David Sirota authored the posting It’s the Stupidity, Stupid. Thanks to my friend MardyS for linking to this on his Facebook page.  It is the perfect response to my posting Poll: Americans Don’t Know Economy Expanded With Tax Cuts.

Sirota writes:

What could cause this intensifying politics of free-market fundamentalism at the very historical moment that proves the failure of such an ideology? Two new academic studies suggest all roads lead to ignorance.

The first, by Harvard’s Michael Norton and Duke’s Dan Ariely, finds that Americans grossly underestimate how much inequality our economy produces.

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…the most powerful factor in our economic illiteracy is found in the other new academic report—the one examining our innate denial reflex.

The October 27, 2010 episode of The Daily Show was devoted to an interview with President Barack Obama.

In this post I have pulled together the three part video of that appearance.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The article Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed by Patricia Cohen in The New York Times coincides more with my view of President Obama than it does with the article’s author’s view.

In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.

“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.

To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

I found the article Chinese Supercomputer Wrests Title From U.S. in The New York Times.

A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.

Dawn of a New Day is the subject of a memo written by Ray Ozzie.  According to Reuters, Ozzie is Microsoft Corp’s resident visionary and departing software chief.

In the Reuters story, they gave the following description of the memo:

Microsoft Corp’s resident visionary and departing software chief has urged the company to move on from its Windows and Office roots and imagine a “post-PC world” of simple, global Web devices.

I have to agree with one of the forces that Ozzie identifies as driving the change.

But as the PC client and PC-based server have grown from their simple roots over the past 25 years, the PC-centric / server-centric model has accreted simply immense complexity.

Complexity kills. Complexity sucks the life out of users, developers and IT.  Complexity makes products difficult to plan, build, test and use.  Complexity introduces security challenges.  Complexity causes administrator frustration.

I am going to miss the PC-centric days, but I must admit, right now the thought of buying a new PC fills me with trepidation as I think about all the installed software on my current PC that I will have to install on the new one.

As someone who enjoys writing his own software to solve problems, I hope the day never comes when I won’t be able to write software no matter what form the next computer revolution takes.  This memo just reminds me of the need to stay abreast of the coming changes even though I am retired from the software industry.  What I learned over the past 40 years will have to be constantly refreshed.

From what I have read, this effort to keep up-to-date will either keep me mentally alert or will drive my mental deterioration even faster.

I found the article How To Protect Against Firesheep Attacks on the Computerworld web site.

Firesheep  adds a sidebar to Mozilla’s Firefox browser  that shows when anyone on an open network — such as a coffee shop’s Wi-Fi network — visits an insecure site.

A simple double-click gives a hacker instant access to logged-on sites ranging from Twitter and Facebook to bit.ly and Flickr.

I had to read this a couple of times before it hit me.  Someone else is running Firesheep on their computer to detect when you access your account on an insecure web site from your computer. You don’t have to be using Firefox to be hacked. Firesheep then allows that other person to access your account on that web site.  A few hundred thousand people have already downloaded Firesheep to their computer.

The article does mention some protective measures you can take.  For the ordinary user who has not taken any of those measures, you should not be accessing your personal accounts from an unencrypted Wi-Fi hot spot.  Most such spots are unencrypted.

I suspect that if you are accessing the internet via a wireless router that is not using strong encryption, then you are also vulnerable.  Places where you might do that other than your own leaky wireless router at home (if you are not using encryption at home) would be in a hotel or on vacation in a rented condo.

Update October 29, 2010

The article Firefox Add-on Firesheep Brings Hacking to the Masses in PC World, may or may not bring some clarity to this subject.  That depends on which of the criticisms in the comments you believe.

In the article Fermilab is Building a ‘Holometer’ to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion in Popular Science, the authors state:

Researchers at Fermilab are building a “holometer” so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram.

Now before you start wondering whether today is April first, they do provide a link to the Fermi Lab web site section devoted to presentations about the holometer.

There you can read the 2009 Holometer Proposal.  Maybe the following quote explains it better than the Popular Science article:

The theory of black hole evaporation, whereby a black hole state converts to free quantum particle states in flat spacetime, also suggests a fundamental bound at the Planck scale. The correspondence is remarkably precise: the entropy of a black hole, identified with the total number of degrees of freedom, is one quarter of the area of its event horizon in Planck units. This idea has led to the conjecture that all of physics may be “holographic”, encoded in some way on null surfaces or light sheets at Planck resolution. However, there has been no experimental test of this conjecture.

For your information they state that Planck time = 5.4 X 10^-44 seconds.

The Los Angeles Times article titled In two years, a fearful turn in Obama’s speeches, ends with the following:

“As a candidate in 2008, Obama made an appealing but naive promise to bring Republicans and Democrats together in Washington and end the bitter partisan standoff,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies and writes about governance. “He learned that was easier said than done.

“He is now giving voice to a reality that he was hesitant to accept.”

Notice the difference between my headline and the one used by the Los Angeles Times. Like two drunks propping each other up as they walk out of the bar, maybe if you put the slant of the two different headlines next to each other, they could hold each other up.

Of course, even the fellow from the Brookings Institution could have phrased it, “President Obama gave the Republicans a chance to put aside their bitter partisanship, but they didn’t take it.” Are three drunks holding each other up better than two?

I found Thaddeus Russell: Why I Got Fired From Teaching American History on the George Mason University’s History News Network web site.

If I had a category, “And Now For Something Completely Different”, I would place this item in it. In describing what got him fired, the article has the following to say:

I showed them that during the American Revolution drunkards, laggards, prostitutes, and pirates pioneered many of the freedoms and pleasures we now cherish — including non-marital sex, interracial socializing, dancing, shopping, divorce, and the weekend — and that the Founding Fathers, in the name of democracy, opposed them.