Book: To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

This history of World War I traces the intertwined lives of a selection of British citizens before and during the conflict. Some supported the war and some opposed it, and most of them were fairly important for their respective side.
The scope and senselessness of the tragedy are difficult to comprehend, but this book helps a little. What terrible mistakes are we making that future generations will look back on with incomprehension?
Thank you, Amy.
And We’re Back
Site was down for a few days, should be OK now that I have my DNS in order.
Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Fantastic. Kahneman reviews much of the recent research in behavioral economics and related disciplines, including his own work (he is one of the founders of the field).
The overarching topic is the tension between our fast, intuitive modes of thought and our more deliberative, somewhat rational side.
It is an enlightening and humbling tour around the limits of human rationality.
Emacs flymake for HTML and Haskell modes
I’m using the default Emacs 23 on Ubuntu 11.10 and both the HTML and Haskell flymake modes seem to be broken. For the HTML mode the problem seems to be that the version of xmlstarlet installed on Ubuntu needs another command line switch to make it print out the information that flymake needs, like line numbers. Here is some elisp code to fix that:
(defun flymake-xml-init ()
(list "xmlstarlet"
(list "val" "-e" "-q"
(flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
'flymake-create-temp-inplace))))
Strictly speaking I don’t think the -q argument is actually needed, but it suppresses a superfluous line in the output.
For the Haskell mode, as far as I can tell it simply doesn’t work quite right and the elisp code is broken. Maybe I’m just not setting it up right, but out of the box it does not work. This makes it work using the hlint checker:
(defun haskell-flymake-init ()
(list "hlint" (list (flymake-init-create-temp-buffer-copy
'flymake-create-temp-inplace))))
Happy hacking!





