Archives April 2006

Free Market Economics and Natural Selection

I’ve long thought that there are parallels between evolution by
natural selection and free market economics. In the first case,
mutations and recombination provide a variety of traits in a
population, and natural selection ruthlessly culls those less able to
survive and reproduce. In the second case, individuals come up with
lots and lots of ideas, are free to implement them, and the market
rewards those with successful ideas, and ruthlessly punishes the
unsuccessful ones.

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Assorted Snippets From Dembski and Pals

So I was poking around at
Chez Dembski,
mainly to see whether he had anything to say about
a recent BC strip, and found a few amusing and/or stupid items:

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Reverse Spam? Poisoning the Well?

George Clooney
suggests a way
to neutralize celebrity stalker websites:

“There is a simple way to render these guys useless,” Clooney advised […]

“Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless.

(Hat tip to kkos for the link.)

While I appreciate the sentiment, and wouldn’t want to be hounded by paparazzi, this reminds me a bit too much of spam.

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How to Write A Good API

A lot has been written about how to design a good user interface, but very little about how to design a good programming interface (API: Application Program Interface, or a library). This is somewhat surprising, since an API is nothing more than an UI for programmers, and programmers are normally good at writing tools for each other.

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