Via Instapundit:

I can tell you exactly how a pointless blog full of poorly written, incoherent commentary made it to the front page on Digg. I paid people to do it. - I Bought Votes on Digg

The profusion of community sites on the Internet, each with their own technical quirks, has enabled an unusual opportunity to study the effects of community structure on the resulting community. I haven't made anything like a formal study out of it, but somebody should; it's strangely interesting in an academic sense, but also very practical as you decide what communities to participate in, and for a few, how to create a community.

I find it amazing how many people refuse to understand something they don't believe.

In my Government Myths post, posted June of 2005, I said:

Things seem right on track so that by the 2012 election, 2016 at the latest, the campaign for the next [Presidential] election will immediately start after the swearing-in ceremony.

I think I can say that we are officially halfway there. The political news, at least in the blogs, has been abuzz about Clinton v. Obama, as they jockey for the Presidential nomination. I don't know if it's gotten into the mainstream news, but clearly, Clinton and Obama see themselves as in campaign mode already.

On programming.reddit.com, I have referred to a list of Big Haskell Projects I'm keeping. I've been keeping it in my head, because it's been short, but I thought I should go ahead and start actually keeping one.

Haskell as a language intrigues me, but I can't help but notice that there aren't a lot of large projects that use it. My intuition suggests that this could be difficult, because I suspect the type system may become increasingly unwieldy. I once asked about this directly, and the results were less than impressive. I'm asking for examples of large projects because concrete results trump my intuition.

In the interests of honesty and transparency, I'm actually going to keep this list in a public place and try to keep it updated as people suggest things until either A: It satisfies me and I start trying to learn Haskell or B: It becomes too much of a time sink, which would basically mean that there are a lot of large projects. That is, my goal is not to keep a list in perpetuity, but just until the point is made.

Update March 8, 2007: This has been up for three weeks now and attracted some attention from some people who really ought to know. I'm willing to say now that pending further updates, I see no compelling reason to believe that Haskell is practical for larger projects. Furthermore, Haskell arrogance is totally unjustified by evidence. It may someday be proven a compelling choice for Real Programming, but there isn't even any significant evidence of that, let alone enough to justify arrogance.

I've seen this sort of spam before, but never with such purity, usually only with the Subject or something left unprocessed.

Date: Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:42:06 -0500
Received: from 192.168.0.%RND_DIGIT (203-219-%DIGSTAT2-%STATDIG.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN [203.219.%DIGSTAT2.%STATDIG]) by mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN (envelope-from %FROM_EMAIL) (8.13.6/8.13.6) with SMTP id %STATWORD for <%TO_EMAIL>; %CURRENT_DATE_TIME
Message-Id: <%RND_DIGIT[10].%STATWORD@mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN> 
From: "%FROM_NAME" <@FROM_EMAIL>

%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0 
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME

%MESSAGE_BODY

Also note that the bit starting with %TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER was the beginning of the messaged body, which is also wrong.

All the talk of benchmarks for American performance in Iraq makes me wonder if we shouldn't reverse them.

Tell the Iraqis as a nation, for every week that goes by without a (well-defined) terrorist incident, we will pull out 1,000 troops. (We need at least one fine-grained condition that is likely to happen, so we can actually do it, and show that we are serious.) Serious terrorist events may pull troops back or delay our leaving.

Via dangerousmeta: How Not to Talk To Your Kids (The Inverse Power of Praise). Self-esteem uber alles as mortal menace.

This strikes me as one of the most important lines of research into education I've ever seen.

Prediction: Iran will be in a civil war at least as intense as the Palestinian and Iraqi civil wars by the end of this year.

Physical Evidence: A significant car bombing and the inevitable failure of centralized economies, with all that implies (and that implies a lot).

I freely grant that's not a lot to go on, although it is telling that we've heard about these things. The real reason I make this prediction is cultural: The entire culture has been built on the premise that if you have a grievance, it's acceptable to bomb people. No, it's beyond acceptable.... it's your moral imperative to bomb them.

Would police officers be happy having that fact tatooed across their foreheads? "Police Officer" in big letters. Leave space so "retired", "dismissed", "ex-" or "disciplined" can be added later.

Would that be acceptable?

Of course not. It might make certain social situations... uncomfortable. It might mean they find it harder to get jobs. It might mean they're open to being attacked on the streets...

So why is it acceptable to publish personal information about everyone else? - katie on ID cards

Apparently, mentioning the word "Superbowl" on my website means I get spam asking me to add my website to a list of sports sites. On the strength of that one word.

("What's the deal with people still 'asking' you if they can link to your site?" he asked rhetorically.)