Jim Coyer’s Weblog

On the coming viability of a third party:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110008453
Well worth your time.

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Last night, celebrating a colleague’s promotion at Rock Bottom, someone brought up the Monty Hall Problem. Almost instantly, I was a vocal defender of apparently the wrong but intuitive answer to the problem. And although most of my friends crowded around the table knew the right answer and over time worked to try to needle me to accept I was wrong, 3 of us (eventually 2 of us) stuck to our guns.

It turns out it’s trickier than you think. Or maybe it’s better to say: thinking about it more leads you farther away from the right answer. The wikipedia article above does of good job of hitting you with several ways to look at it.

The more you think about it, the more interesting it gets.

I still don’t grok it as deeply as I really want to. Note to self: is this yet another example of the Bayesian way of the world? It just keeps coming up.

Schneier writes brilliantly about privacy and why it matters.

Oddly, the same old tired arguments about why only bad guys need privacy keep coming to light. At enonymous, we knew intrinsically that privacy wasn’t just something for people with something to hide, it was something we all need and all expect — until it’s suddenly taken away. Back in 1999, it was being taken away as the Net started to accelerate, and it hasn’t stopped.

Privacy as an end to itself matters, but there’s far more. At enonymous, we figured the only way people would be willing to give up very personal information for targeted advertising or customized content was anonymity. It made alot of sense then and it still does now. Strangely, the public’s interest and concern in privacy went away quickly after 2000, but maybe now as we learn about the NSA, that concern will be back. I hope so. For privacy’s sake, but for the sake too of personalization done right.

Read today, belatedly, that Trevanian died in England this past December.

It’s hard for me to think of a more fundmental novel than Shibumi. It goes back for me nearly as long as I can remember. Mariko… Otake-san…. go and the Basque country…

I can still recall the pre-Internet excitement I had one evening exploring the Academy’s library stacks to find an old 1979 New York Times interview that divulged his true name. Or, years later, of discovering his name in a University of Texas faculty directory late one evening in Champaign.

As Pournelle would say, Rest In Peace.