Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-29-2010

[andrewducker]

• Housing benefit: the facts
  (tags: benefits housing government uk)
• Condorcet 101, or We Can Do Better Than AV
  (tags: voting)
• Apple has transphobic app on the iPhone.
  (tags: apps iphone apple)
• FTSE 100 executive pay rises 55%. I'd like to see a comparison to 2008.
  (tags: money income earnings uk)
• Create an Android smartphone to your liking. Are phones about to become as customisable as PCs?
  (tags: mobile_phones android)
• The Maturity Climb (as illustrated by some terribly cute goats)
  (tags: maturity adult learning)
• Why Obama is right on don't ask don't tell
  (tags: rights gay military)
• Child benefit cuts exposed as unworkable
  (tags: benefits uk government)
• The greatest science-fiction story ever written.
  (tags: scifi writing#)

Comments

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

The goats are awesome, but I'm not entirely sure, having seen a number of people who hurt themselves with this, that "blames self for world" is a particularly positive worldview.

[andrewducker]

You'll notice that that isn't a terribly happy goat, and is facing away from us. I think that's supposed to show people going too far in the direction of taking responsibility.

(Edit: Much like "obsessed with facts", who looks a lot less happy than the one who merely recognises its lack of knowledge.)

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, yeah.

It's a great infographic. I particularly liked the "knows nothing" goat - although again, I've never been certain to what extent underestimating your knowledge is a bad thing.

(I've been poked for being too bashful about my knowledge when lecturing in the past - a good friend of mine gave me a Solid Talking To about not prefacing lectures at academic conferences with jokes about being two to four degrees, doctorates and in some cases tenured professorships behind everyone else in the room.)

[andrewducker]

Oh God, Yes. I hate speakers who put themselves down. Feel free to preface individual statements with "maybe", "it indicates", "we suspect that", etc. to indicate what things you aren't sure of, but don't tell me that you aren't worth listening to!

I feel trapped in the middle ground a lot. I'm a better developer than a lot of people where I work - but I know that there are vastly better people out there. If you asked me to rate my coding skills it would be incredibly hard to do, and depend very much on who I was choosing to compare myself against in my head.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Noted, thanks. That's interesting.

I have a wide variety of skills, and the ones I'm really good at are not always the ones I'm talking about...

[andrewducker]

Pfft. If people _keep_ paying you to talk about them then you must be doing something right!

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

Heh, it's more that I'd rather spend more time talking about the stuff I'm really good at. But that's a marketing problem...

[matgb]

The comments on that DODT piece are a bit, um, weird?

Another black homophobe as an attack on someone clearly saying he wants repeal? There are constitutional procedures and rules to follow, Obama's following them, and I think he's doing it the right way.

If he loses in 2014, without repeal there could be a massive backlash, repeal is actually needed. Of course, struck down as unconstitutional would be even better, but then there'd be some blaming "activist judges" despite, well, them clearly not being so.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that being unconstitutional is necessarily better, because it leaves things open to another court case later. Changing the law is harder, but worth it for reasons of legitimacy.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

I LOL'd at the sci-fi story. Nice punch line.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that punchline at all!