1. failing to hear or understand that quicker may be more expensive in the long-run?
2. discounting future costs too heavily?
3. expecting future costs that are too low?
4. discounting their future costs correctly, and costs to others too heavily?
5. getting it right?

The correct discount rate within any company must vary depending on its health and funding, so the rate at which people discount too heavily must also vary. If the discount rate is very high, as it may be for a startup, for instance, then the decision that brings revenue quickly will be the right one.

Are there any other observable patterns in these decisions?

Fiction

Matter, Iain M. Banks
I can’t get enough of Banks’s Culture, so I wasn’t surprised when I really enjoyed this one. It’s a monster compared to his earlier novels, nearly 600 pages. More tiny people amongst the megastructures.

Halting State, Charles Stross
I mentioned this one back in January, since it seemed to have been only weeks ahead of reality. Like some other Stross novels, the plots turn over quicker and quicker as the story reached its conclusion. I felt like I was starting to lose it near the end, but it was still fun, and hugely imaginative.

Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross
Stross conjures up yet another universe with enough character to convince. I’m not totally sold on the actual plot in this one – yet again it moves faster and faster toward the end. What left me confused wasn’t the final plot movement, but the loose-end collection – I’d put most of it out of my mind in order to keep following. The thing is, this book was still immensely enjoyable anyway. 

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
This one deserves its big reputation. I recognised a worryingly large part of myself in the main character. Very funny.

And also:The Family Trade and The Hidden Family by Charles Stross

Non-fiction

Failure Is Not An Option, Gene Kranz
For a space nerd, this is unmissable stuff. Mission control from Mercury to Apollo, by a man who was there for all of it. For me, it hit the right balance of the technical and the personal.

100 Ways to Save the World, Johan Tell
Well intentioned, I’m sure. Not nearly honest enough about what needs to be done for my liking.

How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich
Another book on heuristics and biases. If you haven’t read any, you really should. The big challenge, of course, is applying the lessons to your own thinking. This is why I keep reading books from this genre – the reminders and rephrasings are useful in trying to kick my own thinking into shape.

Heat, George Monbiot
George thinks catastrophic warming can still, just about, be stopped.

The Revenge of Gaia, James Lovelock
James doesn’t. Interestingly, George Monbiot recently put aside some of his old dislike for nuclear power. I think this was overdue.

And also:Don’t Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Meme parent: BoingBoing, as usual.

This is one of the main purposes of coding standards, particularly formatting rules: to make code easy to read and understand. The shape of the code on the screen should tell you something about how it works before you read a single word of it.

However, reasoning about individual lines of code is too slow a process when you want to know about how a large piece of software works. Imagine living your life without ever seeing or hearing about cars, and then being presented with one. If you had to understand what it did, but now necessarily how it did it, would you prefer to take the car apart and examine every component, or to experiment with the controls? Wouldn’t it be easier still if the car’s controls had labels on them that described what they did?

What the poor maintenance programmer needs to be able to do is think in terms of large blocks of code. Two things wil help him to do this: orthogonality and sensible naming.

In programming terms, orthogonality means that each named block does what it is supposed to do and no more. (If it did any less, that would be a bug). When you use the gear stick, it doesn’t change the gear and apply the brakes. When you use the steering wheel, it doesn’t steer the car and turn on the CD player. In these examples, the controls for the gear, brakes and steering are unhelpful because they are not orthogonal – conceptually different parts of the system cannot be used in isolation from each other.

Sensible naming is almost as simple as it sounds. Functions should generally be named for what they return, and procedures for what they do. This helps with readability of code calling these blocks. The important thing to remember about naming, though, is to take a step back when doing it. The names that are obvious to you when you’ve just spent two days coding something will not be obvious to anyone else, and in 18 months they won’t be obvious to you either. As far as possible, your code should be readable to someone who is not closely acquainted with the subject matter.

*You can say it’s sexist, but we all know it’s actually quite realistic.

What’s interesting is what ‘ours’ means in that sentence. I am no expert, but I guess that large parts of Kosovo are privately owned, and that neither the old Serbian nor the new Kosovan government would claim ownership of them. However, those governments would claim that their laws extend over that land. The ownership that Bojana is talking about is being in charge of, rather than having exclusive rights to.

