Consultingsmiths.com

TOTD

David — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:41:06 +0000

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. – Richard Feynman

TOTD

David — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:29:20 +0000

We are as gods, and might as well get good at it. – The Whole Earth Catalog (1968)

TOTD

David — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:32:50 +0000

All attacks on science are ultimately an attack on freedom. All attacks on religion are ultimately an attack on mind. – Robert W. Godwin

TOTD

David — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:43:30 +0000

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. – Anne Lamott (Traveling Mercies, credited to “my priest friend Tom”)

TOTD

David — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:47:29 +0000

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. – Mark Twain

TOTD

David — Tue, 11 May 2010 20:15:02 +0000

It is not more objective to narrate an outrage calmly. – James Chastek

Tyranny of the Mayors

David — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:32:33 +0000

It’s not that I am opposed to government, I am opposed to big, centralized, overwhelming, national government. Give me the Tyranny of the Mayors, I can change mayors faster than Dominos can deliver pizza! – Martin Lee Rose

TOTD

David — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:33:48 +0000

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. – Richard Feynman

TOTD

David — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:30:50 +0000

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair

Algorithms Yet Again

David — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 15:37:30 +0000

To Amazon’s credit, I didn’t find anything to add to this category yesterday. That may have been from a lack of trying, but so be it.

This morning it was easy – paging backward through the 44 screens of recommendations, I immediately came upon “Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present: An Ecological Perspective.”

How so? “Because you rated…” – are you ready – John Keegan’s “A History of Warfare.”

Your guess is as good as mine, since the product description is full of “ecological anthropology,” “adaptive systems” and dizzying phrases like “Utilizing ethnographic and archaeological data and an update paradigm derived from the best features of cultural ecology…”

One useful data point – it is paired in the “Frequently Bought Together” with Victor Davis Hanson’s “Carnage and Culture” – are these new paradigm cultural ecologists in fact closet warmongers? There has to be an interesting research project buried in there somewhere, if the right grant can be found.