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Red Baldy
People following the “outdoors” thread on this blog will have noticed that Bill and I failed to summit on Mount Baker and also on White Baldy this year already. I’m not all about summiting, but this got on my nerves a little. Yesterday I decided to climb Red Baldy, an 11,000′ neighbor to White Baldy.…
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Why Would Researchers Oppose Open Access?
Last week I started sort of a relaxed flame war with other members of the steering committee for an ACM conference on the subject of open access to the proceedings. “Open access” would mean that anyone could download the proceedings. The current situation is slightly different: Often, individual papers are available on authors’ home pages.…
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A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++, Part 1
Also see Part 2 and Part 3. Programming languages typically make a distinction between normal program actions and erroneous actions. For Turing-complete languages we cannot reliably decide offline whether a program has the potential to execute an error; we have to just run it and see. In a safe programming language, errors are trapped as…
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The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind
Earlier this year Thomas Benton wrote an essay The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind, skewering academic humanities in the United States. His thesis is that there is effectively a conspiracy to produce many more PhDs than there are faculty slots, and to keep the carrot of the tenure-track faculty position just out…
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An Epidemic of Rat Farming
In Hanoi, as the story goes, the French placed a bounty on rat pelts. The locals responded by farming rats. A child who gets candy for cleaning up a big mess is likely to create another mess the next day. These are perverse incentives: incentives that have unintended and often undesirable side effects. As a…