So what I’m left thinking is that Bojana believes that, no matter who buys the land of Kosovo, Serbia must remain in charge. Even when Kosovo is 90% or more ethnic Albanian, Serbia must be in charge. I doubt that it’s cost-effective for Serbia to rule a land that doesn’t want to be ruled. So in the absence of an economic motive, why do some Serbs want so badly to be in charge of Kosovo?

1. Having responsibilities – chiefly, having to be awake, sober and somewhere other than bed at nine in the morning.
2. Having more money – so beer with a premium of 30% or more (off the top of my head) doesn’t seem so unreasonable.

What I want to know is, in the absence of those two drivers, how many indiscriminate pissheads would become connoiseurs of wine and ale? Have we convinced ourselves that we like them because we know we can’t get slaughtered every night?

A counterexample would be a British male who had the opportunity to get plastered regularly on cheap booze, but who passed it up for restraint and more expensive drinks. I can think of no-one who falls into this category.

I’m fairly ignorant when it comes to wine, which is not to say I don’t enjoy it. I’ve known for a while that I’m not really capable of telling good wine from average, although I’d like to think I could spot the bad. I think that I prefer red to white, like Shiraz and dislike Chardonnay, but I also think I’m probably just trying to fool myself.

I’ve a good mind to buy half a dozen bottles and try a double-blind test. Anyone fancy some experimentation, strictly in the name of science?

• My weight is down again. The calorie counting, gym trips and swimming are gradually working. The only problems have been when eating out, or snacking after drinking.
• The blogging is ongoing, as you can see here or at my Oracle blog. I’ve remembered now something I had previously forgotten: writing a well-researched, clear article is difficult and time-consuming.
• Getting up early is now pretty much habit. I sometimes have to remind myself to do something other with the time than read Bloglines!
• I’ve cut back on the booze. It’s particularly important when you’re also trying to count calories. Only two exceptions to the six-unit rule so far, despite being tempted a few times.
• The Spanish is going fairly well, but would be going better if I actually made an effort outside of the class.
• Budgeting needs more attention.

If it wasn’t for one epic fail of a weekend, I’d have done almost perfectly on the first four points. Good weekend though! So the only two that need serious work are the last two. Let’s see how I do in February.

Like another modern Aristotle of SF, Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross seems to understand everything, including economics. More importantly, he understands why it’s important (something I only started to grasp a couple of years ago) and can explain it without killing the story. So Halting State spends some of its time discussing money supply and inflation within virtual worlds. So far ahead of the curve, so Charles Stross, I think.

Last night I picked up this week’s Economist, to find mention in the business headlines of Second Life‘s financial crisis. Halting State‘s characters refer to Second Life as a metaverse, not a MMORPG, but I still find this amazing. Theoretical GDPs and game-currency-to-hard-currency exchange rates have been published for a while now, but maybe the crossover from amusing sideline to area of serious interest is closer than even Charles Stross thinks.

Obviously, no amount of matching values from profiles will tell an advertiser exactly who will buy their stuff, but they will want to play the odds. It’s generally a waste of money to advertise a UK service to someone living in France, or to advertise books to someone who hasn’t filled in the “Favourite Books” field. On the other hand, travel, financial products and cosmetic surgery can be usefully adertised to both sexes, so you wouldn’t want to filter out some of that potential audience.

Now, if advertisers know their desired audience, and have tracked their previous successes and failures, they will have a good idea of which fields in my personal information are important and which are not. They probably have hard evidence to back this up.

The second and subsequent lines of my Facebook profile are:

These three bits of info are the truth and the whole (relevant) truth. Facebook advertisers seem to be very interested in them, judging by the ads that are normally shown to me – I guess about a third are dating-related.

So I was a little surprised, initially, to see an ad earlier for www.urbanconnections.co.uk, a gay dating/event site. Didn’t they see that I am “Interested In” women, and not men? A couple of seconds later I clicked that they probably don’t care what I put in “Interested In” – they presumably figure that there are enough men out there in the closet that it’s worth advertising to the apparently straight men as well as the openly gay. And they quite possibly have the statistics to back this up.

I wonder what else you could find out about society by examining Facebook advertising patterns, maybe using multiple fake accounts. Other people have been datamining it recently as well, although not using any advertising-related data. My hope with advertisers’ choices is that at least some of them would be gathering real evidence of what worked, rather than just guessing.