Author Archives: Paul

Ambivalence

I strongly opposed the Iraq war. I was in favor of the US invasion of Afghanistan. I favored intervention in Kosovo and the first gulf war. I opposed the US interventions in Latin America in the 1980s. I held all … Continue reading

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My letter to the US Patent Office

(I wrote this letter this morning, after seeing from Matt Cutts and Daniel Tunkelang that the Patent Office was soliciting guidance on patents following the Bilski decision. I wrote it quickly and it’s less polished than I would have liked, … Continue reading

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Intelligence failure?

Spencer Ackerman argues that attempted suicide bombing of Flight 253 on Christmas Day didn’t necessarily represent an intelligence failure. I think the key part of his post is: The intelligence community is drinking from a fire hose of data, a … Continue reading

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“Polled” on Net Neutrality

I just participated in a phone poll from some outfit (Western Wats) calling with caller ID saying 801-823-2023. Occasionally, I’ll do these things out of curiosity about what they’re asking, but this one really offended me by how blatantly the … Continue reading

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Newspapers just don’t get the web, part 7542

I spent a little time playing The New York Times’s Times Reader 2.0 this evening and it’s pretty nice. It gives what appears to be a full copy of the day’s Times in an easy to browse format. Cut and … Continue reading

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The things we carried (personal electronics edition)

For a recent family vacation, we had with us two iPhones two iPod nanos a speaker/docking station for the iPods a MacBook a Kindle a Panasonic LX3 a Flip Mino and a Nintendo DSi At one point on the outbound … Continue reading

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The Irrationality of Flexible Spending Accounts

Ezra Klein has a good post up today on the problems of giving employers, but not individuals, a tax exemption on health insurance. This is clearly central to the problems of healthcare financing in the US, but, given how things … Continue reading

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Lawrence Lessig and Why I’m Going on Strike

Lawrence Lessig spoke at Google this week on his and Joe Trippi’s Change Congress organization. In particular, he made a convincing pitch for the Strike 4 Change initiative, which asks people to make a pledge: “I’m pledging not to donate … Continue reading

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“Soonly”

Allie, our three year old, just told me she’d do something “soonly,” obviously generalizing from an observation that she wanted a word that ended in “-ly” for that role. Matthew, our son, didn’t make the same types of errors at … Continue reading

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Interviewing someone is a skill

We saw Paul Auster interviewed tonight as part of the City Arts & Lectures 826 Valencia Program. Auster is one of my favorite authors — very few books are as good as his Leviathan and others, from the sparse New … Continue reading

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