Synposium

Jason Y. Sproul

November 13, 2011
by jsproul
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Rands In Repose: Why?

“Having an opinion takes work.” Or at least it should – and watching Fox News doesn’t count.

Rands in Repose: Why? »

Early in the design discussion for the logo for the latest Rands in Repose charity t-shirt, Robert Padbury responded to my early design feedback: “You know, I realized something when I was thinking about this the other day – People don’t really have more than the following three responses to a design:

  1. It’s awesome.
  2. It sucks.
  3. Apathy.”

This short list of responses captured me with their lack of subtlety. Three bullets effectively describe the majority of opinions people have about topics that often deserve more consideration. While Robert’s eventual point was different, his observation serves as a starting point for understanding why I’m once again offering a t-shirt supporting a literacy charity.

October 10, 2008
by jsproul
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What’s gone wrong with the GOP?

David Brooks, in one of his more reasonable moods, explains what has gone wrong with the Republican party, as exemplified by Sarah Palin. To summarize, the strategists and the party insiders have allowed the ends to justify the means to such an extent that the ends have been almost completely forgotten (outside of shallow rhetoric). In the quest for power the anti-intellectual undercurrents of American society have been manipulated, encouraged, and used to advance narrow partisanship to a truly dangerous extent—especially moving into the climate of fear surrounding the current financial catastrophe.

[NOTE: I was once the president of the Wesleyan Republicans.]

December 1, 2007
by jsproul
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From the Upgrades are Never Easy department

After almost seven years, my old Athlon XP 1500/Asus A7V266-E PC finally died. Looks like either the power supply or the motherboard went bad and toasted several pins on the ATX power connector. So I bit the proverbial bullet and bought a Core 2 Duo E6850 (3.0GHz) running on a Gigabyte P35 motherboard (GA-P35-DS4 v2.0) with 2GB of PC2-8500 RAM (that’s 1066MHz DDR2). Got everything installed with a fresh copy of XP… and nearly had a heart attack when I couldn’t read the files from my old hard drive. Then I realized that this is because the NTFS permissions on the drive were locked to the UUIDs on my old Win2K install. Nice.

March 15, 2007
by jsproul
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The supreme confidence of utter incompetence

According to a study published in 2000 by Dr. David A. Dunning of Cornell University, “most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent… On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities…” This is frighteningly accurate in many companies, not to mention the current White House.