Older blog entries for zhaoway (starting at number 306)

Steven Cheung 张五常在《卖橘者说》says vote by money is the best. My intuition is he is wrong. But I didn't know how to argue. A few days ago, I finally have a theory. :)

I read Karl Popper is against social science. certainly i disagree. but the argument is subtle. i remember when i first read Karl Popper quite a few years ago, i agree with him on this. i study game theory these days. in BusinessWeek, there was an editorial on this year's Nobel economics. the article blasts game theory ``not testable''. i agree. but i can make some change. :)

books by 吴思 are the best economics books i was reading so far. it's deep but it lacks mathematization. contemporary game theorists' work are good mathematics. but often bad economics. this is echoed by S Cheung and 杨小凯. it's interesting time for an economist.

i remember Knuth once said the 60s and 70s were golden times for computer scientists. it's like that for economists now.

yo! i'm back. :)

happy happy joy joy. :)

a few chinese books i'm reading:

• 陈桂棣和春桃的《中国农民调查》
• 吴思的《血酬定律》
• 吴思的《潜规则》
• 天则所的两本案例研究
• 王才亮的一本谈房改的书
• 李昌平等编的《税费改革》
• 吴敬琏的《当代中国经济改革》
• 何清涟的《现代化的陷阱》
• 肖特的《社会制度的经济理论》
• 扬的《个人策略与社会结构》
• 张五常的《佃农理论》
• 钱颖一的主页上的文章
• 青木昌彦的《比较制度分析》

and a few english ones

• a few articles by Janos Kornai
• a few by Avner Greif
• a few by Gerard Roland
• one by Acemoglu

read or die. :) なんしさん is cool! :)

today's good laugh from wikipedia general equlibrium:

... Some critics of general equilibrium modeling contend that much research in these models constitutes exercises in pure matheamtics with no connection to actual economies. "There are endeavors that now pass for the most desirable kind of economic contributions although they are just plain mathematical exercises, not only without any economic substance but also without any mathematical value" (Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen 1979). Georescu-Roegen cites as an example a paper that assumed more traders than there are points on a real line.

in these days, news from the arena of programming languages only reminds me how people can easily get excited over trivial things.

empirical and theoretical. many and many big volumes of trivialities are produced. and not necessarily easy to be learnt.

life is very short. time spent to learn a new, so called, fundamental innovation in programming languages, could be better spent elsewhere.

learn chemistry. learn economics. there're many whole world unknown to me. watch another japanes anime or tv series. they teach me more than old Alan Kay or old Guy Steele.

lisp or unit testing, i'd better spent more time with my life partners.

don't take me wrong. i like collecting programming languages. to this day, i've collected some of c, of course, and scheme and forth and c++ and java and python. and a little bit of perl and ruby and ocaml and clean and erlang. and even less so with a few more bizarre ones.

i've also collected some programming practices, such as literate programming, and such.

it's a difficult thing to say. it's like you asking me if i support the death penalty. i just can't give a quick answer.

but i do dislike people give easy answers in the face of real difficult questions.

there ARE real questions in the field of programming languages research.

for a quick and conservative adoption of scons, GenerateConfigH provides excellent example.

in fact, that example could be even simplified a little bit more.

it should be noted that it's still easy to provide the user the usual interface to a source package:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

just dump the m4 and autotools, in favour of python and scons. (i think it should be perfectly ok if one has nothing against make, especially when one's project is small.)

funniest ad of the week:

nobody reading your blog?

rotfl..

i thought AVL was initiatives of three persons. it seems it was two. (i am totally confused about the plural and singular stuff.)

suppose there is a solar system in a galaxy far far away.

suppose there is only one planet in this solar system.

suppose there is a civilization which is like the one on our earth about five hundred years ago.

now think about their Issac Newton.

can you notice something interesting?

now i, too, know that blogging is risky. :D

bonus point:

have you read the paper by nobel prize winner Michael Spence on Job Market Signaling?

a little economics is good for us. ;)