In Hunting the elusive search strategy Jon Udell proposes to study the methods that people use to effectively search. He proposes capturing individual cases of searching for something and then analyzing those cases.
The point is to help people learn to search.
That’s an interesting approach, and it would benefit from having some good tools to capture [...]

I have been reading The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs.
It was published in 1969 which means I have been walking around blindly for the past 37 years not noticing it. I don’t know how that is possible. So many of my interests intersect in this single thin book, the history of agriculture, the development [...]

In honor of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, quotations from Rumsfeld’s Rules

It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.
If a prospective presidential approach can’t be explained clearly enough to be understood well, it probably hasn’t been thought through well enough. If not well understood by the American people, it probably won’t [...]

Regular readers know have a handful of disparate phenomena that are interesting to me because they are mathematically similar. Each is a process that traverses a probability tree and becomes more or less probably as the number of branches in the tree increase. My posts on Wiio’s Laws, network effects in rural economies (Jane [...]

Steve Yegge wants to hear about my gross conceptual misunderstandings. I’ve had a couple in the hopper to blog about for a while, so I’ll take the opportunity of this new blog to mention two I’ve become clear on over the past few years. Both relate to plumbing and water temperature.
Once when I was about [...]

This week both President Bush and Vice President Cheney have pointed fingers at the press for focusing on the bad news from Iraq. These attempts to salvage US public opinion in favor of Iraqi War and against President Bush follow on earlier effort by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to shape media coverage to [...]

Last week Andrew Sullivan was raising the issue of ex post facto claims that the speaker/writer knew Saddam did not have WMD. Examples here,here, here, and here.
The central nugget:
I’m now overwhelmed by how many people say they now opposed the war all along because they could see that the WMD issue was invalid. It’s amazing [...]

My rule of thumb for analyzing an argument was anticipated by Wiio1 in the late 70’s.
My argument:
The likelihood of the conclusion of an argument being true is the product of the likelihoods of each statement used in reaching that conclusion being true.
Wiio’s conclusion from an inspection of each statement takes this my argument to its [...]

I’ve been thinking over the past month more about experience, permanence and regrets.
The conventional wisdom is that in a person’s life, they make mistakes when they are young, which they regret, learn from and never do again.
This sounds great to me. Let’s encourage everyone to make as many mistakes as possible, then they [...]

In my previous rule of thumb for getting to your destination quickly, I recommended that you take the first available turn. Here is a rule for selecting when confronted with equivalent two turns,
Keep going the way you were going.
Since this situation may depend entirely on the boundary conditions, here is the example that [...]