Spock’s emotional state is always set to “calm”, even when wildly inappropriate. He often gives many significant digits for probabilities that are grossly uncalibrated. (E.g: “Captain, if you steer the Enterprise directly into that black hole, our probability of surviving is only 2.234%” Yet nine times out of ten the Enterprise is not destroyed. What kind of tragic fool gives four significant digits for a figure that is off by two orders of magnitude?) Yet this popular image is how many people conceive of the duty to be “rational” - small wonder that they do not embrace it wholeheartedly.

Just a sample of the amazing facility for instance possessed by Eliezer Yudkowski, a self-taught AI researcher and guy behind Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

I’ve been slowly working my way through his writing over the past few months and can’t recommend him enough.

I’ve been talking with a number of you about Adobe and Apple’s platform fight. The latest monday note by Jean-Louis Gassée (who founded BeOS after leaving Apple) makes an excellent jumping-off point, explaining some of the history and elucidating (as always) the underlying strategies of the players. Whereas Adobe is trying to commoditize it’s compliments, Apple must hold onto it’s unique strengths:

Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future.

Gassée also nails what I find the most fascinating about the new Apple:

Does anyone mind that Jobs won’t sacrifice the truly strategic differentiation of the iPhone platform on the altar of cross-platform compatibility? Customers and critics don’t. They love the end-result. Nor do developers.

The response by the market (the consumer market and the developer market) supports Apple differentiating itself along a basis vector largely ignored by the rest of the computer industry.

This is extremely encouraging to me. I’ve always held that computers are not ready for the world, but we’re approaching and age where the average person can use a computer as a natural extension of themselves and their will to manipulate the world. I approve of what Apple is doing with the iPad not because they are Apple, but because their actions take us further toward this ideal.