Erdos Had The Number First

Market forces are often not good at providing public goods. For example, Infrastructure (roads, public transport,etc) and research (would Hubble have come about if market forces dictated astronomy?).

But why is that? Markets are good at controlling economic activity, but not so good at controlling non-economic activity. Part of the problem is that infrastructure and reasearch activities are 2nd and 3rd order (if not more) activities associated with economic activity. They are also, as public goods, not useful for providing advantage in 1st order activity.

So, given that they (public goods) are Nth order aspects of 1st order economic markets, can spending and allocation toward public goods be determined by an Nth order market? And, can alloations at the Nth level of economic systems be used as
indicators and predictors of 1st order economic markets.

My wording here is somewhat clumsy, still trying to work it out, I guess.

I’ve got a problem.

It’s LISP. I do nearly all my programming in Python, C++, and OCaml (In that order) and I do some work with genetic algorithms that is somewhat painful to do in C++ [1] but easy to do in Python and Fast when run in OCaml (and now that I’ve learned how to use ocamllex/ocamllyacc it’ll be easy to do in OCaml too).

Notice there is no LISP there. And that is the problem. I can use elisp to customize my xemacs sessions but that’s about as far as it gets.
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N 43′46.339″
W 72′22.039″

Last weekend I was there. My wife’s family owns a small (57 acres) “farm” (they never farmed this land, but if was once farmed. It’s off an unpaved road, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
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I tell you there is a very fine line between being detail oriented and detail fixated.

I think this is the dividing line between a good sysadmin and a BOFH.

So, I’m walking around the chemist like an idiot, looking for two things: band-aids and bars of soap. I also need onions, but I need to go to a different store for that. I like London, but it’s times like these when I feel I need some sort of handbook like in the “Accidental Tourist”.

I need band-aids because I cut my finger pulling off the airline tags from my bag, in a bad omen event. I was standing there in the tube station, bleeding from the largest, non-fatal, paper cut ever. Just standing there thinking “Damn it, where am I going to get a band-aid?”.

So, I go to the Chemist (or drugstore, for the un-with-it-not-person-of-the-world … I was trying to figure out how science would help me when I was told it was place not a person).

Anyway, back to me looking like an idiot. So there I am, staring at the shampoos and the security guard, who has been circling me like a wary bird, asks if I need help finding something.

Yes I do, I told him. And yes, I answered to his next question, I am an American. He’s from Nigeria himself, but was in Chicago a few weeks ago, in transit to visit his familiy in Wisconsin. Funny world.

Still didn’t get my bar of soap, but at least the bleeding has stopped.

Hiring people is difficult. Often times, in the IT world, you’ll just rely on a headhunter and be done with it. But that is problematic and expensive.
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http://www.inertia-llc.com/sandbox/temp/clie-easel/index.html

This is so awesome. I’m going to use this during interviews.

It’s happened again. Someon from my past, a Train and a narrowly avoided contact.
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People refer to Google as a search company. It’s not a search company.

Google is an AI company. They are not working on a search engine, they are working on a knowledge engine. Searching is just one aspect of the organization of information that google is working on. It (searching) also
happens to be profitable right now.

Quite frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me if Google, AI, and library science all meld into one cross-disciplinary
wunderfest at some point in the future.

It is even more interesting to look at how Microsoft is interested in dominating the Search Industry. This may be where
MS really screws up. They’ve missed the point. People don’t want searches, they want the information. By dumping a huge amount of capital and time into the search space (even though they’ve missed the point) they will tie up precious
resources and loose their strategic focus. They (MS) will become attenuated as an organization allowing competetors the opening they need to challenge MS.

Man I wish I could get a job at Google.

It bothers me that I’m hearing more and more about the things they can’t tell us. If an argument hinges on information
that I cannot be told then it’s not a very good argument is it?

I mean, come on. Either tell me or just say nothing. The end result is the same. I supported the war in Iraq, and I support it now. Those who do evil should fear the U.S.A. but how can the citizenry elect officials based on the fact that they
can’t tell us the important information that would make all of this make sense just re-elect me ’cause I know what I’m doing.

WTF?