Tom Coates links someone talking about social software and the natural limit on group sizes,#

``"When i have 200+ friends on a site like Friendster, i'm not a social networks anomaly. What is actually being revealed is that my articulated network goes beyond the relationships that i currently maintain. [...] "

Particularly that early phrase, "I'm not a social networks anomaly", intrigued me. The assumption seems to be that Friendster just reveals our social networks - uncovers them - and that we had to explain away those circumstances where it seemed to indicate that human beings were managing more than 150 weak ties. This seems ofd to me - surely Friendster is actually a mechanism by which we might outstrip the limits imposed by the size and power of the primate neocortex.''

Via Richard Tallent is something from Glenn Sacks refuting the "Mommy Tax"...#

``However, if there is a woman paying the "mommy tax" by sacrificing her earning power to be at home full-time or part-time, there has to be a man in the household supporting the family and, by so doing, paying the "daddy tax." Crittenden, by defining "privilege" and "sacrifice" only in terms of pay and career status, sees disadvantages only for mothers and not for fathers. But what about the price of fatherhood?

The average American father works 51 hours a week. While nearly half of American mothers with children under the age of six do not work full time, even those who do average only a 41 hour work week. American men work the longest hours of any workers (male or female) in the industrialized world. Men work 90% of the overtime hours in the US, and are more likely to work nights and weekends, to travel for work, and to have long commutes. All of these deprive fathers of valuable time with their children. ''

Jason Marshall writes about the need to "nanny" sometimes in programming systems,#

``Be careful what you give people, they just might use it.

I've seen it happen a hundred times. Any old hand at multiplayer computer gaming (and I can only qualify as one, since I haven't been prolific for half a dozen years), will agree that many game players suffer from an overactive sense of entitlement. The players rationalize that anything the game lets them do is fair game. If they weren't supposed to do something, the game wouldn't allow them to do it (regardless of whether the action they're performing makes any sense whatsoever). Later on, as my career began to unfold, and I began studying the concepts behind programming language design, I noticed a similar pathology among some programmers. "If the language designers didn't want me to use <evil feature X>, they wouldn't have put it into the language!"

[...] This is also why languages like Java risk being labeled as "nanny-ware" by trading features like pointer arithmetic for other powerful features, like Garbage Collection, or trade GOTO for simplified stack-frame verification. Sometimes the world needs a little nannying. ''

There are ways to be safe and still be useful. See Lisp. I know Jason knows, but some may not.

Jen Chung quote some questions and answers aimed at Sarah Jessica Parker,#

``OK. A pair of Manolos or a Kelly bag?
Oh, well, that's like "Sophie's Choice." That's an impossible situation. [Ah, the classic comparison of choosing which of your two children lives to choosing between accessories. Got it.]''

The Yeti says, I'm a "smart clearinghouse for blogs with lots of good stuff." And writes that he will continue to write stuff I want to link,#

``I plan on writing about religion and sex. That way I can still lecture and stimulate at the same time. Either way, I promise my unique perspective (I chose unique because some say crazy or insane and some say awesome or brilliant) on what drives us will make you think, link, and buy me a drink.''

I'm glad he didn't say his "random thoughts" or "random perspective", too many blogs have "random" in the title. It's not really random, it's just disjointed.

Christian wonders if there should be a standard way to give credit in weblog entries,#

``A lot of smart people have been thinking about the data model of a weblog entry (going back to the weblog profile for RSS initiative that stalled out and partly led to the Pie process), and particularly what are the likely meanings of the link element, which can be (as originally invisioned) a link from a description to a full item, or (as Blogger's link field and bookmarklets imply) a link to an external resource that the weblog entry comments on, or (as is commonly generated by Movable Type) a permalink for the entry, regardless of whether a summary, excerpt, or complete body text have been packed into the description field.

Those are the three most likely key links in a blog entry, and they are sometimes the same thing, especially when there is no external resource. Including links in an entry body doesn't inherently populate the link feed, although in theory a blog tool could grab the first anchor href, if any, and use that as the default link, if not overriden. Instead, the default seems to be the permalink, with the option - in some tools - over overriding with an external-resource link.''

