A couple of years ago, I went looking for an RSS reader. For those not familiar with the concept, an RSS reader is a piece of software that maintains a list of blogs, pulls their RSS feeds, and displays a list of articles in them. And, if the blog maintainer puts the full text of his articles in the feed, it lets you read them. A decent RSS reader also remembers which articles you’ve read, and either marks them accordingly or only shows you the new ones. For subscribing to blogs that are only occasionally updated (like this one), an RSS reader is almost a necessity: it does the boring work of repeatedly checking for new articles when there seldom are any.

A couple of quick tips for improving the way the web looks under Linux:

When I first read Shannon’s 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, one set of numbers particularly jumped out at me: the numbers for the difference between the error rate of a communications channel and the rate at which information is lost from it. I recently ran into a free link to the paper (in a blog post by Federico Pereiro), which reminded me of it. As Shannon explains the issue:

Bread right out of the oven has a taste that beats most anything that can be bought in a store. Even in stores that sell bread baked on the same day, it has usually been sitting around for hours. But baking one’s own bread is generally a hassle. Bread machines make it much easier, but like all machines, they aren’t quite as easy to deal with as one first imagines. They take up space; they sometimes break; they have to be cleaned. (The one I once owned featured an impeller that had to be dug out of the bottom of each loaf.) Nonstick surfaces make cleaning easier, but don’t entirely eliminate it.

Christopher Montgomery (“Monty”) recently posted an excellent argument against distributing music in 192 kHz, 24-bit form, as opposed to the usual 44.1 kHz (or 48 kHz), 16-bit form. I think, however, that many of the people who are inclined to doubt this sort of thing are going to doubt it at a much more fundamental level than the level he’s addressed it at. And I don’t just mean the math-phobic; I know I would have doubted it, once. For years, and even after finishing an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, I wondered whether speaking of signals in terms of their frequency content was really something that could be done as glibly and freely as everyone seemed to assume it could be. It’s an assumption that pervades Monty’s argument – for instance, when he states that “all signals with content entirely below the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) are captured perfectly and completely by sampling”. If you don’t believe in speaking of signals in terms of their frequency content, you won’t know what to make of that sentence.

The book Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, is widely recommended to those wishing to know about the US political system. Personally, I tried to read it at one point, but found it boring, and only got through fifty pages or so. Yet I devoured from cover to cover Tocqueville’s later book The Old Regime and the Revolution, about pre-revolutionary France. It’s a much better book, in a lot of ways.

The placebo effect is well known for interfering with medical experiments. It’s not just that if you tell patients that a drug is going to have an effect they tend to believe it has had that effect. It’s that it tends to actually have that effect, when measured by objective measures such as blood tests. Thus the use of double-blindness in experiments, where not only the patients but also the doctors dealing with them have no idea whether they’ve been given the active drug or a placebo. Something about wishing really does make it so, somewhat, when it comes to health; the placebo effect is not just in patients’ minds but also in their bodies.

Back in June (this blog does not in any way aim to be a timely reporter of news), Transocean released their report on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I found it interesting, and read most of it; it seems like primarily an honest effort to get to the bottom of the disaster, not an exercise in blame-shifting and ass-covering. (I am not involved in the industry, so might be being a bit naive here, but at least have the miserable excuse that I am unbiased.) There is only one place, described below, where I noticed the report getting weaselly. Otherwise, the bad decisions were quite plainly BP’s, both as a matter of law (they being the “operator” who was in control) and as a matter of fact; so Transocean didn’t need to indulge in evasiveness, but could just plainly state what happened, and what should have been done better.

When I first got into messing with computer hardware, the received wisdom as regards fan bearings, for cooling fans on computers, was that there were two types, ball bearings and sleeve bearings, and that the tradeoffs were that ball bearings were noisier, but that sleeve bearings tended were less reliable, and tended to fail silently, likely letting the device they were cooling overheat and fail. Ball bearings get a lot noisier before they fail, and were thus the recommended solution for most purposes.

For all the talk, these days, of the problems that state pension funds are getting into, I haven’t seen anyone argue against their existence. But the case against them is simple and strong.