thoughts on philosophy and science

If you think you have your finances in order, think again. I am the best money handler I know and "Personal Finance for Dummies" still taught me a few things! It is an excellent book on personal finance, planning, insurance and investment planning.

Using this book I put together an equation which summarizes the inflow and outflow of money. It's not difficult to understand and for me helped me visualize how to best spend my money.

Most books on electronics theory treat the subject of passives in the following way:

Our Constitution is a pretty good one. It helped form the first (modern) free nation on earth and set an example for the rest of the world. It rewrote the book on government and put free men on the map. But, our Constitution could use an update. Why you say? It turns out that 200 years of this democratic republic has revealed a few flaws unforeseeable by our founding fathers. Many countries in Europe and Latin America have learned from our mistakes and have implemented changes in their own democracies.

Engadget reviewed perhaps the craziest keyboard ever created. A keyboard the likes of which have never been seen before. The keyboard of keyboards, the Optimus Maximus. Featured here as well, this bad boy features a built in display in every key, a couple USB ports, an SD card and a very clean look. The key displays are of course programmable and feature a frame rate of 10fps.

I have a very specific problem at work: the power engineers refuse to assist me. Well I can't say refuse, more like "only help me begrudgingly and only if they absolutely have to and even then very little." Why? It's their task to work on the power circuits of my boards. And why not? The problems on my board are relatively small compared to other problems (e.g. bugs and such). Well, part of the problem is management, and the other part is time.

I read Gould's "Structure of Evolutionary Theory" and I was relieved to see that the there are others who are struck with the same problem with Darwin that I have. The thing that doesn't add up in "Origin of Species" is slow gradual evolution couldn't work during extinction events. More specifically, the period afterwards when the environment has radically changed and that all living things are somehow expected to slowly catch up. The life timescale is far shorter than the evolutionary timescale. If that were true, the species would become extinct.

On Mar 28, 2007 OSNews carried a story¹ about the linux community and the impact of the formation² of the Linux Foundation.³ As the article indicates, the Linux Foundation membership is comprised of commercial entities and no leading members of either the Linux community or the Open Source community. Many readers were alarmed (including myself) and this led to a very interesting discussion in the OSNews forum, but failed to come to any solid conclusion why this consortium was dangerous to the Linux community.

It is commonplace between scientists and lay people alike to treat a set of objects as a singular group. For example, if I buy a box of cheerios, I don't say I just purchased 2,000 cheerios. I say I bought a box of cheerios. Simple enough and justified. Similarly, when I refer to the inhabitants of say, India, we just call them Indians. Or a trunk, root system and leaves as a tree. Again, justified. It seems to be natural for humans to group things together and refer to them as one. However, this grouping soon breaks down when used beyond anything but a convenience device.

I am constantly struck by the beauty of California. Up and down the highways the state has placed interesting and unusual flora. It is spring time now and everything has come alive, shooting leaves and branches and stems into the air. Here and there stretches of highway will explode with color as a particular plant blooms. I could count a hundred different plants to and from work... trees, flowers, bushes, shrubs, cactus, etc. Most of which are flowering or soon to. Once leafless and dull, trees have shot out little leaves. It is quite pleasing to see different plants for the first time.