Stultitia Delenda Est

“Milton [Friedman] argued that a society with more wealth can better pursue its transcendent goals, and more wealth is produced by maximizing profits. THat’s right, and is one crucial argument for capitalism. He further argued that a hired manager for Boeing who improves his social standing in Chicago by getting the corporation to give to the Lyric Opera is stealing money from the stockholders. That’s right, too, though there is a contrary economic argument, namely that the ability to play the noble lord with the stockholders’ money is part of executive compensation. The stockholders would have to pay the manager more in cash than they do if they insisted that he not be allowed to give away the corporation’s money to worthy causes.”

-Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues

She then goes on to note that Milton Friedman advocated maximizing value within ethical constraints, something that often gets missed by his detractors.

I haven’t had a chance to read P. J. O’Rourke’s new book, but I did stumble across this amazing interview he did for Wanderlust. They talk about his excellent book Holidays in Hell and compare it with his newly released sequel to it, Holidays in Heck. My favorite bit from the interview:

I was up on the Pakistan frontier, trying to get into Afghanistan as the Russians were being kicked out of there in 1989. And the best informed person I ran into was, of all things, a Christian missionary. He’d had fuck-all success converting anyone, but he had actually met the Taliban. As with many pious people the Taliban had respect for other religious people. They have a certain respect for other people of the Book. What they really hate are atheists.

Anyway, this missionary had a really nice relationship with the Taliban and at one point, in the chaos, he had to leave his warehouse full of food. The Taliban took it over and were launching anti-aircraft missiles from his warehouse. When he managed to get back to Kabul, the Taliban took him back to his warehouse and proudly showed him that they hadn’t touched any of his food. There’s rice and sugar and so on and in the month or so he’s been gone they have not touched this.

“Everything is here as you left it,” they said.

He pointed to the missile launcher and said “I don’t remember leaving that here.”

“No, no, no, that’s us. But we have not touched any of your food.”

From the wonderful Letters of Note blog comes this brilliant missive from H. L. Mencken. I idolize Mencken and think he was one of the best writers the English language has ever had. His lucidity and enchanting way with language far surpass any writer who has lived since.

This letter, sent to the abstract painter Charles Green Shaw, is a scattered list of seemingly haphazard observations. It bares reading in its entirety, but below is an excerpt from the transcription provided by Letters of Note:

10. I believe in marriage, and have whooped it up for years. It is the best solution, not only of the sex question, but also of the living question. I mean for the normal man. My own life has been too irregular for it: I have been to much engrossed in other things. But any plausible gal who really made up her mind to it could probably fetch me, even today. If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself. I’ll regret it bitterly for about a month, and then settle down contentedly.

11. I believe in and advocate monogamy. Adultery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table. This fact makes me careless of ordinary politeness. I don’t like to be made much of. Such things please only persons who are doubtful about their position. I was sure of mine, such as it is, at the age of 12.

12. Pilsner should be in Roman type, and begin with a capital.

13. I usually lie to women. They expect it, and it is pleasant to watch them trying to detect it. They seldom succeed. Women have a hard time in this world. Telling them the truth would be too cruel.

14. I am completely devoid of religious feeling. All religions seem ridiculous to me, and in bad taste. I do not believe in the immortality of the soul, nor in the soul. Ecclesiastics seem to me to be simply men who get their livings by false pretenses. Like all rogues, they are occasionally very amusing.

I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. It is well worth your time and attention.

Sorry for the light posting lately. I spent most of the past two weeks preparing for a job interview at work. (I’m applying for a more coding-heavy role.) The interview was a few days ago and I haven’t heard back yet, but now I’m getting caught up on all the stuff I didn’t do while I was plowing through pages and pages of practice questions.

In prepping for the interview, I picked up a couple of new texts to help me sharpen my skills. I wanted to say a few words about two of them.

The first is Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. The book is a collection of 150 programming questions, with solutions provided. It also feature brief, high-level overviews of major areas of knowledge. The questions themselves are excellent, but the provided solutions can be hit or miss. Most include sample code which appears to be correct, but the descriptions of their solutions can sometimes be vague and hard to follow.

I was also unimpressed with the overview at the beginning of each chapter. They tend to be too shallow to be very useful, and I found a few technical mistakes in them. (E.g., the book asserts that a full and complete binary tree will have 2ⁿ nodes. This is wrong. A full and complete binary tree will have a number of nodes that is one less than a power of two. To be more specific, it will have 2^h+1-1 nodes, where h is the height of the tree.)

All in all, if you’re prepping for an interview, this will be a handy book to have for the list of excellent coding questions it provides. I would recommend looking around for a used copy at a reasonable price.

The second book I wanted to comment on is Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne. The Sedgewick and Wayne Algorithms book is one of The Texts in algorithms, and it largely lives up to its reputation. It’s well organized, clearly written, and has excellent explanations and samples. It also has an excellent website that includes all the sample code from the book as well as notes and other resources.

Unfortunately, it too had some noticeable mistakes. The authors of this text, however, have taken the laudable step of making all the known errors available on the book’s site. This allows you to double check code that doesn’t appear correct or which doesn’t behave correctly when you run it.

I highly recommend this book. It’s a fantastic resource programmers of any level. For my purposes it served as a fantastic study text, but it would also be an invaluable reference resource or learning text as well.

One note: I got the Kindle edition of the book, and while the publisher did an awesome job with it, it’s probably worth it to get a physical copy. If for no other reason than it lets you pencil in the corrections to the mistakes listed on the book’s web site. That being said, I seriously doubt you’ll regret getting the Kindle edition.

Disclosure Notice

“Not every would-be Irish poet learned his art through a chance encounter with a fish.”

- Philip Freeman, The Philosopher and the Druids

“…the prevailing American view of the world and its mysteries is still a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attention that is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of the other fellow. It needed no official announcement to define the function and office of the republic as that of an international expert in morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the more backward nations. Within, as well as without, the eternal rapping of knuckles and proclaiming of new austerities goes on. The American, save in moments of conscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values, including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. He is beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly that there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its operation with a fanatical vigilance.”

– H. L. Mencken, Puritanism as a Literary Force

Tim Harford’s new book is getting quite a lot of press, and as a result he’s been popping up all over my Internet radar. Well worth your time are this interview he did with the excellent Surprisingly Free podcast, and this talk he did for TED:

Blogging later. In the meantime, I’m readin’ a book:

Discipline must come through liberty…We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute or as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life.

-Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method as quoted in Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use

I love that opening sentence. “Discipline must come through liberty.” That is so true and so eloquently stated. The only sure path towards self-control, self-mastery, and self-responsibility is through the exercise of our freedom. Human beings are radically free, and it’s only through that freedom that we can truly cultivate the responsibility that must accompany such liberty.

I’ll have more to say about Sullum’s book when I’m done with it (I’m maybe a dozen pages from the end), but I had to share that quote.