It was a nice day, so I took a quick spin around Prospect Park at lunch time. I picked up 34 total species including two American Wigeons, a Belted Kingfisher, and a record high 40+ American Coots. However, the highlight of the day was not one, not two, not three, but four banded geese:
It always amuses me when economists go out of their way to claim that economics is a science (more or less true) and that they base what they say on purely on the scientific principles and not value judgments (very often false). It’s especially amusing when they blow the science to get the value judgment they’re looking for. Here’s the latest example I’ve seen. George Mason economics professor Walter E. Williams attempts to explain why for-profit entities sometimes spend on unnecessary luxuries:
You say, “Professor Williams, for-profit entities sometimes have plush carpets, have juicy expense accounts, and behave in ways not unlike non-profits.†You’re right, and again, it’s a property-rights issue. Taxes change the property-rights structure of earnings. If there’s a tax on profits, then taking profits in a money form becomes more costly. It becomes relatively less costly to take some of the gains in non-money forms.
Actually taxes have little to nothing to do with this. There is a real economic reason for this behavior (as well as several psychological and sociological ones, but economists like to ignore those factors so let’s stick to the purely economic for the moment) and it has nothing to do with taxes. Read the rest of this entry »
If only we could remove the cable connecting our monitor to a computer, then we’d really be in a wireless world. The necessary bandwidth and speed hasn’t been there to support this yet, but some people are trying. TeqGear has released the Wid 101. It’s a big chunky box, it costs $995, and its maximum resolution is 1366 by 768 pixels, below what I’ve been using on my monitors for half a decade or more. However, it’s the first product of its type I’ve seen. Wait a couple of years and maybe we’ll finally be ready to break the wired chains that bind us.
I’m thinking about upgrading my DVD burner to use dual layer discs. The prices have dropped to about $2 a disc, and are likely to fall fast throughout the next year. Maybe I’ll wait till I’m about to the bottom of my current spindle of 4 Gig DVDs, and then upgrade.
The LaCie d2 DVD+/-RW with LightScribe looks like a good deal at $175. Burning labels right onto the disc would be cool, and this model includes a full version of Toast 7 Titanium which I could use. I’ve been limping along with Toast 6 for the time being, since I totally don’t trust Roxio’s upgrade rebates. (They’ve cheated me on those before.)
Anyone have any experience with this drive?
The last couple of weeks have seen the an influx of New York’s winter residents like this Winter Wren:
Most birds fly south for the Winter, but for some species New York City is far enough south. Temperature doesn’t really bother them. As long as they can find food, they’re happy.
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Despite some warts, XML and the Web have done pretty well. They work and they work well. A large part of that is because both were designed with certain basic principles in mind. This gives them a unifying vision and a clean architecture that solves many problems.
However, when a technology becomes successful it often attracts developers who recognize its success but don’t recognize or understand the underlying reasons for its success. Each one wants to make a change here, an addition there, a deletion somewhere else. Sometimes these suggestions are good and valid. Sometimes they’re not. However, even the suggestions that address real needs and use cases cause problems if they’re made without a deep understanding of the principles of the thing being changed. It’s like modifying a building by knocking down walls, cutting new windows, and erecting an extra bedroom on the roof. If you do this without consulting the original blueprints and understanding of the architectural principles that went into the house design, the best you can hope for is an ugly mess. More likely the whole structure will collapse around you, as the changes weaken the foundation the whole edifice rests upon.
Previous examples include cookies, frames, SOAP, YAML, SimpleXML, binary XML, RSS, and many other cases I could mention. However the latest is coming from a place I really didn’t expect it: the W3C XForms and XHTML working groups. These two are working together to eviscerate XML namespaces, and make it difficult to impossible to process XHTML2 and XForms with standard XML tools like XSLT and DOM.
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