Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-27-2009

[andrewducker]

• Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge
  (tags: Singularity future intelligence interview technology)
• Israeli oranges faked in China
  Oh for goodness sake...
  (tags: EpicFail food israel iran)
• Cow urine drink set to launch
  Yum! Sign me up!
  (tags: EpicFail food drink india)
• Unschooling
  I'd have killed to have been part of the project they went through. As long as they maintained 80% grades they didn't have to attend classes. And when they were given this opportunity their grades went _up_.
  (tags: education learning unschooling)
• Programmer Competency Matrix
  Not sure I agree with all of it. But there are lots of talking points there.
  (tags: programming development Matrix competency)
• Good and Bad Procrastination
  You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.
  
  If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.
  (tags: procrastination productivity paulgraham)
• The Portuguese Experiment: Did Legalizing Drugs Work?
  Yes. Yes it did. I'll be keeping this one around to wave at people next time this debate comes up.
  (tags: drugs legalisation law europe)
• MoonLander
  A Lunar Lander clone. Infuriatingly addictive.
  (tags: flash games)

Comments

[yalovetz]

I think my teachers took a sort of informal unschooling approach to me when I was in high school. I wagged a lot of classes, but maintained A grades across the board, so in the end my teachers just asked that I try to stay on school premises if I wasn't attending classes, or at least let a responsible adult know where I was going if I left school premises.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The Portuguese article might imply that prohibition makes people so miserable that they're more likely to use drugs.

[matgb]

Problem with the Portuguese report. Written by the Cato institute. While I've no doubt, in this instance, that it's correct, Cato are notorious for biased reports that fulfill their policy objectives, even moreso than religious groups funding studies.

Bear that in mind—some anti types will dismiss it out of hand because of the source. And, unfortunately, given the source, I don't entirely blame them.

[andrewducker]

Yup, I noticed that.

But it's all I have to go on for the moment - and it did seem pretty reasonable on the face of it, at least not going all out to say "Huge Success" - just "Didn't make things worse and seems to have improved things a bit".

Hopefully there will be followups.