I wish this "chess makes you crazy" line would just die. If anything, chess kept Fischer sane. Chess gave Fischer focus and forced him to interact with people. He only truly went off the deep end after he stopped playing.

I had no idea that Beethoven used equal temperament. Do you have a source for that?

Nah, just from learning about music years ago. Not everything he wrote was equal temperment, though.

And after that, you can get a little bit funky with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM5WPCsWA3M

I'm sure that if Congress really wanted to directly regulate the sell of automobiles, they can find a way to appeal to the constitution's commerce clause. I know the courts have tended leaned more towards the 10th amendment in recent decades, but they still tend to give the commerce clause a very broad interpretation.

So which is it? Is Douglas Crockford a god or a superhero?

Use it all the time. Love it.

Why didn't you tell me you hated my Lisp tips! :(

Love your Lisp tips, not your lolcats!

By voting for Scheme, I really mean Racket.

Been using Linode for years now. Cheap enough, and you can install just about anything you want.

Turn each state into a multi-member district. Small states with only one rep can be combined with other states to form three-rep blocks, i.e., North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana can be combined into one election. Elections can be party-list elections. For example, Utah has 3 seats; each party puts forward a list of 3 candidates, and the voters vote for the party of their choice. There's no longer a need to redraw lines because there are no more lines.

There is some value in geography-based representation! Idealistically, well, there's idealistic value. Cynically, considering that many members of Congress are capable of bringing pork-barrel projects to their home districts, it makes sense for voters that their representative is accountable to the district.

While the idea of decoupling representation from geography is an interesting one and it may seem appealing, in practice I would not be surprised at all to see this result in a rapid deterioration in the quality of representation for areas in which representatives do not live and a corresponding rise in legislative effectiveness for the areas housing the representatives.

Following this line of assumptions a little further, it's easy to understand why Congress is divided into components where representation is based on different geographical scales.