people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family.

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

"These are very big effects - the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says Baumeister. "

Green Dam has many uses. It can police a list of forbidden Web sites. It can monitor a user's reading habits. It can even enlist the computer in some massive botnet attack, as part of a hypothetical future cyberwar.

What are your predictions for the future of computer science?
HA: Hmm, I don't even know what the recent past of computer science is, much less the future. So if I stand on my soapbox, I must say I believe the future of computer science is information science. Cornell has a nice way of saying it – they talk about computer science inside the box and outside the box. So inside the box is the compiler stuff that makes it work, and the detailed kinds of operating systems, and all of that; and outside the box is the impact that it has on the world. I think that computer science is getting dragged by its ears into understanding that the fundamental problem is the impact that it has on the world. Faculty need to figure out that they're working on the problems of 20 years ago. It’s funny, some people at Google kind of understand this. There are all these people who work on distributed computing, and yet there are these wonderful things you do inside Google. Folks think they understand what scalability means as a problem, and they don't – the issues are different and bigger and you haven't even seen the phenomenon people say they're studying. So to me, the future of computer science really is information.

Steps to reproduce (on mac osx leopard): 1. log on using SSH 2. start screen 3. detach and logoff 4. logon again, screen -dr

At this point screen is in a weird state with the following symptoms: - DNS requests do not work: cannot resolve domain.tld: Unknown host - 'whoami' returns the uid of the user instead of the username - sudo gives: sudo: uid 501 does not exist in the passwd file!

people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family.

Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.

"These are very big effects - the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says Baumeister. "

Frost himself warned "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem – very tricky."

The assumption is that each voter will vote for the candidate or party that is closest to his or her political position. Thus when a candidate takes a position to the right of the other candidate he or she will get the votes of all to the right of that position. As with the ice cream sellers on the beach the political candidates will choose a political position that is virtually the same as their opponent's. Furthermore the candidates will be driven to select the political position of the median voter.

The Kruskal count shows how seemingly unconnected or unrelated chains of events can lock together after a while. Such counterintuitive processes underlie many amazing coincidences and startling predictions. They're what the magician has up his sleeve.

Extreme redundancy

 If the whole idea is to leverage redundancy then the groups who author the launch control code for the Space Shuttle have made this an extreme sport. They have two separate isolated teams--working in different parts of the country--who both implement against exactly the same spec but are allowed no cross-communication at all. They plan their design independently and code independently to produce two programs that both do exactly the same thing, but not the same way. Both programs are installed on redundant computers aboard the Shuttle, each receiving the same input and issuing the same commands to control thrusters and flight surfaces. Only one program is allowed to be dominant, but its output is compared against the output of its sister program to make sure they're exactly the same. If there's a deviation then ground control can pick which one "wins" the argument, or abort the mission.

When you, the student writer, understand that nobody wants to read your shit, you develop empathy. You acquire that skill which is indispensable to all artists and entrepreneurs: the ability to switch back and forth in your imagination from your own point of view as writer/painter/seller to the point of view of your imagined reader/gallery-goer/customer.

In December of 2007 and January of 2008 I interviewed a sampling of the really high achievers here at the Field Guide and I learned an amazing time management revelation.

They do know a secret but it is not the one you might expect. The super achievers know that time management is a myth. They focus not on managing their time but on managing their achievements.

They know a to do list is often used as an excuse to avoid the difficult, yet critical, task. They refer to this ignored task as the elephant or 800 pound gorilla in the room.

What other easy-to-punish consequential lies do we tolerate, and why?

If you knew someone who was wrong 99.99% of the time on yes-or-no questions, you could obtain 99.99% accuracy just by reversing their answers.  They would need to do all the work of obtaining good evidence entangled with reality, and processing that evidence coherently, just to anticorrelate that reliably.  They would have to be superintelligent to be that stupid.

A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken.

If stupidity does not reliably anticorrelate with truth, how much less should human evil anticorrelate with truth?  The converse of the halo effect is the horns effect:  All perceived negative qualities correlate.  If Stalin is evil, then everything he says should be false.  You wouldn't want to agree with Stalin, would you?