Would

IF YOU PLAN ON WATCHING THE OLYMPICS

(There are photographs I couldn’t bring myself to post because I just can’t look at them once again. I’m still shaking and shivering from having had a glimpse of a woman whose left breast is completely trashed out from electric torture — the right breast is blurred away, probably from being even more shocking. There’s a link at the end of this post that you must look at if you’re going to watch the olympics and rooting for your nationals. It’s a flash slideshow with pictures I can’t bear to think about again, let alone describe into mere words. These are just the soft ones.)

href=”http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA17/089/2008/en/824a9d66-5724-11dd-90eb-ff4596860802/asa170892008eng.html”>The olympic principle is betrayed by China’s broken promises.

Shortly after awarding the Games to Beijing in 2001, Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) publicly stated his expectation that hosting the Olympics would improve China’s human rights record, adding that the IOC would act if human rights were not acted upon to their satisfaction.⁶Since then, the IOC has continued to maintain the public line that China is making progress on human rights.⁷On 23 March 2008, Jacques Rogge issued a statement reaffirming that the Olympic Games are a ‘force for good⁸

Breadcrumb trails:

Bit bombs and other dangers

Clever hack: a 42 kb .zip file that decompresses unto your hearts’ content.

Quoting freely from various Wikipedia articles in italic, the specification for ZIP indicates that files can be stored either uncompressed or using a variety of compression algorithms. However, in practice, ZIP is almost always used with Katz’s DEFLATE algorithm, except when files being added are already compressed or are resistant to compression”; where DEFLATE is a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding.

Whille DEFLATE, the LZ family and other compression systems are often referred as algorithms, what they really are is file specification standards. It’s theoretically possible that the standard DEFLATE algorithm isn’t the most efficient in terms of final size/uncompressed size such that the resulting file is a DEFLATE standard stream. Which is why such clever hacks as the 42kb zip bomb that uncompresses into petabytes of nonsense data are possible.

This extends in general to all kinds of compression systems, and even more for lossy ones. It’s actually  widely-known that there exist competing MP3 encoders which will produce a varying range of “qualities” while still generating valid MP3 files. (These qualities might be multi-dimensional — not “better”, but better for rock or classical music, or perhaps a spectrum between “best for a wide amplitude range” or “best for a wide frequency range”).

Breadcrumb trails:

Understanding the new violence

Neoschumpeterians are a crazy bunch. Maybe Williamson can be excluded from that affirmative, but I would hardly link him to Schumpeterian thought though.

Schumpeter himself was a walrasian, and I quote from him

“Walras is in my opinion the greatest of all economists. His system of economic equilibrium, uniting, as it does, the quality of a “revolutionary” creativeness with the quality of classic synthesis, is the only work by an economist that will stand comparison with the achievements of theoretical physics. Compared with it, most of the theoretical writings of that period - and beyond - however valuable in themselves and however original subjectively, look like boats beside a liner, like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth.” (History of Economic Analysis, 1954: p.827)

Schumpeterianism at its very core is a theory of the supply side of economics. (Not to be confused with american “supply-siders”, who are just stupid) The competing theory is that of David Ricardo, synthetized with the walrasian system (at its theoretical core an equilibrium given a level of supply of resources, even if this very core does not fulfill a theory of general equilibrium) by Marshall. Marshall actually thought and taught that the marginalist revolution was not that much of a revolution — not that much of a break with Ricardian economics, just an evolution brought by the onset of differential methods.

Breadcrumb trails: