iRi

Swoopo, which I refuse to link to, is one amazingly evil site. It is an auction site (for some loose definition of the word "auction") that works as follows: A mark registers for the site and buys "bids" for $1 each. The site puts an item up for auction, starting the price at 15 cents. The marks take turns "bidding". Each bid makes them the auction's current winner, costs them one "

Garret, I know you generally dislike pictures using HDR photography, but there is certainly a time and a place for it.

By popular demand ("this one guy asked for it once"), I've added a post index to iRi. (Also, Google has lost a lot of my pages, which sucks mostly because I keep trying to use it on my own site.) I tried to implement something like Amazon's Statistically Improbable Phrases, which take characteristic phrases out of books and works pretty well, but my corpus is too small. There are many words I use only once, and the vast majority of two-word phrases are entirely unique.

I didn't notice this reddit link go by last month, since I don't check my referrers as often as I used to (heh), linking to my post about teaching things other than trig. All in all, I feel like I fared well for a site like Reddit, but there was one repeated theme in the comments I wanted to address: The idea that economics would be impossible to teach in high school.

Following up on my "failed predictions" point, I point at the now widely-distributed article about the low-fat vs. low-carb diets. The standard dietary orthodoxy predicts that the results of this study would be exactly the opposite of what happened. The predictions are wrong. Therefore, the standard model is wrong. I don't need to be a nutritionist to make this determination. I don't know what the right model is. I think that's pretty sad, considering that if nutritionists hadn't gotten bogged down by a premature orthodoxy, we would probably be now in the position of refining a solid idea, instead of where we really are now, which is quite nearly square one.

Over the past couple of years, I've been turning into a skeptic on the global warming theory, in particular the idea that mankind's actions have effectively doomed us to an uncomfortably hot planet (since the putatively required solutions are all completely unimplementable).

I will grant that my politics would seem to incline me to such skepticism, but I try to decide based on the science, not the politics. If the world truly is heading for disaster, I want to know.

It is very hard to judge a science that you have no experience in, but there is one metric that you can correctly use as an educated outsider to determine whether a scientist is on the right track or the wrong track: the accuracy of predictions. If a prediction is correctly made, it favors a theory, proportionally to the difficulty of the prediction. If the prediction is wrong, it is very solid evidence that the theory or model is wrong. This judgment can be often be made by anybody, especially when it's a question of something simple like temperature.

Slashdot has an unusually interesting discussion on the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, which is why I give that link precedence over the original story.

I mention this because I keep waiting for someone to discuss the root problem, and it's so rarely done that I guess I'm just going to have to do it myself. The root problem of spam comes from the following simple tension:

We want to be able to contact or be contacted by anybody.
We don't want to be contacted by just anybody.

Without understanding this fundamental dynamic, the whole "spam" situation won't make any sense.

One of the things I sometimes fiddle with in the back of my head is how to fix school curricula to better serve students and society. One of the stronger ideas I have is that economics (and ideally, game theory) should be taught, replacing a lot of really dumb mathematical holdovers like trigonometric identities for a semester or two.

And over the last few weeks, I've been really wishing that we'd been teaching economics for the past fifty years instead of other silly things, because the blinding stupidity on exhibit in the recent oil debates is really starting to get to me.