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The good news is that you'll never get over it. In my youth I developed severe, disfiguring calcifications of the scalp, which required surgery. The result was suboptimal, I still have numerous lesions left, and I face a scalp resection to get rid of all of them. I also had a jaw deformity--I didn't feel free to smile in public, until I was in my mid thirties. I was shy 30 years ago, and today I am proud to announce that despite the setbacks, despite never getting married and having a family, and despite the opportunity and economic costs, which have been considerable, and despite the lost time, which cannot be recovered, I am slightly less withdrawn today than I was then. My attitude did undergo a subtle but significant improvement.

Many happy carriage returns!

I had vague thoughts of using XMPP for grid computing--but I suppose this is obvious.

The historical evidence contradicts Matt Maroon's assertion, conventionally held by corporate intellectual monopolists, that copyrights "incent" [sic] creativity. See Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly for a detailed discussion.

Can you learn an industry without working in it? My boy, that, or rather the converse: that you can work in and manage an industry without learning it, is the great promise that MBA programs make to their students. The idea that there are abstract principles of management, of dressing down subordinates, of bringing in new business and cutting costs (that's all that CEOs do, essentially) that free the MBA from ever having to dirty his or her hands with the business--their primary, all-consuming interest, they protest--is for them a feature, not a bug. It's business processes all the way down...

I have chronic insomnia. Now that I'm walking home from work (about 35 blocks), I feel even better, and my insomnia is worse. I tried resetting my circadian rhythm by not eating 16 hours before going to bed: even worse insomnia. Anything I do to control my insomnia exacerbates it.

Credit for this is optional. Another way to see obtain a partition of G is to observe that the relation x ~ y if and only if x = y or x = y^{-1} is an equivalence relation on G. The equivalence classes induce the partition above. The point is that any two equivalence classes {x, x^{-1}},{y,y^{-1}} are either disjoint or equal, and their union is G. But this is obvious (the word 'obvious' means "I thought of it.")

Note on the problem that a group G of even order contains an element of order 2. Partition G into classes {{x,x^{-1}|x\in G}. This is a partition since inverses are unique. For x\in G, call {x, x^{-1}} the class of x. At least one other element x besides the identity has a class of size one. Otherwise, the order of G would be 1 + 2*(# of classes of size 2) which is odd. Hence there is an x with x != 1 and x = x^{-1}; i.e., an element of order 2.

Gee, I routinely ignore queries from Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

No word about Vista's DRM and the difficulty this is causing many multimedia content providers and others. Economist David K. Levine called Vista "one of the colossal business blunders of all time" in the following article in the Against Monopoly blog:

http://againstmonopoly.org/index.php?limit=10&chunk=0...

Here's an excerpt: "the demand for degraded computers that can play "premium content" is limited. People just don't buy computers to play movies on them. Michele and I previously dug out some numbers on the size of the "premium content" industry versus the IT industry. According to the RIAA, the value of all CD's, live presentations, music videos, dvds in 1998 was 13.72 billion US$. According to the SOI, in 1998 the business receipts of the computer and electronic product manufacturing including both hardware and software was 560.27 billion US$. I looked up at the census 1997 revenue in the telecommunications industry: 260.50 billion US$. So: are people going to give up their general purpose computers they spend $560 billion on to access less than $14 billion in content?"

From an economist's perspective, a $13.8 billion industry is negligible compared with a $560 billion industry.

"I don't know about unparalleled." That means, "compared with CUNY."

As I recall, the Oakland Science Museum is focused on technology. The American Museum of Natural History is a better museum in many ways, but its focus is entirely different. The Hall of Science seems like a leftover from the World's Fair--I'm probably completely mistaken.

I associate the Hall of Science with cranky aging amateur radio operators on account of the annual hamfests they hold in the vicinity. Those hams seem as if their wives ordered them not to come home until they sell off their old equipment. That's the impression of science and technology you get from the Hall of Science. That impression might be a little hard to convey, so try comparing the discussions on eHam with those on hacker news.

Since we're on the subject of the politeness of New Yorker's and the attitude that everything has its price, in New York, a simple "thank you" might be considered a costly acknowledgment.

Here's a dismal example by hacking standards, but it's still indicative of the attitude. Someone from a financial firm, known for its rating system and price indexes, had a data conversion problem. They were using Matlab--a dismal language with a bastard semantics. One of the functions they were using was Datenum(), which converts dates and times to the number of days since the year zero, in the proleptic Gregorian calendar.

The specification of this function should have been to return a floating point number equal to 1+1/86,400 (in units of days) for a date argument equal to one second after year zero. And in fact, the open source equivalent function in Octave does exactly that. However, Matlab's function differs from this in the 11th decimal place. Their technical support has been silent on the issue.

When I informed the person at the financial firm about this discrepancy, they thanked me for "my comments." In the next sentence, I was informed that that they were redoing their calculations using another method. It was stated as if the decision to do this was an entirely independent judgment, not at all informed by my observations, and completely unrelated to any problems they might have encountered using the previous method. They simply decided to change the way they were doing things, without explanation.

Finding a numerical bug that could complicate the analysis of code that depends on it is not earthshaking. But not stating what informed a decision to avoid the problem altogether is a typical New York attitude. Or perhaps the reluctance to credit others is typically corporate. Correct me if I am mistaken.

I have to agree with Paul Graham's essay on the relative lifelessness of employees: if I were an employee, I simply would have accepted the decision as a completely independent judgment, internalized it and defended it.

The values of New York come from Wall Street, which sets the tone for the rest of industry there. The attitude that everything has its price is responsible for the bad reputation that New York and New Yorkers have in the rest of the country.

If you live in New York, in some sense you aren't a citizen of the United States: your residency means that you have a passport to enter the "real" United States.

Another thing about New York: it clearly isn't known for science. The Science Museum in Oakland California would be impossibly out of place in New York. The two main categories of industry in New York are finance and media, broadly conceived (including the arts, television, publishing, fashion, advertising and so on).