November 2017

Buddhism Is More ‘Western’ Than You Think – NYTimes.com
Argues that incomprehensible gnomic sayings are a Western stereotype of what Eastern philosophy is.
(tags: meditation buddhism philosophy paradox)
Inspiring Philosophy and the Laws of Logic: Part 1 – UseOfReason
What could apologists be talking about when they speak of “the laws of logic”? (This is usually part of an argument that God is needed for there to be such laws). Discusses various different logics, what Godel really proved, and a bunch of other stuff.
(tags: philosophy mathematics logic presuppositionalism apologetics godel)
Thin Pinstriped Line: The business of Remembering
Veteran and civil servant “Sir Humphrey” on poppies: “I have grown increasingly concerned at the manner in which manufactured outrage focuses on any organisation or individual that challenges the Poppy status quo, by not wearing one. If you are wearing one only because everyone else is wearing one, then perhaps it is time to ask whether the Poppy has become a victim of its own success.

As we move into the world where we are over a century on from the events of WW1, perhaps the time has come to ask if it is time to evolve the service of Remembrance, and perhaps do it differently. I do feel that the need to remember is always appropriate, but that the means by which a simple silence has become a business and outrage outlet to sell papers is increasingly distasteful. “
(tags: war remembrance poppy politics media)

What every systems programmer should know about lockless concurrency
“Seasoned programmers are familiar with concurrency building blocks like mutexes, semaphores, and condition variables. But what makes them work? How do we write concurrent code when we can’t use them, like when we’re working below the operating system in an embedded environment, or when we can’t block due to hard time constraints? And since your system transforms your code into things you didn’t write, running in orders you never asked for, how do multithreaded programs work at all? Concurrency—especially
on modern hardware—is a complicated and unintuitive topic, but let’s try to cover some fundamentals.”
(tags: concurrency programming mutex)