Just a Gwai Lo writes, more of less, that there's no time like the present and you'll always wish you were in the past. *A year in the past forever*#

``The past 10 months or so—which have been among the most stressful, fun, relaxing, but altogether interesting of my life—are definitely going to be included in my "those were the days" statement.''

Also, jagl wasn't writing about camel toe the other day. I can't really picture what he IS talking about, but I'm glad I am corrected. Perfection over Pride.

Kristin lives in Football Town, USA. And knows that the fans can win a game,#

``football at my school isn't just a sport, it's a religion. every sunday morning people go to church and every saturday afternoon people devote their lives to the crimson and cream on the football field. while any encounter with a football player is newsworthy, a meeting with one of the coaches, especially the head coach, is treated more as a brush with the angels. ''

Darling Girl asks,#

``How do people like Ben Affleck pull off all those rose-petals-in-the-foyer stunts?''

It's all about getting good with the female's mom. Trust me. Once I was going out with a girl and I wanted to let her known how rad I thought she was. So I called up her mom and asked if I could come over and give her a surprise when she got home from work. The mom, who at the time liked me but I have since fallen out of favour with, agree that this was a good idea.

So I go over with my bags of Hersey's Kisses and sprinkle them all over the floor of her room and leave a note that says, "I Kiss The Ground You Walk On." Lame I know, but she liked it.

In summary, MOMS. They are the key to everything.

Chrystal posts a great picture, and writes about something she misses,#

``I miss the butterfly feeling. The one that you get when you first see the person you're in love with. Filled with happiness and excitement and a little bit of nervousness, but a good kind of nervous --- a nervous that perhaps can't even be described as nervous, maybe more of an anxious. Mmmmm... that's what I want. I want someone who will give me the butterfly feeling.''

I'm hopeless too.

Razib at Gene Expression wrote an article for The American Conservative about immigrant in Europe,#

``Alas, this is a gloomy tale and not one of hope. David [a Dutch person Razib met on a bus] saw a dark future ahead for the Dutch nation, and moreover for Europe as a civilization. He told me what I had only read of: the prevalence of immigrants in the prisons, on the dole, and in the streets, as if this was the norm for any immigrant to the Netherlands. He described young activists, Dutch by birth, campaigning to make Arabic an official language and elevate the Islamic faith to the same status as the Reformed and Catholic Churches. He recalled walking through Rotterdam for hours without seeing another white person.''

Razib also writes about the NPR statistic that a high percentage of highly educated people (characterized as having post-graduate degrees) believe in God,#

``1) Not all graduate degrees are created equal by the Creator....

Many people with "post-graduate" educations are teachers, social workers and accountants, not the doctors & lawyers who are mentioned above. 9% of Americans have graduate degrees. There are 700,000 doctors, 490,000 lawyers and somewhere north of 500,000 scientists and engineers with doctoral degrees-about 2 million people out of the 16 million with "postgraduate" educations. Fair & balanced? Selection bias? Readers might find it interesting that 87% of doctors believe in a "Supreme Being" as opposed to 40% of scientists (I assume that a lawyer's belief is predicated on God's retainer fee).

2) Most educated believers and non-believers have never examined Aquinas' Five Ways to prove the existence of God nor do they come to their faith or lack of via rational or empirical paths. Granted, some do, but most people of high intellectual capacities have in my experience a tendency to rationalize positions rather than reach their conclusion through reason. Granted, a higher percentage of those of high intellect tend to follow the latter path than the general population, but as the bright writer above notes, the difference between the bright and less so is not particularly large in these matters. Soren Kierkegaard rationalized (OK, philosophized) a pietist Lutheran faith that the common man took for granted, and no doubt received much more comfort from. Who was the smart one on that?''

Many interesting links on the actual post.

Patterns used in naming programming languages.#

Peter Lindberg once wrote about complexity theory and software,#

``[The simple rules of Boids] are enough to create something very similar to how real flocks of birds behave. So, if such a simple theory can give rise to unpredictable and complex behavior in the interactions of a population of several such agents—does this mean that a software system soon gets infinitely complex, as it evolves into consisting of several agents, each following its own specialized, and often not that simple theory?''

