I think in the end this British sailor kidnapping will prove to have been a big mistake by Iran.

In the short term, their goal of embarrassing Britain may have worked, thanks to the eager greediness of our news media for bad news and their anxiousness to toss barbs at Blair (and indirectly at Bush). Mission accomplished.

However, after that, I'm just not seeing a good move for Iran. They can't just hand these guys back. Well, they could and in some sense it's probably still their best move ("We're so confident that we can kidnap with impunity that we don't even need these hostages; we can take whom we choose, when we choose. Your entire armed force is hostage to us now.") But in reality it'd be seen as weakness by their internal factions, probably.

The observation that the internet breeds impoliteness is an old one, and I don't intend to repeat it. I would just like to point out that there is something concrete you can do, which I'm trying to do more often.

Most people don't make death threats, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that most people's contribution to the Internet is a net negative for civility. We tend to post only to point out errors, to "correct" "mistakes", to explain to somebody in detail why they not only believe the wrong thing, but are stupid for believing it. Greivance Law 3 usually kicks in for at least two people, and cascading insults are a normal occurrence on the Internet.

Every once in a while something so very iRight-y comes along I just have to post it: DMCA author says DMCA is a failure.

The biggest problem it had was attempting to legislate technology, rather than people.

This is the first post of my new BlogBook, Programming Wisdom.

This initial post starts off by discussing exactly what I mean by "wisdom" in the context of programming. Non-programmers may still be interested as it is more about wisdom than programming.

Some people have observed that Iran's seizure of British soldiers would at most points in history be considered casus belli, and perhaps at least lead to naval blockade.

While I don't entirely disagree with the idea that some people consider what I would call cowardice a virtue, I don't think it completely explains the blasé attitude this is meeting with. I think there's a strong non-political component to it as well.

Western societies have grown by leaps and bounds over the past several hundred years. It takes a lot more to get our attention than it used to, because we are a much bigger society, and I think a strong case can be made that this is a perfectly rational outlook. A two-inch cut on a small child can be a big deal; the same cut on me is an annoyance. If the West went to war over every two-inch cut, we'd be in full-scale war, all the time; there's always another grievance to be converted to casus belli.

• First Law of Grievances: There's always another grievance.
  • Corollary to the First Law: A list of grievances can always be produced. Therefore, the information content of a list of grievances is zero, and is not useful for determining "fault" or any other purpose.
• Second Law of Grievances: My grievances are worse than your otherwise-identical grievances.
• Third Law of Grievances: Revenge never satisfies your grievance. It follows from the second law that what you perceive as a balancing of the scale will be overcompensation from your enemy's point of view. Net result: There's another grievance.
• Fourth Law of Grievances: The longer the Third Law iterates, the harder it is to escape from, because both sides will perceive the other side as ever-more in debt.

(I use "grievance" here as "a reason to hate someone or seek revenge". Something can be both a grievance and something else; for instance, an act of war is certainly a grievance, but it is also an act of war. It isn't rational to seek "revenge" for an act of war, but it can be perfectly rational to go to war for any number of other reasons; it may even be irrational not to.)

After a long search for what iRi is, I have finally found it, and now I'm taking the time to write it down, or at least part of it.

iRi is the leftover stuff in my life. Talking about politics, religion, ethics, science, programming, epistemology, all that jazz is important to me, but I can't talk about them in "real life" because talking about this stuff is really, really hard in the real world, due to the limits of the conversational form.

iRi is my platform for getting such things off my chest. As such, you are welcome to read it, but that is a secondary concern to me.

Per the recent news about TiVo and Amazon Unbox integration, and a $15 dollar credit for trying it out before April 1 (or so), my wife and tried it.

First, at least TiVo series 2 machines don't download very quickly, a problem I've already had trouble with when trying to download things from the TiVo directly. It's not much better with Amazon Unbox; a 42-minute TV program took quite a while to download, two hours at least. (We weren't obsessively paying attention.) This is definitely a TiVo problem, though, not an Amazon problem.

The commercial for The Last Mimzy attracted my attention, because it sounded an awful lot like the 1943 Mimsy were the Borogroves by Lewis Padgett. I'm not sure I can quite call it my favorite short story ever (there are so many other good ones), but it's in the top 5 for sure.

But I seriously doubted that, because Golden Age science fiction stories do not frequently make it to the silver screen, especially in the 21st century. And certainly not ones I like.

In the Star Trek the Next Generation episode The Outrageous Okana, it is revealed that the funniest comic in history was "'Stano Riga', a 23rd Century comic who 'specialized in jokes about quantum mathematics.'"

I've always wondered what kind of real-life situation would lead to someone being able to successfully become a comic with such niche appeal.

The answer, of course, is the Internet. In the last month I've been treated to two funny comedians that are very, very niche; one in classical and modern music, one in economics. And they are actually good, if you like the source material at all.