This post is a test of some structural stuff.

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As promised, I’m weighing in on another burning issue of 10 years ago:

I recently overheard the utterance “@thomblake No one has any good reason to like \s indent. Either you like \t, or you don’t care. It’s not life-and-death, but \t is clear win” (via isaacschlueter on Twitter). I assented, as I really only started using space-indent because it’s a best practice at my workplace. But on reflection, I really do have good reasons for space-indent, based on the way that I use indentation in code.

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It is about this time of year that I traditionally start to reflect on my life and where it’s going. It’s the beginning of July, and today is the holiday of “Birthday”, the time of year that we celebrate our coming into the world. The date for the holiday was chosen to logically break up the year, so that gift-giving holidays occur in the Winter and Summer, and consumption holidays occur in the Spring and Fall. This holiday was proposed some years ago by Isaac Schlueter, who coincidentally has his own birthday on the same day.

Isaac recently wrote a post reflecting on his experience as a programmer and the difficulty of becoming an expert. Apparently, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master anything.

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The following is a web adaptation of a paper I wrote for a seminar on epistemology. I think this idea has the potential to revolutionize epistemology in the 21st century - maybe I’ll write a better paper about it later.

The discipline of cybernetics, created in the 1940’s by Norbert Wiener, is the science of information processing systems. Recent developments in cybernetic technology have given us reason to re-evaluate the way we think about knowledge. This is because knowledge is certainly related in some way to information. However, I do not think it has been made clear in exactly what way they are related. When I sit down at a computer with access to the internet, I feel smarter; I am able to answer questions that I would never be able to otherwise, with very little effort on my part. One likely explanation of this phenomenon is that I am somehow more knowledgeable when I am sitting at a computer. But this does not fit into the usual conception of knowledge; I doubt that sitting down at a computer automatically changes any beliefs of mine, nor does it justify them. This leads me to think that there should be a theory of knowledge that allows for this kind of thing to be called knowledge. Generally, I believe that a claim to knowledge is a claim to a certain competence; it is commonly said that knowledge is power, and “power” is often used analogously with other types of competence. I intend to show that a claim to knowledge (in the sense of knowledge about the world) is a claim to have access to information.

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I had started to write this as an academic paper several years ago. It never got finished, so I’ve slightly rewritten it for the web. Enjoy.

The issue of same-sex marriage oft gets bandied about in the public forum. People are essentially arguing over whether marriage is a legal right, and whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman. The issues involving “gay marriage” are addressed fairly well (in a rather one-sided fashion) by Scott Bidstrup in Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives. But the question that has not been sufficiently addressed is why marriage is a legal institution, and more importantly whether it should continue to be. I intend to demonstrate that marriage should not be an institution of the state, specifically in the US.

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I just spent a weekend in Cape Cod, and had some time to think while I was relatively unplugged. Since coming back, I’ve seen a lot of comments out there claiming that people are making too big a deal out of NetFlix removing profiles. I disagree - NetFlix has repeatedly shown themselves to be a bad company, and boycott may be the only rational response. At the very least, after observing the complete lack of professional ethics in those at NetFlix, I regret having given them my personal and financial information. And so I decided that here I should outline a little more thoroughly what’s wrong with what NetFlix has done.

UPDATE: NetFlix is now not getting rid of profiles. But they’re still evil.

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So I’ve been doing some mildly philosophical writing over at Congypsy, and decided to stop that since that’s not really what that site’s for. Will be moving those posts here, in no particular order.

UPDATE:successfully imported using the Wordpress import from rss functionality.

Upgraded hosting plan. Working on new layout in Wordpress. More to come.

Netflix just informed me that it will no longer have account profiles. Profiles are a useful feature that let multiple people on one account have different queues. We also use them to separate “movie” and “series” queues, so that if we send back a disc of Lost, we get a new disc of Lost.

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At ETHICOMP2008, Don Gotterbarn will be presenting a paper entitled, “The Ethics of Video Games: Mayhem, Death, and the Training of the next generation”. The abstract is currently available on the ETHICOMP2008 website. Having read the abstract, I feel I must respond to some of the points made there. I hope I am not doing Don too much of a disservice by responding before having read the entire paper.

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