Michael Watkins is relentless on Rumsfield,#

``There must be something about Ireland, with all its articulate people, that causes Donald Rumsfeld to place both feet in his mouth.

On his way over to the Middle East he stopped at Shannon and said of the security situation in Iraq: "This is their country. They are going to have to provide security." [See my posting "Memo to the President" for my thoughts on that.]

On the return trip stop at Shannon Rumsfeld upped the foot-in-the-mouth ante by alleging that critics of the administration were essentially giving aid and comfort to the enemy.''

Michael Watkins continues on some criticism of who should be accountable for the Iraq Mess, I mean War,#

``So now the cost in lives and funds will be higher than it would have been if these warnings, and the assessments of experienced military officers like General Shinseki, the Chief of the Army, had been listed to in the first place.

And why did this happen? *I think it was because Rumsfeld wanted to use the war to push his vision of military transformation, to show all those "Clinton generals" that he knew how to do it better.*

Again, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz must be held accountable for their costly negligence. I agree completely with Congressman Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee [See my post "Neoconned no more" below] that the President should "allow them to return to the private sector." ''

Michael Watkins is on a roll,#

``'ve been reading Andrew Sullivan's blog for about six months or so and I must say he really perplexes me. He is a social liberal and a fiscal/defense conservative. Yet he is reflexively supportive of the Bush administration, which is made up of social conservatives and fiscal/defense liberals. What gives?

Doesn't it bother him that practically no one in leadership positions in the Republican Party would acknowledge his right to love and the pursuit of happiness? Doesn't it bother him that they are putting us in very deep financial hole? Is he deluded? Is he a hypocrite who gains from being a scarce commodity - a conservative, openly gay politically commentator in America? Of the two explanations, I would prefer to think that it is the former, and that he will come to see the light. ''

Michael Feldman has a picture of a gigantic cat on this post,#

``WASHINGTON (AFP) - One out of every four dogs and cats in the western world is now obese and needs diet to protect itself from diabetes, heart disease and other health problems, the US National Research Council warned.

[...]

"For example, if one cannot feel a dog's ribs, the animal is probably overweight," the report pointed out. "Fat deposits on the back and base of the tail, or lack of a discernable waist when viewed from above, are other clues that a dog is eating too much." ''

Tony Pierce writes about writing,#

``there was a belief at our college paper that a guy couldnt write a column every day.

it wasnt a belief that was challenged outside of the sports page, but despite all our great writers, i dont remember anyone who thought that they could honestly write thirty to fourty inches of opinon daily that would be as good or better than the stuff we normallyd put in there.

also the opinion page was the most-read page and why let one voice dominate a quarter of it.''

Then some great advice to the tune of, "Great Writers write a lot, and read a lot too."

Tony Pierce is the master of weird analogy,#

``i told her that im no better than a french mountain goat in a zoo trying to get some corn out of a dispenser except the goat is smarter. and she said why. and i said cuz the goat can shit where he wants to, he doesnt have to wear pants and eventually some asshole will put a euro in the machine and give him his damn dry corn.''

Ted Leung quotes Anders Hejlsberg -#

``There's one kind of simplicity that I like to call simplexity. When you take something incredibly complex and try to wrap it in something simpler, you often just shroud the complexity. You don't actually design a truly simple system. And in some ways you make it even more complex, because now the user has to understand what was omitted that they might sometimes need. That's simplexity. ''

The Daily Flight continues some notes about the "Scenic Route" to becoming a competent designer,#

``Given a different set of circumstances, we could have been an illustrator, an animator, maybe even a contender. The path that led us to design was anything but direct, more like a meandering scenic route than an interstate highway.

We tried to keep our impatience to a minimum, to stifle our Are we there yet? remarks and to really absorb the scenery. The resultant journey has felt much more comprehensive and rich with insights. Allow us today to share some of our travel highlights: [...]''