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Turing!Len gets email
So here's a sort of goofy thing.
A week or two after Len died, I forget exactly, all of a sudden one day emails addressed to him started showing up in my inbox, most of them listservs and announcements and things like that. It was a bit jarring and quite surreal; then again, basically everything about that time had a "you are living in a Jeunet ( Read more... ) -
How it usually goes.
I've made my own contributions to the #IAskedPolitely discussion, which probably got lost in the shuffle. But those are my unusual stories. Here are twothree real-life stories of what conflict resolution, in those kinds of scenarios, usually looks like for me.
I'm among a small group of hacker friends, and the subject of underrepresentation of ( Read more... ) -
Let's talk about social contracts.
Skip this post if you're sick of hearing about Donglegate.
We'll start with a little history. You might have noticed, in the KYM synopsis, a reference to the PyCon Code of Conduct, a document largely derived from boilerplate language originally advanced, systematically, by the Ada Initiative in August 2012. The PyCon code asserts that "all ( Read more... ) -
*taps mic*
Well, that was the longest radio silence we've had in a while ( Read more... ) -
Birthday and Travel
Thank you for the lovely birthday wishes yesterday, everyone! It cracks me up that most of them showed up on Facebook, since that's the social networking service I use the least, but really I'm quite delighted by all the greetings and nifty links people sent ( Read more... ) -
Keynes vs. Hayek: Round Two!
This probably makes more sense if you've already seen the previous Keynes/Hayek Rap Battle. Go check it out, I'll wait.
Now, please enjoy the lyrical stylings of Billy Scafuri and Adam Lustick, featuring Richard J. Murphy:
Obviously I am backing Team Spontaneous Order; Freddie wuz robbed! I'm not sure how well these videos actually communicate ( Read more... ) -
Weak anthropic futurism
After that last post, some of you may be thinking "But, Meredith, I don't think I've ever heard you talk about transhumanism before outside of the context of Vernor Vinge's novels. Are you an extropian, too? What's up with this futurism stuff ( Read more... ) -
How do we let them know the rapture of the nerds is coming?
Matt Bell remarks about the blind spot that many futurists exhibit with respect to the organisational and effort-leveraging capabilities of the religious, whom those futurists regard as "too dumb or narrow-minded to understand futurist concepts like the Singularity ( Read more... ) -
The Quotable Hayek
I feel like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek gets a bad rap from today's liberals and progressives, mainly because his support of free markets (particularly free global markets) made him the darling of Republicans from the beginning and especially the Reagan administration. I recently re-read his essay "Why I am Not A Conservative", which ( Read more... ) -
Unpacking the tone argument
You might or might not be familiar with the blog Slacktivist, perhaps best known for its ongoing exegesis of the wretched theology and even worse writing in the Left Behind novels. The blog ran for years on typepad.com, and recently its author, Fred Clark, moved it to the Patheos portal in the interest of engaging with the broader ecumenical/ ( Read more... )
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