i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Photo from doodlepuppy.com.

Patrick McKenzie has identified 40 incorrect assumptions that programmers (and non-programmers) tend to make about names (of people, that is). Some of the assumptions are common "obvious" facepalms like #21:  "People’s names are globally unique" (how many Michael Davises or Ali Mohammeds are out there, do you suppose?) or #7: "People’s names do not change" (oh hi, newlyweds!).

A recent study in Germany suggests that non-traditional first names are correlated with poor academic performances and bad behavior.

Surprisingly, at least for Americans, is the particularly poor performance associated with the name "Kevin". I've known some bad Jeffs, and even a few sketchy Erics, but Kevin? This guy?

I was reading this article in The New Yorker about a book called "Eating animals" today and something came to my mind. Somehow categories define how we feel. I like eating "pork", but maybe I wouldn't like to eat "pig". We also do not want to have "cow sausages", let's better call them "beef sausages". Why don't we eat "dog" or "cat"? Well... because they are pets, aren't they?

As with just about everything for which one would create an ontology, the beer ontology could have been done a few different ways, but I actually think having fermentation style on the first level works well and seems logical (to me, anyway, as someone who has a few batches of homebrew under my belt). However, there are a few picky points of contention. "Bitter" doesn't really belong in its own alongside those styles because a bitter beer is usually a heavily hopped pale ale, and since you include pale ale as its own term, then bitter could spring from that.

Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2009

"In Tax Case, 4 Days Save Robertson $27 Million"

This article might not be available to you if you aren't a subscriber (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125729222815826639.html#mod=todays_us_mo...) so I'll summarize it.