was anything but a spontaneous explosion of violence, as many have long assumed, but rather an operation orchestrated by Hutu extremists from Rwanda's north attempting to maintain their hold on power. Melvern uses this and other documents to demonstrate the meticulous premeditation of the killing, revealing, for instance, Kambanda's testimony on cabinet-level discussions about the genocide. She also reveals that the Rwandan government imported $750,000 worth of Chinese machetes (enough to arm one in every three Rwanda men). Mulvern also discusses arms imports from France and Egypt shortly before the genocide and offers an "insider's account of the roadblocks where so many Tutsi lost their lives." Many of the road blocks were manned by French troops.
[...]
Last february and March, filmmaker Georges Kapler filmed interviews with three Interahamwe militiamen which he presented in Paris. The three men say they were "trained and assisted" by France and one of them, Jean-Bosco Halimana, says that "the French gave us a license to kill. They came to support the genocide in a clear and visible manner."
[...]
the French were there at the moment the genocide occurred. They trained the killers. They were stationed at command positions within the armed forces that carried out the genocide. They also directly participated in the operations: they filtered the road blocks, identifying people on an ethnic basis, punishing the Tutsis and favoring the Hutus.All this was done in broad daylight at the road blocks. We've got it all on video, numerous pieces of evidence of the participation of the French. Not the French people but certain elements acting on orders from the government and who were manning these roadblocks during the genocide. They knew. They supported it. They supplied arms and they gave orders and instructions to the killers. What more can I say?
[...]
On March 25, Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, a reporter from Le Figaro published the book L'inavouable: La France au Rwanda ("That which cannot be confessed: France in Rwanda". It reads like a lyrical 300-page letter to former Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin:Soldiers of our country trained, under orders, the killers of the Tutsi genocide. We armed them, encouraged them and, when the time came, evacuated them. I came upon this story unwittingly in the Rwandan hills. It was hot. It was summertime. The weather was lovely, magnificent. It was the season of genocide.
n the end we are left with a list of suspects without a definite culprit. Kagame had the motive but not the means. A rebel leader at the time, he didn't have the juice to pull strings at the highest levels of the UN or at the Security Council. France had the means, but not the obvious motive. What could be possibly be worth enough in a place like Rwanda to make killing nearly a million people worthwhile? Most mysterious of all is the role of the United Nations. One gets the sense that they were in on the plot early on, but what was the plot? Read the whole thing.
Great post by Randy McDonald analyzing European demographic trends and showing why projections of Europe's demise are greatly exagerated.
Why? Well, rates of immigration are high enough, but the main factor is the high Muslim birth rate. In the context of a generalized European birth dearth, high fertility rates on the part of Muslim immigrants will inevitably lead to a replacement of the native European population by non-natives. We’ve seen this before, of course, in such sterling examples as the success of the French Canadians in assimilating eastern Canada and New England, the Italian absorption of France and Argentina, the irreversible Russification of the outer republics of the Soviet Union, the ongoing Mexican conquest of California and Texas, et cetera.First question of the day: Does anyone see a problem with the above historical summary?
[....]
A question should be asked: Just why is Islam in 21st century France supposed to develop so differently from Catholicism in America? Even if you did accept the thesis--questionable, as I'll demonstrate--that France will shortly accumulate a huge Muslim minority, why should Islam not change over time like American Catholicism? After all, as I've pointed out already, Roman Catholic dogmas have as many problems with modernity as Islamic ones, yet they've changed.
[...]
The suggestions of The Economist that there are a bit over four million French Muslims seem to be more sensible and generally accepted. This amounts to roughly 7% of the French population--a significant number, to be sure, but not an overwhelming majority.
That being said demographics do matter. I believe there is substantial evidence that one of the main reasons Christianity overtook Western Europe was a dramatic failure to breed on the part of the pagans (see Rob's posting on this issue over at business pundit).
Given the available evidence that secular people (and especially liberated women) don't breed and the historical dominance of religion and the oppression of women (despite its apparent maladaptive irrationality and despite prior eras of rationality), it seems reasonable to believe that secularism and woman's rights peridiocally flourishes, causes birth-dirths, and then dies out leaving only religious people who oppress women and therefore breed.
The question for Europe and the US is whether modern secularism can infect immigrant religious populations faster than they breed (relative to the majority populations). But, if secularism causes infertility, eventually only the religious will survive (unless the secular people memocide them first!).
"Premature Optimization is the root of all evil."
--Donald Knuth
Concern: Functional languages may be easier to use but they consume more CPU and memory which can cause problems when you need to scale.
Response I don't know that Haskell performs substantiallyworse than e.g. Java or Python on various tasks, but, either way, my bet is that CPU and memory have gotten sufficiently cheap so that it takes a while before
scale hits you and until that time, the thing to optimize is development time. Also, scale is more of an architectural and systems issue than a programming language issue. 1-10x differences in memory/cpu just aren't enough to justify
language decisions given that your choice of algorithm (O(n) vs O(n^2) vs O(log(n)) matter so much more when you get scale and Haskell make it easier to program efficient algorithms. However, although on the memory
consumption side, Haskell does not yet have a 64-bit implementation, its compiler developers say it would not be hard to get there. (Note: There is no 64 bit java either). On the CPU side, there is already GPH, a version ofHaskell that parellizes code accross multiple
CPUs. Haskell's referential transparency means that it is much more straightforward to parellize execution than it is in traditional imperative programming lanugages.
Concern: Why not use an off-the-shelf RDBMS?
Response:Off the shelf RDBMSs are optimizations for a prior era when memory was VERY expensive and people believed in long transaction locks. Today Sun's web site offers servers with .5 terabyte of RAM (nearly 2k for every man, woman, and child in the US!) and the management costs of big disk arrays combined with the development and CPU cost of optimizing disk read/writes mean that memory is actually cheaper than disk in many contexts. (Note: Google doesn't use disk for exactly this reason). The web made long duration transactions obsolete. All the information for a database transaction is available in a single HTTP request. If the server imposes a total order on all HTTP requests (see SEDA), then write ahead logging of HTTP requests combined with periodic serialization of server state to disk obviates the need for much of the transaction infrastructure in databases (see Prevayler). The bonus here is much faster development time and a substantial performance improvement because you are not writing and executing code to martial data/queries to/from some external relational database. (Prevayler in Java claims a 1000x improvement over MySQL and a 3000x improvement over Oracle)
Concern:Why not use a more standard language (databases are a small part of application code and there are tons of examples of how to do stuff in traditional lanuages with OTS DBMSs)?
Response: If I can write a RDBMS in Haskell in a couple of part-time weeks in under 1000 lines of code then you can probably write your application equivalently fast and integrating that app with a Haskell DBMS will be easier than calling an external one (and save you money on system administration). Also I recommend this Paul Graham here:
We knew that everyone else was writing their software in C++ or Perl. But we also knew that that didn't mean anything. If you chose technology that way, you'd be running Windows. When you choose technology, you have to ignore what otherpeople are doing, and consider only what will work the best.This is especially true in a startup. In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do. I don't think a lot ofpeople realize this, even in startups.
The average big company grows at about ten percent a year. So if you're running a big company and you do everything the way the average big company does it, you can expect to do as well as the average
big company-- that is, to grow about ten percent a year.The same thing will happen if you're running a startup, of course. If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you'll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you're running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you're in trouble.
Concern: OTS RDBMS's do indexing.
Response: My HARDBMS automatically indexes all fields (and lets you define custom datatypes and indexes for specialized data). Moreover being native means that recursive queries (such as all the friends of friends of friends etc.) can be done with reasonable performance (traditional database require a round trip to the DBMS for every level of recursion and that quickly becomes too hard -- note the performance problems of Friendster running MySQL!).
Many anti-(Iraq)-war folks are actually truly anti-war (pacificsts). They believe war (and the killing/responsibility associated with it) is inherently bad and must be avoided at all costs. These folks are the mirror image of the classical warrior who believes that war/courage/victory/glory is inherently good. They are both irrationally obsessed with war, both fetishizing kiling and death. They are both, fundamentally warriors, just handling that fetish in different ways.
Both these views are ancient and basically religious. They contrast with the modern (secular humanist view), propounded by Clausewitz, that "war is the continuation of policy/politics by other means." The purpose of war/politics/policy is to achieve ends we consider desirable. The correct assesment of whether the Iraq/Afghan wars are good/bad for the US is in terms of goals such as strenghtening/weakening the US vis-a-vis likely enemies, increasing/decreasing the risk of WMD terrorism, increasing/decreasing the risk of oil supply shocks (to the economy), impoving/degrading the quality of life for the Iraqi people, etc.
The question is whether you are mature enough to take responsibility for the choices you make. The fetishizing of war is about whether the gods reward/punish killing. The modern view is that people will die/be-killed no matter what choice you make, so you have to take care to choose well.
In thinking about a data storage model for a web app I wanted to develop, and in finding Haskell so concise and expressive, I wondered if one could write a relational DBMS in Haskell in under 1000 lines of code. The answer appears to be yes!
Features:
Risks:
License: GPL
Note: I am an expert neither in Haskell, nor in
relational databases, nor in
relational algebra/set theory/category theory. So
comments/suggestions/recommendations on any aspect
of this code are welcome.
Comment on Haskell: WOW!!!!!! I basically wrote
this without testing just thinking about my
program in terms of transformations between types.
I wrote the test/example code at the end and had
almost no implementation errors in the code! The
In 1994 Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker gave a lecture at the World Bank in which he noted that, given finite resources, parents must choose between having fewer, more educated/healthy, children or larger numbers of less educated/healthy ones. Parents unbound by welfare states would, perhaps, make these choices in a manner which optimizes the total number of grandchildren (or the likelihood that some children/grandchildren will take care of them in their old age). Welfare states surpress population growth both because they force parents to invest in human capital at rates above they would otherwise choose (e.g. taxes that pay for education or healthcare) and because social-security/pension systems force other people's children to pay for old age (decreasing the incentives to produce one's own children to guarantee this.) Unless Europe gets rid of its welfare states, the result will be Eurabia (perhaps it is too late).
This NY Times article talks about the decline of Europe's population:
To begin with, consider the extraordinary prospect of European demographic decline. A hundred years ago -- when Europe's surplus population was still crossing the oceans to populate America and Australasia -- the countries that make up today's European Union accounted for around 14 percent of the world's population. Today that figure is down to around 6 percent, and by 2050, according to a United Nations forecast, it will be just over 4 percent. The decline is absolute as well as relative. Even allowing for immigration, the United Nations projects that the population of the current European Union members will fall by around 7.5million over the next 45 years. There has not been such a sustained reduction in the European population since the Black Death of the 14th century. (By contrast, the United States population is projected to grow by 44 percent between 2000 and 2050.)
Is Europe suffering from a memetic disease (the enlightenment?) or the demographic equivalent of old age?
Google's Big ServerOP in the Sky!
http://blog.topix.net/archives/000016.html
Update: see also
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2004-04-02