Category: link blog

Link blog: europe, debugging, brexit, shopping

There’s a lot wrong with this viral list about the Lisbon Treaty – Full Fact
A large number of our readers have asked us to factcheck a list of claims about the Lisbon Treaty, or “what will actually happen if we stay in the EU”, which has gone viral on social media.

The list has appeared in numerous versions across different platforms since mid-December. The text at the beginning and end is often different, but the central list of claims is virtually identical across most of the versions we’ve seen.

Much of it is wrong. The list is a mixture of false claims, and claims that have some truth but could be misleading given the context.
(tags: brexit politics lisbon propaganda eu europe)

Stoicism’s Appeal to the Rich and Powerful – Ex Urbe

(tags: stoicism philosophy)

How to Buy a Car Without Interacting With a Human – The Toast
I wonder whether this works in the UK…
(tags: shopping cars money car)
Debugging Vim by example – David Winterbottom
“This post illustrates a range of debugging and profiling approaches for Vim by walking through real issues I’ve recently investigated, diagnosed and resolved. “
(tags: vim debugging)

Link blog: psychology, research, culture, internet

Sick and tired: Online activists are silencing us, scientists say
“Scientists researching treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome say they face online abuse and harassment. Some are leaving the field. It’s a ‘new normal,’ they say, and patients may lose out.”
(tags: research culture psychology internet trolling medicine)

Link blog: ferrets, barnsley, funny, yorkshire

The King of the Ferret Leggers | Outside Online
“One can only wonder what suffering might have been avoided if the Argentine junta had been informed that sportsmen in England put down their pants animals that are known only for their astonishingly powerful bites and their penchant for insinuating themselves into small dark holes. Perhaps the generals would have reconsidered their actions on the Falklands.”
(tags: ferrets barnsley yorkshire funny)

Link blog: politics, brexit

Stumbling and Mumbling: The right’s triumph; the left’s complicity
“If I’d told you just four years ago that I was a Remainer, you wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. The fact that we now speak about little else reveals an under-appreciated fact about politics – that power consists not merely in getting your own way when conflict arises, but in shaping the agenda.

Back in 2015 less than 10% (pdf) of people thought relations with the EU were the important political issue – far fewer than cited the NHS, economy or crime. And yet a handful of cranks have succeeded in making Brexit (a word almost unheard in 2015) dominate politics to the exclusion of all else.”
(tags: politics brexit)

Link blog: epistemology, brexit, parliament, constitution

Quine’s Naturalism – 3:AM Magazine
“Sense data, Quine came to realize, are just as much theoretical posits as the electrons, bacteria, and chromosomes we supposedly construct from them. We do not see ‘patches of green, brown, and grey’ when we are walking through a forest; we see trees, logs, and squirrels. This is why it requires severe training to teach amateur painters to reproduce their everyday three-dimensional view of the world on a two-dimensional canvas.”
(tags: quine philosophy naturalism science epistemology)
Parliament is now at war with government – and it’s winning
“The content of Theresa May’s defeats over the last couple of days isn’t particularly meaningful, but the fact they happened at all suggests that parliament’s guerrilla war against the government has started. And it seems to be winning.”
(tags: constitution brexit politics parliament)

Link blog: C, punning, programming, casting

Type punning isn’t funny: Using pointers to recast in C is bad.
A common C programming technique (casting between pointers to structures) leads to problems when strict aliasing is turned on (as it is if you set -O2 -O3 in gcc).
(tags: C programming casting punning)
Type Punning, Strict Aliasing, and Optimization – Embedded in Academia
More on the type punning/aliasing business.
(tags: C punning aliasing programming)