I have just discovered (via Ben Kuhn) a wonderful blog called Ribbonfarm. While I’m still struggling to understand what the site is really about,1 I feel obligated to share an outstanding summary of the book Seeing Like a State in the post “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility”. Ribbonfarm’s author presents the “authoritarian high-modernist recipe for failure,” a detail of the process by which leaders throughout history have consistently attempted at utopian reform for the better and failed miserably. Seeing Like a State went onto my reading list immediately after I finished this article. The ..read more

Christmas, birthdays, graduations, housewarming parties — all wonderful times to celebrate and reunite with family and friends. But for a certain class of unlucky revelers, beneath that celebration lies that haunting specter of the gift. I’m terrible at finding good gifts for people. Maybe I was one of those born without the proper genes. Malls and department stores are scary places for people of my type at this time of year, where everyone but you seems to be running from store to store, picking out the perfect products without breaking a sweat. For people like me, these celebrations always c ..read more

This was submitted as my final research paper for Education as Self-Fashioning: The Active, Inquiring, Beautiful Life. See my Zotero folder documenting my research for this essay. The learning of a Salmasius or a Burman, unless you are its master, will be your tyrant. ‘Imperat aut servit’; if you can wield it with a strong arm, it is a great weapon; otherwise, ‘Vis consili expers / Mole ruit suâ.’ You will be overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by the heavy wealth which you have exacted from tributary generations.1 Cardinal John Newman acknowledges a problem familiar to any student in this quote from ..read more

The quarter is over, and I’m back at home with the family. Tomorrow I’ll return for a few weeks contracting at Stremor. Here’s what I’ve been reading this week: Aaron (1994) attacks the idea of treating the preferences and values of an individual as stable as more of an “axiom of religious faith” than a “defensible scientific hypothesis” (6). He supports approaches such as that of Epstein and Axell, which avoid unrealistic oversimplified models of utility that Aaron claims have plagued microeconomics for too long. Bertrand Russell gives the 10 commandments of “true liberalism” — worth a read ..read more

It’s finals week here at Stanford. I’m just finishing up a research paper entitled “Imperat aut servit: Managing our knowledge inheritance” which will likely be published here after the quarter has ended. Apart from writing, I’m beginning to think about further independent research. I’ve been investigating patterns in Romanian etymology and am considering engaging in some sort of formal analysis. Hayek is also still on my mind — I’ve been wondering about how I can model a particularly interesting statement in “The Use of Knowledge in Society” using genetic programming. More on all of this late ..read more

Gneezy and Rustichini (2000) examine the effect of imposing a fine on parents who arrive late to pick up their children from Israeli daycare centers. They find that parents actually arrive significantly later once this fine is in place. When what was formerly a fuzzy unwritten social contract is rewritten with an exact punishment, they suggest that parents feel free to break the rules and pay the exact fine (where before they were unsure about the potential consequences of their lateness). Lawrence Lessig argues that most of the people who watch The Social Network will miss the really importa ..read more

I’ve decided to join the Internet-wide trend of posting regular updates on articles, blog posts, etc. that I have read recently and find interesting. I see multiple benefits in such a practice: As a commitment mechanism: With the Internet watching, I will (hopefully) feel more motivated to maintain good reading habits. Furthermore, I’ll have an incentive to write about my insights on each piece (these posts would otherwise be of no more value than any other news aggregation). As a more effective method of sharing: Individual posts on social networks often seem “drowned out” to me, quickly ecl ..read more

Something of a departure from the usual content today — what follows is my attempt to answer the question, “Why didn’t Marcus Aurelius the Stoic fight to end slavery?” I hope you enjoy the read. I’d appreciate any and all comments! See a Zotero folder documenting my research for this essay. In the Meditations Marcus Aurelius extols the ideas of independence and self-determination, echoing many of his Later Stoic intellectual ancestors and contemporaries. In 1.14 he speaks of the treasures of a “balanced constitution” and a “monarchy which values above all things the freedom of the subject.” It ..read more

ZeroMQ is one of those technologies today that have sizeable shares of breathless adherents. I had been aware of the hubbub over the open-source messaging library for quite some time when I heard that the popular online tutorial – known simply as “The Guide”, written by Pieter Hintjens, an author of ZeroMQ – would be made available in print and ebook. I snagged my chance to get a nice Kindle edition of the O’Reilly release. Apart from some serious formatting problems with the ebook (read on), I was extremely satisfied with the breadth and depth of this guide. Hintjens abandons all pretense at ..read more

I often run into what you might call closet functional programmers – people who seem to have a genuine interest in acquainting themselves with a new paradigm, but just can’t manage to find the time to do it. Some of those who do invest the time often end up on something like the Typeclassopedia1, where the combined force of jargon and type signatures kill whatever interest they began with. Thanks to Clojure Programming, though, I’m happy to report that this will no longer be a problem. This book gives hope to those who have championed Lisp and / or functional programming in vain. Emerick et al ..read more